State of Peace in Europe
Product details
- ISBN 9781800737310
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 09 Dec 2022
- Publisher: Berghahn Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s West German foreign policy underwent substantial transformations: from bilateral to multilateral, from reactive to proactive. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was an ideal setting for this evolution, enabling the Federal Republic to take the lead early on in Western preparations for the conference and to play a decisive role in the actual East–West negotiations leading to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. Based on extensive original research of recently released documents, spanning more than fifteen archives in eight countries, this study is a substantial contribution to scholarly discussions on the history of détente, the CSCE and West German foreign policy. The author stresses the importance of looking beyond the bipolarity of the Cold War decades and emphasizes the interconnectedness of European integration and European détente. He highlights the need to place the genesis of the CSCE conference in its historical context rather than looking at it through the prism of the events of 1989, and shows that the bilateral and multilateral elements (Ostpolitik and the CSCE) were parallel rather than successive phenomena, parts of the same complex process and in constant interaction with each other.
Petri Hakkarainen is the Political Director at the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Prior to that, he worked for over five years as the Director of Foreign and Security Policy at the Office of the President of Finland. During his career at the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs since 2006 he has been stationed in Washington, Berlin and Helsinki, as well as at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP) and at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam. He received his doctorate in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 2008. In 2009 his dissertation was awarded the Willy Brandt Prize for the 'advancement of outstanding young scholars' by the Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation.
