Towards an Independent Europe?

Abstract

On 19 November 1983, in a vote which is still reverberating through Europe, the West German SDP brought four decades of bipartisan foreign policy in the Federal Republic to an end, pronouncing against the emplacement of Cruise and Pershing II missiles there by a 96 per cent majority. Willi Brandt announced that in 1984 he would ‘move on to the offensive’, issuing the call to all European socialist parties to campaign in the Euro-elections on a platform of European independence from both super-powers. Already the German opinion polls show large majorities, stretching far beyond the ranks of the SPD, sympathetic to such aims. There is no need to remind anyone that it was in precisely similar fashion that Brandt launched the policy of Ostpolitik, and that that policy is now a fact of life.