From the 1960s the word ‘détente’ crept into our political vocabulary to signify a foreign policy process mainly concerned with an easing of tension between the Soviet Union and the USA. At any particular time the content of policies meant to increase détente varied widely. Very roughly, any policy which involves self-interested economic co-operation, or steps towards reduction in the level of armaments, is likely to qualify as an example of détente. In many ways the apparent existence of a new and softer relationship between the two superpowers had more to do with a tendency to use the extreme hostility of the cold war of periods in the 1950s and 1960s as a benchmark than with any real reduction in conflict between Western and Eastern states.
Most historians would suggest that the process of détente after 1945 has been cyclical, and that the period which first produced the label, during the Nixon and Carter US administrations, was sharply reversed in the early Reagan years. It is common to see the period after Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union as the second détente. However, there had been earlier periods of relaxation of tension under Khrushchev, and perhaps immediately after Stalin’s death in 1953.
The country where détente was both most politically important, and perhaps most real, was Germany, where the Ostpolitik identified with Willy Brandt represented a genuine rapprochement between the Soviet Union and West Germany, which took place about 20 years before the collapse of Soviet power in Europe and the unification of the German states.
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