ABSTRACT
In the era of Brezhnev (1964–1982) and that of his short-time epigones Andropov (1982–1984) and Chernenko (1984–1985), there was an “ice-age” between Moscow and its Central and Eastern European satellites on the one hand and Brussels on the other. The COMECON (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) and the EC (European Community) remained isolated from each other. Each was a world apart with its distinctive philosophy and its own ideas of cooperation and dynamism. Only later a relationship between both economic blocks emerged as an effect of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika. A public acknowledgement of the positive development in the East-West relations was given in 1987, when the West German Minister of Foreign Affairs Hans-Dietrich Genscher gave his famous speech, “Let us Give Gorbachev a Chance,” at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Hardly one of the political decision makers at that time nurtured the expectation that fast revolutionary changes in the Eastern bloc would soon lead to the fall of the communist system. The best that one could hope for seemed to be improving relations step-by-step and by reaching a “change by rapprochement” (Wandel durch Annäherung), as was the classic definition of the then German Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt of his goals of an appeasing Ostpolitik of the 1970s. In Europe, memories were omnipresent of the frustrated hopes for a détente triggered by the Final Act of the CSCE (Conference of Security and Cooperation in Europe) of Helsinki 1975, which had to give way to a period of renewed confrontation, characterized by the USSR’s invasions in Afghanistan, the deployment of nuclear intermediate range missiles in Europe, and the crushing of the Solidarnosc movement in Poland in 1982. Only when the leadership of the USSR finally recognized that it would not be able to win the arms race with the by far superior technological and economic power of the West, it began to see the relationship to the EC from a different angle.
