The Reuniting of Europe

Promises, Negotiations and Compromises

José I. Torreblanca

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351808439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Tratados

This title was first published in 2001: In 1989, central and Eastern European countries broke free form the Soviet Union and looked upon the European Community to support their 'return to Europe'. Some years later, leaders of the European Community, meeting in Copenhagen in June 1993, endorsed for the first time the membership aspirations of the recently democratized countries of Central and Eastern Europe. This insightful text examines the negotiations, debates, tensions and contradictions behind the process of approximation between the two halves of Europe, both within the EC itself as well as between the EC and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The extensive consultation of unpublished internal documents, and a theoretically relevant and well-written analysis, ensures that this book is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of EC/EU relations with Central and Eastern Europe.

PART I

THE EMERGENCE OF AN ASSOCIATION POLICY

1 Unclear Objectives

This chapter begins by examining the problems the European Community had historically confronted in its attempts to devise a joint Ostpolitik. It then considers how the accession to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, and the early economic and political reforms introduced by the Polish and Hungarian leadership, finally enabled the European Community to establish a policy of promoting political and economic reforms in Central Eastern Europe. Finally, as the reforms in Central Eastern Europe progressed, it shows how the problems raised by the reunification of Germany and the need to strengthen the EC started to undermine EC’s internal cohesion with respect to the ultimate objectives of its newly achieved Ostpolitik.

The long search for an Ostpolitik

For most of the Cold War, the Soviet Union adopted a very hostile attitude to the European integration process embodied by the European Economic Community (EEC). During the détente period, the Soviet suspicions concerning the West’s desire to undermine the cohesion of its bloc, as well as the EEC member states different goals and strategies with respect to East-West relations precluded, in spite of mutual economic interests, the normalisation of relations between the EEC and the Eastern bloc.

Gorbachev’s accession to power in 1985 paved the way for a process of dialogue between the EEC and the Soviet Union which led to the normalisation of relations between the EC and the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA). Thanks to the historic Joint EC-CMEA declaration of June 1988, the EC was able to conclude Trade and Economic Cooperation agreements (TCAs) with the Eastern European countries, and promote political and economic reforms in the region as well as greater independence from Moscow.

The EC and Eastern Europe during the Cold War

The imposition of Communist rule over Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1948 divided the continent in two, signalling the start of the Cold War. The Soviet push in the late forties (Berlin), the fifties (Korea), and the early sixties (Cuba) helped to strengthen the unity of the West and paved the way for American support for the political and economic integration of Western Europe, but left little room left for any attempt to loosen Soviet control over Eastern Europe or to put the official rhetoric on the ‘Captive Nations’ of Eastern Europe into practice.¹

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union adopted a twofold approach to Western multilateralism and the European integration process. On the one hand, it would try to frustrate the creation of multilateral organisations or undermine their cohesion once established. On the other hand, it would try to imitate these moves and strengthen its own control over its East European satellites. However, the failure of this strategy was also twofold: first, the West was not deterred from further cooperation and integration, and second, the increase in Soviet control over its satellites provoked major intra-bloc crises (Yugoslavia in 1948, the riots in East Berlin, Sofia, and Prague in 1953, the revolts in Poznan and Budapest in 1956, and the Czech rising in 1968). Thus, while multilateralism strengthened the West, the Soviet Union struggled in its attempts to foster communist multilateral economic organisations. The CMEA was established in 1949, but as multilateralism required equality among members and implied greater Eastern European independence from Moscow, it was never seriously considered by Moscow. Well aware of this, the Eastern European countries never willingly accepted the disguised multilateralism through which the Soviet Union was seeking to strengthen its control over Eastern Europe. Hence, the successive reforms of the CMEA in 1960, 1962, and 1971 were essentially cosmetic and did not change the intergovernmental and Soviet-dominated nature of the organisation.²

The West’s neglect of Eastern Europe in the fifties gradually came to an end during the sixties due to a combination of factors. Until then, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) had maintained a policy of isolation towards the German Democratic Republic (GDR) on the grounds of its ‘illegal’ nature. However, in the early sixties, the entry of the Liberals (FDP) and the Social democrats (SPD) into the federal government opened the way for a new policy, to be known as the ‘Ostpolitik’, the main tenet of which was to replace the previous policy of diplomatic isolation by one of dialogue and cooperation. Rather than seeking the immediate collapse of the GDR, the new Ostpolitik sought to engage East and West in a dialogue which would lessen the tensions between them. In the most optimistic scenario, the new policy of cooperation would eventually lead to the end of the division of Europe, and specially of Germany, while in any case, it would make the division of Europe more bearable for the Germans, reduce world tension, and provide substantial economic benefits. The first West German trade missions were dispatched to Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria between 1962 and 1963. By the turn of the decade, the 1970 Peace Treaty between the Soviet Union and West Germany and the 1972 Treaty between the two Germanies had radically transformed East-West relations.³

