The Crisis of Détente in Europe

From Helsinki to Gorbachev 1975-1985

Leopoldo Nuti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134044979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This edited volume is the first detailed exploration of the last phase of the Cold War, taking a critical look at the crisis of détente in Europe in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The transition from détente to a new phase of harsh confrontation and severe crises is an interesting, indeed crucial, phase of the evolution of the international system. This book makes use of previously unreleased archival materials, moving beyond existing interpretations of this period by challenging the traditional bipolar paradigm that focuses mostly on the role of the superpowers in the transformation of the international system. The essays here emphasize the combination and the interplay of a large number of variables- political, ideological, economic and military - and explore the topic from a truly international perspective. Issues covered include human rights, the Euromissiles, the CSCE (Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe), the Revolution in Military Affairs, economic growth and its consequences.

Part I
The superpowers and the Conference on Security and Cooperation

1 Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Helsinki Final Act

Patrick G. Vaughan

On the morning of October 5, 1976 Zbigniew Brzezinski sat across from Jimmy Carter in a suite at the St Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Carter had summoned his primary foreign policy adviser to prepare for that evening’s debate with President Gerald Ford. Carter, barefoot and in blue jeans, was not in a good mood. He had left the Democratic convention in July leading Ford with the largest margin recorded in modern polling. But the Ford campaign had pulled the race even, largely by hammering away at the point that Carter lacked the necessary experience in foreign affairs.

This added an even greater importance to that evening’s debate dealing with foreign affairs. A satellite hookup had broadened the audience to some 300 million people around the world, the largest television audience since Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon.¹ Carter, widely known as a foreign policy novice, would also be debating Henry Kissinger, Ford’s Secretary of State, and chief foreign policy adviser since he inherited the White House from Richard Nixon in August of 1974.

Brzezinski was known as among the more vocal critics of Henry Kissinger’s version of détente with the Soviet Union. Indeed, that morning newspapers were portraying the Carter–Ford debate as a proxy war between their two high profile advisers.

Brzezinski believed the Helsinki Final Act was a key toward a more ‘reciprocal’ version of détente with the Soviet Union. Brzezinski, writing in the late 1960s, repeatedly urged the United States to take the lead in a major Europeanwide conference. This was hardly conventional wisdom. It was the Soviet leadership, not the United States, that had begun calling for such a conference since the 1960s. They had done so, it was thought, in order to gain Western acceptance over the Soviet conquest over Eastern Europe and the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.

Brzezinski countered that a conference would be in the US interest, moving the debate away from a ‘static’ détente with Moscow, and toward the grander aim of ending the civil war within the developed world. Brzezinski noted,

A European Security Conference could be a desirable step in that direction.We should think of it as a process, the purpose of which is to explore and only eventually resolve the various outstanding legacies of World War II but we will not be able to do so if the West – and particularly the UnitedStates – keeps shrinking away from the challenge on the jejune argument that we can’t enter a conference unless we know in advance what its outcome will be.²

Nixon and Kissinger saw little advantage in opening up a multilateral European framework while engaged in a bilateral détente with Moscow. Yet, as a side note to the 1972 summit in Moscow, Nixon agreed to a European Security Conference.

Deliberations on the Conference on Security and Cooperation (CSCE) began in Helsinki on November 22, 1972.³ It was the West European nations that most actively promoted the idea of increasing human contacts and insisting on freer flows of information toward the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, later known in the CSCE lexicon as the ‘Basket Three’ proposals. The United States representation, in stark contrast, stressed the need for greater ‘realism’ and sought to ‘reign in’ the Western Europeans from dwelling on such potentially destabilizing issues such as human rights.⁴

Kissinger’s dismissal of the European approach was seen at a NATO meeting in June 1974, when he quipped that the Soviet system had ‘survived for fifty years’ and ‘would not be changed if Western newspapers were put on sale in a few kiosks in Moscow.’⁵

‘I do not think,’ said a member of a West European delegation of Kissinger, ‘he understands the genuinely idealistic elements in the European approach but rather, in the manner of his hero Metternich, wants stability and détente (in the Russian sense of the word) for their own sakes.’⁶

Brzezinski had begun to take a more critical view of the Nixon–Kissinger détente.

