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Document No. 88: Summary of the Deputy Foreign Ministers’ Preparatory Meeting for the CSCE Madrid Conference, July 8–9, 1980 ——————————————————————————————————————————— The purpose of this meeting of Warsaw Pact deputy foreign ministers, held at Soviet initiative, was to prepare a joint strategy for a CSCE follow-up session in Madrid. That session would begin in 1980 and drag on for over three years. The Soviets’ basic goal in Madrid was to weaken NATO politically and undermine support in Western Europe for the Atlantic alliance’s military reorganization program. Within the Eastern bloc, this strategy was known as military détente. Moscow was most interested in emphasizing Basket I issues, namely, the basic political–military aspects of East–West relations, and shifting attention away from Basket III, with its human rights content, which was a particularly sensitive issue in the wake of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. This and similar documents show that much of the detail work in hammering out strategies within the Warsaw Pact took place at the level of deputy ministers. ____________________ On July 8–9 a consultation of the deputy ministers of foreign affairs of the Warsaw Pact member-states took place in Prague. The purpose of this consultative session, called at the May Political Consultative Committee meeting, was to exchange views and experiences concerning the preparations made to date for the Madrid meeting and to get clarification on the main directions of the next coordinated advance. […] All the participants […] agreed on the character of the intentions of the capitalist states who are preparing to level sharp criticism of the socialist states at the Madrid meeting, in particular of the Soviet Union, based on the provision of international aid to Afghanistan and on the alleged failure to satisfy the Final Act especially in the area of human rights and freedoms. The United States will go farthest in this sort of confrontation while other West European countries with the possible exception of Great Britain and the Netherlands will be interested in not having the confrontation exceed the threshold, which would endanger the essence of détente—in which they are to some extent interested. The participants in the consultation agreed that it is necessary to exploit the non-integrated Western stand on the Madrid meeting and, in this regard, to pay primary attention to the neutral and non-aligned countries, but also to some NATO countries as well as France. The head of the Soviet delegation, Cde. A. Kovalev, emphasized in his speech that in a situation where the United States and several other countries such as Great Britain were prepared to give the meeting a confrontational character, it would be important, as suggested in Cde. L. I. Brezhnev´s proposal at the Political Consultative Committee, to concentrate, in the course of the meeting, on one or two of the most topical items in every part of the Final Act that serve our interests and can become of interest to other countries as well. […] Among these matters are: 438 In the first basket 1. Convening a conference on military détente and disarmament in Europe as the Warsaw declaration of the Warsaw Pact Political Consultative Committee4 session suggests. This question will be a priority for the Warsaw Pact member-states. Unlike the enemies of détente such as the United States, which are against convening such a conference, the Warsaw Pact member-states must endeavor to determine not too narrow a mandate, but a broad and flexible one that would create a wide space for assessing all the proposals submitted (by France, Finland and Sweden, e.g.) concerning confidence and security-building measures and disarmament initiatives, and would not set any preliminary conditions that could a priori influence the course and final result of the conference. […] If the Western position on this question is positive, the Soviet Union will have no objections to including several confidence-building measures in the final document of the Madrid meeting. […] 2. Recommending that the principles governing relations between states, included in the first part of the Final Act, be embedded by the signatory states in the legislative (constitutional) provisions that conform to the procedural norms of each of the states. […] Concerning the standpoint of the Romanian Socialist Republic its representative repeated familiar views and proposals. However, he did not aggravate the negotiation . […] In the second basket The Soviet Union will not be able to overlook the severe violation of the Final Act in this area by the United States...

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