In the wider sense, the term refers to the country's foreign policy during the Cold War which has been argued as being imperialist: the nations which were part of the Soviet Empire were nominally independent countries with separate governments that set their own policies, but those policies had to remain within certain limits decided by the Soviet Union and enforced by threat of intervention by the Soviet forces, and then the Warsaw Pact. Major military interventions took place in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1980 and Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. Countries in the Eastern Bloc were considered satellite states.