The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered: International Relations in Eastern Europe, 1955–1969 by Laurien Crump (review)

The Soviet Union established the Warsaw Treaty Organization (or Warsaw Pact) in May 1955 as an ostensible counterpart to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) founded by the United States, Canada, and ten West European countries in April 1949. An empty vessel or "cardboard castle" through the 1950s, the Warsaw Pact developed an institutional structure of councils, committees, and advisory bodies in the 1960s. This bureaucratic edifice was both consequence and facilitator of efforts by the smaller states in the Soviet bloc—Albania (initially), Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania—to use the alliance structure to pursue autonomous foreign and security policy agendas. The seven non-Soviet Warsaw Pact (NSWP) states, as they came to be known, were ruled by Communist regimes imposed by Soviet occupation, subversion, and pressure (Albania was a partial exception) and, as demonstrated in 1989, remained existentially dependent on Soviet influence and ultimately Soviet military force for their survival (and, in the case of East Germany, the survival of the state).

Within these constraints—quite different from relationships within NATO—the NSWP states pursued differentiated international initiatives in the 1960s. Romania refused to back the USSR in the Sino-Soviet dispute and defied East Germany by establishing diplomatic relations with West Germany. Romania also developed a special relationship with the United States and other Western countries. The sweeping liberal reforms in Czechoslovakia during the 1968 Prague Spring threatened other Soviet-bloc regimes, spurring the Soviet Union to crush the Prague Spring with military force. Poland and East Germany espoused maximalist positions on West German issues in an unsuccessful effort to force final international legal recognition of Poland's Western border (demarcated provisionally in the Potsdam Agreement) and East Germany's right to exist as a separate state (in the absence of a German peace treaty). Hungary sought with some success to improve economic ties with the West and to limit conflict within the Warsaw Pact that might interfere with that objective. Albania, being territorially separated from the Soviet bloc and aligned after 1960 with China, first boycotted and then in 1968 withdrew entirely from the Pact.

Relationships within the Soviet bloc after 1956 have long been well understood by scholars, intelligence analysts, and journalists focused on Eastern Europe. If early literature on the Cold War could reasonably characterize the NSWP states as Soviet "satellites" or "vassals" or "transmission belts," such descriptions have long been outdated. Unity and Conflict was the subtitle of Zbigniew Brzezinski's seminal 1961 book The Soviet Bloc (published in an updated edition in 1967), in which he traced (in chapter 17) the evolution of "Satellites into Junior Allies." Brzezinski's Alternative to Partition: For a Broader Conception of America's Role in Europe, which he published in 1965, advocated a Western policy of peaceful engagement in Eastern Europe keyed to differentiation within the Soviet bloc. The NSWP states openly articulated their differentiated interests in the 1960s and beyond in their official media, and these were tracked by contemporaneous Western observers, especially analysts working for the research branches of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (of which I was one).

The evolution of Soviet satellites into junior allies is the subject of the volume under review. Laurien Crump devotes her attention to the differentiated impact in the 1960s on what Brzezinski called the "Soviet alliance system" of developments, including the Sino-Soviet split and Albania's alliance with China, the German question and broader European security issues, Romania's independent international course, and intrabloc ramifications of the Prague Spring. Her conclusions on these issues confirm previous studies and do not break new ground, despite Crump's all-too-frequent claims that her arguments are "contrary to conventional wisdom" (p. 74) and "often … ignored in the historiography" (p. 48). This tilting at scholarly windmills detracts from the value of the book. Although Crump includes an extensive bibliography, greater use of cited works and other monographs on Eastern Europe would...