The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War
424
The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War
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Overview
The first in-depth account of the historic diplomatic agreement that served as a blueprint for ending the Cold War
The Helsinki Final Act was a watershed of the Cold War. Signed by thirty-five European and North American leaders at a summit in Finland in the summer of 1975, the agreement presented a vision for peace based on common principles and cooperation across the Iron Curtain. The Final Act is the first in-depth account of the diplomatic saga that produced this historic agreement. Drawing on research in eight countries and multiple languages, this gripping book explains the Final Act’s emergence from the parallel crises of the Soviet bloc and the West during the 1960s, the strategies of the major players, and the conflicting designs for international order that animated the negotiations.
Helsinki had originally been a Soviet idea. But after nearly three years of grinding negotiations, the Final Act reflected liberal democratic ideals more than communist ones. It rejected the Brezhnev Doctrine, provided for German reunification, endorsed human rights as a core principle of international security, committed countries to greater transparency in economic and military affairs, and promoted the freer movement of people and information across borders. Instead of restoring the legitimacy of the Soviet bloc, Helsinki established principles that undermined it.
The definitive history of the origins and legacy of this important agreement, The Final Act shows how it served as a blueprint for ending the Cold War, and how, when that conflict finally came to a close, the great powers established a new international order based on Helsinki’s enduring principles.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400888870 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/13/2018 |
| Series: | America in the World , #26 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 424 |
| File size: | 873 KB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
CRISES OF LEGITIMACY
During the 1960s, the post–World War II era drew to a close, but no single moment signaled its end. Many of the patterns that had defined international affairs since 1945 began to crack up, and the familiar elements of the high Cold War faded. The growing sophistication of nuclear weapons stabilized Soviet-American relations and forced the superpowers to recognize their shared interest in avoiding conflict. The bonds that held the Eastern and Western alliances together began to loosen, and some members of the Warsaw Pact and NATO demanded greater freedom of action. At home, citizens lost faith in their governments. Young people questioned longstanding political and social conventions. The economic systems that had operated since the war began to sputter, sowing doubts about the long-term viability of both capitalism and communism.
Contemporary observers saw that the world stood on the verge of a new age, but they could not discern its shape. "Events have drawn us beyond the postwar world into a perplexing period of transition whose rules we have not yet learned and whose rivalries we do not yet understand," an American commentator wrote in 1964. "The waters we are entering are uncharted and perhaps treacherous, and we are not likely to steer safely through them unless we have the courage to question the old assumptions which once seemed eternal and have now become so threadbare." A French analyst echoed these sentiments a few years later: "It is almost impossible to escape the impression that we are entering a new period of international relations — and almost as difficult to agree on where we go from here," he wrote. "Our feeling of change is based on our witnessing the decay of the old, rather than on any concrete fears or hopes about the emergence of the new." Some went so far as to claim that the conflict between the superpowers had ended. "The cold war is dead, in the popular view on this side of the Atlantic," the Washington Post reported from Bonn. Even those who disputed this suggestion acknowledged that the tectonic plates of international politics were shifting.
These changes affected different countries in different ways, but no one, on either side of the Iron Curtain, could escape them. They affected the United States and the USSR alike, and Western Europe and Eastern Europe equally. Despite their political, economic, and social differences, a common thread connected them. In the 1960s, the two worlds of the Cold War — the American and the Soviet, the West and the East — fell into crises of legitimacy.
The crises fractured the rival international orders that had emerged at the end of the Second World War. The defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945 raised numerous questions about the shape of the postwar world: How should the vanquished powers be treated? What would be the fate of the lands liberated from occupation? How could war be prevented in the future? Starting from substantially different assumptions about the meaning of peace, democracy, and justice, the Soviets and Americans answered these questions in dramatically different ways. Unlike the allies who defeated France in 1815 and created a new international order at the Congress of Vienna, or the allies who defeated Germany in 1918 and established a new model for peacemaking in Paris, the victors of 1945 could not agree on common principles to guide the postwar world. Beyond respect for state sovereignty, which provided the foundation for the United Nations, no amount of diplomatic effort could reconcile incompatible Soviet and Western concepts. As a consequence, the world fragmented into two parallel societies of states.
