Willy Brandt and International Relations: Europe, the USA, and Latin America, 1974–1992 9781350040427, 9781350040458, 9781350040434

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Willy Brandt and International Relations

Willy Brandt and International Relations Europe, the USA, and Latin America, 1974–1992 Edited by Bernd Rother and Klaus Larres

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Bernd Rother, Klaus Larres, and Contributors, 2019 Bernd Rother and Klaus Larres have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Willy Brandt, former West German chancellor, seated in his office at the Bundestag during an interview with James Barry, 1984. (© Bettmann/Getty Images) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-4042-7 PB: 978-1-3501-6352-2 ePDF: 978-1-3500-4043-4 eBook: 978-1-3500-4044-1 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction Bernd Rother and Klaus Larres

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Part 1 Willy Brandt and the United States 1

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Willy Brandt’s Relations with the United States, 1933–1974 Judith Michel

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Berlin Bonds: Willy Brandt’s American Support Network, 1946–1989 Scott H. Krause

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Two Very Different Atlanticists? Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, 1945–1992 Mathias Haeussler

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A Prophet Unheard: Willy Brandt’s North-South Policy and Its Reception in the United States Wolfgang Schmidt

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Part 2 Willy Brandt: The European Dimension 5

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A Post-national Europe: Brandt’s Vision for the European Community between the Superpowers Harold Mock

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How Do We Deal with Eurocommunism? A Case Study of Dissonance between Willy Brandt and the US Governments of Nixon, Ford, and Carter Nikolas Dörr

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The Turbulent Years: Willy Brandt’s Transatlantic Networks during the Euromissile Crisis Jan Hansen

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Conceptualizing “Common Security”: Willy Brandt’s Vision of Trans-bloc Security and Its International Perception, 1981–1990 Oliver Bange

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Part 3 Willy Brandt: The Latin American Dimension 9 “Elastic Cooperation”: Willy Brandt and Latin America Fernando Pedrosa

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10 From the Iberian Peninsula to Latin America: The Socialist International’s Initiatives in the First Years of Brandt’s Presidency Ana Mónica Fonseca

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11 Cooperation between the European and Latin American Moderate Left in the 1970s and 1980s Bernd Rother

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Annex: Doing Historical Research on Willy Brandt Bibliography Index

211 215 231

Acknowledgments This volume is the outcome of an international conference that was held in Berlin in June 2016, organized by the Bundeskanzler-Willy-Brandt-Stiftung. It was generously supported by the German Historical Institute, Washington DC, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Berlin, and the Berliner Kolleg Kalter Krieg. We are most grateful for the many insights provided during the conference by Dieter Dettke, Pierre Schori, Reimund Seidelmann, and Karsten D. Voigt. We would like to express our deep appreciation to Sabine Bartel for her outstanding lingustic skills, which helped us greatly to produce a polished manuscript. Without Martin Hamre and Martin Pieper this volume would have lacked a register. Thanks to both of them. And last but not least we are thankful for the tireless support that Emma Goode of Bloomsbury Publishers provided during the editiorial process.

Contributors Klaus Larres is a professor of History and International Relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a senior fellow at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. He has worked as a professor and fellow at different universities around the world. His research includes contemporary transatlantic relations, European integration, and twentieth-century American, German, and British foreign policies in comparative perspective. Klaus Larres has published Germany and the United States of America in the 20th Century: A Political History (1997) and The American Secretaries of State and Transatlantic Relations (2010). Bernd Rother works as a research fellow at the Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation in Berlin. He studied History and Political Science and wrote his thesis about Portugal’s socialist party. Bernd Rother worked as a research fellow at the Institute for Social History in Bonn, the University of Hanover, and the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam. His fields of research include German and European labor movements, contemporary history, social democracy, and Jewish history. He is the editor of Willy Brandts Außenpolitik (2014) and coeditor of Berliner Ausgabe—Volume 8: Willy Brandt. Über Europa hinaus. Dritte Welt und Sozialistische Internationale (2006) and Volume 10:  Gemeinsame Sicherheit. Internationale Beziehungen und deutsche Frage 1982–1992 (2009). Oliver Bange is a senior lecturer at the University of Mannheim and is currently working at the East Asia Desk of the German Ministry of Defense. He received his doctorate from the London School of Economics and his habilitation from the University of Mannheim. His research focuses include diplomatic, military, social, and nuclear history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 2017 he published:  Sicherheit und Staat—Die Bündnis und Militärpolitik der DDR im internationalen Kontext 1969 bis 1990 (Berlin); he edited:  Zwischen Bündnistreue und staatlichen Eigeninteresse—Die Streitkräfte der DDR und der ČSSR 1968 bis 1990 (Potsdam); and coedited with Poul Villaume: The Long Détente: Changing Concepts of Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1950s–1980s (Budapest/New York).

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Nikolas Dörr is a historian and political scientist working as a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Bremen’s SOCIUM—Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy. He studied History, Political Science, and Peace and Conflict studies. Nikolas Dörr published his doctoral thesis on Die Rote Gefahr. Der italienische Eurokommunismus als sicherheitspolitische Herausforderung für die USA und Westdeutschland 1969–1979 (2017). His academic research includes the history of international relations, Cold War studies, the history of the labor movement, and military history. Ana Mónica Fonseca works as a research fellow and postdoctoral researcher at the Center for International Studies at the University Institute of Lisbon. She graduated in Modern and Contemporary History in 2011. Her thesis is entitled É Preciso Regar os Cravos! A Social-Democracia Alemã e a transição portuguesa para a Democracia (1974–1976) and was awarded Honorable Mentions. Her main fields of research are Southern Europe’s democratic transitions, Portuguese-German relations during the Cold War, transatlantic relations, German history, democracy promotion, and transnational history. Mónica Fonseca has published papers in several international academic journals, such as the Journal of European Integration History. Mathias Haeussler is a postdoctoral research fellow at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. He studied History and Politics in London and did an MPhil in Modern European History before receiving his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2015 with a thesis entitled Helmut Schmidt and Anglo-German Relations, 1974–82. He held visiting fellowships at the University of Bonn and the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. His research mainly focuses on the interrelations of the Cold War and European integration and Europe’s changing role in the transatlantic alliance. Mathias Haeussler is currently working on his postdoctoral project on Elvis Presley and the Cold War. Jan Hansen is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of History at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. After his graduation in 2014, he started working at the chair for the History of Western Europe and Transatlantic Relations. For the 2017–2018 academic year, he is a fellow in the History of the Americas at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. He is also a book review editor for H-Soz-Kult. His doctoral thesis was published with De Gruyter Oldenbourg as Abschied vom Kalten Krieg? Die Sozialdemokraten und der Nachrüstungsstreit (1977–1987) (2016). Jan Hansen’s academic research interests include the history of politics, Cold War studies, and the history of the

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labor movement. He is currently working on his second book project, entitled Urban Infrastructure and Everyday Life in Los Angeles, 1860–1930. Scott H.  Krause is a Leibniz postdoctoral fellow at the ZZF (Centre for Contemporary History), Potsdam. He studied History, Political Science, and English at Göttingen University, UCLA, and Freiburg University before receiving his PhD at UNC Chapel Hill. His manuscript Bringing Cold War Democracy to West Berlin, 1933–1972: A Shared German-American Project has won the 2017 Willy Brandt Prize in Contemporary History and will appear in English and German. His research has been published in several journals, such as Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History and Central European History. Judith Michel is a research fellow at the Department of Contemporary History of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin. She studied North American Studies, History, and Political Science in Bonn and Worcester and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship during her graduate studies. Following her dissertation on Willy Brandts Amerikabild und -politik 1933–1992 (2010), Judith Michel worked at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute of Contemporary History) München—Berlin and the University of Bonn. Her research focuses on German history in the twentieth century, transatlantic relations, and corporate history. Harold Mock is assistant professor of History at Georgia College, where he also directs public policy and leadership programs. His research interests include civil-military relations and transatlantic affairs during the Cold War, particularly as related to nuclear strategy and defense planning. He is currently writing a book entitled Dangerous Power: An International History of German Unification, 1969–1993. Mock holds a PhD in European History from the University of Virginia, where he previously served as Bradley Research Fellow. Fernando Pedrosa is a professor at the School of Political Science at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires and a researcher at the Institute of Studies of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He did his PhD in Contemporary Political Processes at the University of Salamanca and worked as a visiting professor at universities in Europe and Asia. Fernando Pedrosa is the author of The Other Left: Social Democracy in Latin America (2012). Wolfgang Schmidt is a research fellow at the Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation in Berlin. He studied Political Science in Bonn and Kansas and worked for a member of the German parliament and a consulting company

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before joining the foundation in 2002. His research interests include contemporary history, Cold War studies, and Anglo-German relations. Wolfgang Schmidt published his dissertation Kalter Krieg, Koexistenz und kleine Schritte— Willy Brandt und die Deutschlandpolitik 1948–1963 (2001) and is coeditor of Berliner Ausgabe—Volume 8:  Willy Brandt. Über Europa hinaus. Dritte Welt und Sozialistische Internationale (2006) and Volume 10: Gemeinsame Sicherheit. Internationale Beziehungen und deutsche Frage 1982–1992 (2009).

Introduction Bernd Rother and Klaus Larres

As chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1969 to 1974, Willy Brandt reshaped the postwar international system with his Ostpolitik. In early May 1974, he stepped down as chancellor, accepting political responsibility for the discovery that one of his assistants had turned out to be a spy for the East German Stasi. Brandt had an enormous global reputation that was signified by his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971. He had also triumphed electorally within his own country when he won a massive victory in the 1972 snap election. For the first time since 1949, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands—SPD), Willy Brandt’s party, came out ahead of the Christian Democrats, the other major party in West German politics. Still, by the spring of 1974, Willy Brandt had lost much of his earlier popularity, primarily because of the deterioration of the economic situation. Helmut Schmidt, for years seen as Brandt’s natural successor, hesitated to take over the chancellorship. When he eventually agreed, he asked Brandt to remain chairman of the party. Brandt, whose political interests had always focused on international affairs, decided to dedicate his energy to fostering the process of European integration. He called for the direct election of the European Parliament (which was introduced in 1979)  and for solidarity with the emerging democratic forces in southern Europe. As for the latter, he now had the opportunity to embark on what his last foreign visitor during his time as chancellor, Mário Soares, the secretary-general of the Portuguese Socialists, had suggested:  to support the transition of his country to democracy. Soon, Portugal played an important part in Brandt’s agenda. In late 1975, after dictator Franco’s death, Spain became another issue Brandt focused on. Again he was asked to contribute to the transition to democracy, albeit under entirely different circumstances than in Portugal.

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Following a visit to Mexico and Venezuela in the spring of 1975, Brandt began to globalize his political activities, taking Latin America as a starting point but with a great interest in North-South relations in general. A first step was taken with the November 1975 SPD party convention in Mannheim, which was attended by an unprecedented number of non-European observer delegations. For the first time, the convention’s final resolution on foreign relations did not start with Europe or NATO but with the “Third World.”1 Over the course of the following months, Brandt attempted to set up an “Alliance for Peace and Social Justice” with like-minded parties and movements outside of Europe. From early 1976, pressure on Brandt to run for the presidency of the Socialist International (SI) grew. His close friends Bruno Kreisky from Austria and Olof Palme from Sweden succeeded in convincing him. In November 1976, Brandt was elected president of SI. He continued to hold this office until a few weeks before his death in 1992. The idea of an “alliance” existing in parallel to the SI was abandoned; instead, the SI was globalized. SPD Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s loss of office in October 1982 touched Brandt’s global political agenda only marginally. During the sixteen years of Brandt’s tenure as president of the SI, politics underwent drastic changes, both domestically, in the FRG, and globally. The 1979–1980 oil crisis called the basis for economic growth and the terms of trade between industrialized and “developing” countries into question. New players, especially from the global South, entered the scene, for example, Iran and China. The dichotomy between capitalist democracy and state-socialist dictatorship was mitigated when, with the 1979 revolution in Iran, religion reentered international relations as a political force. But this was not just the case in the Muslim world; it also manifested itself in the Catholic Polish workers’ movement. The disintegration of the Eastern Bloc ended the Cold War’s bipolar order in 1989–1990. Transatlantic relations were deeply affected by these changes. Politicians were called upon to give new answers. Willy Brandt was among those who rose to the challenge. Among his most important objectives was his endeavor to make Social Democracy and (Western) Europe serious players in the international arena. Brandt wanted to emancipate the Old Continent from the superpowers United States and Soviet Union. In this context, he used the phrase “the Europeanization of Europe.” Willy Brandt did not want to leave the task of creating and securing peace to the superpowers. He no longer shied away from criticizing the United States, his most important international ally both during his tenure as Berlin’s governing mayor in the 1950s and 1960s and as chancellor in the early 1970s. Brandt’s confidence in the leadership abilities and rationality of successive US administrations dwindled rapidly from the mid-1970s. Henry

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Kissinger’s strategy for Portugal met with Brandt’s incomprehension. So did the US reaction to the process of democratization in Spain a little later. Brandt also viewed Jimmy Carter’s human rights offensive with skepticism. For a long time, he deeply mistrusted Ronald Reagan, whose policy of rearmament contributed, in his view, to a new Cold War. With regard to Western security policy, transatlantic rows started in 1978 with the neutron bomb issue and developed into an open quarrel during the debates about the implementation of NATO’s 1979 dual-track decision. Soon, Brandt and his supporters even questioned the North Atlantic security doctrine of mutual deterrence. Conflicts also arose when the activities of Willy Brandt and the SI touched US geostrategic interests, especially in Latin America. The European Social Democrats rejected the US view that conflicts in Central America and other regions were the result of East-West confrontation. The European democratic left and Latin American reformists concurred in seeing the origin of these conflicts predominantly in social injustice. The differing views led to major controversies within the Western Bloc. In the 1970s, not only the (still primarily European) SI but also a number of Latin American governments started to question US hegemony in South America. The latter sought backing for their project of a New International Economic Order and more autonomy vis-à-vis the superpowers, particularly the United States. The European “center” and the Latin American “periphery” moved closer to each other. For a while, this process went so far that Mexico and Venezuela began to participate in Portugal’s and Spain’s transition to democracy—a kind of Latin American “intervention” in European affairs. To date, scholars have largely neglected this development. Up to that point, international relations had been more or less synonymous with East-West relations. But now international developments became much more diverse. In other words: SI activities contributed to globalizing international politics. The model of “Europe becoming active in the Third World” had become outdated; encounters between European and Latin American movements and political intellectuals increasingly took place on an equal footing. This is a major factor in attempts to explain the SI’s success in Latin America. But differences remained. The SI never sent an exploratory mission to Europe, only to non-European countries. Moreover, most Latin Americans had little interest in North Atlantic security issues such as the arms build-up that followed the NATO double-track decision. The mutual rapprochement that started in the mid-1970s also included a critical reflection on how Western values were applied in practice in international politics. Brandt contrasted the superpowers’ societal models—a dictatorial,

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communist state-planned economy on one side and unfettered capitalism on the other—with that of a social democracy. He looked for new allies, especially in the so-called Third World. The 1980 and 1983 recommendations of Brandt’s NorthSouth Commission found approval neither in Washington nor in many other Western capitals. They stood in stark contrast to mainstream economic thinking in the United States, dominated as it was by monetarism and neoliberalism. In subsequent years, Brandt’s commission became the model for several further commissions, such as the Palme and the Brundtland Commission, which also dealt with disarmament, the environment, and many other topical and important issues. These commissions were all headed by personalities who had closely cooperated with Brandt, mostly in the realm of the SI. The activities of the Brandt Commission and succeeding commissions should perhaps be viewed as part of an emerging international civil society. For the SPD, the repeated conflicts with the US government provoked by its policy toward Latin America had negative domestic repercussions. The party struggled not to be stigmatized as anti-American at a time when the United States was still the FRG’s major protective power. However, a growing number of West Germans (and other Western Europeans) viewed Washington’s foreign policy and US society critically. Brandt had to respond to these changes. At the same time, he was also a protagonist of increasing West German criticism of US policies. In some quarters, this was called anti-Americanism. As SPD party chairman, Brandt had to perform a balancing act between integrating those voices in his party that were critical of the United States and avoiding being perceived as anti-American. Still, the United States remained at the forefront of seminal developments, not least in political phenomena such as the feminist and environmental movements. And the dominance of the American way of life in popular culture was also still getting stronger during the 1970s and 1980s. In view of the paramount role of the United States, it was all the more painful for Brandt, as chairman of one of the largest Social Democratic parties worldwide and president of the SI, that there was no “natural” partner in the United States. And even worse:  the influence of social democratic ideas and groups in the United States was declining compared to the early postwar years. Time and again, Brandt tried to dispel reservations about social democracy in the United States. In this difficult endeavor, his personal credibility as an antifascist and Nobel Peace Prize winner and the chancellor of the Ostpolitik as well as his decades-old network of contacts with influential politicians in the United States helped him greatly.

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But there was not only conflict with various US administrations. There were also moments of rapprochement and even cooperation between US politicians and European social democracy, such as during the first months following the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua or the plebiscite in Chile in 1988 that led to the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. Looking beyond Latin America, the so-called Reagan reversal, which resulted in the US president and Mikhail Gorbachev initiating the process toward nuclear disarmament, was another such moment. The fundamental changes that shook the Eastern Bloc in 1989–1991 presented all political actors with new challenges. During this period, US policy on German unity was largely in keeping with Brandt’s thinking at the time. Differences arose after Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait in 1990. Brandt urged the United States not to react militarily before all diplomatic possibilities had been exhausted. This conflict spurred Brandt in his efforts to promote the debate about a new global order and an increased role for the UN. Another issue was the prospective role of the United States as the only remaining superpower and the future of NATO. This book is based on a conference held in Berlin in June 2016. Many of the papers and panel discussions presented there broke new ground. A number of previous symposia and publications have explored the US reaction to Brandt’s Ostpolitik or, more generally, his attitude toward Washington over the course of his political career.2 Publications on Willy Brandt’s political activities after 1974 are scarce. This is even truer of his Latin American policy. Notable exceptions are Fernando Pedrosa’s studies and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s series on Brandt’s international work.3 Books on the global history of the Cold War tend not to examine the SI or the SPD’s international dimension after 1974.4 The conference set out to examine the reasons for the growing distance between European social democrats and the United States from the mid1970s onward while also taking into account the domestic and international repercussions of this development. Did this process of estrangement originate with the United States or the Europeans? And what were its implications for East-West and North-South relations? Many of the conference participants also addressed the question of what Social Democrats envisioned a reformed international system to look like. Conference participants also explored Latin American agency, attempting to avoid Eurocentric views in their contributions. The conference papers provide merely an initial sketch of Brandt’s post-1974 activities in the Americas. There is such a wide variety of topics and areas to be investigated that much further multi-archival research is necessary. From the mid-1970s onward, transatlantic relations were more than North Atlantic

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relations. Latin America—Mexico and Venezuela in particular—became a factor in world politics; contacts between Europe and Latin America had repercussions for relations between the United States and Europe as well as for domestic debates. Research often deals with trilateral relations. Sometimes it seemed that the proverbial wing beat of a butterfly somewhere in Central America could provoke a storm in Bonn or Washington. Without taking into account the important role played by Latin America, it is impossible to understand the relations between Western European governments led by (or with participation of) Social Democrats and the United States. This book is divided into three parts, each consisting of three to four chapters that deal with Willy Brandt’s relations with the United States, Europe, and Latin America respectively. All of the four authors who discuss Willy Brandt’s relations with the United States in the first part of the book acknowledge the tense relationship between Brandt and the American governments led by Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. Judith Michel, in fact, concludes in her chapter that Willy Brandt’s later skeptical attitude toward and strained relations with the United States, which stood in contrast to the decades prior to his resignation in 1974, often came to be seen as one of the major characteristics of his entire political career. However, it ought to be realized, as Michel argues in her nuanced contribution “Willy Brandt’s Relations with the United States, 1933–1974,” that Brandt’s style of government and political values as well as his approval of America’s role in the Cold War were greatly shaped by US political styles and cultural influences. As a young socialist, Brandt had ambivalent feelings about the United States. Yet during the Second World War, and certainly after 1945, he felt a great deal of gratitude to Washington. Brandt also realized that his city, Berlin, and his country were dependent on the United States and that German politicians needed to present themselves as reliable and stable partners. But he did not shy away from openly criticizing America in certain crisis situations—such as the building of the Berlin Wall, the crisis in the Middle East, and the energy crisis in the early 1970s. Not wanting to alienate the United States too much, he frequently held back and toned down his criticism, especially concerning the Vietnam War. Still, as Michel argues, Brandt always managed to avoid ingratiating himself to Washington. In the following chapter, Scott Krause takes up the theme of Willy Brandt’s gratitude toward the United States and explores the specific roots of this sentiment. He concludes that “in divided Berlin, Brandt had been the most

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prominent beneficiary” of US support for Berlin and the city’s representatives. Scott focuses on Brandt’s support network and personal relationships in the United States, in particular during his time as mayor of Berlin. Brandt developed a “close association with American left-liberals,” who offered both contacts and expertise that would later be of fundamental importance for Brandt’s career at the federal level. In his illuminating chapter, Krause thus attempts to make us understand Brandt as a person who the communists in East Berlin viewed as an American stooge and Henry Kissinger as someone who, with his Ostpolitik, undermined West Germany’s close relationship with the United States. Krause concludes that, on the whole, Brandt’s positive attitude toward the United States was shaped by several major factors, among them his support network of leftliberal US politicians that was based on shared political beliefs. As mayor of Berlin, he shared with US officials an anti-communist attitude and the belief in a “free Berlin.” In the 1960s, Brandt presented himself and the faction of West German politics that supported him as a modern cosmopolitan who stood ready to take over the reins of power. His Ostpolitik coincided with Washington’s interest in détente with the Soviet Union and China. And for Brandt, as Krause points out, Berlin remained the embodiment of values “shared across the Atlantic” even after unification in 1990. All this illustrates that Brandt, despite his frequent criticism of the United States and its political objectives before and after 1990, continued at heart to have an attachment to the United States and its transnational values. These were sentiments Brandt shared with Helmut Schmidt, his longtime parliamentary colleague and heir apparent, who succeeded him to the chancellorship in 1974. In his chapter “Two Very Different Atlanticists?,” Mathias Haeussler explores and compares Willy Brandt’s and Helmut Schmidt’s perception of and politics toward the United States and the transatlantic alliance. The two politicians’ clash over NATO’s dual-track decision is central to his narrative. Rather than focusing merely on Schmidt’s geostrategic arguments and Brandt’s sympathy, emerging by the early 1980s, for the opponents of this policy, Haeussler offers a new interpretation. He concludes that the two politicians’ “actual differences over the substance of the dual-track decision were much less fundamental than often depicted.” Rather, based on their “generational experience,” they shared a very similar outlook on transatlantic relations and the geopolitical dimension of Ostpolitik. They also held similar conceptions of West Germany’s role in international affairs. It was precisely because they thought along very similar lines that their clash about NATO’s dual-track decision became so bitter and personal. This very public clash, Haeussler argues, should not distract from recognizing how similar in principle their political views were.

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The following chapter considers Willy Brandt’s engagement with development politics. Wolfgang Schmidt argues that examination of Brandt’s activities as chairman of the North-South Commission (the “Brandt Commission”) from 1977 onward helps to explain the increasing alienation from the United States that began in the late 1970s. In his contribution, Schmidt focuses on the reaction of the Carter administration to the 1980 Brandt Report. He also discusses the response of the World Bank and briefly looks at other development issues and policies Brandt was involved in during the 1980s. Schmidt precisely outlines Brandt’s increasing sympathy for those who were thinking in post-materialist terms. He also illustrates Brandt’s increasing preference for a “third way” between democratic capitalism and communism. This was not shared by the United States. Neither the Carter administration nor the subsequent Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations had much sympathy for Brandt’s progressive views. They never saw eye to eye with Brandt on these issues. The second part of this book deals with the European dimension of Willy Brandt’s politics in the years following his resignation as chancellor in 1974. In his chapter “A Post-national Europe:  Brandt’s Vision for the European Community between the Superpowers,” Harold Mock explains that the “international character” of Brandt’s politics, and in fact of his personal life, has frequently been overlooked in the literature. Mock argues that Brandt had a “post-national view of international affairs” and “remained far less concerned with the German national question than with building European institutions.” The global clout Brandt gained with his Ostpolitik enabled him to put forward a very bold European agenda in which national governments would delegate much of their authority to European and international institutions. Mock points out that Brandt had the building of a European security structure in mind that would supersede both NATO and the Warsaw Pact. He did not believe that the United States would remain committed to Europe for all eternity. “No alliances last forever,” he once said, and hence he considered cooperation and close coordination of politics among the European nations an urgent necessity. He foresaw that multilateral global structures would become increasingly important and eventually begin to dominate international politics. These notions, along with Brandt’s increasing pacifism and his growing concern with development issues and the North-South divide, shaped his worldview in the years from 1974 on. Mock concludes that “Brandt left a legacy in Germany of positioning a powerful EC as an alternative to transatlantic institutions.” Brandt not only recognized the importance of (and the patience needed for) developing Western Europe’s political and institutional cohesion, he also

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realized the importance of “Eurocommunism.” The term was coined in 1975 by the Yugoslav journalist Frane Barbieri for those communist parties in Western Europe that wanted to pursue a path to socialism that was independent of the Soviet Union. In his chapter on this phenomenon, Nikolas Dörr investigates the dissonance that arose between Brandt and the United States over the development of Eurocommunism. US officials and politicians never managed to understand it properly. Neither Nixon nor Ford or Carter had the inclination or the time to grapple with the internal developments in the communist parties of Western and Southern European countries like France or Italy. Dörr largely focuses on developments within the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Brandt was particularly keen to exploit the efforts within the PCI toward an opening to the communist parties in Eastern Europe with the aim of improving relations with them. Dörr believes that this was “an early element of [Brandt’s] Ostpolitik.” Soon Brandt and people in his circle realized that Eurocommunism might actually help to bring about “real change” in Eastern Europe. And in fact, “Wandel durch Annaeherung” worked very well in the case of the PCI. But in the United States, this was never recognized. US politicians remained puzzled. Eurocommunism, and with it Brandt’s enthusiasm for its development, was always viewed with suspicion in Washington. The following chapter, by Jan Hansen, deals with the controversial and highly divisive Euromissiles question. Hansen argues that by the early 1980s, the leftleaning spectrum in the United States shared Brandt’s position regarding a freeze of the nuclear arms race and the postponement of the deployment of 572 cruise and other missiles in Europe. These weapons were to be deployed under NATO’s dual-track decision of 1979 unless the Soviet Union entered meaningful and successful arms negotiations. By the early 1980s, Brandt was perceived as a proponent of ending the Cold War and promoting economic fairness between North and South. In September 1983, he testified before the US Congress and outlined a “four-point plan” to end the arms race. He called for renewed EastWest negotiations and for the inclusion of British and French atomic weapons into calculations of the nuclear balance between the superpowers. He also emphasized that he and the peace movement, in spite of criticizing the Reagan administration’s nuclear strategy, were not anti-American. Hansen argues that in fact, Brandt strengthened his ties with American politicians and officials by drawing on his long-established network in the United States. He demonstrates that Brandt had two objectives:  to persuade the Reagan administration to negotiate in earnest with Moscow, and to show that concern about the nuclear arms race was by no means tantamount to anti-Americanism. Brandt and the

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peace movement needed Reagan and his hardline Cold War policy “as a negative foil” and “as the discursive other against which they could delineate their position.” In this respect, Hansen writes, Brandt greatly depended on Reagan. In his contribution on Brandt’s vision of conceptualizing “common security” beyond the two blocs, Oliver Bange outlines that in the course of the 1980s Brandt and the United States found themselves on a growing course of confrontation. Bange argues that the key to Willy Brandt’s conflict with the US administration in Washington was a different understanding of security. From a German(-German) and a European perspective, the security situation in Europe seemed to be increasingly volatile. The warning period for a nuclear attack had shrunk to a mere few minutes but both East and West still seemed to assume that the other side was quite prepared to embark on nuclear war if necessary. Regional, accidental, and limited war in Europe or in Germany appeared to be just round the corner. For Brandt the solution consisted of going beyond traditional deterrence-logics. Providing time for political decisionmaking in times of crises or even in war and reassuring the other side of one’s own peaceful intentions could only be achieved through more transparency and the establishment of ongoing exchanges on strategic and tactical issues. This ran counter to the dominating narrative of the Reagan administration during the president’s first term in office. It was only in the latter half of the 1980s that Brandt’s idea of a “common security” framework between East and West overlapped with the “constructive reengagement” policies pursued by the second Reagan administration. The resulting constructive and cooperative approach to security in Europe formed an important backdrop to the overwhelming peacefulness of the revolutions of 1989/1990. Bange’s chapter looks at the issue of “common security” from various perspectives. He considers the view from within Brandt’s party (the SPD) and the ruling conservative government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl as well as the view of the Western allies. Bange also includes evidence from East German, Bulgarian, and Polish sources in his analysis. The third and final part of the book deals with the Latin American dimension of Willy Brandt’s politics as an elder statesman. Fernando Pedrosa characterizes Willy Brandt’s relations with Latin America as “elastic cooperation.” In his chapter, Pedrosa outlines Brandt’s long-standing close links with Latin American politicians and his deep interest in the role of Social Democracy in the region. He then focuses on Brandt’s Latin American politics as chairman of the SI from 1976 onward. Pedrosa argues that Brandt’s activities as head of the SI “had a strong impact in Latin America” that have had a continuing influence. Above all, Brandt’s leadership of the SI made Social Democracy in Latin America much less

Introduction

11

rigid and opened it up to a younger generation. Brandt’s political and personal connections in particular and the networks he built in Latin America aided the SI and Social Democracy in developing a closely knit network of new and more creative political leaders and organizations whose influence quickly spread. But when Brandt became SI chairman, he also developed a new program that included disarmament, support for democracy, the protection of human rights and the environment, and the unambiguous condemnation of dictatorship and authoritarian leaders. This program turned out to serve as a model for many countries in the region, although Latin American politicians frequently decided to pick and choose which aspects to support and implement and which ones to downplay or ignore. In the following chapter on the SI’s “offensive” in Latin America, Ana Mónica Fonseca argues that this initiative was intended to overcome the Eurocentrism in the SI that Brandt and other socialist leaders, such as Palme, Kreisky, Soares, and González, viewed as deeply problematic. Her contribution focuses on the response of the Carter administration, which on the whole was amused neither by the various SI missions sent to Latin American countries nor by the organization of a large number of meetings and conferences in the late 1970s. Essentially, Carter’s rhetoric and humanist sentiments chimed with the ambitions of the SI, particularly with regard to human rights and the development of democracy in South America. Brandt fully supported these initiatives. While the United States frequently intended to cooperate with the SI, Fonseca argues, there was also a great deal of mistrust in Washington toward the socialist European leaders, including Brandt, and, by extension, the SI. Washington was aware that its influence in the region had declined. To a significant extent, it blamed the “increased presence” of the SI and of “non-hemispheric nations.” US mistrust and Washington’s skepticism about the SI’s increased activities in Latin America in the late 1970s and early 1980s was never truly overcome. The cooperation between the moderate Left in Europe and Latin America (and the Caribbean) in the 1970s and 1980s is the focus of Bernd Rother’s chapter, the final contribution in this volume. Rother emphasizes Latin American agency in this process. Despite serious difficulties in accessing the region’s party archives, the available documentation shows that in most cases, it was the Latin Americans who took the first step toward intensifying the cooperation. Their motives ranged from striving to weaken US hegemony to facilitating access to the European market for their export products. They also hoped to learn how Europe’s Social Democrats had succeeded in combining economic growth with social justice. While the Europeans were rather reluctant to “give lessons,” their

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Latin American counterparts explicitly asked for deeper European involvement. For the Europeans, two motives dominated: first, they wanted to stop the loss of credibility of Western values that had occurred as a result of the US backing rightwing dictatorships, and second, they were convinced that global peace depended not only on détente between East and West but also on better relations between North and South. To achieve these aims, they were prepared to cooperate, for the first time in history, even with anti-imperialist liberation movements.

Notes 1 Willy Brandt, Über Europa hinaus: Dritte Welt und Sozialistische Internationale, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 8, eds Bernd Rother and Wolfgang Schmidt (Bonn: Dietz, 2006), 27f. 2 American Détente and German Ostpolitik, 1969–1972, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Supplement 1, eds David C. Geyer and Bernd Schaefer (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2004); Judith Michel, Willy Brandts Amerikabild und -politik 1933–1992, Internationale Beziehungen. Theorie und Geschichte 6 (Göttingen: Bonn University Press bei V&R unipress, 2010). 3 Fernando Pedrosa, La otra izquierda. La socialdemocracia europea en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual, S.A., 2012); Pia Bungarten, Dieter Dowe, Ernst J. Kerbusch, and Uwe Optenhögel, eds, Geschichte der internationalen Arbeit der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (Bonn: Dietz, 2007 ff.), particularly vol. 1: Patrik von zur Mühlen, Die internationale Arbeit der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des Ost-West-Konflikts (Bonn: Dietz, 2007); and vol. 5: Norbert von Hofmann, Volker Vinnai, and Hermann Benzing, Die Arbeit der FriedrichEbert-Stiftung in Indonesien, Tansania und Zentralamerika seit den 1960er Jahren (Bonn: Dietz, 2010). See also: Guillaume Devin, L’Internationale socialiste. Histoire et sociologie du socialisme international (1945–1990) (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1993); Eusebio Mujal-León and Ann-Sofie Nilsson, Die Sozialistische Internationale in den 80er Jahren (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1995); Brandt, Über Europa hinaus. 4 See Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), new ed., 2007; and Carole K. Fink, Cold War: An International History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2014).

Part One

Willy Brandt and the United States

1

Willy Brandt’s Relations with the United States, 1933–1974 Judith Michel

“Brandt was the most American politician I came to know in Germany.”1 This assessment by David Binder, a former New  York Times correspondent in the Federal Republic of Germany, is probably not the first that comes to mind when thinking of Willy Brandt’s relations with the United States after 1974. However, looking at Brandt as a young politician and governing mayor of Berlin and later as a foreign minister and federal chancellor, this characterization seems more appropriate:  Brandt was fluent in English, and his political style was inspired by American models. Consequently, he managed to establish a broad American network and presented himself as a welcome guest to the United States.2 But even earlier, during his exile in Scandinavia, Brandt had already stood up for values similar to those of the United States and hoped for an American military intervention to save Europe from Adolf Hitler. During his years in Berlin and as a member of the federal government, both these factors—the shared values and the dependence on the American security guarantee—dominated Brandt’s relations with the United States.

Brandt’s formative years during his Scandinavian exile and in Berlin In 1933, Brandt left Nazi Germany as a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei—SAP), which positioned itself to the left of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands—SPD). As soon as he arrived in Sweden, he made contact with other European workers’ parties, and within a few years, the SAP revolutionary

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had become a supporter of a moderate democratic socialism.3 For Brandt, democratic socialism meant that everyone should have the opportunity to attain the highest possible degree of economic and social security. This might require the abolition of certain individual rights. However, he also stressed that individual freedom and a planned economy should not be mutually exclusive:  planning had to serve the people and should not be an end in itself.4 This individualistlibertarian approach was also the basis of Brandt’s anti-colonialism. In his struggle against Hitler’s Germany, Brandt relied on the United States. The way he saw it, the United States had no colonial past, unlike Great Britain and France (which in his opinion was one reason for the outbreak of war in September 1939).5 Moreover, he believed that only America had the military power to defeat Germany.6 In addition, Brandt approved of America’s liberal democratic tradition as it was expressed in Franklin D.  Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms.”7 However, at that time, Brandt’s attitude toward the United States was not unambiguously positive. Being a socialist, he criticized American capitalism, although he welcomed Roosevelt’s New Deal as a “socialist program.”8 Similarly, his position toward the Soviet Union was ambivalent at the time: although he admired its economic system, Brandt could not ignore its anti-liberal regime. It is noteworthy that Brandt’s perception of the United States was colored by his socialist classifications: on the one hand, there was Roosevelt as a “kind of Social Democrat”9; on the other hand, there were imperialist businessmen who might lead America toward fascism.10 At the end of the war, Brandt hoped that the United States would not fall back into isolationism as they had done in 1918 and would be willing to take on responsibility in Europe. He did not have a military engagement in mind but hoped for economic support from across the Atlantic.11 Like many of his contemporaries, Brandt initially hoped that the four Allies would continue their cooperation after Germany’s unconditional surrender. However, soon after his return to Germany, the Soviet blockade of West Berlin in 1948–1949 ended the dream of the so-called One World idea. By now a rising star of the SPD, to which he had returned during the last years of the war, Brandt stated: “These days, one cannot be a democrat without being an anti-communist.”12 According to him, the Anglo-American airlift, which had been established to provide the people of West Berlin with supplies during the Soviet blockade, turned “winners into friends and occupying into protecting powers.”13 He now explicitly stressed freedom as the central element of democratic socialism: “We hold nothing in higher esteem than freedom.” He elaborated on this by saying: “Freedom and life are one. Without the guarantee of an individual sphere of rights, without

Brandt and the United States, 1933–1974

17

freedom of thought, without the moral norms of personal, communal, and humanitarian values, there is the danger of sliding back into barbarism. Only by saving the irreplaceable values of occidental culture can we hope to rise to higher levels of human coexistence.”14 For Brandt, democratic socialism was no “closed system of ideas about the reorganization of the social order” but rested “on a commitment to freedom and humanism, to the rule of law, and to social justice.”15 These remarks were clearly inspired by a liberal democratic concept that drew on “Western” sources. In Berlin, in the years that followed, Brandt saw the liberal democratic West as threatened by the expansive, repressive Soviet Union. While many leading figures in the Social Democratic Party still hoped for a reunification of Germany in the near future and therefore rejected any attempts at strengthening the ties between the Western-occupied zones and the Western Allies, Brandt soon came to see reunification as a long-term goal. In the meantime, he hoped to integrate West Germany into the international community of states.16 He soon abandoned his goals to unite the European working class and to introduce a state-directed economy and welcomed the United States’ Marshall Plan aid for Western Europe. Only a few SPD members shared his willingness for economic, political, and even military integration into the West. After the Berlin crisis of 1948–1949, Brandt had come to realize that only the United States could guarantee the security of West Berlin: “Anybody who has made his choice between freedom and bondage cannot believe in neutrality.”17 In his opinion, “a German wanderer between the worlds can . . . no longer exist.”18 Brandt consequently supported the Western arms build-up in order to strengthen NATO’s deterrence of the Soviet Union.19 Still, it was not always easy to determine Brandt’s position in the matter of rearmament of the Federal Republic, since he had to be careful not to jeopardize his rise within the SPD by adopting positions contrary to those of the party’s leading circles. Moreover, he may have thought it necessary to distance himself from the federal government led by Konrad Adenauer, although concerning rearmament, his position was often very similar to that of the Christian Democratic chancellor. Still, the experience of the airlift had shown him that with regard to security, West Berlin and West Germany could only rely on the United States and Great Britain. He therefore did not bemoan the failure of plans for a European Defense Community, which both the Federal Republic and France but neither Great Britain nor the United States would have been members of. He was rather glad that the Federal Republic became a member of NATO instead, thus obtaining the American security guarantee as a member of the Alliance. Additionally, the

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Federal Republic now regained important sovereignty rights. Brandt’s readiness to be part of an Atlantic security system may also have stemmed from his fear that the Americans might reduce their military commitment if the Federal Republic was not willing to share the military burden.20

Vietnam as a test case for Brandt’s relations with the United States In the matter of rearmament, Brandt, relying on the American security guarantee, adopted a position opposed to the majority of his own party. Concerning the Vietnam War, his loyalty to the United States brought him into conflict with his party base and the younger generation. Brandt avoided direct military involvement by the Federal Republic in Vietnam, providing humanitarian assistance instead21 and helping the United States balance its budget by being accommodating in the offset negotiations.22 He never openly criticized American policy in Southeast Asia.23 So what are the reasons Brandt, who usually spoke out for human rights, peace, and anti-colonialism, did not take a stand against the escalating conflict in Southeast Asia? Brandt already had to take sides when he was governing mayor of Berlin. Apropos of a huge demonstration against the Vietnam War in 1966, he stated his willingness to talk with the nonviolent young rebels who, in his view, were simply concerned about world peace and whose critical stance he understood, although he did not share it. But he condemned the behavior of the “rowdies” who poisoned the Berlin air with anti-Americanism.24 In his opinion, Germans should not behave like schoolteachers of world politics but rather help a friend in a time of need.25 Although Brandt did not share the view that “Berlin is defended at the Mekong,” he considered the American involvement in Vietnam a matter of credibility. One could not expect the Americans to guarantee the freedom of West Berlin while denying them the right to defend liberty in other parts of the world.26 By 1968, he had come to abandon this theory of credibility and was urging for a political solution to the conflict, but he continued to interpret the war in Southeast Asia in terms of the established logic of the Cold War. Although Brandt hoped for a peaceful solution, he always stressed that peace could not be accepted under all conditions.27 Even when the bombing of Southeast Asia was intensified in 1973, he generally refrained from commenting at all.28

Brandt and the United States, 1933–1974

19

There are several reasons for Brandt’s stance toward the Vietnam War. He felt grateful toward the United States and did not want to turn away from a friend in a time of difficulty. Especially in his position as chairman of the SPD, which steered a pro-Western course and attempted to establish itself as pro-American after the adoption of the Godesberg Program,29 it was important to reject any accusations of anti-Americanism or sympathies for communism. From 1968, protest against the war grew both within the SPD and West German society in general. From this point on, loyalty toward the Alliance on moral grounds was a policy that was hard to defend.30 Brandt clearly stated that as a member of the executive, he had to disregard personal inclination and domestic policy and follow the Federal Republic’s reason of state: the United States had to be retained as a provider of security, and the withdrawal of American troops from Europe had to be avoided.31 In the same context, he emphasized that the Europeans needed to show initiative and take part in the defense against communism.32 He also knew that he needed good relations with the United States in order to get their support for his Ostpolitik (policy toward the East), which he could not implement without the powerful ally’s approval. Unlike the protest movement, Brandt did not view the war as a conflict between an “imperial center” and a “colonial periphery” but as a proxy war within the Cold War. As early as during his time in exile, Brandt regarded the United States as the cradle of liberal democracy, a country without a colonial past. With regard to Southeast Asia, he also thought of the United States as a bulwark of freedom against communism and a country without imperial ambitions.33 It took several years for Brandt to concede that this war also had a colonial dimension.34 Brandt later stated in his autobiography that concerning the Vietnam War, he had had a kind of “internal prohibition to think,” which had made it seem irresponsible to openly express critical views on the topic.35 He claimed that he had suppressed his doubts and remained silent when he should have voiced his inner sympathies.36 There are some contemporaneous sources which show that Brandt was in fact more critical of American Vietnam policy than he was ready to admit in public. He even went so far as to comment on a draft speech written for him by a staff member that contained the term “American friends” with the words, “unfortunately, a term that can hardly be used like this anymore.”37 After the official end of the war, journalist James Reston told the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: A colleague of mine went to see Willy Brandt and asked “What does the young generation in Germany now think of America?” And Brandt replied, “The magic

20

Willy Brandt and International Relations is gone.” And when he was asked what he meant by that, it was that we had used power, he thought, in a way that did not comport to our ideals, particularly in Vietnam . . . [W]e somehow had lost our ideals in the way in which we approach the world.38

In public, Brandt remained loyal and refrained from criticism. In some respects, his position mirrored that of the majority of society:  unlike the small but influential protest movement, most West Germans did not want to risk a break with the guarantor power.39

Ostpolitik with American backing As mentioned above, one reason for Brandt’s reluctance to criticize the United States for its Vietnam policy was that he did not want to lose American support for his Ostpolitik. As early as the mid-1950s, Brandt had developed his concept of “change through rapprochement,” which comprised economic, cultural, and political but no ideological rapprochement.40 Although Brandt liked to identify with President John F.  Kennedy,41 it was the president’s hesitant reaction to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 that had shown him that the Federal Republic had to develop its own policy toward the East. Nonetheless, he saw a firm entrenchment in the West as an indispensable prerequisite for successful negotiations with the East. This was in keeping with NATO’s Harmel Report of 1967, which stated that détente always had to be accompanied by military strength. Backed by the Western alliance, Brandt planned—in the first instance—to resolve bilateral aspects of the East-West conflict. Topics to be negotiated were the renunciation of force, the respect of mutual borders, and economic and cultural exchange as well as humanitarian and practical matters. The first negotiating partner was Moscow, but later on, Brandt pursued the normalization of relations with all members of the Warsaw Pact, a regulated coexistence of the two German states, and an improvement of the Berlin situation.42 Brandt always coordinated his Ostpolitik with the Allies. This was necessary because the Four Powers were in charge of Germany and Berlin as a whole. Furthermore, the Federal Republic had to dispel fears of a new Rapallo43 by making sure that every step toward the East was discussed with the Western partners. Their support also helped to strengthen Brandt’s position against domestic critics of his Ostpolitik. Moreover, he believed that the Federal Republic had to develop an active role in its relationship with the East in order to prevent

Brandt and the United States, 1933–1974

21

an agreement between the superpowers that did not take West Germany’s interests into consideration.44 Brandt and Egon Bahr—his close advisor and state secretary (Staatssekretär) at the German Federal Chancellery—always kept President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger informed about their Eastern policy initiatives. They even established a secret back channel in order to exchange information on Ostpolitik without necessarily involving their respective foreign ministries.45 Still, Nixon and Kissinger never really trusted Brandt and Bahr. In a private conversation in June 1971, the president remarked to Kissinger about Brandt:  “Good God, this, if that’s all Germany’s hope is, then Germany ain’t got much future. [. . .] I don’t want to say that I, that we’re enthusiastic about Ostpolitik.”46 Both still regretted that the Christian Democrats did not stay in power after the federal election of 1969, or, as Nixon put it in May 1971: “I don’t want to hurt our friends in Germany [the Christian Democrats] by catering to that son-of-a-bitch [Brandt].”47 They were also worried that Brandt’s policy might undermine American détente and their bilateral negotiations with the Soviet Union. While Brandt and Bahr were willing to accept the status quo for the time being in order to change it in the long run, the national security advisor’s policy was aimed at maintaining the status quo with the USSR. Kissinger also feared that in case of the failure of Ostpolitik, the Federal Republic would become destabilized.48 Moreover, he was afraid that Brandt might make too many concessions to the Soviet Union and veer away from his Western partners.49 Since Kissinger was interested in stabilizing the status quo, he also thought that the speed and timing of Ostpolitik were problematic. He therefore suggested supporting the broader goal of Ostpolitik but not commenting on timing, individual measures, and tactics, as long as the areas of responsibility of the Four Powers were not concerned.50 The West Germans were to be solely responsible for their Ostpolitik so that in case it failed, the United States could not be blamed. A scene described by Kissinger seems symptomatic of the US administration’s position: Brandt “expressed his gratification for NATO’s support for his Ostpolitik. Nixon frostily corrected him, saying the Alliance did not object to the policy. But the Federal Republic had to make the decisions and accept the responsibility.”51 This attitude actually gave Brandt more latitude of action, although it was clear that the United Stated could have put an end to his Ostpolitik at any time. Brandt knew about the American reservations, but he downplayed them in public.52 When Nixon and Kissinger realized that Brandt’s negotiations with the East were successful and that his policy was gaining international support, they

22

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changed their position and began to view Ostpolitik as part of American détente policy. West Germany’s federal government now also managed to persuade the Americans to seriously negotiate on Berlin.53 Although negotiations on Berlin fell under the purview of the Four Powers, the Federal Republic was in a position to significantly influence them. As the United States was engaged simultaneously in Southeast Asia and China, Berlin did not have top priority for the Western superpower, which did not occupy itself too much with the issue but rather relied on West German expertise.54 Many of the results of these negotiations were reached not in the meetings of the ambassadors of the Four Powers but during secret talks between Bahr, the American Ambassador to Bonn, Kenneth Rush, and his Soviet counterpart, Valentin Falin.55 The results of these negotiations were also communicated via the bilateral back channel. In the end, an agreement was reached that contained significant concessions on the part of the Soviets. In June 1971, Kissinger told Nixon about the Berlin agreement: “The reason why we are helping him [Brandt] is, is because that it is a pretty good agreement we are getting.” Although Kissinger knew that American support would strengthen Brandt’s domestic position vis-à-vis the Christian Democrats, Kissinger was willing to pay this “price” in exchange for the agreement.56 As long as the global interests of the superpower did not conflict with the regional interests of the middle power, the United States would now back the Federal Republic’s policy toward the East and Berlin. In the end, the Federal Republic concluded bilateral treaties with Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, and the German Democratic Republic, and a quadripartite agreement on Berlin was adopted. All in all, the personal dislike between Nixon/Kissinger and Brandt/Bahr did not seriously hamper their cooperation with regard to their respective détente policies and the negotiations on Berlin, since their general objectives were similar. Overall, Brandt considered détente policy to be peace policy. After the bilateral treaties had been concluded, he worked toward a multilateralization of détente. Brandt hoped that bilateral and multilateral détente would make Europe more peaceful and secure and might be able to compensate for the pending reduction of American forces in Western Europe.57 He always emphasized that there must be no unilateral American disengagement before successful negotiations had been concluded. Otherwise, the military balance would be disturbed, the credibility of deterrence would be called into question, and the West would unnecessarily give away leverage in the negotiations on mutual arms reductions.58 In the long term, Brandt hoped for a pan-European security system that would eventually evolve into a European peace order.59 Although he spoke about these ideas very cautiously, he even considered it possible that one day the military blocs might

Brandt and the United States, 1933–1974

23

become unnecessary. However, he never talked about these ideas to his NATO partners but rather tried to put a damper on the illusions of some of his fellow party members regarding the possible dissolution of the military blocs and never supported plans for a neutral Germany.60

Western Europe as a junior partner of the United States Brandt’s foreign policy centered not only on Ostpolitik but also focused on the process of European integration. In 1973–1974, the European Community (EC) was trying to formulate common positions on its foreign policy. At the same time, the United States wanted to reorganize its relationship with the EC. On April 23, 1973, Henry Kissinger proclaimed the “Year of Europe.” In his speech, while on the one hand he stressed the ongoing importance of European integration, on the other hand he characterized Europe as a regional power that was expected to subordinate itself within the Alliance and asked for greater burden sharing and more concessions in economic questions. Since security, political, and economic issues were interdependent, he asked that they be treated as connected in negotiations between the United States and the EC. Economic policies in particular should always serve larger political goals. In addition, Kissinger proposed the creation of an institutionalized dialogue between Europe and the United States that would also include Japan as a major partner, and the drafting of a “new Atlantic Charter.”61 The Europeans responded reluctantly to Kissinger’s speech. Brandt officially welcomed the initiative and called it an “interesting contribution” to the transatlantic dialogue.62 Still, like his European partners, he rejected Kissinger’s (geo-)political and economic demands.63 The EC member states believed that economic and security issues did not call for an institutionalized dialogue but needed to be dealt with separately. Economic issues, for instance, could be handled at the EC level or through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), security issues at the NATO level or bilaterally (since there was no common European security structure in place yet).64 Instead of an Atlantic Charter, they favored a document with rather broad objectives. Over the following months, France in particular65 took a critical stance toward Kissinger’s initiative. Brandt tried hard to avoid taking sides between America and France. Because of the Federal Republic’s strong dependence on the American security guarantee, West German governments always tried to present themselves as loyal allies of the Western superpower. Also, as mentioned

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previously, Brandt needed American support for his Ostpolitik and thus refrained from harsh criticism of the United States. Moreover, unlike France, Brandt had asked for stronger institutionalized transatlantic consultation mechanisms, which Kissinger had also mentioned in his speech.66 Furthermore, the chancellor’s support of greater trade liberalization was closer to American than French ideas.67 Nonetheless, although the Federal Republic was overall rather sympathetic to the American course, the federal government also asked for a more independent role in the widening and increasingly integrated EC. The personal mistrust between Brandt and the Nixon-Kissinger administration also played its part in straining German-American cooperation. Over the course of the following months, the Federal Republic tried to advance European integration and maintain the French-German friendship while simultaneously trying, along with Great Britain and some of the smaller European countries, to influence France to take a more cooperative route. In the months to follow, the idea of an Atlantic Charter was abandoned. Instead, the allies agreed to draft two different declarations—one US-EC declaration and one NATO declaration—which helped deal with the different issues in different forums. In the discussions on these documents, the EC members tried to pursue a common policy. Kissinger, however, was not willing to deal with the EC as if it was a unity before EC structures were in place and fully functioning.68 While in the end a rather vague NATO declaration was signed, the US-EC document was quietly put aside. Furthermore, the allies could only agree on an informal compromise for consultations with the United States, which came to be known as the Gymnich compromise.69 Kissinger had been criticized for calling America a global and Europe a regional power in his speech of April 1973. However, the Middle East oil crisis of 1973–1974 showed that the EC did indeed have problems formulating a coherent policy and transcending its regional limitations. The United States regarded the Middle East crisis as an event that legitimized the invocation of the NATO treaty clause that committed its allies to supporting the United States’ pro-Israel policy. The Europeans, being dependent on Arab oil, wanted to take a more proArab stance and protested against the American demand for support, while at the same time not being kept informed on all aspects of the American Middle East policy. Despite greatly diverging interests, the nine EC member states, led by France and Great Britain, managed to deliver a common declaration in November 1973 (with the Netherlands abstaining) that was rather close to the Arab position and criticized by the US administration.70 The United States, by contrast, having a more independent energy supply, requested an energy

Brandt and the United States, 1933–1974

25

conference of the oil-consuming countries without making concessions to the Arabs. The Federal Republic aligned itself with the majority of its EC partners, which opposed the United States on the issue, by taking a stance critical of Israel. In order to get America’s allies in line again, President Nixon explicitly linked the Europeans’ “goodwill” with the security guarantee: “Security and economic considerations are inevitably linked and energy cannot be separated from either.”71 He also wrote a letter to Brandt telling him that they had a choice of two paths in front of them—one with a joint economic, political, and security policy, and one of progressive separation from each other.72 The Federal Republic was a prime target for American pressure: first, the divided country in the middle of Europe was, with regard to security issues, the most vulnerable EC member; second, the Federal Republic’s burden of historical responsibility toward Israel prohibited a strong pro-Arab position. Therefore, the Brandt administration tried to take a neutral stance. However, after American pressure increased, Germany drew closer to US policy. Brandt later recalled the American pressure on the FRG with the words: “They [the United States] treated us like a colony.”73 Soon most EC members began to fall in line with the German position. In the end, it became obvious that the EC could not transcend its regional limitations, had to admit its dependence on the United States, and did not find a common voice in positioning itself in relation to America.74

Conclusion When Willy Brandt was in exile, his position toward the United States was ambivalent due to his socialist preconceptions. Still, even then he hoped that America would be militarily strong enough to defeat Nazi Germany and help establish liberal democratic values in Europe. After the war, he was grateful for the American support against the Soviet Union’s repressive actions in Berlin. He knew that the Federal Republic’s and Berlin’s security depended on the United States. This assessment, along with a feeling of gratitude and the belief in common values, caused Brandt to refrain from open criticism in instances where he did not agree with American policy, such as the building of the Berlin Wall, the Vietnam War, or the Middle East and energy crises. Moreover, he took care to present himself and the Federal Republic as a reliable partner that played its part in sharing America’s burden. He believed that, to a certain degree, America even expected its German ally to develop its own dynamic foreign policy and wanted a partner rather than a satellite state.75 He managed to widen his leeway

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to influence crucial US decisions concerning Germany, Berlin, and Europe and to widen his latitude of action. David Binder’s picture of Brandt as an “American politician” probably overstates the case. Brandt’s close advisor and friend Egon Bahr retrospectively stated: “The idea that Brandt’s friendly feelings for America had been uncritical, ingratiating, and unmixed is completely wrong.”76 For the period up to 1974, Bahr’s assessment is likewise overstated, since Brandt swallowed most of his criticism due to reason of state. Referring to the period from 1974 onward, Brandt’s biographer Peter Merseburger sets out this idea: “Is the elder statesman free of the practical constraints of everyday government possibly the pure, selfdetermined, real Willy Brandt? The man who no longer has to comply with any role, wear any mask, fulfil any domestic political expectations, and who is free to think and live in larger dimensions again?”77 In order to assess this statement and get a nuanced picture of Brandt’s relations with the United States, one has to look beyond his time as chancellor to a period when he began to reposition himself vis-à-vis the Federal Republic’s powerful ally.

