ABSTRACT
The unexpected and dramatic events that rocked Europe from Berlin to Moscow between 1989 and 1991 abruptly transformed the structures and patterns of international affairs that had marked the divided continent for more than four decades. The reemergence of a united Germany in the heart of Europe, along with the spectacular demise of the Soviet Union, constituted the most climactic episodes in this process of breathtaking change. Presumably “solved,” or at least dormant, in a context of seemingly definitive national division, the old “German Question” suddenly reappeared on the European diplomatic landscape. The end of the Kohl era after the federal elections of September 1998, coupled with the creation of an unprecedented “red-green” coalition between the Social Democrats and the Greens, merely added renewed fuel to the considerable domestic and foreign interest in (and, at times, wariness regarding) the future direction of German diplomacy that has marked much of the 1990s.
