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From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s West German foreign policy underwent substantial transformations: from bilateral to multilateral, from reactive to proactive. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was an ideal setting for this evolution, enabling the Federal Republic to take the lead early on in Western preparations for the conference and to play a decisive role in the actual East-West negotiations leading to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. Based on extensive original research of recently released documents, spanning more than fifteen archives in eight countries, this study is a substantial contribution to scholarly discussions on the history of d tente, the CSCE and West German foreign policy. The author stresses the importance of looking beyond the bipolarity of the Cold War decades and emphasizes the interconnectedness of European integration and European d tente. He highlights the need to place the genesis of the CSCE conference in its historical context rather than looking at it through the prism of the events of 1989, and shows that the bilateral and multilateral elements (Ostpolitik and the CSCE) were parallel rather than successive phenomena, parts of the same complex process and in constant interaction with each other.

Petri Hakkarainen received his doctorate in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 2008. In 2009 he was awarded the Willy Brandt Prize for the 'advancement of outstanding young scholars' by the Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation. He joined the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs (MFA) in 2006 and worked at the Finnish Embassy in Berlin until the summer of 2012. He then spent over a year as Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, focusing on the European and international dimensions of the German energy transition. Since September 2013 he has been Deputy Director for Policy Planning and Research at the Finnish MFA in Helsinki.