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Gorbachev Seeks a Trade-Off
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17241 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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2 / 1990 |
2,778 Words |
| Author
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Christopher Jones
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In every major speech he delivers, Mikhail Gorbachev begins by saying that the problems he is about to discuss "are all bound together in a tight knot." No knot is tighter and more difficult to disentangle than "the German question," still the central issue of the European security system that, in turn, is still the center of the East-West confrontation.
Bound together in the German knot are not simply the issues of German reunification but a series of other strands leading back to the Soviet/American/British agreements reached in 1945 at Yalta and Potsdam and to the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, which divided Eastern Europe between the USSR and the Third Reich.
These stands are the status of Silesia and Pomerania, now provinces of Poland; the former East Prussian territories now part of Poland and the USSR; the status of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, now union republics of the USSR; the status of status of Moldavia, a former province of Romania and now a union republic of the USSR; the status of millions of ethnic Poles, Ruthenians/Galicians, and Ukrainians now living in three different union republics of the USSR.
Directly connected to these "ethnic" issues are the demands from nationalists in several union republics of the USSR for either outright secession or for autonomy in a loosely linked Soviet confederation. Across the entire expanse of these ethnic-territorial issues is the question of what kinds of political regimes will emerge from the accelerating disintegration of the ruling "ethnic" Communist parties of the Soviet bloc.
The code words for the issues bound together in the German knot are "national self-determination" and "the borders of 1937." These borders delimited a Germany with nearly twice the area of the Federal Republic and a USSR located considerably to the east of its present boundaries.
Looming over the horizons of Eastern Europe is an imminent reconsideration of the interlocking issues of national territory, national self-determination, the human rights of ethnic minorities, and the democratization of one-party systems. The interaction of these issues may soon break up the Warsaw Pact as a military alliance system.
From a technical, legal standpoint, the Warsaw Treaty of 1955 was an Eastern response to an alleged threat of "German revanchism" supposedly supported by Germany's "imperialist" allies in NATO. The USSR established the Warsaw Pact in 1955 in reaction to West Germany's entry into NATO the same year. NATO was established in 1949, as were both the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Since 1955 the Soviets have been on record as favoring the simultaneous dissolution of NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
From a practical political standpoint, the Warsaw Pact, on the basis of bilateral agreements between the USSR and its allies, had been an instrument for maintaining Communist parties in power in Eastern Europe. Now that Gorbachev has blessed the surrender of absolute power by Eastern European communists, the Warsaw Pact has begun to self-destruct. In response, Gorbachev is now asking NATO to keep its Germany in the Western alliances while the Warsaw Pact struggles to keep its Germany in the Eastern alliance.
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