For years, the West German government has nursed a certain longing for closer ties with neighboring Eastern Europe, in part because Moscow's underdeveloped satellites would be a juicy market for Bonn's heavy industrial goods. But Communist Poland, for one, kept insisting on a major political surrender before any deal was signed: full diplomatic recognition of Wladyslaw Gomulka's Polish regime, and acceptance of Poland's Oder-Neisse western frontier, which includes a big chunk of pre-World War II Germany. With 14 million angry refugees from the East added to its population since the war, the...
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