Notes 1 David Binder in an interview with Judith Michel, October 26, 2005, in Washington, DC. 2 Judith Michel, Willy Brandts Amerikabild und -politik 1933–1992, Internationale Beziehungen. Theorie und Geschichte 6 (Göttingen: Bonn University Press bei V&R unipress, 2010), 76–88, 122–66, 207–42, 407–26. 3 Einhart Lorenz, “Einleitung,” in Willy Brandt, Hitler ist nicht Deutschland, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 1, ed. Einhart O. Lorenz (Bonn: Dietz, 2002), 15–72. 4 Willy Brandt, “Nach dem Sieg,” 506–508, A 3, 36, Willy-Brandt-Archiv (WBA) at the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (AdsD) der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn. 5 Willy Brandt, “Zusammenfassung einer Diskussion deutscher Sozialisten, die kurz nach Kriegsausbruch—im September 1939—in Norwegen stattfand,” in Willy Brandt, Draußen: Ausgewählte Schriften während der Emigration, ed. Günter Struve (Munich: Kindler, 1966), 90. 6 Ibid., 91–2. 7 Internationale Gruppe demokratischer Sozialisten, “Die Friedensziele der demokratischen Sozialisten,” March 1943, in Willy Brandt, Zwei Vaterländer: Deutsch-Norweger im schwedischen Exil—Rückkehr nach Deutschland 1940–1947, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 2, ed. Einhart O. Lorenz (Bonn: Dietz, 2000), 88–104, 90–4.

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8 Willy Brandt, Begegnungen und Einsichten: Die Jahre 1960–1975 (Hamburg: Knaur, 1976), 79. 9 Original: “eine Art Sozialdemokraten.” Willy Brandt, Links und frei: Mein Weg 1930–1950 (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1982), 304. 10 Brandt, “Nach dem Sieg,” 49, A 3, 34, WBA, AdsD. 11 Brandt, “Nach dem Sieg,” 475–6, A 3, 36, WBA, AdsD. 12 Original: “Man kann heute nicht Demokrat sein, ohne Antikommunist zu sein.” Willy Brandt, “Die weltpolitische Lage und die Aufgaben der SPD: Referat auf der SPD-Bezirkskonferenz in Berlin,” January 14, 1949, SPD-Mitteilungen für Funktionäre des Landesverbands Großberlin (February 1949), 1–9, 3, A 3, 44, WBA, AdsD. 13 Original: “Sieger zu Freunden und Besatzungs- zu Schutzmächten.” Willy Brandt, “Manuscript for a letter to the editor in Welt am Sonntag,” September 12, 1961, A 3, 125, WBA, AdsD. 14 Original: “Nichts steht uns höher als die Freiheit . . . Freiheit und Leben sind eins. Ohne Sicherheit der individuellen Rechtssphäre, ohne geistige Freiheit, ohne die moralischen Normen der Persönlichkeits-, Gemeinschafts- und Menschlichkeitswerte droht der Rückfall in die Barbarei. Nur durch die Rettung der unersetzlichen Güter der abendländischen Kultur können wir Hoffnung hegen, zu höheren Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens emporzusteigen.” “Rede des Vertreters des SPD-Parteivorstandes in Berlin, Brandt, auf dem VI. Landesparteitag der Berliner SPD,” May 8, 1949, in Willy Brandt, Auf dem Weg nach vorn: Willy Brandt und die SPD 1947–1972, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 4, ed. Daniela Münkel (Bonn: Dietz, 2000), 99–130, 114. 15 Original: “abgeschlossenes System von Vorstellungen über eine Neugestaltung der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse, [sondern fuße] auf dem Bekenntnis zur Freiheit und zum Humanismus, zum Rechtstaat und zur sozialen Gerechtigkeit.” Ibid., 129. 16 Cf. Peter Merseburger, Willy Brandt 1913–1992. Visionär und Realist (Stuttgart/ Munich: DVA, 2002), 296. 17 Original: “[W]er seine Wahl zwischen Freiheit und Knechtschaft getroffen hat, kann nicht an Neutralität glauben.” Willy Brandt, “Neutralität?—Aktivität!” Berliner Stadtblatt, February 21, 1951. 18 Original: “einen deutschen Wanderer zwischen den Welten kann es . . . nicht mehr geben.” Willy Brandt, “Zwischen Europarat und Atlantikrat.” Berliner Stadtblatt, April 29, 1950. 19 Willy Brandt, “Politische Strategie,” Berliner Sozialdemokrat, March 19, 1950; Willy Brandt, “Europäische Sicherheitsprobleme,” Berliner Sozialdemokrat, April 6, 1950. 20 Brandt, “Zwischen Europarat und Atlantikrat.” 21 Willy Brandt, “Draft for an Interview with St. Louis Post-Dispatch,” January 18, 1967, A 3, 246, WBA, AdsD.

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22 The Federal Republic had to make offset payments for the American troops stationed in West Germany. 23 Klaus Hildebrand, Von Erhard zur Großen Koalition, 1963–1969 (Stuttgart: DVA, 1984), 309, 312–13. 24 Willy Brandt, “Statement Concerning the Incidents at the America House,” February 5, 1966, A 3, 225, WBA, AdsD. 25 See, for instance, Willy Brandt, “Nicht Lehrmeister,” Berliner Stimme, February 12, 1966; Willy Brandt, “Speech in the Executive Committee of the SPD,” February 25, 1966, Tatsachen—Argumente, 188 (1966), 1–2; Egon Bahr, “Das musst du erzählen.” Erinnerungen an Willy Brandt (Berlin: Propyläen, 2013), 190. 26 “Willy Brandt in a letter to Norman Thomas,” March 4, 1966, A 6, 105, WBA, AdsD. 27 See, for instance, Willy Brandt, “Speech on the International Situation in the Council of the Socialist International,” October 11, 1967, A 3, 260, WBA, AdsD; “Minutes of the Meeting of the Landesausschuss Berlin,” January 17, 1966, Landesverband Berlin, 3 BEAB000587, AdsD. 28 Case in point: Brandt did not mention the war at all in his government policy statement or his New Year’s address of 1973. 29 The Godesberg Program of 1959 marked a turning point in the development of the SPD from a socialist workers’ party to a catch-all party. In its new program, the party also declared its support for integration into the West. 30 Klaus Schönhoven, Wendejahre: Die Sozialdemokratie in der Zeit der Großen Koalition 1966–1969 (Bonn: Dietz, 2004), 421. 31 Willy Brandt, “Draft for a speech at a meeting of the parliamentary group,” January 17, 1973, A 11.14, 8, WBA, AdsD. 32 Willy Brandt, “Manuscript for the opening address at the Conference of Ambassadors at Viña del Mar,” October 13, 1968, A 3, 287, WBA, AdsD. 33 Willy Brandt, “Interview with AP,” August 2, 1965, A 3, 215, WBA, AdsD. 34 Brandt, Begegnungen und Einsichten, 424. 35 Original: “inneres Denkverbot.” Ibid., 422. 36 Willy Brandt, Erinnerungen, with a new preface (Berlin: Ullstein, 1997), 398. 37 Original: “amerikanischen Freunden” and “leider so kaum noch zu verwendender Terminus.” “Drafts for Brandt’s speech at the Party Congress on April 11, 1973: ‘Das Grundgesetz verwirklichen—Deutsche Politik und sozialdemokratische Grundsätze,’ ” A 3, 485, WBA, AdsD. 38 “Interview with Secretary of State Kissinger,” October 6, 1974, in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1969–1976, vol. 38, pt. 1, Foundations of Foreign Policy, 1973–1976, eds Kristine L. Ahlberg and Alexander Wieland (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 2012), 234–49, 244. Interestingly, Kissinger recalls in his memoirs that Brandt never criticized the American Vietnam

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39 40

41 42

43

44

45 46

47

48 49

50

51

29

policy in “even the most private conversation.” Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), 424. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe, Unionsparteien, Sozialdemokratie und Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika 1945–1966 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1983), 558. On Brandt’s early policy toward the East, see Wolfgang Schmidt, Kalter Krieg, Koexistenz und kleine Schritte. Willy Brandt und die Deutschlandpolitik 1948–1963 (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2001). See, for instance, Willy Brandt, Begegnungen mit Kennedy (Munich: Kindler, 1964). Willy Brandt, “Aufgaben und Verpflichtungen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Rede auf dem SPD-Parteitag in Bad Godesberg,” April 18, 1969, in Außerordentlicher Parteitag der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands in Bad Godesberg, 16.-18. April 1969, ed. SPD-Vorstand (Bonn, n.d.), 443–4, 447. In 1922, Germany and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic concluded a bilateral treaty in Rapallo. The so-called Rapallo complex refers to Western fears of a German-Russian alliance. Willy Brandt, “Draft: Deutsch-amerikanische Beziehungen,” June 22, 1967, B 32, 253, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts; Willy Brandt, “Rede vor dem SPDLandesparteitag in Bremen,” August 18, 1967, Pressemitteilungen und Informationen der SPD 397, no. 67, August 18, 1967, A 3, 258, WBA, AdsD. Egon Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, Anniversary edition (Berlin: Siedler, 1999), 271–3. “Conversation among President Nixon, German Chancellor Brandt, the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), and the German State Secretary for Foreign, Defence, and German Policy (Bahr),” June 15, 1971, in FRUS, 1969– 1976, vol. 40, Germany and Berlin, 1969–1972, ed. David C. Geyer (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 2008), 741–8, 741, fn. 2. “Conversation between President Nixon and the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger),” May 29, 1971, in FRUS, 1969–1976, vol. 40, 720–3, 722. Kissinger, White House Years, 408–409. “Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon,” February 16, 1970, in FRUS, 1969–1976, vol. 40, 150–3; Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1982), 144–5. “Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to Secretary of State Rogers,” April 8, 1970, in FRUS, 1969–1976, vol. 40, 207–8; Helmut Sonnenfeldt to Henry Kissinger, “Memorandum: Increased Concern over Brandt’s Eastern Policy—We May be Getting Drawn In,” March 26, 1970, Box 983, Folder 1 (1 of 2), Nixon Presidential Materials Staff, NSC Files, Country Files, Europe, Germany vol. IV, National Archives, College Park, MD. Kissinger, White House Years, 966; emphasis in the original.

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52 Michel, Willy Brandts Amerikabild, 324. 53 Gottfried Niedhart, “The Federal Republic’s Ostpolitik and the United States: Initiatives and Constraints,” in The United States and the European Alliance since 1945, eds Kathleen Burk and Melvyn Stokes (Oxford et al.: Bloomsbury, 1999), 289–311. 54 Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, 353. 55 Stephan Fuchs, “Dreiecksverhältnisse sind immer kompliziert”: Kissinger, Bahr und die Ostpolitik (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1999). Still, the negotiations did not succeed solely because of these trilateral talks; the official negotiators also had their part in their success. Werner Link, “Außen- und Deutschlandpolitik in der Ära Brandt 1969–1974,” in Republik im Wandel 1969–1974. Die Ära Brandt, eds Karl Dietrich Bracher, Wolfgang Jäger, and Werner Link (Stuttgart/ Mannheim: DVA, 1986), 161–282, 202–203; David C. Geyer, “The Missing Link: Henry Kissinger and the Back-Channel Negotiations on Berlin,” in American Détente and German Ostpolitik, 1969–1972, eds David C. Geyer and Bernd Schaefer (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2004), 80–97, 91. 56 “Editorial Note,” in FRUS, 1969–1976, vol. 40, 751–2. 57 Cf. Willy Brandt, “Ansprache in der Harvard Universität in Boston,” June 5, 1972, in Willy Brandt, Reden und Interviews, vol. 1, ed. Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung (Bonn, 1973), 251–8, 256. See also Bernd Faulenbach, Das sozialdemokratische Jahrzehnt: Von der Reformeuphorie zur Neuen Unübersichtlichkeit—Die SPD 1969–1982 (Bonn: Dietz, 2011), 150–3. 58 “Gespräch des Bundeskanzlers Brandt mit Präsident Nixon in Key Biscayne,” December 28, 1971, in Institut für Zeitgeschichte, ed., Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1971, vol. 3 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002), 1980–97, 1990. 59 Willy Brandt, “Ost- und Westpolitik im Zusammenhang (Interview),” Moderne Welt 8, no. 4 (1967), 358–9. 60 Link, “Außen- und Deutschlandpolitik in der Ära Brandt,” 233. 61 Henry Kissinger, “The Year of Europe, April 23, 1973,” The Department of State Bulletin 68 (1973), 593–8. 62 Embassy Bonn to Department of State, “Telegram: Brandt Press Backgrounder on U.S. Trip,” April 30, 1973, Box 2306, Folder 5, RG 59, Central Files, SubjectNumeric File, 1970–1973, National Archives, College Park, MD. 63 “Berndt von Staden (Washington) to Auswärtiges Amt,” April 26, 1973, 439, Nachlass Egon Bahr, AdsD. 64 Keith Hamilton, “Britain, France, and America’s Year of Europe, 1973,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 17 (2006), 871–95, 878. 65 “Gespräch des Bundeskanzlers Brandt mit Staatspräsident Pompidou,” June 23, 1973, in Institut für Zeitgeschichte, ed., Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1973, vol. 2 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2004), 1034–43.

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66 Willy Brandt, “Partnerschaft bekräftigt. Interview mit Bundeskanzler Willy Brandt über die Ergebnisse der Amerikareise,” Vorwärts, April 16, 1970; Georg Massion to Willy Brandt, “Memorandum: Gipfelkonferenz der Zehn,” September 6, 1972, 439, Nachlass Egon Bahr, AdsD. 67 Link, “Außen- und Deutschlandpolitik in der Ära Brandt,” 244–5. 68 Ibid., 257. 69 “Runderlaß des Vortragenden Legationsrats I. Klasse Dohms,” April 3, 1974, in Institut für Zeitgeschichte, ed., Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1974, vol. 1 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2005), 475–8. 70 “Erklärung der neun EG-Staaten zur Lage im Nahen Osten,” November 6, 1973, Bulletin der Bundesregierung 146, November 14, 1973, 1449; Daniel Möckli, European Foreign Policy during the Cold War: Heath, Brandt, Pompidou and the Dream of Political Unity (London/New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 191–2. 71 Cited in Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 916. 72 Willy Brandt, Über den Tag hinaus: Eine Zwischenbilanz (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1974), 328. 73 Original: “Sie [die USA] haben uns behandelt wie eine Kolonie.” Cited in Klaus Harpprecht, Im Kanzleramt. Tagebuch der Jahre mit Willy Brandt (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2000), 375. 74 Fabian Hilfrich, “West Germany’s Long Year of Europe. Bonn between Europe and the United States,” in The Strained Alliance: U.S.-European Relations from Nixon to Carter, eds Matthias Schulz and Thomas A. Schwartz (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 237–56. 75 Brandt exhibited this attitude particularly after the Berlin Wall had been built. See, for instance, Willy Brandt, “Speech at the SPD Party Council,” June 28, 1963, A 3, 158, WBA, AdsD. 76 Original: “Die Vorstellung, Brandts freundschaftliche Gefühle für Amerika wären unkritisch, anpasserisch und ungetrübt gewesen, ist völlig falsch.” Bahr, “Das musst du erzählen,” 189. 77 Original: “Ist der von Sachzwängen des täglichen Regierens befreite elder statesman vielleicht der unverfälschte, souveräne, wahre Willy Brandt? Der Mann, der keiner Rolle mehr genügen, keine Maske mehr tragen, keinen innenpolitischen Erwartungen mehr entsprechen muß und wieder in großen Zusammenhängen denken und leben kann?” Merseburger, Brandt, 739.

2

Berlin Bonds: Willy Brandt’s American Support Network, 1946–1989 Scott H. Krause

In 1988, Willy Brandt took stock of Shepard Stone’s decades-long transatlantic career that spanned politics and scholarship.1 The former chancellor lauded the former occupation official within the US High Commission in Germany (HICOG) and founding director of West Berlin’s Aspen Institute as having achieved “more than others—and more than most people know—for GermanAmerican relations.” Stone’s impending retirement alone cannot explain such effusive praise. Instead, Brandt hinted at an informal dimension of West Germany’s relationship to the United States.2 While often taken for granted or overlooked, such personal contacts buttressed the transatlantic relationship as a defining feature of the Federal Republic’s culture and politics. Hence the elder statesman applauded Stone for helping a “considerable number of Germans to orient themselves in the post-war world.”3 Left unspoken in public was the motivation for Brandt’s gratitude. In divided Berlin, Brandt had been the most prominent beneficiary from Stone’s activities since the late 1940s. For instance, then HICOG’s Public Affairs director Stone played a crucial role in coordinating a transatlantic campaign to sculpt a winning public persona for the Social Democrat during his tenure as mayor of West Berlin.4 This chapter hence scrutinizes Brandt’s relationship with the United States through the prism of his personal contacts. By outlining Brandt’s American support network from its inception in postwar Berlin through his tenure as chairman of the Socialist International during the 1980s, this chapter examines the Social Democrat’s close association with American leftliberals. These offered Brandt expertise and contacts that shaped the politician’s perspective and career. Subsequently, this chapter retraces the activities of this transatlantic support network during Brandt’s early career at a focal point of the

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Cold War, his emergence as a credible left-of-center alternative to Adenauer, his role as an eminent politician in Bonn, and his advocacy work as elder statesman.

Starting a political career among a circle of returned emigrés in Berlin, 1946–1957 Willy Brandt returned to Berlin barely a year after the Nazi regime’s demise, in 1946. The landscape of destruction hardly resembled the metropolis that the incoming Norwegian press attaché had visited a decade earlier undercover.5 Return to his birth country proved a dislocating experience for the anti-fascist activist, as it had been for most former émigrés: The discrepancy between Nazi “extermination camps and the mass executions” and his German comrades’ alleged lack of knowledge startled the returned émigré.6 Still, the remigré hoped to contribute to a Third Way into the postwar era. Yet the Norwegian diplomat had entered a political cauldron. The erstwhile proponent of a Popular Front for anti-fascist unity between communists and social democrats witnessed the return of the leftist rivalry with a vengeance not seen since the Weimar days. Since late 1945, Moscow-groomed cadres of the Gruppe Ulbricht had sought to merge the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) into a new Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the slipstream of the Soviet occupation (SVAG), promising both overcoming the division of the working class and broadening the base for these Stalinists. Taking advantage of Berlin’s Quadripartite Occupation Statute, a grassroots opposition around Franz Neumann secured a referendum among local Social Democrats. The resulting vote on March 31, 1946, emphatically confirmed the SPD’s independence in Berlin, yet yielded paradoxical results.7 While the communists’ liquidation of the party in the surrounding Soviet Zone razed traditional SPD strongholds such as Saxony, the “forced merger” into the SED served as a rallying cry for the surviving Berlin SPD, setting it on a firmly anti-communist course.8 The 1945/1946 Berliner Fusionskampf over the postwar composition of the left anticipated the frontlines of a global Cold War. Left-wing émigrés opposed to those from Moscow’s Hotel Lux quickly identified Berlin as the battleground for the future of German democracy. An anti-Stalinist returnee informed his comrades in New York: “World history is made here now . . . Today, Democratic Socialism fights a really crucial battle in Germany, a battle no less important than the military decision of the last war.”9 Consequently, former émigrés with competing interests returned to Berlin in higher numbers than to other

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regions of Germany.10 Ernst Reuter was among these returnees. The experienced urban administrator resumed his work as city councilor for transportation in July 1946, resuscitating the city’s vaunted mass transit system that he had integrated during the 1920s.11 Moreover, Reuter paired his administrative skills with a comprehensive vision for a liberal democratic postwar Germany. As early as 1943, Reuter, in his Turkish exile, had called for a “quick mortal blow” to the Nazi regime and proposed a “peaceful competition” between “conservative and progressive forces.”12 While this postwar vision aligned with the goals of the Western Allies in Berlin, communists remained deliberately absent from it. Moreover, Reuter’s past of having renounced communism made him anathema to SVAG, which refused to certify his democratic election as mayor of Berlin in 1947. The rift between the anti-communist SPD and the Stalinist SED demanded a choice of the remigrés with increasing urgency. The former proponents of a Popular Front in exile particularly felt the weight of this choice. For instance, former Socialist Workers’ Party (SAP) leader Jacob Walcher reluctantly moved from New York to Berlin’s Soviet sector, assuring himself that “deliberations over the methods in use should not distract from fundamentals.”13 His close associate and protégé in exile Brandt came to opposite conclusions, disgusted by Stalinist ploys such as the abduction of perceived enemies to People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) Special Camps. Instead, Brandt made the risky decision to stay in Germany and reenter the anti-communist Berlin SPD, commenting privately: “Political work in Germany . . . means fellowship with many people one has little in common with.”14 Still, the diplomat resigned from the Norwegian diplomatic service and took a position as intermediary between the SPD party executive and its Berlin branch.15 Brandt reclaimed his German citizenship, hoping to implement an ambitious agenda: “Much must be done in Germany, for the sake of Europe, democracy and peace. And in spite of everything, there are positive powers within the German people.”16 Reuter played an instrumental role in charting a course for both the SPD as a left-center big-tent party and Brandt personally. In light of the Soviet blockade of Berlin’s Western sectors that started in summer 1948, Reuter encouraged his comrades to promote their plight as pivotal in the opening Cold War: “In this hour, dear comrades, we freedom-loving Berliners must raise our voice for the entire world to hear.”17 By recasting the field of rubble stretching from the Wannsee to the Reichstag as a heroic “Outpost of Freedom,”18 Reuter made a shrewd political move. At once, this narrative vindicated these expellees’ own travails, gave Berliners a blueprint for democratization, while glossing over past

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transgressions in the name of an anti-communist continuity. Most importantly for SPD remigrés, this concept provided successive West Berlin administrations with a case that resonated emotionally with the Western occupiers. The makeshift polity’s precarious position within the Soviet zone demanded close coordination with the United States. Even after the success of the US-led airlift in 1949, West Berlin remained dependent on the deep coffers of American foreign policy. Reuter relied on fellow remigrés like Brandt to promote the heroic outpost domestically and abroad in a decades-long PR campaign, inaugurating as physical manifestations the Freedom Bell, Radio Free Berlin, and the Free University, among others.19 For instance, Brandt sought to bring leaders from the Swedish and Norwegian Socialist parties to Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) meetings in Berlin’s Western sectors.20 Brandt’s own career advanced through his close association with these Propagandists of Freedom. The newly tapped SPD Marshall Plan coordinator for Berlin Paul Hertz remarked upon his return from American exile: “A very substantial discussion started, mostly on party problems. Willy Brandt is one of the [newly constituted Bundestag] Parliament members, knows all internals, [and is] considered a hopeful quantity. He himself has a quite confident presence and judgment, but still humble and winsome.”21 Despite the two-decade age difference, a shared experience of exile connected both men and brought together a network within Berlin’s most popular party. For instance, Brandt developed a close relationship with Reuter and claimed his legacy after the mayor’s sudden death in September 1953.22 Brandt pledged full allegiance to the West in the Cold War: “There is no and there cannot be any intellectual neutrality for us. It would be political impotence. Democratic socialists have their safe mooring.”23 Such grim determination found a more enthusiastic reception among West Berliners and American occupiers than among comrades. With its call for full integration into the West, the Berlin remigrés’ agenda contradicted national SPD chairman Kurt Schumacher and local chairman Neumann. While this Neue Westpolitik championed by West Berlin’s City Hall anticipated the position adopted by the party at Godesberg ten years later, the resulting feud divided the Berlin SPD for nearly a decade.24 The Reuter-Brandt wing followed a two-prong strategy to wrest control from Neumann and his loyalists, broadening its base within the party apparatus and stoking popular demand for Western integration through favorable media coverage. Brandt’s excellent connections to HICOG gave him a public platform in this struggle. As occupiers, American officials had overseen the reconstruction of the press in the postwar era. Moreover, HICOG’s Public Affairs branch ran the Radio

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in the American Sector (RIAS), the most popular station in the Berlin market by far.25 Reuter and later Brandt relied on Hans Hirschfeld as a conduit to American circles. This former propagandistic defender of the Weimar Republic and OSS veteran had been recalled from New York to coordinate the West Berlin Senate’s public relations.26 Presenting Berlin’s democratization as a shared political project helped politicians such as Reuter and Brandt enlist American support against Neumann. As early as 1951, the US Liaison Officer to West Berlin’s city hall cabled his superiors: “Some of this group had spent the war years in exile (REUTER, KRESSMANN, Willi BRANDT, Dr.  HERTZ, Dr.  HIRSCHFELD). They were not a group of cringing Germans, they were as free as we are. They had the same goal we had and I dare say that this is still true.”27 Brandt’s processing of clandestine US donations on Reuter’s behalf underscores his easy rapport with American officials.28 In 1950, Hirschfeld contacted his old friend Shephard Stone, now Public Affairs director at HICOG, for assistance for “an organ of the Reuter SPD,” Berliner Stadtblatt. Hirschfeld praised its editor, Willy Brandt: “He is an excellent man and in no way a partydogmatist or narrow-minded. His entire background guarantees, in my opinion, sensible political views.”29 Highlighting Brandt’s past in exile helped Stone trust him to discreetly funnel 200,000 Deutschmarks into the Stadtblatt for the remigrés within the Berlin SPD.30 This sum, the present-day equivalent of at least $400,000, represented for the remigrés a significant amount of money, equaling up to a third of the Berlin SPD’s budget. The use of this money remains unclear. Brandt’s concealed transaction should not marginalize its context. His clandestine dealings with HICOG on behalf of these remigrés foreshadowed his rapid rise. Yet they also illustrate how remigrés like Brandt profited from promoting the Outpost of Freedom narrative to American authorities, contradicting popular conceptions of power brokers moving pawns on the board: The initiative for this transaction originated in Berlin, not Washington. Hence Brandt and Reuter acted not as American puppets but as shrewd politicians who subverted the hierarchy between occupiers and occupied.

Transatlantic campaigns for introducing Brandt as a center-left alternative, 1957–1966 In spite of the American support, Brandt needed to exhibit remarkable resilience before assuming the mayoralty of West Berlin in October 1957. Neumann and his Keulenriege, meaning both a “buddy collection” and “bludgeoning squad,”

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pioneered the spreading of rumors against Brandt that took aim at his past in exile. In the run-up to the vote, West Berlin voters could read press articles claiming that Brandt had fought in a Communist International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War twenty years earlier. Subpoenaed by Brandt’s legal team, the journalists implicated Franz Neumann as the source of their information.31 This clash illustrates how nominal comrades were the first to circulate unverifiable rumors about Brandt in hopes of exploiting lingering resentment against remigrés, a character assassination strategy quickly adopted by political enemies of all stripes. Transatlantic itineraries provided Brandt a precious opportunity to recast his experience abroad as international efforts on behalf of Berlin. American friends such as Shepard Stone, now director of international affairs at the Ford Foundation, played a crucial role in introducing this “young statesman to be watched” to domestic and international audiences.32 Within months of his election, the Ford Foundation brought the newly minted mayor to lecterns at Harvard University, meetings with US senators, and millions of American households via CBS’s Face the Nation. Friendly radio broadcasts on RIAS and rolling coverage in the Bild-Zeitung during the trip helped to underscore Brandt’s association with youthful dynamism and cosmopolitanism.33 Brandt’s first autobiography, My Road to Berlin, gave the mayor and his team a book-length opportunity to sculpt the public image of a cosmopolitan Cold Warrior. The book therefore opened with a ticker-tape parade Brandt had received.34 By beginning with an all-American honor during his visit to New York in the wake of the 1959 Berlin Crisis, Brandt presented himself as a viable alternative to Konrad Adenauer to both a German and a global public. Consequently, My Road to Berlin was published simultaneously in the United States and the Federal Republic, with other editions across the globe following in short succession.35 This unusual step exemplifies the importance Brandt and his support network placed on the American public in their transnational campaign to popularize West Berlin as a success story of Social Democracy. In this narrative, Brandt cast émigrés—and by extension himself—as crucial cultural translators. He latched onto a chance encounter with a New  Yorker émigré: “How many among these victims of Hitler’s madness . . . had come to America but a few years ago, Jews and Christians alike? For thousands of them Germany had once been their home—later it became their hell. Now Broadway was their special domain.”36 Brandt explicitly connected the hardships that émigrés had suffered with the plight of Berliners, presenting both as a shared anti-totalitarian struggle. In this

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view, New Yorkers could empathize with Berlin “which although conquered by the brown dictatorship had never been converted to the new creed, had to pay the heaviest penalty for the crimes of the Nazis, and which now, still bleeding from many wounds, was holding the front of freedom and human dignity against the red dictatorship.”37 Hence Brandt privileged émigrés as well as Berliners in redeeming more benign German traditions that first the Nazis and then the Stalinists had sought to destroy. This construction of an anti-totalitarian continuity helped Brandt gloss over possible contradictions in his own life by organizing his biography under the rubric of fighting for freedom. For instance, he downplayed his extensive European travels for the Popular Front cause during the 1930s. Instead of revisiting the Spanish controversy, Brandt recounted his experiences from Barcelona in May 1937, where he witnessed communists beholden to Moscow brutally silencing the unorthodox Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM).38 More than twenty years later, Brandt presented reinforced skepticism toward Stalinism as his main takeaway. More broadly, My Road to Berlin capped the effort to recast Brandt’s biography. By stressing an anti-totalitarian commitment that the West German electorate desired, rather than an anti-fascist past that the majority lacked, Brandt made a shrewd move. He used this pitch to gain prominence in his 1961 bid for the chancellorship against Adenauer. In the abrasive Bundestag campaign interrupted once by the GDR’s construction of the Wall, conservative Minister of Defense Franz Josef Strauß questioned Brandt’s loyalty to Germany, noting that Brandt had spent the Nazi era “outside” (draußen), adding smugly:  “We know what we did here on the inside.”39 While these insidious remarks left the Brandt campaign seething on the inside, they ignited a debate that anticipated acrimonious election results. While Brandt led the SPD to its best showing since 1919, the challenger could find no coalition party to dislodge Adenauer, prompting him to search for new strategies to ameliorate Berlin’s situation. Unlike many of his American counterparts, Brandt lacked a Manichean worldview. Rather than accepting the notion of monolithic blocs as a precondition for a global game of chess, his background gave the socialist a keen eye for frictions within the Soviet orbit. Even at the height of the Cold War in Berlin, Brandt and his closest aides had contemplated engaging their East German counterparts in limited negotiations that would improve the situation of Berliners.40 After the GDR’s construction of the Wall, this concern became only more pressing. Brandt and his new PR director, former RIAS journalist Egon Bahr, floated the idea of breaking West German non-recognition of

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GDR representatives. While Bahr’s roll-out of this strategy in Tutzing ignited a firestorm domestically, reactions from the Kennedy administration were muted in public. Brandt had taken care to couch his gambit in the “Strategy of Peace” that Kennedy had called for in his speech at the American University. At this point, the mayor’s view on Washington politics had been shaped by close association with Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), which Social Democratic remigrés in Berlin had remained in contact with since wartime exile in the United States.41 Through these links, Brandt had been in contact with ADA since the late 1940s.42 While Reuter had avoided public association with this leftliberal outfit in hopes of shoring up bipartisan support for West Berlin in the early 1950s, Mayor Brandt openly embraced the liberal outfit a decade later.43 The West Berlin administration hoped that ADA could provide privileged access to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, while the organization showcased the mayor as a guest of honor at its convention.44 Brandt’s transatlantic solidarity did not extend to American-style racism. At an ADA event in New York in 1964, Brandt met Martin Luther King, whom he promptly invited to Berlin for a highprofile visit in September.45 Brandt embraced the African American Civil Rights Movement that not only denounced the shortcomings of American society, but also pointed to issues that contradicted the binary Cold War paradigm, such as the pervasive legacies of racism. At the height of global decolonization, Brandt built upon the socialist creed of equality and developed a deep interest in the “struggle of the colonial peoples,” as he had phrased his sympathies for liberation movements back in 1940.46 Moreover, the exponent of Berlin’s “fight for freedom” made a point by having traveled sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent extensively since the late 1950s. The emergence of the issues of freedom that cut across the Cold War divide indicated to Brandt a possible opening to ameliorate the plight of his divided constituency through promoting a European system of collective security.

Informal network as an eminent politician in Bonn, 1966–1974 During his time as an eminent politician, Brandt maintained his informal contacts. While a sophisticated bureaucracy worked in service of the foreign minister (1966–1969) and chancellor of the Federal Republic (1969–1974), he privileged his transatlantic contacts. Despite the contrast in stature between the party activist

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in destroyed Berlin and the leader of Europe’s economic juggernaut, Brandt pursued the same strategy of discussing and testing ideas informally first. For instance, Shepard Stone attended Brandt’s inauguration, and in a private meeting the next day, the new chancellor candidly discussed his priority with his longtime American friend:  “immediately after new government:  détente.”47 This episode underscores Brandt’s emphasis on maintaining the trust of sensitive partners. At that point, Stone, as president of the International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF), searched for a role in a détente environment for the successor of the CCF, which had been disgraced as a recipient of CIA funding.48 While key aide (and former CCF magazine Der Monat contributor) Klaus Harpprecht dismissed the IACF as a “club of old Cold Warriors,”49 Brandt’s outreach was vindicated by Stone promoting the “Soviet-Western détente” and “emergence of Germany and Japan as world powers” internally among his global network.50 Conversely, Brandt relied on his left-liberal network in the United States to keep him up to date on domestic developments after moving to Bonn. For instance, Manhattan PR consultant Roy Blumenthal, who had become “a devoted friend” of Brandt’s, sent dispatches that were as piercing as they were perspicuous as early as 1964.51 The New  Yorker scorched Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater’s “record [that] is without meaning, direction, serious intention or social responsibility,” yet warned Brandt to take the Arizona senator’s transformative qualities seriously, as “prologue to a violent turn right . . . Goldwater will lose in 1964, but his campaign will accelerate forces of divisiveness in America. Principally, these forces are, in the order mentioned, anti-foreign, anti-Negro, anti-Semitic, anti-labor, and most important of all, anti-intellectual.”52 Blumenthal aptly pointed out how the Johnson administration’s campaign to uphold civil rights undercut its electoral appeal: “Racism was beginning to erode the most traditional Democratic party constituencies, not only in southern states, but in the Southwest and Far West, not to mention several larger Northern states which believed in civil rights for the Negro in the South but reacted strangely to the integration of their own public school system.”53 Liberal voices from the United States shaped Brandt’s view of the country and reinforced his skepticism of American conservatism. Brandt’s close association with the left-liberal side of the American political spectrum made him suspicious to the Republican Nixon administration. While Brandt walked a fine line between the younger generation in his party ranks that was infuriated by the US intervention in Vietnam and upholding the transatlantic alliance, émigrés within the White House derided Brandt’s position as “almost neutral” in the war that increasingly consumed American resources

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and attention.54 This context made it easy for National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to portray the chancellor’s Neue Ostpolitik as “differing greatly” from US interests, jeopardizing Brandt’s ambitious initiative.55 The White House added the West German to its extensive list of enemies. The infamous Nixon tapes have documented the president’s paranoia and cynicism, which extended to Brandt. In conversation with Kissinger, Nixon referred to Brandt as a “dangerous . . . dolt” who “unfortunately” enjoyed “very good health.”56 Yet the overriding shared security interests and the transatlantic bonds he had been cultivating since the 1940s proved too strong for personal misgivings. Brandt and his administration eventually succeeded in embedding the West German Neue Ostpolitik within the broader current of détente that eventually culminated in the 1975 Helsinki Accords (CSCE).57

Out of office, one global agenda, 1974–1989 Brandt’s successes in the sphere of high diplomacy have been lauded since his 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. In bitter irony, the continuing antagonism with the GDR precipitated the controversial end of Brandt’s chancellorship in May 1974. Out of the chancellor’s Palais Schaumburg, but remaining chairman of the SPD, Brandt quickly paid a visit to West Berlin’s newest cosmopolitan venue, the Aspen Institute. The board member for life Brandt had lent crucial support to founding director Stone’s project of opening a German branch of the American think tank.58 The administration of the half-city eagerly alimented the Institute whose budget “exceeded $1000000 per annum,” hoping to offset its remote location with cultural clout.59 In this fashion, the Institute opened its doors with a semipublic “conversation with Willy Brandt” to discuss the legacy, but also the future of his foreign policy.60 Contentedly, Stone noted renewed resolve during Brandt’s presentation: “Willy looked blank at first, but thawed out and came in good form, ganz exciting.”61 Promoting Social Democracy as the best solution for societies in turmoil worldwide now constituted a priority for Brandt. The elder statesman had just returned from Portugal before his off-the-record appearance among old friends in West Berlin. Over the next three years, Brandt played an indispensable role for democracy taking hold on the Iberian Peninsula. The SPD chairman coordinated the organizational and material support by Western European Social Democratic Parties for local comrades who dismantled the Estado Novo and the Francoist regime. In the case of Spain, the SPD donated twelve million

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Deutschmarks toward the reconstruction of its sister party PSOE.62 Buoyed by these peaceful and largely successful transitions, Brandt sought to expand the geographic scope of his agenda through reinventing a supranational outlet. The Socialist International (SI) possessed a long history, but its Social Democratic member parties were concentrated in Europe. Brandt had stated repeatedly that he would not run for its presidency. Yet when asked, he assumed the office in 1976 to conduct “three offensives”: striving for a secure peace, a new relationship between the global North and South, and human rights. SI President Brandt’s focus on the development of democracy in the Americas met with hostile reception by the incoming Reagan administration. The SI’s openness to Latin American liberation fronts that included Marxist-Leninist currents particularly aggravated the US State Department, pitting it openly against the Social Democrats in the case of Nicaragua. The continued existence of a backchannel between Foggy Bottom and the SI indicates the relevance Washington ascribed to the organization, despite these competing interests.63 Brandt’s emphasis on personal contacts can also help explain his frustration when these frayed. President Reagan scrupulously avoided meeting Brandt personally, much to the latter’s chagrin.64 Such animosities pointed to much larger controversy. When Helmut Schmidt, Brandt’s successor as chancellor, staked his political future on implementing the NATO Double Track Decision, he faced a rebellion in his party against the concurrent deployment of further US nuclear missiles to West Germany. SPD Chairman Brandt publically questioned the wisdom of this gambit to bring the Soviet Union to the negotiating table, a dispute that precipitated the SPD’s loss of power. These disagreements on two fundamental issues during the 1980s do not warrant characterizing Brandt simply as “anti-American.” After leaving frontbench politics following his resignation as SPD chairman in 1987, Brandt continued advocating his three goals of peace, reconciliation, and human rights. To bring these lofty goals closer to realization, the elder statesman continued to rely on the transatlantic infrastructure he had helped to create. Months before the collapse of the Wall, Brandt returned to the Wannsee. In the Aspen Institute’s genteel atmosphere, he lectured on “détente as a chance.”65

Conclusion The question of Brandt’s relationship to the United States brought his contemporaries to diverging conclusions. While the Central Committee of

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the SED viewed him as an “exponent of the American faction in the SPD” in the 1950s, US National Security Advisor Kissinger accused Brandt of undermining the Federal Republic’s “Western ties” two decades later.66 To this day, historians seek to reconcile his varying positions toward the United States, while broadsheets muse which stance toward America represents the “genuine, sovereign, true Willy Brandt.”67 Historians can hardly reconstruct Brandt’s range of sentiments toward an elusive “America.” But they can document how the politician’s approach toward representatives of the United States depended on the office held and the issue at stake. As mayor of embattled West Berlin, Brandt embraced local US officials. By presenting the defense of “free Berlin” as a shared goal, the representative of beaten World War enemies could amplify his clout. In similar fashion, the candidate’s self-portrayal as an exponent of a kind of cosmopolitanism that 1960s West German voters approved of helped the former émigré blunt pernicious rumors and present himself as a suitable alternative for the chancellorship. In this office, Brandt presented his landmark Neue Ostpolitik as an initiative that meshed with US interests in détente. White House files reveal how Brandt extracted this concession from the Nixon administration through the relevance that American foreign policy ascribed to the Federal Republic. As elder statesman, the Nobel laureate found the freedom to raise his voice for the marginalized who Washington had frequently ignored. Brandt’s esteem for American representatives and their policies hinged not only on context but particularly on political proximity. Over his four decades in high-profile politics, the Social Democrat maintained a unique personal relationship with the left side of the political spectrum in the United States. Starting from émigré circles, Brandt built a support network among American liberals that shaped his career in Berlin. Considerable overlap in perspectives, rather than ulterior motives, animated this network. The avowed socialist prized personal freedom. This understanding made him effective both as a critic of Stalinism and as an American ally in the Cold War. Yet unlike American conservatives, the Social Democrat saw communism never as a conspiracy but rather as a misinterpretation of ideals he shared. This distinction explains successive Republican administrations’ disagreements with Brandt better than the narratives that Nixon’s and Reagan’s staffs proposed. Taking the variables of context and political proximity into account also brings into view underlying continuities in Brandt’s relationship to American representatives. For Brandt, the city of Berlin continued to embody values shared across the Atlantic. Leading up to the vote on the German capital after

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reunification, Brandt insisted: “West Berlin’s self-assertion of freedom predated Bonn’s accomplishments. The cradle of German-Western friendship was on the Spree.”68 Brandt used his record of German-American cooperation in West Berlin to present the reunited city as the lynchpin of his lifelong vision for a democratic Germany that was not provincial but progressive.

Notes 1 For a survey of Stone’s unique career, see Volker Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 2 For a survey of Brandt’s policies toward the United States and its currents, see Judith Michel, Willy Brandts Amerikabild und -politik 1933–1992, Internationale Beziehungen. Theorie und Geschichte 6 (Göttingen: Bonn University Press bei V&R unipress, 2010). 3 Willy Brandt, “Lieber Freund . . .,” in Ein Buch der Freunde: Shepard Stone zum Achtzigsten, eds Inge Aicher-Scholl and Shepard Stone (West Berlin: Siedler, 1988), 73–4. 4 Scott H. Krause, Bringing Cold War Democracy to West Berlin, 1933–1972: A Shared German-American Project (New York, London: Routledge, 2018). 5 Willy Brandt, “Aus dem Diskussionsbeitrag Brandts über Perspektiven aus dem Reich auf der ‘Kattowitzer Konferenz’ der SAP, Anfang Januar 1937,” in Willy Brandt, Hitler ist nicht Deutschland: Jugend in Lübeck—Exil in Norwegen 1928– 1940, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 1, ed. Einhart O. Lorenz (Bonn: Dietz, 2002), 252–64. 6 Willy Brandt, My Road to Berlin, first edition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 152–7. 7 For details on the Fusionskampf in Berlin, see Harold Hurwitz, Die Anfänge des Widerstands, vol. 4, 4 vols, Demokratie und Antikommunismus in Berlin nach 1945 (Cologne: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1990). 8 For the merger’s long-term effects and the history of the term, see Bernd Faulenbach, ed., Sozialdemokraten und Kommunisten nach Nationalsozialismus und Krieg: zur historischen Einordnung der Zwangsvereinigung (Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 1998). 9 Waldemar von Knoeringen: “Brief an Karl B. Frank,” March 3, 1946, in Hartmut Mehringer, Waldemar von Knoeringen, eine politische Biographie: Der Weg vom revolutionären Sozialismus zur sozialen Demokratie (Munich: Saur, 1989), 267–8. 10 Siegfried Heimann, “Politische Remigranten in Berlin,” in Rückkehr und Aufbau nach 1945. Deutsche Remigranten im öffentlichen Leben Nachkriegsdeutschlands,

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11 12

13 14

15 16 17

18

19

20

21 22

Willy Brandt and International Relations eds Claus-Dieter Krohn and Patrik von zur Mühlen (Marburg: Metropolis, 1997), 189–210. David E. Barclay, Schaut auf diese Stadt: Der unbekannte Ernst Reuter (Berlin: Siedler, 2000). Ernst Reuter, “Programmatische Grundgedanken des Deutschen Freiheitsbundes” August 1943, E Rep 200–21, 166 Nachlass Ernst Reuter, Allgemeiner Briefwechsel, 1936–1946, Landesarchiv Berlin. Quoted in Heimann, “Politische Remigranten in Berlin,” 193–4. Willy Brandt, “brev till Gunnar Myrdal,” November 8, 1947, Gunnar Myrdal brevsamling 1947–57, volym 3.2.2:2, Gunnar och Alva Myrdals arkiv, Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek, Stockholm. For the long redacted correspondence between Brandt and Myrdal, cf. Scott H. Krause and Daniel Stinsky, “For Europe, Democracy and Peace: Social Democratic Blueprints for Postwar Europe in Willy Brandt and Gunnar Myrdal’s Correspondence, 1947,” Themenportal Europäische Geschichte, 2015, www.europa.clio-online.de/2015/ Article=745. Peter Merseburger, Willy Brandt 1913–1992. Visionär und Realist (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2002), 265–9. Brandt, “brev till Gunnar Myrdal.” Ernst Reuter, “Rede auf der SPD-Kundgebung zur Währungsreform auf dem Hertha-Sportplatz am 24. Juni 1948,” in Ernst Reuter: Schriften, Reden, eds Hans E. Hirschfeld and Hans J. Reichhardt, vol. 3 (West Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1974), 400–12. Ernst Reuter, “Rede auf der Protestkundgebung vor dem Reichstagsgebäude am 9. September 1948 gegen die Vertreibung der Stadtverordnetenversammlung aus dem Ostsektor,” in Ernst Reuter: Schriften, Reden, eds Hans E. Hirschfeld and Hans Joachim Reichhardt, vol. 3, 477–9. Stefanie Eisenhuth and Scott H. Krause, “Inventing the ‘Outpost of Freedom.’ Transatlantic Narratives and Actors Crafting West Berlin’s Postwar Political Culture,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 10 (2014), 188–211. Willy Brandt, “Brief an Stefan Szende,” March 8, 1950, A6, 1/WBA-BER-0009 Allgemeine und Persönliche Korrespondenz S-V, 1950, Willy-Brandt-Archiv (WBA) at the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (AdsD) der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn. For a nuanced survey of this combatant in the cultural Cold War, cf. Michael Hochgeschwender, Freiheit in der Offensive?: Der Kongress für kulturelle Freiheit und die Deutschen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998). Paul Hertz, “Als ich wiederkam . . .” October 15, 1949, Film XXXVII Familienkorrespondenz Hertz 1942–1949, Nachlass Paul Hertz, AdsD. Cf. Barclay, Ernst Reuter, 299–301; Merseburger, Willy Brandt, 276–7; Willy Brandt, Mein Weg nach Berlin (Munich: Kindler, 1960), 216.

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23 Willy Brandt, “Rede auf dem Landesparteitag der Berliner SPD, 22. Mai 1955,” in Willy Brandt, Berlin bleibt frei: Politik in und für Berlin 1947–1966, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 3, ed. Siegfried Heimann (Bonn: Dietz, 2004), 189. 24 Scott H. Krause, “Neue Westpolitik: The Clandestine Campaign to Westernize the SPD in Cold War Berlin, 1948–1958,” Central European History 48, no. 1 (2015), 79–99. 25 “Report No 4. Series No 2: RIAS and Its Listeners in Western Berlin,” February 8, 1950, Information Services Division HICOG Research Analysis Branch, the Public of West-Berlin from Cold War to Detente, Harold Hurwitz Collection, GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, http://www.gesis.org/en/services/ data-analysis/survey-data/special-data-collections/hurwitz-berlin-after-1945/. For an overview of the role of RIAS as a Cold War attack station, cf. Nicholas J. Schlosser, Cold War on the Airwaves: The Radio Propaganda War against East Germany (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Schanett Riller, Funken für die Freiheit. Die U.S.-amerikanische Informationspolitik gegenüber der DDR von 1953 bis 1963 (Trier: WVT, 2004). 26 Scott H. Krause, “Hans Emil Hirschfeld,” in Transatlantic Perspectives (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2013), http://www.transatlanticperspectives.org/ entry.php?rec=146. 27 Karl F. Mautner, “Memorandum: My Views on a German-American Relationship Program (as Requested, No Holds Barred),” November 19, 1951, E-162, Box 21, Folder Municipal Government, RG 466, Classified General Records, 1949–1955, US High Commissioner for Germany (HICOG), Berlin Element, Office of the Director, National Archives, College Park, MD. 28 For details of this transaction, see Krause, “Neue Westpolitik,” 90–3. 29 Hans E. Hirschfeld, “Brief an Shepard Stone,” May 31, 1950, E Rep 200–18, 34 Nachlass Hans Hirschfeld, Korrespondenz mit Stone, Folder 1, Landesarchiv Berlin. 30 Hans E. Hirschfeld, “Vermerk,” July 28, 1950, E Rep 200–18, 34 Nachlass Hans Hirschfeld, Korrespondenz mit Stone, Folder 1, Landesarchiv Berlin. 31 See Merseburger, Willy Brandt, 126–49, 341. 32 Karl F. Mautner, “Handwritten Memorandum ‘W.B.,’ ” June 8, 1956, E Rep 300–62, 77 Nachlass Karl F. Mautner, Brandt, Landesarchiv Berlin; Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, 204–35. 33 For Brandt’s savvy adaptation of American PR strategies tailored to broadcasting media, see Daniela Münkel, “Als ‘deutscher Kennedy’ zum Sieg? Willy Brandt, die USA und die Medien,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 1 (2004), 172–94. 34 Brandt, My Road to Berlin, 12. 35 Brandt, Mein Weg nach Berlin. Plus translations in French, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish.

48 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43

44 45

46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55

Willy Brandt and International Relations Brandt, My Road to Berlin, 12. Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 85–91. Moritz Pfeil [Rudolf Augstein], Unbewältigte Gegenwart, in: Der Spiegel, August 3, 1961, 28. Wolfgang Schmidt, Kalter Krieg, Koexistenz und kleine Schritte. Willy Brandt und die Deutschlandpolitik 1948–1963 (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2001). Hurwitz, Die Anfänge des Widerstands, 4:52. Given ADA’s stature in American postwar politics, attention has been scant recently. For an introduction, cf. Steven Gillon, Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism, 1947–1985 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Michel, Willy Brandts Amerikabild und -politik, 1933–1992, 79. Shepard Stone, “Letter to Hans Hirschfeld,” November 16, 1950, E Rep 200–18, 34 Nachlass Hans Hirschfeld, Korrespondenz mit Stone, Folder 1, Landesarchiv Berlin. Michel, Willy Brandts Amerikabild und -politik, 1933–1992, 79. Andreas Etges, “Kennedy, Khrushchev, King, and Springsteen: Staging Visits in a Divided City,” in Cold War Berlin: Confrontations, Cultures and Identities, eds Stefanie Eisenhuth, Konrad H. Jarausch, and Scott H. Krause (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018); Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke, A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 89–106. “Sozialdemokratischer Internationalismus: Die SI und der Nord-Süd-Konflikt,” in Willy Brandts Außenpolitik, ed. Bernd Rother (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2014), 261. Shepard Stone, “Calendar 1969” October 28, 1969, Calendars 1966–86, Personal Collections of Margaret MacDonald-Stone. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, 250. Klaus Harpprecht, Im Kanzleramt. Tagebuch der Jahre mit Willy Brandt (Rowohlt, 2000), 50. International Association for Cultural Freedom, “Board of Directors: Minutes of Meeting Held in Paris on October 2 and 3, 1971,” Box 2 CCF, Nachlass Melvin Lasky, Lasky Center for Transatlantic Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Michel, Willy Brandts Amerikabild und -politik, 1933–1992, 207–209; Egon Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit (Munich: Blessing, 1996), 144–5. Roy Blumenthal, “Memorandum on American Elections 1964,” July 23, 1964, A6 1/ WBA-BER-0046 Allgemeine Korrespondenz A-F, 1964, WBA, AdsD. Ibid. Michel, Willy Brandts Amerikabild und -politik, 1933–1992, 256–83. “Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon, Washington, December 24, 1971,” in Foreign

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57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67

68

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Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1969–1976, vol. 40, Germany and Berlin, 1969–1972, ed. David C. Geyer (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 2008), Doc. 334. “Conversation between President Nixon and the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), Washington, February 3, 1973,” in FRUS, 1969– 1976, vol. E–15, pt. 2, Documents on Western Europe, 1973–1976, ed. Kathleen B. Rasmussen (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 2014), Doc. 6, 25–6. Petri Hakkarainen, A State of Peace in Europe: West Germany and the CSCE, 1966– 1975 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011); Stephan Kieninger, Dynamic Détente: The United States and Europe, 1964–1975 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 159–88; Björn Grötzner, “Partnerschaft im Wandel: Deutschland, Frankreich und die USA, 1969–1981” (PhD diss., Universität Potsdam, 2017). Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, 278–82. Shepard Stone, “Letter Stone to Heinz Fanselau, Presseamt Berlin,” November 19, 1973, Folder Gründungskorrespondenz 1974, Aspen Institute Berlin. Aspen Berlin, “Gespräch mit Willy Brandt,” November 10, 1974, Folder Archiv 1974, Aspen Institute Berlin. Shepard Stone, “Calendar 1974,” November 10, 1974, Calendars 1966–86, Personal Collections of Margaret MacDonald-Stone. Rother, “Sozialdemokratischer Internationalismus: Die SI und der Nord-SüdKonflikt,” 274–81. Ibid., 296–7, 310–12. Jan Hansen, Abschied vom Kalten Krieg? Die Sozialdemokraten und der Nachrüstungsstreit (1977–1987) (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016), 144–5. Aspen Berlin, “Willy Brandt: Entspannung als Chance?,” February 27, 1988, Folder Pressearchiv 3, Aspen Institute Berlin. A. B., “Memorandum ‘Weitere Enthüllungen über die ungeheuerliche Tätigkeit der amerikanischen Fraktion in der SPD,’ ” June 12, 1954, SAPMO DY/30/IV 2/10.02/98, ZK, Westabteilung, Zentrales Parteiarchiv der SED, Bundesarchiv Berlin; “Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon, Washington, February 16, 1970,” in FRUS, 1969– 1976, vol. 40, Doc. 55, 152. Rolf Steininger, “Willy Brandts Außenpolitik: Auf zwei Beinen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 16, 2014, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/politischebuecher/bernd-rother-herausgeber-willy-brandts-aussenpolitik-auf-zweibeinen-12993474.html. Willy Brandt, “Bundestagsrede zur Bonn-Berlin-Debatte,” June 19, 1991, http:// webarchiv.bundestag.de/cgi/show.php?fileToLoad=757&id=1082.

3

Two Very Different Atlanticists? Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, 1945–1992 Mathias Haeussler

Cologne, Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands—SPD) conference, November 18–19, 1983. A  white-faced and visibly aged Helmut Schmidt, who had been ousted from high office only the year before, watched the drama unfold before his eyes in a detached, almost resigned manner. A few moments ago, merely 13 out of 400 delegates had voted with him in support of the deployment of US Pershing II missiles on German soil, in line with NATO’s dual-track decision of December 1979. The overwhelming majority, however, had refused to stand by their former chancellor and support one of his cornerstone policies. Adding insult to injury, these dissidents included party leader Willy Brandt, who had at least paid lip service to the dual-track decision while Schmidt had still been in office. With the SPD back in opposition, however, Brandt now decided to side with Schmidt’s critics. Both politicians left the conference soon afterward, without shaking hands or even looking each other in the eye, and the German press was quick to cast the conference as the final showdown between the two SPD heavyweights. “Dropping the pilot,” the German weekly Der Spiegel had already titled in anticipation of the conference, depicting the impending decision as Brandt’s personal “comeback” against Schmidt, who had now been moved to the party’s “periphery.”1 Its verdict was clear:  Brandt was “the victor,” and “the loser is called Helmut Schmidt.”2 Even more than thirty years later, any attempt to write the history of the relationship between these two political giants of postwar Germany, Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, still has to start at this point.3 The reason the Brandt-Schmidt fallout of the early 1980s has received so much attention, both at the time and in subsequent historical writing, is because the key issues at stake touched on nothing less than the fundamentals of the orientation of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the Cold War: did the

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SPD’s decision signify a deeper anti-American shift in West German society? Was the party giving a much-needed political voice to those millions of Germans anxious to overcome the perverse bipolar logic of the superpower conflict? Or was it instead a mere historical anachronism, stimulated by a Soviet-sponsored, self-referential, and highly emotional peace movement that deliberately ignored the harsh realities of West Germany’s dependency on US protection? Thus far, the emerging historiography has tended to focus mostly on one or the other side of this story. We have elaborate studies precisely reconstructing the geostrategic reasoning of Schmidt and the policymaking elites, just as we have elaborate studies focusing primarily on ground-level opposition against the dual-track decision.4 But only recently have historians started to interconnect these two still largely separate narratives, exposing their many interrelations and embedding them within the wider context of twentieth-century German politics.5 Building on such recent attempts, this chapter offers a new interpretation of the highly publicized fallout between Brandt and Schmidt over NATO’s dualtrack decision in the early 1980s. Taking a long-term view of both politicians’ attitudes toward the transatlantic relationship since the late 1940s, it suggests that their actual differences over the substance of the dual-track decision were much less fundamental than often depicted. Instead, it shows how both Brandt and Schmidt were part of a particular cohort of German détente politicians who, based on their generational experience, shared a remarkably similar approach toward the transatlantic alliance and Germany’s role in it. Indeed, the similarity of their views was a key component in their almost congenial partnership in the pursuit of Ostpolitik during the 1960s. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, they then both sought to preserve their achievements amid a rapidly changing environment, even though their different political backgrounds and roles at the time meant that they went about it in rather different ways. But their conflict did not mark a radical break of either Brandt or Schmidt with their previous political convictions. Instead, it should be seen as the side product of a much wider sea change in international politics, as the East-West conflict entered its final decade and the Brandt-Schmidt “détente generation” increasingly seemed out of touch with harsh new realities.