The success of the Ostpolitik had much to do with the international context of the time. For the United States, the Kennedy presidency and the Cuban crisis, together with the Vietnam War and the forced end of the dollar gold-exchange in 1971, spelt economic exhaustion and a crisis of leadership which made it necessary to convince the Soviet Union of the advantages of a cooperative modus vivendi. For the Soviet Union, the economic slow-down, the subsequent need to import Western technology, the problems of maintaining the cohesion of the Eastern bloc, and the Chinese-Soviet split, counselled the consolidation of the status quo reached after two decades of tensions. In France, both De Gaulle and Pompidou were seeking to reduce the level of confrontation between the superpowers so that Europe, and France in particular, could emerge as a greater power. Finally, in Eastern Europe there was a widespread consensus on the need to gain greater economic and political independence from the Soviet Union in order to win much needed popular support for the political regimes.

Behind the common Western perception of the need to add positive or active goals to the otherwise rather reactive policy of military containment, there were to be considerable differences in the preferred approaches, strategies and instruments of the different countries. As a result, throughout the Cold War, Western foreign policies would comprise different combinations of, and even confusion between, three main strategies.⁴

Strategies of ‘accommodation’ were based on the belief that without major domestic change in the Soviet Union, Soviet control over Eastern Europe would be difficult to reverse. According to this logic, preserving and enhancing the economic and security benefits of détente appeared a better option than provoking the Soviet Union through strategies of direct confrontation, such as economic warfare, or strategies of differentiation or conditionality with respect to its European satellites.

‘Transformationist’ strategies also preferred the preservation of the status quo to the risks of a return to a logic of confrontation. At the same time, however, they were based on the idea that détente should be seen as an incremental process of confidence-building which, in the long run, would foster social change and domestic transformation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Accordingly, the emphasis was on long-term economic incentives, such as credits or technology transfers, the intensity of which could, on paper at least, be modified in accordance with the prevailing tendencies in Moscow, but without completely withdrawing them in response to every new crisis. Thus, these strategies looked to long-term processes and did not depend on the West’s ability to directly condition or shape Soviet behaviour in the short term.

Finally, there were ‘dissolutionist’ strategies aimed at raising both the cost of non-cooperative behaviour and the price the Soviet Union had to pay to maintain its empire. Sanctions, embargoes, and isolationist tactics were seen in the United States, for most of the Cold War period, as the best way of conditioning Soviet behaviour. Though these strategies were abandoned during the détente years, in the eighties Reagan would attempt to use them again, provoking major divisions among the allies, who were not willing to renounce the benefits of détente.

Hardly surprisingly, Western Europe showed greater cohesion in the face of the hostile Soviet Union of the later forties, fifties and sixties, than against the more cooperative Soviet regime of the seventies. If détente contributed to the consolidation of the status quo, turned the Soviet Union into a conservative power, and allowed both the East and West to reap the benefits of expanded economic relations, it evidently failed to foster an independent relationship between the West and the countries of Eastern Europe. The EEC member states were unable to coordinate their economic instruments, such as trade, investment or borrowing, to introduce significant changes in Soviet behaviour, or to increase Eastern Europe’s independence from the Soviet Union.

Taking advantage of these divisions, the Soviet Union was often able to play Western governments, and specially the EEC member states, off against each other when, in fact, the EEC had a strong negotiating position. The EEC’s Common Agriculture Policy (CAP), established in 1962, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which by 1963 had received foreign trade competencies, as well as the Common Commercial Policy (CCP), which was to be fully assumed by Brussels on 1 January 1970, constituted ideal instruments on which to build a common EEC Ostpolitik. In fact, the negative impact of these policies on Eastern European exports to the EEC was already visible to East European leaders in the early sixties, so in spite of the official policy of not recognising the EEC, they had already negotiated specific trade arrangements regulating their access to the EEC market.

