The first steps toward detente in Europe were taken before the Prague Spring. In March 1966, Brezhnev blasted the United States in his report to the XXIIIrd Party Congress, but also called for "achieving European security" on the basis of the territorial status quo.231 That same year, President Charles de Gaulle of France, responding to repeated Soviet appeals for broader cooperation, visited Moscow. While de Gaulle was seeking an independent role for France in bridging the East-West confrontation, Brezhnev and Gromyko saw France as the key to a new relationship with Europe.
French-Soviet detente survived the test of Czechoslovakia. It was invigorated by President Georges Pompidou’s visit to Moscow in October 1970 and Brezhnev’s visit to France in the spring of 1971. France and the Soviet Union signed a declaration on relations between the two countries, which became a tentative model for European security principles. France then became the first country officially to endorse the Soviet proposal for a European security conference.
As for West Germany, it was slowly moving away fTom its earlier policy of no contact with the Eastern bloc, while not abandoning its ultimate goal of unification. When Willy Brandt was elected chancellor of West Germany in October 1969, he launched a program of Ostpolitik aimed at relaxing tensions in Europe by recognizing East Germany, along with postWorld War II territorial changes in Europe. Brandt chose to deal directly with the Soviet Union first (rather than with its East European allies) as a way of allaying Moscow’s concerns about West German-East German rapprochement.
As a result of very fast-moving and productive negotiations, the USSR and West Germany signed a non-aggression pact (the Moscow Treaty) in 1970. Next, Brandt signed similar treaties regulating the borders of the two Germanys with Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The process was completed in 1971 by a Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin signed by the USSR, the United States, Britain and France. The Soviets, for their part, pressured the Stalinist East German leader Walter Ulbricht to step down and be replaced by a more open-minded Erich Honecker. After this leadership transition, the two Germanys extended recognition to each other and signed a bilateral treaty in December 1972. In this way, Brezhnev and company achieved through careful, steady negotiation what Khrushchev had failed to achieve through ultimatums, bluster, and bluff.
World History
