Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (review)

What caused the end of the Cold War and how can we explain the dramatic growth of human rights politics since the 1970s? Both questions have animated historical inquiries into international relations in recent years, and for good reason. Few issues have cast a larger shadow on the recent geopolitical stage than the Cold War's demise and the global proliferation of human rights discourses. These questions are often tackled separately, however, or at least with considerable priority accorded to one over the other. Sarah Snyder fuses them together to compelling effect in Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network. This well researched, clearly written, and capably argued study is a welcome contribution to scholarship examining the history of Cold War diplomacy, international human rights, political development, and global civil society. While appropriate for upper division undergraduates and graduate students, seasoned scholars will also find much to contemplate in the book's framework, assertions, and evidence.

Snyder places human rights advocacy squarely in the center of existing explanations for the end of the Cold War. The book examines what has come to be known as "the Helsinki effect," a term popularized by political scientist Daniel C. Thomas that references the broad geopolitical and human impact of a cluster of international conferences, agreements, and monitoring activities begun in 1972 by the Soviet bloc, Western Europe, and the United States. The first chapter demonstrates how the core agreement in the process, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act (or Accords), aimed to balance Soviet desires for recognition of secure post-World War II borders in Eastern and Central Europe with Western demands that human rights be respected by the Soviet bloc. The Soviets were initially eager about the process while the Ford administration involved itself more warily, positions that Snyder shows would nearly reverse themselves as the human rights provisions in the agreements grew teeth. Critical to the Accords' long-term influence, according to Snyder, was the guarantee that conferences would be held regularly among the signatory states to track compliance. Snyder argues that this monitoring apparatus nurtured a robust transnational network of human rights advocates from Moscow to Washington DC and places in between. The middle chapters of Human Rights Activism examine with impressive detail the emergence and growth of this "Helsinki Network." They reveal the roles played by the network's key participants, including members of the United States Congress, the Carter and Reagan Administrations, the US-based Helsinki Watch, the Moscow Helsinki Group, various other human rights activists throughout Eastern and Western Europe, and the umbrella entity that helped to formally unite them all: the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights. Snyder argues that this network, in turn, proved critical in putting human rights squarely on the foreign policy agendas of both the United States and the Soviet Union beginning in the mid-1970s and mid-1980s respectively.

Drawing on research conducted in North America, the United Kingdom, and former Soviet satellite states, Snyder provides a textured, nuanced account that strives to supplement more than supplant dominant explanations for the end of the Cold War. As marshaled by historians and political scientists—including John Lewis Gaddis, Constantine Pleshakov, Archie Brown, Charles Maier, and Jeffrey Checkel—the most common explanations for the disintegration of the Soviet empire have emphasized material factors such as overstretched militaries and economic stagnation, "great man" approaches that highlight the outsized influence of visionary leaders, the regional effects of Soviet bloc dissidence, and ideological paradigms that attribute transformative force to the growth of liberal precepts in the East. Snyder generally accepts each of these explanations so far as they go, but argues that the story is woefully incomplete without attending to the remarkable activities and impact of the Helsinki Network. Diverse yet interconnected webs of transnational human rights advocacy are...