The Pax Americana and Pax Sovietica, which coalesced in the late 1940s, operated according to different standards of legitimacy. Legitimacy has two faces. One looks inward, at a state's domestic order, and defines the acceptable types of government and economic order. A government that enjoys popular legitimacy makes certain promises to its citizens to secure their consent to its rule. The other form of legitimacy looks outward. It provides, in Philip Bobbitt's phrase, a "constitution for the society of states" and stipulates how governments must behave internationally. The more that states exercise self-restraint and abide by these rules, the easier it is to maintain international peace.
Because the nature of a regime influences how it treats its neighbors, these two kinds of legitimacy are interdependent. As a consequence, a stable peace settlement requires states to agree on common standards of domestic and international legitimacy. These standards do not prevent conflict, but provide the tools for keeping it contained. When a revisionist power questions the fundamental principles of legitimacy, disputes can spin out of control and spark cataclysmic wars that destroy order itself.
The international order that the United States built after the Second World War extended from Japan to Western Europe. At its center stood the institutions of the Atlantic world, especially NATO, the European Economic Community, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. In politics, its members adhered to liberal democratic values. In economics, they blended the free market with the principles of social democracy, and they promoted free trade and economic integration. In foreign affairs, they balanced the imperative of containing communism with respect for states' autonomy. With citizens and allies alike, they accommodated diverse political views and worked to reconcile competing interests.
Under the pressure of the Cold War, the American government sometimes departed from its liberal democratic principles. It covertly intervened in the Italian election of 1948, for example. Countries that stood outside the American-led order, especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, suffered repeated interventions at the hands of Western powers in the name of containing communism, with bloody results. Nonetheless, at least from the perspective of leaders in Washington, London, and Paris, these cases remained exceptions to the rules of the Western order.
The Soviet-led order crystallized in Eastern Europe. Its architects defined security in terms of territory and ideological affinity, redrawing the region's borders and installing new communist governments. Following the logic of Stalinism, they assumed that conflict between capitalist and communist states was inevitable because the capitalists intended "to combat Socialism and democracy, and to support reactionary and anti-democratic pro-fascist regimes and movements everywhere," as Andrei Zhdanov put it in 1947. Because of this threat, the Soviets demanded that their allies defer to their policies and interests.
Working with local communists, the Soviets remade Eastern Europe in their image. Central planners organized industry and agriculture according to the Soviet model and refused to join the economic institutions of the Western order. They promised citizens that social justice and material plenty awaited them once the project of building a communist society had been achieved. In the meantime, that project demanded patience and self-sacrifice. Soviet and Eastern European leaders justified their rule by claiming the mantle of antifascism and anti-imperialism. To defend their rule against these threats from abroad and the danger of counterrevolution at home, communist leaders prioritized military over civilian spending and imposed tight controls on citizens' lives, restricting what they could read, what they could say, and where they could live.
In the first two decades of the postwar period, the two international orders did not operate perfectly. The United States and its allies quarreled over military strategy and economic affairs. The 1956 Suez crisis caused a rift between the Americans on the one hand and the British and French on the other. In the Soviet bloc, even loyal allies sometimes chafed at ideological strictures and complained that Moscow provided too little economic assistance. Material privation and political repression prompted several domestic uprisings, which communist leaders put down by force. After Joseph Stalin's death, the USSR intervened in East Germany and Hungary to prevent the overthrow of communist rule, at considerable cost in human life. These episodes raised questions about the best means to preserve communism without resorting to Stalinist methods, but Soviet and Eastern European leaders nonetheless had faith that they could perfect their system, and millions of citizens continued to believe in the ideals of Marx and Lenin.
