A State of Peace in Europe: West Germany and the CSCE, 1966–1975 by Petri Hakkarainen (review)

Since the end of the Cold War, scholars have published a great deal about the “Helsinki effect”—that is, the role of the 1975 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in shaping human rights discourse across the Iron Curtain. Now that the documentary record of the CSCE negotiations is finally available at archives across Europe and North America, historians have begun sifting through vast quantities of material for insights into the breakthrough at Helsinki. But with thirty-five participating countries and a welter of preparatory conferences to consider, the details are often more dusty than devilish.

Petri Hakkarainen has therefore performed a commendable service by writing such a clearly structured analysis of West Germany’s role in the CSCE. This is not faint praise: what Hakkarainen has done is extraordinarily demanding, requiring the ability to parse the true meaning of deliberately opaque diplomatic language. For nearly a year, West German officials haggled over the placement of words “in accordance with international law” within the Helsinki Final Act (229–32). Every comma mattered. Even experts on international relations have a hard time discerning just what was at stake in the countless preparatory meetings. Hakkarainen clarifies this for us.

Tracing the story of the CSCE back to the late 1960s, the author explains that West Germans responded cautiously to insistent calls by the Warsaw Pact for an international conference. Soviet intentions were unclear. Did the Kremlin hope to achieve a consensus on the permanent division of Europe—including Germany—into separate capitalist and communist spheres? Were they trying to break apart the North Atlantic alliance? Willy Brandt and his confidante Egon Bahr, then ensconced in Bonn’s foreign ministry, mused that such a conference might serve as a step toward creating a “European peace order”—a stable and lasting form of détente.

After moving to the chancellor’s office in 1969, Brandt and Bahr sought to instrumentalize Moscow’s conference ambitions, proclaiming that Bonn would not agree to take part in a CSCE until certain preconditions had been met. Unfortunately, the exact nature of those preconditions was constantly in flux, and, as a result, the Brandt government played its cards inconsistently. Hakkarainen is fairly neutral in his assessment of these half-hearted “linkages,” but other readers might find confirmation here of Bahr’s dilettantism. The Moscow Treaty of 1970 was, it seems, a tenuous achievement; for the next five years, its provisions had to be reinforced every time West German diplomats sat down to negotiate with their Soviet counterparts.

The core of this monograph concerns the years 1970–72, when Bonn’s foreign ministry stopped viewing the CSCE as a means to an end, and started to see real value in the substance of the upcoming conference. For the first time, West German officials became truly proficient at skating across the various multilateral groupings available to them—the nine-member European Community, the NATO Council, the so-called “Bonn Group” (France, Britain, the US, and West Germany)—in order to win over Western partners to specific German wishes. Most significant, Bonn guided the Western camp away from a confrontational posture. There was no point, the West Germans argued, in demanding the removal of the Berlin Wall—or even the free and open sale of Western newspapers inside the Soviet bloc. Vague provisions such as “human contacts” or “cultural exchange” would provide a useful starting point, and they would be more likely to find Soviet approval. Hakkarainen is quite insistent about the absence of grand ambitions in West Germany. Ameliorating the Cold War division of Germany (and, where possible, Europe) was as much as could be expected. For Bonn, human rights were best realized on a small scale, e.g., through family reunifications across the Iron Curtain.

Hakkarainen’s monograph derives from a prize-winning dissertation, and the accolades are well deserved. The research...