ABSTRACT
The ‘new Ostpolitik’ of Brandt’s government is something of a historical curiosity. Deeply controversial in the early 1970s, it had become the object of widespread consensus only 12 years later. Blamed by many of its domestic critics for perpetuating indefinitely the division of Germany, it alarmed some, outside of Germany, for diametrically opposite reasons: beyond the opening of a dialogue with the other German state and its publicly proclaimed objective of tempering the effects of division, was it not a policy designed to pave the way towards actual reunification? It is also misleadingly named. For while it did involve, in one way or another, all the states of Eastern Europe, the ‘German Question’ lay at its heart and was the issue it was intended primarily to resolve. As a result, it was natural that German Ostpolitik had implications and ramifications which stretched far beyond the Eastern policies of any other Western European state.
