Cold War hawks loathed the East-West discussions in Helsinki in the early 1970s, and the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was signed in the Finnish capital this week 50 years ago. William Safire of the New York Times likened it to another Yalta—the deal thirty years earlier in which British and American wartime leaders consigned Eastern Europe to Stalin. Ronald Reagan, later to be US president, claimed that it gave an American “stamp of approval” to the Kremlin’s “enslavement of the captive nations.” Put crudely, for recognizing the Soviet empire’s frontiers, the West gained unenforceable promises on human rights.
Judgments now are kinder. The Helsinki process brought together 33 European countries (excluding only Hoxhaist Albania and Andorra) plus the United States and Canada. The two years of negotiations exemplified détente and opened the door to peaceful change. Because the Soviet side could not publicly argue that membership of the Warsaw Pact was imposed at gunpoint, and that communism rested on lies and mass murder, its members had to accept the principles of political and geopolitical freedom.
These included the “Hamlet Clause” establishing the principle that every country had the right “to be or not to be” a member of a military alliance. As Ian Bond of the Centre for European Reform notes in a recent paper, “Western governments and dissident movements in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union used its human rights commitments as standards to which they could hold communist regimes accountable, putting them on the defensive and gradually increasing the pressure on them to take steps to implement what they had signed up to. Mikhail Gorbachev could argue that his reforms merely implemented principles that the Soviet Union had already signed up to.”
But a template is not the same as a mandate. Though the dissident movement gained new impetus in most countries in the late 1970s, it posed a serious challenge to communist rule only in Poland, and even that ended with martial law in December 1981. Elsewhere, the KGB and its counterparts cracked down hard. By 1984, at the end of Yuri Andropov’s two-year stint in the Kremlin, almost every notable dissident was in prison or exile; some were dead (Jüri Kukk, an Estonian chemistry professor, for example, died on hunger strike in 1981). It was little comfort to know that their rulers were breaking the rules.
Like West Germany’s “Ostpolitik”, which sought to normalize relations with East European countries, the Helsinki process probably contributed something to the ultimate collapse of communism. In particular, the West’s acceptance of Poland’s post-1945 border defanged one of the Warsaw communist leadership’s strongest lines: that without Soviet protection, the Germans would take back their lost territories. More generally, it became increasingly hard to demonize the “imperialist block” as warmongering and exploitative. Boosting the “reform communist” factions in the ruling elites may have helped undermine the dominant hardliners.
But what really destroyed the evil empire was not diplomatic debating points, but its own internal weaknesses: economic, political, and moral. The daily indignities of queuing for food and basic consumer goods, and of dealing with snoopers and bossy bureaucrats, destroyed its legitimacy. The regimes’ rigid inability to cope with disagreement turned supporters into critics. The humiliation of Russian colonial rule sparked patriotic resistance. Externally, the robust leadership of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher intensified the pressure. One reason for overestimating Helsinki’s importance is that it allows an influential slice of Western liberal opinion to downplay the role of the conservative leaders that they detested. That may be comforting, but it is ahistorical and cowardly.
Edward Lucas is a Senior Fellow and Senior Advisor at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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