ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the speeches made by the politicians in the four countries, France, Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States. French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas marked one essential feature of French foreign policy: the perceived need for the country to play a special role. This is one of the characteristics that recurred often in the French speeches on relations with Moscow. The official British analysis of Soviet foreign affairs changed fairly remarkably by the autumn of 1988, after several years of scepticism concerning whether or not the Soviet process of change was really serious. By that time, however, Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe made the assessment that Moscow had indeed changed. The very first specific Swedish reaction to General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's new policies came in a speech by the Prime Minister Olof Palme in February 1986 in a debate in the Swedish Parliament.
