page_title: Ludwig Erhard
section_title: Foreign policy
hierarchical_section_title: Ludwig Erhard / Chancellor / Foreign policy
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Kanada-Reise des Bundeskanzlers Ludwig Erhard Kranzniederlegung am kanadischen Ehrenmal Information added by Wikimedia users.English: Ludwig Erhard in Ottawa, CanadaFrançais&#160;: Ludwig Erhard à Ottawa, Canada
context_page_description: Ludwig Wilhelm Erhard was a German politician affiliated with the CDU, and the second Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1963 until 1966. He is known for leading the West German postwar economic reforms and economic recovery in his role as Minister of Economic Affairs under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer from 1949 to 1963. During that period he promoted the concept of the social market economy, on which Germany's economic policy in the 21st century continues to be based. In his tenure as Chancellor, however, Erhard lacked support from Adenauer, who remained chairman of the party until 1966, and failed to win the public's confidence in his handling of a budget deficit and his direction of foreign policy. His popularity waned, and he resigned his chancellorship on 30 November 1966.
context_section_description: Erhard considered using money to bring about the reunification of Germany. Despite Washington's reluctance, Erhard envisaged offering Nikita Khrushchev, the leader in Moscow, massive economic aid in exchange for more political liberty in East Germany and eventually for reunification. Erhard believed that if West Germany were to offer a "loan" worth $25 billion US to the Soviet Union (which Erhard did not expect to be repaid), then the Soviet Union would permit German reunification. The acting American Secretary of State George Wildman Ball described Erhard's plan to essentially buy East Germany from the Soviet Union as "half-baked and unrealistic." Erhard's objective coincided with Khrushchev rethinking his relations with West Germany. The Soviet leader secretly encouraged Erhard to present a realistic proposal for a modus vivendi and officially accepted the Chancellor's invitation to visit Bonn. However, Khrushchev fell from power in October 1964, and nothing developed. Perhaps more importantly, the Soviet Union had received a vast series of loans from the international money markets by late 1964, and no longer felt the need for Erhard's money.
  Support for the American role in the Vietnam War proved fatal for Erhard's coalition. Through his endorsement of the American goal of military victory in Vietnam, Erhard sought closer collaboration with Washington and less with Paris. Erhard's policy complicated Allied initiatives toward German unification, a dilemma that the United States placed on the back burner as it focused on Southeast Asia. Erhard failed to understand that American global interests—not Europe's needs—dictated policy in Washington, D.C., and he rejected Adenauer's policy of fostering good relations with both the United States and France in the pursuit of West German national interest. Faced with a dangerous budget deficit in the 1966–1967 recession, Erhard fell from office in part because of concessions that he made during a visit to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson.
  In 1961, while vice president, Johnson had hosted Konrad Adenauer some two years before the German statesman vacated the chancellorship of the German Federal Republic. In December 1963, less than a month after he had assumed the American presidency upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Johnson staged the first ever presidential barbecue in Erhard's honor. The event was held in and about the Stonewall Elementary School gymnasium in Stonewall in the Texas Hill Country. As a member of the Texas House of Representatives, Samuel Ealy Johnson, Jr., Johnson's father, been sensitive to his German-American constituency and had opposed the Creel Committee's attempt to disparage German culture and isolate German-Americans during World War I. Adenauer and Erhard had also stayed at Johnson's ranch in Gillespie County.
  Erhard's fall suggested that progress on German unification required a broader approach and a more active foreign policy. Chancellor Willy Brandt in the late 1960s abandoned the Hallstein Doctrine of previous chancellors and employed a new Ostpolitik, seeking improved relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and thereby laying the groundwork for détente and coexistence between East and West. In the 1980s Chancellor Helmut Kohl, however, reverted to Erhard's approach in collaborating with the Reagan administration in its hard-line anti-Soviet policy.
caption: Ludwig Erhard in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, 1964
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