Stephan Kieninger is a research fellow at the Berlin Center for Cold War Studies in 2016/17. He is a historian of U.S. foreign relations who specializes in the history of the Cold War, detente and cooperative security policies.
His first book, Dynamic Détente. The United States and Europe, 1964–1975 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), sheds new light on the interdependence between power and mission in US foreign policy arguing that dynamic détente policies made it possible to square the circle and to foster both security and liberalizing changes. Detente transformed Europe in the shadow of the military status quo. Kieninger investigates the origins and the implementation of American policies to overcome Europe’s division peacefully through the kind of dynamic détente that was codified in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975.
Kieninger’s second book project explores the economic side of detente and the interrelationship between cooperative security policies and pan-European energy trade from a European and transatlantic perspective. His research investigates Helmut Schmidt’s Ostpolitik and the relevance of Soviet natural gas trade against the background of the Euromissile crisis and the deployment of new Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces in Europe. The study explains the underlying reasons for the longevity of detente arguing that the crisis in US-Soviet relations was compensated by policy initiatives from small- and medium-sized European countries.
Kieninger previously served as a Senior Researcher at the Federal German Archives co-editing a document volume on inner-German relations during the first two years of Helmut Kohl’s Chancellorship, 1982-1984, and as an adjunct lecturer at Mannheim University.
He received his PhD, MA and BA from Mannheim University.
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Stephan Kieninger 