Leveled today’s Russia policy?: When the Eastern treaties became a crucial test for Brandt

Today’s Russia policy leveled?
When the Eastern Treaties became an ordeal for Brandt

05/17/2022, 08:41 am

“Change through rapprochement” was the motto when a new political approach to the Soviet Union was decided in Bonn in 1972. The government around SPD Chancellor Willy Brandt almost collapsed. Even 50 years later, the debate about the Eastern treaties and their consequences continues.

It was an epochal argument, heated, hurtful, polemical. “Never before has a question excited the minds of our people so much, never before have opinions faced each other so relentlessly,” Foreign Minister Walter Scheel stated in the Bundestag on May 17, 1972. Once again the debate raged there, once again it was pointed and button. Then the social-liberal coalition managed to ratify the Moscow and Warsaw treaties that day – the central Eastern treaties of Chancellor Willy Brandt’s government.

Fifty years later, in times of the Ukraine war, there is a lot of talk about Brandt’s Ostpolitik – either as a trend-setting achievement or as a basis for lost “Russia understanders” in the SPD. “Change through rapprochement” was the slogan coined by Brandt’s adviser Egon Bahr. Or, as FDP politician Scheel said: “It’s about trying to move from confrontation to cooperation.” That sounds familiar from the Russia debate of recent years. But is the comparison good?

“If you look back at Ostpolitik, you don’t get much further on the question of the Ukraine war these days,” says historian Bernd Rother, who used to be a long-time researcher at the Willy Brandt Foundation. “The ‘turning point’ also includes the question of whether Brandt’s Ostpolitik can still be applied today.” Before the Russian war against Ukraine, negotiations were an option – and many of them were also conducted in Moscow. “But the Russian attack on Ukraine has now created a completely new situation,” says Rother.

Small steps, big questions

Strictly speaking, the initial situation in which Brandt sought closer understanding with Moscow at the end of the 1960s differed considerably from post-Cold War Russia policy. The most important motivation for Brandt, previously Governing Mayor in West Berlin, were improvements in everyday life for East and West Germans separated by the Wall. The catchphrase: “Policy of small steps”, for example in the case of visits and transit traffic.

To do this, however, Brandt had to tackle the big political questions that had remained unanswered since the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949: Is the GDR recognized as a state – the “phenomenon in the East”, as the Christian Democratic Chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger called it? Do you accept the post-war borders, i.e. the territorial losses in the World War started by Nazi Germany? And anyway: are you allowed to negotiate with communists?

Brandt ultimately answered all of these questions in the affirmative, thereby initiating a historic change of course. “The new Ostpolitik of the social-liberal coalition under Chancellor Willy Brandt broke the deadlock between Bonn and Moscow and ended the persistence in the Ostpolitik impasse of demands in the Federal Republic,” said the recently deceased contemporary historian Manfred Wilke in a series of articles on Ostpolitik for the Federal Agency for Political Education.

Tangible results were the Moscow Treaty with the Soviet Union of August 12, 1970 and the Warsaw Treaty with Poland of December 7, 1970, two amazingly short papers in just a few articles. The central messages: Renunciation of violence, respect for the borders that apply in Europe, including the Oder-Neisse border, and the abandonment of any territorial claims.

Stasi keeps Brandt in office

Brandt had already paved the way for the new line as foreign minister in the grand coalition under Kiesinger from 1966 and won the federal elections for the SPD in 1969. The chancellor had a mandate and yet sparked a domestic political crisis. When Brandt brought the treaties to the Bundestag for ratification on February 23, 1972, opposition leader Rainer Barzel bitterly rejected the agreement, peppered with accusations such as “sophisticated propaganda”, “untrue” allegations, and disregard for German interests.

What followed was a 22-hour battle of speeches. The SPD and FDP still trusted in their own majority. But things turned out differently. Several members of the coalition defected to the Union in protest against the Eastern treaties, and the social-liberal majority was gone. CDU man Barzel sensed an opportunity for a change of government and tried on April 24, 1972 to be elected chancellor with a constructive vote of no confidence. That failed for reasons that were puzzling at the time, due to two missing votes.

It was only decades later that it became clear: the GDR state security had bribed the CDU MP Julius Steiner with 50,000 marks and had the CSU MP Leo Wagner listed as an unofficial employee. The Stasi had an interest in keeping Brandt in office and saving the Eastern treaties. This was achieved on May 17 with a parliamentary compromise. A “joint resolution” was passed on the ratification law, which the coalition and the Union agreed to – a clarification of points of criticism.

Almost all members of parliament from the CDU and CSU then abstained from voting on the treaties, and ratification was carried out. It was a close result, which also depended on those who pulled the strings in the GDR. Nevertheless, the policy of détente, for which Brandt also received the Nobel Peace Prize, quickly became a consensus in German foreign policy. CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl continued it after 1982. The fall of the Berlin Wall, German unification, the end of the Cold War: everything was often described as a merit of Brandt’s Ostpolitik, for which Brandt was revered as an icon in his party.

When it comes to Russian energy, Germany went further than others

The situation changed after the end of the GDR and the Soviet Union. Germany was far less dependent on Moscow’s benevolence and rather than at the forefront, it sat comfortably in the middle of Europe. “After 1989 there was a new European peace order,” says SPD-affiliated historian Rother. “It looked pretty good in the 1990s.” Only at the end of the 2000s did Russia’s relationship with the West become more confrontational.

The fact that Germany still wanted to stay in touch with Moscow, “I don’t see it primarily as a direct line of Brandt’s Ostpolitik,” says Rother. “It wasn’t just Germany and by no means just the SPD that opted for negotiations with Russia.” In its dependency on Russian energy, however, Germany went further than other EU countries. This, in turn, actually goes back to Brandt, because in 1970 the Eastern contracts also saw the first gas pipe deal, which brought Russian gas to Western Europe on a large scale.

But here, too, the following applies: For a long time, there was a broad consensus on these deals, including the Nord Stream pipeline, supported by former Chancellor Angela Merkel. When the SPD in particular is pilloried today for being too pro-Russian, it is not only Chancellor Olaf Scholz who is annoyed. “Since Adenauer’s time there have been these falsifying and slanderous representations of the SPD’s European and Russian policy, which annoys me,” Scholz told the “Spiegel”.

The party does not want to be badmouthed the Ostpolitik. And yet the big brooding has long since begun. SPD leader Lars Klingbeil now told the “Welt am Sonntag”: “If the SPD’s basic program states that security in Europe can only be achieved with Russia, then we see that against the current background of the war, that is no longer true.” The foundations are shaking – perhaps as violently as under Willy Brandt.