Political Developments

ALTHOUGH IT ENDED WITH THE same SPD/FDP coalition with which it began, and the two parties had their positions confirmed in the 1980 federal election, the decade of the 1970s was a time of massive changes in political mood in the Federal Republic. While the Christian Democrats licked their wounds following the events of 1969, the new government under Chancellor Willy Brandt proposed changes on both the domestic and foreign political fronts. At home, Brandt spoke of reforms and of daring to be more democratic. In foreign affairs, he turned his attention to negotiations with the Federal Republic's eastern neighbors, to what became universally known as Ostpolitik. Treaties were signed in 1970 with the Soviet Union and Poland, 1971 saw a four-power agreement on Berlin, and the following year the two German states signed a “Basic Treaty.” All that was then left was the less controversial treaty with Czechoslovakia, by which the infamous Munich Agreement of 1938 was accepted as null and void. In essence, all the treaties signed by the Federal Republic amounted to an acceptance of postwar realities, specifically, the loss of Germany's former eastern territories to Poland and the Soviet Union and the division of Germany itself, although the possibility of reunification was left open. To their detractors, the treaties were the abandonment of long-held positions — in particular, the notion of a single Germany in its 1937 frontiers — in return for very little.