Popular Culture
NATO Statement on Its Role in Reshaping East-West Relations
As the Cold War wound down, NATO’s mission underwent a gradual shift from one of insuring the security of member nations through the deterrence of military aggression to one of fostering the integration of Eastern European countries into a new world order.
NATO celebrates German Reunification
On 3 October 1990, the constitution of West Germany was extended to cover the five states of East Germany, reunifying Germany as a single country under one law.
NATO Statement of the Future of East-West Relations
On December 3, 1989, following the summit meeting in Malta between US President George H. W.
President Bush and Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki of Poland Trade Toasts
Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a founder of Solidarity, who became Poland’s first noncommunist prime minister in forty years, visited Washington for three days of meetings in March 1990 as European and American diplomats were engrossed in negotiations to devise a plan for German reunification that would be
President Bush's Statement on the Anniversary of the Berlin Wall
In May 1989, Hungary began to dismember the barbed wire fences and mines surrounding its border with Austria, prompting the largest exodus of East Germans since August 1961 when East Germany constructed the Berlin Wall to stop the flow of emigrants to the West.
Statement by Press Secretary Fitzwater on Economic Assistance for Poland and Hungary
After Poland formed a new coalition government in August led by the noncommunist Catholic intellectual and longtime Solidarity adviser Tadeusz Mazowiecki, factions within the Bush administration hotly debated an aid policy to help stabilize the faltering Polish economy.
President Bush's Remarks to the Polish National Assembly
President George H. W. Bush visited Poland and Hungary in July 1989 after June elections in which Solidarity candidates won 160 of the 161 seats in the Sejm that were available to them and 92 of the 100 seats of the Polish Senate.
Czechoslovak Anti-Charter 1977
In 1976, the government of Czechoslovakia arrested the Czech psychedelic rock band, the Plastic People of the Universe, for disturbing the peace. In the subsequent trials, the band members were convicted and sentenced to 8 to 18 months in prison.
Appealing to College Students in Hungary
In the summer of 1989, President George Bush made an official visit to several East European countries, each in the midst of democratic demonstrations and public pressure on their Communist regimes.
Remarks Celebrating the Reunification of Germany
On October 3, 1990, the East and West German states officially united into a single sovereign state—the Federal Republic of Germany.