part of the four-power Berlin accord of 1971) relatively quickly. On 8 November 1972, after only six months of negotiations, the two states concluded a Basic Treaty that established relatively normal relations between them. While the two Germanies stopped short of full-scale recognition, the Basic Treaty acknowledged the reality of two states.
This was a major triumph for East Germany, as its diplomatic isolation came to an end. Trade with the West grew substantially, and increasing visits from West Germans provided a steady source of hard currency. To a considerable degree, the West underwrote the refurbishment of the East German infrastructure. This allowed Honecker to implement social programs on a grand scale. Between 1971 and 1980, the regime built more than a million new housing units and renovated half a million more. Economic policy centered on the provision of consumer goods, and the East German standard of living, although still lower than West Germany's, was the highest in the Soviet bloc.
Under Honecker, moreover, the SED regime scaled back indoctrination campaigns, accepting public conformity as being sufficient. Most East Germans went along with the bargain, supporting—or at least not opposing—the SED in public and otherwise retreating into their private lives. Those who continued to criticize the regime openly, such as Wolf Biermann and Vera Wollenberger, usually found themselves "exiled" to the West. The Stasi established an extensive network of spies and informants that effectively quashed any nonconformist movements before they could start.
Honecker's no-taboos state thus evolved into a stagnant society—a "niche society" as Günter Gaus famously termed it—in which stability and outward conformity were most important. The politics of the East German state were nonetheless hollow. Although the SED professed confidence in its support from the population, it consistently refused to allow citizens below retirement age to travel to the West. Supported financially by West Germany and politically by the Soviet Union, however, East Germany played an increasingly important role in Cold War and international politics. In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union and the United States came to loggerheads over the deployment of nuclear missiles on German territory. Although Honecker accepted the missiles, he acted as a moderating force in the standoff. He insisted that gains in West German–East German relations would lead to a solution favorable to the Soviets and that the entente therefore needed to be preserved.
The Soviets effectively turned the tables under Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. When Honecker steadfastly refused to go along with Gorbachev's radical program for reforming socialism internally (perestroika), the Soviet leader made it clear that support for East Germany would be limited. This along with Honecker's continuing liberalization of intra-German relations—allowing independent political demonstrations in 1987, for example, or televising debates between East and West German politicians—ultimately led to the collapse of the East German state.
When the Hungarian government removed the fortifications along its border with Austria in May 1989, more than 30,000 East Germans fled along this route in just six months. Honecker refused to acknowledge the mass exodus, and during a visit to East Germany on 7 October 1989, Gorbachev made it clear that the Soviet Union would not intervene as it had in 1953. Two days later, demonstrations against the SED regime began in Leipzig.
Reformers within the SED, led by Egon Krenz, seized the opportunity to oust Honecker at the party plenum on 18 October 1989. On 9 November they announced that citizens of East Germany would be allowed to travel freely. Within days, millions of East Germans had broken through the Berlin Wall, literally in many cases, to visit West Germany. Further attempts at reform by the Krenz government paled against the economic lure of the West, however. On 18 March 1990, East Germans voted overwhelmingly for unity with West Germany. State treaties for th