The signing of the Helsinki Accords on August 1, 1975, represented a seminal moment in Europe’s Cold War. With thirty-five nations represented, including the United States and Canada, most of them by their respective heads of state, it was the biggest (and first) European multilateral gathering since World War II. While it did not result in the signing of formal treaties, the CSCE was perhaps the most high-profile expression of the fact that the Cold
War had moved to an entirely new stage. While observers disagreed (and historians continue to do so) about whether the Helsinki Accords were a move toward undermining the Cold War order or an effort to stabilize it, the sheer magnitude of the undertaking spelled the birth of a new kind of Europe, one no longer exclusively dominated by East-West rivalries.
The CSCE had a long history. The original proposal for a Pan-European security conference had been made by the Soviet foreign minister, Viacheslav Molotov, in 1954. Because the United States (and Canada) were not invited, the proposal was turned down by NATO countries (as they rejected Warsaw Pact appeals in the 1960s). In the aftermath of the crackdown on Czechoslovakia in 1968 and virtually coinciding with the Sino-Soviet border clashes, the Warsaw Pact issued, on March 17, 1969, the Budapest appeal, which, for the first time, did not include specific preconditions (that is, it did not exclude any countries from the list of participants). Two months later, the Finnish president Urho Kekkonen, at the USSR’s urging, acted as a neutral go-between, offering Helsinki as the site for such a conference. Most significantly, the latter invitation was directed to all European countries as well as the United States and Canada.302 Finally, in November 1972, the initial Multilateral Preparatory Talks began at the Dipoli conference centre, outside of Helsinki. After several years of arduous negotiations in Geneva and Helsinki, involving representatives of thirty-five countries, the CSCE finally concluded with a high-level three-day summit in Helsinki (Stage III) that opened on July 30,1975.
Both the process and the outcome were remarkable in highlighting the birth of a new kind of East-West relationship in Europe. The four 'Baskets’ (or parts) of the Helsinki Accords dealt with virtually every aspect of Pan-European security. While Basket I, for example, dealt with such "traditional" security issues as the inviolability of borders, Baskets II and III dealt with economic issues and, perhaps most controversially, human rights. Basket IV - rarely mentioned - was perhaps the most important of all: it called for follow-up conferences, thereby ensuring that the accords would become a 'living" document. In other words, the signing ceremony at Helsinki’s Finlandia Hall on August 1, 1975, was as much the beginning of a process as it was an end of the multilateral negotiation that had stretched far beyond the time limits anticipated in 1972.
Nor should one underestimate the significance of the process itself. It was quite a feat to bring together the diplomatic representatives of countries as different as Britain and Romania, or Belgium and Yugoslavia. Equally importantly, by involving both Germanies in the process, the CSCE negotiations offered the first significant opportunity for addressing the division of the country. Of course, the Helsinki Accords did not solve the question of Germany’s division; in fact, many in Western Germany were concerned lest the process, by adding further legitimacy to the East German regime, actually served to solidify the division. The CSCE did, though, fit nicely with Brandt’s Ostpolitik by offering yet another means for strengthening the Federal Republic’s ties to the East (both the GDR and other Soviet bloc nations).
Remarkable - and perhaps somewhat overrated - though the CSCE’s final document was, it was also inherently contradictory, producing diametrically opposite interpretations. The Helsinki Accords were widely criticized in the United States for allegedly recognizing Soviet control over Eastern Europe. In the Soviet bloc, the provisions on human rights were basically ignored. Nevertheless, the CSCE was of major long-term significance: it signaled the emergence of human security as an important and recognized aspect of international relations. The agreements would later serve as a manifesto by numerous dissident and human rights groups inside the Soviet Union and its satellites. The fact that the CSCE did recognize the possibility that borders might be changed through "peaceful means" also satisfied the minimum demands of those Germans who still held up unification as a realistic goal.303
Not everyone, however, was excited (or concerned) about the CSCE. Iurii Andropov, the head ofthe Soviet KGB and later secretary-general ofthe Soviet Communist Party, dismissed the notion that Basket III would ever have an appreciable impact inside the USSR. "We are the masters in this house," he reportedly told the Politburo members who doubted the wisdom of signing a protocol that recognized freedom of speech. Others, like Kissinger, did not even bother reading the Helsinki Accords. The American secretary of state, whose lack of enthusiasm for the CSCE was notable throughout the process, at one time even quipped that the Helsinki Final Act might just as well be written "in Swahili."304
Such missives notwithstanding - and Kissinger himself would later provide a rather positive assessment of the CSCE - the CSCE did mark a certain rebirth of Europe. For the first time since the end of World War II, the CSCE provided a forum in which all-European negotiations could take place. In Helsinki and Geneva, under the umbrella of the CSCE, East-West contacts were fostered in a way that could hardly have been foreseen a decade earlier. West Europeans, in particular, found the CSCE to be a vehicle for putting the recommendations of the 1970 Davignon Report into practice, in effect launching what today is called a European Common Foreign and Security Policy. NATO members and neutrals tended to dominate much of the negotiating process because the Americans showed but minimal interest and the Soviets (and selected East European governments) tried to keep the agenda - and the results - as limited as possible.305
At the same time, the Iron Curtain was punctured economically. Already, by the late 1960s, the unity of the Atlantic alliance regarding its trade embargo against the Soviet bloc in strategic goods had evaporated. Europeans had gradually drifted away from the rigid American approach to the embargo.306 Consequently, aggregate East-West trade (exports plus imports) rose nearly sixfold in nominal terms from 1970 through 1979. The increase, however, was imbalanced in at least two ways. First, only a few key countries (such as West Germany and Romania) saw a substantial increment in their trade with countries outside their own bloc. Second, while Western Europe produced a host of goods in demand in the East, there was little that Soviet bloc countries could offer in return. Unlike the USSR, they had no massive energy sources (gas or oil). Thus, Eastern Europe’s purchases from the EEC countries were financed heavily with loans provided by banks in Western Europe. In the 1980s, the credits would effectively bankrupt a number of Soviet bloc countries and deepen the crisis of Communism.307
Perhaps most importantly, West Europeans were able to include questions of individual freedom and political rights in the CSCE agenda, an important - if initially perhaps mainly cosmetic - victory. As T. A. K. Elliott, the British ambassador to Finland who was deeply involved in the negotiations, put it in 1974: "One thing the Conference has already achieved: to get it accepted for the first time by Communist states that relations between peoples - and therefore the attitudes of Governments towards their citizens - should be the subject of multilateral discussion." This principle, he added, was important because it might "eventually be able to get the Soviet Union to lower, even a little, the barriers to human contacts and the flow of information and ideas between East and West."308
Herein lay the key to the long-term significance of the CSCE and of European detente. Unlike superpower detente, it did not focus on nuclear weapons or traditional security issues. What the CSCE, one of the key products of European detente, brought clearly to the international arena was a focus on human security, on the rights of people rather than the prerogatives of states.
World History
