Abstract
The Soviet Union’s conceptions of the German question, which were based on the assumption of the strategic significance of the GDR to Soviet security interests, resulted in an awkward political relationship between the two countries in the late 1980s. Even though they had not always been during the Cold War years, Soviet perceptions of the German question had radically shifted by the late 1980s because the GDR no longer constituted the lynchpin of the Soviet security system in Eastern Europe. In the changing international environment of the late 1980s, Soviet security interests would be better served by ‘one Germany’.
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Notes
- 1.
Social factor structures are defined as ‘shared ideas or common knowledge embodied in intersubjective phenomena like institutions and threat systems’; see Wendt and Friedheim (1995: 689–721).
References
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Megas, A. (2015). Conclusion. In: Soviet Foreign Policy Towards East Germany. Contributions to Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20001-9_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20001-9_9
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