By the 1960s, however, the established ways of doing things had become unsustainable in both the American and Soviet orders. Governments were losing their citizens' support. The superpowers' relationships with their allies threatened to unravel. One scholar summed up the problem: "What is at stake is how both domestic politics and the international order are to be organized." The status quo in the Pax Americana and Pax Sovietica could not endure.
I
During the high Cold War, the superpowers came to rely on nuclear weapons as the foundation of their security. In a series of confrontations, they stepped repeatedly to the brink of nuclear destruction. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev provoked crises over Berlin and Cuba by trying to overturn the political and strategic status quo. In a bid to force the Americans, British, and French to abandon Berlin, he threatened to give the East Germans control of the checkpoints into the city's Western zones. To defend Cuba's communist government against American attack, he deployed nuclear missiles to the island. In both instances, he wagered that only dramatic action could redress the imbalance between the superpowers and preserve the regimes in East Berlin and Havana. He expected that the United States would back down instead of risking a war that could annihilate everyone involved. These gambles tested nerves on all sides and nearly led to disaster. If a tank commander at Checkpoint Charlie or a naval officer in the Caribbean Sea had acted rashly, the results could have been catastrophic.
After 1962, the superpowers reached a makeshift equilibrium. The Cold War stabilized. The same weapons that had threatened to destroy both sides now steadied their relationship. "In Europe, the feeling of insecurity which, at an earlier stage, came first from the fear of aggression and then from the fear of accidental war, has disappeared," French analyst Pierre Hassner observed. "A balance has been established." Leaders in Washington and Moscow recognized that the dangers of recklessness outweighed any possible rewards. On the basis of this military reality, they reached an understanding in Europe. The Western powers acquiesced in the newly built Berlin Wall, which prevented any more East Germans from fleeing westward. The Soviets tolerated the continued presence of American, British, and French troops in the city and in West Germany. The 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which tacitly aimed to prevent nuclear proliferation, ensured that the Federal Republic would not acquire the ultimate weapon. However imperfect, this combination of political accommodation and strategic deadlock blunted the Cold War's existential dangers. "Whereas fifteen years ago many believed the threat to be real and immediate it [has] now apparently diminished to the point where virtually no one in Europe, [or] in the United States, believe[s] in a Soviet attack," French President Charles de Gaulle told the American ambassador to Paris in 1964.
The superpowers welcomed the respite from repeated crises. Yet life in the nuclear shadow exacted a steep psychological price from their citizens. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told the House of Commons that the world had "reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror and survival the twin brother of annihilation." Mutually assured destruction made life more predictable and imposed unrelenting anxiety. Security entailed vulnerability.
Nuclear stability overturned traditional ideas about the relationship between military power and political influence. According to the logic of deterrence, the balance of terror guaranteed peace because each side understood that it could not hope to win a nuclear war. But as stability increased, the threats on which it depended lost credibility. Some observers doubted that the United States would retaliate with a full-scale nuclear strike if the Soviet Union attacked Western Europe with conventional forces. Nor could either superpower use its arsenal to bully its adversary. "[N]obody would believe a bluff that involved the threat of national suicide," American writer Ronald Steel argued. This did not mean that nuclear weapons had lost their value. Rather, they ushered in a new kind of superpower competition in which diplomacy and negotiation took precedence over brinksmanship and intimidation.
The superpowers realized that their fates were now intertwined. Shortly after the Cuban crisis, Khrushchev acknowledged that the Cold War adversaries stood on common ground. "Of course I was scared. It would have been insane not to be scared. I was frightened about what could happen to my country — or your country or all the other countries that would be devastated by a nuclear war," he said. "One of the problems in the world today is that not enough people are sufficiently frightened by the danger of nuclear war." American president John F. Kennedy likewise acknowledged the ironies of deterrence and the realities of interdependence. The United States and the Soviet Union "have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race," he told a university audience in June 1963. "For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
Interdependence blurred the line between Soviet and American interests. Security now transcended national boundaries and eluded strictly military calculations. But turning stability into peace required more than a balance of forces. It was necessary "to broaden our conception of security, in the realization that our security in the broadest sense of the word is interlocked with that of our adversary," Sovietologist Marshall Shulman argued. Because neither the United States nor the USSR would benefit from war or unrestrained military spending, American and Soviet leaders committed themselves to arms control.
