As the collapse of the Soviet Union and its economic system throughout Eastern Europe was becoming all too evident in late 1988, Lyndon H. LaRouche, accompanied by his German wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche, held a spectacular press conference in Berlin on Oct. 12, 1988, outlining a constructive way out from this profound crisis, based on the scrapping of geopolitics and launching East-West economic cooperation for the benefit of both sides. The idea was to have the “Productive Triangle Berlin-Vienna-Paris,” with its heavy focus on machine building and developing high technologies, contribute to the development of the East, turning the crisis into a potential for building a new world.
The Triangle proposal gained widespread recognition in 1989 when, in the summer, the Iron Curtain began to come down, first at the Hungarian-Austrian border, followed by the opening of the Berlin Wall. A memorandum published by Helga Zepp-LaRouche addressing this potential was widely read by decision-makers at the highest level, including Deutschebank’s Alfred Herrhausen, who pursued similar designs with his proposal to fund large-scale industrial development and infrastructure construction in the countries east of the former Iron Curtain, and have this carried out by a new bank based in Warsaw, the Polish capital.
