German reunification (nov 9, 1989 – oct 3, 1990)

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The East German government, controlled by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), started to falter on May 2nd, 1989, when the removal of Hungary's border fence with Austria opened a hole in the Iron Curtain. The border was still closely guarded, but the Pan-European Picnic and the indecisive reaction of the rulers of the Eastern Bloc started off an irreversible movement. It allowed an exodus of thousands of East Germans fleeing to West Germany via Hungary. The Peaceful Revolution, part of the international revolutions of 1989 including a series of protests by East German citizens, led to the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, 1989 and the GDR's first free elections on March 18th, 1990, and then to negotiations between the two countries that culminated in a Unification Treaty. Other negotiations between the two Germanies and the four occupying powers in Germany produced the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, which granted on March 15th 1991 full sovereignty to a reunified German state, whose two parts had previously been bound by a number of limitations stemming from their post-World War II status as occupation zones, though it was not until August 31st, 1994 that the last Russian occupation troops left Germany.

In the context of the revolutions of 1989; on 12 September 1990, under the Two Plus Four Treaty with the four Allies, both East and West Germany committed to the principle that their joint pre-1990 boundary constituted the entire territory that could be claimed by a government of Germany.

The reunited state is not a successor state, but an enlarged continuation of the 1949-1990 West German state. The enlarged Federal Republic of Germany retained the West German seats in the governing bodies of the European Economic Community (EEC) (later the European Union) and in international organizations including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United Nations (UN), while relinquishing membership in the Warsaw Pact (WP) and other international organizations to which only East Germany belonged.

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