European integration and the Cold War: Ostpolitik-Westpolitik, 1965-1973

This edited volume uses newly released archival material to show linkages between the development of the European Union and the Cold War. Containing essays by well-known Cold War scholars such as Jussi Hanhimaki, Wilfried Loth and Piers Ludlow, the book looks at: France, where neither de Gaulle nor Pompidou felt committed to the status quo in East-West or West-West relations, Germany, where Brandt’s Ostpolitik was acknowledged to be linked to the success of Bonn’s Westpolitik, and Britain, where the move towards Community membership was tightly bound up with a variety of calculations about the organization of the West and its approach to the Cold War. Nixon and Kissinger’s policies are set out as the background of US policy against which each of the European players was compelled to operate, explaining how Washington saw European integration as part of the over-arching Cold War.