West Germany has become a potential balancer in the equilibrium of power between East and West.

Linee di continuit della politica della germania federale :

They have been remarkably constant: security, reunification, and political rehabilitation and
economic reconstruction in the context of Western Europe and the Atlantic alliance.

This continuity is in large measure a consequence of the durability of the postwar European order.

Linee di continuit del conflitto EST-OVEST durante la guerra fredda:

the political and economic division of the European continent and of Germany; the mostly
unrelieved confrontation of the two military alliances at the border between the two German states;
and the regional manifestations in Europe of the continuing global rivalry between the United
States and the Soviet Union.

Tra la fine degli anni 50 e la fine degli anni 60:

Gaullist France was determined to gain a global role for a Europe led by the French, even at the
expenses of the Atlantic unity.

Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, although its dynamics were largely spent by the mid-
seventies, had obtained a more active role for German diplomacy. It was the centerpiece of efforts at
East-West detente, it became an integral part of the security policy of NATO and Germany, and it
increased Germany's diplomatic leverage both in the East and in the West.

PAG 17-21

The coalition government of the SPD and FDP (Social Democratic Party (SPD), and Genscher of
the Free Democratic Party) under Chancellor Willy Brandt and Foreign Minister and Vice-
Chancellor Walter Scheel.

In important respects, Bonn's Ostpolitik matched a central diplomatic concern of the Soviet Union
that had preoccupied Moscow since the mid 1950s: obtaining international recognition
of the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern and Central Europe.

Ostpolitik intended to change the status quo by formal recognizing it.

This anticipated complementarity was already embodied in NATO's Harmel Report of 1967,
which stressed the need to approach the East on the basis of a "two-pillar" approach that
incorporated de'tente.
ition to its intrinsic importance, Ostpolitik was connected with Germany's security policy because
Bonn's readiness to accept the territorial status quo confronted German security problems at their
political roots and thus became a complementary political part of Germany's and NATO's policy of
detente.
Ostpolitik overcame the stark contradictions of the fifties and sixties when Bonn's security policies
conflicted sharply with its Eastern policy.

Thus dtente sharpened and reflected a central paradox: for many Europeans de'tente meant a
chance to overcome or at least ameliorate the division of Europe, whereas for the Soviet Union and
the United States it meant solidifying the European status quo.
When Helmut Schmidt took over the chancellorship from Willy Brandt in 1974, economics became
the continuation of politics by other means. Because German Ostpolitik had largely run its
course, and because oil price increases and the world-wide recession brought economic matters to
the foreground.
At the end of the 1980s, as the Federal Republic and its allies sought to come to terms with the
flexibility and sophistication of Mikhail S. Gorbachev's diplomacy and as Bonn prepared to deal
with the new administration in Washington, it became clear once again that the limits defining
arms control were at the same time the boundaries that contained the possibilities for the
evolution of a new European order.