The origins of Brandt’s and Schmidt’s “Atlanticism” In order to truly understand the Brandt-Schmidt split of the early 1980s, it is necessary to trace their attitudes toward transatlantic relations back to

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the earliest years of their political lives. To be sure, there were some distinct differences between the two: Brandt, born in 1913, had been politically active prior to Hitler’s rise to power and drew his earliest lessons primarily from the breakdown of the Weimar Republic and his subsequent political activism as a political émigré in Scandinavia; Schmidt, by contrast, was five crucial years Brandt’s junior and came of age only during the Nazi years, serving as a soldier on the Eastern front during the Second World War. In spite of these differences, however, Brandt and Schmidt shared the formative experience of having seen the old order break down in front of their own eyes at a very young age. After 1945, they were thus united in their belief that radically new political approaches were needed to rebuild their country, particularly with regard to Germany’s future place on the international stage.6 Importantly, these convictions put both of them in direct opposition to the leadership of their SPD, which was at the time still dominated by the “Weimar” generation around Kurt Schumacher. Yet, whereas the party leadership demanded that any plans for a future European order start with a unified and self-determined Germany,7 Brandt and Schmidt regarded such plans as unrealistic in light of Germany’s unique historical burden and the hostility the country faced internationally. Instead, they shared the conviction that postwar Germany could only regain strength if firmly embedded and contained in a wider international setting. These beliefs were shaped not least by their exposure to international contacts and transnational networks, such as Brandt’s political activism during his Scandinavian exile and close cooperation with US authorities in postwar Berlin, or Schmidt’s postwar political socialization in British-occupied Hamburg. As a result, they soon found themselves at the forefront of a new political generation within the SPD calling for a radical departure from Schumacher’s nationalistic and seemingly isolationist line. In this, they were joined by some more undogmatic North German SPD politicians, as well as by the party’s American-friendly Berlin branch led by Ernst Reuter. The vast majority of the SPD, however, had very different ideas: at the 1951 party convention, Brandt and Schmidt were two out of only eleven delegates who voted in favor of the Schuman Plan.8 It was only from the mid-1950s onward that Schmidt and Brandt’s pro-American, pro-European course would become the accepted party line.9 As Brandt and Schmidt rose through the ranks of the SPD, their views became increasingly shaped by the changing Cold War context. After the almost total hostility and rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union during the late 1940s and 1950s, the 1960s saw the transformation of the conflict into

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a more stable period of rough strategic parity and cautious but lasting attempts at superpower rapprochement.10 Both Schmidt and Brandt reflected deeply on the likely consequences of these wider developments for the FRG’s future international role, even though their different personalities and careers led to somewhat different emphases. For Brandt, the formative event was undoubtedly the erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. The almost complete lack of a Western response not only illustrated drastically to the young Berlin mayor that the Cold War division of Germany was there to stay, but it also brought home in a most dramatic way that German interests were not always compatible with those of the superpowers. All of this shaped Brandt’s growing conviction that Germany had unique interests in the Cold War conflict and that it needed a more assertive and proactive foreign policy to pursue them successfully.11 For Schmidt, by contrast, the decisive event that shaped many of his beliefs and principles came in October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Over the preceding few years, Schmidt had already made his name as the SPD’s prime expert on security and defense issues, not least by publishing two books on the topic.12 Indeed, it was in this context that Brandt wrote one of his very first personal letters to Schmidt in May 1960, asking for a policy paper on military-strategic questions.13 Schmidt duly complied, offering Brandt an extensive exposé of his evolving thoughts in response. Since the letter already included many key beliefs that would later shape his policies as chancellor, it is worth quoting at some length: [NATO’s] nuclear defense strategy remains valid, by the way, only in those cases where the other side is planning a nuclear strategic attack itself. In all other cases of Eastern aggression, it has to be doubted whether the West would decide on nuclear retaliation. These other cases, however, have a far greater probability than a general, total nuclear-strategic assault by the Soviet Union.14

In light of the emerging nuclear parity between the superpowers, Schmidt had thus come to the conclusion that the doctrine of total nuclear retaliation was no longer credible. Instead, he advocated what would become an almost dogmatic belief in his later years, namely, that NATO had to ensure a credible balance of power on all military levels in order to be able to defend itself against more limited acts of Soviet aggression. As he went on to argue in his letter, “The threat of retaliation is not sufficient. Rather, we have to be able to actually defend ourselves in case of limited aggression . . . One cannot threaten with retaliation and, in case the desired deterrence does not work and a military conflict emerges, then not be able to execute the strategy one has threatened with.”15 In this context,

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it is easy to see why the Cuban Missile Crisis confirmed many of Schmidt’s beliefs. As he wrote in a newspaper article at the time, Kennedy’s stand-off with Khrushchev had shown that “in the age of the current nuclear-strategic parity, the ability to locally deploy conventional weapons can be decisive.”16 It was an assertion he repeated countless times throughout the 1960s, calling strongly for a balance of power on all military levels in Europe.17 Interestingly, however, the episode had also illustrated to Schmidt that the United States’ European allies had little chance to even marginally influence US strategy during major Cold War crises. “However bitter the realization,” he wrote, “one has to recognize just how minimal the influence is of even directly affected alliance partners, and how minimal the consideration of the world powers to them is in cases where their own interests are at stake.”18 Just like Brandt, he therefore concluded in the early 1960s that a more assertive German foreign policy was necessary to protect the country’s unique interests in the superpower conflict. In many ways, Schmidt’s and Brandt’s subsequent pursuit of Ostpolitik can thus be seen as a reaction to these trends.19 Its wider implications for the American security guarantee to Western Europe would lie at the heart of the dual-track controversy over a decade later. For the time being, however, Brandt’s and Schmidt’s beliefs were not only complementary but mutually reinforcing. Like Brandt, Schmidt was one of the strongest advocates of the SPD’s Ostpolitik, speaking out early and strongly in favor of increasing political and economic contacts with the Eastern Bloc.20 Yet he continued to be conditioned in his views first and foremost by his background in military and defense issues, arguing consistently that any attempts at détente always had to start from a militarily secure position. In his 1961 letter to Brandt, for example, Schmidt had already claimed that “the decisive confrontation” between the superpowers would eventually take place “in the economicideological field”—but only if the West managed to keep “its military balance of power.”21 In various speeches and writings throughout the 1960s, Schmidt similarly stressed that a military-strategic balance of power had to be the crucial first step toward any attempts at East-West reconciliation.22 All of this made Schmidt an obvious choice as minister of defense in Brandt’s cabinet from 1969 to 1972, where he played a crucial role in balancing the government’s attempts at Ostpolitik with a correspondingly proactive Westpolitik.23 Thus, prior to their times in office, Schmidt and Brandt approached the transatlantic relationship and the FRG’s role in it from remarkably similar perspectives. As part of a new generation of SPD politicians, they were among the earliest advocates of a more US-friendly, pro-Western foreign policy within

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the party, arguing strongly that the young and provisional FRG’s interests were best served by its firm anchoring in Western alliance. The changing international environment of the early 1960s then made both of them realize that US interests were not always compatible with German interests. Yet whereas Schmidt came to these conclusions primarily from his expertise in security and defense matters, Brandt’s views were of a more political and indeed personal nature:  what mattered most to him was the precarious state of inner-German relations and the human suffering resulting from the country’s enforced division. In spite of these slightly different emphases, however, neither Brandt nor Schmidt deviated from the conviction that any West German policy would always have to be pursued with the tacit backing of the United States, which made them almost congenial partners in the pursuit of Ostpolitik during the 1960s and early 1970s.

The changing environment of the late 1970s The controversies surrounding Brandt’s resignation as chancellor have been discussed numerous times and do not need to be recollected here. Suffice to say that the events of May 1974 did little to calm the personal rivalry between the two SPD heavyweights that had always lingered underneath the surface.24 In terms of political substance, however, the new Chancellor Schmidt appeared anxious to preserve the key elements of Brandt’s policies while also trying to inject a sense of somber realism into his program. “At a time of growing problems worldwide,” he declared in his first address to the Bundestag as chancellor, the two guiding principles of his government were “continuity and concentration.”25 Such continuities were particularly pronounced in the realm of foreign policy, where Schmidt clearly sought to secure and build on the previous achievements of Ostpolitik. Yet while Schmidt enjoyed some initial successes, notably the 1975 Helsinki Conference, his fortunes soon changed as the international scene darkened and both East-West and intra-West relations worsened markedly during his chancellorship.26 By the end of the 1970s, the initially highly benevolent international environment of Ostpolitik had evaporated almost completely, culminating in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 that seemed to put the final nail in the coffin of superpower détente. While the worsening world situation offered troubling prospects for the FRG in many respects, what concerned Schmidt the most was the Soviet military build-up in the field of intermediate-range nuclear weapons, the so-called SS-20s.27 Not covered by any of the disarmament talks between the superpowers,

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these weapons were capable of performing nuclear strikes against various Western European countries but could not target the United States directly. Since NATO also did not have any adequate counter-deterrents in its nuclear arsenal, Schmidt regarded these weapons as a qualitatively new threat that had the potential of upsetting the precarious balance of power between East and West. In due course, Schmidt therefore moved decisively to push the issue on the international agenda, playing a key role in the eventual emergence of NATO’s dual-track decision of December 1979. While the evolution of Schmidt’s geostrategic thought has already been discussed elsewhere,28 it is nonetheless important to stress that Schmidt approached the issue first and foremost from a defensive viewpoint. Whatever the motivations of the various other players, the key consideration to Schmidt had always been to preserve the military balance between East and West on all military levels. This, of course, was completely in line with the geostrategic convictions he had harbored since the early 1960s, something he never got tired of pointing out in various interviews and speeches. “This is not new for me,” he told the British weekly The Economist in October 1979. “It did not start once we heard for the first time of the SS-20s or the Backfires. It has been my thinking all along the past 20 years. Backfires and the SS-20s are just a confirmation of what one saw as likely to develop.”29 As a result, Schmidt was careful to depict the potential deployment of Pershing II missiles on German soil as a defensive move in reaction to the Soviet build-up. “If the balance is upset,” Schmidt declared in another major newspaper interview around the same time, “it has to be restored.”30 The fact that Schmidt’s actions and thoughts were completely consistent with his long-term military-strategic concepts can be seen as the main reason why he never quite managed to take the growing opposition within Germany against the dual-track decision seriously. Indeed, Schmidt regarded his critics’ ideas as the more serious threat to West German security. In a particularly heated letter to Brandt in September 1981, for example, Schmidt complained heavily about Brandt’s decision to let one of the SPD’s most prominent opponents of the dualtrack decision, Erhard Eppler, speak at a major peace rally in Bonn. According to Schmidt, Eppler’s views amounted to a one-sided and thus dangerous acceptance of the Soviet military build-up. While Eppler “constantly and repeatedly” stressed that the proposed US missiles could reach Soviet territory, Schmidt claimed, he could “not detect that he [Eppler] speaks out with similar sharpness against the fact that Soviet Eurostrategic weapons have already been pointing in increasing numbers against German cities and targets on German soil for four years.” He

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was not the only one, Schmidt concluded, who read Eppler’s views as “a onesided acceptance of Soviet armaments.”31 The long-term consistencies in Schmidt’s thought also explain why he never really understood the peace movement’s argument that the dual-track decision was a renunciation of the SPD’s previous peace policies and threatened to erode détente. To Schmidt, the precise opposite was the case:  the restoration of the military equilibrium between East and West to him was a precondition for any meaningful pursuit of détente. Again, this was a conviction Schmidt had harbored for a long time and that he now repeatedly stressed in interviews and speeches. In an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau, for example, he claimed that his foreign policy principle had always been to “attempt cooperation between West and East,” but that any such cooperation always had to start from an “approximate balance of power” in the military field.32 Indeed, Schmidt consciously coupled his strong personal support for the dual-track decision with simultaneous attempts to preserve détente, keeping East-West channels open and trying to mediate the more confrontational US stance during the Afghanistan and Poland crises. Deterrence and détente remained two sides of the same coin to Schmidt, even though they proved increasingly difficult to reconcile. Schmidt’s delicate balancing act triggered contradictory perceptions at home and abroad. While domestically, the growing peace movement castigated Schmidt as a new “Cold Warrior” who had abandoned Brandt’s policies of peace, the international community by contrast worried that Schmidt seemed no longer able to contain pacifist or even neutralist tendencies in West Germany.33 Schmidt sought to counter such perceptions through elaborate media diplomacy, styling himself into a leading statesman on the global stage and downplaying the extent of domestic opposition to the dual-track decision.34 In off-the-record conversations with international journalists, for example, he claimed repeatedly how it was a big mistake to confuse left-wing newspapers like Der Spiegel with the actual state of German public opinion, and that it should not be seen as a serious newspaper but as a political instrument intent on overthrowing the dual-track decision.35 Yet Schmidt’s repeated reassurances failed to convince most observers, not least because he sounded increasingly desperate as his domestic opposition grew. In December 1981, for example, the US ambassador to Bonn reported about yet another heated complaint by Schmidt to stop American debates over West Germany’s reliability in the Cold War. “Personally, I don’t mind this [talk], but politically, I do,” Schmidt exclaimed, for if Washington lost “this government, they will lose the only reliable ally they have on the European continent. Any other government (in

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Germany) would meet with opposition; nobody (else) can hold the various interests together.”36 Domestically too, Schmidt increasingly seemed to be losing the plot, something that did not go unnoticed by Willy Brandt. Still SPD leader, Brandt was significantly more attuned than Schmidt to the moods and dynamics of the party base. As a result, Brandt felt that the growing opposition against the dualtrack decision made the SPD seem increasingly out of touch with its electoral base.37 It did not help that Schmidt himself clearly failed to see the long-term political potency of the peace movement, at times displaying a remarkable degree of arrogance toward his domestic critics. Having just returned from a US trip in January 1981, for example, Schmidt complained in a letter to Brandt about what he called the “naive provincialism” of the German political debate. “I will find it hard,” he concluded, “to turn myself back towards such superfluous, egocentric hic-hack.”38 Brandt, however, realized that such attitudes only served to alienate the chancellor even further from the party base. In a strongly worded letter to Schmidt the following March, he criticized Schmidt’s tendency to “cover the party with various general and specific accusations,” stressing the SPD’s political need to convince the people that it was still able to provide answers to their concerns.39 Thus, we can see how the different political functions of Brandt and Schmidt in the early 1980s triggered quite different perceptions of the peace movement: whereas party leader Brandt was primarily preoccupied with ensuring the SPD’s internal cohesion and electoral future, Chancellor Schmidt instead focused first and foremost on what he regarded as the FRG’s major security interests.40 Yet at the heart of Brandt’s and Schmidt’s growing tensions over the dual-track decision lay the slightly different approaches toward détente both politicians had already taken in the early 1960s. In the rapidly changing environment of the late 1970s, these underlying differences now came to the surface. Whereas Schmidt remained unwavering in his attachment to the military-strategic balance as the decisive precondition for any meaningful East-West reconciliation, Brandt, who had always approached détente from a more political perspective, now displayed much greater readiness to depart from previous doctrines and search for new ways of advancing the bigger political goals behind Ostpolitik. In this regard, Brandt’s perceptions of the wider world after his time as chancellor were shaped significantly by his intense involvement in the North-South Commission during the late 1970s as well as by his activities as president of the Socialist International. Indeed, as Judith Michel has shown, Brandt’s worldview after 1974 became increasingly dominated by a North-South dimension, in a sense

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replacing the lens of the East-West conflict that continued to shape Schmidt’s worldview.41 Combined with his lack of governmental responsibility and increasing marginalization in the transatlantic community (Reagan was the first US president since Eisenhower refusing to meet with him),42 Brandt now felt much greater freedom to question widely held Cold War orthodoxies and to explore new ways of thinking about international politics. At the same time, however, it is important to keep these real differences between Brandt and Schmidt’s views in some perspective, since the core convictions of the two leaders remained remarkably similar even at the height of their tensions in the early 1980s. Schmidt, for example, remained as convinced as Brandt of the need to preserve East-West détente, even though he considered the restoration of the military balance a vital precondition for its success. Brandt, in turn, also never deviated from the belief that the transatlantic alliance was indispensable to the Federal Republic as long as the East-West conflict still persisted—something he was careful to stress even in his controversial Hofgarten speech on October 22, 1983.43 Indeed, it was precisely Brandt’s continuing attachment to these basic principles that angered Schmidt so much:  Schmidt tellingly never abandoned the belief that Brandt had not truly followed his real intellectual convictions in backing the peace movement after Schmidt’s fall from office.44 Indeed, it seems as if Brandt and Schmidt actually both sought to preserve the achievements and substance of their joint Ostpolitik in the changing environment of the early 1980s. Their different political roles as well as their somewhat different concepts of détente dating back to the 1960s, however, meant that they went about it in rather different ways.

Conclusion When Schmidt lost office on October 1, 1982, his departure seemed to signify the end of an era. For some time, Schmidt had been the last man standing of a second generation of Cold War politicians, a generation that had come to power during the 1960s with the realization that the superpower conflict was there to stay and that searched for new ways of dealing with that fact. It was a generation that was at the heart of both East-West détente and German Ostpolitik. By the late 1970s, however, Schmidt looked increasingly alone in trying to preserve these policies against the backdrop of worsening superpower relations and a new generation of Western leaders. As American policymakers in particular became convinced that détente could only stabilize but never actually overcome

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the Cold War, Schmidt’s continuing attachment to East-West détente seemed increasingly like an artifact from the past.45 Rather than redrawing the political battle maps of the early 1980s, this chapter has sought to place Brandt’s and Schmidt’s evolving attitudes toward the United States in a more long-term perspective, historicizing them within these wider trends outlined above. What emerges is a picture of far greater similarities in views than has previously been acknowledged. Indeed, as the chapter has shown, Brandt and Schmidt rose to political power in the postwar years precisely because of their complementary views on both the transatlantic alliance and West Germany’s particular role in it. During the 1960s and 1970s, they then proved congenial partners in the pursuit of Ostpolitik, with Schmidt’s focus on the geostrategic dimension of détente providing a crucial supplement to Brandt’s broader political approach. Even in the late 1970s, they both sought to preserve their previous achievements against a changing world situation, albeit in different ways. Arguably, then, it was precisely the large overlap in Brandt’s and Schmidt’s views that made their eventual clash over the dual-track decision such a heated one—familiarity, after all, frequently breeds contempt. To put Brandt’s and Schmidt’s journey in an even wider context, it is worth stressing that the views of both of them were in the final instance shaped primarily by what they regarded as Germany’s unique national interests as a divided nation on the Cold War frontline. The two SPD heavyweights may have had rather different temperaments and political socializations, but they ultimately shared similar convictions about West Germany’s role on the international stage. These beliefs, as has been shown, were shaped not primarily by party-political considerations or personal genius, but rather by the structural pressures on the divided and semi-sovereign FRG at the very heart of the superpower conflict.46 It is therefore not entirely surprising that even Schmidt’s Conservative successor Helmut Kohl eventually decided to protect the fragile balance at the heart of Ostpolitik—preserving the FRG’s commitment to the dual-track decision as well as continuing the pursuit of European and inner-German détente during much of the 1980s.

Notes 1 “Das Schiff verläßt den Lotsen”; “Brandt glückt ein Comeback, das Helmut Schmidt versagt bleiben wird”; “. . . rückt Helmut Schmidt an den Rand des sozialdemokratischen Geschehens,” Der Spiegel 46, November 14, 1983.

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2 “Der Parteichef ist der Sieger . . . der Verlierer heißt Helmut Schmidt,” Der Spiegel 46, November 14, 1983. 3 For an even more dramatic retelling, see Gunter Hofmann, Willy Brandt und Helmut Schmidt: Geschichte einer schwierigen Freundschaft (Munich: dtv, 2015), 9–11. Another excellent introduction to the Brandt-Schmidt relationship is Meik Woyke, “Der Briefwechsel zweier Partner und Rivalen,” in Willy Brandt—Helmut Schmidt: Partner und Rivalen. Der Briefwechsel (1958–1992), ed. Meik Woyke (Bonn: Dietz, 2015), 7–88. See also their respective biographies: Peter Merseburger, Willy Brandt 1913–1992. Visionär und Realist (Stuttgart/Munich: DVA, 2002); Hartmut Soell, Helmut Schmidt: Vernunft und Leidenschaft—1918–1969 (Munich: DVA, 2003); and Helmut Schmidt: 1969 bis heute: Macht und Verantwortung (Munich: DVA, 2008). 4 For the high politics behind the dual-track decision, see Helga Haftendorn, “Das doppelte Mißverständnis,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 33 (1985), 244–87, and most recently Kristina Spohr, The Global Chancellor: Helmut Schmidt and the Reshaping of the International Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 85–108. For an introduction to the German peace movement, see B. Ziemann and H. Nehring, “Do All Paths Lead to Moscow? The NATO Dual-Track Decision and the Peace Movement—A Critique,” Cold War History 12 (2012), 1–24. 5 Jan Hansen, Abschied vom Kalten Krieg? Die Sozialdemokraten und der Nachrüstungsstreit (1977–1987) (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2016). Recent edited volumes are also careful to include both analytical levels, though they are rarely interconnected directly. See The Euromissile Crisis and the End of the Cold War, eds Leopoldo Nuti, Frederic Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey, and Bernd Rother (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015); and Zweiter Kalter Krieg und Friedensbewegung: Der NATO-Doppelbeschluss in deutsch-deutscher und internationaler Perspektive, eds Philipp Gassert, Tim Geiger, and Hermann Wentker (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011). 6 In this regard, they might well be seen as part of Germany’s 1945er generation. See Mark Roseman, “Generation Conflict and German History, 1770–1968,” in Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770– 1968, ed. Mark Roseman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–46. 7 Peter Merseburger, Der Schwierige Deutsche: Kurt Schumacher (Stuttgart: DVA, 1995), 7–8. 8 For more detail, see Mathias Haeussler, “A ‘Cold War European’? Helmut Schmidt and European integration, c.1945–1982,” Cold War History 15/4 (2015), 431–2. 9 Bernd Faulenbach, Geschichte der SPD: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, 2012), 72–82. 10 William Burr and David Rosenberg, “Nuclear Competition in an Era of Stalemate, 1963–1975,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 2: Crises

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12

13 14

15

16

17

18

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and Détente, eds Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 88–111. For the effects on Europe, see Jussi M. Hanhimäki, “Détente in Europe, 1962–1975,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 2, 198–218. Judith Michel, Willy Brandts Amerikabild und –politik 1933–1992 , Internationale Beziehungen. Theorie und Geschichte 6 (Göttingen: Bonn University Press bei V&R unipress, 2010), 166–98. Helmut Schmidt, Verteidigung oder Vergeltung: ein deutscher Beitrag zum strategischen Problem der NATO (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1961); and Strategie des Gleichgewichts: Deutsche Friedenspolitik und die Weltmächte (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1969). For Schmidt’s early strategic thought, see also Spohr, Global Chancellor, 33–59. Brandt to Schmidt, May 30, 1960, in Briefwechsel, 94–5. “Im übrigen ist nukleare Verteidigungsstrategie nur noch für den Fall glaubwürdig, daß die andere Seite ihrerseits einen nuklearen strategischen Überfall plant. Für alle übrigen Fälle östlicher Aggression muß bezweifelt werden, daß der Westen sich zur Anwendung der nuklearen Vergeltung entschließt. Diese übrigen Fälle haben aber eine sehr viel größere Wahrscheinlichkeit als der allgemeine, totale nukleare strategische Überfall durch die Sowjet-Union.” Schmidt to Brandt, February 6, 1961, in Briefwechsel, 96–9. “Deshalb ist die D r o h u n g mit der Vergeltung nicht ausreichend. Wir müssen uns vielmehr für den Fall begrenzter Aggressionen auch tatsächlich verteidigen können . . . Man kann nicht mit Vergeltung drohen wollen und, für den Fall, daß die damit beabsichtigte Abschreckung nicht funktioniert und es daher trotzdem zu einem militärischen Konflikt kommt, die angedrohte Strategie nicht anwenden.” Ibid. “Im Zeitalter des gegenwärtigen nuklear-strategischen Patt kann die Fähigkeit zu örtlicher konventioneller Machtanwendung entscheidend sein.” Helmut Schmidt, “Vor einem Jahr: Die Krise um Kuba,” Die Zeit, September 13, 1963. See in particular his party conference speech in 1966, SPD, Parteitag Dortmund 1966: 1.-5. Juni. Protokoll der Verhandlungen, Anträge (Bonn: n. p., 1966), 438–41, and the revised introduction to his book published in 1965, Helmut Schmidt, Verteidigung oder Vergeltung: ein deutscher Beitrag zum strategischen Problem der NATO, 3. unveränderte Auflage mit einem zusätzlichen Kapitel über die Lage des Westens im Jahre 1965 (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1965), v. “Man muß—mag es auch noch so bitter sein—erkennen, wie gering die Einflußmöglichkeiten selbst der unmittelbar betroffenen Bündnispartner sind und wie gering die Rücksichtnahme der Weltmächte ihnen gegenüber, wenn die eigenen Interessen der Weltmächte auf dem Spiel stehen.” Schmidt, “Krise um Kuba,” Die Zeit, September 13, 1963.

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19 Gottfried Niedhart, “Ostpolitik: Transformation through Communication and the Quest for Peaceful Change,” Journal of Cold War Studies 18/3 (2016), 14. 20 Spohr, Global Chancellor, 47–50. 21 “wirtschaftlich-ideologischen Felde”; “vorausgesetzt, daß der Westen eine militärische ‘balance of power’ aufrecht erhält.” Schmidt to Brandt, February 6, 1961, in Briefwechsel, 98. 22 Helmut Schmidt, “Deutsche Politik im Patt: Wir müssen uns freimachen von den hemmenden Maximalvorstellungen,” Die Zeit, September 16, 1966; BPA, “ZDF: Bonner Perspektiven,” June 19, 1966; BPA, “DLF: Das Interview der Woche,” February 15, 1970. 23 For the links between West- and Ostpolitik in Brandt’s strategic thought, see Andreas Wilkens, “New Ostpolitik and European Integration: Concepts and Policies in the Brandt Era,” in European Integration and the Cold War: Ostpolitik-Westpolitik, 1965–1973, ed. N. Piers Ludlow (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 67–80. 24 Hofmann, Brandt und Schmidt, 173–82. 25 “In einer Zeit weltweit wachsender Probleme”; “Kontinuität und Konzentration— das sind die Leitworte dieser Bundesregierung,” BPA, Bulletin 60, May 18, 1974, 593–604. 26 The Crisis of Détente in Europe: From Helsinki to Gorbachev, 1975–1985, ed. Leopoldo Nuti (London: Routledge, 2008). 27 For more background, see Leopoldo Nuti, “The Origins of the 1979 Dual Track Decision—a Survey,” in The Crisis of Détente in Europe, 57–71; Kristina Spohr, “Conflict and Cooperation in Intra-alliance Nuclear Politics: Western Europe, the United States and the Genesis of NATO’s Dual-Track Decision, 1977–1979,” Journal of Cold War Studies 13/2 (2011), 39–89. 28 Spohr, Global Chancellor, 85–108; also K. Spohr, “Helmut Schmidt and the Shaping of Western Security in the Late 1970s: The Guadeloupe Summit of 1979,” The International History Review 37/1 (2015), 167–92. 29 The Economist, October 6, 1979. 30 My emphases. “Wird das Gleichgewicht gestört, muß man es wiederherstellen,” Die Welt, November 6, 1979. 31 “ständig und wiederholt”; “Ich kann nicht entnehmen, daß er sich in gleicher Schärfe dagegen äußert, daß schon seit vier Jahren sowjetische eurostrategische Waffen sich in zunehmender Zahl gegen deutsche Städte und Ziele auf deutschem Boden richten”; “einseitige Akzeptanz der sowjetischen Rüstung.” Schmidt to Brandt, September 16, 1981, in Briefwechsel, 866. 32 “die auf der Basis des Gleichgewichts den Versuch der Zusammenarbeit unternimmt, der Kooperation zwischen West und Ost,” Frankfurter Rundschau, June 30, 1981. 33 The Wall Street Journal, August 19, 1981.

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34 For an entertaining account, see Hansen, Abschied vom Kalten Krieg?, 125–37. 35 “Hintergrundgespräch BK Schmidt mit der New York Times,” July 7, 1981, Eigene Arbeiten (EA), 29.6.-10.9.1981, Privates Helmut-Schmidt-Archiv, Hamburg (PHSA); “Hintergrundgespräch BK mit The Times London,” November 13, 1981, EA, 28.10.-27.11.1981, PHSA. 36 Burns to State Department, December 8, 1981, National Security Council, Country File Box 14: Germany (FRG), Ronald Reagan Library, Simi Valley, CA. 37 Hansen, Abschied vom Kalten Krieg?, 153–65. 38 “Der naïve Provinzialismus”; “Mir wird es schwerfallen, mich all diesem überflüssigen, egozentrischen Hickhack zuzuwenden.” Schmidt to Brandt, January 7, 1981, in Briefwechsel, 840. 39 “daß die Neigung besteht, ‘die’ Partei im allgemeinen und besonderen mit Schuldzuweisungen zu überziehen.” Brandt to Schmidt, March 30, 1982, in Briefwechsel, 890. 40 This argument has also been made in a lot more detail by Michel, Willy Brandts Amerikabild und –politik 1933–1992, 454–93. 41 Ibid., 397–503. 42 Bernd Rother, “Einleitung,” in Willy Brandts Außenpolitik, ed. Bernd Rother (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2014), 14. 43 Michel, Willy Brandts Amerikabild, 486–7. 44 Hofmann, Brandt und Schmidt, 13. 45 Although there remained of course a marked difference between European and American views. John W. Young, “Western Europe and the End of the Cold War, 1979–1989,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3: Endings, eds Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 289–310. 46 For a fresh take on the centrality of Europe and the German question to the Cold War conflict, see Federico Romero, “Cold War Historiography at the Crossroads,” Cold War History 14/4 (2014), 685–703.

4

A Prophet Unheard: Willy Brandt’s North-South Policy and Its Reception in the United States Wolfgang Schmidt

The late Willy Brandt’s engagement in development issues is often treated by his biographers as a mere subtopic of his life in politics.1 But this is too narrow a view. In fact, his vast activities in North-South relations are quite important, not least in explaining why, from the late 1970s throughout the 1980s, Brandt and three different US administrations became increasingly alienated from each other. This contribution therefore aims to examine Brandt’s work as chairman of the “Independent Commission on International Development Issues” (ICIDI) (known as the North-South or Brandt Commission) since 1977 and the US responses to its recommendations. It focuses on the Carter administration’s reply to the so-called Brandt Report of 1980 and also includes a look at the World Bank’s response to the study, since the ICIDI had initially been proposed by World Bank President Robert S. McNamara. Finally, it discusses which further North-South initiatives were launched by Brandt during the 1980s and how they were received by the US administrations of Reagan and Bush Senior.

McNamara’s proposal for a Brandt Commission Interestingly, the idea of Willy Brandt becoming strongly engaged in development politics originated in Washington, DC. In 1976, William D. Clark, the World Bank’s vice president in charge of external affairs, internally suggested the establishment of a reprise of sorts of the Pearson Commission, whose 1969 report, “Partners in Development,” had investigated the effectiveness

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of development assistance and recommended a strategy for the Second Development Decade.2 As Clark later remembered, “Pearson II” was intended to “produce a report which would send us on our way again.” According to him, it was Barbara Ward, the British journalist and pioneer on environment and development issues, who in a private discussion with Robert S. McNamara first brought up the idea of the former German chancellor Willy Brandt chairing a new commission.3 However, it took a while for the president of the World Bank and former US secretary of defense to seize Ward’s idea. McNamara put the suggestion to Brandt shortly after the SPD chairman had been elected president of the Socialist International (SI) in November 1976. Apparently, neither man considered this position to be an obstacle to the 63-year-old taking on yet another job: when Brandt was approached about heading the commission in late December 1976, he agreed to what McNamara was not going to publicly announce until two weeks later.4 In a speech given in Boston on January 14, 1977, McNamara proposed that “a high-level, but deliberately unofficial, commission” be established “to recommend action to be taken by both developed and developing nations” in order to break the deadlock in North-South negotiations. “The chairman and convener of such a commission ought to be a person of the great political experience and stature, say, of a Willy Brandt.”5 Despite Brandt’s preeminent international reputation, the initial reactions to this initiative were not very favorable. Representatives of the “Third World” were opposed to it. Within the non-aligned “Group of 77” (G77), Algeria, Jamaica, Pakistan, Venezuela, and Yugoslavia uttered strong criticism, fearing interference with the ongoing “Conference on International Economic Cooperation” (CIEC) in Paris, where nineteen developing and eight developed countries had been in negotiations since December 1975. The response of the new US government under President Jimmy Carter was also less than warm. On February 21, 1977, Assistant Secretary of State Arthur Hartman told Egon Bahr that the administration looked on McNamara’s proposal with a “certain suspicion.” In his opinion, the establishment of a new, government-independent body would do the North-South dialog no service.6 Over the course of the following months, Willy Brandt made it clear that he would not launch a commission without international approval, in particular from “Third World” countries. Privately and publicly, he stressed that a large US influence was to be avoided and that developed and developing countries were to be equally represented. Brandt strongly emphasized that a commission under his chairmanship, in contrast to the Pearson Commission, would be

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truly independent from the World Bank,7 which was dominated by the Western industrialized countries, predominantly by the United States.

The Brandt Commission’s problematic line-up It was not until September 28, 1977, that the creation of the “Independent Commission on International Development Issues” was officially announced by Willy Brandt at the UN headquarters in New York. After the CIEC had ended without tangible results in June 1977, he had received, if nothing else, a “nihil obstat” for his endeavor. Three weeks before his announcement, Brandt had sent official letters to several international leaders, among them Jimmy Carter, asking for support and advice. Notably, the US president did not endorse the North-South Commission prior to its launch but only replied to the former German chancellor on October 7, 1977, writing a very amiable letter to the effect that he was happy to learn that Brandt was going to head the new body and expressing his best wishes for its success.8 In total, the ICIDI had twenty-one official members, all formally appointed by its chairman. The most prominent figures were the British Conservative Edward Heath, the Swedish Social Democrat Olof Palme, the Chilean Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei, and the US publisher Katharine Graham. The former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had been approached by Willy Brandt to join the commission early on and had accepted, unexpectedly retracted his commitment in November 19779 and was replaced by Peter G. Peterson, a banker and former US secretary of commerce in the Nixon administration. Eleven commission members were from countries of the global South. The ICIDI represented a very broad political spectrum, and this was what made its deliberations so difficult over the next two years. Brandt had wanted this diversity, but he had not anticipated how hard it was going to be to reconcile the different positions. From the beginning, the crucial and divisive issue was the “Third World” countries’ call for a “New International Economic Order” (NIEO), put forward by the UN General Assembly in May 1974 against the determined opposition of the Western industrialized nations. The key figures among the members from the southern hemisphere who were pushing to make the NIEO the basis of discussion in the Brandt Commission were Shridath Ramphal from Guyana, at the time secretary-general of the British Commonwealth, and Layashi Yaker, vice president of the Algerian

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National Assembly. They were strongly supported by the ICIDI’s treasurer Jan Pronk, the Dutch minister for development cooperation. On behalf of the World Bank’s leadership, William Clark, who feared a rerun of the fruitless debates on the topic in the UN organizations, advised Willy Brandt to refuse the demand for an NIEO. Initially, Brandt agreed with Clark, but in the end, Pronk and the members from the “Third World” prevailed.10 In its “Terms of Reference,” adopted at its first meeting in December 1977, the Brandt Commission declared that a “New International Economic Order” was needed.11

Brandt’s proposal for an NIEO compromise and his appeal to the United States Willy Brandt aimed to find a compromise on the NIEO issue. This became obvious in a speech before the United Nations Association in New  York on October 26, 1978, in which he tried to explain to a US audience why a “new international order” was needed and, in general terms, what it should look like.12 Brandt regarded the problems faced by the “Third World” and those of the industrialized countries, including the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies, as interdependent. Hence North and South would mutually benefit from cooperation in a “healthier,” more balanced world economy, and mitigating their conflicts would contribute to world peace. Brandt also asserted that the existing international system had never been quite equitable for the South and failed even the interests of the North. He expressed his sympathy for the developing countries’ complaints that they were at a disadvantage in the international economic system and not adequately represented in the decision-making bodies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Brandt also expressed his regret over the lack of stability in the global finance system and international trade since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s.13 For implementation of the necessary reforms, the chairman of the NorthSouth Commission strongly pinned his hopes on the United States, which, in his opinion, had to take the lead within the Western industrialized world. He advocated a substantial US contribution toward the creation of a better and more just international order. Though denying that he would ask for a “Marshall Plan for the Third World,” Brandt praised the Marshall Plan and its underlying policy as a shining example that the United States should follow again.14 It was the old school of liberal internationalism that he made his appeal to.

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At the time, the chances for this message to be heard seemed not too bad. In addition to his general commitment to the promotion of human rights worldwide, President Jimmy Carter showed a strong personal interest in NorthSouth affairs, indicated, for example, by his grand tour through Venezuela, Brazil, Nigeria, and Liberia in the spring of 1978. In another letter to Brandt, he wrote in July 1978: “I am deeply interested in your efforts to identify the mutual interests between developed and developing countries.”15 It was evident that the US government was in search of a new development policy. In 1977, Carter had established a “Presidential Task Force on Global Resources and Environment” that was to conduct a study on how the world’s population, natural resources, and environment would change until the year 2000. Additionally, a “Presidential Commission on World Hunger” was founded on September 5, 1978. The two resulting reports, “Global 2000” and “Overcoming World Hunger,”16 were finally released in 1980—only a few months after the Brandt Commission’s report. The central recommendation of all three studies was a call to end world hunger and widespread poverty, which were identified as contributing to environmental degradation and resource depletion. The reports also concurred in emphasizing the need for greater public awareness of these global issues and greater support for foreign aid.

The recommendations of the Brandt Report of 1980 Yet by the year 1980, the prospects for North-South cooperation as well as for East-West détente had become very gloomy. The Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis, the second oil price shock, followed by a global economic crisis, plus the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prompted a dramatic shift in international relations and led to major changes in US domestic and foreign policies. Unfortunately, when the Brandt Report was published in mid-February 1980, it fell on very stony ground. Its title, “A Program for Survival,” and Willy Brandt’s morally persuasive foreword highlighted the urgency of taking action.17 The report proposed a short-term emergency package, including a global food program, the stabilization of commodity prices, and the development of an international energy strategy. The recommended long-term reforms would in essence have consisted of the concentration of aid on the poorest countries and on the satisfaction of basic needs, more support for rural development and agriculture, and reform of the international financial institutions. Aiming for a

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revival of the North-South dialogue, the ICIDI also suggested a summit of about twenty-five heads of state and government who would represent the “major world groupings.” Despite all the diplomatic rhetoric that heaped praise on the Brandt Report, its about eighty wide-ranging proposals did not find much approval, neither in the United States nor in the other Western countries, including the Federal Republic of Germany. Why was that? First of all, the main thrust of the report’s recommendations was on transferring additional resources to the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), at a total of fifty to sixty billion dollars a year. The industrialized countries were urged to raise their Official Development Assistance (ODA) from 0.3 to 0.7 percent of their gross national product (GNP) within five years. Until the year 2000, their ODA was even supposed to rise to 1.0 percent. Furthermore, the World Bank, which was just about to double its lending capacity, was asked to quadruple it to $160 billion. In addition, the LDC’s special drawing rights in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were to be extended as well. The massive increase in capital transfers from the North to the South was expected to boost the Third World economies and consequently the world economy. In order to overcome the common crisis, the Brandt Commission advocated a program whose underpinnings could be described as “global Keynesianism.” The chairman himself explained it as follows:  Because the purchasing power of people in the poor countries was too low, they suffered from hunger and were not able to buy the products the unemployed of the rich countries were in a position to manufacture.18 It therefore seemed to be in the North’s vital interest to strengthen demand in the South. By the same token, the Brandt report argued for the integration of the developing countries into the global markets and against protectionism. It advocated trade liberalization agreements and recommended the merging of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). In any case, the climate for higher spending on foreign assistance was anything but favorable in the early 1980s, not least in the US Congress. In all industrialized countries the economic crisis had triggered conflicts over diminishing financial resources. Moreover, the heyday of Keynesian economics was over after its shortcomings had revealed themselves in the 1970s:  deficit spending, rather than eliminating mass unemployment, had fueled inflation instead, and monetarism and supply-side economics were on the rise. Not surprisingly, neoliberal economists were among the harshest critics of the

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North-South Commission’s prescriptions.19 There was a fear that its call for a dramatic increase of development aid and almost unconditional lending would reinforce inflationary tendencies worldwide. There was also criticism that the Brandt Report would obscure the need for structural reforms, particularly in the developing countries. Against this backdrop, the report’s proposal to set up a $400 billion World Development Fund (WDF) was a “red rag” to Western governments and grist to the mill of its critics.20 The fund was designed to operate independently from the World Bank and the IMF as an entirely new, multilateral, UN-type institution that all nations would be invited to join and in which decision-making rights would be “more evenly” distributed between rich and poor nations. The fund’s revenue was to be generated automatically through an international development tax (e.g., on trade and tourism), through expected earnings from deep-sea mining, and through the sale of IMF gold—a mechanism designed to weaken the control of national legislatures over the granting of aid. The WDF proposal was clearly a vote of no confidence in the Bretton Woods institutions and a concession to the advocates of a NIEO in the North-South Commission. Although Brandt was not in favor of a WDF, he was forced to accept it because the report would not have been completed otherwise. In early October 1979, after months of controversial debates over the final wording, the chairman seemed on the verge of calling it quits. It was Shridath Ramphal, Edward Heath, and Willy Brandt’s aide, Michael J. Hofmann, who, chapter by chapter, worked out a last-minute compromise on the report’s wording.21

The World Bank’s disappointment Although Robert S. McNamara praised the way Willy Brandt chaired the ICIDI as “a magnificent political achievement,” the World Bank president was in fact disappointed with the results produced by the body he had initiated three years ago. He had hoped that the Brandt Report would rouse political support for his institution. But when it was officially submitted to him, he privately told Shridath Ramphal that it was too critical of the World Bank and would do nothing but harm.22 The warning World Bank Vice President Clark had conveyed to Brandt and other commission members in 1979 had turned out to be in vain: “Proposals that please the Third World’s political leaders but are not economically sound or have no chance of being adopted will leave the situation far worse.”23 As Clark

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later succinctly put it:  “The difficulty about the Brandt Commission was that it didn’t look to a revised World Bank, it looked to a new Heaven and a new Earth.”24 McNamara also lamented “that the Report was poorly presented so that few would read it and it would not have much leverage.” He agreed, though, that “the Bank should simply seize on those recommendations . . . which were useful for its purposes.”25 As World Bank Vice President Ernest Stern recalled in 1983, “twenty-three or so” proposals were selected and taken to the World Bank’s Board of Governors. But it “did not show great interest in the Brandt Commission’s recommendations,” which in the end, from Stern’s point of view, “had almost no impact on Bank policy.”26

The Carter administration’s review of the Brandt Report The US government’s response to the Brandt Report was initially welcoming. President Jimmy Carter, who held Willy Brandt in high personal esteem, still seemed very much interested in the ICIDI’s findings. He immediately instructed the International Development Cooperation Agency (IDCA) to conduct an interagency review of the report. Carter also arranged for Brandt and Ramphal to visit the White House on February 15, 1980, and personally deliver a copy to him with the cameras running. But the Carter administration soon assumed a more reserved stance toward the Brandt Report. A memorandum to the secretary of the treasury warned as early as February 25, 1980: “By endorsing numerous demands of the developing countries that there is no realistic expectation of meeting—the Report may create false expectations which will lead to future disappointments. Most likely, it will have little or no effect on public opinion in this country and marginal effect in a few places abroad (Germany, U.K.).”27 This assessment proved to be right. The main reason the American public completely ignored the report was a fundamental disinterest in the topic. Upon its release, the Washington Post, for example, only ran a short article on page  25, although Katherine Graham, the newspaper’s publisher, was a member of the Brandt Commission. Not even she was able to get publicity for the report in the United States because her own media outlets did not consider it important enough. When Newsweek, at Graham’s insistence, eventually devoted a cover story to the North-South conflict, it became the worst-selling issue of the year.28

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The interagency study Carter had commissioned was not completed until mid-September 1980. The review the IDCA’s director Thomas Ehrlich eventually presented to the president endorsed in general terms “the Commission’s view that there are growing mutual interests between North and South; and that all countries must assume an appropriate share of responsibility for managing a rapidly changing world economy.” It also saw US development assistance policy as largely being in line with the Brandt Commission’s call to focus aid on the LDCs. But the review also found that not enough mention was made of the developing countries’ obligations. Moreover, several US administrative agencies took “strong exception to two major clusters of recommendations—those requiring large increases in development assistance and those calling for major reforms in existing international institutions, including substantially greater voting power for developing countries.” In particular, most agencies were “skeptical, if not opposed, of an international tax” and unambiguously dismissed the proposed World Development Fund.29 The priorities of the Carter administration’s North-South policies were quite different from those advocated by the Brandt Report. In the letter accompanying the ICDA director’s official submission of the interagency review, Ehrlich briefed the president on “several initiatives for consideration at the start of your next term.” In particular, he mentioned a “Coal for Peace and Development Program” designed to foster the purchase of US coal by developing countries as an alternative to high-priced oil. Ehrlich also hinted at “an international population initiative aimed at doubling the availability and use of family planning and related health services in developing countries” over the course of the 1980s as well as a program to increase food and agricultural productivity.30 These measures were supposed to achieve a number of the objectives outlined in the ICIDI’s emergency program. But in substance, they had very little in common with the Brandt Report’s specific recommendations for action. Remarkably, the review did not comment on the proposed North-South summit. President Carter’s stance on this issue wavered. Willy Brandt had left Washington with the impression that the US administration was open to the idea of a summit. At his request, the Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, along with the Mexican President José López Portillo, set out to explore the possibility of convening such a conference. At the meeting of the Group of Seven (G7) in Venice in June 1980, however, the US president stated that he was personally against the proposed NorthSouth summit. If it failed, he argued, the West would doubtless be blamed for

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its failure. At Carter’s insistence, a sentence saying that a North-South summit “could be useful under appropriate circumstances and at a suitable time” was deleted from the draft of the G7 leaders’ declaration. The two sentences that remained in the final communiqué were: “We welcome the report of the Brandt Commission. We shall carefully consider its recommendations.” In reality, the G7 never mentioned the report again. Oddly, when German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau told their five colleagues in Venice that they would both participate in a North-South summit if it was convened by others, Carter added that in that case he would also attend.31 Nevertheless, over the following months, the president’s position on the issue continued to harden. In early October 1980, Brandt was informed that Carter did not expect any progress to be made by a North-South summit and that he was not willing to attend a meeting that would only serve as a platform for showcase rhetoric.32 Consequently, the United States was not present when foreign ministers and diplomats from eleven countries gathered in Vienna on November 7, 1980—three days after the American presidential election—in order to prepare a conference in Cancún (Mexico) the following year.

The Reagan administration and the Brandt Report: separate universes While Jimmy Carter probably would have stayed away, Ronald Reagan, along with Margaret Thatcher, decided to take part in the first North-South summit in October 1981—not without hesitation and only after the conveners had ensured that Fidel Castro would not be invited to Cancún. (The Soviet Union had refused to attend at an early stage.) In his talks with the other attending leaders, among them the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Tanzania’s President Julius Nyerere, the Chinese Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang, the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Fahd, and the Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, the new US president seized the opportunity to promote his neoconservative and neoliberal beliefs in supply-side economics.33 Compared to its predecessor, the Reagan administration’s attitude to NorthSouth issues was even less compatible with the Brandt Report. Two letters exchanged before and after the Cancún meeting exemplify the very different approaches. In a joint letter of September 11, 1981, Willy Brandt, who had not received an official invitation to Cancún, and Shridath Ramphal addressed the twenty-two leaders who were expected to attend the conference. Referring to the

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recommendations of the North-South Commission, especially to its emergency program, the appeal called for urgent action against the global economic crisis.34 In his answer of November 4, 1981, the US president implicitly but clearly rebuffed the entire thrust of the Brandt/Ramphal letter. Leaving no doubt about his opinion on what was necessary “to revive world growth” and “to achieve self-sustaining growth in the poor countries, particularly in food and energy,” Reagan wrote: “While foreign assistance remains a vital factor for development in many countries, constructive efforts to expand global trade and increase domestic and international private investment play an even more important role in many countries.” The president added that “the best hope to defeat protectionism and to continue the trade liberalization process” was offered by the GATT negotiations, thus implicitly expressing his dislike of UNCTAD and other UN institutions.35 The Reagan administration advocated deregulation, liberalization, and privatization at home and abroad. Highly critical of multilateral mechanisms, it also preferred a bilateral approach in international politics. In short, the United States considered the Brandt Report recommendations to be irrelevant. In the time that followed, its ideas “were placed unequivocally at the bottom of the international agenda.”36

An ideological divide: Brandt’s sharp critique of Reagan’s policies Willy Brandt and his fellow members on the North-South Commission considered Ronald Reagan’s domestic and foreign policies the main culprit for the worsening of the global economic and financial crisis in the early 1980s. The second Brandt Report,37 published in 1983, especially condemned the United States’ excessive military spending, which caused record deficits in the American federal budget. These deficits, in turn, contributed to record interest rates around the globe, exceeding 20 percent in the United States in 1982, which led to many developing countries, particularly in Latin America, incurring gigantic debts. As a result of the combination of exploding debt service obligations and decreasing development aid, in net result, the “Third World” transferred more capital to the industrialized nations than it received from them. In Brandt’s view, the rise of poverty worldwide thus resulted largely from the superpowers’ arms race in the renewed Cold War and from their export of the East-West conflict to developing countries, in particular to Central America and Africa. Time

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and time again, and with growing anger, he condemned what he saw as the correlation between arms expenditure and hunger.38 Willy Brandt’s disapproval of US development policy reached its peak in 1984, when the Reagan administration unilaterally decided to reduce its payments to the International Development Agency (IDA), an affiliate of the World Bank designed to lend money to the poorest countries on particularly favorable terms. He unsuccessfully called on Reagan to revise the decision. Brandt also failed in an appeal to other G7 nations, in particular West Germany and Japan, to compensate for the US cuts.39 The divide between the president of the SI and the US administration grew even wider with Willy Brandt’s three-week trip to Latin America in October 1984, which included visits to Nicaragua and Cuba. During this trip, he called for a “New Bretton Woods” that would enable better coordination of economic and financial policies worldwide. Brandt wanted the Western Europeans to lead the way in helping prevent Latin America from being destroyed by the debt crisis. For immediate relief, he suggested a cap on interest rates, a debt moratorium for the weakest countries, a ceiling on foreign debt service, and a social clause concerning a minimum standard of living.40 These proposals were aimed against the highly controversial “Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAPs) of the World Bank and the IMF, which eagerly followed the US Treasury Department’s neoliberal and monetarist prescriptions.41 They pressured developing countries to implement free-market and exportoriented reforms as well as austerity measures in return for emergency loans. In many cases, the SAPs exacerbated the crises in the indebted countries instead of easing them. Willy Brandt did not merely declare monetarism a failure. His criticism of World Bank and IMF policies also contained an element of disagreement in principle. The way he saw it, the question of “free market economy or centrally planned economy” was inapplicable to the developing countries because they either wanted a “third way” or did not meet the requirements of a market economy. And he always underscored that under no circumstances was the West to impose its own economic model on the developing countries.42 In 1985, Brandt even expressed the opinion that “the old post-war model of growth and recovery is finished.” In addition, he joined the call for a “recovery of growth through redistribution,” “accompanied by a fundamental restructuring of the ownership and traditional pattern of resource allocation,” and agreed with the demand that the “New International Economic Order, NIEO, must be progressively implemented.”43

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The failure of Brandt’s “Cancún II Initiative” in 1989 Third World rhetoric, skepticism toward the Western economic model, sympathies for a “third way” between capitalism and communism, postmaterialist notions:  over the course of the 1980s, Willy Brandt increasingly tended toward concepts that were at odds with what the United States, especially during the Reagan era, stood for and firmly believed in. This may explain why yet another initiative failed that had been on the elder statesman’s mind since a conversation he had had with the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984.44 In early 1989, he suggested to the new US President George Bush and the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev convening a North-South summit along the lines of the Cancún meeting, but this time with the USSR attending. With the Cold War coming to an end, Brandt believed that the situation was favorable for the multilateral dialogue and cross-bloc cooperation on global issues that he had envisioned for so long. Since the mid1950s, he had wished for joint efforts by East and West, particularly in the field of development, in order to promote “peaceful coexistence” worldwide.45 However, the Bush administration had no interest in this endeavor and obviously was not very keen on hearing what the SI president and former German chancellor had to say. Arriving at the White House on March 3, 1989, to personally deliver his letter to the US president, Willy Brandt actually had to spell his name to the doorman.46 Once inside, he was received not by George Bush but by Brent Scowcroft. It was the national security adviser as well, not the president, who five months later officially replied to Brandt. In his letter, Scowcroft expressed doubt that a Cancún-type summit “would be the most effective way” to solve global problems. There already were “a number of mechanisms to promote international cooperation,” and those should be made to work better. Most notably, Scowcroft underscored that governments throughout the developing world had “come to realize that economic development can best be achieved by economic reforms that give free rein to market forces.” Pointing to the “profound transformation of the postwar political landscape with political freedom and economic change proceeding” in many developing countries and in the communist world, Scowcroft made it clear that the United States would continue to support “especially those countries pursuing strong marketoriented policies.”47 On the verge of winning the East-West-conflict in ideological and economic terms even in the “Third World,” the Bush administration no longer saw—if it

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ever had—anything to gain from the American-Soviet co-leadership for global governance that Willy Brandt still hoped for. In the end, he remained a prophet unheard in the United States.

Notes 1 See, for example, Hélène Miard-Delacroix, Willy Brandt: Life of a Statesman, trans. Isabelle Chaize (London/New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 174–6. 2 Lester B. Pearson et al., Partners in Development: Report of the Commission on International Development (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969). 3 William Clark, oral history interview, October 4, 1983, transcript, 19–20, World Bank Group Archives, Washington, DC, United States. Available online: http:// documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/571041468337173687/pdf/789640v20TRN0 C0on010October04001983.pdf (accessed March 21, 2017). 4 McNamara’s letter to Brandt of December 27, 1976, Box 1078, Nachlass Bahr, Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (AdsD) der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn. 5 Robert McNamara, “Closing Remarks of World Bank President Robert S. McNamara’s speech delivered on January 14 in Boston at the World Affairs Council,” Box 89, Nord-Süd-Kommission, AdsD. 6 See telex from the German Embassy in Washington, DC to the Auswärtiges Amt in Bonn of February 22, 1977, Box 1078, Nachlass Bahr, AdsD. 7 See the interview with William Clark, October 4, 1983, 21, and Brandt’s interview with the Westfälische Rundschau of April 7, 1977, in Willy Brandt, Über Europa hinaus: Dritte Welt und Sozialistische Internationale, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 8, eds Bernd Rother and Wolfgang Schmidt (Bonn: Dietz, 2006), 179–82. 8 See Brandt’s letter to Carter of September 5, 1977, and the president’s reply of October 7, 1977, Box 41, Nord-Süd-Kommission, AdsD. 9 See Brandt’s letter to Kissinger of November 28, 1977, Box 24, Nord-SüdKommission, AdsD. 10 Interview with William Clark, October 4, 1983, 24. 11 Rother and Schmidt, eds, Über Europa hinaus, 71. 12 See the English manuscript of this speech, titled “Why a New International Order?” of October 26, 1978, Box 773, A 3, Willy-Brandt-Archiv (WBA), AdsD. For excerpts in German, see Rother and Schmidt, eds, Über Europa hinaus, 234–42. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 President Carter’s letter to Brandt of July 28, 1978, Box 34, Nord-Süd-Kommission, AdsD.

