ABSTRACT
Relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and the six smaller states of the Warsaw Pact—the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Poland, CSSR, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania—have improved in recent years. The German question is the most complex, most important, and most emotion laden in Europe. The Germans are a dynamic, technologically advanced, and industrious people. Military skill, industrial competence, popular discipline, and conviction of cultural superiority twice pushed Germany in the two world wars to try becoming a world power. West German Ostpolitik became much more active, gained a much higher priority, and included the GDR, when for the first time since 1949 the Social Democratic party (SPD) came to power, in coalition with the Free Democratic Party, in October 1969. The West German Left—the SPD and the Greens—broke with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization consensus on Intermediate Nuclear Forces deployment after the fall in 1982 of the Schmidt government.
