Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain

19 To Helsinki and Beyond

19 TO HELSINKI AND BEYOND The participating States . . . [m]ake it their aim to facilitate freer movement and contacts, individually and collectively, whether privately or officially, among persons, institutions and organizations of the participating States, and to contribute to the solution of the humanitarian problems that arise in that connexion. —   When Premier Leonid Brezhnev traveled to Helsinki in the summer of  to sign the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), it is not clear that he understood what he was committing the Soviet Union to do.1 The Final Act, as the conference’s concluding document is known, recognized, for the first time in an international agreement, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freer movement of people, ideas, and information.2 There was considerable drama in the signing of the Final Act on August , , by thirty-three European heads of state or government as well as the prime minister of Canada and the president of the United States. Not since the Congress of Vienna in , which redrew the map of Europe and established a peace that lasted for forty years, had so many European leaders assembled to put their pens to a document outlining future relations between their states. A European security conference had been proposed by the Soviets in  as a surrogate for a World War II peace treaty. Soviet motives were clear—recognition of postwar borders in Europe (especially between Poland and the German Democratic Republic and Soviet Union), cooperation among European states, reduction of armaments, and removal of foreign (that is to say, U.S.) troops from Europe. Under the Soviet proposal, the United States and Canada would have been excluded from the conference. The Europeans—the neutrals and nonaligned as well as NATO members— were interested in such a conference, tempted as they were by the prospects for  . In the following pages on the CSCE, the author has drawn from William Korey, The Promises We Keep: Human Rights, the Helsinki Process, and American Foreign Policy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ), prologue and chap. , as well as the author’s own experience as a member of the U.S. delegation to the Helsinki Review Conference in Madrid and staff consultant to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (U.S. Congress) from  to . . Ibid., xxi. peace and stability in Europe, as well as increased East-West trade. The NATO states, however, stipulated that their non-European allies, the United States and Canada, must also participate in the conference. In addition, as the preliminary political positioning evolved in the late s, the West Europeans maintained that the conference should also discuss fundamental human rights. By the early s, the timing for a European security conference seemed right. A Four-Power agreement on Berlin had been signed, German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik had produced rapprochement between West Germany and Poland, the two Germanys had recognized each other, the Vietnam War appeared to be approaching an end, and agreement had been reached to hold talks on troop reductions in Central Europe. U.S. reaction to the conference, however, was decidedly cool. Henry Kissinger, as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, was not enthusiastic about CSCE, fearing its focus on human rights, which he saw as an impediment to reaching agreement with the Soviet Union on security and other major foreign policy issues. Accordingly, the instructions to the U.S. delegation to the conference were to support our allies but not be confrontational with the Soviets. East European ethnic groups in the United States were also skeptical about any freezing of postwar borders in Eastern Europe and lending legitimacy to communist rule and Soviet hegemony there. But President Nixon was meeting Leonid Brezhnev at summit meetings in the early s, and the administration could hardly object to Europeans also wanting to sit at the same table with the Soviets and discuss common interests. So the United States participated in the CSCE deliberations, although, reflecting Kissinger’s caution, it played a secondary role and left the heavy lifting to its allies. After three years of arduous and prolonged negotiations in Helsinki and Geneva, the CSCE reached agreement in  on a forty-page, forty-thousandword document. The Soviets got their inviolability of borders but had to accept language recognizing respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms as well as the freer movement of people and information. As the date approached for signing the Final Act, domestic opposition in the United...