Origins of the European Security System: The Helsinki Process Revisited, 1965–75 (review)

Few international agreements have encountered as much interpretative turbulence as the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, the product of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). After nearly three years of negotiations, this long, complex document was signed by leaders of 35 states: the United States, the Soviet Union, Canada, and all of Europe except Albania. At first it was wrongly vilified by many Western commentators for allegedly endorsing Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe. Moscow proclaimed the same interpretation. Then, when courageous people in the Soviet sphere began citing the document’s pledges on human rights, the Final Act was enthusiastically taken up by its former critics in the West. Later it was credited with having contributed to ending the Cold War.

Fortunately the subject has lately been attracting a great deal of scholarly interest. As the archives have opened up (some fully, others less so), conferences, books, and memoirs have proliferated, stripping away accretions of political interpretation to reveal a more complex but no less fascinating reality.

The book under review is the product of a conference that brought many leading scholars and former participants to Zurich in September 2005 under the auspices of the Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security (http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch). The result is a valuable examination of the many facets of the CSCE and the interaction of the conflicting interests that went into the making of the Final Act. The book concentrates on the years 1972–1975 but starts with a sober warning about the dangers of hindsight. We can now see that the Final Act had precisely the opposite effect of that predicted by its Western critics and hoped for by the Soviet Union. Far from cementing the status quo, it helped to erode Soviet power in Eastern Europe. But, as Andreas Wenger and Vojtech Mastny rightly argue, Helsinki did not cause the collapse of the Soviet empire. Rather, it set in motion developments that eventually “supplied a normative framework conducive to the peaceful demise of Communism” (p. 3).

A surprising finding of recent research is how much diversity and conflict existed behind the monolithic facade of the Warsaw Pact. Romania, Poland, and East Germany, in particular, were all pressing their own demands, to which Moscow was forced to pay some attention. Douglas Selvage and Federica Caciagli offer valuable analysis in this area, and Marie-Pierre Rey examines differences in Moscow reflecting both institutional interests and pressure from a rising generation of Soviet diplomats who saw detente as having “major potential for instigating an evolution in their regime” (p. 73). She reaches the interesting though disputable conclusion that signature of the Final Act constituted “the victory of reformers over conservatives” (p. 78).

But there was no East-West symmetry in the negotiations. Within the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union ultimately called the shots. On the Western side the United States took a back seat through most of the negotiations, and Henry Kissinger was actively hostile until the final phase, more so in private than he admits in his memoirs. Jeremi Suri offers a partial defense of Kissinger and charts his reluctant conversion from opposition to belated support, and Michael Morgan takes a broader view of the North American role by including Canada. Although the North Atlantic Treaty Organization initially agreed on parameters for the conference, the CSCE was hampered not only by Washington but also by undemocratic members who were not interested in human rights. Leadership of the Western caucus therefore passed to the nine members of the (then) European Community, which, as Daniel Möckli shows, used the new machinery of European Political Cooperation (EPC) to become not only “the actor group with the single biggest impact on the outcome of the negotiations” (p. 145) but also “a key driving force behind the expanding notion of security that resulted in the recognition of human rights as a principle of international relations...