Berlin Foreign Ministers Conference
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At the Berlin Foreign Ministers' Conference in 1954, the “Council of Foreign Ministers” met, which had been established at the Potsdam Conference in 1945 by the three main victorious powers of the Second World War ( USA , Soviet Union and Great Britain ). The original mandate of this body was to prepare peace treaties. According to the decisions of Potsdam, the Council of Foreign Ministers should also include the great powers France and China . However, China only took part once at the London Foreign Ministers' Conference in autumn 1945. The Berlin conference focused on the German question , part of the post-war borders and the demilitarization of Germany.
The West German desire for reunification brought the German question into opposition to the East-West conflict . After Josef Stalin's death in 1953, it was discussed in four conferences of the four powers, this Berlin Foreign Ministers conference in 1954 was the first of them. It was followed by the Geneva Summit Conference in 1955, the Geneva Foreign Ministers Conference in the autumn of the same year and the second Geneva Foreign Ministers Conference in 1959.
From January 25 to February 18, 1954, this four-way conference of foreign ministers took place in Berlin. The place of negotiation was the building of the Allied Control Council and the Soviet embassy in East Berlin Unter den Linden .
The conference was attended by John Foster Dulles for the USA , Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov for the Soviet Union , Anthony Eden for Great Britain and Georges Bidault for France . The aim of the conference was, among other things, a rapprochement on the German question, and it was agreed to convene an Indochina conference , which took place three months later.
As in their responses to the 1953 Stalin Notes , the Western powers insisted on holding free all-German elections (see Eden plans ) and on reunification in stages. The German government took part in these plans for reunification . According to their ideas, West Germany should be incorporated into a military alliance system of the Western powers , the EVG . As a counter-draft, Molotov presented a treaty on security in Europe, calling for the dissolution of NATO , the withdrawal of American troops from Europe and the neutralization of Germany. In this Soviet system of collective security, he only gave the United States and China observer status. As a first step on the way to reunification, the Germans should form a joint provisional government (see Molotov Plan ). Both German governments should be involved in peace negotiations.
The positions of East and West were incompatible and the conference ended without result.
"The course of the following years makes the Berlin Conference appear to be the point at which the course was finally set for the separate and increasingly distant development of the two parts of Germany."
On October 23 of the same year, West Germany signed the founding treaty for the Western European Union (WEU) . In this treaty, the Federal Republic of Germany, the USA, Great Britain and France declared themselves to be partners within NATO. The western powers promised to end the occupation regime and to grant the Federal Republic sovereignty in internal and external affairs. The Federal Republic of Germany joined NATO on May 9, 1955.
The official dissemination of the two-state theory took place on July 26, 1955, following the Geneva summit conference by Khrushchev .
Individual evidence
- ^ Peter Graf Kielmansegg: After the disaster. A history of divided Germany. Siedler Verlag, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-88680-329-5 , p. 153.
literature
- Jost Dülffer: Europe in the East-West Conflict 1945–1990. Munich 2004, ISBN 3-486-49105-9 .
- Michael Lemke: Unity or Socialism. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne / Weimar 2001, ISBN 978-3-412-14200-1 , p. 302 ff.
- Hermann-Josef Rupieper: The Berlin Foreign Ministers' Conference 1954. A high point of East-West propaganda or the last chance to create German unity? In: VfZ 1986, 3, pp. 427-453.