Inching eastwards: The re-alignment of Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain

“In fact, it started with Mikhail Gorbachev in the spring of 1990. To give some context, this was a time when Germany was in the process of reunifying. Gorbachev agreed to have a reunited Germany be a part of NATO. He was promised that there would not be any enlargement, “not one inch eastward” as U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told him in February of 1990. Now this was in the context of German reunification. Those remarks later became rather controversial, because the Russians said: ‘Well, you promised that there would be no enlargement and yet you then started pushing it’.