ABSTRACT
When looking back on more than sixty years of German foreign policy, it seems to be a remarkable success both in the context of German history and in international comparison: from the collapse of the Third Reich to the powerless occupied Germany to a partner integrated in the Western community of democracies and, finally, to the reunited European Power. These significant steps since 1945 did not occur solely as a result of deliberate political decisions but came into being gradually as the result of a specific constellation in world politics, as the product of the Second World War and the Cold War. Germany’s evolution progressed in an uneasy mix of the old territorial-geostrategic mode of international relations, a new military-strategic mode shaped by nuclear weapons, and a modern economic-interdependent mode that seemed impervious to considerations either of territory or the nuclear balance1.
