Abstract
This chapter sheds light on ‘sea changes’ in the international security system in the late 1980s and asks why policies persist even when the conditions that the international system used to be based upon have completely transformed. The Soviet policy towards the GDR was determined by domestic Soviet policy and its achievements in terms of the German question as well as by the structures of the international system. This chapter examines the political and economic aspect of the Soviet GDR policy, which tied the hierarchical relationship between the two countries, especially in the light of developments in international political practices.
The GDR was believed to be the linchpin of the Eastern Soviet security system. For three decades this structure remained a considerable factor in European stability and influence against any shift that might have occurred. In the 1980s a remarkable transformation occurred to the position of the GDR within Soviet politics. Even though it was no less than paradoxical at the beginning, when the second Cold War started and the INF deployments occurred, the GDR argued for ‘limiting damage’ to inter-German relations. It was astonishing in the period of reforms that the GDR should make a definite move away from the Soviet Union’s openness. On the one hand, a certain level of economic and technological cooperation between the USSR and the GDR remained unchangeable, as it was a vital interest for the GDR’s survival. On the other hand, the GDR had been quasi-incorporated into the FRG, since the new realities of the European and international systems had destroyed any structural stereotype of inter-German détente that the GDR’s leadership had used to be based upon.
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Notes
- 1.
Nomenclature is a Russian term, derives from the Latin term nomenclatura that includes a small, even elite list of names, subset of the general population of party members, specially composed of blue-collar workers. The nomenclature includes all kinds of jobs, technical staff, managers and teachers formed a system of people able to run state’s administration. A state-owned factory, could be directed by top managers belonged to nomenclature but not necessary belonged to the Party. Party members that worked in the factory were separately from nomenclature, they simply formed workers within the apparatchiks of the Party. Even though nomenclature did not always need to be members of the Communist Party, the Party involved to the decisions about who will belong to nomenclature and should have been convinced that they were reliable and trustworthy.
- 2.
The three-level literature comprises studies from the following areas. Theory, Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War. A theoretical analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, (1959), David J. Singer, ‘The level of Analysis Problem in International Relations’ in The International System: Theoretical Essays, ed. Klaus Knorr and Sidney Verba, 77–92 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Nicolas Onuf, ‘Levels’, European Journal of International Relations, 1, 1, (1995): 35–58. In foreign policy analysis, Valerie M. Hudson ‘Foreign Policy Analysis: Actor-Specific Theory and the Ground of International Relations’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 1, (2005): 1–30, argues that the FPA multilevel analysis offers substantial contribution to IR, theoretical, substantive and methodological in understanding state behaviour. The three-level analysis in foreign policy is used by Daniel S. Papp, Loch K. Johnson and John E. Endicott, American Foreign Policy: History, Politics, and Policy (New York: Longman, 2005), 1–37. Sara B. Hobolt and Robert Klemmensen, ‘Follow the Leader? Divergent positions on Iraq in Denmark and Ireland’, European Consortium for Political Research, (2003): 1–6. Particularly in European studies and the relations of European Commission with third-type countries, M. F. Larsen, Power and Pressure in EU Agenda-Setting. Theoretical Framework for the Agenda-Setting in Negotiations Between the EU and South Africa, paper prepared for the European Foreign Policy Conference LSE, (June 2004):1–12.3. In development diplomacy and Private Business Sector, Mikoto Usui, ‘Sustainable Development Diplomacy in the Private Business Sector: An Integrative Perspective on Game Change Strategies at Multiple Levels’, International Negotiations, 8, (2003), 267–310. Lawrence E. Susskind, Environmental Diplomacy: Negotiating More Effective Global Agreements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
- 3.
Mikhail Suslov was a member of the Central Committee from 1941 until his death in 1982. He strongly defended the Stalinist school and became a ruthless, strongly doctrinaire administrator. He was very far from Khrushchev’s political temperament, opposed ‘destabilisation’ measures, economic reforms and foreign policy and was instrumental in unseating Khrushchev in 1964.
- 4.
Ostpolitik: This was Bahr and Brandt’s idea to achieve collective European security by reuniting the Germans. Then, when Willy Brandt became Chancellor of the FRG, Ostpolitik became West Germany’s eastward policy. It both recognised the GDR and promoted a series of political measures for improvements of relations between the East and West.
- 5.
The inter-German détente should be understood in terms of inter-German contacts in the post-Ostpolitik period. It defines the period of contacts between the two German nations in complete contrast to the years of non-contact in the 1960s. These contacts included cultural interchanges, restored contact between long-separated families and friends, freedom for journalists, vast improvements of telecommunications and postal services, occasional visits between East and West Germans and meetings for fighting air pollution, water pollution and damage to forests. Security questions were excluded from these meetings. Finally, detente betwwen Germans should be seen as the opposite to the years of non-contact between the two German states. It should not be seen as one state becoming acceptable to the other. It just was the period of decreased international tensions, an awareness of the main partners in the international system that despite separate ideological orders, a significant shift from the Cold War years occurred towards accommodating political and human inter-German contacts.
- 6.
Record of conversation between M.S. Gorbachev and SED colleague, Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv (SAPMO-Barch), DY 30/J1V2/SA/3255 (Cold War International History Project 2001b)
- 7.
The word ‘paradox’ is many times confused with surprising. In our book paradox is used to support the main argument that a policy was being observed which diverted from rational political behaviour. This political behaviour is diverted from conventional behaviour that rational policy used to be based upon.
- 8.
Interview with David Childs, 13 February 2002
- 9.
Cold War International History Project (2001a) at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
- 10.
The Brezhnev doctrine is the result of Leonid Brezhnev’s speech to the fifth congress of the Polish Communist Party. Brezhnev’s speech treated the Eastern European community as a whole and stated that he had the right to intervene in the territory of any one of the socialist states threatened by forces hostile to socialism. The Brezhnev doctrine was used to justify the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Afghanistan in 1979.
- 11.
Interviews with Gerard König and Manfred Shünemann, 13 November 2002
- 12.
The term ‘informal empire’ is used by Wendt and Barnett to demonstrate the type of system that forms the relationship between dominant and subordinate state. An informal empire is a socially structured system of interaction amongst juridically sovereign states in which one, the ‘dominant’ state, has a significant degree of de facto political authority over the security policies of another, ‘subordinate’, state; see Wendt and Friedheim (1995).
- 13.
Interview with Gerard König, 13 November 2002. Interview with David Childs, 13 February 2002
- 14.
See Footnote 6
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Megas, A. (2015). The Politics of Economy. In: Soviet Foreign Policy Towards East Germany. Contributions to Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20001-9_2
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