Abstract
The introduction sets out the research process which will be applied throughout the developments of the book. It contextualises the focus of inquiry into main arguments and creates the setting for the political process about the German question in relation to the Soviet retrenchments in foreign policy. It introduces to the reader in the sphere of international Soviet-German affairs that a specific international and domestic environment redistributed political resources for making foreign policy. By examining the domestic and international constraints, it is revealed how and why the hierarchical relationship between the GDR and the USSR, which had defined and ‘informal society’, altered the domestic influence of international politics.
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Notes
- 1.
Vyacheslav Dashichev could not accept that Gorbachev’s views existed in different variations. He had assumed that from the time of being elected General Secretary of the CPSU, Gorbachev had developed the NPT consistently (Interview with Vyacheslav Dashichev, 10 November 2002). Nevertheless, in the 1990s, Gorbachev argued that ‘the GDR since 1985 was absolutely free to take its own decisions’. In the discussions with Honecker in East Berlin in April 1986, Gorbachev had not defended the conventional revenge-driven Soviet rhetoric against the FRG; see Krenz (2000). In fact, on several occasions in the period between 1985 and 1986, Gorbachev refused to denigrate the role of the FRG in Soviet politics and its mediator role in the relations between Moscow and Washington; see analytically the meeting of Eric Honecker with Michael Gorbachev on 2–3 October 1986, SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/2383.
- 2.
Natural sciences have long been involved in the debate for a reputation of an objective knowledge that has been founded by a world ‘out there’ towards a scientific method. According to positivism, natural sciences are the only legitimate repository of human knowledge. See Aronowitz (1988).
- 3.
Interview with Vyacheslav Dashichev, 10 November 2002
- 4.
The term ‘structural realism’ refers to the specific propositions put forward from the Waltzian theoretical perspective of Theory of International Politics (TIP). All realist theories derived from this Waltzian perspective of ‘structural realism’ for the international system constitute neorealism or structural neorealism; see Keohane (1986).
- 5.
The term ‘imperial overstretch’ was introduced by Paul Kennedy whose study of a series of empirical events concluded that the USA was bound to ‘fall’ in the same way the earlier great powers had fallen; see Kennedy (1988).
- 6.
Constructivism is defined by Richard Price and Christian Reus-Smit as a theoretical approach to international politics that is characterised by concern for the social construction of reality and for concepts like political and social identity and normative structures; see Reus-Smit (2002: 487–509) and Price and Reus-Smit (1998: 259–294).
- 7.
Documentary records of Soviet decision-making from 1985 to 1990 are sparse. The 30-year publication law limits archive research in Russian libraries and institutes for the above period. Evidence from other primary sources and secondary research demonstrates the significance of the context of the military rivalry between the two superpowers and the implications of domestic structures for Soviet-German policy and the perceptions and beliefs of the new generation of politicians in Moscow.
- 8.
Stiftung der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR (SAPMO) was the Central Party archive, which is now under the administration of the German government.
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Megas, A. (2015). Introduction. In: Soviet Foreign Policy Towards East Germany. Contributions to Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20001-9_1
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