Nicht einen Schritt weiter nach Osten

Sarotte:Nicht einen Schritt weiter nach Osten
AMERIKA, RUSSLAND UND DIE WAHRE GESCHICHTE DER NATO-OSTERWEITERUNG

Not one inch. With these words, US Secretary of State James Baker proposed a hypothetical deal to Gorbachev during the negotiations for German reunification: You give up your part of Germany, we won't move Nato east. Since then, numerous legends and controversies have grown up around this conversation. What exactly was promised back then? And how did the eastward expansion of Nato, so controversial today, come about?

After the end of the Cold War, many dreamed of a "common house of Europe", of the "end of history" and the dawn of a peaceful age. But the picture soon darkened. The Soviet Union disintegrated in December 1991, leaving a power vacuum. Since 1994, Moscow's bloody war in Chechnya has unsettled observers in the West, especially in the successor states of the Warsaw Pact. Thus, the exact opposite of what Baker had said prevailed in Washington: no footprint of European soil should now be barred to Nato. Mary Elise Sarotte has combed through vast amounts of archival material to clarify one of the great political controversies of our time. In her seminal book, she takes us into the crucial decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Putin. In doing so, she shows why a new security architecture for Europe did not emerge, how the idea of Nato's eastward expansion was able to gain acceptance, and how the seeds were planted then for the tensions that define our world today.

Book will be published by C.H.Beck Verlag in September 2023.

Binding registration via begleitprogramm@historikertag.de until September 1st, 2023.

Min. 4 up to max. 40 participants.