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16 United States Presidential Commission on World Hunger, Overcoming World Hunger: The Challenge ahead (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1980). 17 Independent Commission on International Development Issues, North-South: A Program for Survival. The Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues under the Chairmanship of Willy Brandt (Cambridge : MIT Press, 1980). 18 See Brandt’s press statement on December 17, 1979, in Über Europa hinaus, 288–94. 19 See, for example, Friedrich August von Hayek, “The Flaws in the Brandt Report,” The Times, January 9, 1981. 20 Interview with William Clark, October 4, 1983, 26. 21 Rother and Schmidt, eds, Über Europa hinaus, 78. 22 Interview with William Clark, October 4, 1983, 26–7. 23 “Your conversation with Peterson and Botero,” office memorandum from Clark to McNamara, June 25, 1979, Brandt Commission—Correspondence 13, Folder ID: 1771354, ISAD(G) Reference Code: WB IBRD/IDA 03 EXC-10-4539S, World Bank Group Archives. Available online: http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/ en/783141389301413696/wbg-archives-1771354.pdf#29 (accessed March 21, 2017). 24 Interview with William Clark, October 4, 1983, 28. 25 “Meeting on Brandt Commission Report, February 8, 1980,” Brandt Commission— Correspondence 13, World Bank Group Archives. Available online: http://pubdocs. worldbank.org/en/783141389301413696/wbg-archives-1771354.pdf#25 (accessed March 21, 2017). 26 Ernest Stern, oral history interview, March 2, 1983, transcript, 2–6, World Bank Group Archives. Available online: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/ en/970971468326687651/pdf/791300TRN0Ster0Box0377367B00PUBLIC0.pdf (accessed March 21, 2017). 27 “Memorandum from the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs (Bergsten) to Secretary of the Treasury Miller,” February 25, 1980, in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1977–1980, vol. 3, Foreign Economic Policy, eds Adam M. Howard and Kathleen B. Rasmussen (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 2013), Doc. 345, 1089–90. Available online: https:// history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v03/d345. 28 Katharine Graham, Personal History (Newark, NJ: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 587–8. 29 “Interagency Review of the Report of the Independent Commission on Development Issues under the Chairmanship of Willy Brandt. Report to the President,” September 15, 1980, National Security Affairs, Staff Material, Office, Outside the System File, Box 58, Chron: 9/10–20/80, Confidential, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta, GA.

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30 “Memorandum from the Director of the International Development Cooperation Agency (Ehrlich) to President Carter,” September 16, 1980, in FRUS, 1977– 1980, vol. 3, Doc. 351, 1103–105. Available online: https://history.state.gov/ historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v03/d351 (accessed March 21, 2017). 31 For the German record of the discussion among the G7 leaders, see “Weltwirtschaftsgipfel in Venedig, 22./23. Juni 1980,” in Institut für Zeitgeschichte, ed., Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1980, vol. 1 (doc. 184) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011), 962–77. 32 See “Betr.: Nord-Süd-Gipfel, hier: Treffen der Persönlichen Beauftragten der (westlichen) Regierungschefs in Washington am 25./26. September 1980,” Memorandum from Fritz Fischer to Willy Brandt, October 2, 1980, Box 2, Nord-Süd-Kommission, AdsD. 33 Stephen Buzdugan and Anthony Payne, The Long Battle for Global Governance (London/New York: Routledge, 2016), 94. 34 Letter from Willy Brandt and Shridath Ramphal to the heads of state and government invited to the Cancún summit, September 11, 1981, Box 3, Nord-Süd-Kommission, AdsD. 35 Ibid.; Letter from Ronald Reagan to Willy Brandt, November 4, 1981. 36 Jean-Philippe Thérien, “The Brandt Commission: The End of an Era in NorthSouth Politics,” in International Commissions and the Power of Ideas, eds Andrew Cooper, John English, and Ramesh Thakur (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2005), 39. 37 The Brandt Commission, Common Crisis North-South: Cooperation for World Recovery (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983). 38 This is the guiding theme of Brandt’s book Der organisierte Wahnsinn. Wettrüsten und Welthunger, published in 1985. For the English version, see Willy Brandt, Arms and Hunger (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). 39 Brandt, in close cooperation with Heath and Ramphal, exchanged letters on the IDA replenishment issue with Reagan and another twenty-six heads of state and government. Box 6, A 14, WBA, AdsD. 40 See the manuscript “Address by Willy Brandt before the Colegio de México, Mexico City, October 18th, 1984,” 10. Box 43, A 11.10, WBA, AdsD. 41 Sarah Babb, Behind the Development Banks: Washington Politics, World Poverty, and the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 77–91. 42 See, for example, Willy Brandt’s interview with the radio station Deutschlandfunk on July 2, 1978, in Sozialdemokraten Service Presse Funk TV, no. 318/78. Available online: http://library.fes.de/cgi-bin/digibert.pl?id=013683&dok=24/013683 (accessed March 21, 2017). 43 Willy Brandt and Michael Manley, “Introduction,” in Global Challenge—From Crisis to Cooperation: Breaking the North-South Stalemate. Report of the Socialist

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46 47

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International Committee on Economic Policy (London and Sidney : Pan Books, 1985), 15–19. See Brandt’s letter of June 12, 1984, to the members of the North-South Commission, Box 6, A 14, WBA, AdsD. Wolfgang Schmidt, “Die Wurzeln der Entspannung. Der konzeptionelle Ursprung der Ost- und Deutschlandpolitik Willy Brandts in den fünfziger Jahren,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 51 (2003), 521–63. Rother and Schmidt, eds, Über Europa hinaus, 95. Scowcroft’s letter to Brandt of August 2, 1989, Box 197, A 10.1, WBA, AdsD.

Part Two

Willy Brandt: The European Dimension

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A Post-national Europe: Brandt’s Vision for the European Community between the Superpowers Harold Mock

The political legacy of Willy Brandt has provoked no shortage of debates among historians. Both the general and the specialist literature on the Brandt era obviously, and perhaps rightly, have focused on the chancellor as the architect of Bonn’s Ostpolitik and as the standard-bearer of West Germany’s own approach to a détente between East and West after the middle 1960s. More often than not, however, scholars have failed to treat Brandt as an international character and not as a mere exponent of West German politics. From the earliest days of his political life, Brandt was always more than just a West German politician. Among the Federal Republic’s postwar chancellors, Brandt was the one most widely traveled in his youth; he donned no German national uniform in wartime; and from his young adulthood until the end of his life, he maintained a vast network of friends and associates that spread across the continent and the world, transcending blocs and the traditional NorthSouth divide. By the 1950s, just as West Berlin represented far more than some capitalist outpost beyond the Iron Curtain, Brandt, as the city’s governing mayor, likewise figured as far more than just another young promising West German politician. When the Wall rose up, so too did Brandt as a symbol of the West; as mayor, he gave voice simultaneously to the indignation of the free world and to the genuine desire to overcome the East-West division altogether. Scholars have remained fascinated by Brandt’s new Eastern policies, though few have treated the European dimensions of his agenda. Brandt maintained a post-national view of international affairs, and he remained far less concerned with the German national question than with building European institutions more assertive within world affairs. In the years of his chancellorship (1969–1974),

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Brandt leveraged his country’s influence to retool Europe’s postwar institutions, an agenda that remained largely unchanged across his tenure as chairman of the Social Democratic Party (1964–1987). His Ostpolitik, which won him acclaim on both sides of the Iron Curtain, provided him the clout to advance his even bolder European agenda. Brandt envisioned a Europe in which national governments would cede much of their traditional authority to international institutions. Given his own country’s peculiar international status—neither fully subject nor fully sovereign—he sponsored this scheme to endow European institutions with many formerly domestic responsibilities, from economic cooperation to a new security régime. Brandt hoped to supplant superpower influence through NATO and the Warsaw Pact, superseding both organizations with general European security structures. Moreover, he believed, Europe’s very survival demanded greater intra-continental cooperation. “There is a growing need for the European allies jointly to formulate and present their particular interests,” especially as “the modalities of the U.S. commitment to Europe are subject to change.” No alliance lasts forever, and “in all countries the question will arise . . . whether [NATO] should be abandoned in favor of new solutions.” Thus, Brandt believed, “coordination, particularly among the nations of Western Europe, had become a necessity.”1 Through the European Community (EC), the chancellor helped to devise such international institutions that privileged his vision. “We can, and we will, create Europe!” he promised.2 In that regard, Brandt’s new Eastern policies represented a means to an end: if Ostpolitik lessened the risk of conflict between East and West, European institutions could function as an alternative to the postwar status quo. Assessing “the scene of world politics,” Bonn’s defense ministry asserted that “the bipolar structure of world politics is losing stability and exclusiveness” and that “a multipolar structure is becoming more pronounced.” Certainly, Western Europe “will develop into [a] new international center of power.” Furthermore, by the 1970s, the two superpowers had largely been satiated, “more pragmatic” and with “dampened ideological zeal.” Even the doctrinaire Soviet Union could be considered “a status-quo power,” no longer seeking “any territorial gain in Europe.”3 In Brandt’s mind, “the Cold War had passed its peak.”4

The making of a post-nationalist As chancellor and as chairman of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, Brandt became beloved in the East as well as in the West. When he was later

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muscled out of the party leadership in 1987, distraught East Germans “lamented” Brandt’s fall from grace. One “East Berlin housewife” suggested that “we ought to build a monument to Willy Brandt,” while another Easterner suggested that “[h]e was too good for them” (i.e., for the Bonn government).5 As president of the Socialist International (SI) for sixteen years, Brandt helped to expand the global reach of the SI and to establish socialist and social democratic parties in every corner of the world. Likewise, for a generation, his name became synonymous with development in the global South, where his legacy as chairman of the Brandt Commission rivals his work in Germany and in Europe. More than Woodrow Wilson or Jean Monnet or Jacques Delors, Brandt might be remembered as the great internationalist of the twentieth century. That outlook had been borne out of the experiences of his turbulent youth, when an excess of racially infused nationalism had destroyed his homeland. At the age of 19, the young shipbroker’s apprentice pressed his possessions in a small attaché case and, with only a hundred Reichsmarks in his pocket, escaped Hitler’s Reich as a stowaway on a fishing vessel. “I quickly saw that there was neither a moral nor a national duty to remain in Germany,” he later explained. “Faith in the power to resist had been dealt a death blow. God helps only those who help themselves.”6 Brandt lived out the Nazi years in Scandinavia, though traveling frequently around the continent as a journalist. He adopted a series of pseudonyms and became conversant in local languages. He emerged as an instrumental figure in the socialist movement and in 1934 helped to establish the International Bureau of Revolutionary Youth Organizations. Even upon his return to Germany in 1946, he arrived not as a returned expatriate, but as a diplomatic agent of the Norwegian government. Immersing himself in the great political questions of the day, Brandt joined the Social Democratic Party. His energy and compelling personal narrative quickly attracted the attention of the party elders and set him on the political trajectory that he would follow for the rest of his life, propelling him to the heights of his career as his country’s first social democratic chancellor and to an ignominious downfall in an East-West spy scandal.7 Brandt’s post-nationalist views became crystallized in the late 1960s and across the 1970s, when all of Europe confronted interrelated political, economic, and social crises that transgressed borders with impunity. As chancellor and party chairman, he expressed that outlook most clearly through his policies of engagement with the East, which ultimately represented a larger scheme of replacing superpower influence in Europe. Brandt saw European institutions as the panacea for the East-West conflict and for the many problems Europeans faced in the early 1970s. Establishing the EC as a third great-power bloc and

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dismissing traditional notions of state sovereignty, including the Westphalian nation state itself, Europeans could rally together to assert their own interests within world affairs.

Brandt’s worldview “The brotherhood of peoples is an institution which grimly reminds us: Cain and Abel were also brothers. However confident our hopes, we should never forget that.”8 Speaking in Oslo as he received his Nobel Peace Prize in 1971, Willy Brandt urged caution. “A good German cannot be a nationalist; a good German knows that he cannot refuse a European calling. Through Europe, Germany returns to itself and to the constructive forces of its history.”9 Accepting his prize, Brandt spoke of peace, of Europe, of unity; so too did every West German politician. The devil always lay in the details. Since 1949, the Christian Democrats had relied on the delicate, dangerous diplomacy of nonrecognition of the East German state. Assuming office in late 1969, Brandt and his social democrats completely recast their country’s foreign policy through the chancellor’s Ostpolitik, which sought official cooperation with the estranged German Democratic Republic (GDR). For Brandt, foreign policy always involved striking a balance between interests and ideals and between the parochial concerns of his country and the wider interests of Europe. Among contemporaries, his efforts to reconcile those competing imperatives, namely, through his Eastern policies, proved controversial among domestic constituencies (though they ultimately had earned him an international peace honor). The opposition feared that engagement with the German Democratic Republic was tantamount to a renunciation of eventual German reunification and that to recognize the East German régime in the name of “false détente” would endorse its legitimacy within Germany and international affairs.10 So intractable were the foreign-policy differences between left and right that, in April 1972, the opposition Union parties, touting “sober and realistic alternatives,” took the unprecedented step of arranging a constructive vote of no confidence to force Brandt out of office. “The SPD-FDP coalition has been warned,” noted the opposition: “The government should be in recognition that this short course [of Ostpolitik] will result one day in NATO’s protection crumbling and Soviet domination over all of Europe.”11 Warning that the government’s foreign policies would bring “a communist or socialist Europe through the backdoor,” the CDU/CSU hoped to make the vote a referendum

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on the chancellor’s Ostpolitik.12 By a margin of only two votes, Brandt and his policies survived their referendum. In their understanding of Ostpolitik, scholars have arrived at a historical consensus that has largely reproduced the domestic political debates of the early 1970s. Historians and commentators on Brandt’s foreign policies have thus relied more heavily on the specific language the chancellor and his party used to defend their positions among domestic audiences and to internal critics than on the long-term thinking and the logic of Brandt and his coterie of advisors. Brandt viewed foreign affairs in inherently post-national terms, and he harbored suspicion toward (or rejected) institutions that perpetuated the parochial interests of nation states to the detriment of transnational or multilateral cooperation. Ostpolitik had been born in that spirit. Far more than a simple rapprochement with the communist bloc, Brandt’s Eastern policies ultimately represented a larger scheme of altogether replacing superpower influence in Europe by reinvigorating European institutions as a great-power bloc between the United States and the Soviet Union. He aimed for a Europe no longer hostage to the East-West contest and altogether more assertive of its own interests within world affairs. In both public and private, Brandt spoke in a language that discredited traditional notions of state sovereignty, of nationalism, and of the nation state itself. “We must discard that unimaginative principle that nations with different social and economic systems cannot live side by side without being in grave conflict,” he remarked. “My country is no longer a greatpower (“große” Macht), nor can it be.”13 Brandt believed that his new Eastern policy transcended both partisan loyalties and ideological limitations. The Soviets and the Americans were losing their interest in Europe as growing preoccupations in the Third World consumed their attention and resources, yet Europeans remained confined by the strictures placed on them by three outsiders at Yalta. Western Europe, Brandt believed, could “develop into a union which will be able to assume part of the responsibility for world affairs, independently of the United States.” Moreover, “Realpolitik,” he explained, “proved to be an infernal chimera.” Germany had destroyed Europe in his youth, and by the 1970s, Germany could be responsible for ensuring peace and prosperity in a new era.14 Those dimensions of Brandt’s worldview, however, have largely been overlooked by scholars, particularly in the English-language literature. The finest studies of Willy Brandt and Ostpolitik, most of which have been published in German, have not permeated English-speaking scholarship as thoroughly as they might, and many American and British authors continue to rely on a simple

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dichotomy of containment versus engagement—ideas that, although they were debated hotly among contemporaries in the 1970s and seemed persuasive among American east coast intellectuals, did not define Brandt’s thinking in any more than a superficial way. In that regard, many otherwise fine studies of improved East-West relations during the 1970s have neglected Brandt’s views on European integration and his foreign-policy worldview more generally.15 Thus, in the historiography, Ostpolitik has taken on a familiar mythology: engagement between East and West led ultimately to reconciliation and reunification. Brandt’s program, however, was never a blueprint for unity; instead, it represented a plan for returning his country to the peaceful conduct of international relations and for achieving greater independence between the superpowers.16 He understood that overcoming Germany’s division remained a prospect as elusive as ending the Cold War itself. “Reunification,” he later confessed, “became the indispensible lie (Lebenslüge) that characterized the second German republic.”17 Instead, achieving a more integrated Europe, independent of the superpowers, remained the more important ambition. Despite the controversy among contemporaries, Ostpolitik itself was not revolutionary; in many ways, the new Eastern policies devised during Brandt’s tenure as chancellor represented but the logical outcome of Ludwig Erhard’s and Kurt Georg Kiesinger’s policies during the middle 1960s. In fact, every postwar government in Bonn had pursued its own version of Ostpolitik.18 Adenauer’s 1955 trip to Moscow had established diplomatic relations with the USSR, and Foreign Minister Gerhard Schröder had pursued ambitious trade deals beyond the Iron Curtain. Across 1963 and 1964, only two years after the construction of the Berlin Wall, Schröder’s “policy of movement” (Politik der Bewegung) had yielded trade agreements between Bonn and communist régimes in Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria.19 By the time of Adenauer’s retirement from the chancellery in 1963, prominent West Germans were calling for engagement with the East—among them essayist Golo Mann, journalist Rudolf Augstein, psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, and physicists Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (elder brother of the CDU’s Richard von Weizsäcker).20 Left-of-center publications, namely, Die Zeit and Der Spiegel, along with the maturation of a new political generation, were gradually swaying public opinion away from the Adenauer-Hallstein nonrecognition doctrine and toward a greater sense of maneuverability between East and West.21 During the Grand Coalition government, Brandt and Schröder both had secured top cabinet posts and helped to continue greater engagement with the East.22

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Brandt’s logic behind Ostpolitik, however, did prove revolutionary. His Eastern policies reached further than those of his predecessors in the chancellery; they represented more than an exchange of representatives or market expansion. Brandt envisioned not simple adjustments in a few bilateral relationships but a complete redefinition of diplomacy itself. He hoped to leverage his country’s political and economic influence to rejuvenate Europe’s stalled integration and to modulate the East-West struggle. A stronger EC, with its own peaceful international agenda, could simultaneously assert greater independence from the transatlantic partnership and endow European institutions with credibility. The EC, behind Franco-German leadership, could supplant American-dominated NATO as the chief interlocutor in East-West relations. “Legitimate national interests required a spring cleaning of Federal German policy toward Moscow and its allies,” Brandt explained.23 NATO clearly constituted America’s means of remaining at the zenith of its 1945 power over Europe, cloaked in the guise of interallied cooperation. The EC, on the other hand, afforded Europeans self-assertion in international affairs and a forum for addressing uniquely European problems. Brandt believed that American involvement in European affairs represented a relic of 1945—a temporary stopgap until Europeans developed their own mechanisms of continental stability.24 By the 1970s, that moment had come; the Federal Republic of Germany, now an engaged partner in both superpower blocs, had honored the two implicit axioms of West German foreign policy, “never alone” and “never again,” and had reentered world politics in a peaceable way.25 In concert with its EC partners, the Federal Republic could devise foreign policies calibrated to its peculiar security situation within the divided Europe. “No national interest can today be isolated from collective responsibility for peace,” Brandt argued. “Our Europe, born of the experience of suffering and failure, is the imperative mission of reason.”26 Brandt was, as one historian has noted, a master of “emotive imprecision” across his political life. Heinrich Krone, who had served as a minister under Adenauer, wrote of Brandt:  “[he] likes to talk in a hovering language” (eine schwebende Sprache).27 As with all historical studies of political figures, researchers must work to distinguish Brandt’s philosophical musings from his long-term policy agenda. The most revealing picture of Brandt’s thinking comes from Egon Bahr, Brandt’s closest associate and intellectual confidant across his decades in public life. The two men had become acquainted during Brandt’s tenure as governing mayor of West Berlin, when Bahr, a journalist with RIAS, began service as a press advisor. When Brandt moved to the Foreign Office during the years of the Grand Coalition, Bahr took over as chief of the

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policy planning staff (Planungstab), and by 1969, with Brandt’s accession to the chancellorship, Bahr had become his closest advisor and confidant as well as his personal emissary to the East. The two men intentionally chose the modest title of “state secretary” for Bahr, as M. E. Sarotte has shown, allowing the chancellor to disavow Bahr’s actions should Ostpolitik go badly awry.28 But “no matter how readily Bahr always stepped into the background and no matter how much he avoids any personal exaltation,” noted one contemporary, “one can without exaggeration characterize him as the real strategist of Ostpolitik.”29 In the late summer of 1969, Bahr sketched out a foreign-policy strategy which ultimately would become the lodestar of Brandt’s diplomatic agenda. Finishing the draft just a week before the election, Bahr proposed a major reconfiguration of the Federal Republic’s relationship with its allies, abandoning those “last relics of the post-war period.”30 The paper, “Reflections on the Foreign Policy of a Future Federal Government,” served as the basis of the social democrats’ coalition negotiations with the Free Democrats later that year. Thus, at its genesis, SPD foreign policy focused equally on creating a stable peace with the East and establishing independence from the West. “Notwithstanding the continuity of the alliance systems,” he wrote, “there is nothing to prevent concluding agreements which maintain the present system at a fairly low level and may be seen as the forerunners of a new European order.”31 But what specifically would such a “new European order” entail? Earlier work, drafted by Bahr and by Brandt’s policy planning staff in the Foreign Office, contemplated three outcomes. Model “A” envisioned gradual evolution in the status quo to allow for détente and disarmament in Europe. Models “B” and “C” proved decidedly more radical. “B,” which Bahr feared as a likely outcome for Europe, envisioned retaining NATO and the Warsaw Pact with interconnected institutions to oversee collective disarmament measures. “C,” Bahr’s preferred outcome, aspired to replace NATO and the Warsaw Pact with altogether new European security structures in which the superpowers would play no role. Bahr hoped to leverage the Soviet desire for an all-European security conference (eventually the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe) “as an instrument for the realization of our interests”—greater independence from the West. The result would afford the two German states latitude for inner-German rapprochement, outside the two Cold War alliances.32 Brandt, though he never clearly settled on any of Bahr’s three schemes, believed that Europeans needed a collective identity of their own, beyond the bipolar worldview thrust upon them by superpower outsiders. Central to that aim, the EC represented the proving ground; if the Europeans could strengthen their

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community through political, diplomatic, and economic cooperation, NATO and the Warsaw Pact could eventually fade away. Moreover, the transatlantic alliance system perpetuated nationalism as a force within Europe, while the EC, at least in principle, sought to transcend nationalism altogether. And by engaging with the East, the West Germans could open new possibilities not only for their country, but for Europe as a whole. Peace, freedom, and human rights “can no longer be achieved with the help of the nation state tradition but only in alliance with others,” Brandt explained. “In the future, significant political solutions will no longer be achieved outside alliances, security systems, or communities.”33 The days of nation-state cooperation were numbered, he believed. In fact, an earlier Bahr paper pledged to leverage discussion of the German question to reshape the European security régime, indeed replacing NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Bahr envisioned a new transcontinental security pact, headquartered in Berlin, freed from Four-Power administration.34 In his configuration, the United States and the Soviet Union would not actively participate in the new European security structure. Likewise, France and the United Kingdom, as two nuclear states, would be excluded, privileging a “balanced conventional relationship” among the non-nuclear states of Europe. Instead, Central Europe, including both German states, would stand as an independent, nuclear weapons-free territory. No foreign troops would be stationed in Czechoslovakia, Poland, the German Democratic Republic, the Federal Republic, or the Benelux countries. The two German states would then be able to ultimately pursue unification on their own neutralist terms.35 To what degree was Bahr indulging in fantasy, or were he and Brandt taking actionable steps toward realizing such schemes? Were they simply “playing with ideas,” asked one analyst. The answer quickly became clear: the two were motivated by a certain vision of the world—one in which multilateralism would trump narrow national self-interests and Europe would assert itself as a third great-power bloc between the antagonistic superpowers—and they were taking decisive steps to realize such ends. “It had all the earmarks of a strategy concept that had been thought out clearly,” concluded the Institute for Defense Analyses’ Walter F.  Hahn after a meeting with Bahr. “Moreover, it was presented as the strategy” absent any alternative.36 Ostpolitik represented a means to an end; replacing superpower influence in Europe would yield more integrated and assertive European institutions and ultimately a diminished role for the nation state within European affairs. Still, despite Bahr’s scheming, Brandt understood that a diplomatic revolution could not be created overnight. The former was a dreamer, the latter a politician.

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The chancellor frequently cited Bahr’s motto, calling for “a policy of small steps” (eine Politik der kleinen Schritte).37 Though by his own admission, Brandt did not see West German neutralization as wholly desirable, he understood that ideas such as Bahr’s neutralization scheme should guide policymaking but also remain integrated into a larger vision.38 And while the two shared a philosophical bent toward overcoming the bipolar system with comprehensive European institutions as the eventual outcome, they did not always agree on the specific dimensions West German foreign policy should take. Brandt saw European unity as essential for lasting peace and prosperity on the continent, while Bahr saw integration in largely instrumental terms. Likewise, Bahr remained more wedded to the national idea than Brandt and feared that redoubled effort toward European union might eclipse the struggle for German reunification.39 Furthermore, Bahr was motivated by an instinctive mistrust of the United States, while Brandt did not share such a view.40 Still, despite any dissonance between their views, Brandt and Bahr remained in a political symbiosis across their public lives. Each man could only function with the other, Richard von Weizsäcker reflected later.41 Contemporaries offered similar assessments:  “Like no one else, Bahr has found an almost intuitive connection with Brandt through the precision of his thinking,” noted one journalist in Die Weltwoche in 1972.42 Brandt relied on Bahr’s intellect and creativity, and Bahr relied on Brandt’s political acumen. Together, they advanced an ambitious agenda.

The European crisis In many ways, Brandt was able to consider and even pursue such a radical new vision for Germany and for Europe because social and political life on the continent reached such disarray in the 1970s. Slow economic growth and high unemployment across the continent yielded economic sclerosis. Europeans, including West Germans, proved unable to sustain high wages and expansive welfare benefits as they faced the end of three decades’ commercial expansion. Western economies struggled with chronic balance of trade deficits as low production costs lured manufacturers to the developing world. Across the continent, governments seemed powerless to slow the crises gripping their countries. Meanwhile, the conduct of international relations itself was being redefined. In a world of globalized trade and communication, technological revolution,

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and nuclear weapons numbering in the tens of thousands, to Brandt, the notion of sovereign states conducting diplomacy through their ambassadors seemed antiquated. Even the nation state itself figured as little more than a sentimental anachronism. “Only in a Europe that has found its personality can we secure our national identities,” he told the European Parliament in 1973. The pressing problems of the day—sluggish economic growth, skyrocketing unemployment, high inflation, superpower brinksmanship—could all best be addressed through the EC, Brandt believed, not in the “isolation of the nation state.”43 “The classical nation state belongs to yesterday,” he believed.44 At the same time, however, Europeans were confronted with a defeatist sense of pessimism that their integration projects were collapsing. Policymakers, intellectuals, and the public at large began to question the longevity of European institutions.45 The outlook for Europe appeared bleak, but a renewed mission for the EC could breathe new life into an old institution. Though the once-lauded visions of Monnet and Schuman had stalled, Brandt hoped to retool them for a new era. Across Europe, political legitimacy was being redefined, expanding the nexus of politics and power beyond the sovereign institutions of the nation state. To Brandt’s mind, none of the many crises Europeans faced stopped at any border; by their history, the challenges they faced, and their ability to meet the problems of the age, the states of Europe were inextricably woven together. Only through an international forum could Europeans solve their problems. The Federal Republic of Germany, with its new Eastern policy, safely ensconced within international institutions and multilateral networks, could take the lead. Speaking in Strasbourg, Brandt proposed “a European government in charge of the economic and monetary community, the social community, and perhaps also the educational community, definitely the community of foreign affairs, and—certainly with a cogent logic, one day—a security community administered under European sovereignty.”46 Such a system, he believed, though complicating the postwar security régime, could supplant American meddling in German affairs under the façade of interallied cooperation. More importantly, it could transcend the Cold War itself along with the bipolar world. “We can, and we will, create Europe!” he promised. “The unification of Europe is not merely a question of the quality of our existence. It is a question of survival between the giants.”47 Europeans’ postwar dependence upon the United States, which Brandt often perceived as excessive entanglement, exacerbated the crises. American dollars no longer offered the security they once had provided. The United States had come to rely on chronic balance of payments deficits, as the government depleted its gold reserves and eroded the stability of the Bretton

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Woods monetary system. Rising commodity prices in the industrialized countries favored the developing economies of the global South, and Europeans produced less and imported more. Rising wages and production costs chipped away at private-sector profits, and expanding welfare benefits siphoned off public-sector revenues. Underwriting the entire system was abundant, low-cost energy, which ultimately was taken hostage by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in October 1973. For although the United States imported only 30  percent of its oil from abroad, most of the EC states—including the Federal Republic—imported more than 90  percent.48 Brandt himself believed that if the oil shock failed to bring the Europeans together, nothing would. He told his speechwriter: “If there is no progress on this, then the whole European union is no good.”49 The Americans, of course, worried about such Brandt schemes—not fully appreciating the degree to which his strategizing had been touched off by Washington’s failures of leadership. “The problem of the Western countries right now is that the nature of authority of all of them is in the process of redefinition,” brooded US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger.50 Washington sought a careful balance with the Europeans—the ability to maintain their own stability, perhaps with less direct US involvement, but still recognizing the necessity for American leadership and the ultimate congruence of American and European interests. Even official American policy for Europe “required the U.S.  to play an active role in European politics, not only to shield Western Europe from Soviet pressure, but also as a stabilizing factor in relations among the Western European governments themselves.”51 Brandt’s Ostpolitik, premised on greater European independence from the superpowers, threatened to redefine that dynamic transatlantic relationship. Washington insiders either failed to understand Brandt’s post-nationalist views or dismissed them as little more than a bid for German supremacy in Europe. “German nationalism might break forth again,” Kissinger warned, “and, if through calamity it had learned patience, it might prove even more dangerous.”52 His successor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, offered his own similar warning. “The division of Germany at the end of World War II put the major issue of Europe in this century on ice: the emergence of German power and the relative decline of Britain and France,” he wrote. “[M]any political leaders in the West have come to assume that indeed the Federal Republic is irreversibly part of the West as well as a rooted democracy,” but “[t]he reassertion of German power” might “throw those assumptions into doubt.”53

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Ultimately, however, American policy toward Europe remained inchoate across the 1970s, largely owing to Washington’s preoccupations in the Third World. And that vacuum better enabled consecutive governments of Brandt and Schmidt to expand West Germany’s influence in Europe—both West and East. Renewed interest in strengthening EC institutions offered an opportunity for Europeans to generate collaborative solutions to the political and economic upheavals of the day—many of which had been touched off by profligate spending in the United States. European institutions could function as a bulwark against that instability and as a means of reducing American influence on the continent. Reasserting a European identity—or, as Brandt suggested, pursuing “the Europeanization of Europe”—could afford an alternative to that bipolar status quo and allow the Europeans to position themselves as a third greatpower bloc between East and West.54

Conclusion Brandt’s Ostpolitik has defined his legacy, but his European agenda has largely been ignored; he is remembered for the means but not for the end. After his 1974 resignation from the chancellorship, his Ostpolitik was left to be carried out by his successors—Helmut Schmidt and the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl. Brandt’s twenty-three-year stranglehold on the party leadership had hindered younger leaders from advancing within social democratic politics. His failure to cultivate a natural successor among the party’s moderate base left him no natural heir and his foreign-policy outlooks no immediate sponsor after his resignation. Out of the chancellery, freer from the constraints of coalition politics, Brandt redoubled his commitment to international affairs, focusing especially on the North-South divide. His views on politico-military affairs became far less focused on defense than on development, and his outlook on the East-West conflict became decidedly more pacifist. The European project continued, but only in fits and starts, for at least another decade before the Schengen Agreement and the Single European Act were concluded. NATO endured and, following the so-called dual-track decision of 1979, played a powerful role in West German politics. Ultimately, however, Brandt left a legacy in Germany of positioning a powerful EC as an alternative to transatlantic institutions. Such an assertion of European interests provided West Germans a common vocabulary for opposing NATO’s installation of theater-based nuclear weapons in 1983, for the ensuing

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peace movement, and for the social democrats’ redefined politico-military platform in the 1980s. Ostpolitik was never a panacea for the problems of German division, the East-West conflict, or the throes of European integration. In the end, Europe indeed unified but not in the configuration Brandt (and Bahr) had envisioned. Europe never functioned as a third great-power bloc between the superpowers, and no alternative security régime replaced NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Brandt remained largely alone in his post-national approach to European politics. Instead, the institution of the nation state endured and even thrived. It was not the demise of the nation state that facilitated European integration. Rather, with the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and German unification in October 1990, it was in fact the endurance of the nation state that ultimately brought Europe together. For with a powerful Germany ambitiously pressing for national unification, European integration took on a new degree of urgency— both for the Germans themselves and for their neighbors. The Cold War’s end and Germany’s unification demonstrated the popular appeal of national institutions and national identity. When Berliners breached the Wall on November 9, they did not celebrate the international institutions of European peace—the EC, NATO, the CSCE—but the great victory of their nation; at the Brandenburg Gate, at the Reichstag, and amid the ruins of the Wall, they sang their national song and waved the German flag. The Maastricht Treaty creating the European Union was signed just months before Brandt’s death, and it entered into force just months later. National unification showed that Germany, pressing for multilateralism, intra-European consensus building, and the strengthening of international institutions, could function as the EC’s (and EU’s) strongest asset. Germans pledged their influence and capital to alleviate any troubles facing Europe and demonstrated their incontrovertible commitment to continental peace, stability, and prosperity.

Notes 1 Bundesministerium der Verteidigung, Weißbuch 1970 zur Sicherheit der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und zur Lage der Bundeswehr (Bonn: Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, 1970), 33. This 1970 West German security white paper, first published during Brandt’s chancellorship, relied on vague language of “Western partnership,” tempering earlier references made to NATO in the 1969 edition.

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2 Brandt, address to the European Parliament, Strasbourg, November 13, 1973, in Official Journal of the European Communities: Debates of the European Parliament, Annex 168 (November 1973), 20–5. 3 Weißbuch 1970, 3–4. Brandt took a decidedly anti-dogmatic view and avoided ideological language as often as possible. During his service as foreign minister, this approach to East-West relations divided him from the Americans, namely, his counterpart Dean Rusk, who, as Oliver Bange has argued, pressed Brandt to welcome ideological “competition” rather than minimize it. See Bange’s “Ostpolitik—the Hidden Agenda,” open paper delivered at the London School of Economics, February 26, 2003; available online: www.ostpolitik.net. 4 Willy Brandt, Erinnerungen (Frankfurt/Main: Ullstein, 1992), 170. 5 Leslie Colitt, “East Laments Der Willy’s Fall,” Financial Times, March 25, 1987. 6 Brandt, Erinnerungen, 94–5. 7 On this period of Brandt’s life, see especially Willy Brandt and Leo Lania, Mein Weg nach Berlin (Munich: Kindler Verlag, 1960); and Brandt, Draussen: Schriften während der Emigration, ed. Günter Struve (Munich: Kindler, 1966). 8 Brandt, acceptance speech on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, December 10, 1971. 9 Brandt, “Friedenspolitik in unserer Zeit,” Nobel lecture (December 11, 1971); in Friedenspolitik und Friedensforschung: Die Friedensnobelpreisträger aus Deutschland, ed. Hans Kloft (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2011), 137–52. 10 Herbert Czaja, “Überprüfung der Ost- und Deutschlandpolitik”; 07-001, Karton 1912, Archiv für Christlich-Demokratische Politik (ACDP). For a further threat assessment, see “Verteidigung als Teil deutscher Sicherheitspolitik” [c. 1974], 07-001, Karton 1912, ACDP. 11 Arbeitspapier der Unterkommission “Ostpolitik” der Außenpolitischen Kommission: “Fünf Jahre Ostpolitik der SPD/FDP-Koalition—eine Bilanz,” second draft, n.d., 07-001, Karton 1911, ACDP. 12 “Deutschlandpolitik,” February 2, 1976, 07-001, Karton 1913, ACDP; and “Zur Europapolitik der CDU,” June 16, 1975, 07-001, Karton 1912, ACDP. 13 Brandt, “Friedenspolitik in unserer Zeit,” December 11, 1971. 14 Ibid. 15 Among the very finest studies on Ostpolitik, see Helga Haftendorn, Sicherheit und Entspannung: zur Außenpolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1955–1982 (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1983); Karl Dietrich Bracher, Wolfgang Jäger, and Werner Link, Republik im Wandel. Die Ära Brandt 1969–1974 (Stuttgart/ Mannheim: DVA, 1986); Carole K. Fink and Bernd Schaefer, eds, Ostpolitik, 1969–1974: European and Global Responses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); M. E. Sarotte, Dealing with the Devil: East Germany, Détente, and Ostpolitik, 1969–1973 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Stephan Kieninger, Dynamic Détente: The United States and Europe, 1964–1975

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19

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Willy Brandt and International Relations (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016); and Heinrich Potthoff, Im Schatten der Mauer: Deutschlandpolitik 1961 bis 1990 (Berlin: Propyläen, 1999). Indeed, Brandt later asserted that his Ostpolitik inspired Gorbachev’s own “openness.” See his Erinnerungen, 403–13. Brandt made this comment on at least three separate occasions: addressing the Munich Kammerspiele Theater on November 18, 1984, on September 11, 1988, in his “Berlin lessons” address, and on September 14, 1988, to the FriedrichEbert-Stiftung in Bonn. See Heinrich August Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, vol. 2, Deutsche Geschichte vom “Dritten Reich” bis zur Wiedervereinigung (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2000), 471. The text of the first address had been drafted by Bahr. See Andreas Vogtmeier, Egon Bahr und die deutsche Frage: Zur Entwicklung der sozialdemokratischen Ost- und Deutschlandpolitik vom Kriegsende bis zur Vereinigung (Bonn: Dietz, 1996), 287–92. Golo Mann, “Gedanken zum Grundvertrag,” Neue Rundschau 84, no. 1 (1973), 3. On the 1960s, especially illuminating is Peter Hoeres, “Außenpolitik, Öffentlichkeit, öffentliche Meinung: Deutsche Streitfälle in den, langen 1960er Jahren,’ ” Historische Zeitschrift 291 (2010), 689–720. See Oliver Bange, “Kiesingers Ost- und Deutschlandpolitik von 1966 bis 1969,” in Kurt Georg Kiesinger: 1904–1988. Von Ebingen ins Kanzleramt, eds Günter Buchstab, Philipp Gassert, and Peter Thaddäus Lang (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2005). See A. James McAdams, Germany Divided: From the Wall to Reunification (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 64–71; Hans-Peter Schwarz, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Die Ära Adenauer, 1957–1963 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981), 299–300; Peter Bender, Neue Ostpolitik: vom Mauerbau zum Moskauer Vertrag (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986), 118; and Karl Kaiser, German Foreign Policy in Transition: Bonn between East and West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 90–5. Additionally, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, Der Monat, and Frankfurter Hefte featured prominent discussions on a relaxation in Bonn’s Eastern policies. Future US National Security Advisors Henry A. Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski offered important contributions to the debate as well. Key contributions to the debate were compiled by Theo Sommer in his Denken an Deutschland. Zum Problem der Wiedervereinigung—Ansichten und Einsichten (Hamburg: Nannen, 1966). Articulated by State Secretary Walter Hallstein and largely crafted by his deputy Wilhelm Grewe, the so-called Hallstein doctrine held that the Federal Republic of Germany solely represented the German nation and threatened withdrawal of diplomatic relations between West Germany and states that recognized the German Democratic Republic.

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22 Historians have largely neglected each party’s internal dynamics in instituting the new Eastern policies. Most scholars draw rather an arbitrary distinction, assuming that the left aspired to ultimate recognition of the Eastern European communist states while the right hoped to retain the non-recognition policies until an ultimate German reunification. Reality, however, proves more complex. While the Social Democrats and Liberals debated their foreign policies in the pages of West Germany’s news magazines, the internal party politics of the Union parties, as well as Adenauer’s tendency toward centralized decision-making, imbued within the political right a tradition of collective partisan responsibility. Though the CDU/ CSU deliberated over a range of Eastern policy options, their debates remained largely confined to private offices and party cloakrooms. See, for example, Sommer, Denken an Deutschland, 7. 23 Brandt, Erinnerungen, 170. 24 On the contrary, Brandt’s Christian-Democratic predecessors—and official US policy for Europe in the 1970s—held that the American presence in Europe signified a deeper civilizational connection between the allies and a transoceanic bond based upon capitalism and liberalism. Helmut Kohl, speaking with Gerald Ford, explained that “NATO is more than a military alliance; it is an alliance of ideas and must have unity on these philosophic concepts.” Memorandum of Conversation (MemCon), May 4, 1976, secret; Box 19, National Security Adviser files (NSA), Memoranda of Conversations, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library (GRF-PL), Ann Arbor, MI. A German internal assessment noted that American leadership in NATO faced an uncertain future owing to (1) US-Soviet strategic parity, (2) the bipolar world being replaced by “multilateral trends,” (3) European allies contributing more to world leadership through NATO, and (4) transformed relations with the East through détente. See Botschafter von Staden, Washington, an das Auswärtiges Amt (AA), February 26, 1974, no. 60, in Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (AAP) 1974, vol. 1, 229–32. 25 Since 1949, both the left and right in Bonn had placed a premium on multilateralism and Berechenbarkeit (“calculability”) in foreign affairs. On “never alone” and “never again,” see Hanns Maull, “Außenpolitische Kultur,” in Deutschland Trendbuch: Fakten und Orientierungen, eds Karl-Rudolf Karte and Werner Weidenfeld (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 2001), 645–72. On nationale Alleingänge, see Helga Haftendorn, Coming of Age: German Foreign Policy since 1945 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 6. On German Berechenbarkeit, for instance, see Clay Clemens, Reluctant Realists: The Christian Democrats and West German Ostpolitik (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 242. 26 Brandt, “Friedenspolitik in unserer Zeit,” December 11, 1971.

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27 Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (New York: Random House, 1993), 64; Heinrich Krone, “Aufzeichnungen,” quoted in Adenauer Studien, vol. 3, Untersuchungen und Dokumente zur Ostpolitik und Biographie, ed. Rudolf Morsey and Konrad Repgen (Mainz: Matthias-GrünewaldVerlag, 1974), 155–6. 28 M. E. Sarotte, “Egon Bahr,” in Encyclopedia of the Cold War, vol. 1, ed. Ruud van Dijk (New York: Routledge, 2008), 57–8; Stephan Fuchs, “Dreiecksverhältnisse sind immer kompliziert”: Kissinger, Bahr und die Ostpolitik (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1999). Sarotte identifies Bahr as “Brandt’s personal emissary to East Germany and the Soviet Union” and credits him with “de facto control over the key elements of policymaking.” 29 Dettmar Cramer, “Egon Bahr und die Ostpolitik,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 25, 1970. 30 Bahr thoroughly developed his ideas in his “Im Untergang wären wir vereint: Gemeinsame Sicherheitsinteressen und die deutsche Frage,” in Egon Bahr, Was wird aus den Deutschen? Fragen und Antworten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982), 214–36. One observer later noted that “Bahr has had a more profound and sustained influence on the basic structure of European security policy than is generally understood.” See John E. Reinertson, “The Egon Bahr Line,” in Defense Planning for the 1990s and the Changing International Environment, ed. William A. Buckingham, Jr. (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1984), 139. 31 Bahr quoted in Bracher, Jäger, and Link, Republik im Wandel 1969–1974. Die Ära Brandt, 173. 32 See, for example, discussion between Günter Gaus and Egon Bahr on Zu Protokoll, June 4, 1972, in Kommentarübersicht, June 6, 1972. Furthermore, the Federal Republic of Germany agreed in principle to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions in the Moscow Treaty of 1970. 33 Address by Chancellor Brandt before the Bundestag, Deutscher Bundestag, 6. Wahlperiode, 22. Sitzung (January 14, 1970), 839–47. 34 Bahr’s ideas, later leaked, were published and caused a public stir. See “Wie Egon Bahr Deutschland neutralisieren will,” Quick 40, September 27, 1973. The Christian Democrats accused Bahr of spreading a poisonous brand of Ostpolitik to other Western European states, hoping that all of Europe might “slowly drive eastward.” See “Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland und das europäische Einigungswerk,” n.d., 07-001, Karton 1911, ACDP. 35 For a thorough assessment, see Hans-Georg Lehmann, Öffnung nach Osten: Die Ostreisen Helmut Schmidts und die Entstehung der Ost- und Entspannungspolitik (Bonn: Neue Gesellschaft, 1984).

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36 Walter F. Hahn, “West Germany’s Ostpolitik,” Orbis 16, no. 4 (1973), 371–2. Emphasis in original. 37 Bahr first called for his “policy of many steps and many stations” in his 1963 Tutzing address on “Wandel durch Annäherung.” See Egon Bahr, “Wandel durch Annäherung,” address delivered at the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing, July 15, 1963; later reprinted in Deutschland Archiv 8 (1973), 862–5. 38 Brandt, “Offener Brief an die jüngere Generation,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 6, 1983. 39 Bahr’s most revealing exposition, Was nun?, remained unpublished after he wrote it in 1965. Bahr did not altogether reject the concept of nationalism or the institutions of the nation state; he saw them in instrumental terms and as a principal means of knitting Europe together. German “national reunification” represented the precursor to “tremendous progress toward Eastern Europe and toward the East European peoples,” he told Günter Gaus. Without unification, there could be no “European federal state in which the identity of nations will have been dissolved,” he believed. Brandt, however, eschewed nationalism altogether. It was too powerful a weapon to be wielded for good. At the very least, “there must be room for the idea of a global community,” he urged. See Bahr, “Zu Protokoll,” Ord. 465, Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (AdsD) der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, published in Vogtmeier, Egon Bahr und die deutsche Frage, 80–95; and Brandt, “A Plea for Change,” 12–13, in Judith Michel, “Dissociation and Cooperation: Willy Brandt, the United States and the New Social Movements,” in Jan Hansen, Christian Helm, and Frank Reichherzer, eds, Making Sense of the Americas: How Protest Related to America in the 1980s and Beyond (Frankfurt: Campus, 2015), 303. 40 For instance, the two men drew very different conclusions from Washington’s reaction to the construction of the Berlin Wall. Bahr saw the permanence of division as the result of failed policy from Washington, and Brandt saw Kennedy’s resolve as Berlin’s saving grace. “[We] had to wait for a relatively long time before Allied patrols arrived,” Bahr later recalled, and “it also took a long time before merely a protest was sent to Moscow. That was the reality.” Bahr in a television interview on August 3, 1970; reported in Kommentarübersicht (Bonn: Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, August 4, 1970). When the people of Berlin required swift action and firm resolve, the Americans stopped short, Bahr believed. Brandt drew the opposite conclusion. “A young President” Kennedy met the situation with “both firmness and flexibility.” Brandt, Erinnerungen, 65. Though Brandt considered himself ardently pro-American, his zeal for German-American closeness began to wane by the late 1970s. In Brandt’s view, it had not been an excess of superpower self-interest that had guided Washington’s reaction to the Berlin crisis (as Bahr believed) but rather a keen appreciation for peace in Europe and a pragmatic balancing of ideals and reality. Judith Michel, a foremost historian

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Willy Brandt and International Relations of Brandt, has analyzed the degree to which Brandt viewed the United States as a factor of insecurity and instability within international affairs. See her “Dissociation and Cooperation,” 299, and her contribution in this volume. Vogtmeier, Egon Bahr und die deutsche Frage, 60. Ulrich Blank, “Die graue Maus und der Dressman,” Die Weltwoche [Zurich], November 15, 1972. Willy Brandt, address to the European Parliament, November 13, 1973. Brandt had included this comment on the obsolescence of the nation state in his Strasbourg address, and it is included in the transcript. Delivering his speech, however, he omitted the phrase after a pause, skipping to the next paragraph. Jürgen Schwarz, addressing the CDU’s Sicherheitspolitischer Kongreß in January 1975, noted that “both the integration of Western Europe and Western defense cooperation appear in a state of stagnation, if not erosion.” Jürgen Schwarz, “Westeuropäische Sicherheitspolitik: Konturen einer westeuropäischen Verteidigungsgemeinschaft,” January 9, 1975, 07-001, Karton 1911, ACDP. Willy Brandt, address to the European Parliament, November 13, 1973. Many documents refer to the goal of Europe “speaking with one voice” in foreign affairs. See, for example, Politischer Ausschuß Arbeitsdokument (und Fragebogen) im Hinblick auf die Ausarbeitung des Berichts über die Europäische Union, January 13, 1975, 07-001, Karton 1911, ACDP. Brandt, address to the European Parliament, November 13, 1973. See MemCon, February 8, 1973, MemCons, Box 1, NSA, GRF-PL. See also Staatssekretär Frank an Botschafter von Staden, Washington, January 31, 1974, no. 30, in AAP 1974, vol. 1, 123–7. Klaus Harpprecht, Im Kanzleramt: Tagebuch der Jahre mit Willy Brandt, Januar 1973-Mai 1974 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2000), 427. Transcript of telephone conversation, Henry A. Kissinger and Jerrold Schechter (March 22, 1974), NARA, quoted in Jeremi Suri, “Détente and Human Rights: American and West European Perspectives on International Change,” Cold War History 8, no. 4 (November 2008), 530. Memorandum “Atlantic Relations,” n.d., Box 15, folder, NATO (1), Presidential Agency File, 1974–1977, NSA. Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), 422–3. Zbigniew Brzezinski, quoting Col. William Odom, in memorandum from Brzezinski to Jimmy Carter, “NSC Weekly Report #20,” July 8, 1977, top secret; subject file 4, Zbigniew Brzezinski Collection, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta, GA. Willy Brandt, quoted in Deutscher Bundestag, 10. Wahlperiode, 36. Sitzung (November 22, 1983), 2509. Similarly, journalist Peter Bender, a close collaborator

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of Brandt and Bahr, called for “an end of the ideological era” and for “the Europeanization of Europe.” Peter Bender, Das Ende der ideologischen Zeitalters: die Europäisierung Europas (Berlin: Severin und Siedler, 1981). Bender’s book quickly became, in the words of one observer, “the Bible of the peace movement.” See William D. Zuckerman, “The Germans: What’s the Question,” International Affairs 61, no. 3 (1985), 467.

6

How Do We Deal with Eurocommunism? A Case Study of Dissonance between Willy Brandt and the US Governments of Nixon, Ford, and Carter Nikolas Dörr

At the end of December 1971, Willy Brandt met with US President Richard M.  Nixon in Key Biscayne. The main topic of the talks was the Ostpolitik of the social democratic-liberal government. In his conversation with the US president, the West German chancellor also mentioned a new development in some communist parties of Western Europe. He stressed that it was no longer possible to speak of a monolithic world communist movement. Brandt pointed out the new influence of progressive elements in the communist world, which were not to be underestimated. He cautiously tried to draw Nixon’s attention to changes in the communist camp and emphasized that parties such as the Italian communists were abandoning propaganda initiatives against West Germany, which would weaken the cohesion of the communist camp.1 Brandt also said to Nixon that sometimes one could change things only by accepting them, even though one did not appreciate them.2 He had, however, little success in convincing the president that it was now necessary to distinguish between reform-minded and pro-Soviet communists. These remarks by the chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) referred to a development that had taken place predominantly in Western European communism after the crushing of the “Prague Spring” in August 1968. A  few years later, this development became known as “Eurocommunism.” The term was coined by the Yugoslav journalist Frane Barbieri in 1975 to describe the reform efforts of some Western European communist parties that wanted to minimize the Soviet influence and take an independent path to socialism.3 The term was criticized,

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especially for referring exclusively to Europe, but within a very short time, it became a widely used expression for actual or purported reforms in Western communist parties.

The Communist Party of Italy and Eurocommunism The debate about Eurocommunism became highly popular in the mid-1970s. Politicians, scientists, journalists, and even religious leaders commented on the topic. Between 1976 and 1979, for example, more than fifty monographs and anthologies about Eurocommunism were published in German. Renowned historians and political scientists such as Wolfgang Leonhard, Giovanni Sartori, and Eric Hobsbawm wrote about the phenomenon—the latter with apparent sympathy for the Italian Eurocommunists.4 Despite the many publications, no widely accepted definition emerged. What Eurocommunism was supposed to mean exactly remained largely open. But the openness of the term was instrumental in the concept’s popularization:  it could be interpreted quite flexibly. As a result, the similarities between the Eurocommunist parties have often been exaggerated. Nearly all analyses of the phenomenon have included—in addition to the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano—PCI)—the French and the Spanish communist parties without paying attention to the differences between them. Conservative politicians in particular constructed the image of a unified Eurocommunist movement that in reality never existed. Between 1976 and 1979, the interest in Eurocommunism reached its peak. Its focal point was Italy. With its 1.8 million members in 1977, the PCI was the strongest and most influential Eurocommunist party.5 The party already had a long, independent tradition, from the works of the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci in the late 1920s and 1930s to the concept of polycentrism, which was coined by then Secretary-General Palmiro Togliatti in 1956.6 In 1973, the Italian communists adopted the strategy of the compromesso storico (Historic Compromise). Enrico Berlinguer, leader of the PCI since 1972, had developed this strategy in light of the right-wing coup d’état in Chile against the elected government of Socialist President Salvador Allende.7 The Chilean example had made it clear to him that PCI participation in the government was not possible without an internal political settlement with the relevant political forces in Italy and an external opening toward the capitalist countries. In the following years, a rapprochement between communists

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and Christian Democrats took place, and a government coalition became a possible scenario. In many respects, this new communist strategy in Italy led to a highly complex situation because it did not fit into the bipolar order of the Cold War: a communist party that wanted to become not only independent from Moscow but also part of the government in a geostrategically central member state of NATO and the European Community. According to election polls, there was a possibility that the communists might become the strongest party in the legislative elections of June 1976. This prospect sparked panic among Western politicians, especially in the United States. If, following the elections, the communists were in a position to form the Italian government, one consequence would be that communist ministers would be able to gain information about NATO’s military strategy.8 The PCI narrowly failed to come out on top in the general election but captured a record 34.4 percent of the vote. More than 12.5 million Italians voted communist in an important NATO member state. An even bigger problem was the election result for the US-friendly Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana), which had been in government without interruption since the end of the Second World War. Despite heavy losses, the party became the strongest group in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic, the two chambers of the Italian parliament. But they did not achieve the majority necessary to form a government. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), George H.  W. Bush, commented in a memorandum to US President Gerald R. Ford: “The Italian elections avoided the ‘worst case’ outcome but have solved nothing.”9 After long negotiations between the two parties, the result was a Christian Democratic minority government that was tolerated by the communists in parliament. For the Republican administrations of Richard Nixon (1969– 1974) and Gerald Ford (1974–1977), the increasing popularity of the PCI represented a massive threat to Western security. In consequence, they pursued a confrontational strategy toward it. After some hesitation at the beginning of his term, this was also the approach taken by the Democratic administration of US President James Earl (“Jimmy”) Carter (1977–1981).