They also looked for new ways to strengthen their relationship. Although they continued to jockey for military and geopolitical advantage, especially in the global south, the superpowers now sought to understand each other, cooperate across the Iron Curtain, and reach agreement on the rules that would govern their relations and their conduct in the world. Regular meetings between officials and closer contacts between average citizens would also help to establish "an easier pattern of human relations" between East and West, an eminent group of Western European analysts argued. But numerous obstacles stood in the way. Closer cooperation — and ultimately a durable peace settlement — required "radical changes in the present structure of greater Europe."
Here lay another paradox of nuclear stability. As soon as the status quo had stabilized, it needed to be revised. The immediate danger of war faded, but public support for familiar Cold War patterns did too. Popular demands for a resolution to the conflict grew apace. As the military situation became more rigid, the diplomatic situation became more flexible but also more urgent. "Precisely because we no longer fear war, we should start thinking about peace," Pierre Hassner concluded. "[W]e cannot afford not to start thinking about a new security system." A window of opportunity had opened. It was now possible — and necessary — to address the problems that had created the Cold War in the first place.
II
As superpower relations stabilized, the Eastern and Western alliances fractured. Among the members of NATO, preserving allied unity no longer seemed so urgent. "On both sides of the Atlantic, there is a murmuring discontent with the prevailing philosophy of the Cold War, although no consensus has emerged as to what should take its place," Marshall Shulman noted. "This discontent is often part of the unarticulated background of policy differences within the Western alliance."
Mutually assured destruction undermined the military assumptions on which NATO operated. In the early years of the alliance, the Western Europeans had played an important role as "forward-defense allies," hosting bases for the bombers that formed the backbone of the American nuclear deterrent. In the event of hostilities, they would also provide a buffer against a communist invasion. The development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which enabled the superpowers to strike each other directly, reduced the allies' military importance. The missiles also raised uncomfortable questions about the logic of extended deterrence. By the mid-1960s, few officials in Paris or Bonn expected the American government to defend Western Europe as if it were its own territory. Because of the threat of Soviet retaliation, Washington would not "risk New York to save Paris."
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction To the Helsinki Station 1
Chapter 1 Crises of Legitimacy 18
Chapter 2 The Class of 1969 50
Chapter 3 Creating the CSCE 75
Chapter 4 The Meaning of Security 108
Chapter 5 A Declaration of Interdependence? 145
Chapter 6 The Closed Society and Its Enemies 169
Chapter 7 The Pens of August 207
Epilogue Reunifications 235
Notes 259
Bibliography 363
Index 387
What People are Saying About This
“The Final Act is a masterpiece. Michael Cotey Morgan tells a complex story with a novelist’s attention to narrative and a historian’s depth and scope. This will be, I am confident, the definitive work on the most important development in international relations of the postwar period.”—Philip Bobbitt, author of The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History“The Final Act offers by far the most comprehensive history of a critical turning point in modern international diplomacy.”—Thomas Borstelmann, author of The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality“Michael Cotey Morgan’s richly researched book reminds us that, in tense times when chances of improvement seem remote, sowing the seeds for long-term change is often the smartest strategy. The Final Act is a timely and essential book.”—Mary Elise Sarotte, author of The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall“This judicious and well-researched book is perhaps as exhaustive on the origins of the Final Act as the diplomatic negotiations that created it. Morgan’s biggest surprise for readers is a story of why and how the Soviet bloc acted as halfhearted architect of a liberal-democratic European order. In a truly historical irony, the book provides a nostalgic contrast to the woes and divisions that this order is experiencing in our own day.”—Vladislav M. Zubok, author of A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev