Detente in Europe was a complex and constantly evolving process. It sprang from the national aspirations of several countries; it represented a rebellion of sorts against the formation of tight blocs that had emerged in previous decades. De Gaulle’s efforts to lift France’s status and Ceau§escu’s attempts to take Romania down a more independent road were two examples of such nationalism. But so was the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt, at least if one regards the chancellor’s policies as an effort to advance the cause of German reunification. Still, men like Brandt touched chords and inspired people beyond their national boundaries. Among a large number of Europeans, whether they were members of NATO or the Warsaw Pact or neutrals, there was a strong desire to overcome the rigidities of the blocs and to puncture holes in the Iron Curtain. Because of his unique background, Brandt in many ways was the perfect symbol of the new European era: a social democrat and victim of Nazi persecutors, he had served as the mayor of Berlin in the early 1960s when the Soviets and East Germans had erected the wall. Because he had earned his anti-totalitarian and anti-Communist credentials, Brandt was the right person to talk peace to the Soviets.
Recognizing the aspirations of its allies to reach out to their brethren in East Germany and Eastern Europe, US officials were impelled to pursue a policy of building bridges to the eastern part of the continent. When they put their weight behind the Harmel Report in 1967, American officials were saying that they accepted detente as an appropriate policy to be undertaken multilaterally to relax tensions in Europe while they focused on other parts of the world that they now deemed increasingly important. The detente in Europe that was launched in the late 1960s, however, was very different from its Soviet-American counterpart. It was nurtured and driven by European leaders like Brandt and was embodied in European institutions like the CSCE, setting it apart from its superpower variant.
The practical results of European detente, however, are difficult to measure. Unlike Soviet-American detente, which had its specific mileposts like SALT I and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, the relaxation of East-West relations in Europe was a relatively open-ended process. Because it was not propelled by a single country, it did not have a single coherent goal. Although economic intercourse grew between East and West, it did not transform continent-wide patterns. Although Brandt signed numerous agreements with his counterparts in the East, they were, in the end, less important for what they stated or recognized than for the contacts and processes that were begun. Likewise, the CSCE was not a formal treaty and could be interpreted in numerous contradictory ways; yet the Helsinki Accords for all their ambiguities - perhaps because of their ambiguities - were of great consequence.
Perhaps because it did not have such identifiable and formal "end products," European detente did not suffer a rapid decline and collapse. Unlike Soviet-American detente which was widely proclaimed dead by 1979 (if not earlier), the European process lingered on into the 1980s. The CSCE, for example, was institutionalized in the framework of the follow-up conferences (Belgrade, 1977-78; Madrid, 1980-83; Ottawa, 1985). These had been outlined in Basket IV of the Helsinki Final Act. Indeed, unlike the ABM Treaty of 1972, the CSCE still exists in the form of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). This, in turn, reflected one of the most important developments in the all-European process that had gradually emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s. Getting to the point of signing the Helsinki Final Act on August 1,1975, had required a collective change in the mindsets of leaders on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Although the division of Europe remained intact for another decade and a half, detente and the Helsinki process had begun to nurture an all-European challenge to the division of the continent.
When Willy Brandt accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1971, he said: "Europe has its future ahead of itself. In the West it will grow beyond the European Economic Community and develop into a union which will be able to assume part of the responsibility for world affairs, independently of the United States but firmly linked with it. At the same time there are opportunities for developing cooperation and safeguarding peace through the whole of Europe, perhaps of establishing a kind of European Partnership for Peace."43 Later events would show that Brandt’s vision was far more prophetic than that of most of his counterparts in the West or the East.
43 Willy Brandt, "Peace Policy in Our Time," Nobel lecture, December ii, 1971, in Irwin Abrams (ed.), Nobel Lectures: Peace, 1971-1980 (Singapore: World Scientific, 1997), 24-25.
World History