Willy Brandt and Italian Eurocommunism In contrast to the US governments, the German social democrats under the leadership of Willy Brandt implemented a cooperative strategy toward the Italian

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communists. German social democrats had closely observed the development of the PCI after the liberation from fascism, from its subordination to the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in the immediate postwar period to Togliatti’s theory of polycentrism and Berlinguer’s Historic Compromise strategy of 1973, up to the subsequent development of Eurocommunism. Brandt, at the time not only chairman of the SPD but also Minister for Foreign Affairs in the West German government, accepted an offer of direct talks between the Italian communists and the German social democrats in 1967.10 The first of these talks was held in Rome in November of the same year. The parties found common ground on many topics, for example, concerning the war in Vietnam, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and the right-wing dictatorships in Spain, Portugal, and Greece.11 The Italian communists showed particular interest in and approval of Ostpolitik. Even Egon Franke, the leader of the SPD delegation and a prominent member of the party’s right wing, expressed his satisfaction after the discussion in the Italian capital. After this first conversation, Brandt gave his consent to further meetings. The contact between the two parties continued until the dissolution of the PCI in February 1991. However, it must be noted that relations were never formalized. The Italian socialists and the small Social Democratic Party of Italy remained the SPD’s official partners. To Brandt’s mind, Italian Eurocommunism presented an opportunity, despite all reservations. Brandt believed that there was a real possibility for the Italians— in contrast to the French communists—to break away from Soviet communism. Five months before the Italian general election in June 1976, he summed up his position in an interview with the German news magazine Der Spiegel: “There are interesting developments in the Communist world. We do not walk through the world wearing blinkers and saying, there is nothing there. There are really very interesting things going on.”12 It was this openness to new developments in Western European communism that constituted the main difference between Brandt and the US governments. But his openness also presented a danger in domestic politics. After the interview was published, Helmut Kohl, the Christian Democrat leader and front-runner in the upcoming general election, accused Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of depending “on socialist forces in the SPD.”13 And Karl Carstens, then chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, warned that “the German citizens are tired of being drawn into the semi-darkness of social democratic Ostpolitik and an opaque move towards Communist parties.”14 To prevent further attacks by political opponents, the SPD leadership decided in 1977 to update its publication “On the Relationship between Social Democracy

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and Communism.” It had originally been published in 1971 to counter allegations of a supposed collaboration with the newly founded German Communist Party (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei). The second edition of 1977 also addressed the relationship to Eurocommunist parties. Willy Brandt wrote in the afterword: “One complicating element here is what, in spite of all differences, is called ‘Eurocommunism’ . . . It is part of the situation on this continent that, in order to ensure peace, we need Communist partners as well.”15 Despite his clear differentiation between Soviet communism and democratic socialism, Brandt repeatedly became the target of accusations over the course of the following years. In a debate in the German Bundestag, for example, conservative MP CarlDieter Spranger called him “Volksfront-Willy” (“Popular Front Willy”) because of Brandt’s openness toward the direction Eurocommunist parties were taking, which he had expressed at the Socialist International (SI) meeting in Vancouver in 1978.16

The Socialist International and Eurocommunism However, Eurocommunism was not only viewed critically by the social democrats’ political opponents in Germany. Within the SI and European social democracy, there was intense discussion about how to deal with the reformoriented communists as well. Within the SI, criticism was leveled against the close relationship between the SPD and other social democratic parties, like the French, Greek, and Swedish ones, and exponents of Eurocommunism. Especially the British Labour Party and the Italian socialists under their new leader Bettino Craxi criticized the SPD for being too close to Eurocommunism. The social democratic position toward the new trend in Western European communism was discussed at the conference of European social democratic heads of state and government as well as party leaders in the Danish city of Elsinore in January 1976. Prior to the conference, Henry Kissinger had expressed his negative opinion of Eurocommunism in a letter to Willy Brandt, James Callaghan, and Harold Wilson. The US secretary of state warned that a further increase in importance of the PCI and other Eurocommunist parties would have negative consequences for the Euro-American relationship and NATO.17 The attending parties’ very different attitudes toward Eurocommunism left no room for the adoption of a common social democratic position, either in Elsinore or later. The disagreement on the subject was also noted by the US government.18

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As expected, Brandt was elected president of the SI at its Congress in Geneva on November 26–28, 1976. In his inaugural speech, he explicitly referred to Eurocommunism: We are also faced with a phenomenon that is called—indistinct and misleading— Eurocommunism. I  suspect it would not exist if it had not been forced into existence partly by the vitality, the competition of Western European Social Democracy. For me, the verdict is still out on where this is tactics for the sake of power and where it is a development born out of insight. The well-known East Berlin conference19 a few months ago has shed light on this only to a degree. It has to be taken seriously that the representatives of the parties we are talking about here want to remain communists; it also has to be noted that some of them appear to be willing to expose themselves to the daring undertaking of democracy. Only the politically insensitive will be able to say that this is of little interest.20

Even before Brandt became president of the SI, he had decided that the relationship of the SI to the Eurocommunist parties had to be resolved.21 In consequence, a study was commissioned. But when it was presented in 1977, it could only outline the different positions among the member parties. The result was summarized as: “The non-communist left is divided and confused on the issue.”22 But the analysis also concluded that Eurocommunism was “the most important ideological trend that has emerged in Europe since the Second World War.”23 Although Brandt sought to clarify the SI’s position on Eurocommunism at the beginning of his term as president, by 1978 his attention was taken up by other topics. It can be assumed that Brandt wanted to keep the delicate issue out of the SI’s internal debates in order to preserve the unity of the European social democracy movement.

The United States and Italian communism in the postwar period In the United States, the perception of the situation contrasted strongly with Brandt’s stance on the issue. In the postwar period, Italy and in particular the PCI, had been a focal point of US foreign policy, the aim being to prevent a communist victory in the general elections of 1948.24 At this time, the Communist Party had an impressive membership of more than 2.2 million, many of them militarily trained fighters of the resistenza, the Italian resistance movement against the German occupation and the fascist government led by Benito

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Mussolini. Eventually, a communist success in the election was prevented with the deployment of massive financial and human resources. The pro-American Christian Democrats obtained the absolute majority and formed a government under Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi. The communists, in an electoral alliance with the Socialist Party, gained only 30 percent of the vote. Shortly after, the alliance broke apart. The US government also successfully engineered a split in the communist labor union. Over the course of the following years, the PCI lost more than 500,000 members.

The fight against Eurocommunism in Italy under Nixon and Ford As a result of these developments, the Italian communists presented no great danger to Western security in the 1950s and 1960s. The party’s ideological evolution was hardly noticed in the United States during this period. The situation changed with the inauguration of Richard M. Nixon as president and the appointment of Henry A.  Kissinger as national security advisor in 1969. The Italian communists had gained more votes in every general election since 1953, and despite a decline in membership that lasted until the late 1960s, the party always had more than 1.5 million members. After the failure of the center-left coalition between the Christian Democrats, the socialists, and two minor parties under Prime Minister Mariano Rumor in August 1969, the White House instructed the CIA to draw up the first scenario for a potential government involvement of the PCI since 1948.25 From that point on, keeping the communists out of the Italian government was once again an important issue for US foreign policy. The governments of President Nixon and, from 1974, Ford perceived the Historic Compromise and Eurocommunism in general as a threat to Western security. The result was a confrontational strategy that showed great similarities with the containment strategy of the immediate postwar period. From the early 1970s onward, the US government provided massive support to anti-communist parties, mainly to the Christian Democrats, but also to neofascists like Vito Miceli,26 then head of the S.I.O.S. Esercito Italiano, the Italian army’s intelligence service.27 Unlike Brandt, the Republican administrations were convinced that direct contact with Italian communists would be too dangerous. The State Department therefore denied US diplomats permission for talks with members of the PCI, although the US Embassy in Rome had requested it.28 As a result, the US government mainly depended on information from external

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sources, most notably provided by politicians from the Christian Democrats and the Vatican, who, out of self-interest, often painted a picture of the Italian communists as secretly still strongly devoted to Soviet leadership. The idea of a successful Eurocommunist movement gave rise to fears in the United States that were deeply rooted in political culture, resulting in warnings about the PCI that were far removed from reality. One particularly strong one was the fear of a Eurocommunist domino effect that would spread from Italy to the rest of Europe, then to South and Central America, and finally to Mexico.29 In this manner, Eurocommunism would have threatened the United States directly.30 The result of the Italian general election on June 20, 1976, seemed to confirm those fears. The administration of President Ford identified the uncertain situation following the election as a serious problem. The US government temporarily accepted the communists’ parliamentary support of the Christian Democratic minority government under Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti because there was no other option. But Kissinger, by that time secretary of state, instructed the US ambassador in Rome to put pressure on the Christian Democrats to prevent an official government coalition with the Communist Party.31 But the Ford administration only had a short time to pursue its strategy: less than five months after the Italian general election, on November 2, 1976, Gerald Ford lost the American presidential election against Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter, who was inaugurated as head of state in January of the following year.

The Carter administration and the PCI During the election campaign, most observers expected an opening up of US foreign policy toward the Eurocommunist parties should Carter win the election.32 This was also the assessment relayed to the SPD headquarters in Bonn by Karl Kaiser, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations, who observed the election campaign in the United States.33 Carter’s moderate stance toward Italian Eurocommunism even prompted a dispute between the two presidential candidates in the second nationwide TV debate.34 In reality, there was little change in US policy toward Western European communism under the new Democratic administration. Prior to Willy Brandt’s trip to the United States in March 1977, Berndt von Staden, the West German ambassador to Washington, DC, explicitly stated that talks about Eurocommunism could be expected.35 Brandt, however, did not want to put too much emphasis on this delicate subject in the United States and rarely brought

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it up—once, for example, briefly in a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on March 9, 1977.36 While Carter seemed hesitant after assuming office, it was mainly the new Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, who called for a more liberal attitude toward the Eurocommunists.37 But within a short time, the new National Security Advisor, Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, established himself as the leading figure in foreign and security policy. With the new US Ambassador to Italy, Richard N. Gardner, he drafted the administration’s strategy in dealing with Eurocommunism. In the beginning of 1978, when the possibility of the Italian communists becoming a government party was debated, the US government responded with a clear statement against such a coalition.38 From a diplomatic point of view, this was a highly unusual public intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation in Western Europe. Brandt was informed of the change in Carter’s attitude at an early stage. Karsten D.  Voigt, then the SPD’s deputy spokesman on foreign policy in the German Bundestag, had reported on the conflict between Brzezinski and Vance on the Eurocommunist issue after returning from his trip to the United States in May 1978.39 Voigt said that Carter tended toward Brzezinski’s position and that Vance was becoming increasingly isolated. The new US president also expressed his increasingly critical attitude during his state visit to the Federal Republic of Germany on July 19, 1978. In a public meeting with citizens of West Berlin, Carter emphasized his rejection of Eurocommunism and expressed the hope that “free people make the right decision.”40

Reasons for the differences in perception of Italian Eurocommunism The German social democrats had been in a position to build a trust-based relationship with the Italian communists since the late 1960s. Their shared experience of resistance against the fascist dictatorships in Germany and Italy in particular helped further good relations between the two parties. In some cases, German social democrats and Italian communists had met in the Spanish Civil War or in exile. Leo Bauer, who had been commissioned by Willy Brandt to prepare the first talks with the Italian communists, had even taken care of the sick Luigi Longo, who became general secretary of the PCI in 1964, while they had both been imprisoned in a detention camp in France during the Second World War.41 The shared experience of defeat by fascism led to an awareness

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of the negative consequences of a divided labor movement on both sides. Of course, neither Berlinguer nor Brandt sought immediate unification of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties. But a discussion between these two pillars of the labor movement seemed not only appropriate but also necessary.42 It should not be forgotten that in 1967, when the talks between the two parties began, there were three right-wing dictatorships in Western Europe (Spain, Portugal, and Greece). Berlinguer and Brandt saw a very realistic danger of Italy becoming the fourth. In fact, there had been repeated discussion among rightwing forces in the 1960s and 1970s of a right-wing coup d’état in case of the communists becoming a government party. The planned coups of 1964 (“Piano solo”) and 1970 (“Golpe Borghese”), both of which were ultimately abandoned, are prominent examples. In all this, Willy Brandt played a major role.43 As a charismatic leader of the European left, he attracted not only social democrats and socialists but also reform-minded communists in Western and Eastern Europe. Sergio Segre, the leading foreign policy expert of the Italian communists in the 1970s and 1980s, emphasized this important aspect in comparison with his encounters with other social democratic parties:  “I had many meetings with Mitterrand, with the Portuguese, the Spanish, with the Swedes, but those with the SPD are the ones that went deeper, because Willy Brandt was an extraordinary character: He had a passion for politics and culture at a very high level.”44 Brandt’s authority as chairman of the SPD and, from 1976, as president of the SI shielded him from criticism within the SPD of his contacts with the Italian communists. Despite skepticism among leading figures of the party’s right wing, such as Helmut Schmidt and Annemarie Renger, breaking off relations with the PCI was never seriously discussed. It is noteworthy that the US governments did not try to use the SPD in their strategy toward Eurocommunism. There were proposals in this direction in the State Department and especially in the Western Europe Department of the National Security Council.45 But Kissinger as well as, later, Brzezinski rejected these ideas.46 Under Brandt’s leadership, the SPD displayed a new self-confidence in foreign and security policy that caused little joy in Washington. Confidence in the German social democrats was rather low in the US governments of Nixon and Ford. Because of the strained relations between Chancellor Schmidt and the president, this was also true for the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter.47 Employing the SPD as a mediator in dealing with Italian Eurocommunism was therefore not an option. In Kissinger’s view, a Eurocommunist election victory in Italy would have negative consequences not only for Italy but also for the

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European Community and especially for NATO and affect West Germany as well.48 According to Kissinger, it would encourage the SPD’s left wing and weaken Chancellor Schmidt in his commitment to NATO.49 He also saw the SPD’s success in the German general election of 1969 as a negative example of an overly soft stance toward the left. In this context, he told President Ford in reference to the Christian Democratic Chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger: “The Socialists never would have gained power in Germany if that nice idiot hadn’t taken them into a coalition. That makes them respectable. The same would happen in Italy.”50 Kissinger was particularly worried that the social democrats’ left wing might join forces with the Eurocommunists. This “popular front” would serve to loosen ties with the United States and NATO. The dividing lines between democratic socialism and communism, which to Brandt were completely clear, became blurred to the US governments. Ford and Kissinger pinned their hopes on Chancellor Schmidt.51 While the SPD maintained contact with the Italian communists, at least the Federal government was supposed to remain critical in its attitude toward Eurocommunism. Schmidt thought that the PCI’s participation in the government would have negative consequences for Europe’s economy and security. Just a month before the Italian general election, Kissinger and his close advisor Helmut Sonnenfeldt discussed the situation with Chancellor Schmidt and the Liberal Foreign Minister HansDietrich Genscher at Castle Gymnich in Erftstadt near Cologne. Schmidt and Genscher shared Kissinger’s view that control of key ministries by the Italian communists would have “devastating consequences.”52 The chancellor expressed the same opinion at the G7 summit in Puerto Rico that took place one week after the Italian election.53 The agreements on Italy, in particular the refusal of a much-needed currency loan should the communists enter the government, should have remained secret but were published soon after the summit. The content of these agreements triggered massive protests, especially by left-wing parties in Italy.54 Another, crucial reason for the differences in attitude toward Eurocommunism was the dominant strategy in US foreign policy. Within the theory of realism, Eurocommunism, and especially its Italian variation, was perceived as a threat to the balance of power. For a staunch supporter of realism in international relations like Kissinger, the aims of Eurocommunism were more or less irrelevant. A  successful Eurocommunist party was a severe problem in any case.55 If the PCI proved to be loyal to Moscow after entering government, an imbalance in favor of the USSR would arise. And if the Italian communists did break away from the influence of the CPSU, the consequence would be a Western gain in

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power, which would prompt undesired countermeasures by the Soviet Union. Following this logic, it was absolutely necessary for each nation to conform to the demands of the balance between the two superpowers.

Conclusion In the end, the PCI’s participation in the Italian government was prevented in the years following the election of 1976. The communist defeat in the general election of 1979 removed the need for a “toleration agreement” with the Christian Democratic government in Parliament.56 Subsequently, the highly politicized debate about Eurocommunism lost much of its hysterical edge. One late consequence of the Eurocommunist reform period was the transformation of the majority of the PCI into the social democratic Partito Democratico della Sinistra (Democratic Party of the left) at the beginning of 1991. As a result of this transformation, its participation in government became possible. The former chairman of the Young Communist League, Massimo D’Alema, became prime minister in 1998, and in 2006, the former mastermind behind the conception of Eurocommunism, Giorgio Napolitano, was elected head of state. In contrast to the US governments of the 1970s, Willy Brandt had recognized this potential at an early stage. Initially, the SPD’s discussions with the Italian communists were motivated by a desire to improve relations with the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, and these contacts could therefore be regarded as an early element of Ostpolitik.57 But Brandt, with the help of others, such as Leo Bauer, Heinz Timmermann, Klaus Harpprecht, Horst Ehmke, and Karsten D.  Voigt, quickly realized that more could be achieved. Instead of using the PCI as a mere intermediary with the intention of taking the ideas of Ostpolitik to the single-state parties of Eastern Europe, the developments during the Eurocommunist period revealed a potential for real change. In the case of Italy, even a transformation to social democracy seemed possible, at least in the long term. It took decades for the PCI to be able to break away from Soviet influence. The period of Eurocommunism was essential for this process. In place of communist parties, new international partners had to be found. The SPD was the most important one of these. In the 1970s and 1980s, the German social democrats increasingly became a point of reference for the Italian Eurocommunists. The concept of Wandel durch Annäherung (change through rapprochement) worked in the case of the Partito Comunista Italiano. Despite much criticism from political opponents in Germany, in his own party, in the international social

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democratic movement, and from US governments, Willy Brandt helped the Italian communists on their way to self-democratization.

Notes 1 Minutes of the discussion between Willy Brandt and Richard Nixon in Key Biscayne, Miami, December 29, 1971, A 9 (secret), 30, 7, Willy-Brandt-Archiv (WBA) at the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (AdsD) der Friedrich-EbertStiftung, Bonn. 2 Ibid., 38. 3 Manfred Steinkühler, ed., Eurokommunismus im Widerspruch. Analyse und Dokumentation (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1977), 389–92. 4 Wolfgang Leonhard, Eurocommunism. Challenge for East and West, trans. Mark Vecchio (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1979); Austin Ranney and Giovanni Sartori, eds, Eurocommunism: The Italian Case (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1978); Eric Hobsbawm and Giorgio Napolitano, The Italian Road to Socialism: An Interview, trans. John Cammett and Victoria DeGrazia (Westport, CT: L. Hill, 1977). On Hobsbawm’s fascination with Italian Eurocommunism, see: Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times. A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 352. 5 Marc Lazar, Maisons rouges. Les partis communistes français et italien de la Libération à nos jours (Paris: Aubier, 1992), 398. 6 John M. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), 141–213; Joan B. Urban, Moscow and the Italian Communist Party: From Togliatti to Berlinguer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 225–59. 7 Silvio Pons, Berlinguer e la fine del comunismo (Turin: G. Einaudi, 2006), 35ff. 8 Nikolas Dörr, “NATO and Eurocommunism: The Fear of a Weakening of the Southern Flank from the Mid-1970s to Mid-1980s,” Journal of European Integration History 20, no. 2 (2014), 248–51. 9 Memorandum from CIA Director George Bush to President Gerald Ford, Washington, DC, June 24, 1976, National Security Advisor, Presidential Country Files for Europe and Canada, Country File: Italy (1), Italy (6), Box 8, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library (GFL), Ann Arbor, MI. 10 Heinz Timmermann, “Im Vorfeld der neuen Ostpolitik—Der Dialog zwischen italienischen Kommunisten und deutschen Sozialdemokraten 1967/68,” Osteuropa 21, no. 6 (1971), 390. 11 Protocol of the discussion with representatives of the SPD, November 29–30, 1967, in Rome, Estero, 1967, mf 0545, 1824, Archive of the Italian Communist Party at

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16

17

18

19

20

21 22 23 24 25

Willy Brandt and International Relations the Antonio Gramsci Foundation, Rome; Summary report on the conversation with the Communist Party of Italy by Egon Franke, Fried Wesemann, and Leo Bauer, Bonn, December 15, 1967, Leo Bauer papers, 1/LBAA000010, AdsD. Willy Brandt, quoted in: Der Spiegel, no. 5, January 26, 1976, 24. Der Spiegel, no. 6, February 2, 1976, 25. Karl Carstens, quoted in: Der Tagesspiegel, February 1, 1976, 16. Parteivorstand der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, ed., Zum Verhältnis von Sozialdemokratie und Kommunismus. Neuauflage mit einem Nachwort von Willy Brandt (Bonn: Abteilung Presse und Information des Vorstands der SPD, 1977), 15f. Carl-Dieter Spranger, quoted in: German Bundestag, Minutes of Plenary Proceedings 8/138, Stenographic Record, 183th meeting, Bonn, Thursday, February 15, 1979, 10969. Note (confidential) to Henry Kissinger’s letter to Willy Brandt on the Western European Communist parties, Bonn, January 16, 1976, B 150, Bd. 342, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Berlin. Interagency Group Memorandum “The European Communist Parties,” June 6, 1977, Subject File, Box 17, 23f., National Security Affairs, Brzezinski Material, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library (JCL), Atlanta, GA. Brandt referred here to the “Conference of Communist and Workers’ Parties of Europe” that took place in the capital of the GDR on June 29–30, 1976. The conference garnered high media attention because of the dispute between reformminded Eurocommunist and pro-Soviet parties. See also Nikolas Dörr, “Die Beziehungen zwischen der SED und den kommunistischen Parteien West- und Südeuropas. Handlungsfelder, Akteure und Probleme,” in Bruderparteien jenseits des Eisernen Vorhangs. Die Beziehungen der SED zu den kommunistischen Parteien West- und Südeuropas (1968–1989), eds Arnd Bauerkämper and Francesco Di Palma (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2011), 55–8. Antrittsrede des Präsidenten der SI, Brandt, beim Kongress der SI in Genf, 26. November 1976, in Willy Brandt, Über Europa hinaus. Dritte Welt und Sozialistische Internationale, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 8, eds Bernd Rother and Wolfgang Schmidt (Bonn: Dietz, 2006), 168f. Reflections on the reorganization of the tasks of the Socialist International, August 7, 1976, Günter Markscheffel Papers, no. 22, 8, AdsD. “Eurocommunism: An Analysis Prepared for the Socialist International by Gino Bianco,” May 28, 1977, A 13, 16, 1, WBA, AdsD. Ibid. E. Timothy Smith, The United States, Italy and NATO 1947–1952 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 169–73. Memorandum from Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Martin J. Hillenbrand to Secretary of State William P. Rogers, Washington, DC, January 20,

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28

29

30 31

32 33

34

35 36 37 38

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1970, RG 59 General Records of the Department of State, Subject Numeric Files 1970– 1973, Political & Defense, Box 2391, US National Archives II, College Park, MD. Miceli was elected to Parliament in 1976 on the ballot of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano). United States of America, Congress, House of Representatives, Select Committee on Intelligence, CIA. The Pike Report (Nottingham: Spokesman Books for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 1977), 195. Telegram from John A. Volpe to Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Arthur A. Hartman, Rome, June 25, 1975, National Security Advisor, Presidential Country Files for Europe and Canada, Country File: Italy (1), Italy-State Department Telegrams, Box 8, GFL. On the influence of Eurocommunism on Mexican policy, see Barry Carr, Mexican Communism, 1968–1983: Eurocommunism in the Americas? (San Diego: Center for US-Mexican Studies, 1985). Rodolfo Brancoli, Spettatori interessati. Gli Stati Uniti e la crisi italiana 1975–1980 (Milan: Garzanti, 1980), 123f. Telegram from Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Arthur A. Hartman to John A. Volpe, Washington, DC, July 9, 1976, National Security Adviser, Presidential Country Files for Europe and Canada, Country File: Italy (1), ItalyState Department Telegrams, Box 8, GFL. Bryan Lops, “Will Carter Administration Embrace ‘Eurocommunism’?” Human Events, December 18, 1976, 965. “Carter’s Foreign Policy Concepts and Consultants,” by Karl Kaiser, Bonn, May 1976, Committee on International Relations 1971–1976, 1/EBAA001095, 3, Egon Bahr Papers, AdsD. Statement by the Press Secretary, White House, Lawton (Oklahoma), October 8, 1976, Box 18, 2, Stuart Eizenstat Files, Jimmy Carter Papers—Pre-Presidential, 1976 Presidential Campaign, Issues Office, JCL. Letter from Berndt von Staden to Willy Brandt, Washington, DC, February 8, 1977, International Division of the SPD executive, Willy Brandt’s US Trip, 11592, AdsD. Willy Brandt’s lecture at the MIT, March 9, 1977, International Division of the SPD executive, Willy Brandt’s US Trip, 11592, 10, AdsD. Olav Njølstadt, “The Carter Administration and Italy: Keeping the Communists Out of Power without Interfering,” Journal of Cold War Studies 4, no. 3 (2002), 68. Statement concerning Italy, State Department, Washington, DC, January 12, 1978, Country File, Box 39, Italy 6–8/80, National Security Affairs, Brzezinski Material, JCL. Report on a trip to the United States from May 12 to 28, 1978, by Karsten D. Voigt, Bonn, June 12, 1978, International Division of the SPD executive, Working Committee USA, 11921, 2, AdsD.

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40 “Town Meeting Präsident Carters mit Bürgern in der Berliner Kongresshalle,” Amerika Dienst US Embassy Bonn, July 19, 1978, International Division of the SPD executive, Working Committee USA, 11921, 13, AdsD. 41 Peter Brandt, Jörg Schumacher, Götz Schwarzrock, and Klaus Sühl, Karrieren eines Außenseiters. Leo Bauer zwischen Kommunismus und Sozialdemokratie 1912–1972 (Bonn: Dietz, 1983), 83. 42 Nikolas Dörr, Die Rote Gefahr. Der italienische Eurokommunismus als sicherheitspolitische Herausforderung für die USA und Westdeutschland 1969–1979 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2017), 173–6. 43 Bernd Rother, “ ‘Era ora che ci vedessimo.’ Willy Brandt e il Pci,” Contemporanea. Rivista di storia dell’800 e del ‘900 14, no. 1 (2011), 61. 44 “I segreti della politica internazionale, intervista a Sergio Segre,” in L’Europa da Togliatti a Berlinguer. Testimonianze e documenti, 1945–1984, eds Mauro Maggiorani and Paolo Ferrari (Bologna: il Mulino, 2005), 168. 45 Memorandum from Robert E. Hunter to Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Washington, DC, July 5, 1977, Country File, Box 38, 4f., National Security Affairs, Brzezinski Material, JCL. 46 Ibid., 5. 47 Kristina Spohr, The Global Chancellor: Helmut Schmidt and the Reshaping of the International Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 56ff. 48 Henry A. Kissinger, Communist Parties in Western Europe: Challenge to the West (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1977), 10–15. 49 “Gefahr von links bestimmt Kissingers Europa-Bild,” November 21, 1975, Committee on International Relations 1971–1976, 1/EBAA001095, DPA-Press Release, Egon Bahr Papers, AdsD. 50 Henry Kissinger, quoted in: Alessandro Brogi, Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 333. 51 Ibid., 334f. 52 Institut für Zeitgeschichte im Auftrag des Auswärtigen Amts, ed., Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1976, vol. 1, “23.05.1976, Gespräch des Bundeskanzlers Schmidt und des Bundesministers Genscher mit dem amerikanischen Außenminister Kissinger auf Schloß Gymnich” (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007), 680f. 53 Antonio Varsori, Puerto Rico (1976). Le potenze occidentali e il problema comunista in Italia, Ventunesimo Secolo 7, no. 16 (2008), 111f. 54 Godfrey Hodgson, “The US Response,” in Eurocommunism. Myth or Reality?, eds Paolo Filo della Torre, Edward Mortimer, and Jonathan Story (Harmondsworth, NY: Penguin, 1979), 293f.

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55 Irwin Wall, “Les États-Unis et l’eurocommunisme,” Relations Internationales 119 (2004), 363f. 56 The PCI lost twenty-six seats in the Chamber of Deputies (30.4 percent) and seven in the Senate (31.5 percent). 57 Brandt et al., Karrieren eines Außenseiters, 287.

7

The Turbulent Years: Willy Brandt’s Transatlantic Networks during the Euromissile Crisis Jan Hansen

Testifying before Congress On a beautiful early autumn day, Willy Brandt entered the Rayburn House Office Building in the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Washington, DC. He was there to testify against the deployment of Euromissiles in West Germany and to push both superpowers to freeze the arms race.1 It was September 29, 1983, and the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union had reached its nadir.2 Rayburn House was the seat of the “Public Forum on the INF Negotiations in Geneva and the Proposed US Deployment of Pershing II and Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles in Europe,” organized by the National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign.3 On this day, Brandt outlined his “fourpoint plan,” which he had introduced the day before in a speech at Walsh College in North Canton, Ohio.4 There he had made a plea for a comprehensive freeze of the nuclear arms race and asked for a delay in the deployment of 572 missiles.5 According to him, negotiations should be extended and merged with talks about strategic offensive arms, and French and British intermediaterange nuclear weapons should also be considered in the determination of the global equilibrium. Crucially, he assured the American public that European opponents to deployment, in their majority and despite their disagreement with President Ronald Reagan, were strongly in favor of the transatlantic alliance. He stressed that criticizing US politics did not mean being anti-American.6 On that day, several other European peace leaders visited Rayburn House along with Brandt. Among them were Judith Hart and Denis Healey from Great Britain, Joet de Boor and Joop den Uyl from the Netherlands, and Irene Petry from

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Belgium.7 They had all come to Washington to join the anti-missile campaign month organized by the Freeze Campaign that started on September 12 and ended on October 7, 1983.8 During this month, they participated in meetings with US politicians, journalists, scientists, and ordinary Americans concerned about preventing war. This was a truly transnational event with people from different countries joining a common cause: protesting Cold War politics and the prevailing adversarial stereotypes in the West and the East. Their opposition was driven by deep fears of a nuclear Armageddon and profound anxieties over the potential dangers of modern technology.9 Brandt, who had been invited by Congressmen Edward J. Markey, Jim Leach, Thomas J.  Downey, and Stewart B.  McKinney, visited the United States from September 26 to September 30, 1983.10 Besides testifying before Congress and delivering a speech at Walsh College, he also met with candidates of the 1984 Democratic Party presidential primaries in Maine.11 To understand his transatlantic ties in the early 1980s, it is important to see him as a person acting in several roles. As the former chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the chairman of its Social Democratic Party (SPD), the president of the Socialist International (SI), and a leader of the extraparliamentary peace movement in West Germany, he was acknowledged by many people from the left-leaning political spectrum in the United States as a fighter for reconciliation between East and West and for economic fairness between North and South.12 Viewed in this context, it comes as no surprise that Randy Kehler, the Freeze Campaign’s executive director, wrote in a statement to local Freeze organizers after Brandt’s testimony: It was also clear to me that Brandt’s four points were very much in line with the positions the Freeze Campaign had already taken. Specifically, his call for an immediate bilateral halt on most aspects of testing and deployment, at the beginning of negotiations for a comprehensive freeze, was almost identical to our National Committee’s call in June of 1982 for a “negotiator’s pause” at the beginning of freeze negotiations. As for the Euromissile part of his plan, this, too, was almost identical to our position coming out of our February 1983, National Conference in St. Louis, in which we called for no deployment of cruise and Pershing II missiles and a drastic reduction in the number of Soviet intermediate-range missiles aimed at Europe.13

Kehler stressed that Brandt’s positions were “very much in line” with and “almost identical” to those of the Freeze Campaign. This wording was carefully chosen; it came out of a strategy of self-positioning. Aiming to demonstrate that the Freeze

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Campaign’s political stance was anything but unusual, Kehler was building verbal bridges across the Atlantic.14 In effect, he was saying that Americans and Europeans were united in opposing NATO’s deployment plans and that even a prominent representative of the German establishment shared the stance of the Freeze Campaign.

The eroding Cold War order Brandt met not only with representatives of the Freeze Campaign in September 1983. He was also scheduled to talk to people from the administration and from Congress.15 The visit continued the tradition of Brandt’s trips to the United States since the 1940s—which had resulted in an extensive “network”16 of political and personal contacts—as well as of his correspondence and phone conversations with political interlocutors. Brandt’s networks dated back to the 1940s and took shape in the 1950s and 1960s when he became mayor of West Berlin and ran unsuccessfully for chancellor in 1961 and 1965.17 They were strengthened further during Brandt’s regular visits to the United States as the FRG’s foreign minister between 1966 and 1969 and as chancellor between 1969 and 1974. Even after he resigned, he remained in touch with US politicians, journalists, and academics. The visit to Washington of September 1983, however, was the culminating point of Brandt’s transatlantic contact-building in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was partly due to the deterioration of international relations, which led to an intensification of transatlantic consultations; it was also partly due to the widespread US perception that Brandt and many of his fellow peace activists in Germany were driven by anti-American sentiment. In short, the early 1980s were turbulent years in the history of Brandt’s networks. Drawing on sources from archives in West Germany and the United States, this chapter investigates Brandt’s transatlantic networks in the early 1980s.18 It examines how Brandt expanded or reinforced his contacts with the political establishment in the United States—in spite or because of his harsh condemnation of the Reagan administration—and how he established new contacts with actors from civil society. While giving particular attention to Brandt’s role during these years, the chapter also investigates the attempts of his fellow social democrats and the peace movement to strengthen their transatlantic ties. I do not conceive of social democracy in terms of a political party here but rather of a sociocultural milieu without clearly defined boundaries. In this way, I intend to contextualize Willy Brandt’s life and work. This chapter suggests that his network turned out to

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be not as successful as he had hoped because of the Germans’ and the Americans’ very different backgrounds and traditions with regard to the history of ideas. Nonetheless, these encounters and exchanges were important for Brandt, since they allowed him to reassure others of his strongly pro-American stance. To put it succinctly, this chapter argues that his transatlantic networks were a stage on which Brandt constructed and displayed his identity. Before I  investigate these networks in depth, I  will give a brief account of fundamental political transformations at the time that led to the intensification of Brandt’s transatlantic ties in the 1980s. I argue that the Euromissile crisis was a proxy debate about the East-West conflict in general. I believe that in the 1980s, many people in the West critically examined their attitude toward the Cold War, holding that ideological hostilities between the superpowers were anachronistic, given that the world faced more urgent problems.19 First and foremost, social movements asserted that humankind had to mitigate the North-South divide and global social injustices as well as environmental problems on both sides of the Iron Curtain. They maintained that fighting the Soviets for ideological reasons, thus accelerating the nuclear arms race and spending enormous amounts of money, was not a meaningful contribution to resolving the challenges of the late twentieth century. In brief, they claimed that the Cold War as a mental frame of reference no longer helped the world solve its problems. Rather, the Cold War itself now appeared to be a problem. There was a widespread feeling in the West in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the ideological competition between the superpowers was a relic of the past. Reasons for this phenomenon were easy to find. I need only point to Charles Maier’s claim that around 1970, the “territorial age” had come to an end. He argues that alternative leading notions were on the rise, among them “interdependency” and a pervasive “global mind.” People conceived of the world as interconnected and no longer as arranged according to the binary oppositions of the Cold War. This new mindset was based on the notion of global interdependence and emphasized the importance of network structures.20 The controversies over the Euromissiles and the resulting turbulences in the transatlantic alliance can thus be attributed to diverging representations of the Cold War order. While since the 1960s, a significant number of citizens of Western countries had stopped subscribing to the Cold War system, the superpowers were, in the early 1980s, once again guided by the very principles of the Cold War. This development starkly exposed the anachronicity of the Cold War and helped those opposed to the arms race recognize that the Cold War order was outdated. They demanded that the Soviet Union no longer be demonized as the ideological enemy but rather regarded as a legitimate political partner capable of

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solving problems as well. This reorientation could of course be observed on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was much more pronounced in Western Europe and especially in Germany. While anti-nuclear protests were a mass phenomenon in the United States as well, these protests questioned the Cold War system less frequently than they did in West Germany. Arguing against the Cold War was difficult in American society, since the political discourse and prevailing power relations did not easily permit a questioning of the basic foundations of US foreign policy.21 Nevertheless, the erosion of the Cold War was the basis for the transatlantic alliance between Brandt, as a representative of the forces for peace in West Germany, and the Freeze Campaign in the United States. At the same time, diverging outlooks on the Cold War fueled disagreement between Brandt and the political establishment in Washington, DC.

Weaving the network Willy Brandt’s stance toward the deployment of Euromissiles was strongly affected by the US administration’s politics. The same was true for his sociocultural milieu:  many of those aligned with the social democratic spectrum in West Germany—whose background was either in the peace movement or in a more traditional trade union milieu—perceived the US government’s foreign policies as war-mongering.22 In print media affiliated with the social democrats, such as the Vorwärts, Reagan was pictured as a Texan cowboy figure with his finger on the trigger.23 This image was common currency in the political domain, and the image of a president prepared to fight a nuclear war fueled opposition against US policies. Especially the ruling party’s youth and women’s organizations and several local chapters questioned the course taken by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (SPD), who was among the most vocal supporters of the transatlantic alliance. As we now know, Brandt joined the inner-party opposition early, but maintained his loyalty to Schmidt and the coalition government until the SPD lost power in September 1982.24 From the opposition benches, however, Brandt voiced numerous objections against deployment. He saw the Reagan government as primarily responsible for the dramatic deterioration in the relationship between the superpowers, but he recognized the Cold War order as the cause for the threat posed by the arms race. He also pointed to the economic injustices between North and South.25 Although Brandt disagreed with the White House about the rationality of the Cold War, he was aware of the necessity of finding common ground

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with the conservatives in the United States. Of course there had always been communication and personal exchange between social democrats and US Americans, most notably during the Nazi dictatorship, when several future prominent SPD functionaries had been forced into exile—Willy Brandt among them.26 The connections they established in exile served as a basis for their US network after 1945. While Brandt was in continuous contact with American intermediaries—not least because his duties in office required it—the ties between his fellow social democrats and the United States weakened in the 1970s. This was due to a generational shift, as younger people joined the SPD in the early 1970s. Having been politicized by the anti–Vietnam War protests, they assumed a critical attitude toward the United States. In the early 1980s, as the superpowers’ relationship deteriorated, SPD officials quickly recognized the need to reexpand contacts with the political establishment in the United States and to build new bridges with civil society actors such as the Freeze Campaign.27 This was a concern among the party elite; ordinary members or sympathizers did not have the time or the means to network in US society. Among those who emphasized the necessity of better communication were Hans-Eberhard Dingels, the international secretary at the party’s headquarters, and Dieter Dettke, who at the time worked for the SPD Bundestag group. In 1976, Dingels and Dettke had already helped establish a special commission called “USA” whose objective was to build network ties with public officials in the United States. Horst Ehmke served as the group’s chairman, and among its members were Klaus von Dohnanyi, Alfons Pawelczyk, Heinz Rapp, Annemarie Renger, Dietrich Stobbe, Ulrich Steger, and Karsten Voigt, most of them members of Parliament. The social democrats’ aim was to establish a working network with their US American partners. How did they go about this? A letter from Steger to his Bundestag colleague Helga Timm illustrates how they approached this task.28 Steger emphasized continuity of relationships, common expertise, and personal sympathies as the most important ingredients for a functioning network. He detailed how he tried to stay in touch with his contacts in the United States: an extensive list of about fifty names, including twelve of his counterparts in Congress, that he had created many years ago, played a vital role in it. Steger wrote that he constantly revised and redrafted this list and added notes to the names. Every time he visited the United States, he tried to contact each person on the list. According to him, he met these people either for private conversations or at small dinners, often at the invitation of diplomats who were common friends. Steger also said that after each visit to the United States, he wrote personal letters to all his American contacts on the list, attaching his newly published articles. This

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procedure kept his transatlantic network of contacts active and helped him stay connected. In addition, staff in the party headquarters systematically followed influential media outlets that covered US politics. Stobbe, for instance, in a circular letter to the commission members, listed the journals Wireless Bulletin, Amerika-Dienst, Dialoge, Economic Impact, and Problems of Communism as reliable sources of information on the United States.29 From these newspapers and journals, social democrats compiled knowledge about the United States and formed their picture of it. In sum, the network’s functioning was contingent both on technical devices that served as mnemonic aids and procedures that helped gather input for these mnemonic aids (Steger’s notebook or Stobbe’s methodical monitoring of the media). Steger’s letter reveals how efforts to get in touch with American interlocutors worked in practical terms:  visitors to the United States contacted the person they wanted to get in touch with by mail or through mutual acquaintances. Among the potential interlocutors they sought out were second- and third-tier representatives of the Reagan administration, senators and members of Congress, journalists, academics, church officials, and, last but not least, representatives of civil society. The Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which was closely aligned with the SPD headquarters, even opened a branch office in Washington, DC in the late 1970s that was to serve as an unofficial embassy and an entrepôt for social democracy and US politics.30 In this way, hubs of contact were developed. To mention only a few names: SPD visitors frequently met with Alexander Haig, Richard Allen, Richard Perle, Dennis Blair, William P. Clark, Robert McNamara, Edward Kennedy, Randy Kehler, and Randall Forsberg.31 It was easy for Brandt to maintain a presence in Washington, DC. Senators and members of Congress held Brandt in higher esteem than the administration did. For instance, in a letter from Capitol Hill, Jim Leach, Charles McC. Mathias, Jr., Paul E. Tsongas, and Anthony C. Beilenson from the House Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus asked Brandt in May 1984 to assess East-West tensions after deployment had taken place.32 They solicited Brandt’s “views on the best way to get these critical negotiations back on the right track.”33 This shows that Brandt was a much sought-after intermediary for both sides of the political spectrum in the United States (Leach and Mathias were Republicans). Not surprisingly, his network reached beyond those who held office during the Carter and Reagan years. A  good example of those long-standing, unofficial contacts was Norman Birnbaum, a leftist sociologist at Georgetown University Law Center. While the letters written by Birnbaum to Brandt far outnumber those written by Brandt, this contact proved to be important for Brandt,

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since Birnbaum shared with him the belief in a strengthened role for the SI in international relations.34 In many regards, he was a kindred spirit. When Birnbaum wrote to Brandt in 1985 of “the abysmally ignorant and stupid man in the White House” who “persists in believing what his governmental associates use only as a cynical excuse for pushing the arms race onto a new plane,” Brandt tacitly agreed with this assessment, although he would never have used such wording in public.35 In this respect, Birnbaum served for Brandt as a source of information about the ideas and discussions among American leftists.

Performing identities, building trust What motivated Brandt and his fellow social democrats to put so much work into their transatlantic networks? First, they wanted to convey the reasons for their criticism of the US negotiation strategy regarding the Euromissiles and to encourage the US administration to seriously engage in talks with the Soviets. Acting as a self-appointed special envoy, Brandt started from the premise that more could be done to stop the superpower confrontation. He believed that he was particularly well suited to serving as a mediator between the blocs. This is why he also frequently traveled to the Soviet Union; however, his network of Soviet discussion partners did not develop to a comparable size. In sum, Brandt engaged in nonofficial diplomacy: along with other SPD figures like Egon Bahr and Hans-Jochen Vogel, he repeatedly suggested detailed plans for reaching an agreement between the superpowers in the hope of revitalizing détente policy and relaxing Cold War tensions.36 Brandt traveled to Washington and Moscow not only as an envoy for his own party but also as a spokesperson for the peace movement—or at least for its social democratic wing—thus performing his selfperceived role as a peacemaker between East and West.37 Second, Brandt and his political friends were intent on demonstrating the absurdity of the allegations of anti-Americanism leveled against them. This was of critical importance to the way they wanted to be perceived. Conservatives in general, and especially those in West Germany, Western Europe, and the United States, accused the social democrats of anti-Americanism.38 These accusations followed in the tradition of anti-socialist campaigns in Imperial Germany.39 The social democrats had long come to regard themselves as legitimate actors in German democracy and as reliable partners in the transatlantic alliance. To them, the accusation of anti-Americanism was false and defamatory. They hoped to counter these allegations by pointing to the fact that there was opposition

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against Ronald Reagan and his administration in US society as well. Erhard Eppler, a leading figure of the peace movement and member of the SPD, pointed out that criticizing the US president was not tantamount to denouncing the American way of life.40 In his widely noticed article in the Washington Post from August 7, 1983, Brandt reinforced this claim by stressing that in West Germany, more than 90  percent of the population were in favor of a close partnership with the United States.41 Here it becomes evident that the controversies over anti-Americanism were as much about social democratic identity construction as they were about how this identity was defined by others. Not only did Brandt take it as a given that he and his fellow peace activists, while being critical of the Reagan administration, were strongly pro-American, but he also considered it vital to rectify perceptions to the contrary in US politics. Yet to those making insinuations of anti-Americanism, the allegation was an essential part of bringing the social democratic stance on the Euromissile question into accordance with their own worldview. Glad to have evidence to counter the allegations of anti-Americanism, the clear majority of social democrats were enthusiastic about the emergence of the Freeze Campaign. We can therefore think of the network connecting people associated with the SPD and the Freeze Campaign as a stage where both constructed and asserted their identity. One of the key constituent parts of these identities was trust as an immaterial resource. Transatlantic contacts, from a contemporaneous perspective, were supposed to foster trust between US politicians and the German peace movement and subsequently deepen the understanding between the superpowers as a first step toward bridging the Cold War divide. Following this understanding, the networks linking forces of peace on both sides of the Atlantic were conceived as a laboratory for the production of trust and a model to emulate for a relaxed phase in East-West relations. But how did Americans who supported the government’s position feel about this?

The tragedy of failure In the twentieth century, Germans and Americans often had different outlooks on the world. This grew out of the diversity of historical backgrounds, traditions, and experiences, as well as out of the two countries’ geographical locations. The contrasts appeared to be even more salient when protagonists of the German left and the American right tried to find common ground. From a historical perspective, the relationship between SPD members and Republicans had always

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been ambivalent, to say the least. During the Reagan presidency, it became tense and edgy. Never before had the ties between social democracy and the White House been marked by such open hostility as they were in the early 1980s. Against this backdrop, answering the question of whether the social democrats achieved their goals is easy:  neither did they convince the US administration to turn away from the Cold War antagonism and to negotiate seriously nor did they succeed in convincing the conservatives in the United States that they were not anti-American. There are two sets of reasons for this. First and foremost, different concepts of the political prevailed on the two sides of the Atlantic. Germans and Americans were not talking about the same things when they talked about how democracy should work, how a state should be run, and how the government should organize its relations with other countries.42 It is well known that SPD members and sympathizers argued in favor of strong state involvement, which was supposed to guarantee social justice and individual rights. In the United States, the central state and the federal government were viewed with suspicion even by left-leaning voters. They preferred individual responsibility and personal freedom. While the social democratic spectrum in Germany historically stood in opposition to the prevailing political and economic order, the left in the United States regarded itself as part of this order. In a way, the left in Germany and the United States approached their societies from different angles. Against the backdrop of Imperial Germany’s class society, the labor movement in the nineteenth century developed as an outsider whose goal it was to transform the system. Conversely, American democracy had more integrative power right from the beginning, which impeded the rise of radical positions. To return to the transatlantic networks:  different conceptions of statehood and society made it challenging for Brandt and US government officials to find common ground. As mentioned previously, reasons were to be found in the dissimilarity of intellectual backgrounds. Consequently, US executives could not agree with Brandt because they had a different international agenda. They wanted America to be strong, both politically and militarily, and they distrusted the Soviets for a variety of reasons. Political conversations between Americans and Germans therefore proved to be unpleasant for both sides. In the primary sources, these discussions read like scripted stage plays.43 German guests and American hosts went into these meetings certain of what to expect from each other. They read out prepared statements following prefabricated patterns of argument. Both sides repeatedly put forward the same arguments and counterarguments, raised the same ideas, and rejected those they held to be wrong. Their representation of the other followed fixed perceptual patterns from

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which neither could escape. The source material runs along predictable lines. To give an example: a US government note for a meeting with Volker Hauff, the German minister of transport, reads: The key to the success of these arms control negotiations is a strong Alliance, unified and possessing the political will to defend our security. You may wish to underscore the necessity of Alliance resolve to meet the Soviet threat and stress the point that, unless the Soviets are convinced that INF deployment will take place, the outlook for the Geneva talks is poor.44

These lines of argumentation are found in many similar documents.45 They are marked by standardization, repetition, and redundancy. In this respect, these stage plays were performances of disagreement. This routine was interrupted whenever personal tensions arose between the interlocutors. The Americans in particular were not mincing their words. In internal documents, the Carter administration had already derided Bahr as a “roving emissary.”46 In 1981, Reagan’s National Security Advisor Richard Allan initially declined to meet with Bahr (“Bahr will simply go out and say that he lectured us. I know this guy.”47) but later agreed to an encounter, asking to be prepared extensively so he could “read him the riot act.”48 Dennis Blair and James M. Rentschler of the National Security Council assured Allan: “We see no difficulty in providing plenty of juicy quotations from Bahr’s past statements— you could paint him as either a closet Soviet sympathizer, or a neutralist, or almost anything else.”49 US officials also gave the cold shoulder to German visitors. Often they simply refused to receive them, since they believed that such meetings were not necessary. Willy Brandt, among others, had this experience. In 1977, Carter’s advisors recommended that he decline a meeting with the SI president because “[t]his is too marginal.”50 In 1979, an unknown staff member of the National Security Council noted: “Brandt reportedly joins Egon Bahr in woeful ignorance about current East-West military realities and the solidity of our intelligence on them . . . It’s hard to believe he came through years as Foreign Minister and Chancellor without learning better.”51 The hostility did not abate even after deployment had begun. When Ronald Reagan visited the FRG in 1985, he once again refused to talk to Brandt.52 After the visit, Brandt wrote a personal letter to Reagan complaining about the rejection.53 Even Bruno Kreisky, the Austrian chancellor, sent a protest note to Washington.54 This episode was particularly painful for Brandt because he understood its underlying meaning: the Reagan administration assumed that he was no longer a serious interlocutor in transatlantic consultations.

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In the end, an analysis of these attempts to develop a reliable network of connections with the US administration entails elucidating the tragedy of failure. In terms of political influence, the network did not fulfil the expectations Brandt and other social democrats had for it. Explaining this failure requires a look at the big picture: it mainly came about because of different intellectual backgrounds, historical experiences, and the resulting political agendas. Brandt wanted to ease Cold War tensions, but the Reagan administration saw things differently. Against the backdrop of performance studies, I  suggest that this phenomenon should be labeled the “politics of non-visibility.” In this I follow Andreas Daum, who, in his book Kennedy in Berlin, describes the “politics of visibility” as a means “to seek and achieve the visibility of actions, actors, and objects in order to articulate and strengthen political statements.”55 The “politics of non-visibility” reveals the hidden meaning of not seeing and not being seen as a political statement that was crucial for the social construction of reality. The US officials’ treatment of Brandt was, at its core, a political message of fundamental disagreement that left no room for further discussion.

The discursive other: conclusion In the early 1980s, when the Euromissile question divided Western societies, Willy Brandt and many other West Germans both inside and outside the SPD distanced themselves from US policies. Skepticism about the rationality of the Cold War was certainly the driving force behind this move. Despite his condemnation of the Reagan administration, Brandt intensified his ties with American interlocutors. In doing so, he was able to build on his old and wellestablished networks with American friends and partners. His aims were twofold:  he wanted to convince the US administration to negotiate seriously with the Soviet Union, and he wanted to prove that he and his fellow peace activists were not anti-American. To achieve the former, he approached officials from the Reagan team but failed in the end, since Americans had a diametrically different agenda due to their different intellectual tradition. As for the latter, he was successful in establishing new links with actors from civil society and the Freeze Campaign, and these networks helped him to strengthen his political legitimacy. They were a stage for the construction and assertion of identities. This applied both to Brandt and to the social democratic activists in the peace movement. Paradoxically, they vitally needed the Reagan administration and its allegedly war-mongering foreign policy to define their own position,

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adding emphasis to the importance of peace and the necessity to overcome the Cold War. Reagan was indispensable as a negative foil, a target of vehement disapproval, the discursive other against which they could delineate their position. In this respect, Brandt and his followers needed Reagan much more than the US president needed them. In the end, this was an unexpected result, given all the heated talk about how much better the superpowers’ relationship would work if there was a Democrat in the White House. Quite the opposite is true—Brandt crucially depended on Reagan so he could talk about the end of the Cold War.

Notes 1 Willy Brandt, “Redebeitrag in einem Hearing des US-amerikanischen Kongresses,” SPD-Pressemitteilung, September 30, 1983. 2 Cf., as an introduction, David Holloway, “The Dynamics of the Euromissile Crisis, 1977–1983,” in The Euromissile Crisis and the End of the Cold War, eds Leopoldo Nuti et al. (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2015), 11–28. 3 “Statement of Purpose for the September 1983 Forum on Euromissiles,” August 8, 1983, sl 454 National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign (NNWFC), Box 2, Folder 51, Western Historical Manuscript Collection (WHMC), University of Missouri-St. Louis, St. Louis, MO; Kyle Harvey, American Anti-Nuclear Activism, 1975–1990: The Challenge of Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 4 Willy Brandt, “The Challenge of World Disarmament and Development. Manuskript für Rede am Walsh College in Canton, Ohio anläßlich der Verleihung der Ehrendoktorwürde,” September 27, 1983, A3, 933, Willy-Brandt-Archiv (WBA) at the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (AdsD) der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn. 5 In the following weeks, many people in North America and Western Europe signed the “Brandt Plan.” “Complete List of American and International Signatories for the ‘Brandt Plan,’ ” undated, sa1039 NNWFC Addenda, Accession 9/30/94, Box 2, Folder “Correspondence 10/1983,” WHMC. 6 As also summarized by Randy Kehler to Paul C. Warnke, October 18, 1983, sa1039 NNWFC Addenda, Accession 9/30/94, Box 2, Folder “Correspondence 10/1983,” WHMC. 7 Wolfgang Biermann to Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr, “Einladungen von Edward Markey zu Hearings im Amerikanischen Kongreß,” September 1, 1983, A19, 240, WBA, AdsD. Attending from Germany were Egon Bahr, Heidemarie WieczorekZeul, and Herta Däubler-Gmelin. 8 Cf. “A Call for Euromissile Actions October 21–24, 1983,” NNWFC, Box 2, Folder 50, WHMC.

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9 Benjamin Ziemann, “German Angst? Debating Cold War Anxieties in West Germany, 1945–90,” in Understanding the Imaginary War: Culture, Thought and Nuclear Conflict, 1945–90, eds Matthew Grant and Benjamin Ziemann (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 116–39. 10 Edward J. Markey, Jim Leach, Thomas J. Downey, and Stewart B. McKinney to Willy Brandt, August 10, 1983, A19, 240, WBA, AdsD. 11 Biermann to Brandt and Bahr, “Einladungen von Edward Markey zu Hearings im Amerikanischen Kongreß,” September 1, 1983. 12 Judith Michel, Willy Brandts Amerikabild und -politik 1933–1992, Internationale Beziehungen. Theorie und Geschichte 6 (Göttingen: Bonn University Press bei V&R unipress, 2010), 407–26. 13 Randy Kehler to local Freeze Organizers, “The Willy Brandt Appeal,” December 1, 1983, 11241, SPD Party Executive Files, Department for International Affairs, AdsD. 14 Kyle Harvey, “The Promise of Internationalism: US Anti-nuclear Activism and the European Challenge,” in Making Sense of the Americas: How Protest Related to America in the 1980s and Beyond, eds Jan Hansen, Christian Helm, and Frank Reichherzer (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2015), 225–43, 230–8. 15 Biermann to Brandt and Bahr, “Einladungen von Edward Markey zu Hearings im Amerikanischen Kongreß,” September 1, 1983. 16 For the conception of the “network,” cf. Matthias Schulz, “Netzwerke und Normen in der internationalen Geschichte: Überlegungen zur Einführung,” Historische Mitteilungen 17 (2004), 1–14. 17 Michel, Willy Brandts Amerikabild und -politik, 76 ff. 18 This chapter is partly based on Jan Hansen, Abschied vom Kalten Krieg? Die Sozialdemokraten und der Nachrüstungsstreit (1977–1987) (Berlin: de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016). 19 This is the central claim in ibid., 53–100. 20 Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History. Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review, no. 105 (2000), 807–31. 21 William M. Knoblauch, Nuclear Freeze in a Cold War: The Reagan Administration, Cultural Activism, and the End of the Arms Race (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017). 22 Examined from a broader perspective in Wilfried Mausbach, “Nuclear Winter: Prophecies of Doom and Images of Desolation During the Second Cold War,” in Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear, and the Cold War of the 1980s, eds Eckart Conze, Martin Klimke, and Jeremy Varon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 27–54, 34–5. 23 Joachim Riedl, “Er kommt aus der Tiefe der 50er Jahre. Die Philosophie des Kandidaten Ronald Reagan,” Vorwärts, October 16, 1980.

