Brother parties on the other side of the Iron Curtain

In contrast to the GDR's state foreign policy, the SED's relations with its Western and Southern European "brother parties" have been neglected in research to date. This volume is the first to systematically treat the SED's foreign relations with the communist parties in France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, and Greece, especially in the period from the suppression of the "Prague Spring" to the collapse of the SED dictatorship, and to place them in relation to the hegemonic CPSU in the Soviet Union. The scope and limits of the political-ideological and cultural exchange between the parties are analyzed and their actors are presented. At the same time, the conflicting relationship between the officially proclaimed "internationalism" and the realpolitik constraints of the GDR on the foreign economic level is addressed. The 14 contributing authors au.