Envisioning a Post-Cold War Europe : Conflicting Visions of Détente in the 1970s

US-Soviet détente aimed at preserving, and indeed propping up, the bipolar divide of Europe: at fixing and crystallizing the Cold War partition and the geopolitical stability it seemed to guarantee. The diplomacy of détente, however, contributed to unleash forces and processes that destabilized the very geopolitical order it intended to protect and consolidate. Among them was a different, intra-European détente led by Willy Brandt’s West Germany that, by fostering new forms of interdependence between the two blocs, envisioned the gradual overcoming of the division of Europe and the return to a united continent. These two détentes – bipolar and intra-European – were often antagonistic, as stressed by US National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, who criticized Brandt’s Ostpolitik, presenting it as a new “Rapallo” founded of the objective of creating a German-Soviet axis in Europe. But they also reflected different views and discourses of the future of Europe and the persistence of Cold War boundaries, which juxtaposed the idea of an immutable and US-led Atlantic Europe to that of a broader Europe, centered on a new Carolingian core and the gradual erosion of the post-1945 fissions.