The postwar presence of Western European colonies in Africa and Asia put the diplomats of the early FRG in a bind. On one hand, two pillars of Adenauer's foreign policy were the normalization of the FRG into Western Europe and the integration of the FRG into various systems like NATO and the EEC. Such moves would be a tantamount sign that the FRG had restored German sovereignty, but the return of Germany as a partner in European affairs was very alarming in Western Europe given the long memories of occupation and war. Therefore, the FRG's diplomats and officials could not openly criticize the remnants of empire lest it alienate the Western European policymakers the FRG needed to implement its return to the fold. On the other hand, the avowedly Marxist-Leninist GDR used any FRG support for colonies as yet another sign that the FRG was merely a stalking horse for global capitalism and used these charges as part of a larger campaign to undermine the FRG's legitimacy. The anti-colonialist rhetoric of the SED created a fear inside Bonn that if the FRG hewed too close to these empires, the GDR would emerge as the "true" Germany in the eyes of the Third World. FRG experience both in the Middle East and India in the 1950s underscored this danger as the first generation decolonization leaders often toyed with the idea of recognition of the GDR to gain concessions from Bonn. By 1959, the FRG had decided to cautiously favor the process of decolonization through the use of foreign aid and the its recognition of moderate leaders within the Third World.

One of the main animating policy agendas of the early FRG was the Hallstein Doctrine, which held that on the global stage, only the FRG could represent German interests. In a 1956 Bundestag speech, Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano contended that the FRG would consider third-party recognition of the GDR:

as an unfriendly act calculated to intensify and aggravate the partition of Germany. The Federal Republic would in such a case have to reconsider its relations with the state in question.

This diplomatic cordon around the GDR meant that Third World leaders had to contend with the possibility that extending recognition or opening trade missions to the GDR would lead to being cut off from FRG support. In light of the Wirtschaftswunder and the meager results of the SED's Aufbau des Sozialismus, the attraction of keeping Bonn placated was fairly obvious. The paltry results of the SED politician Otto Grotewohl's 1958/59 tour of the Third World bespoke to the success of the Hallstein Doctrine; Grotewohl was only able to get noncommittal remarks of GDR recognition from leaders like Nehru and boilerplate declarations of solidarity with Germany. It is telling that of the sixteen African nations that gained independence in 1960, not a single one recognized the GDR.

Yet Bonn did not publicly rationalize the Hallstein Doctrine as a geopolitical maneuver. From 1959 onward, the FRG posed its foreign policy and the Doctrine as part of the FRG's larger commitment to political self-determination. Bonn positioned itself as a stabilizing force in a chaotic time and used its aid to the Third World not only to uphold the Doctrine, but as a rhetorical club against the GDR. Not only could the FRG provide a level of foreign aid the SED could not, but by being a self-appointed champion of self-determination, Bonn could portray the GDR as yet another of the world's colonies controlled by a foreign power. In 1959 at the height of the second Berlin crisis, the FRG launched a public relations offensive explaining the plight of West Berliners and included West Berlin's mayor Willy Brandt visit to Rangoon as part of a larger campaign to win over the non-aligned world to the FRG's side of the German question.

The Hallstein Doctrine's threat to break off diplomatic relations always had something of a bluff to it, and by the 1960s, Bonn mostly pressured the Third World to play semantic games with their GDR contacts by having them refuse to grant the GDR missions full embassy status and titles. Nor was the FRG a fully forthright partner for Third World independence. Guinea's overwhelming rejection of union with France referendum and open courting of the socialist bloc in the early 1960s tested the Hallstein Doctrine and strained Franco-German relations. De Gaulle pressured Adenauer not to give Guinean leader Ahmed Sékou Touré to grand a visit during his state tour of the FRG and the German Chancellor was notably reluctant to fully embrace an African leader. When the GDR media let it slip that Guinea had extended diplomatic recognition to the GDR and Guinea's representatives in the UN castigated FRG connections with France, Sékou Touré was in an awkward situation with Bonn. Von Brentano wrote to Adenauer:

If we swallow such an impudent affront from a country like Guinea, then we can be certain that our policy will be no longer be seen as consistent or credible. Then, according to the rule that bad examples corrupt good morals, others will do the same; and we’ll have tied our own hands.

The FRG managed to heal this rift in Guinea-FRG relations through a use of carrot and stick of promises of foreign aid and their withdrawal, so that Guinea backpedaled on extension of recognition of the GDR.

Although the Sékou Touré visit was something of a tempest in a teapot compared to other Cold War diplomatic rows, its resolution highlighted both the weaknesses of the Hallstein Doctrine and the limited sway Adenauer's rhetoric about self-determination accrued in the Third World. The post-Adenauer generation of FRG leaders, especially among the SPD, saw the reflexiveness of the Hallstein Doctrine as counterproductive and ultimately self-defeating because the export-orientated FRG could never fully break off diplomatic contact with the developing world. The diplomatic cordon against the GDR proved to be increasingly leaky by the mid-1960s and trade missions and other diplomatic presence of the GDR became more common in the Third World. Bonn's use of foreign aid as well as the growth of the FRG economy opened it up to charges of engaging in neo-colonialism. Such charges of FRG economic imperialism not only became commonplace among various Third World left-wing groups, but increasingly in the 1960s and 70s among various left-wing milieus inside the FRG. One important facet of the self-fashioning of left-wing terrorist groups like the RAF and Revolutionary Cells was that they were urban guerillas whose actions were done in solidarity with other anti-colonial forces of the Third World.

The ideological fervor of the likes of the RAF proved quite shallow and limited, but it did signal a broader shift of the FRG away from a politicized foreign policy with the Third World. The qualified successes of the Hallstein Doctrine did allow it the FRG to engage in the Ostpolitik of the 1970s from a position of relative strength. Additionally, the Adenauer program of diplomatic missions and foreign aid did create the mechanisms and infrastructure for subsequent German presence within the Third World. Diplomatic contact with the emerging countries of the Third World also led to an increasing contact of the FRG with the peoples of these states, whether through business contacts or student exchanges. These new contacts often became enfolded into larger questions about the increasing presence of non-Germans within the FRG such as Gastarbeiter. Compared to the dilemma over decolonization, the existence of non-ethnically Germans within the Republic is a far more vexing problem and one that remains in German politics even after the events of 1989.

Sources

Gray, William Glenn. Germany's Cold War: The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany, 1949-1969. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Slobodian, Quinn. Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

Winrow, Gareth M. The Foreign Policy of the GDR in Africa. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1990.