INTRODUCTION

In a speech commemorating Abraham Lincoln's 150th birthday in February 1959, the governing mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, cautioned his audience that there would be “neither an isolated nor sudden solution” to Germany's division. He therefore called for a new policy based on “gradual changes.” Brandt's sober vision led to the détente policy of “small steps” of cooperation between the two German states and anticipated Ostpolitik and the Eastern treaties of the early 1970s under Brandt's chancellorship. The inter-German modus vivendi was in tandem with the Soviet-American détente that had tentatively begun shortly after President John F. Kennedy's inauguration in January 1961. Although Ostpolitik followed the American global lead, it also laid the foundation for European détente by making possible the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and its inaugural document, the Helsinki Final Act of 1975.

The CSCE was a series of roving, “followup” diplomatic conferences of thirty-five states in which a gradual, uneven thawing of the Cold War helped prepare the ground for the revolutions of 1989 and the peaceful closure of the East-West conflict. The extraordinary and underrecognized role of the CSCE as a forum of European and global détente cannot be separated from the partnership of the United States and the Federal Republic. By turns they confronted each other in the Helsinki process in serious disagreement, only to reforge their common positions and reestablish consensus among the NATO allies. The differences between the United States and the Federal Republic produced a creative tension and an unintended division of labor: The United States brandished a stick of Cold War confrontation and radical change, while West Germany, with support from the majority of other West European states, strove to sustain a process of incremental change in the framework of European détente. This combination pressured the Soviets to accept radical, systemic changes but at the same time cultivated a framework in which Moscow, under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, could design and implement such monumental change peacefully and in cooperation with the West.