The interest in increasing East-West trade was mutual. For the EEC member states, exports to Eastern Europe would help boost domestic production and employment, while for Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, these imports would bring in the Western technology they needed to overcome the economic stagnation of the Socialist bloc. As the shortage of hardcurrency in Eastern Europe meant that East-West trade could only be financed by credits, détente turned into a profitable and safe business for all concerned, above all for Western governments, which soon became enthusiastic about a policy which brought exports, jobs, and international security at one and the same time.⁵

Whereas the domestic economic benefits of détente were obvious, its implications for the real goals of Ostpolitik were rather less positive. If the West could not coordinate the flow of Western lending towards the Soviet bloc, there would be scant opportunities to link trade to political and diplomatic concessions. NATO members had agreed in the early sixties on the interest rates to be granted to the Eastern block. But, first the United Kingdom, in 1964, then Italy, in 1966, and later the other Western European countries, broke the commitment reached in NATO’s Economic Committee and engaged in massive long-term lending at quite low interest rates. The abundant supply of credit allowed the Eastern bloc to negotiate even better conditions in return for even fewer concessions: $ 67 billion flowed from the West to the East between 1974 and 1981, at the same time as there was a ten-fold increase in trade.⁶

Rather than ‘accommodation’, the West’s (lack of) strategy served to finance the viability of the Soviet bloc. Ironically, the abundant supply of Western credit at low rates during the seventies would allow Eastern European leaders to avoid embarking on the much-needed structural transformation of their economies, making their collapse almost unavoidable in the late eighties. But at a time of major recession, the EEC member paid little attention to the way the absence of a common strategy was undermining their chances of weakening Soviet control over Eastern Europe.⁷

Significantly, differences within EEC over trade with Eastern Europe ‘spilled back’ into the European integration process on two occasions. First, when the member states decided to postpone until 31 December 1974 the full transfer of treaty-making powers in trade to the European Commission (EEC Article 113), so as to delay for a few years more the possibility of signing bilateral trade agreements with Eastern Europe. Second, when despite the 1975 ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) that established that the regulation of export credits fell within the powers of the European Commission, the member states forced the Commission to adopt an extremely low profile in this area.⁸

The weak cohesion of the West and the EEC strengthened the Soviet Union’s negotiating position. The European Commission and the member states had agreed on a ‘twin-track’ policy in their trade dealings with the Soviet bloc. This policy (also labelled the ‘parallel approach’) consisted in accepting the normalisation of relations between the EEC and the CMEA only if the EEC was to be allowed to sign bilateral trade agreements with the Eastern European countries, treating each one individually. The EEC was right, from a legal point of view, to argue that Community trade with the Soviet bloc could not be managed by the CMEA because, whereas the EEC was a customs union and both the EEC Treaty and the Common Commercial Policy (CCP) gave clear trade competencies to Brussels, the CMEA was purely intergovernmental and played no role in external trade. But behind this legal reasoning, the political rationale of this ‘twin-track’ policy was evident: providing the Eastern Europeans an opportunity to establish an autonomous trade policy towards the EEC would automatically give them greater independence from Moscow. In contrast, dealing exclusively with the CMEA would reinforce Soviet control over its satellites.

The problem was that the EEC had no way of forcing the Soviet Union to accept this twin-track policy. Soviet exports to the EEC, mostly consisting of energy and raw materials, were not affected by the commercial barriers erected by the EEC. In contrast to Eastern Europe, whose exports to the EEC were adversely affected by the CAP and the ECSC, the Soviet Union itself could afford to maintain its policy of tight control over Eastern Europe. Faced by Soviet obstinacy, the EEC member states broke ranks and competed with each other in offering credits to the Eastern bloc. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981 brought détente to an end but the balance was clearly favourable to the Soviet Union: Moscow had obtained generous funding for crucial technology imports, the ‘twin-track’ policy had never really taken off, and the cohesion of the West had been seriously undermined.

The frustrations of détente

The prospect of a common Ostpolitik was closely related to the ‘German question’. Any change in the status, position, or relative power of the Federal Republic inevitably provoked a major crisis during the Cold War and its aftermath. This was seen first in the late forties, when France refused to integrate its occupation zone into the projected new West German state. Then, in the mid fifties, when the US sponsored rearmament of Germany confronted the French with a major internal political crisis which led to the non-ratification of the European Defence Community (EDC) by the French National Assembly. And also later, in the mid sixties, when the German Socialdemocrats started to talk openly of both the future reunification of Germany and a new policy of cooperation with the Soviet Union. And it became evident again on the eve of German reunification in the late eighties, when West German anchorage i...