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24 Cf. Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, Partner und Rivalen. Der Briefwechsel (1958–1992), ed. Meik Woyke (Bonn: Dietz, 2015), 914–17. 25 Willy Brandt, “Address at audience for members of the Independent Commissions on International Development and Security and Disarmament Issues,” January 21, 1984, Series III, Box 34, Folder 238, Cyrus R. Vance Papers, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT. 26 Julia Angster, Konsenskapitalismus und Sozialdemokratie. Die Westernisierung von SPD und DGB (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003), 252 ff. Brandt went to Norway and Sweden. 27 For the following, cf. Hansen, Abschied vom Kalten Krieg?, 138–41. 28 Ulrich Steger to Helga Timm, June 25, 1982, H 2, Karsten D. Voigt Papers, AdsD. 29 Dietrich Stobbe to the members of the USA Commission, “Informationsmöglichkeiten über die USA,” September 1, 1983, SPD Party Executive Files, Department for International Affairs, 11923, AdsD. 30 “USA-Aufenthalt von Alfred Nau, Dr. Günter Grünwald und Siegfried Bangert vom 9. bis 16. Juni 1977—Erster Bericht,” June 24, 1977, 1977/I, A-L, Bd. 17, lf. Nr. 52, Korrespondenz privat/politisch, Private Archives of Helmut Schmidt, Hamburg. 31 Haig was secretary of state, Allen was national security advisor, Perle was assistant secretary of defense, Blair worked in the Office of Political Affairs at the White House, Clark was assistant to the president for National Security Affairs, McNamara was president of the World Bank, Kennedy was the senator for Massachusetts and a proponent of the Freeze resolution in Congress, Randy Kehler was executive director of the Freeze Campaign, Randall Forsberg was the founder of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, which became a think tank for the Freeze Campaign. For more names, see Michel, Willy Brandts Amerikabild und -politik, 407–26. 32 Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus to Willy Brandt, May 1, 1984, 10912, SPD Party Executive Files, Department for International Affairs, AdsD; response letter of May 24, 1984, A11.2, 154, WBA, AdsD. 33 Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus to Brandt, May 1, 1984. 34 Norman Birnbaum to Willy Brandt, January 24, 1980, A11.1, 99, WBA, AdsD. 35 Norman Birnbaum to Willy Brandt, September 27, 1985, A11.2, 164, WBA, AdsD. 36 In early September 1983, the SPD Bundestag group issued a paper in which they proposed a possible negotiation outcome for Geneva. Cf. Hans-Jochen Vogel, “Before the Decision in Geneva: For a New Move to End the Nuclear Arms Race,” September 2, 1983, 1/HJVA102752, AdsD. 37 Peter Burke, “Performing History: The Importance of Occasions,” Rethinking History 9, no. 1 (2005), 35–52. 38 Cf. Jim Cooney, “Germany, Europe and the United States—Is Anti-Americanism Significant? Report on a Conference Held at the Aspen Institute Berlin,” July 1981, H 3, Karsten D. Voigt Papers, AdsD.

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39 Dieter Groh and Peter Brandt, “Vaterlandslose Gesellen.” Sozialdemokratie und Nation 1860–1990 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1992). 40 “Sind Sie ein Friedensguru, Herr Eppler?,” Quick, October 8, 1981. 41 “Willy Brandt’s Plea: It’s Not Too Late for an Arms Deal,” Washington Post, August 7, 1983. 42 Angster, Konsenskapitalismus, 39. 43 Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Performance, Inszenierung, Ritual. Zur Klärung kulturwissenschaftlicher Schlüsselbegriffe,” in Geschichtswissenschaft und “performative turn.” Ritual, Inszenierung und Performanz vom Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit, eds Jürgen Martschukat and Steffen Patzold (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 33–54. 44 “Judge Clark’s Meeting with FRG Minister for Transport Volker Hauff,” May 5, 1982, NSC: Country File, RAC Box 14, Folder “Germany, FRG (1/1/82–9/30/82) (9),” Executive Secretariat, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (RRL), Simi Valley, CA. 45 Cf., representatively, State Department to US Embassy Bonn, “The Secretary’s meeting with Horst Ehmke,” July 10, 1981, NSC: Country File, RAC Box 14, Folder “Germany, FRG (7/1/81–8/31/81) (3),” Executive Secretariat, RRL. 46 Unsigned note to Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Your Meeting with SPD Secretary-General Egon Bahr on Wednesday, November 29, [1978], at 5:00 p.m.,” undated, Box 14, Folder “Germany FR: 11/78-2/79,” Brzezinski Material: Brzezinski Office File, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library (JCL), Atlanta, GA. 47 Handwritten note by Richard V. Allan on Dennis Blair to Allen, “Visit by Bundestag Subcommittee for Disarmament and Arms Control,” August 21, 1981, WHORM Subject File, FG006-01, 39239, RRL. 48 Handwritten note by Richard V. Allan on Dennis Blair and James M. Rentschler to Allen, “Meeting with Egon Bahr,” September 4, 1981, NSC: Country File, RAC Box 14, Folder “Germany, FRG (9/1/81-12/31/81) (8),” Executive Secretariat, RRL. 49 Blair and Rentschler to Allen: Meeting with Egon Bahr, September 4, 1981. 50 Handwritten note by advisor Robert Hunter on Peter Tarnoff to Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Request for Presidential Appointment by FRG Leader Willy Brandt,” September 20, 1977, Box CO-26, Folder “CO 54-2 Confidential 1/20/77-10/31/77,” White House Central File, Subject File, JCL. 51 Defense Policy Coordination (National Security Council) to Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Evening Report,” December 12, 1979, NLC-10-26-1-4-7, Brzezinski Material: Staff Evening Report Files, CREST, JCL. 52 [Karl-Heinz Klär] to Willy Brandt, “Reagan-Besuch,” April 29, 1985, A11.15, 24, WBA, AdsD. 53 Ibid.; Willy Brandt to Ronald Reagan, May 3, 1985. 54 Bruno Kreisky to Ronald Reagan, June 4, 1985, A11.2, 169, WBA, AdsD. 55 Andreas W. Daum, Kennedy in Berlin: Politik, Kultur und Emotionen im Kalten Krieg (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003), 10.

8

Conceptualizing “Common Security”: Willy Brandt’s Vision of Trans-bloc Security and Its International Perception, 1981–1990 Oliver Bange

This chapter considers various perceptions of Brandt’s security policies throughout the 1980s:  from within the party (the Social Democratic Party of Germany [SPD]), from within the then ruling conservative government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, from the perspective of the Western allies, but also from East German, Bulgarian and Polish sources. Throughout these years the key to Brandt’s relentless efforts at creating a new security and military architecture in Europe remained his insight that the new military capabilities introduced in the 1980s would not enhance security in Europe, but rather contribute to its successive erosion. With warning times for a nuclear attack down from thirty days to mere minutes, fear and preemption dominated military thinking and planning.1 The potential victim of this perceived deterioration of security was to be Central Europe and above all the Germans living on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This contribution aims to describe the distinctive steps in which Brandt’s thinking on a new, less aggressive framework for security in Europe developed and how this brought him increasingly into conflict with official US policies at the time.2

1981: Willy Brandt’s visit to Brezhnev— torn between loyalty and doubts Ever after his resignation as federal German chancellor in 1974 Brandt had supported the official position of the succeeding coalition government, headed by social-democrat Helmut Schmidt as chancellor and Hans-Dietrich

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Genscher as foreign minister. But in the summer of 1981 several developments coincided:  The SPD-FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei) coalition government was on its last leg and Helmut Schmidt had lost support within his own party, particularly for his security policies. Schmidt had been a driving force behind NATO’s dual track decision of December 1979. In this the Western alliance threatened to deploy new intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe and especially in West Germany, if the Soviet Union would not abolish its newly deployed SS-20 missiles within the next three years. Brandt had good reasons to believe that East-West détente—the epitome of his personal political efforts— might be damaged irreversibly. He therefore agreed to an invitation by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. The conversation with Leonid Brezhnev took place on July 29, 1981, in the Kremlin.3 The intense discussion lasted for almost three hours, in itself not a mean feat for two ageing political leaders. During the exchange Brandt showed an “understanding” for the Soviet wish to include NATO’s so-called Forward Based Systems as well as French and British nuclear systems into the ongoing arms control negotiations over the new class of “ground launched” intermediate-range nuclear weapon systems. Forward Based Systems included US strategic bombers based in Great Britain (the F-111), nuclear submarines in European waters (equipped with Polaris and Poseidon missiles), and the new generation of fighter-bomber aircraft (F-15, F-16, MRCA Tornado).4 These weapon systems were by nature either “sea-” or “air-launched” and therefore remained outside the INF (Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces) negotiations. But their reach fell well within the parameters of both “long and far reaching” INFs between 500 and 5,000 kilometers. The same was true for the existing French5 and British nuclear missiles. If Washington and Moscow were to agree on a bilateral INF treaty, all of these non-US nuclear weapon systems as well as the air-launched and groundlaunched US systems would have constituted a continued nuclear threat to Soviet territory in case of a war in Central Europe. This could have led to a rapid nuclear escalation right at the beginning of an armed conflict in Europe and the annihilation of Germany as a result. Therefore, Willy Brandt stated that the “Zero-option” (the complete abolition of INF missiles) would be the “best” one from a West German perspective. He also conveyed the support of the West German government for a conference on Confidence and Security Building Measures (CSBMs) and disarmament in Europe. Brandt’s exchange with the Soviet leadership was watched by both the official diplomatic machinery in Bonn and German public opinion with great skepticism: Would the Nobel Peace Prize winner counteract the official policies

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of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the other iconic leader of Germany’s Social Democrats? West Germany’s ambassador to Moscow reported that the Soviets indeed had tried to turn Brandt against the Federal German government. “But this attempt came to nothing, because Brandt strongly rejected any suggestion that the Chancellor desired [the new INF missiles] at any costs.”6 Contrary to this loyalty to governmental policies displayed in public, Brandt continued to harbor serious doubts over the wisdom of contemporary thinking on security and deterrence in Europe. After his return Brandt informed the SPDleadership in Bonn accordingly. The contents of these talks was soon picked up by East German agents in Bonn and reported back to East Berlin and Moscow. According to Brandt’s closest confidant Egon Bahr, Brandt regarded his talks in Moscow as “urgent and important because US policies had become uncalculable.”7 Furthermore, his trip to Moscow and the public attention which it provoked put Brandt in conflict with Chancellor Schmidt and the newly elected socialist French President François Mitterrand,8 who both favored a stronger signal to Moscow. According to East German intelligence, Brandt was convinced that now was the right time for US-Soviet negotiations. Nevertheless, he doubted the “seriousness” and willingness on the US side to engage in such negotiations. On Brandt’s initiative, Horst Ehmke, the deputy leader of the SPD’s parliamentary party, flew to Washington in order to explain the perceived urgency for INF negotiations: If these negotiations were not started soon and in earnest, then the rational of NATO’s dual-track decision (to negotiate first and deploy later) would become “untenable.”9 East German ear-droppers also reported that Brandt demanded in internal discussions that the numbers provided by the American administration ought to be checked. According to the document, Brandt suspected that the US administration was deceiving the public over the extent of US INF deployments in the FRG already.10

1982: The report of the Palme Commission— free to think and free to act From 1980 until 1982 an international commission of peace researchers headed by Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme worked out a report on “Common Security: A Blueprint of Survival.” They presented their report in June 1982 to the UN Special Session of Disarmament.11 Initial reactions by Western academics and politicians remained critical.12 But the report did have an important impact on the public debate in West Germany.

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Johan Jörgen Holst and Barry Blechman are generally credited with the formulation of the report, but Egon Bahr also played an important role in its genesis. And with Bahr Brandt’s ideas for implementing a new kind of security structure in Europe also found their way into the report.13 It is therefore not surprising that it was Bahr who introduced the “Palme Report”14 to the German press in July 1982. Bahr drew attention to the necessity for conceptualizing a “common security” concept, comprising nations and societies from both major blocs. Then he promoted the report’s proposal for a nuclear weapons free zone covering 150 kilometers on both sides of the line dividing NATO and Warsaw Pact member countries.15 Furthermore, this was to be augmented by a zone free of chemical weapons in Europe. Bahr also argued that recent Soviet moves with regard to the complicated verification issue should seriously be considered. And finally, Bahr connected the report with the work of the North-South Commission under Willy Brandt on global poverty issues.16 From the perspective of Social Democrats like Brandt, Palme, and Bahr the interconnection between cost-cuts through disarmament and more development aide seemed to be an obvious one.

1983: The SPD’s extraordinary party convention— constructing a majority for new security concepts In October 1982 a parliamentary vote of no confidence brought both Helmut Schmidt’s chancellorship and the era of social democratic-liberal coalition governments to an end. From now on and until the end of the East and West conflict, Germany’s social democrats would remain in parliamentary opposition. One year later, in November 1983, an overwhelming majority of delegates at the SPD’s party convention in Cologne voted against the implementation of NATO’s dual track decision. The three-year moratorium had run out without any compromises on the Soviet side with regard to their SS-20 deployments. But the SPD delegates voted against the dislocation of NATO-INFs and in favor of further negotiations. The current status of nuclear deterrence was deemed to be increasingly “dangerous.” During the party convention Willy Brandt argued for a security partnership across the blocs. As in his earlier discussions with Brezhnev, Brandt favored the inclusion of Forward Based Systems in the INF negotiations. He argued against any “automatism” in stationing INFs in Europe. And shortly before the convention, the SPD’s chairman revealed to Germany’s leading weekly magazine

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Der Spiegel that he “had always been against NATO’s dual track decision” and that he had supported it only out of loyalty to the SPD-led government.17 East German experts remained convinced that Brandt’s course had been geared to keep the party together over the INF issue already well before the November 1983 party convention. Thus in February 1982 Brandt was well aware that the pending decision to deploy the new Pershing II and BGM-109 Tomahawk Cruise Missiles in Germany might well lead to an explosion within the party. This could have resulted in an untimely death of the SPD-FDP coalition. The issue had to be defused before the regular party convention in April 1982, or at least it had to be delayed until beyond that date. Eventually Brandt succeeded in constructing a majority among the SPD leadership for Egon Bahr’s draft resolution against any “automatism” of deploying the INFs after the moratorium had run out.18 This terminology was meant to hold safe within the SPD until after the scheduled West German elections in 1984. But by the time of the next extraordinary party convention in November 1983 the SPD was out of government. The party was torn over the INF issue as never before. On September 15, 1983, the Stasi listened in to a telephone conversation between Peter Glotz and Peter Merseburger. Glotz was the head of the party executive and Merseburger one of Germany’s most prominent political journalists.19 Glotz appeared desperate and confided that the SPD was “in a shitty condition.” And he added that “before the missile-story is not brought to an end, there can be no reasonable discussions within the SPD” on any other topic.20 So divisive and destructive were the psychological and emotional effects of the ongoing discussions over the issue on the cohesion of the party. This of course made it easy for Helmut Kohl, the new conservative chancellor, to portray Brandt and the SPD to the Western allies and particularly to US decision-makers in the worst possible light. In late January 1983, during a conversation with US Vice-President George Bush, Kohl identified Brandt and Bahr as the source of all security-political evil within the SPD. Schmidt would no longer represent the position of his party, he was “only a monument.” In reality, however, Brandt and Bahr would “dominate opinion within the SPD.”21 Talking to conservative Danish Prime Minister Poul Schlüter, Kohl considered that Brandt had established his own as the dominating view within the SPD: “Those who think differently within the SPD, do no longer talk about it. This is also true for Helmut Schmidt.” For Kohl the consequences appeared obvious: “Willy Brandt will do everything to get away from NATO’s dual track decision.”22 A  few months later, when conversing with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Kohl even accused Brandt of trying to take Germany out of

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the Western alliance: “Former Chancellor Brandt has said that the Russians must get out of Germany, ‘and the others too.’ This amounts to a neutralistic Germany as [Brandt’s] objective.”23

1983: An important visit to Washington—trying to explain the new thinking in security policies to the “American friends” In his own explanations to the American public and to the US Congress Brandt took a very different stance, focusing exclusively on the security political rational of the INF issue. In his open letter to the Washington Post,24 published only weeks before the extraordinary party convention, the SPD chairman argued that skepticism against the deployment of new missiles both among the German public and within his own party should not be mistaken as an indication of a widening gulf between Germany and the United States. Instead, the Americans should be aware of the differences in threat perceptions: While the United States was merely confronted with a “potential” threat of intercontinental nuclear war at the latter stages of an armed conflict between East and West, “our small Europe” was facing destruction by conventional warfare, by tactical nuclear exchanges, and by INF missiles. Brandt expressed his understanding for American ideas about a possible decoupling from a nuclear war in Europe, adding that such a decision would only be taken after the “total annihilation” of both West and East Germany. According to Brandt’s analysis, NATO’s dual track decision was not “holy,” but an instrument to hinder the deployment of new INFs. Rhetorically geared toward the religious sentiments of his “American friends,” Brandt pledged to “pray” that leaders in East and West would not wait until it was too late. Talking to the US Congress in late September 1983, Brandt even ventured as far as proposing a plan for nuclear arms control in four steps: the two superpowers could declare a “freeze” in nuclear testing and in the deployment of nuclear weapons; the US administration could then dismiss deploying new INF systems in Europe while the USSR would destroy their SS-20 systems; thereafter the two superpowers might negotiate a “freeze” in the production of nuclear weapons; and they could then combine the INF and START negotiations on weapon systems with an intercontinental and continental reach.25 At the same time, Brandt argued within his own party in favor of a continuously close security partnership with the United States. While security in the 1980s was “still only

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conceivable in cooperation with the potential enemy,” this new kind of security was equally “only possible within the Western alliance and not outside of it.”26 These different reflections on Brandt’s course—from within his party, from East Berlin, from the Chancellery in Bonn, from the Western allies, from his own hand and mouth—raise the question of what was really behind Willy Brandt’s change of course on the INF issue: Was it merely an attempt to keep the party together? Or was it after all a matter of principal objections and a different concept of security policies?

1985: Willy Brandt’s “grand tour”—trying to sell a new understanding of trans-bloc security For twelve months—from December 1984 until December 1985—Willy Brandt toured European and North American capitals in an effort to explain the necessity for a new thinking in security affairs. The first of these visits brought Brandt to Bulgaria’s capital Sofia. The focal topic of his conversations with the leadership around Todor Zhivkov was the idea of a nuclear free zone in the Balkans. Both sides agreed that such a project would be a worthwhile undertaking, both in itself and as a possible catalyst for the introduction of other nuclear free zones along the Iron Curtain. Furthermore, Brandt informed the Bulgarian leadership that his trusted confidant Egon Bahr had visited Athens shortly before and that Greece’s first socialist Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou was in support of the idea. But the initiative for a nuclear free zone in the Balkans had to be launched without Turkey:  At the moment the Turkish government was under pressure from Washington, but “might later join the idea of a nuclear free zone.”27 Brandt had started to engage the countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain and run rings around the American administration of President Ronald Reagan. Willy Brandt, after all, had become highly skeptical about Reagan’s idea of protecting US citizens from a nuclear attack by means of a space-deployed missile defense system (SDI). In Brandt’s view this, however, would lead to two different but equally dangerous consequences:  it would create two different zones of security both within the alliance and in relations with the Soviet Union. If successful, Reagan’s concept for protecting the United States against nuclear attack would undercut Brandt’s ideas for a “common security” umbrella overseen by both military alliances. While talking to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in April 1985, Brandt made no attempt to hide his “critical distance”28

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to the security and military policies of the Reagan administration. He implied that “America” was no longer a reliable partner. US foreign and securities had become subject to abrupt changes. While the United States was free to pursue their own security interests, the Western alliance would hardly survive its division in two zones of different security rational. In short, Reagan’s policies seemed to be lacking in perspective: his policies would lead to more weapons at higher costs while millions of people were dying of hunger—in Brandt’s mind this constituted a fundamental challenge for both rationality and morality as well as for experience and idealism. In May 1985 Willy Brandt embarked on trips to Paris and Moscow. While talking to the French socialist leaders he argued against Helmut Schmidt’s longestablished demands for a German say in the French decision to use French nuclear weapons on German territory.29 In Moscow, Brandt showed himself convinced that the USSR was indeed unwilling to attack. In conversations with the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev he spoke out against the Strategic Defence Initiative of US President Ronald Reagan. He drew attention to the problem of tactical nuclear weapons and conventional armament—and what this meant from the point of view of European countries and particularly of those in the geographical heart of the continent. In consequence he argued for a more independent role for Europe.30 In June 1985 Brandt visited Budapest and in September he went to East Berlin. There he argued for an INF moratorium and showed himself in favor of nuclear and chemical weapon free zones in and around the two Germanies.31 With this Brandt endorsed the discussions and preliminary conclusions from the SPD-SED talks on ideological and security political questions, which had started in February 1984.32 Meanwhile the diplomats in West Germany’s foreign ministry remained extremely skeptical about the concepts for these zones. And the Americans, French, Canadians, and other allies agreed that they would avoid the issue by claiming that this was a “party-political affair” between the SPD and the SED only.33 In internal discussions Willy Brandt went even one step further, revealing his intention to use these projects for nuclear and chemical weapon free zones as a catalyst for further arms control and reduction initiatives.34 Brandt continued to lobby for these ideas in Belgrade in October 1985, in Washington and Prague in November, and in Warsaw in December. Here Brandt canvassed for more Confidence-Building Measures (CBMs) in the military sphere and for a successful conclusion of the ongoing “Conference on Confidence and Security Building Measures and Disarmament in Europe” in Stockholm. He proposed CBMs that would include compulsory announcements

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of troop movements, access for international observers to military maneuvers involving more than 20,000 military personnel, mutual access and inspections rights of military sites, and an in-depth exchange on military doctrines and capabilities. Brandt argued that this would contribute to more “transparency,” resulting in a better understanding of the essentially defensive posture of the other side and a safer security environment in Europe.35 In the West reactions and interpretations of Brandt’s positions and accomplishments differed. They were certainly not overly positive. In January 1985, Chancellor Kohl confided in Margaret Thatcher that “as party chairman, Willy Brandt lives above the clouds and touches ground only occasionally.”36 Displaying a refined sense of political character assassination, Kohl added: “In some respect, the SPD has taken on the position of [the USSR’s] Foreign Secretary Gromyko.” Soon enough, this narrative was reflected by French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas. Speaking at the Meeting of Four on the eve of NATO’s defense ministers meeting on June 5, 1985, Dumas feared that “Gorbachev’s proposal [to Brandt] for a moratorium” on INF deployments by NATO would be “no harmless undertaking.”37 With this Dumas insinuated that Brandt had fallen for a trick played by the young CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) leader in Moscow. In reality, however, Brandt had consistently argued for a prolonged moratorium. The Soviet proposal for a moratorium of the deployment of US intermediate range nuclear weapon systems in Europe had been published at the end of March 1985.38 Only four weeks later, Willy Brandt signed the final declaration of a conference on the “Survival in the Nuclear Age” in New York. The declaration demanded no arms race in space, a nuclear test-stop treaty, a no-first-use declaration from all nuclear powers, and a freeze in nuclear missile numbers.39 During their conversation in Moscow, Gorbachev briefly referred to the moratorium idea. But it was Brandt who elaborated on it. He noticed the Soviet proposal “with respect,” but went on to ask Gorbachev to “go one step beyond” and take an unprecedented “unilateral step.”40 While Gorbachev rejected this at the time, only three months later he announced a unilateral nuclear test stop, asking the US administration to join the undertaking.41 At the same time, West Germany’s foreign ministry under the leadership of liberal politician Hans-Dietrich Genscher drew somewhat different conclusions from the Brandt-Gorbachev talks: According to Bonn’s diplomats, Gorbachev remained preoccupied with economic issues and had therefore displayed little if any motivation to engage in far-reaching arms control initiatives: “Gorbachev is interested in a strong Europe—but only economically and not militarily.”42 A remarkable misinterpretation, as the coming years would show.

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The seemingly limitless criticism in the West of Brandt’s peace initiative in 1984/1985 led East German Foreign Minister Oskar Fischer to comment sarcastically to his West German colleague Genscher in September 1985: “Why are you so hard on the SPD? I can confirm the SPD is not changing over into the communist camp!”43 Willy Brandt’s sales-tour for a different approach to East-West security made it easy for others to portray him and his party as left-wing lunatics. Once again, this contemporary notion has to be questioned in the light of available sources: Was Brandt really out of step with the necessities of the security structures in the East-West conflict? Or was he in fact among the first to understand that these security structures had developed to the point where the mechanisms of deterrence began to contradict their very purpose?

1987: The SPD-SED paper—and its multiple effects both across the blocs and within the SPD In August 1987 the SPD’s fundamental values commission and the SED Central Committee’s academy for social sciences published a coauthored memorandum with the programmatic title “The Conflict of Ideologies and the Common Security.”44 It was published in the two respective party newspapers—the SPD’s Vorwärts and the SED’s Neues Deutschland. The edition of the Neues Deutschland, normally known for its utterly boring language, was soon sold out and as there was no reprint most East Germans found it hard to obtain the text.45 The compromise paper dealt with five main arguments, which differed both in language and in contents from long-established Cold War patterns and narratives. It focused on the systemic competition rather than on military confrontation. It contained a mutual recognition of each other’s existence. In it both sides took a long view on this conceptual conflict about how society should be organized. Furthermore, both sides agreed on each other’s ability to reform. And with regard to the military aspects of the conflict they agreed on the necessity of a “security partnership” across the two blocs. The paper triggered a large variety of reactions and intense debate not only within the two Germanies but also among their allies and not least in the capitals of their respective superpowers. It triggered distrust against the “policy of a [German-German] dialogue on security” in the United States.46 It also triggered distrust in the USSR due to the SED’s perceived unilateral action in dealing with

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the SPD.47 But the paper enhanced the understanding between the SPD and SED leaderships, and between the governments in Bonn and East Berlin in a wider sense as being “partners for survival.”48 The paper led to intense discussions within the SPD. On the surface this was a discussion over the meaning of words. The debate soon centered on two terms:  “re-armament” or “de-militarisation.” “Re-armament” meant changing the structures of arms and armament, while “de-militarisation” denoted a process aiming to reach an essentially pacifistic status. Key questions within this discussion touched upon the realization of Bahr’s concept for a “structural inability to attack” and the eventual importance of a residual nuclear deterrence. The “structural inability to attack” defined a combination of military capabilities that would allow for an effective defense but not for a successful offensive. In Bahr and Brandt’s view this had to be a mutual and balanced and not a unilateral process within NATO as the left of the party demanded. A similar discussion raged in the party over the future of NATO’s nuclear deterrence: While Bahr, Voigt, von Bülow, and others from the party’s center argued for keeping a minimal nuclear deterrence on both sides even within a new security structure, the left wing of the SPD refused to consider this.49

1988/89: The Baltic Sea as a “security zone”—the discussions between the SPD and Poland’s ruling communists The years 1988 and 1989 saw an intensive dialogue between party officials from the SPD, then the opposition party in West Germany’s parliament, and the Polish United Workers Party (PUWP), Poland’s ruling communists. The dialogue started with a series of highly secret exchanges over the idea of turning the Baltic Sea into a possible area for intensified Confidence and Security Building Measures (CSBMs). This special and yet asymmetric dialogue started in October 1988 as a purely bilateral party affair. It was conducted on quite a high level, involving politicians such as Ehmke, Dingels, von Bülow on behalf of the SPD, and Kucza, Karski, Ostrowski, and Wojna on the PUWP side. Unusually the preliminary results were handed to the Polish General Staff only after the conclusion of the talks. It was only after the SPD and PUWP delegations had drafted a paper on CSBMs and arms control in the Baltic Sea region that the Polish General Staff under General Jozef Uzycki was asked for their military expertise in the matter.50 And only in May 1989 it was decided

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to invite all Baltic Sea neighbors to a mutual conference in Plön in northern Germany.51 But despite numerous encouraging signals, by then it was already too late. The events of the summer of 1989, the fall of the wall in November, the GDR’s exit from the Warsaw Treaty Organisation in October 1990, and the eastern alliance’s dissolution in spring 1991 created a new international dynamic. In the process long-term and cross-bloc projects such as that of a new “security zone” around the Baltic Sea became obsolete.

1989/1990: Willy Brandt and Germany’s unification—No unification without security from and with Germany In the late summer of 1989 Willy Brandt sensed the changing societal situation within East Germany. In September 1989 he urged his party to establish contacts with the opposition movement in the GDR as soon as possible. Furthermore, Brandt as an elder statesman convinced himself that this was the time to reconsider the security dimensions of the new situation. During his speech on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War, Brandt reminded the members of West Germany’s parliament that the democratic upsurge “in the other part of Europe . . . will be bound up with new risks.” And he foresaw the “end of an era”—his own era of “trying to maintain the unity of divided families and the nation with the help of numerous small steps.” On the same day, the SPD publicly threatened to end their contacts with East Germany’s ruling communists in the SED party. On behalf of West Germany’s social democrats Erhard Eppler declared that “without reforms a dialogue with East Berlin [is] meaningless.”52 Much has since been written about Willy Brandt’s political, personal, and emotional involvement in German reunification. There is little if anything to add but one final story with a happy ending and a very human touch. When in June 1990 Checkpoint Charly was removed, Brandt stood at the sidelines. Apparently, the SPD-ruled Senate of Berlin under Mayor Walter Momper had relegated Brandt to a backseat. But the commander of US troops in Berlin, Major General Haddock, the man who previously had commanded the Pershing II battalions in Southern Germany,53 spotted the former Berlin mayor and federal chancellor. Haddock turned to his Secretary of State James Baker, pleading: “Shouldn’t we ask Brandt to join you in the front row? After all, without this man nothing of this would be happening.”54 Baker agreed and Haddock guided Willy Brandt not only to the front row but to a center seat between the foreign ministers of the four powers.

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Conclusions The key to Brandt’s and later also the SPD’s conflict with Washington in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s was that they had a different perspective on security. From a German(-German) and a European perspective the mechanics of nuclear deterrence had developed to a decisive point. The combination of much shortened pre-warning times (on a continental scale) and continuing assumptions over the other side’s willingness to wage war made the security situation in Europe increasingly volatile. Regional, accidental, and limited war in Europe or in Germany alone appeared to be becoming a possibility. The solution seemed to be to step out of the traditional deterrencerational: avoiding nuclear war, providing time for political decision-making in times of crises or even in war, reassuring the other side of one’s own peaceful intentions through more transparency, and the establishment of ongoing exchanges on strategic and tactical issues. All of this, of course, went against the dominating idea of the first Reagan administration, namely, to overcome the Cold War and the Soviet Union through a combination of military and economic power. The concept pursued by Brandt, by social democratic parties in Europe, and finally by most other parties was based on a trans-bloc security understanding of “common security,” confidence and security building measures, zones of disarmament, force reductions to the point of actually hindering offensive actions. Much of this prevailed in the aftermath of the breakdown of communist rule throughout Central and Eastern Europe. And much of this is still with us today in the guise of the OSCE, the Vienna Document, the Serious Combat Force issue, and—last but not least—the military status of Germany.

Notes 1 Oliver Bange, “SS-20 and Pershing II: Weapon Systems and the Dynamization of East-West Relations,” in The Nuclear Crisis—The Arms Race, Cold War Anxiety, and the German Peace Movement of the 1980s, eds Christoph BeckerSchaum et al. (Oxford/New York: Berghahn, 2016), 70–86. See also from the same author: Sicherheit und Staat—Die Bündnis- und Militärpolitik der DDR im internationalen Kontext 1969 bis 1990 (Berlin: Ch.Links, 2017), especially chapters III and V on the nuclear dimension of security and the changing image of war in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

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2 See Judith Michel, Willy Brandts Amerikabild und -politik 1933–1992 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2010). 3 AdsD: Willy Brandt Archiv, A9, 7: Conversation between Brandt and Brezhnev on June 30, 1981, in Moscow; record written by Thomas Mirow on July 6, 1981. Edited in: Willy Brandt, Die Entspannung unzerstörbar machen—Internationale Beziehungen und deutsche Frage 1974–1982, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 9, ed. Frank Fischer (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 2003), 319–26, particularly 323. 4 Robert E. Horkavy, Bases Abroad—The Global Military Presence (SIPRI, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), particularly 80–9. Graham Spinardi, From Polaris to Trident—The Development of US Fleet Ballistic Missile Technology (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 5 The French S2 missile had a range of 3,000 kilometers, the S3 missile a range of 3,500 kilometers. Robert S. Norris, William M. Arkin, Hans M. Kristensen, and Joshua Handler, French Nuclear Forces, in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July 2001. The British government relied on a force of Polaris missiles obtained from the United States. 6 FS 2563, Moskau, 3.7.1981, from Andreas Meyer-Landrut. Edited in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1981 (AAPD), eds Daniela Taschler, Matthias Peter, and Judith Michel (Munich: De Gruyter, 2012), 992–4. 7 BStU, HVA 12: Außenpolitische Informationsübersicht no. 22/81, East Berlin, June 9, 1981. 8 On the similarity of views between François Mitterrand and Helmut Schmidt regarding the threat of Soviet SS-20s and the necessity for a NATO reply, see: Ronald Tiersky, François Mitterrand—A Very French President (Lanham/New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 169–76. For East German intelligence information on the Mitterrand-Schmidt exchange on this issue on May 24, 1981, in Paris, see BStU, HVA 12: Außenpolitische Informationsübersicht no. 27/81, East Berlin, July 13, 1981. 9 BStU, HVA 8: “Top Secret” Stasi information for seven SED Politburo members, also forwarded to Soviet officials. Information no. 425/81, East Berlin, August 25, 1981. The West German weekly Die Zeit had been even quicker than the State Security: The paper reported on July 10, 1981, that Ehmke had informed SPD members of parliament immediately after Brandt’s return from Moscow that he was traveling to Washington from July 6 to 10, 1981, for arms control talks and “for informing the US administration about the contents of Willy Brandt’s conversations in Moscow.” Die Zeit, Nr. 29/81, July 10, 1981. 10 Brandt would later relate to his doubts about the military estimates provided by the US side also in public. See his speech before the Council on Foreign Relations on April 24, 1985, cited below. 11 Johan Jörgen Holst, Arms Control in the Nineties—A European Perspective, in Daedalus, Winter 1991, 90. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 246–7.

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12 Johan Galtung, The Palme Commission Report on Disarmament and Security—A Critical Comment; in Bulletin of Peace Proposals, vol. 14/2, 1983, S. 147ff. For international reactions, see: Ingemar Dörfer, “A Comment on the Palme Report,” in Strategic Analysis and the Management of Power—Johan Jörgen Holst, the Cold War and the New Europe, ed. Olav F. Knudsen (London: Palgrave, 1996), 109 ff. 13 Egon Bahr, Was wird aus den Deutschen? Fragen und Antworten (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982). Rasmus Mariager, “New Security Concepts and Transnational Party Networks, 1976–1983—The Socialist International, Scandilux, and the Overcoming of the Crisis of Détente,” in The Long Détente: Changing Concepts of Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1950s–1980s, eds Oliver Bange and Poul Villaume (Budapest/New York: CEUP, 2017), 127–52. 14 Der Palme Bericht. Bericht der Unabhängigen Kommission für Abrüstung und Sicherheit (Berlin: Siedler, 1982). 15 Hubert Thielicke, “Mitteleuropa—Kernwaffenfreie Zone statt regionaler Abschreckung,” in Gemeinsame Europäische Sicherheit—Konzepte für das 21. Jahrhundert, eds Erhard Chrome and Lutz Kleinwächter (Potsdam: WeltTrends, 2012), 135–61. 16 Willy Brandt (ed.), Das Überleben sichern—Bericht der Nord-SüdKommission—Gemeinsame Interessen der Industrie- und Entwicklungsländer (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1982). Willy Brandt, Hilfe in der Weltkrise—Ein Sofortprogramm. Der 2. Bericht der Nord-Süd-Kommission (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1983). 17 “The SPD is not the world’s third superpower,” in Der Spiegel no. 38/1983 (September 19, 1983), 17–20. The article cited at length from the records of the SPD’s board meeting on September 12, 1983. 18 BStU, HVA 14: Information no. 56/82, East Berlin, February 3, 1982. 19 Conversations with Merseburger were exempted from the various memoires and diary editions by Glotz. Peter Glotz, Von Heimat zu Heimat—Erinnerungen eines Grenzgängers (Berlin: Econ, 2005). The same, Die Jahre der Verdrossenheit— Politisches Tagebuch 1993/94 (Stuttgart: DVA, 1996). Glotz did however explain the political situation in September 1982 in a previous edition of his diaries: The FDP had tabled numerous demands that remained unacceptable to the SPD, practically a “certificate of divorce.” Therefore, the party convention in November 1982 was to be an important litmus test both for the condition of the party and its chances in the forthcoming elections. Peter Glotz, Kampagne in Deutschland—Politisches Tagebuch 1981–1983 (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1986), 207–27. Peter Merseburger is equally cautious about his conversations with Glotz. See, for example: Peter Merseburger, Willy Brandt, 1913–1992—Visionär und Realist (Stuttgart: DVA, 2002). The same, Grenzgänger—Innenansichten der anderen deutschen Republik (Munich: Bertelsmann, 1988). The same, Die unberechenbare Vormacht—Wohin steuern die USA? (Munich: Bertelsmann, 1985).

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20 BStU, BVfS Potsdam, Abt. II 49, vol. 2: Stasi protocol of a telephone conversation between Peter Glotz and Peter Merseburger, September 15, 1983. 21 Conversation Kohl-Bush, Bonn, January 31, 1983. Edited in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1983 (AAPD), eds Tim Geiger, Matthias Peter, and Mechthild Lindemann (Munich: De Gruyter, 2014), 137–41. 22 Conversation Kohl-Schlüter, Bonn, April 19, 1983. AAPD 1983, 548–58. 23 Conversation Kohl-Thatcher, Bonn, September 21, 1983. AAPD 1983, 1354. 24 Open letter by Brandt, in: Washington Post, August 7, 1983. A German translation is edited in: Willy Brandt, Gemeinsame Sicherheit. Internationale Beziehungen und deutsche Frage 1982–1992, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 10, eds Uwe Mai, Bernd Rother, and Wolfgang Schmidt (Bonn: Dietz, 2009), 142–6. 25 AdsD, Willy-Brandt-Archiv, A19, 240: Statement by Brandt before the US Congress, Washington, December 29, 1983. Edited in a German translation in: Brandt, Gemeinsame Sicherheit, 157–71. 26 Speech by Brandt before the SPD parliamentary party on September 6, 1983, published in: Sozialdemokraten Service Presse Funk TV, Nr. 530/83, September 7, 1983; edited in: Brandt, Gemeinsame Sicherheit, 147–54. 27 Bulgarian National Archives (BNA), Central Committee Papers, F1B, Op. 101– 1016, G274: Information on the visit of the chairman of the SPD Willy Brandt to the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, December 1–3, 1984. Conversation with Karsten Voigt, Berlin, June 11, 2016. Voigt accompanied Brandt on this occasion. 28 AdsD, Willy-Brandt-Archiv, A3, 992: Speech by Brandt before the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, April 24, 1985. Edited in a German translation in: Brandt, Gemeinsame Sicherheit, 209–13. Also referred to in: Michel, Amerikabild, 426. 29 Conversation Brandt-Mitterrand, July 12, 1985. Edited in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1985 (AAPD), eds Michael Ploetz, Mechthild Lindemann, and Christoph Johannes Franzen (Munich: De Gruyter, 2016), 901–906. 30 AdsD, Willy-Brandt-Archiv, A9, 10: Conversation Brandt-Gorbachev, Moscow, May 27, 1985. The Soviet record of the conversation (from the archive of Gorbachev Foundation) can be found edited in a German translation in: Brandt, Gemeinsame Sicherheit, 219–30. Brandt summarized his talks and impressions to the SPD’s parliamentary party on June 11, 1985, in Bonn. AdsD, Bestand SPDBundestagsfraktion, 6948 (edited ibid., 230–6). 31 Brandts conversations in East Berlin, September 18–20, 1985. The records of these conversations are edited in two collections: Detlef Nakath and Gerd-Rüdiger Stephan, Von Hubertusstock nach Bonn—Eine dokumentierte Geschichte der deutsch-deutschen Beziehungen auf höchster Ebene 1980–1987 (Berlin: Dietz, 1995), 239–57. Heinrich Potthoff, Die “Koalition der Vernunft”—Deutschlandpolitik in den 80er Jahren (Munich: dtv, 1995), 340–59.

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32 Detlev Preuße, Umbruch von unten—Die Selbstbefreiung Mittel- und Osteuropas und das Ende der Sowjetunion (Berlin: Springer, 2014), 256. 33 BStU, HVA 56: Außenpolitische Informationsübersicht no. 29/85, East Berlin, July 22, 1981. 34 BStU: HVA 56: Außenpolitische Informationsübersicht no. 26/85 and 29/85, East Berlin, 1.7. and July 22, 1985. 35 AdsD, Willy-Brandt-Archiv, A 19, 264: Conversation Brandt-Jaruzelski, Warsaw, during the morning of December 7, 1985. Edited in: Brandt, Gemeinsame Sicherheit, 264–73. 36 Conversation Kohl-Thatcher, Bonn, January 18, 1985; edited in AAPD 1985, 59–71. 37 Speech by Dumas on the occasion of the meeting of the “four” foreign ministers (French, British, American, and German) on the eve of the NATO Ministerial Meeting, June 5, 1985. AAPD 1985, 769–75. In his memoires the French socialist Dumas does explain his personal friendship and political proximity with West German Foreign Minister Genscher, a German liberal. Roland Dumas, Coups et blessures—50 ans de secrets partagés avec François Mitterrand (Paris: Cherche Midi, 2011), 231. 38 Archiv der Gegenwart, vol. 55 (1985), 28699. The declaration was signed on April 26, 1985. 39 Published in: Sozialdemokraten Service Presse-Funk-TV, no. 244/85, April 29, 1985. 40 Conversation Brandt-Gorbachev, Moscow, May 27, 1985. The relevant passages can be found in both the Soviet and German records. Brandt, Gemeinsame Sicherheit, 226 and 228; see also fn 31 on page 589. 41 Archiv der Gegenwart, vol. 55 (1985), 29084. 42 Memorandum by the Auswärtiges Amt on Soviet security policies, including the Brandt-Gorbachev talks, Bonn, June 27, 1985, by Oesterheldt. AAPD 1985, 905–10. 43 Conversation Fischer-Genscher, New York, September 27, 1985; edited in: AAPD 1985, 1344–50, here: 1347. 44 Der Streit der Ideologien und die gemeinsame Sicherheit, ed. by the Grundwertekommission der SPD und der Akademie für Gesellschaftswissenschaften der SED; in: Politik—Informationsdienst der SPD, Nr. 3, August 1987. 45 Rolf Reißig, Dialog durch die Mauer—Die umstrittene Annäherung von SPD und SED (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2002). Lothar Mertens, Rote Denkfabrik? Die Akademie für Gesellschaftswissenschaften beim ZK der SED (Münster: LIT, 2004), particularly chapter 6. Nina Grözinger, Dialog und Dissens—Das SPD-SED-Papier von 1987. Die sozialdemokratische Deutschlandpolitik in den 1980er Jahren am Beispiel des SPD-SED-Dialogpapiers (Saarbrücken: Akademikerverlag, 2016). 46 For a summary of American reactions, see: Ann L. Phillips, The West German Social Democrats’ second Phase of Ostpolitik in historical perspective, in: Peter H.

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47

48 49

50

51

52 53 54

Willy Brandt and International Relations Merkl (ed.), The FRG at forty—Union without Unity (New York: NYU Press, 1989), pp. 408–24. Reißig, Dialog durch die Mauer, pp. 311f. Bernd Rother, Common security as a way to overcome the (second) Cold War? Willy Brandt’s strategy for peace in the 1980s, in: Frédéric Bozo et al. (eds), Visions of the End of the Cold War in Europe, 1945–1990 (New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2012), pp. 239–52, particularly 247. “A reply on the analysis of the common document from SPD and SED,” by Egon Bahr, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 2, 1987. BStU, HVA 51: These discussions within the SPD remained a key interest for the SED leadership in East Berlin. Information no. 63/88, East Berlin, February 12, 1988. Archivum Akt Novych (AAN), Papers of the International Commission of the PUWP, LXXVI-1522: Kucza, Secretary of the International Commission of the PUWP, to Uzycki, May 13, 1989. AAN, Papers of the International Commission of the PUWP, LXXVI-1610: Polish letter from April 21, 1989, regarding the invitation to the Baltic Sea security conference. “SPD droht mit Abbruch ihrer SED Beziehungen—Eppler: Ohne Reformen ist Dialog mit Ost-Berlin sinnlos.” In: Die Welt, September 8, 1989. The 56th Field Artillery Command in Schwäbisch-Gmünd, Mutlangen, Neu-Ulm, Neckarsulm. Conversation with General Raymond E. Haddock during the conference “Kernwaffen in Europa—Lernen von der Vergangenheit für die Zukunft,” held in Berlin from November 3 to 4, 2012, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the INF Treaty.

Part Three

Willy Brandt: The Latin American Dimension

9

“Elastic Cooperation”: Willy Brandt and Latin America Fernando Pedrosa

Introduction This chapter aims to review Willy Brandt’s relations with Latin America over the course of his long political career. It is not possible to analyze the links between Brandt and Latin America in depth without including the Socialist International (SI), since this was the platform that gave him the global stature to achieve his political objectives.1 Brandt’s non-European connections were strong. They helped him become an international protagonist in the more complex arenas of the Cold War in the region (Central America, the Caribbean, and Chile). This is especially true for the period between 1976, when he became president of the SI, and 1992, but Brandt was knowledgeable about Latin American politics before that. This chapter will begin by laying out the background to Brandt’s relations with Latin America, before his assumption of the SI presidency, and then go on to address the German leader’s years as the head of the SI. The conclusion, finally, will address issues related to the kinds of strategies Brandt employed to build and consolidate his leadership.

The Socialist International and Latin America before 1976 Europe’s social democratic parties began to take an interest in other continents as soon as the Second World War ended.2 Since its founding in 1951, the SI had been dominated by the British Labour Party, which adhered to a set of firmly held convictions: first, to align itself with the United States in the struggle against

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communism, and second, to act as a political protagonist in parts of the world where the decolonization process was taking place. These tenets were applied very consistently in Asia and Africa and also had an important impact in Latin America.3 As part of this internationalist strategy, the Latin American Secretariat (LAS) was created in 1955.4 The establishment of the LAS was the SI’s first formal strategic step toward increasing its influence on the continent between 1955 and 1963. A Latin American politician was chosen as its president, Humberto Maiztegui, a member of the Socialist Party of Uruguay. In addition, the LAS office was set up in Montevideo.5 Although there were bilateral relations between individual social democratic parties in Europe and Latin America, social democratic politics focused predominantly on the SI and (since 1955) on the LAS in particular. The growing German presence began to change the balance of power within the international social democratic movement. It was in this context that the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) regained its international clout. Its new role within the SI was illustrated by Erich Ollenhauer’s short presidency, which was curtailed by his death in 1963. The 1960s began with more radicalization and fragmentation in the socialist parties of the Southern Cone, which were the SI’s traditional allies. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 and its rapid drift toward the orbit of the Soviet Union radically changed the Latin American political map. Despite the enthusiasm the LAS was greeted with—especially in the British Labour Party—the project clashed with the radicalization of the socialist parties in the southern hemisphere. The socialist parties of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay tended toward fragmentation, in addition to carrying little electoral weight and harboring increasing aversion toward liberal democracy.6 During these years, the SI raised visions of socialism based on the welfare state, liberal and representative democracy, and a strong alignment with the United States in the Cold War against communism. The Cuban Revolution pushed Latin American socialists out of this consensus. As a result of the Cuban influence, socialists in Latin America began to strongly attack the SI for its cooperative role in US strategy. This conflict between Latin American political parties and the SI even extended to Uruguay’s long-established socialist party, which had initially been the bridgehead of European Social Democracy in Latin America.7 Over the course of 1963, the SI reevaluated its relations with and strategy toward Latin America very thoroughly. In order to obtain first-hand information

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and draft a resolution, an extended mission was sent to the region.8 The new German presence was noted within the SI. Although there had been earlier missions, Germans had never been part of them. This changed in 1963:  a German representative took part for the first time; his name was Max Diamant, and in addition to being German, he was also the only member of the mission who spoke Spanish. Diamant was in charge of preparing a detailed report for the organization, and in response to this report, the SI decided on an important modification to its Latin American strategy. The Latin American Secretariat was disbanded; however, the Social Democrats decided to strengthen their presence in Latin America and once again turned to the Uruguayan Humberto Maiztegui for leadership. At the instigation of Maiztegui, the “Coordinating Bureau of the SI in Latin America” was established, with headquarters in Montevideo.9 As of 1964, the organization decided to prioritize contacts with political parties that were not necessarily socialist. The SI’s European member parties were aware that the socialist parties of the Southern Cone, usually “Socialist Parties” in name and heirs to the European socialist tradition of the late nineteenth century, were not the most loyal or easy partners. The SI decided to change its strategy of alliances while also shifting its geographical focus of interest:  the Southern Latin American countries would become less important than Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Venezuela. There were important parties and leaderships—not necessarily socialist—in those countries, which gradually began to approach the SI. At the same time, this was a region where Cold War tensions were higher than in southern Latin America. Brandt became vice president of the SI in 1966, ten years before being elected president of the organization. The SI board—with Brandt among its members— adopted a pragmatic attitude toward Latin America. The years during which Brandt was part of the SI leadership in his capacity as vice president were important in shaping his own views about Latin America—views that would become the basis for the SI’s success in the region over the next decade.

Brandt and Latin America before 1976 In 1968, when he was West Germany’s foreign minister, Brandt traveled widely throughout Latin America. This was an extensive tour of the continent, especially when compared to the two- or three-day trips foreign ministers usually take today. Brandt was in Latin America from October 12 (a symbolic date marking

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the beginning of the journey) to October 26, visiting Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. Meanwhile, the Under-secretaries Rolf Lahr and Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz visited all of Central America, as well as Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Paraguay. They all met in Chile. The location was not chosen randomly: Chile was one of the few countries in South America that had a democratic government at the time. An ambassadorial conference attended by all German ambassadors accredited to Latin American and Caribbean countries was held there and it lasted almost five days.10 Each ambassador presented his report to the Ministry officials who were also present, and together they conducted a joint analysis of West German policies in the region. In their findings, they concluded that an increase of West German political and economic presence in the region was needed and strongly recommended. Brandt met with the (military) presidents of Argentina and Brazil and their foreign ministers, obtaining first-hand information on the countries of the region. In his capacity as foreign minister, Brandt made the objective of the Latin American tour clear: it was the beginning of a political and diplomatic German offensive in Latin America.11 Previously, in his role as mayor of Berlin (1957–1966), Brandt had met the Chilean President Eduardo Frei. The relationship between the two politicians was cultivated in meetings at international forums and later with the appointment of Frei to the North-South Commission chaired by Brandt. It was this relationship that, years later, led to Brandt enthusiastically promoting the historic reconciliation between Christian Democracy and Chilean socialism. Years later, Brandt’s SI presidency would be a fundamental stepping stone in the process that led to the creation of the Concertación Chilena, which would eventually oust Pinochet from the Chilean presidency. Brandt’s first tour of Latin America garnered extensive coverage in the journalistic and political media at the time—not only because of his personality and political office, but also because it marked the starting point for future agreements on nuclear and energy development with Brazil and Argentina.12 The oil crisis of 1973 constituted a direct threat to the welfare state, the cornerstone of social democratic politics. This was illustrated by a series of electoral defeats for Europe’s main socialist parties.13 At this juncture, Brandt was one of the first to understand the new situation and its implications, long before even experts, academics, and intellectuals did.14

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If social democracy did not become global, if its range of action could not be expanded beyond European borders, Ralf Dahrendorf ’s pessimistic predictions about the end of the social democratic century would come true.15 The transnationalization of the economy hence also demanded the transnationalization of politics. The SI would be able to provide a suitable framework for this task. Between 1972 and 1975, Brandt, Bruno Kreisky, and Olof Palme—who were the highest elected officials in their respective countries at the time—exchanged a series of letters. In these letters (which later became part of a book),16 the three European politicians analyzed with surprising clarity the origin of the problems faced by their governments. In one of these letters—written several years before he became president of the SI—Brandt wrote: Our Socialist International is only capable of doing that to a very limited degree. What we need is not a formulaic but an elastic cooperation with forces in other parts of the world, which, of course, have their own conditions, but which we have things in common with . . . So let us take Central America as an example. There are several countries there that have parties that are very close to what we call democratic socialism. But they do not fit into a rigid, a strongly traditionbound framework such as the International. So one would have to find a way of initiating an exchange of views between our parties and a group of parties there.17

During those years, a number of Southern European countries (such as Spain, Greece, and Portugal) were also transitioning to democracy, and help from Germany was paramount in creating and sustaining Felipe González’s leadership in Spain.18 But help—both political and economic—also came from the network that was gradually being built among the SPD, the National Liberation Party (PLN) of Costa Rica, Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and Venezuela’s Democratic Action (AD). For the first time, Latin American parties were funding European organizations, and Brandt was at the center of a network that, from 1976 onward, would steadily grow.19 In 1975, Brandt traveled to Mexico, invited by the then president Luis Echeverría. The trip’s purpose was to deepen relations with the leadership of the PRI, but this was not an easy task. The Mexicans did not look kindly on European “intrusion” into regional politics. However, Brandt’s words already showed the growing importance he placed on transnational politics. I am here to learn about the concepts, opinions, and experiences of the political forces of your country. For me, there is no longer any doubt that our parties can

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help complete the efforts of their governments, especially in the international arena. We can help each other. It is true that the exchange of views between parties is a substitute neither for diplomacy nor for summits of heads of state and government. But if properly understood and used, it is an important platform on which the political forces of our nations can meet.20

During the same trip in 1975, Brandt also visited Venezuela, where he strengthened relations with the Acción Democrática (AD). But he particularly connected with the person who was then president of the country and also a leader of regional significance, Carlos Andrés Pérez. The ties between the two leaders would be of crucial importance for the future of Brandt’s relationship with Latin America.21

The Caracas meeting With the insights garnered from his travels, the contacts he had made in international forums, and, crucially, with Carlos Andrés Pérez, Bruno Kreisky, and Olof Palme on his side, Brandt now embarked on a strategic effort to bring leaders from all over the world into a single network. Latin America was key to this project. The goal was to win support from regional leaders to join him in creating a global network. A meeting to further this cause was held in Caracas between May 23 and May 25, 1976, just a few months before Brandt assumed the SI presidency. The Caracas Meeting was to be both the final step toward reaching this consensus and the forum at which it was to be presented to the public and the press. The conference was well thought out and ideologically broad, bringing together a large group of leaders from both continents.22 Formally, the meeting was convened by the AD and the SPD, and its official title was “Meeting of Political Leaders of Europe and America in Favor of International Democratic Solidarity.” The name made it clear that this was to be a meeting of leaders, not of parties, underscoring the idea that the goal was to build a network of politicians. Social democratic leaders from Latin America and Europe agreed to set out on a common journey toward gaining geopolitical influence. The bulk of the debates at the meeting were related to ideas, to the development of a common political program. AD leader Gonzalo Barrios said that the meeting could be regarded as a “private version of the North-South dialogue without the irreducible antagonisms that have now been transferred to the United Nations,” in reference to the polarization that had arisen between the nonaligned and the developed countries.23

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It was also an opportunity to overcome the deep distrust that Latin American leaders harbored against their European peers24: In Caracas, we talked about what unites us and what our common political goals might be. We examined possibilities for practical solidarity without trying to obliterate the differences between the understandable interests of the developed countries and the legitimate claims of the Third World. It was an affirmation as well as a new beginning of amiable relations between similar parties beyond all national and regional differences. So I got the impression that this was successful.25

Old grudges were held in particular on two issues: first, on Europe’s role in its automatic alignment with the United States’ Cold War strategy, and second, on the damage caused to Latin American economies by the Europeans’ protectionist policies. The modification and reformation of the program of social democracy as proposed by Brandt played a key role in the attempt to reach a new consensus.26 But the first necessary step was the recognition and acceptance of differences. The closing document (titled “Caracas Declaration”) put into words all the intentions expressed over the course of the meeting. The question of the relationship with the Cold War superpowers would also have to be resolved. For this reason, the Caracas Declaration (signed by all attending leaders) was, in geopolitical terms, positioned at a midpoint between US-style capitalism and Soviet-style communism.27 Apart from its ideological aspects, the 1976 meeting in Caracas constituted a step toward the consolidation of personal relationships between some of the leaders on both continents, relationships that were as important with regard to support for Brandt’s SI leadership as the new programmatic focus. We cannot say to what degree solid relationships were established in Caracas or the attendees really got to know each other. Still, there is no doubt that the personal interaction made it easier to process political differences and ideological conflicts.28 But not everybody on the European side agreed. Neither François Mitterrand nor Labour leader James Callaghan attended. With the French, Brandt would always maintain a difficult personal relationship. The British and the French would continue to be largely outside the SI project. With very few exceptions (Ricardo Balbín of Argentina among them), almost all Latin Americans present at the meeting showed a firm desire to advance their relationship with European Social Democracy.29 The political leaders who were part of the network that Brandt built around the SI had many things in common. For one, they all had experienced exile or

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struggle against dictatorship. This was true of the Europeans who had fought against the Nazis (Brandt himself, Kreisky) or later dictatorships (González and Mário Soares against Franco and Salazar, respectively) as well as of almost all the Latin American leaders who had been persecuted by the military or authoritarian governments that marked the political landscape of the region in the twentieth century. For all of them, then, freedom, democracy, and human rights were not minor issues. And this fact already implied an important change in the traditional program of European Social Democracy for Latin America—a point of view that united politicians from different continents and, at the same time, one of the key factors in Brandt’s decision to accept the SI presidency. The SI congress in 1976 was a repeat of sorts of the Caracas meeting, but this time with political leaders from other continents attending as well.

