to achieve German reunification. East Germany voted to dissolve and accede to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990. The five post-war states () were reconstituted, along with the reunited Berlin, which ended its special status and formed an additional . They formally joined the federal republic on 3 October 1990, raising the total number of states from ten to sixteen, and ending the division of Germany. The reunited Germany is the direct continuation of the state previously informally called West Germany and not a new state, as the process was essentially a voluntary act of accession: the Federal Republic of Germany was enlarged to include the additional six states of the German Democratic Republic. The expanded Federal Republic retained West Germany's political culture and continued its existing memberships in international organisations, as well as its Western foreign policy alignment and affiliation to Western alliances such as the United Nations, NATO, OECD, and the European Economic Community. Naming conventions Before reunification, Germany was divided between the (Federal Republic of Germany; commonly known as West Germany) and the (German Democratic Republic; commonly known as East Germany). Reunification was achieved by accession () of the German Democratic Republic to the Federal Republic of Germany, so became the official name of reunified Germany. In East Germany, the terms (West Germany) or (West German Federal Republic) were preferred during the 1950s and 1960s. This changed under its 1968 constitution, when the idea of a single German nation was abandoned by East Germany. As a result, it officially considered West Germans and West Berliners as foreigners. The initialism BRD (FRG in English) began to prevail in East German usage in the early 1970s, beginning in the newspaper . Other Eastern Bloc nations soon followed suit. In 1965, the West German Federal Minister of All-German Affairs Erich Mende had issued the "Directives for the Appellation of Germany", recommending avoiding the initialism BRD. On 31 May 1974, the heads of West German federal and state governments recommended always using the full name in official publications. From then on, West German sources avoided the abbreviated form, with the exception of left-leaning organizations which embraced it. In November 1979, the federal government informed the Bundestag that the West German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF had agreed to refuse to use the initialism. The ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code of West Germany was DE (for Deutschland, Germany), which has remained