Looking Eastward

For years, the West German government has nursed a certain longing for closer ties with neighboring Eastern Europe, in part because Moscow's underdeveloped satellites would be a juicy market for Bonn's heavy industrial goods. But Communist Poland, for one, kept insisting on a major political surrender before any deal was signed: full diplomatic recognition of Wladyslaw Gomulka's Polish regime, and acceptance of Poland's Oder-Neisse western frontier, which includes a big chunk of pre-World War II Germany. With 14 million angry refugees from the East added to its population since the war, the Bonn government could hardly swallow that kind of proposition.

Last week, after three months of delicate negotiations in Warsaw, Poland at last dropped its tough demands, and the two sides signed their first long-term trade agreement, a threeyear, $650 million pact exchanging West German machinery and metals for Polish meat, fruit and dairy products. West Germany will send a permanent trade mission to Warsaw, its first permanent outpost in a Soviet satellite land. Bonn officials clearly feel the way is open for similar deals with Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

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