Brandt as SI president As president of the SI, Brandt exercised global leadership. The combination of his personal reputation and the mobilization of economic, symbolic, and political resources he stood for attracted leaders from around the world, who began to initiate or increase links with the SI. Regardless of their geographical or ideological roots, as of 1976, almost all of them wanted to approach the SI and its new president. While Europe’s socialist parties were still in crisis, the SI regenerated itself and became stronger. Brandt assumed the SI presidency at its congress in Geneva in 1976. The event was carefully planned to send a global message—after decades of inactivity, the SI was once again an active force. The media response was significant and global. At the congress, Brandt presented his aspirations for global leadership— conceding the challenges he was facing—and the commitments that sustained his work: peace, human rights, and the new relations between North and South. The SI’s commitment to these issues had been a condition for his candidacy for the SI presidency. Elastic cooperation resulted in a new global social democratic program. This was particularly important for Latin America, whose parties and leaders were steeped in strong political and ideological traditions. This was the reason the SI needed to be able to connect with them through a common program. The Europeans’ money and reputation were not enough. To Latin Americans, ideology mattered. Brandt understood this perfectly.

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The new orientation of social democracy involved reinforcing its internationalism and emphasizing political cooperation with international organizations, in particular with the UN. But it also included developing common transnational strategies with trade union organizations, where social democrats were particularly influential. The approach of elastic cooperation abandoned Eurocentrism and did not insist on new allies advocating such traditional postwar social democratic issues as the welfare state, liberal democracy, and anti-communism. This opened up room for new topics that were of utmost interest to the countries of the then so-called Third World. The new SI placed the defense of human rights at the top of its agenda. This entailed, for example, condemnation of the administrations of Pinochet, Stroessner, and Somoza, the fight against South African apartheid, a peaceful and neutral position within the Cold War, the protection of exiles, and the demand for the elimination of poverty—an issue that was of particular concern to the leaders of the so-called Third World.30 The SI was active in the networks of exile communities and in some cases (e.g., the Chilean and Uruguayan communities in Sweden and the Netherlands) had a strong impact on the national politics of both the expelling and the receiving country. It was deeply involved—just short of direct intervention— in the political issues of other countries, and the clout of its leaders amplified the benefits of its international political involvement.31 Its role in the electoral juncture in the Dominican Republic in 1978 was a great example of the power of transnational leadership. The authoritarian Dominican government, headed by Joaquín Balaguer, refused to admit electoral defeat. The international pressure put on by the SI (especially by Brandt and Soares), acting in conjunction with the government of Jimmy Carter, forced Balaguer to acknowledge the opposition’s triumph. The victory of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) of Peña Gomez was considered one of the most important “trophies” of social democracy in Latin America. But Brandt also stood out for his efforts to initiate an alternative geopolitical alignment. In this regard, his chairmanship of the so-called North-South Commission was key, because the commission, although it did not originate within the SI, clearly influenced the ideas of the period,32 as did the “Palme” and “Brundtland” Commissions.33 It was in these three commissions that the basis for the Social Democratic renewal was established that would influence left-wing thought around the world. Brandt maintained an ongoing relationship with Tito in Yugoslavia and other leaders of countries behind the Iron Curtain. He had a particular relationship

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with the Polish government: both Brandt and Mitterrand considered Wojciech Jaruzelski (the former Polish prime minister, 1981–1985) a real patriot, an esteem that led to disputes with the United States, the Vatican, and even within the SI itself. SI leaders visited and were in contact with Moscow on a regular basis, and communication took on several forms, among them those typical of the Cold War era:  messages to ambassadors, secret exchanges, and so on. The Soviets shared a key concern with the SI in its new orientation: opposition to the arms race—even more so after the launch of Ronald Reagan’s controversial project known as “Star Wars.” Brandt’s personal and political leadership style was at odds with the policies of the superpowers at the time. His policies regarding the Cold War were firm but moderate, but this moderation did not meet with unanimous approval within European social democracy. Other traditional SI member parties, by contrast, held very left-wing positions on international politics. This was the case in the Scandinavian countries, which, ideology aside, also had a very active and committed electorate that pushed the parties to the left. The same was true of the French Socialist Party, allied with the Communist Party, and the British Labour Party, which had come under the control of its more radical wing. This radicalization of Europe’s political parties also gave rise to disputes within Latin America’s social democracy. Latin American political parties began to split into “neutralists” and “Atlanticists.” The latter (among them Venezuela’s AD and Costa Rica’s PLN) were opposed to the radicalization among Europe’s Social Democrats—especially where it concerned developments in Central America. In almost all cases, these self-designations (as “neutralist” or “Atlanticist”) depended on whether the party in question was in power or in the opposition. With Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, these problems became more acute, and Brandts’ relations with the AD and the PLN began to show cracks, especially with regard to the Nicaraguan situation. This was also true of the SI’s Salvadoran and Guatemalan allies and, to a lesser extent, of the Grenadians. It is true that Brandt and the SI tried in many ways to put pressure on the Sandinistas, and in a way, the SI deserved the credit for the 1984 elections as well. But even being aware of the progressive radicalization of the Nicaraguan government, the SI never withdrew its public support,34 with the possible exception of the Spanish leader Felipe González.35 The international political climate had changed since 1980, from being receptive to the SI’s project to being hostile toward it. Brandt was aware of this, but there was very little he could do about it.36 There was a lot of pressure on the SI member parties to prioritize

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their primary role (as national parties) over the collective project that had been unfolding from 1976 onward. The key to Brandt’s success at the SI was the creation of an impressive network of leaders from around the world. These were actors who sought, through transnational action, to sidestep the polarization typical of the Cold War, giving their own projects and interests precedence over those of the so-called superpowers.37 For a variety of reasons, these leaders saw the SI (and by extension the entire international environment) as an arena that allowed them to maximize their political power. To this end, the SI organized, from 1976 onward, a steady stream of meetings and gatherings with the aim of strengthening the personal and political ties among political leaders around the world. Brandt had the support of an entire group of extraordinary leaders. But his project was also a personal and individual one. The SI was the stage he used to project his influence beyond Germany and Europe, aided by the economic support of the SPD and, most importantly, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, FES). This tension between collaborative leadership and a markedly personal project produced its share of conflicts.38 Brandt’s idiosyncratic leadership style also brought him up against his second-in-command, Bernt Carlsson. Carlsson was critical of Brandt’s large circle of confidants, which, among others, included Klaus Lindenberg and Hans-Eberhard Dingels. Seeking to maintain his autonomy within the SI, he continuously worked on allying himself with the more left-wing groups within the SI. This, however, did not prevent the German group from forcing his resignation at the 1983 Congress. The radicalization of Europe’s socialist parties also caused the SI president problems. Although Brandt’s leadership remained almost unchallenged, problems arose due to serious differences of opinion with Latin American parties regarding areas of political conflict in the region, namely in Nicaragua, Grenada, and El Salvador. The window of opportunity that had opened in 1976 began to close in 1981, with the beginning of Reagan’s presidency and the “Second Cold War.”39 Starting in 1983, Brandt’s informal network of contacts and allies began to lose some of its members, while others began to take their aspirations and projects elsewhere. There were several reasons for this—internal conflict, death, and people taking on high positions at the national level. As a result, Brandt’s leadership role took on a more individual but no less influential character. This is illustrated by his efforts to bring together and align political actors with the aim of putting an end to the Central American conflict and bringing about democratic regimes

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in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, and, of course, by his active involvement in European politics.

Conclusion Willy Brandt’s relationship with Latin American politics evolved in a way that paralleled the development process of social democracy at an international level. The leaders of the SI had learned from the frustrating experience of the Secretariat (1955–1963) that politics in Latin America required a wide range of approaches in which informal and personal exchange were of utmost importance. The excessive rigidity of social democratic politics in Latin America had been one of the reasons that prevented its political expansion in the region. The network of personal relationships that was built among the leaders of Europe and Latin America within the context of the SI was one of the organization’s most important assets. This network was reinforced when multiple political actors took advantage of the window of opportunity that opened with Brandt’s assumption of the SI presidency. Since 1976, Brandt’s leadership and his personal and political connections had been a key asset in allowing the European social democracy movement to create an extensive network of political leaders and organizations that spread around the world, particularly to Latin America. Many political leaders around the world still did not have much influence in their own country or were forced into inactivity for the simple reason that their country was under dictatorship (especially in Central America). Some leaders in the SI had already reached the end of their political life (such as Kreisky or Haya de la Torre), while others, by contrast, were at the beginning of their political career (Felipe González, Raul Alfonsín, and Mário Soares, among others) and needed international support in order to gain credibility with their electorate, their government, and the international community. When Brandt took organizational control of the SI, this change was also reflected in a new program. The Palme, the Brundtland, and, above all, the North-South Commission were very powerful instruments that generated momentum for new ideas around the world. Previously, the SI had operated on the basis of a number of principles (the welfare state, liberal democracy, anti-communism) that had been immutable for decades and had been touted to other countries as a panacea to be applied even where the state was still a set of weak or even nonexistent institutions.

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The new line also included disarmament, the protection of human rights, support for democracy and the struggle for freedom, condemnation of dictatorship, and protection of the environment. There was also a wide margin for each country to adopt these premises flexibly according to its own needs and agendas. Brandt’s activities as head of the SI had a strong impact in Latin America that can still be felt today. The policies he created and implemented played an important role in the democratization of the region:  they contributed to the moderation of the more radical leftists and provided a certain degree of protection from repression to the democratic opposition forces, thus facilitating their rise to power and aiding in the emergence of new elites whose members would later go on to form governments:  Raúl Alfonsín, Rodrigo Borja, José M. Sanguinetti, and Alan García. He is not responsible for what happened later.

Notes 1 This research was carried out in the historical archive of the SI, located in the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (IISG) in Amsterdam, as well as through several personal interviews. 2 Julius Braunthal, History of the International, vol. 3. World Socialism 1943–1968, trans. Peter Ford and Kenneth Mitchell (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980); Fernando Pedrosa, La otra izquierda. La socialdemocracia europea en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual, 2012). 3 Peter Van Kemseke, Towards an Era of Development. The Globalization of Socialism and Christian Democracy, 1945–1965 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006). 4 Maiztegui, 1992. 5 Fernando Pedrosa, La otra izquierda. La socialdemocracia europea en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual, 2012). 6 Günsche and Lantermann, 1979. 7 The Uruguayan PS broke off relations with the SI in repudiation of the policies of France’s official socialist party in Algeria and Israel. See Felicity Williams, La Internacional Socialista y América Latina: Una visión crítica (Azcapotzalco, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Azcapotzalco, 1984). 8 The mission departed from London and visited New York (March 25–27), Santo Domingo (March 29–April 1), Mexico City (April 1–5), Costa Rica (April 5–10), Venezuela (April 11–14), Ecuador (April 14–18), Peru (April 18–23), Bolivia (April

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Willy Brandt and International Relations 23–26), Chile (April 27–May 2), Argentina (May 2–6), Montevideo (May 6–9), Brazil (Porto Alegre, May 9–11; São Paulo, May 11–14; Brasilia, May 14–16; Rio de Janeiro, May 16–19; and Recife, May 19–22). The members of the mission returned to London on May 24. ARCH01340, Box 712, IISG. Williams, 1984; an excerpt from the circular issued by the SI that was sent to all member parties reads: “The Bureau has decided to intensify its cooperation with the forces of democratic progress in those countries. In consultation with them it will map out a series of measures designed to share experiences in the common fight for social justice. In particular, it was deeply impressed by the clarification which it received from the function which has been, and is still being, performed in the special historical circumstances of Latin America, by the popular parties in so many of the countries which the mission visited. It was gratified not to have the strong impression which the Mission formed of the bonds of interest and aspiration which these popular parties share with the SI and its member parties. In many cases, these parties which aim at achieving the democratic social revolution which is the urgent task of our time, expressed the desire for closer forms of association.” SI Circular no. XXXIII/63 for member parties, ARCH01340, Box 112, IISG. “Germany and Latin America. Official Visits of Foreign Minister Willy Brandt of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany,” published by the Press and Information Department of the Federal Government, October– December 1968, ARCH01340, Box 700, IISG. Tilman Evers, La socialdemocracia Alemana en América Latina. ¿Ofensiva o Huida hacia adelante? (Bogotá: CINEP, 1983). “German politics was not an appendage of Washington but a state with its own interests. Brandt’s trip showed that it was time to seek partners outside of NATO and Europe as well. Other arguments for increasing Germany’s interest in Latin America are based on the increased strength of the German economy. It was not possible to continue advancing as an economic giant and still be a political dwarf.” Heike Pintor Pirzkall, La política de cooperación de Alemania en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Centro Argentino de Estudios Internacionales, 2006), 10. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 32, no. 6 (June 1976), 8. Merkel, 1995. Willy Brandt, Bruno Kreisky, and Olof Palme, Briefe und Gespräche (Frankfurt/ Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1975). Wolfgang Merkel, ¿Final de la socialdemocracia? Recursos de poder y política de gobierno de los partidos socialdemócratas en Europa Occidental, trans. Manuel Ardid Lorés (Valencia: Edicions Alfons El Magnànim, 1995). Willy Brandt, Bruno Kreisky, and Olof Palme, La alternativa socialdemócrata: cartas y coversaciones, trans. Joan-Josep Navarro Arisa (Barcelona: Editorial Blume, 1977). Ibid., 59.

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18 Antonio Muñoz Sanchez, El amigo alemán. El SPD y el PSOE de la dictadura a la democracia (Barcelona: RBA, 2012). 19 Pedrosa, La otra izquierda. 20 Willy Brandt, “Discurso en México,” Nueva Sociedad 18 (1975), 72–4. 21 Raquel Gamus Gallego, Una fugaz convergencia. CAP y la IS en Centroamérica (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1990); Pedrosa, La otra izquierda. 22 The European delegation was unusually high-profile and consisted of Brandt and Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski (Germany), Bernt Carlsson (Sweden), Bruno Kreisky and Walter Hacker (Austria), Willy Claes and André Cools (Belgium), Anker Jørgensen and Ejner Christiansen (Denmark), Felipe González (Spain), Ulpu Tapiola (Finland), Michel Rocard (France), John Silkin (Great Britain), Bettino Craxi (Italy), Reiulf Steen (Norway), Mario Soares, José de Medeiros Ferreira, and Rui Mateus (Portugal), Luís Yáñez, Raúl Morodo, and Eduardo Foncillas (Spain), and Lilian Uchtenhagen (Switzerland). On the Latin American side, the delegation was not less prominent: Ricardo Balbín and Luis León (Argentina), Walter Guevara Arce and Hernán Siles Suazo (Bolivia), Fernando Gasparian and Marcos Freire (Brazil), Fabio Lozano Simonelli (Colombia), Oscar Arias and Luis Alberto Monge (Costa Rica), Carlos Parra, Anselmo Sule, and Aniceto Rodríguez (Chile), Sylvius Rozendal and Ricardo Elhage (Curaçao), Rodrigo Borja (Ecuador), Guillermo Ungo (El Salvador), Alberto Fuentes Mohr (Guatemala), Dudley Thompson (Jamaica), Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, Carlos Sansores Pérez, Enrique Olivares Santana, Manuel González Cosio, Víctor Flores Olea (México), Elpidio Yegros (Paraguay), Víctor Haya de la Torre, Andrés Towsend and Armando Villanueva (Peru), José Francisco Peña Gómez, Jacobo Majluta and Secundino Gil Morales (Dominican Republic), and Carlos Andrés Pérez, Rómulo Betancourt, Gonzalo Barrios, Jaime Lusinchi, and Raúl Leoni (Venezuela). 23 Reunión en Caracas, Mayo 1976. Encuentro de dirigentes políticos de Europa y América Latina en pro de la solidaridad democrática internacional (Caracas: Difusora postal del Libro, 1978). 24 “This contradiction between economic interests and political solidarities has generally been resolved through declarations and offers that are sufficiently vague and uncertain to avoid compromising. But these formal statements have served to encourage some hope in the undeveloped countries and reassure the great international economic interests at stake.” Carlos Andrés Pérez, “Hacia la auténtica liberación del hombre universal,” Nueva Sociedad 24 (1976), 15. 25 Willy Brandt, “Después de Caracas,” Nueva Sociedad 31/32 (1977), 13–18. 26 Hugues Portelli (ed.), L´Internationale Socialiste (Paris: Les Éditions Ouvrières, 1983); Menno Vellinga (ed.), Democracia y política en América Latina (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 1993). 27 “Reunión de Dirigentes políticos de Europa y América en Pro de la Solidaridad Democrática Internacional: Declaración Final”: http://nuso.org/media/articles/ downloads/240_1.pdf (accessed November 8, 2017).

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28 “We must not underestimate the problems that will have to be overcome in the future for the development of this idea. The President of Venezuela, Carlos Andrés Pérez, told us, both in Caracas and in the SI Congress of November 1976 in Geneva, that the representatives of European social democracy have actually come to meet their Latin American colleagues. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of truth in this (statement). On the other hand, we can also assume that our Latin American colleagues could get to know the European social democrats even more deeply and perhaps also understand them better. However I do not lose sight of the fact that the ‘Caracas idea’ is just in its infancy, even though it may be the ‘beginning of great hope,’ which Mario Soares said could ‘make history.’ ” Brandt, “Después de Caracas,” 13. 29 The Dominican leader José F. Peña Gómez stated: “The statement speaks vaguely of future meetings and talks about building a group, but it does not say how the group will be constituted, nor who will convene future meetings and for what purpose. I formally propose that meetings are held within the SI framework.” Reunión, 251. 30 Fernando Pedrosa, “La redefinición de la agenda socialdemócrata entre la crisis del petróleo y el fin del socialismo real (1973–1992),” Buenos Aires: Revista Colección no. 22 (2012), 15–44. 31 Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activistas sin fronteras: redes de defensa en política internacional, trans. Mercedes Córdoba y Magro (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 2000). 32 Hans Wolfgang Singer, “The Brandt Report: A ‘Northwestern’ Point of View,” Third World Quarterly 2, no. 4 (1980), 694–700. 33 Pedrosa, “La redefinición de la agenda socialdemócrata entre la crisis del petróleo y el fin del socialismo real (1973–1992).” 34 Michael S. Greve and Martin Kriele, “Willy Brandt & the Sandinistas: The Neutralization of the SPD,” The National Interest no. 4 (1986), 100–103. 35 Belén Blazquez Vilaplana, La proyección de un líder político: Felipe González y Nicaragua 1978–1996 (Seville: Centro de Estudios Andaluces, 2006). 36 Bernd Rother, “Common Security as a Way to Overcome the (Second) Cold War? Willy Brandt’s Strategy for Peace in the 1980s,” In Visions of the End of the Cold War in Europe (1945–1990), eds Frédéric Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey, N. Piers Ludlow, and Bernd Rother (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 239–52. 37 Fernando Pedrosa, “Políticos sin fronteras. Redes transnacionales, partidos políticos y democratización en América Latina,” Salamanca: América Latina Hoy 73 (2016), 67–86. 38 Guillaume Devin, L’Internationale socialiste. Histoire et sociologie du socialisme international (1945–1990) (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1993); Pedrosa, La otra izquierda. 39 Pedrosa, La otra izquierda.

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From the Iberian Peninsula to Latin America: The Socialist International’s Initiatives in the First Years of Brandt’s Presidency Ana Mónica Fonseca

This meeting is supposed to show political public opinion in Latin America and maybe also the decision makers in North America that democratic Europe follows with growing interest and engagement the challenges faced by the Latin American dictatorships. —Willy Brandt, Lisbon, September 30, 19781 One of Willy Brandt’s concerns when he assumed the presidency of the Socialist International (SI) in the fall of 1976 was its expansion to Asian, African, and Latin American countries. To that end, Brandt, along with other distinguished socialist leaders—Olof Palme, Bernt Carlsson, and Pierre Schori from Sweden; Bruno Kreisky from Austria; Mário Soares, Rui Mateus, and Bernardino Gomes from Portugal; and Felipe González from Spain, among others—developed the so-called Latin America offensive aimed at overcoming the Eurocentrism that Brandt and others had identified in the International.2 The purpose of this chapter is to analyze how these initiatives were viewed in the United States. It is widely recognized that the United States had a particular interest in the region and that the SI played a significant role in the international arena, particularly from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. However, my main concern in this chapter is to analyze how the first steps taken by the SI were viewed from outside the International. The Carter administration (1977–1981) will receive particular attention here, as Washington’s reactions to the initial and most conspicuous steps in this offensive, namely, the several missions to the

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region and the organization of large-scale meetings and conferences in the late 1970s, coincided with the early years of Carter’s presidency.

The Socialist International in the 1970s In the second half of the 1970s, the SI saw a period of growing international influence and relevance. There were several reasons for this:  many of the socialist or social democratic parties that comprised the SI were in government in most Western European countries (the Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Austria, Denmark, Norway), which gave them increased visibility and political relevance. Most importantly, Willy Brandt, one of the most respected and active politicians in Western Europe, was the leader of the wealthiest and most influential social democratic party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The SPD’s material and political resources gave it an unparalleled capacity to actively support its sister parties and the SI itself. Unencumbered by governmental duties (after the Guillaume affair of April–May 1974), the Party chairman was free to increase his activity on the international stage.3 Second, and most importantly, there was a change in the international system that became known as détente. By the end of the 1960s, the bipolar tensions between the United States and the USSR had eased. Détente marked the period of the Cold War during which the United States and the USSR tried to come to an understanding, which led to other powers gaining greater autonomy to develop independent initiatives in international politics.4 The case of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), especially after 1969, when the SPD became the major party in a coalition government, is a major example of this autonomy.5 In fact, this was a period of superpower retrenchment. The growing criticism of US politics—in Vietnam, but also domestically, namely, with regard to the Civil Rights Movement and social unrest—weakened Washington, and the Chilean intervention and the Watergate scandal strained transatlantic relations even further.6 At the same time, the growing international influence of the Federal Republic and, most notably, the international role of the elder statesman Brandt highlighted the growing influence of the Western European countries and their leaderships even more. The democratic transitions on the Iberian Peninsula are among the best examples of this shift in the Western Bloc’s international influence and illustrate the Western European countries’ vanguard role in supporting and

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strengthening the democratic forces (the Portuguese Socialist Party of Mário Soares and the Socialist Workers’ Party of Felipe González in Spain).7 The crisis in Southern Europe following the Portuguese Carnation Revolution in April 1974 created the ideal opportunity for the development of the FRG’s leading role in support of democratic forces. Indeed, the SPD was the only Western European party that had substantial knowledge about the Portuguese socialists’ objectives and program, having been responsible for the establishment of the Portuguese Socialist Party (PS) in Bonn in 1973.8 Intense fighting between the democratic forces (viz. the Socialist Party) and the extreme left characterized the political process that began on April 25, 1974, after the Portuguese revolution. During the almost two years of democratic transition in Portugal, there was constant and vital exchange between Western Europe’s social democratic parties (and governments) and the Socialist Party of Mário Soares. Meanwhile, the Eastern Bloc, and especially the Soviet Union and the GDR, strongly supported the communists and a number of other extreme left-wing forces in Portugal.9 Western engagement was particularly strong from the Federal Republic of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, headed by Willy Brandt. This was even more relevant bearing in mind that Washington’s first reaction to the events in Lisbon (and the political radicalization that ensued) was to isolate Portugal and “leave it to the communists.”10 It was not until the spring of 1975 that the United States began to follow the Western European— more correctly, West German—strategy of engagement with the democratic forces, including Soares and his Socialist Party.11 The SPD, taking advantage of the resources of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and skillfully appealing to the government of Helmut Schmidt, developed a comprehensive support strategy for the socialists. This involved financial support, for example, through assistance for office supplies and cars in support of the party infrastructure, or even through paying the salaries of a number of party cadres. Also, Friedrich Ebert Foundation experts provided important organizational input, namely, on how to organize the party structure and on what was necessary to run a successful election campaign. This political and moral support was particularly welcome at a time of growing tension.12 Finally— and this was probably the most important element of the strategy of engagement with the Portuguese democratization process—there was the mobilization of Europe’s socialist and social democratic parties through the SI. This resulted in growing material support for the PS, but it also reinforced the visibility of the party’s international connections, mostly with the Scandinavian and other

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northern European countries, which just a few months ago had seemed so far from Lisbon.13 All these levels of action give a general picture of the concerted strategy behind the support of the SI’s member parties for the democratization of Portugal. The combination of efforts gave the case of Portugal an added international dimension that made it a genuine threat to the détente process. Brandt himself was at pains to explain his position both in Washington and in Moscow. In the United States, he and his fellow SPD members (particularly Chancellor Schmidt) focused on making it clear that Western Europe’s Social Democratic parties would not accept any type of military intervention “à la Chile” and strongly advocated unconditional support for Soares14; in Moscow, Brandt personally told Brezhnev that a communist takeover in Lisbon would endanger the whole process of détente—after all, the signing of the Helsinki Final Act coincided precisely with the Portuguese “Hot Summer” (July/August 1975). As we all know, Portugal would eventually, in spite of the political radicalization, become a pluralist and representative democracy, with the first constitutional government being headed by none other than Mário Soares.15 In Spain, the transition, which began later but had been expected by the international community, unfolded differently.16 It was neither made by revolutionary means nor radicalized as the one in Portugal. Instead, it was a transicion pactada, meaning that there was an agreement between almost all political forces to come to an understanding that would allow the establishment of a democratic regime.17 This was going to take time, and the democratic constitution was not approved until December 1978. Still, the Spanish example was very important as well, and it clearly reflected the lessons learned in Portugal. Because of the revolutionary nature of Portugal’s transition process, all eyes were on Spain when the time of the transition approached.18 Franco’s chosen successor, Prince Juan Carlos, had already assured the European leaders that he would attempt to liberalize and democratize the regime—the question was merely how long it would take and at what pace it could be done. To avoid a reprise of political radicalization in the Iberian Peninsula, the socialist and social democratic parties of Western Europe—once again under the leadership of Brandt and the SPD (not to forget the enormous material support given by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation)—set out to create the conditions necessary for the existence of a progressive party that would be a feasible alternative to the communists, both to voters and to the political authorities in charge of the regime transition.19 In this aspect, the newly elected PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español) Secretary-General Felipe González

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seemed like the ideal man to be supported by the SPD and the other European Social Democratic forces. Indeed, it was in Lisbon, in October 1974, that González met Brandt for the first time, an encounter that marked the almost immediate beginning of a very close and fruitful relationship. González transformed the PSOE into a balanced, pro-European party with a clear and astute strategy that entailed the cautious development of close relationships with the other socialist groups (which were scattered across Spain’s political landscape) and thus forced the government to negotiate with the opposition.20 Once again, the support the PSOE received from its West German and Western European sister parties had the desired effect: becoming head of government only in 1982 (largely due to the internal workings of the democratic transition process), Felipe González was a respected and internationally recognized political leader well before that time. With this in mind, we can say that the Iberian democratization processes had two main ramifications for the SI’s future strategy: first, the transition processes in Portugal and Spain could serve as examples of successful regime change processes, both countries having transformed themselves from right-wing authoritarian states into pluralist democracies. Here were two cases of democratic, moderate left forces emerging as winners, having overcome not only authoritarian resistance but also strong communist forces.21 A  second, very important consequence, especially with regard to Latin America, was that the Iberian democratization process gave the SI the leading figures for its missions. Both Soares and González were respected and recognized internationally and would make good use of the historical, linguistic, and cultural connections between the Iberian and the Latin American countries. As Willy Brandt said in his opening remarks at the Latin America Conference in Lisbon in September 1978, there were “already useful experiences in Latin Europe which will hopefully give grounds for hope for Latin America.”22 There was clearly an idea that the Iberian experience was to play a crucial role in the expansion of the SI’s strategy to Latin America.

The Carter presidency and the emergence of a new rhetoric in US foreign policy The United States’ international position changed fundamentally in the second half of the 1970s. The election of Jimmy Carter in November 1976, who took office in January of the following year, brought with it a complete change in the way the United States was expected to position itself within the international system. With Carter’s human rights policy, a new paradigm emerged in US foreign policy.

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Carter’s foreign policy was based on two interconnected tenets. First, he saw the internal affairs of states as “a legitimate concern in crafting US foreign policy.” He assumed that “applying pressure for reform abroad would ultimately reinforce stability more effectively than the old ‘Kissingerian’ approach.”23 As Carter wrote in his memoirs, he strongly believed that it was in the United States’ best interest to push governments to adopt reformist policies that would eventually “remove the reasons for revolutions that often erupt among those who suffer persecution.”24 Second, Jimmy Carter set out to demonstrate that in contrast to his predecessors, he no longer regarded the Cold War as “the only lens . . . through which to view global challenges.”25 In fact, rather than ignoring or rejecting the Cold War, he was “waging a more complex, preemptive and diffuse Cold War.”26 In consequence, he developed a foreign policy that was based on values and principles, realizing that “conflict in the global periphery might stem from causes other than Moscow’s machinations”—and once again, this assumption was a clear departure from the position of previous US governments. As Nancy Mitchell puts it, Carter “believed in patient diplomacy and in the dramatic gesture; he saw beyond the Cold War and he was a firm Cold Warrior.”27 Consequently, his foreign policy was based on “the new global questions of justice, equity, and human rights,” which could no longer be separated from the “traditional issues of war and peace.” In the same speech, Carter stated his belief in a foreign policy that was “based on fundamental values, and that uses power and influence . . . for humane purposes” while at the same time being one that “the American people both support and, for a change, know about and understand.”28 One of the regions where this change was most evident was Latin America. In fact, Jimmy Carter adopted a different approach to this part of the world than his predecessors had. Combining the rhetoric of a human rights defender with the presidential stance of trying to serve US interests to the best of his ability, Carter reached important moments in the early days of his presidency, but nonetheless left a sense of incompletion.29

Washington’s views on the Socialist International’s activities in Latin America During the same period, the SI’s international influence was growing. Not only was its leadership comprised of some of the most influential and recognized political figures in Western Europe, it had also gained significant momentum

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with the outcome of the democratization processes in the Iberian countries, especially in Portugal. It was now a demonstrable fact that it was possible to have a leftist, but noncommunist alternative in a regime change scenario. One of the regions where the SI now increased its engagement was Latin America. There are several reasons for this, some of which are laid out in Fernando Pedrosa’s contribution to this volume, but one very important aspect should be pointed out here. There was a general feeling that the region was “the most ‘European’ part of the Third World, with institutions, cultural values, and political problems similar to those that [had] confronted Southern European countries” not long ago. This created expectations for “greater possibilities for dialogue and understanding.” At the same time, there was, from the Latin American side, greater openness than ever before to further contact with Western European partners, who represented an alternative to US influence in the region and whose engagement was, moreover, indicative of the shift in the international system. Also, Western Europe’s Social Democratic parties regarded Latin America as a region with “well-organized parties”—an additional incentive to establish closer ties. And last, there was an economic aspect that should not go unremarked: Latin America constituted an extremely attractive market for European exports, while at the same time (especially in the wake of the oil crisis of 1973) emerging as an important source of natural resources.30 There had been some contact and a growing interest in Latin America on the part of the SI since the 1950s.31 This growing attention toward the South American continent gained momentum with the SI’s Caracas Conference in May 1976. Marking the beginning of intensifying relations between the SI and several Latin American political organizations, the Caracas Conference was the first SI meeting outside Europe. To the State Department officials in the United States, the conference was a clear signal that the International—which had begun working with the Acción Democratica (AD) from Venezuela, one of the strongest democratic parties in the region—was beginning to go beyond its Eurocentric reach.32 American observers also noted the attendance of the SI’s main leaders, making particular note of the presence of Brandt, Kreisky, Soares, and González—in fact, some reported that “the only thing the delegates found to cheer was the restoration of political rights in Portugal and Spain.”33 With its impact and symbolic significance, the Caracas meeting marked the beginning of the SI devoting increased attention to Latin American issues, a fact that was always recognized by its leaders.34 The Caracas meeting marked the SI’s starting point in its strategic effort to overcome the Eurocentrism that Brandt considered the organization’s major

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weakness—especially considering the role it was supposed to play in international development. In order to achieve this goal, three major missions were organized in 1977 and 1978: a delegation headed by Olof Palme visited southern Africa; the Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky went to the Middle East; and Mario Soares headed an SI mission to Latin America in March 1978. There were other meetings of SI bodies in Asia (the 1977 leaders’ conference took place in Tokyo) and Africa, and in 1978, the SI Congress met in Vancouver, Canada. The mission to Latin America of March 1978 that was headed by Soares had been proposed at the SI’s Bureau meeting convened in Rome at the beginning of June 1977. It had been the seminal leader José Peña Gomez from the Dominican Revolutionary Party who had called for such a mission, pointing “to the spread of dictatorships in Latin America in the recent years” and asserting that “the mission was necessary because of the support which it would give to democratic political parties” in the region.35 The mission, which visited Mexico, Costa Rica, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica, took place between March 15 and March 25, 1978. It had been conceived mainly as a goodwill and factfinding mission; its purpose was not to “give any solutions or instructions” to partner parties. Rather, it was designed to deepen knowledge on both sides and to further the development of contacts and networks among representatives of like-minded parties in Europe and Latin America. And of course, beyond these general goals, there was the objective of showing “active solidarity with the people and similar parties living under dictatorship and underdevelopment.”36 In its main recommendations, the mission pointed out that there was an increasing need for deeper knowledge of and engagement with the problems of the region. There was a growing openness on the part of Latin America’s democratic parties to receiving support from the SI, but they also needed greater flexibility in finding their own solutions to some of their problems. Of the concrete proposals presented in the mission report, one that should be mentioned was an urgent call to the democratic socialist parties in the SI to take a clear and cohesive stance in defense of human rights and against dictatorship and to lend their support particularly to those parties with similar ideological positions that were fighting dictatorial regimes. This support would be even more relevant in scenarios where there was electoral competition, which was the case in several Latin American countries during this period—the Latin America Committee would play a crucial role in this respect, and the mission report recommended that the Committee’s action be “initiated immediately.” The extension of SI membership to more parties in Latin America was also seen as a very positive step, as the rising number of applications indicated.37

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Soares was traveling in his capacity as vice president of the SI rather than as the Portuguese prime minister. However, there were moments when these roles were not clearly distinguished, and at times Soares found himself being used in unwelcome ways. One such situation occurred during the mission’s visit to Santo Domingo: Joaquín Balaguer, the authoritarian president of the Dominican Republic, decided to ignore Soares’ critical stance toward his regime and received the Portuguese socialist with a “Dominican army’s honor guard battalion, and a 21-gun salute for the Portuguese ‘chief of state’ ”—which left Soares and his political friends, the opposition Dominican Revolutionary Party,38 “disconcerted.” While there, Soares made an appearance in the election campaign and had a long meeting with the leadership of the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD)—the main item on his agenda for the visit—“all broadcast live on TV.” In the opinion of the US Embassy in Santo Domingo, Soares could not “escape [the] basic contradiction of his visit”: to show “support and solidarity” with the PRD without intervening in the internal affairs of the country. But the same report also stated that the visit had been a great success with regard to its main objectives:  the PRD had clearly demonstrated not only that it had important international contacts but, most importantly, that it played “in the same league as European democrats and not with communists.”39 The mission had been a success and had received huge international exposure. However, the European parties needed to demonstrate their interest in Latin America more strongly—and they needed to explore the readiness of their potential sister parties to move closer to the SI. To this end, and following a proposal by Mário Soares, the Portuguese socialists organized an international conference to take place in Lisbon that was conceived as the European answer to the Caracas Conference. Having received immediate assurance of support from Willy Brandt—according to Brandt’s chief of staff and former Friedrich Ebert Foundation representative in Venezuela, Klaus Lindenberg40—Soares decided to convene the first meeting of Latin American and European representatives of democratic socialism in Europe. The conference took place from September 30 to October 2, 1978, in Estoril (Lisbon) and brought together representatives from twenty-eight countries. In preparation for the Estoril Conference, a mission to the countries that had not been visited by Soares was organized. This mission was going to be more discreet and comprise of only two members: Klaus Lindenberg, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation representative in Venezuela; and Bernardino Gomes, a close aide to Mário Soares in the Socialist Party. Between August 18 and September 14, 1978, the two men visited eight countries: Venezuela, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay,

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Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, meeting with representatives of different political forces. There were no press and no grand receptions. The mission was financed and organized by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. This was a pivotal moment in the project of investigating the situation in Latin America and planning the further development of the SI’s activities in the region. It was also important to gain a clearer idea of which party in each respective country was best suited to becoming a partner party (especially if there were several political forces that professed to be close to social democratic values).41 The Estoril Conference brought together more than forty party representatives and had a major impact, both on public opinion and on the international stature of the PS and Mário Soares. It was a very important step toward the SI’s launch of the Latin America offensive. The Lisbon Declaration, approved at the end of the conference and later adopted by the SI congress in Vancouver, became the SI’s official document on Latin America for the period. The declaration stated that the conference’s main goal was to bring together parties and political forces that shared the principles of “liberty, democracy and social progress.” In addition, the Iberian countries—which were regarded as being midway in their development between Latin America and the highly developed European countries by their sister parties—were presented as shiny beacons of success that the progressive forces of Latin America were encouraged to follow. Both the examples of Portugal and Spain showed that it was possible for progressive forces to prevail and to defeat dictatorship of any kind, be it right- or left-wing, and the Latin Americans were supposed to take their cue from this. And last, the Lisbon Declaration called for more active and determined support on the part of European and North American parties and governments for the democratic forces in the region to help them in their fight against authoritarian regimes and promote democratization.42 The conference was a huge success. As the US ambassador to Lisbon reported back to the State Department, the “conference strengthened socialist international links with Latin America, and the International’s European members emerged with a greater understanding of Latin American complexities.” The organization of meetings such as the Estoril Conference and the development of personal contacts between European and Latin American political actors were part of the strategy developed by the SI to foster and assist democracy in the region.43 Nonetheless, despite being invited to send a representative to the opening session of the conference, the Carter administration decided to decline the invitation. The arguments, as presented by the embassy, were twofold: first, the presence of a US representative could be construed as implying a “special US relationship

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with the Socialist International,” which was undesirable. Second, it might fuel suspicions in Portugal that the Socialist Party and Mário Soares had “a privileged relation with Washington,” which would have unwelcome implications for Portugal domestically. Consequently, there would be no official US government representative present, despite the significant attention the embassy paid to the event.44

Final remarks According to a RAND report, Washington’s initiatives on Latin America should be rooted “in the belief that the region’s independence and security was in the national interest of the US.”45 In this respect, Carter’s political and humanist rhetoric did resonate with the Western European Socialist leaders, namely, with men like Brandt, Soares, and Palme, who presumed that the new US stance would facilitate and aid their own plans regarding Latin America, reinforcing the opportunity for the democratization of the southern part of the American continent.46 With this in mind, the Western European leaders came to the conclusion that the United States should be included in their own efforts to approach the Latin American pro-democratic forces. At events like the Estoril Conference, the US ambassador was invited to sit at the head table for dinner, which he interpreted as an obvious attempt on the part of Soares to demonstrate that the United States supported the SI’s Latin American initiatives. However, and keeping in mind that “with a few exceptions,” most of the representatives were from the democratic left, this “play of the socialists was probably in the US interest as well.”47 Still, there was always a palpable distrust of the SI’s real intentions, as was confirmed to me both by Klaus Lindenberg, Brandt’s chief of office at the SI and former Friedrich Ebert Foundation representative in Venezuela, and by Zbigniew Brezinski, Carter’s national security advisor.48 Nevertheless, the United States recognized that its influence and prestige in the region had diminished and that its policies were frequently ignored by its counterparts.49 The reasons ascribed to this development were manifold:  “the decline of the US economic and military assistance, the growing capabilities of the Latin American governments, the emergence of regional powers and the perceptions of the new political elites contribute for this diminished influence and tarnished image.” And there was another element that added to the United States’ diminishing influence:  “the increased presence of non-hemispheric

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nations” on the American continent, a clear reference to the SI’s activities in the region.50 So while a new Latin American strategy was being devised in Washington, there was a new, competing strategy by Western Europe’s social democratic parties. Despite the differences between Jimmy Carter and his predecessors, his administration was not strong, nor did it have the necessary tools to bring about a real change in the way the United States was perceived on the southern part of the continent. The Western European socialist parties, by contrast, showed up with a bit of solidarity, political recognition that was above suspicion of colonialism, and a lot of material assistance, all of which was enormously attractive.

Notes

1

2

3 4

5

The research presented in this chapter is the result of a project coordinated by Bernardino Gomes, passed away in 2016, and me and is titled “The United States, Europe and the Democratization of Latin America,” developed at the Portuguese Institute for International Relations (IPRI-NOVA) and funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Foundation for Luso-American Development (FLAD). “Esta reunião deverá mostrar à opinião pública política latino-americana e, talvez também aos responsáveis na América do Norte, que a Europa democrática acompanha, com interesse e empenho crescentes, os desafios que vêm enfrentando as ditaduras latino-americanas.” Willy Brandt’s speech at the opening session of the Estoril Conference, September 30, 1978. Partido Socialista Português, ed., Processos de Democratização na Península Ibérica e na América Latina. Conferência de Lisboa, 30 de Setembro a 02 de Outubro de 1978 (Lisbon: Partido Socialista, 1979), 42. Bernd Rother and Wolfgang Schmidt, “Einleitung,” in Willy Brandt, Über Europa hinaus. Dritte Welt und Sozialistische Internationale, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 8, eds Bernd Rother and Wolfgang Schmidt (Bonn: Dietz, 2006), 25–6. Ibid. Matthew Evangelista, “Transnational Organizations and the Cold War,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3: Endings, eds Melvyn Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 400–21. Giovanni Bernardini, “Forced to Cooperate: the Brandt Government and the Nixon Administration on the Road to Helsinki,” in Perforating the Iron Curtain. European Détente, Transatlantic Relations and the Cold War, 1965–1985, eds Odd Arne Westad and Poul Villaume (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010), 79–100. See also Werner Link, “Ostpolitik: Détente German-Style and Adapting to America,” in The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–1990. A Handbook,

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7

8

9 10 11

12

13 14 15

16 17

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Volume 2, 1968–1990, ed. Detlef Junker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 33–9. Mario del Pero, “ ‘Which Chile, Allende?’ Henry Kissinger and the Portuguese Revolution,” Cold War History 11, no. 4 (2011), 625–57. See also Carlos Gaspar, “International Dimensions of the Portuguese Transition,” in The Transition to Democracy in Spain, Portugal and Greece: Thirty Years After, ed. Marietta Minotou (Athens: Konstantinos G. Karamanlis Foundation, 2006), 121–42. Ana Monica Fonseca, “ ‘É Preciso Regar os Cravos!’ A Social-Democracia alemã e a transição para a Democracia em Portugal (1974–1976)” (PhD diss. in Modern and Contemporary History, ISCTE-University Institute Lisbon, 2011). Ana Monica Fonseca, “The Federal Republic of Germany and the Portuguese Transition to Democracy (1974–1976),” Journal of European Integration History 15, no. 1 (2009), 35–56. Tilo Wagner, “Portugal e a RDA durante a ‘Revolução dos Cravos,’ ” Relações Internacionais 11 (2006), 79–89. This was Kissinger’s famous inoculation theory. Tiago Moreira de Sá and Bernardino Gomes, Carlucci versus Kissinger: The US and the Portuguese Revolution (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011); Fonseca, PhD diss. Kissinger famously proclaimed Soares to be the new Kerensky. Fonseca, PhD diss. See also Patrik von zur Mühlen, Die internationale Arbeit der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des Ost-West-Konflikts (Bonn: Dietz, 2007); and Jens-Ulrich Poppen, Soft Power Politics: The Role of Political Foundations in Germany’s Foreign Policy towards Regime Change in Spain, Portugal and South Africa 1974–1994 (PhD diss., London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2006). Fonseca, PhD diss. Del Pero, “ ‘Which Chile, Allende?’ ” David Castaño, “ ‘A Practical Test in the Détente’: International Support for the Socialist Party in the Portuguese Revolution (1974–1975),” Cold War History 15, no. 1 (2015), 1–26. See, for example, Charles Powell, El Amigo Americano. España y Estados Unidos: de la dictadura a la democracia (Madrid: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2011). Much has been written on the different types of democratic transitions, but the best reference remains the seminal work by Philippe C. Schmitter, “An Introduction to Southern European Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey,” in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, eds Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 3–10. Antonio Muñoz Sanchéz, El amigo alemán. El SPD y el PSOE de la dictadura a la democracia (Barcelona: RBA, 2012).

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19 Antonio Muñoz Sánchez, “The Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the Spanish Socialists during the Transition to Democracy, 1975–1982,” Contemporary European History 25, no. 1 (2016), 143–62. 20 Antonio Muñoz Sanchez, “Aportación al estudio de la influencia de los factores internacionales en la transición democrática española: la política de la RFA hacia la península Ibérica en los años setenta,” Memorana, no. 3 (1998), 55–67. 21 Fonseca, “The Federal Republic of Germany and the Portuguese Transition to Democracy (1974–1976),” 35–56. 22 “Há experiências úteis na Europa-Latina, das quais esperamos que elas constituam motivos de esperanças para a América Latina.” Willy Brandt, “Sessão de Abertura da Conferência do Estoril,” in Processos de Democratização na Península Ibérica e na América Latina, Partido Socialista, 42; emphases in the original. 23 Mark Atwood Lawrence, “Containing Globalism. The United States and the Developing World in the 1970s,” in The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, eds Niall Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 205–19. 24 Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: The Memoirs of a President (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 143, quoted after Lawrence, “Containing Globalism,” 213. 25 Lawrence, “Containing Globalism,” 214. 26 Nancy Mitchell, “The Cold War and Jimmy Carter,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3: Endings, eds Melvyn Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 66–88. 27 Mitchell, “The Cold War and Jimmy Carter,” 69; emphases in the original. 28 Jimmy Carter, Commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame, May 22, 1977, Public Papers of Presidents of the US, accessed March 17, 2017: http://www. presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=7552. 29 Mitchell, “The Cold War and Jimmy Carter.” 30 Eusebio Mujal-León, European Socialism and the Conflict in Central America (Washington, DC: CSIS, 1989), 19–21. 31 Fernando Pedrosa, La otra izquierda. La socialdemocracia europea en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual, S.A., 2012). See also Pedrosa’s chapter in this volume. 32 US Embassy in Caracas to State Department, telegram, May 17, 1976, 1976CARACA05565: https://aad.archives.gov/. 33 “European Socialists and Latins hold a ‘solidarity’ conference,” New York Times, May 24, 1976. 34 Rother and Schmidt, “Einleitung.” 35 Notes on the Bureau’s meeting in Rome on June 2–3, 1977, June 24, 1977, 1/ WBASI00003, Willy-Brandt-Archiv at the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn.

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36 “Informe de la misión de la Internacional Socialista a la América Latina,” March 15 to 25, 1978, 1127, SI Archive, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. 37 Ibid. 38 Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD). 39 US Embassy in Santo Domingo to State Department, telegram, March 21, 1978: https://aad.archives.gov/. 40 Author’s interview with Klaus Lindenberg, April 2014, Bonn. 41 Author’s interview with Bernardino Gomes, July 2014, Lisbon. 42 Lisbon Declaration, October 3, 1978, in Processos de Democratização na Península Ibérica e na América Latina. 43 US Embassy in Lisbon to State Department, telegram, October 6, 1978: https://aad. archives.gov/. 44 US Embassy in Lisbon to State Department, telegram, July 21, 1978, and State Department to Lisbon, telegram, August 8, 1978: https://aad.archives.gov/. 45 Arturo Gándara and Caesar Sereseres, US-Latin American Relations under the Carter Administration (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, June 1980). 46 This was openly acknowledged by Soares in his opening remarks at the Estoril Conference, where he alluded to the support President Carter gave to the defense of human rights. Soares, “Opening Session,” in Processos de Democratização na Península Ibérica e na América Latina, 15. 47 US Embassy in Lisbon to State Department, telegram, October 6, 1978: https://aad. archives.gov/. 48 Conversation with Zbigniew Brzezinski in Washington, January 21, 2015. 49 Robert Pastor, The Carter Administration and Latin America: A Test of Principle (Atlanta: The Carter Center of Emory University, 1992): https://www.cartercenter. org/documents/1243.pdf. 50 Gándara and Sereseres, US-Latin American Relations under the Carter Administration, 10–11.

11

Cooperation between the European and Latin American Moderate Left in the 1970s and 1980s Bernd Rother

Volume 8 of Willy Brandt’s selected works is titled “Beyond Europe.”1 With this Brandt quotation, the volume’s editors tried to capture the essence of his political thinking as president of the Socialist International (SI) and chairman of the North-South Commission in the 1970s and 1980s. This part of Brandt’s political activities is either overlooked completely or relegated to a very few pages in all the biographies published to this day. In choosing “Beyond Europe” as the title, the editors (among them the author of this chapter) emphasized how important global politics was during the last two decades of Brandt’s life—to him and in international politics in general. But in some respects, the title is misleading, as later archival research showed. Latin American center-left forces did not play the role of passive actors that were discovered by European democratic socialists. Latin American (and Caribbean) political leaders from various countries had developed their own agenda to expand beyond their subcontinent—parallel to and independent from the Europeans. There is one major obstacle to giving a balanced account of the period: the stark asymmetry in written records that have been produced and preserved. European party officials wrote more memoranda and preserved their documents better than the Latin Americans did. Even among the Europeans, there are significant differences:  at the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) archives in Bonn, scholars are confronted with thousands of shelf meters, whereas the archives of the Austrian or the Italian socialists contain much less material. In Latin America, only a few party archives seem to exist, and they are usually closed to scholars.

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The Caracas meeting, 1976 As early as September 1972, Willy Brandt, disappointed by the lack of political initiatives coming from the SI, proposed to the Austrian and Swedish party chairmen and heads of government, Bruno Kreisky and Olof Palme, convening joint conferences of European social democrats and like-minded (not necessarily social democratic) forces in the Americas, Africa, and Asia.2 But no practical result is recorded. The breakthrough came with Willy Brandt’s visit to Mexico in late March 1975 (a return visit to President Luis Echeverría, who had visited Bonn when Brandt was chancellor), but it was not the German who took the initiative. He was received with full honors, and for the first time ever, a Mexican president came to the airport to welcome a guest who was not a head of state or government. Echeverría’s motives were manifold. He hoped to overcome German resistance to his proposal for a New International Economic Order (NIEO); the Federal Republic had been one of the few countries to vote against it at the United Nations General Assembly. Mexico’s president also intended to increase his country’s foreign policy leeway. Breaking with the decades-long tradition of not cooperating formally with non-Mexican parties, he announced that the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) would establish formal relations with the SPD. The PRI Chairman Jesús Reyes claimed that there were similarities between his party’s ideology and the Godesberg Program. And last but not least, Echeverría, whose public image still suffered from his responsibility for the brutal repression of student protests in the run-up to the 1968 Olympic Games, was secretly working toward getting awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his NIEO initiative. What better move than to gain the friendship of a statesman who already had been awarded this prize and who was on good terms with Norwegian politicians in charge of the decision?3 By coincidence, Willy Brandt stayed in Mexico at the same time as Venezuela’s center-left president Carlos Andrés Pérez, in office for twelve months. Pérez was eager to reduce his country’s dependency on the United States and to turn Venezuela, whose revenue had tripled since the rise of petroleum prices in 1973, into a leading force among the nonaligned and Third World states and to become one of their spokespeople himself.4 Both Latin American leaders showed an interest not only in Third World issues. In a joint meeting with Brandt, Echeverría and Pérez expressed their concerns over recent developments in Portugal, where the radical left seemed to gain the upper hand. They promised Brandt that they would pass their concerns on to Moscow.5 This was quite novel. Very rarely had Latin Americans “interfered” in European affairs; Mexico’s help for the Spanish

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Republic during the Civil War had been the last major commitment in this vein. In the following months, Venezuela showed an increasing interest in what was going on in Portugal, which in the summer and fall of 1975 was on the verge of a showdown between the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. In September and October 1975, Venezuelan emissaries reiterated their commitment. Caracas declared its willingness to accept several thousand Portuguese refugees from Angola.6 Venezuela’s president asked Brandt to make a detour to visit the country, where he was supposed to deliver a speech to the National Assembly. He also proposed organizing a gathering, to take place in Caracas, of two or three European Social Democratic leaders and a few like-minded leaders of Latin American parties. This had been, as he stressed in an interview years later, the main reason for inviting Brandt. Back in Germany, in a meeting with Palme and Kreisky in late May 1975, the SPD chairman put forward the idea of establishing a dialogue with parties from outside Europe, but neither did he go into detail nor did Kreisky and Palme show any enthusiasm.7 The latter and Anker Jørgensen, the prime minister of Denmark, paid visits to Venezuela in 1975, thus further contributing to strengthening the bonds with European Social Democracy, as Pérez emphasized looking back in an interview.8 Venezuela also approached the French socialists.9 In Europe, the SPD took the lead. To signal the party’s growing interest in becoming an active international player (with Brandt as the driving force), the regular party conference in November 1975 was transformed into the biggest international event the SPD had ever organized. Two hundred delegates from thirty-eight countries attended, among them four Latin American countries (Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Venezuela). In his closing speech, Brandt announced his party’s intention to help create an “Alliance for Peace and Social Justice” with like-minded non-European parties.10 The new organization was not supposed to replace the SI, but Brandt intended to restrict the International to its traditional domain of Europe. The SPD issued a brochure with the main speeches and resolutions in English, French, and Spanish; the Mexican PRI published the speech that the head of its delegation had delivered to the party conference.11 In late January 1976, Willy Brandt wrote a letter to President Pérez and the chairman of the ruling party Acción Democrática (AD), Gonzalo Barrios, reminding them of what had been agreed in May. Within a few days, an AD delegation traveled to Bonn to arrange the organizational details for the conference to be held in Caracas in May 1976.12 The Venezuelans, at this time without formal links with the SI, took on the task of selecting the Latin American participants. Costa Rica’s Partido Liberación Nacional, an SI “observer” (one

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level below full membership); Jamaica’s People’s National Party, a long-standing SI member; and Mexico’s PRI, also without formal links with the SI, were to join the AD as conveners. With regard to Europe, the chairmen of all social democratic parties as well as the social democratic heads of government were to receive an invitation from the AD. A  smaller contingent of the European participants was to be invited by the Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN) and by the PRI for talks in their respective countries after the end of the Caracas Conference. The AD also went along with the SPD’s idea of inviting some representatives from Africa and Asia to pave the way for subsequent conferences with parties from these continents, but neither the invitations nor the follow-up conferences materialized.13 To sum up: Venezuela took the initiative, the SPD embraced it and reminded the AD a few months later that the time had come to act on it, and the AD and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) offshoot Instituto Latinoamericano de Investigaciones Sociales (ILDIS) in Caracas, headed by Klaus Lindenberg, finally put the plans into action. A few weeks before the Caracas meeting, the FES and the PLN Costa Rica held a seminar titled “Problems of Organization and Training in Social Democratic Parties.” It started on April 4, 1976, at CEDAL (the Latin American Center for Democratic Studies) near San José/Costa Rica, established in 1968 by the FES and the PLN. The choice of venue was in itself a programmatic statement: since 1948, Costa Rica had been the most firmly entrenched democracy in Latin America, not least—as its proponents repeated time and again—because it had abolished the armed forces. It was the social democratic alternative to Cuba.14 In addition to the host party, the participating parties were the PR Chile (an SI member and, until the 1973 coup, part of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular), Jamaica’s and Venezuela’s governing parties (the People’s National Party [PNP] and AD respectively), the Dominican Republic’s main opposition party PRD (not yet an SI member), two small parties from Central America (the Frente Unido de la Revolución [FUR] Guatemala and the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario [MNR] El Salvador), and, last but not least and as an observer only, Mexico’s all-powerful PRI. Despite the seminar’s title, this was not a meeting of purely Social Democratic parties, and the organizers acknowledged this on page one of the seminar’s proceedings, adding “or similar” to “Social Democratic parties.”15 Germany’s SPD was the sole European party to be represented (accompanied by FES officials from Bonn). The conference’s aims were: 1. To analyze the organizational problems and the formation of social democratic parties in Latin America.

