Helsinki 1975 and the Transformation of Europe (review)

The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was such a complex and protracted exercise in multilateralism that it deserves a minute examination of its diverse components. At the same time, the recognition that CSCE was disparaged at the time as a sideshow yet now looms so important in retrospect also calls for bearing in mind the larger picture. Connecting the diverse causes and the different consequences is not easy.

The book under review brings together two kinds of essays. Some originated at a conference in Zurich that looked at the CSCE as progenitor of the European security system. Others were prepared under a Mannheim University project, directed by the two editors, to examine in detail the origins of West Germany's Ostpolitik and its long-term consequences. All the essays focus on the CSCE's preparatory stage more than on the developments that followed the 1975 Helsinki Final Act.

Oliver Bange in his own contribution highlights the indispensability of Ostpolitik in getting the CSCE under way by facilitating the "Eastern treaties" that defused the German question. His co-editor, Gottfried Niedhart, explains how West Germany helped to clinch the Helsinki agreement by devising the ingenious formula about "peaceful change" of "inviolable" borders that prefigured the way the border between the two Germanys would eventually be erased.

What remains debatable is the connection between the intent and the accomplishment. In the intervening period, West Germany played a rather modest role in the CSCE and Germany was eventually reunified in a manner different from what the founding fathers of Ostpolitik, or anyone else, had anticipated. Whether the Ostpolitik helped or hindered what actually happened is a controversial question, a question that in Germany is still politically charged and is unlikely to be conclusively answered anytime soon.

As long as the Cold War lasted, the common assumption was that the unification of Germany could happen—if at all—only as the last, rather than the first, act in the unification of Europe and could be accomplished only with Soviet consent through détente. France, too, subscribed to this assumption, which is why the French government was supportive of its West German allies' Ostpolitik despite, as Marie-Pierre Rey shows in her contribution, President Georges Pompidou's occasional irritation at their Alleingang.

Among those who came closest to grasping what the CSCE might lead to, British diplomats were more perceptive than most. At an early stage, as told by Luca Ratti in his chapter, they understood particularly the potential of the CSCE's follow-up process for undermining the cohesion of the Soviet bloc.

Most of the contributions do not address the hypothesis spelled out in the introduction; namely, that the 1966-1975 period saw the "transformation of the Cold War . . . towards détente" (p. 7). In fact, détente began to decline soon afterward, leading to the "second Cold War" before it recovered in the Cold War's unexpected dénouement.

Two essays addressing the CSCE's unintended consequences are the most original in the collection. The first is Juhana Aunesluoma's piece about the CSCE's much neglected and not inherently exciting Basket II—the economic portion. Her conclusion deserves to be quoted for both its insight and its presentation: "If perestroika was in any way a child of détente and not of the second Cold War, then its parents most certainly were the experience of boom and bust in East-West trade in the 1970s, the deficiencies it showed in the planned economies, their fundamental incompatibility with the emerging global economic order and how the road to prosperity and peace in Europe went through reforms and not status quo policies" (p. 110).

Similarly original is Svetlana Savranskaya's explanation of how Helsinki came to defy Soviet expectations. Soviet and East European dissidents did their part by invoking in their struggle the Final Act's seemingly paper-thin provisions about human rights, thus giving it political substance. However, once this happened, Soviet repression of dissent...