ABSTRACT
Dramatic changes took place during 1989-91. It was a time when ‘people power’ peacefully toppled the communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany (GDR), Czechoslovakia and Romania. Within two years the antagonistic and ideological bipolar structure of military power that had characterised world politics for 40 years disappeared. The Warsaw Pact broke up, Germany unified, the Baltic states regained independence and the Soviet Union disintegrated-symbolising the total collapse of communism in Europe and making way for a new European post-Cold War order. But as much as there emerged new questions, one fundamental old question reappeared: the German Question.