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2. To define the strategies and tactics to overcome the problems detected. 3. To encourage mutual information dealing with related political parties. 4. To pave the way for a closer communication and cooperation among the parties invited to this seminar.16 This was another step toward building a social democratic alternative to the Cuban model and to the military-oligarchic rule in so many Latin American countries. The Caracas meeting started on May 22 and ended on May 25. The conference was attended by thirteen European and fifteen Latin American parties. Prominent delegates from Europe were Willy Brandt, Bruno Kreisky, Anker Jørgensen, and Mário Soares. “Never before had there been a ‘summit’ of this kind of forces of the European and the non-European Left.”17 Ideologically, the Latin American participants were rather heterogeneous. Left-wing socialists like Jamaica’s PNP and national reformists like Venezuela’s AD or the Mexican PRI had little in common, certainly lesser than the Europeans, despite the much-talked-about but quite artificial controversy between northern Social Democrats and southern socialists. In his speech, Felipe González observed a total lack of European knowledge about Latin America and different cultures of political rhetoric: according to him, Latin Americans were liable to speak with emphasis and anger, Europeans calmly and serenely. The Europeans had already solved major social problems like housing, education, and welfare, and this was the reason for their different rhetoric, the Spanish socialist leader argued.18 It is beside the point whether this is a convincing explanation; what matters is that González openly addressed the different political cultures. They were a major impediment to overcome before joint political action could be possible. We will encounter this issue again. The final “Caracas Declaration”19 mentioned neither “social democracy” as a political movement (“social democracia” in Spanish) nor socialism, and “social democracy” (“democracia social”) as a set of ideas was mentioned only twice. The meeting was not defined as one of parties but as one of political leaders who had compared their experiences and programs and found certain common principles. A  looser alliance is difficult to imagine. The declaration followed the lines of Willy Brandt’s speech at the conference and can thus be described as taking up the political values of the SPD’s 1959 Godesberg Program plus statements on the so-called North-South relations, an issue on which the declaration repeated the essentials of the UN General Assembly’s 1974 Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order.20 But this consensus was preceded by harsh confrontation. Carlos Andrés Pérez in particular attacked the European countries for having rejected the idea of a NIEO.21

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Nevertheless, Venezuela’s AD sent a strong signal of continued interest in cooperation with the Europeans. Having become an SI “observer” at the November 1976 congress in Geneva, the party increased its (voluntary) annual contribution to the SI budget from less than 200 GB pounds to more than 14,000 (!)  pounds, thus becoming its fourth most important financial contributor, surpassing the British Labour Party.22 And during Spain’s transition to democracy, the AD became a major source of funds for the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE).23 Why did other Latin Americans share the desire to strengthen their links with Europe? In late May 1976, after the Caracas Conference, Costa Rica’s president Daniel Oduber (PLN) provided some answers in an interview. He started by mentioning that he had taken his first trip after his inauguration as president to attend a meeting of Social Democratic party leaders in Great Britain in June 1974. With his counterparts from Mexico, Columbia, and some Caribbean democracies, he shared a “deep concern” (“gran preocupación”) over not having any contact with their European colleagues, “whose countries practice a social democracy . . . we should know in depth because they could teach us how to undertake social change within the democratic system.” All those who fought for international justice should unite. “This is what social democracy is about, and that is why I travel so much.” And there was another, more mundane motive: the European Economic Community (EEC) had granted tariff preferences to its member states’ former European colonies in the Caribbean, which excluded Central America as well as the Dominican Republic. Oduber called this “discriminatory and unjust.” Fighting it required more than telephone calls or letters, he added; it required personal contacts. Oduber believed that Willy Brandt tried to bring together Latin America and the EEC. And as a result of his many trips abroad, Oduber could, as he explained in the interview, open doors for Costa Rican export: “The Israelis [where Labour still led the government] buy our meat not because we are from Central America but because we have good relations with them.”24

The Socialist International gets involved It took two years until the Caracas follow-up conference gathered in Portugal. In the intervening years, Willy Brandt was elected president of the SI at the 1976 Geneva conference. Soon he transferred the project of extending social democracy beyond Europe to the framework of the SI. The “Alliance for Peace

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and Social Justice” disappeared quietly, but the idea behind it did not. The next steps toward deepening the SI’s hold in Latin America came once again from the region. In 1977, the secretary general of the Dominican Republic’s PRD, Jose Francisco Peña Gómez, invited the SI to send an observation mission to observe the following year’s electoral campaign. He had to overcome “doubts . . . about the value of this but the representative of the Dominican party strongly urged the Bureau to agree.”25 His hope was that such a mission would help prevent the incumbent president Balaguer from manipulating the election outcome, as he had several times in the past. Indeed, the SI visit in May 1978 became a major domestic event. The delegation was headed by the then Portuguese Prime Minister Mário Soares (in his capacity as party chairman), himself a champion of the struggle against oppression. Nevertheless, Balaguer, faced with defeat at the ballot box, tried to hang on to power. The joint efforts of the US administration under Jimmy Carter and the SI, mobilizing its Latin American and European heads of government to send protest telegrams and warn of severe consequences in case the will of the voters was not respected, secured a change of government, and the PRD candidate became the new president of the Dominican Republic. Although the US pressure had surely been a more important factor, the quick and strong-worded SI “intervention” strengthened the International’s reputation in Latin America. It must be remembered that ousting a government through elections was a very rare exception from the Latin American rule at the time. In 1978, only Costa Rica, Columbia, and Venezuela could be called democracies, and now, thanks to—among others—the SI, so could the Dominican Republic.26 The 1978 meeting in Estoril near Lisbon, titled “Conference on Processes of Democratization in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America,” was the last event to come out of the “Alliance,” outside the SI framework. But the general public perceived it as an SI meeting.27 On both the European and the Latin American side, the delegations were slightly less prominent. In contrast to Caracas, Anker Jørgensen and Bruno Kreisky did not attend, and François Mitterrand was once again absent. But with Willy Brandt, Bettino Craxi, Felipe González, and Mário Soares, the list of European participants was still impressive. Venezuela’s AD did not send Pérez but the party’s international secretary instead. But there were more Latin American countries represented than in Caracas; only Peru and Cuba were absent.28 The Dominican Republic’s Peña Gómez and Ernesto Cardenal, a Catholic priest from Nicaragua speaking on behalf of the Sandinista liberation movement, turned out to be the “stars” of the conference. Peña Gómez, a charismatic leader and extraordinary orator, surprised the meeting by preferring to hold bilateral meetings in the lobby.29 He asked the Friedrich

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Ebert Foundation, whose commitment had been critical in preparing the Estoril conference, to train PRD party cadres and aired the idea of inviting young Dominican army officers to Germany so they could become acquainted with a democratic army.30 The final declaration was much more difficult to write than the Caracas one had been two years earlier. The Spanish delegation and many Latin Americans complained that the draft was too positive about Jimmy Carter’s Latin American policy. The Mexican PRI, however, criticized it as being too close to the SI. The final version mentioned neither the United States nor the SI and focused on the call for a New International Economic Order.31 Conflicts also arose among the  Europeans. The Spanish were taken by surprise when the Portuguese announced plans to establish an SI research center on Latin America in Lisbon (that never came into being). This must be seen against the background of growing competition between the PS and the PSOE for the leading role in European-Latin American contacts. The PSOE delegation in Estoril was reportedly the largest and the most active.32 Generally speaking, the party that had been illegal until 1976 became, within two years, the role model for Latin American center-left forces trying to overcome their dictatorships. Veronika Isenberg, who worked for the SPD’s International Secretariat, related that Felipe González’s trips to Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, and Chile had been a triumphal procession. The PSOE was about to eclipse Mário Soares’ party. As the PSOE’s attitude, particularly with regard to international issues, was far more radical than that of the Portuguese, this was going to affect the balance of power within the SI. The PSOE could have formed an alliance with the French PS, which had complained about the SPD being too moderate and too influential at the same time, not least because of its superior financial resources. Antoine Blanca, who had represented the PS in Estoril, came back with the message that several Latin American parties were counting on the French socialists as a counterweight. He finished his report by asking: “Notre Parti en a-t-il conscience?”33 In the end, this hypothetical alliance did not materialize because both parties became strongly divided over other issues, such as Spain’s entry into the European Community and the question of how to deal with the Basque ETA.

Setbacks and challenges Mexico soon lost much of its interest in cooperation with the International. The reasons are manifold. Echeverría’s successors José López Portillo (1976–1982)

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and Miguel de la Madrid (1982–1988) dreamed neither of becoming Nobel Peace Prize winners nor of being spokespeople for the Third World; the PRI went back to focusing exclusively on Latin America. Mexico’s hegemonic party had hoped for more intensive contact with the SPD, which did not materialize, and also complained about Chancellor Helmut Schmidt not including the country in his visit to the region in 1979. Other Latin American parties were disappointed that it took years for the long-planned SI Latin America committee to come into being. Taken together, these circumstances worked in favor of the PRI establishing, in 1979, a rival party alliance for Latin America that admitted no outside members.34 COPPPAL (the Permanent Conference of Latin American Political Parties) was meant to claim the political leadership on the subcontinent for Mexico, not the Europeans. But COPPPAL was too obviously a Mexican instrument. And with the debt crisis of 1982, the country lost its autonomy visà-vis the United States. But most of the Latin American partners did not have a problem with the Europeans’ activities. On the contrary: while Willy Brandt and other European leaders were always reluctant to interfere into American domestic affairs for fear of being accused of paternalism or neo-colonialism, the Latin Americans explicitly asked for a deeper European involvement. Pérez, verbatim: “We want the European parties of democratic socialism to intervene in Latin America.” Peña Gomez and Oduber (Costa Rica) expressed the same sentiment.35 Nestor Parra from the Colombian Liberal Party’s left wing, when asked by a journalist whether the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s activities did not constitute “cultural neo-imperialism,” replied that he wanted the Foundation to get involved because it had answers to questions the Colombians were asking.36 Nevertheless, different political cultures made matters complicated. At the end of the 1976 Caracas Conference, the Latin Americans proposed that the to-be-established liaison committee composed of two Europeans’ and two Latin Americans’ work in secret. A similar problem arose when Pérez tried to establish a solidarity fund for persecuted political activists and forces:  he pledged to annually provide the fund with a high sum, but this fund, too, was to be kept secret. Brandt found a compromise typical of his way of solving conflicts: the issue was postponed to the next meeting.37 Peña Gomez, from 1979 head of the committee, was given to informing the Dominican public via radio speeches or lengthy newspaper interviews about the latest SI meetings, even about the most confidential deliberations. The meetings of the SI committee on Latin America that he headed were attended by both member parties and nonmembers as well as by real journalists and Cuban diplomats disguised as such. Several

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of the committee’s resolutions had to be declared by the London-based SI secretariat statements of the attendees rather than binding decisions made by the International. Peña Gomez also shared the habit of many Latin American politicians of speaking for an hour or longer, to the general annoyance of the Europeans.38 In 1982, the SI Bureau (its highest body in between congresses, in 1986 renamed “Council”) refused to discuss his oral report as secretary of the SI Latin America Committee because he had failed to submit it in writing.39

The Latin Americans only partially integrated into the Socialist International The Latin Americans were very reluctant to intervene in issues that did not relate to their continent. They participated in the debate on general NorthSouth issues and on a future socialist economic policy—in the latter case not only because it had much bearing on North-South problems but also because the SI commission dealing with the question was headed by a representative from the region, Jamaica’s party leader and longtime Prime Minister Michael Manley. Hardly a voice from Latin America was heard when discussions focused on the Middle East or on East-West relations, for instance, when martial law was imposed in Poland in late 1981. The same was true for disarmament, as the SI commission in charge of the question noted with regret in 1987.40 Even more astonishing is that Latin Americans refrained from debates on Africa in general and South Africa in particular. At the 1978 SI congress in Vancouver, many Latin American delegates were absent from the plenum when African problems were discussed. The Europeans had hoped for North-South-South solidarity, whereas their new comrades from the other side of the Atlantic only looked to the “old continent.”41 The only partial exception was Venezuela’s AD, which had the ambition and the means to act globally. But the party had to concede that it was the exception from the rule: in 1987, Carlos Andrés Pérez admitted “that one of the main causes of the failure of the North-South dialogue thus far was the lack of communication within the South.”42 A peculiar “business model” came into being within the SI. When, in 1990, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo from Mexico’s PRD was astonished that no Latin American delegate attended the SI Council’s deliberations on the Middle East, he was told by his comrade Guillermo Ungo from El Salvador that the absence of a Latin American voice was due to the implicit acceptance of what Ungo called a colonialist subjection to the SI’s compartmentalization

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by region. Only the Europeans had the right to speak about everything.43 Whereas Ungo put the blame for this state of affairs on the Europeans, the available documentation points to a deliberate indifference on the part of the Latin Americans. Only in the last years of Brandt’s presidency, more or less from 1989 onward, did things start to change. By 1991, Muñoz Ledo’s observation was no longer considered as inappropriate as he had originally been told but rather a signal for change. Financial problems also contributed to the Latin Americans not playing a larger role in the SI. Most meetings took place in Europe, out of long-standing routine and because the infrastructure was better than in Latin America. But with the exception of Venezuela’s AD, the parties from the other side of the Atlantic lacked the monetary resources to regularly attend all meetings, be it of the Bureau (or, respectively, the Council) or the committees. The nominal strength indicated by the number of affiliated parties could not be translated into real clout on the level of day-to-day politics.

How to deal with revolutionary uprisings? The Caracas Conference and the SI’s subsequent activities in Latin America until 1978 dealt with the problem of how to remove existing military dictatorships or (in the case of the Dominican Republic) how to prevent a new one. The second half of the year brought a new challenge for the SI: how to react to revolutionary uprisings. The Nicaraguan Sandinistas met with widespread sympathy in Latin America (where help came even from Christian Democrats) and Europe. Within a few months, all SI member parties established ties with the Nicaraguan liberation movement. When an SI delegation headed by Mário Soares arrived in Managua two weeks after the triumph of the revolution in July 1979, they observed the unloading of an airplane with food and medical supplies delivered as emergency aid by the German Under-secretary of State Alwin Brück. The Swedish government also responded immediately.44 Three months later, the prospects for a democratic and socialist future for Central America seemed even brighter: a group of reform-minded mid-ranking army officers overthrew El Salvador’s right-wing government and invited the small SI member party MNR to join the new junta. The honeymoon lasted less than three months. In early January 1980, El Salvador’s conservative forces managed to reverse the balance of power once again; the MNR leadership had to flee the country, and the Christian Democrats split into two groups, with the

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majority deciding to join the new government and the minority siding with the left. Nevertheless, from that point on, Central America would be a constant issue on the agenda of every SI meeting for more than ten years to come. The International’s European leaders wanted to demonstrate that Third World liberation movements did not have to resort to help from Moscow, that the parties of democratic socialism could also provide effective help and did not easily bow to pressure from the US government or domestic public opinion. This was an attempt to remediate the West’s (and, in many cases, their own) strategic error after the Cuban Revolution: in the eyes of Europe’s social democrats, the US government and its allies had driven the originally noncommunist Castro into Moscow’s arms. Additionally, the leaderships of most European SI members were faced with a strong tendency among their left-leaning, militant members toward solidarity with social revolutions in the Third World. Now was the time to show that democratic socialists had learned their lessons. Generally speaking, the Sandinistas and the El Salvadoran Left welcomed the SI’s solidarity. But it became a real challenge for the European Social Democrats in particular and also for Central American revolutionaries. There was no SI member party in Nicaragua at all, and the MNR El Salvador was a tiny group comprised mostly of academics and other members of the urban upper middle class. It was too weak to exercise any kind of real influence, let alone dominance over the guerrilla Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) and its political arm, the Frente Democrático Revolucionario (FDR). The only leverage the MNR had at its disposal was its close relations with the European Social Democrats; if it had broken with the FDR/FMLN (or vice versa), the guerrilla would have lost its support and direct access to the international social democratic network, which on various occasions had helped put external pressure on the government of El Salvador, especially regarding human rights violations. But more than once, the guerrilla acted without consulting the MNR or even ignored its explicit protests. Solidarity with El Salvador’s MNR brought with it a very specific problem:  fighting against the Salvadoran government meant fighting against Christian Democrats. The small but densely populated Central American country became the only place on the globe where social democrats were allies in an armed struggle against Christian democrats. This, of course, had repercussions on Europe, particularly in West Germany, where the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) started a campaign against the SPD, accusing it of siding with Marxist-Leninists. Time and again, disputes arose between the MNR

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and European SI members as well as among Latin American SI parties about which strategy to follow. Discussions focused on the question of whether the MNR, or the FDR respectively, should take part in the elections—and whether it would even be able to, given the widespread activities of right-wing death squads that threatened every left-leaning politician. In the case of Nicaragua, only one year after the revolution, first concerns arose among some SI members—among them the Portuguese PS and the SPD— about the Sandinistas taking a Marxist-Leninist course.45 The International’s wording changed from solidarity with the revolution to solidarity with the original aims of the revolution: a mixed economy, a pluralistic democracy, and nonalignment. Officially, the Sandinistas always asserted that they stuck to these aims, but in the first post-revolution years, until 1984, the majority of the Sandinista leadership seemed disinclined to follow advice coming from the SI. The degree of discontent among SI parties grew from year to year. Not least because Fidel Castro also advised his Sandinista comrades to use moderation (“contrary to Cuba, Nicaragua is no island”) and, of course, under the impact of Ronald Reagan’s undeclared war on Nicaragua, the Sandinistas agreed to elections and to negotiations with the counterrevolutionaries, who were trained and armed by the US army.

Conclusion The rapprochement between European and Latin American moderate leftists was a difficult process with unexpected obstacles along the way. But this could hardly surprise, as there was no precedent to draw on. Modifying a famous expression used to describe Brandt’s Ostpolitik, one could say that the process under consideration here was a “rapprochement by mutual learning.” From a broader perspective, it forms part of the globalization of international relations. What does this mean? Despite the founding of the nonaligned movement in 1955, international politics largely remained the preserve of the superpowers, the European countries, Canada, and Japan—the First and the Second World, as opposed to the Third World. This started to change in the 1970s. The transformation of OPEC into a powerful instrument of those Third World countries that had rich oil reserves is the most emblematic sign of this change. Third World countries became increasingly aware that they needed to forge connections among each other and seek allies. For reform-minded forces from the “South,” European Social Democrats who had succeeded in combining

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economic growth with the creation of a welfare state were the best address to turn to. Latin America, however, was especially attractive to the European democratic Left because it had a similar party system—or, at any rate, one that was closer to the European model than the party systems of Africa and Asia, even though the similarity of party names could be misleading—and conversely, self-defined Latin American revolutionaries could be reformists in European terms. What prompted European Social Democrats to extend their activities beyond Europe was the growing belief that global peace was endangered not only by the East-West conflict but more and more by the North-South divide as well, and that the two superpowers did not pay sufficient attention to this challenge. But setting foot on Latin American soil brought with it hitherto unfamiliar political risks and sometimes required alliances with partners about which very little was known.

Notes 1 Willy Brandt, Über Europa hinaus. Dritte Welt und Sozialistische Internationale, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 8, eds Bernd Rother and Wolfgang Schmidt (Bonn: Dietz, 2006). 2 Willy Brandt, Bruno Kreisky, and Olof Palme, Briefe und Gespräche (Frankfurt/ Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1975), 42. 3 Eduardo Jiménez González, Embajador por 700 días (Misión confidencial) (Mexico D.F., J. Pablos, 1979), 19, 22. See also the Mexican US embassy’s report from March 14, 1975: http://aad.archives.gov/aad/createpdf?rid=208488&dt=2476&dl=1345 (accessed July 3, 2017). 4 Demetrio Boersner, “Venezuelan Policies toward Central America,” in Political Change in Central America: Internal and External Dimensions, eds Wolf Grabendorff, Heinrich-W. Krumwiede, and Jürgen Todt (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1984), 245–60, 249; Raquel Gamus, Una fugaz convergencia. CAP y la IS en Centroamérica (Caracas: Acta Científica Venezolana, 1990), 182f., 189. 5 Willy Brandt, Erinnerungen (Frankfurt/Main: Propyläen, 1989), 348; SPDParteivorstand (PV), 11629: Dingels, Vorlage für die Sitzung des Präsidiums am 8. April 1975, Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (AdsD) der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn; Koniecki, “Zusammenfassung der Gespräche von Willy Brandt mit dem mexikanischen Staatspräsidenten, Luis Echeverría,” A 19, 271, Willy-Brandt-Archiv (WBA), AdsD.

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6 Dingels an Lindenberg, October 17, 1975, 2966, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Hausakten, AdsD; Lindenberg, November 6, 1975, 3003, FES-Hausakten, AdsD. 7 Brandt et al., Briefe und Gespräche, 133; Gamus, Una fugaz convergencia, 201; Lindenberg, Kurzbericht über den Besuch . . ., April 5, 1975, 3003, FES-Hausakten, AdsD; “Sozialdemokratie in Lateinamerika?” A 19, 20A: Instituto Latinoamericano de Investigaciones Sociales (ILDIS)/FES, WBA; Secretaría de Gobernación, siglo XX, Investigaciones politicas y sociales, caja 1747B, exp. 005, Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Ciudad de México. 8 Gamus, Una fugaz convergencia, 147–9; see also Pierre Schori, “Socialdemocracia y América Latina (Un punto de vista sueco),” in Nueva Sociedad, no. 40, (January/ February 1979), 115–21: http://nuso.org/media/articles/downloads/512_1.pdf (accessed September 12, 2017). 9 Cot to Mitterrand, November 13, 1975, 639 Relations Internationales (RI) 1, Fondation Jean Jaurès (FJJ), Paris. 10 Minutes of the SPD party convention in Mannheim, November 11–15, 1975, 999, 1455. 11 11284, SPD-PV, AdsD; caja 358, exp. 77, Muñoz Ledo papers, PRI, discursos, AGN. 12 Brandt’s letters, A 11.1., 52A, WBA, AdsD. 13 11936, SPD-PV, AdsD. 14 CEDAL/FES, eds., Problemas de Organización y Formación de Partidos Social Democratas (Costa Rica: Santa Bárbara de Heredia, 1976). 15 Ibid., vol. 1, 1. 16 International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam (IISH), Socialist International (SI), 1071. 17 Brandt, Über Europa hinaus, 28. 18 Caja 068-B, carp. 1, doc. 1, Archivo del Partido Obrero Socialista Español (PSOE), Fundación Pablo Iglesias (FPI), Alcalá de Henares, Spain. 19 http://nuso.org/media/articles/downloads/240_1.pdf (accessed July 5, 2017). 20 http://www.un-documents.net/s6r3201.htm (accessed July 5, 2017). 21 A 19, 20B, WBA, AdsD. 22 Box 114, Archivio dello Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI), PSI Direzione, Dep. Internazionale, I.S., Fondazione Filippo Turati, Florence. 23 Pilar Urbano, La Gran Desmemoria. Lo que Suárez olvidó y el Rey prefiere no recordar (Barcelona: Planeta, 2014), 332f.; caja 068-G, carp. 6, doc. 6, PSOE, FPI. 24 May 30 and 31, 1976, FES-Hausakten, 8543, AdsD. 25 Barbara Castle/Jenny Little, Report of SI Bureau Hamburg, February 9–10, 1978, National Executive Committee (NEC) meetings, Labour Party Archive, Labour History Archive and Study Center (LHASC), Manchester. 26 Not including Jamaica and the other democracies in the English-speaking Caribbean.

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27 See, for example, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), October 4, 1978. 28 Box “Konferenz Lateinamerika-Europa, Lissabon (Estoril), 30.9.-2.10.78,” SPD-PV, Internationale Abteilung, AdsD; Blanca: A Propos . . ., Estoril, September 30 to October 2, 1978, Box 56, 8 Fonds Robert Pontillon (FP) 7, FJJ. 29 Tito Drago, journalist from Argentina, in “Cuadernos para el Diálogo,” October 14, 1978. 30 Grunwald an Brandt, October 12, 1978, Box “Konferenz Lateinamerika-Europa, Lissabon (Estoril), 30.9.-2.10.78,” SPD-PV, Internationale Abteilung, AdsD. 31 Lindenberg, Vermerk, October 10, 1978, SI, 24, WBA; Blanca: A Propos . . ., Estoril, September 30 to October 2, 1978, 8 FP 7, 56, FJJ; the text of the declaration in Uwe Kopsch, Die Rolle und Aktivität der Sozialistischen Internationale und ihrer Mitgliedsorganisationen in Lateinamerika seit 1976 (Hamburg: Institut für Iberoamerika-Kunde, 1982), 122. 32 FAZ, October 26, 1978. 33 Blanca: A Propos . . ., Estoril, September 30–October 2, 1978, 8 FP 7, 56, FJJ. 34 11027, FES-Hausakten, AdsD. 35 Lindenberg: Lateinamerika-Gespräch Lissabon, October 29, 1979, Box “AO SIBürositzung Lissabon 30.-31.10.79,” SPD-PV, AdsD. 36 Schneider-Deters an Stenzel, December 6, 1978, 8368, FES-Hausakten, AdsD. 37 A 19, 25, WBA, AdsD. 38 See, for example, Jenny Little’s constant complaints: Labour Party Archive, Labour Party International Department, 109, LHASC; ibid., Report of SI Bureau Lisbon, October 30–31, 1979, NEC meetings. Little was the British Labour Party’s international secretary. 39 SI Bureau Circular B3/82, March 17, 1982, 11993, SPD-PV, AdsD. 40 Report of SIDAC Helsinki, February 16, 1987, NEC meetings, Labour Party Archive, LHASC. 41 Karl-Ludolf Hübener, “Vancouver Congress in Perspective,” Socialist Affairs, no. 1/79 (January/February 1979), 22. 42 Council circular C2/88, February 23, 1988, SI, 105, WBA. 43 Caja 472, exp. 4, Muñoz Ledo papers, PRD, participacion en foros, AGN. 44 Joxe, Note pour Jospin, September 14, 1979, 644 RI 6, FJJ. 45 Rui Mateus, Contos Proibidos. Memórias de um PS desconhecido (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1996), 192f.; Lindenberg: Vertrauliche Aufzeichnung, December 17, 1980, 1/HEAA000441, Nachlass Ehmke, AdsD.

Annex: Doing Historical Research on Willy Brandt

Willy Brandt ranks as one of the most prolific writers among the political leaders of the twentieth century. From early on Brandt was aware of his historical role and thus did not throw away any piece of paper he or his office produced. This, of course, has proven to be very helpful when conducting historical research on Brandt and compares favorably to some of his contemporaries, such as Spanish politician Felipe González who never filed his papers, or Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev whose papers still remain locked up in Russian archives. Brandt’s private papers are stored at the Willy-Brandt-Archiv (WBA) in Bonn, the former West German capital. This archive is an autonomous part of the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (AdsD) of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Bonn. They occupy 400 shelve meters in total:  https://www.fes.de/archiv/adsd_neu/ inhalt/archive/brandt.htm. Before heading to the archive any newcomer to the field of Brandt studies finds plenty of information on Willy Brandt’s political career, personality, and life in Brandt’s six autobiographies: ● ●

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My Road to Berlin (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1960). In Exile: Essays, Reflections and Letters 1933–1947 (London: Oswald Wolff, 1971; Reprint Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Begegnungen und Einsichten. Die Jahre 1960–1975 (Hamburg, 1976; there is no English translation). People and Politics: The Years 1960–1975 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978). Links und frei. Mein Weg 1930–1950 (Hamburg, 1982, new edn, 2012; no English translation available). My Life in Politics (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992).

A very long but still not exhaustive list of Brandt’s writings is the Personalbibliografie; see http://library.fes.de/cgi-bin/populo/brandt.pl.

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Information on archival resources Besides Willy Brandt’s own archive referred to above, the most important resource is the archive of the SPD-Parteivorstand (SPD party board). It is also located at the archive of the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation (AdsD) in Bonn. Highlights are the papers of the International Department and those covering Brandt’s terms as party chairman and as federal chancellor. Additional information can be found in the archive’s papers of Helmut Schmidt, Egon Bahr, Horst Ehmke, and Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski. Important archival resources are also the SPD press releases with dozens of Brandt speeches and declarations; they can be accessed online at http://library.fes.de/cgi-bin/populo/spde.pl?t_maske=x. The archive of the Socialist International (SI) is deposited with the International Institute of Social History (https://search.socialhistory.org/Record/ ARCH01340). Unfortunately, this archival depository seldom goes beyond the year 1983. The SI archival holdings are complemented by the papers of the late Bernt Carlsson, SI general secretary from 1976 to 1983:  https://search. socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH00254. Portugal’s Socialist Party has scanned all of its documents and uploaded them to the internet. The papers related to the SI can be accessed here:  http:// casacomum.org/cc/arquivos?set=e_607#!e_635. Mário Soares’ personal archive is also available: http://casacomum.org/cc/arquivos?set=e_3092. Information on the archive of the French Socialist Party is available here: http://www.archives-socialistes.fr/. For the British Labour Party, researches must access the Manchester-based People’s History Museum:  http://www.phm. org.uk/archive-study-centre/. The Swedish Social Democratic archive has this address:  http://www.arbark.se/en/collections-service/, and the Norwegian Social Democratic archive is accessible here:  https://www.arbark.no/InEnglish. htm. Finally for the Austrian Socialists the link is:  http://www.vga.at/articles/ id/999. The Spanish PSOE has not yet deposited its documents after 1976. All of the above archival depositories contain a great deal of material on Brandt, the SPD, and the SI.

Secondary literature Among the numerous scholarly biographies on Brandt, Peter Merseburger’s stands out as the best balanced and detailed (Willy Brandt, 1913–1992: Visionär

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und Realist, 2013). Hélène Miard-Delacroix gives a well-informed view from the outside (available in French and in English):  Willy Brandt: Life of a Statesman (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016); French: Willy Brandt (Paris: Fayard, 2013). The nonprofit organization “Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation” (Bundeskanzler-Willy-Brandt-Stiftung) in Berlin was established by the German parliament in 1994 as a public entity to commemorate Brandt’s political legacy. The foundation has published the “Berliner Ausgabe,” an edition of Willy Brandt’s selected papers, letters, speeches, and so on: ●

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Vol. 1: Hitler ist nicht Deutschland. Jugend in Lübeck—Exil in Norwegen 1928–1940, edited by Einhart Lorenz (Bonn, 2002). Vol. 2: Zwei Vaterländer. Deutsch-Norweger im schwedischen Exil—Rückkehr nach Deutschland 1940–1947, edited by Einhart Lorenz (Bonn, 2000). Vol. 3: Berlin bleibt frei. Politik in und für Berlin 1947–1966, edited by Siegfried Heimann (Berlin, 2004). Vol. 4: Auf dem Weg nach vorn. Willy Brandt und die SPD 1947–1972, edited by Daniela Münkel (Berlin, 2000). Vol. 5: Die Partei der Freiheit. Willy Brandt und die SPD 1972–1992, edited by Karsten Rudolph (Bonn, 2002). Vol. 6: Ein Volk der guten Nachbarn. Außen- und Deutschlandpolitik 1966– 1974, edited by Frank Fischer (Bonn, 2005). Vol. 7: Mehr Demokratie wagen. Innen- und Gesellschaftspolitik 1966–1974, edited by Wolther von Kieseritzky (Bonn, 2001). Vol. 8: Über Europa hinaus. Dritte Welt und Sozialistische Internationale, edited by Bernd Rother und Wolfgang Schmidt (Bonn, 2006). Vol. 9: Die Entspannung unzerstörbar machen. Internationale Beziehungen und deutsche Frage 1974–1982, edited by Frank Fischer (Bonn, 2003). Vol. 10: Gemeinsame Sicherheit. Internationale Beziehungen und deutsche Frage 1982–1992, edited by Uwe Mai, Bernd Rother, and Wolfgang Schmidt (Bonn, 2009).

The ten volumes are freely accessible online:  https://www.willy-brandt.de/diestiftung/downloads/. Some of the documents, twenty-two in total, have been translated into English and made available online by the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project:  https://www.wilsoncenter.org/ publication/introduction-to-the-willy-brandt-document-collection. The Willy Brandt Foundation has also published two additional series:

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Willy-Brandt-Studien (Willy Brandt Studies) ●

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Vol. 1: Daniel F. Sturm, Uneinig in die Einheit. Die Sozialdemokratie und die Vereinigung Deutschlands 1989/90 (Bonn, 2006). Vol. 2: Robin M. Allers, Besondere Beziehungen. Deutschland, Norwegen und Europa in der Ära Brandt (1966 bis 1974) (Bonn, 2009). Vol. 3: Andreas Wilkens (ed.), Wir sind auf dem richtigen Weg. Willy Brandt und die europäische Einigung (Bonn, 2010). Vol. 4: Friedhelm Boll/Krzysztof Ruchniewiecz (ed.), Nie mehr eine Politik über Polen hinweg. Willy Brandt und Polen (Bonn, 2010). Vol. 5: Bernd Rother (ed.), Willy Brandt. Neue Fragen, neue Erkenntnisse (Bonn, 2011).

Willy-Brandt-Dokumente (Willy Brandt Documents) ●

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Vol. 1: Willy Brandt: Verbrecher und andere Deutsche. Ein Bericht aus Deutschland 1946, edited and introduced by Einhart Lorenz (Bonn, 2007). Vol. 2: Willy Brandt: Im Zweifel für die Freiheit. Reden zur sozialdemokratischen und deutschen Geschichte, edited and introduced by Klaus Schönhoven (Bonn, 2012). Vol. 3: Willy Brandt und Helmut Schmidt—Partner und Rivalen. Der Briefwechsel (1958–1992), edited and introduced by Meik Woyke (Bonn, 2015).

Another noteworthy study is Bernd Rother’s, Willy Brandts Außenpolitik (Wiesbaden:  Springer Verlag, 2014). Finally, there is a recently published exhaustive Willy Brandt Online Biography, available in English, German, and Norwegian. It is accessible here: https://www.willy-brandt-biography.com/.

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Index Adenauer, Konrad 17, 34, 38–9, 92–3 Afghanistan 56, 58, 71 Africa 77, 164, 179, 186, 196, 198, 204, 208 sub-Saharan 40 Alfonsín, Raul 174–5 Algeria 68–9 Allen, Richard 137 Allende, Salvador 110, 198 Alliance for Peace and Social Justice 2, 197, 200–1 Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) 40 Amerika-Dienst 133 Andreotti, Giulio 116 Angola 197 Argentina 164, 166, 169, 174, 188 Asia 164, 179, 186, 196, 198, 208 Southeast 18–19, 22 Aspen Institute 33, 42–3 Athens 149 Atlantic Charter 23–4 Augstein, Rudolf 92 Austria 2, 75, 137, 179–80, 186, 195–6 Bahr, Egon 21–2, 26, 39–40, 68, 93–6, 100, 134, 137, 145–7, 149, 153 Baker, James 154 Balaguer, Joaquín 171, 187, 201 Balbín, Ricardo 169 Balkans 149 Baltic Sea 153–4 Barbieri, Frane 9, 109 Barcelona 39 Barrios, Gonzalo 168, 197 Bauer, Leo 117, 120 Beilenson, Anthony C. 133 Belgium 128 Belgrade 150 Benelux countries 95 Berlin 5–7, 15, 17–18, 20, 22, 25–6, 33–41, 44, 53, 95, 100, 154, 166 crisis of 1948/49 see Soviet Blockade

crisis of 1959 38 East 7, 35, 89, 114, 145, 149–50, 153, 154 (see also West Berlin) Berlin Wall 6, 20, 25, 39, 54, 92, 100, 154 Berliner Stadtblatt 37 Berlinguer, Enrico 110, 112, 118 Bild-Zeitung 38 Binder, David 15, 26 Birnbaum, Norman 133–4 Blair, Dennis 133, 137 Blanca, Antoine 202 Blechman, Barry 146 Blumenthal, Roy 41 Bolivia 188 Bonn 22, 34, 40–2, 45, 57–8, 116, 144–5, 181, 195–8 (see also Federal Republic of Germany) Borja, Rodrigo 175 Boston 68 Brandt Commission, see North-South Commission Brandt Report 8, 67, 71–7 Brazil 71, 166, 187 Brezhnev, Leonid 143–4, 146, 182 Britain, (Great) see United Kingdom British Labour Party 113, 163–4, 169, 172, 200 Brück, Alwin 205 Brundtland Commission 4, 171, 174 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 98, 117–18, 189 Budapest 150 Bulgaria 10, 92, 143, 149 Bush, George H. W. 6, 8, 67, 79, 111, 147 Callaghan, James 113, 169 Canada 186, 207 Cancún 76, 79 Caracas 168–70, 185, 187, 196–203, 205 Declaration 169, 199, 202 Cardenal, Ernesto 201 Caribbean 11, 163, 166, 195, 200 Carlsson, Bernt 173, 179

232

Index

Carstens, Karl 112 Carter, Jimmy 3, 6, 8–9, 11, 67–9, 71, 74–6, 111, 116–18, 133, 137, 171, 179–80, 183–4, 188–90, 201–2 Castro Ruz, Fidel 76, 206–7 Central America 3, 6, 77, 116, 163, 166–7, 172–4, 198, 200, 205–6 Central Europe 95, 143–4, 155 Chile 5, 69, 110, 163–4, 166, 171, 174, 180, 182, 197–8, 202 China 2, 7, 22, 76 Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) 22, 90, 206 Clark, William P. 67–8, 70, 73, 133 Cold War 2–3, 5–6, 9–10, 18–19, 34–6, 39–40, 44, 51, 53–5, 58, 60–1, 77, 79, 88, 92, 94, 97, 100, 111, 128–31, 134–6, 138–9, 152, 155, 163–5, 169, 171–3, 180, 184 Cologne 51, 119, 146 Colombia 166, 202–3 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) see Helsinki Accords Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) 36, 41 Costa Rica 165, 167, 172, 186, 197–8, 200–1, 203 National Liberation Party (PLN) 167, 172, 198 Craxi, Bettino 113, 201 Cuba 78, 164, 198–9, 201–3, 206–7 Missile Crisis 54–5 Czechoslovakia 22, 95, 109 D’Alema, Massimo 120 Dahrendorf, Ralf 167 de Boor, Joet 127 De Gasperi, Alcide 115 de la Madrid, Miguel 203 de la Torre, Haya 174 Delors, Jacques 89 Democratic Action (Venezuela, AD) 167– 8, 172, 185, 197–201, 204–5 Democratic Party (USA) 41, 128 den Uyl, Joop 127 Denmark 113, 147, 180, 197 détente 7, 12, 20–2, 41–4, 52, 55–61, 71, 87, 90, 94, 134, 144, 180, 182

Dettke, Dieter 132 Diamant, Max 165 Dingels, Hans-Eberhard 132, 153, 173 disarmament 4–5, 11, 56, 94, 144–6, 150, 155, 175, 204 Dominican Republic 165, 171, 186–7, 198, 200–1, 205 Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) 171, 186–7, 198, 201–2 Downey, Thomas J. 128 Duckwitz, Georg Ferdinand 166 Dumas, Roland 151 East-West conflict see Cold War East-West reconciliation 55, 59, 92, 128 Eastern Bloc 2, 5, 55, 91, 154, 181 Eastern Europe 9, 105, 118, 120, 155 Echeverría, Luis 167, 192, 202 Economic Impact 133 Economist, the 57 Ecuador 188 Ehmke, Horst 120, 132, 145, 153 Ehrlich, Thomas 75 Eisenhower, Dwight 60 El Salvador 172–3, 198, 204–6 National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) 198, 205–7 Elsinore 113 Eppler, Erhard 57–8, 135, 154 Erftstadt 119 Erhard, Ludwig 92 Estoril Conference 187–9, 201–2 Eurocommunism 9, 109–21 Euromissile 9, 127–39 Europe 1–3, 6, 8–11, 16, 19, 22–6, 43, 87–100, 114, 116, 127–8, 143–55, 163–70, 172–4, 179, 185–8, 195, 197–208 (see also Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Western Europe) European Community (EC) 8, 23–5, 87–100, 111, 119, 202 European Defense Community 17 European Economic Community (EEC) 200 European integration 1, 23–4, 92, 100 European Parliament 1, 97 European Union 96, 98, 100

Index Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud 76 Falin, Valentin 22 Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany, FRG) 1, 6–8, 10, 17–26, 33, 40–1, 44, 51–61, 72, 74, 78, 87–93, 96, 99, 109, 113, 117, 119, 127–9, 131, 134–5, 144–5, 147–9, 151, 153–5, 165, 167, 173, 180, 181, 196, 206 Fischer, Oskar 152 Ford Foundation 38 Ford, Gerald 9, 111, 115–16, 118–19 Forsberg, Randall 133 France 9, 16–17, 23–4, 95–8, 117, 127, 144, 150, 197, 202 Franco, Francisco 1, 42, 170, 182 Franke, Egon 112 Frankfurter Rundschau 58 Free Democratic Party (Germany, FDP) 90, 144, 147 Frei, Eduardo 69, 166 French Socialist Party (PS) 172, 202 Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) 5, 133, 173, 181–2, 187–9, 198, 203 Gandhi, Indira 76, 79 García, Alan 175 Gardner, Richard 117 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 23, 72, 77 Geneva 114, 127, 137, 170, 200 Genscher, Hans-Dietrich 119, 143, 151–2 German Democratic Republic (East Germany, GDR) 22, 39–40, 42, 90, 95, 143, 145, 147–8, 152, 154, 181 German unification 7, 17, 45, 90, 92, 95–6, 100, 154 Germany see Federal Republic of Germany, German Democratic Republic, German unification, Nazi Germany, Weimar Republic Glotz, Peter 147 Godesberg Program 19, 36, 196, 199 Goldwater, Barry 41 Gomes, Bernardino 179, 187, 190 González, Felipe 11, 167, 170, 172, 174, 179, 181–3, 185, 199, 201–2 Gorbachev, Michail 5, 79, 150–1 Graham, Katharine 69, 74 Gramsci, Antonio 110

233

Greece 112, 118, 149, 167 Grenada 172–3 Gromyko, Andrei 151 Group of 7 (G7) 75–6, 78, 119 Group of 77 (G77) 68 Guatemala 172, 198 Guillaume affair 180 Guyana 69 Gymnich compromise 24, 119 Haddock, Raymond Earl 154 Hahn, Walter F. 95 Haig, Alexander 133 Hamburg 53 Harpprecht, Klaus 41, 120 Hart, Judith 127 Hartman, Arthur 68 Harvard University 38 Hauff, Volker 137 Healey, Denis 127 Heath, Edward 69, 73 Heisenberg, Werner 92 Helsinki Accords 42, 56, 94, 100, 182 Hertz, Paul 36–7 Hirschfeld, Hans 37 Hitler, Adolf 15–16, 38, 53, 89 Hobsbawm, Eric 110 Hofman, Michael J. 73 Holst, Johan Jörgen 146 Hungary 92 Iberian Peninsula 42, 180, 182–3, 185, 188, 201 Independent Commission on International Development Issues (ICIDI), see North-South Commission India 40, 76, 79 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) 137, 144–51 negotiations 127, 144–6 International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF) 41 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 70, 72–3, 78 Iran 2, 71 Iraq 5 Isenberg, Veronika 202 Israel 24–5, 200

234 Italian Christian Democrats (DC) 111, 115–16, 120 Italian Communist Party (PCI) 9, 110–20 Italy 9, 110–20 Jamaica 68, 165, 186, 198–9, 204 People’s National Party (PNP) 198–9 Japan 23, 41, 78, 207 Jaruzelski, Wojciech 172 Jaspers, Karl 92 Johnson, Lyndon B. 40–1 Jørgensen, Anker 197, 199, 201 Juan Carlos of Spain 182 Kaiser, Karl 116 Karski Ryszard 153 Kehler, Randy 128–9, 133 Kennedy, Edward 133 Kennedy, John F. 20, 40, 55, 138 Key Biscayne 109 Keynesianism 72 Khrushchev, Nikita 55 Kiesinger, Kurt Georg 92, 119 King, Martin Luther 40 Kissinger, Henry 3, 7, 19, 21–4, 42, 44, 69, 98, 113, 115–16, 118–19, 184 Kohl, Helmut 10, 61, 99, 112, 143, 147, 151 Kreisky, Bruno 2, 11, 75, 137, 167–8, 170, 174, 179, 185–6, 196–7, 199, 201 Kressmann, Willy 37 Krone, Heinrich 93 Kucza, Ernest 153 Kuwait 5 Lahr, Rolf 166 Latin America 2–6, 10–11, 43, 77–8, 163–75, 179, 183–90, 195–208 Latin American Secretariat (LAS) 164 Leach, Jim 128, 133 Leonhard, Wolfgang 110 Liberia 71 Lindenberg, Klaus 173, 187, 189, 198 Lisbon 179, 181–3, 187–8, 201–2 Declaration 188 London 204 Longo, Luigi 117 López Portillo, José 75, 202

Index Maier, Charles 130 Maiztegui, Humberto 164–5 Managua 205 Manley, Michael 204 Mann, Golo 92 Mannheim 2 Marcos, Ferdinand 76 Markey, Edward J. 128 Marshall Plan 17, 36, 70 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 117 Mateus, Rui 179 Mathias Jr., Charles McC. 133 McKinney, Stewart B. 128 McNamara, Robert 67–8, 73–4, 133 Mekong 18 Merseburger, Peter 26, 147 Mexico 2–3, 6, 76, 116, 166–7, 186, 196–8, 200, 202–4 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) 167, 196–9, 202–3 Miceli, Vito 115 Middle East 6, 24–5, 186, 204 Mitterrand, François 118, 145, 169, 172, 201 Momper, Walter 154 Monat, der 41 Monnet, Jean 89, 97 Montevideo 164–5 Moscow 34, 92, 134, 145, 150–1, 172, 182 (see also Soviet Union) Muñoz Ledo, Porfirio 204–5 Mussolini, Benito 115 Napolitano, Giorgio 120 Nazi Germany 15–16, 25, 34–5, 39, 53, 89, 132 Netherlands, the 24, 127, 171, 180 Neues Deutschland 152 Neumann, Franz 34, 36–8 New Deal 16 New International Economic Order (NIEO) 3, 69–70, 73, 78, 196, 199 New York 34–5, 37–41, 69–70, 149, 151 New York Times 15 Newsweek 74 Nicaragua 5, 43, 78, 172–3, 201, 205–7 Nicaraguan liberation movement (Sandinistas) 5, 172, 205, 207 Nigeria 71

Index Nixon, Richard 9, 21–5, 41–2, 44, 69, 109, 111, 115–16, 118 Nobel Peace Prize 1, 4, 42, 90, 144, 196, 203 North America 149, 179, 188 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 2, 5, 8, 17, 21, 23, 24, 54, 57, 88, 90, 93–5, 99–100, 111, 113, 119, 129, 144, 146, 151, 153 double-track decision 1979 3, 7, 9, 43, 51–2, 57, 99, 144–8 Harmel Report 20 North Canton 127 North-South Commission 4, 8, 59, 67–77, 89, 146, 166, 171, 174, 195 North-South relations 1, 5, 8, 43, 59, 67–80, 87, 99, 128, 130–1, 168, 199, 204, 208 North-South summit 75–6 Norway 34–6, 89, 180, 196 Nuclear weapons 9, 54, 56–7, 95, 97, 99, 112, 127, 143–4, 146, 148–51 Nyerere, Julius 76 Oduber, Daniel 200, 203 Oil crisis of 1973 24, 98, 166, 185 Oil crisis of 1979–1980 2, 71 Ollenhauer, Erich 164 Oslo 90 Ostpolitik 1, 4–5, 7–9, 19–24, 42–4, 52, 55–6, 59–61, 87–100, 109, 112, 120, 207 Ostrowski, Krzysztof 153 Pakistan 68 Palme Commission 4, 145–6, 171, 174 Palme, Olof 2, 11, 69, 145–6, 167–8, 179, 186, 189, 196–7 Papandreou, Andreas 149 Paraguay 166, 187 Paris 68, 150 Parra, Nestor 203 Pawelczyk, Alfons 132 Pearson Commission 67–8 Peña Gomez, José Francisco 171, 186, 201, 203–4 Pérez, Carlos Andrés 168, 196–7, 199, 201, 203–4 Perle, Richard 133

235

Pershing II missiles 51, 57, 127–8, 147, 154 Peru 166, 188, 201 Peterson, Peter G. 69 Petry, Irene 127 Pinochet, Augusto 5, 166, 171 Plön 154 Poland 2, 10, 22, 58, 92, 95, 143, 153, 172, 204 Polish United Workers Party (PUWP) 153 Portugal 1, 3, 42, 112, 118, 167, 179, 181– 3, 185, 188–9, 196–7, 200 Carnation Revolution 181 Portuguese Socialist Party (PS) 181, 187, 202, 207 Prague 150 Problems of Communism 133 Pronk, Jan 70 Puerto Rico 119 Ramphal, Shridath 69, 73–4, 76–7 Rapp, Heinz 132 Reagan, Ronald 3, 5–6, 8–10, 43–4, 60, 67, 76–9, 127, 129, 131, 133, 135–9, 149–50, 155, 172–3, 207 Renger, Annemarie 118, 132 Rentschler, James M. 137 Republican party (USA) 41, 133, 135 Reston, James 19–20 Reuter, Ernst 35–7, 40, 53 Reyes, Jesús 196 Romania 92 Rome 112, 115, 116, 186 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 16 Rumor, Mariano 115 Rush, Kenneth 22 Salazar, António de Oliveira 170 San José 198 Sanguinetti, José M. 175 Santo Domingo 187 Sartori, Giovanni 110 Scandinavia 15–16, 53, 89, 172, 181 Schlüter, Poul 147 Schmidt, Helmut 1–2, 7, 43, 51–61, 76, 99, 112, 118–19, 131, 143–7, 150, 181–2, 203 Schori, Pierre 179 Schröder, Gerhard 92

236

Index

Schumacher, Kurt 36, 53 Schuman, Robert 53, 97 Scowcroft, Brent 79 Segre, Sergio 118 Soares, Mário 1, 11, 170–1, 174, 179, 181–3, 185–9, 199, 201–2, 205 Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) 1, 4–5, 10, 15–17, 19, 34–7, 39, 42, 44, 51–9, 88–90, 109, 112–13, 116–20, 128, 131–3, 135, 138, 143–6, 150–5, 164, 167–8, 173, 180–3, 195–9, 202 Socialist International (SI) 2–5, 10–11, 43, 59, 68, 89, 113–14, 128, 134, 163–75, 179–90, 195–8, 200–7 Socialist Unity Party (East Germany, SED) 34–5, 44, 150, 152–4 Socialist Workers’ Party (Germany, SAP) 15, 35 Sofia 149 Somoza Debayle, Anastasio 171 Sonnenfeldt, Helmut 119 South Africa 171, 204 South America 3, 11, 116, 166, 185 Southern Cone 164–5 (see also Latin America) Southern Europe 1, 181, 185 Soviet Blockade 16–17, 35 Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SVAG) 34–5 Soviet Union (USSR) 2, 7, 9, 16–17, 20–2, 25, 39, 43, 53–4, 56–7, 70–1, 76, 80, 88, 90–1, 93, 95, 98, 109, 111–12, 116, 119–20, 127, 130, 134, 138, 144–5, 149–50, 155, 164, 172, 181, 184, 196, 206 Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) 112, 119, 151 Spain 1, 3, 42, 112, 118, 167, 179, 181–3, 185, 188, 200, 202 Spanish Civil War 38, 117, 197 Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) 43, 181–3, 200, 202 Spiegel, der 51, 58, 92, 112, 147 Spranger, Carl-Dieter 113 St. Louis 128 Stalinism 39, 44 Steger, Ulrich 132–3 Stern, Ernest 74

Stobbe, Dietrich 132–3 Stockholm 150 Stone, Shepard 33, 37–8, 41–2 Strasbourg 97 Strauß, Franz Josef 39 Stroessner, Alfredo 171 Sweden 2, 15, 36, 69, 113, 145, 171, 179, 196, 205 Thatcher, Margaret 76, 147, 151 Timm, Helga 132 Timmermann, Heinz 120 Tito, Josip Broz 171 Togliatti, Palmiro 110, 112 Tokyo 186 Trudeau, Pierre 76 Tsongas, Paul E. 133 Turkey 149 Tutzing 40 Ulbricht, Walter 34 Ungo, Guillermo 204–5 United Kingdom (UK) 16–17, 24, 74, 95–8, 127, 144, 180, 200 United Nations (UN) 5, 69–70, 72–3, 77, 145, 168, 171, 196, 199 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 72, 77 United States 2–10, 15–26, 33–45, 51–61, 67, 69–80, 91, 95–9, 111, 114–17, 119, 127–39, 148–50, 152, 163–4, 169, 172, 179–85, 189–90, 196, 202–3 foreign policy 4, 33–45, 51–61, 114–16, 119, 131, 138, 150, 183–4 High Commission in Germany (HICOG) 33, 36–7 Uruguay 164–166, 171, 174, 187 Uzycki, Jozef 153 Vance, Cyrus 117 Vancouver 113, 186, 188, 204 Vatican 116, 172 Venezuela 2–3, 6, 68, 71, 165–8, 172, 185–7, 189, 196–201, 204–5 Venice 75–6 Vienna 76, 155 Vietnam 18–20, 180 War 6, 18–19, 25, 41, 112, 132 Vogel, Hans-Jochen 134

Index Voigt, Karsten D. 117, 120, 132, 153 von Bülow, Andreas 153 von Dohnany, Klaus 132 von Staden, Berndt 116 von Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich 92 von Weizsäcker, Richard 92, 96 Vorwärts 131, 152 Walcher, Jacob 35 Ward, Barbara 68 Warsaw Pact 8, 20, 88, 94–5, 100, 146 Washington Post 74, 135 Washington, D.C. 4, 10, 67, 75, 116, 127– 9, 133, 134, 137, 145, 148, 150, 182 (see also United States) Watergate scandal 180 Weimar Republic 37, 53 Weltwoche, die 96 West Berlin 2, 6, 15–18, 33–40, 42, 44–5, 54, 87, 93, 117, 129, 138, 154, 166

237

Western Europe 2, 6, 8–9, 17, 22–3, 55, 57, 109, 117–18, 131, 134, 180–5, 189–90 Westpolitik 36, 55 Wilson, Harold 113 Wilson, Woodrow 89 Wireless Bulletin 133 Wojna, Ryszard 153 Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (Spain, POUM) 39 World Bank 8, 67–74, 78 World Development Fund (WDF) 73 Yaker, Layashi 69 Yalta 91 Yugoslavia 68, 171 Zeit, die 92 Zhao Ziyang 76 Zhivkov, Todor 149