While the Soviet side has continued to proclaim domestically that the ideological conflict must go on unabated and that therefore severe restrictions of basic human rights are justified, the US side has been relatively inactive at the East–West European Conference now in progress, where the West Europeans have been assertively demanding freer East–West contacts, and it has been quietly reducing the effectiveness of both Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which for less than 15 cents per head per year have become the most significant US levers for freer communications – and thus for social change – in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.⁷

By early 1976 Jimmy Carter had emerged as the unlikely front runner for the Democratic nomination. All foreign policy memos had to pass through Brzezinski. Any staff member who tried to give a memo directly to Carter was met with a hand wave instruction to ‘clear it with Zbig.’⁸ Henceforth Carter’s foreign policy speeches – denouncing the ‘Nixon–Ford–Kissinger obsession with power blocs and spheres of influence’ – were lifted from Brzezinski’s scholarly articles and

campaign memos.⁹ ‘Hearing Brzezinski’s snide words slung at him each day,’ noted, Kissinger biographer, Walter Isaacson, ‘not with a slightly embittered Polish accent but a smiling Georgia accent, drove Kissinger to near distraction.’¹⁰

The Helsinki Final Act was made public in June of 1975. The Soviet Union immediately portrayed it as a triumph of Soviet diplomacy. American conservatives denounced it as ‘Yalta II.’ There were some Soviet officials who expressed concerns that the ‘Basket Three’ sections could become a significant problem. Both Brezhnev and Foreign Minister Gromyko countered that they could go ahead and sign the Final Act, and then simply ignore the clauses they objected to. ‘We are masters in our own house,’ said Brezhnev, ‘and we shall decide what we implement and what we ignore.’¹¹ This was, Brzezinski believed, a reasonable assumption as long as President Ford permitted Kissinger to determine the meaning of the Helsinki Final Act.

The Final Act was signed in Helsinki on August 1, 1975. The 35 representatives sat shoulder to shoulder for a silent 17 minutes as each man signed the pages in the ceremonial green-leather bound document.¹² The conference was marked by three days of speech making about what the Final Act ‘really’ meant. Brezhnev, increasingly frail and visibly ailing, was nevertheless firm in articulating the Soviet viewpoint. The Soviet leader, noticeably slurring during his speech, sharply enunciated his words when it came to the question of human rights. The ‘main conclusion’ of the conference, insisted a suddenly defiant Brezhnev, was that no one should try to dictate to others how ‘they ought to manage their internal affairs.’¹³

Zbigniew Brzezinski was one of the few ‘hardliners’ in the United States who did not interpret Helsinki as a second Yalta. The Final Act, he believed, had codified two vital aspects of his ‘peaceful engagement’ program he had outlined for John Kennedy in the late 1950s. First, said Brzezinski, the Helsinki accords finalized the long disputed German–Polish border. This would finally put to rest the bogey of West German revanschism that Moscow had long used to legitimize its dominion over Eastern Europe. More importantly, said Brzezinski, the Helsinki accords legitimized Western concern for citizens within the Soviet Union and Eastern European states. ‘The fundamental difference between Yalta and Helsinki,’ Brzezinski noted later, ‘was that Helsinki focused on the tangible and the achievable; Yalta was rhetorically on the high ground but in effect it was a testimony to Western weakness and shallowness.’¹⁴

Brzezinski, utilizing his connections at Radio Free Europe, sought to refashion the debate over the meaning of Helsinki. The ‘Basket Three’ section of the Final Act had given citizens the right to simply ask their oppressive communist regimes to abide by their own constitutions – and the agreements they had signed at Helsinki. Bronislaw Geremek, later a key member of Solidarity, recalled Brzezinski’s role as crucial in changing the debate over the perception of the Helsinki Final Act.

