ABSTRACT
The Final Act of the London Conference of 3 October 1954, signed by Britain, France and seven other NATO powers, endorsed the frontiers of Germany as provisional pending a comprehensive peace settlement with a future all-German government.1 This effectively accepted the West German government’s refusal to recognise the status quo. Little wonder that the creation of a strong German state, aligned with the West, had been something Moscow had determined to prevent.2 The West’s position flew in face of the fact that much of the post-war status quo had been agreed during the wartime conferences. The Soviets3
(and Poles, Czechs and others for that matter) certainly believed in the permanence of the post-war arrangements – and the British well knew this.4 Moscow determined at every turn to highlight its belief that it was the British (and the Americans) who were reneging on agreements given that ‘the Soviet Government hold as adequate and final the decisions . . . of the Potsdam Conference’.5 But, as Joseph Joffe later noted, this meant that
[While] the grand settlement of 1954 precluded an autonomous German Ostpolitik, it also denied the West a free hand in Eastern Europe and Moscow. By underwriting Bonn’s maximal objectives, the West had minimized its freedom of manoeuvre in the East . . . the German Problem was now the decisive barrier in the overall East-West relationship, and the Federal Republic was the guardian at the gate.6
