Abstract
The foundation of the West German armed forces in 1955–6 was without precedent. Never before in German history had a democracy created its own army; nor had there been an armed force within a German democracy based upon conscription and integrated in a supranational alliance. Despite the innovations of the Bundeswehr, the men who founded the West German military in the 1950s cast their glance not forward to a nuclear-armed and missile-laden world of the superpowers, but backward to the political misfortunes of German liberalism, social democracy, and the military in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Notes
This section draws on the author’s discussion of NATO’s historical development in NATO’s Future: Toward a New Transatlantic Bargain (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1985) chapter 2.
Timmermann, Manfred, ‘German-Turkish Cooperation in the Area of Defence’, NATO’s Sixteen Nations, vol. 32, no. 4, July 1987, p. 60.
Dean, Jonathan, Watershed in Europe, Dismantling the East-West Military Confrontation, (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1987).
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© 1990 Stephen F. Szabo
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Abenheim, D. (1990). The Citizen in Uniform: Reform and its Critics in the Bundeswehr. In: Szabo, S.F. (eds) The Bundeswehr and Western Security. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11032-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11032-2_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-11034-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-11032-2
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