To say very frankly we in the Polish opposition had some serious doubts about the Helsinki process. We initially thought it was another situation where the Russians were superior negotiators to the Western politicians, as expressed by Lenin when he said the West would ‘produce the rope that would hang themselves.’ It was thus extremely important to us that Zbigniew Brzezinski was involved in the process and that he supported Basket Three. The dissidents, until this time, had this feeling of being marginal, and had no legal reference. But with the Helsinki agreement, and especially this ‘third basket,’ we could say to our government: ‘You signed it – if you signed the agreement, we are now asking about the agreements on freedom of information, freedom of expression, travels and so on.’ So Brzezinski’s role in emphasizing the third basket was crucial, and this, I have no doubt, played a key role in the implosion of the Soviet empire.¹⁵

The term ‘Basket Three’ gained currency in the United States only when Brzezinski began to advise Jimmy Carter to focus on it in his 1976 presidential campaign.¹⁶ Brzezinski began to advise Carter to avoid Reagan’s wholesale condemnation of the Helsinki Final Act, and instead focus on the still little known ‘Basket Three’ aspects that committed all signatories to respect ‘civil, economic, social, cultural, and other rights and freedoms.’ ‘I really felt these systems were in decay and artificial,’ recalled Brzezinski.

‘So Basket Three gave us (the Carter campaign) a real opportunity to press them at the point of greater vulnerability to them, and to do it in a manner which at the same time didn’t make us look as if we were just some sort of crude anti-communists interested in inflaming or re-flaming the Cold War. Carter was killing the Soviets with kindness because he was talking about engagement, human rights, disarmament. But the Soviets knew what he was talking about it,’ Brzezinski recalled, ‘or at least they knew what I was thinking about.’¹⁷

On August 1, 1976, the one-year anniversary of the signing of the Helsinki Accords, Moscow was still commemorating the Final Act as a ringing triumph for Soviet diplomacy in special television programs and full page spreads in Soviet newspapers.¹⁸ This was the widely shared view of the Helsinki Final Act when Brzezinski sat down with Jimmy Carter to prepare for his debate with Gerald Ford in San Francisco. Brzezinski, briefing Carter for two hours over breakfast, told the challenger he must take the initiative. ‘Only by putting Ford on the defensive,’ Brzezinski insisted, could Carter ‘shatter the advantage of presidential incumbency.’ But the key to the debate was the emphasis on ‘Basket Three’ of the Helsinki Final Act.

‘Do not attack the Agreement as a whole,’ read Brzezinski’s memo.

The so-called ‘Basket III’ gives us the right – for the first time – to insist on respect for human rights without this constituting interference in the internal affairs of communist states. Accordingly, this is a considerable asset for us, and you should hammer away at the proposition that the Republicans have been indifferent to this opportunity. The Helsinki Agreement also provides for the permanence of existing borders in Europe, and this happens to be in our interest. Insecurity about borders tended to drive the East Europeans (notably the Czechs and Poles) into Soviet hands. Thus, it is not in your interest to suggest that it would have been better if we had not accepted the existing borders.¹⁹

Brzezinski’s memo also prepared a dummy answer for Carter to address any question pertaining to Eastern Europe, a question he warned was likely to come from panelist Max Frankel, a former Moscow correspondent from the New York Times: Ford, after a series of mock debates with Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, was said to be ready for any questions that might emerge dealing with Eastern Europe.

Panelist Max Frankel, as Brzezinski had predicted, challenged Ford to defend his foreign policy of détente.²⁰ Ford seemed eager to meet the challenge. Yet in his convoluted defense of the Helsinki Final Act, he entered the annals of debate history with his claim that ‘There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.’ It was a stunning statement. James Naughton of the New York Times, observed an ‘audible intake of air’ throughout the crowd. Brent Scowcroft, watching off the stage, was said to have ‘gone white.’ The debate gaffe proved a disaster for the Ford campaign. Republican hopes of exposing Carter’s foreign policy ‘inexperience’ were dashed.

On November 2, 1976, Jimmy Carter defeate...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I The superpowers and the Conference on Security and Cooperation
• PART II The strategic landscape of the 1980s, East and West
• PART III Economic issues and European integration
• PART IV The battle of ideas
• Bibliography