Reform and Protest in the 1960s A.
Cold War Tensions Thaw
1.
Buoyed by the rapidly expanding economy of the postwar era, the political consensus in western Europe shifted to the left.
2.
In Britain, the Labour Party returned to power in 1964.
3.
In the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, Social Democratic parties maintained a leading role throughout the period.
4.
In West Germany, Willy Brandt (1913–1992) became the first Social Democratic West German chancellor in 1969.
5.
While the Cold War continued to rage outside Europe and generally defined relations between the Soviet Union and the United States, western Europe began to pursue a policy of détente, the progressive relaxation of Cold War tensions.
6.
In December 1970 Willy Brandt flew to Poland for the signing of a historic treaty of reconciliation.
7.
Brandt also laid a wreath at the tomb of the Polish unknown soldier and another at the monument commemorating the armed uprising of Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto against occupying Nazi armies; these actions and the treaty were part of his policy of reconciliation with eastern Europe, termed Ostpolitik.
8.
Brandt, believing that a new foreign policy was needed, negotiated treaties with the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia that formally accepted existing state boundaries in return for a mutual renunciation of force or the threat of force.
9.
The policy of détente reached its high point when the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, and thirty-two European nations signed the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference in 1975, agreeing that Europe’s existing political frontiers could not be changed by force.
10.
They also accepted numerous provisions guaranteeing the human rights and political freedoms of their citizens, and although the East continued to violate human rights guarantees, the agreement was generally effective in maintaining international peace.
11.
Social Democrats maintained