Postwar

Lebensluge (‘life-lie’) of the Federal Republic, as Brandt put it. But by the mid-Eighties, a few years before it unexpectedly took place, re-unification no longer mobilized mass opinion. Polls taken in the Fifties and Sixties suggested that up to 45 percent of the West German population felt unification was the ‘most important’ question of the day; from the mid-Seventies the figure never exceeded 1 percent.

The third constituency for Bonn’s new approach, of course, was the Soviet Union. From Willy Brandt’s first negotiations with Brezhnev in 1970, through Gorbachev’s visit to Bonn nearly two decades later, all West German plans for ‘normalization’ to the east passed through Moscow and everyone knew it. In Helmut Schmidt’s words, ‘naturally, German-Soviet relations stood at the centre of Ostpolitik .’ Indeed, once the West Germans and Russians had agreed on the permanence of Poland’s new frontiers (respecting long-established European practice, no one asked the Poles for their views) and Bonn had consented to recognize the People’s Democracies, West Germans and Russians found much common ground.

When Leonid Brezhnev went to Bonn in May 1973, the first such visit by a Soviet Communist Party leader, he and Helmut Schmidt even managed to share warm memories of their common wartime experiences—Schmidt conveniently recalling that he ‘fought for Germany by day and at night privately wished for Hitler’s defeat’. In his memoirs Willy Brandt, who really had opposed the Third Reich from beginning to end, coolly observes that ‘when war reminiscences are exchanged, the fake and the genuine lie very close together’. But if the reminiscences were perhaps illusory, the shared interests were real enough.

The USSR had for many years been pressing for official recognition of its post-war gains and the new frontiers of Europe, preferably at a formal Peace Conference. The Western Allies, the US especially, had long been unwilling to go beyond de facto acknowledgement of the status quo, pending resolution of the ‘German Question’ in particular. But now that the Germans themselves were making overtures to their eastern neighbors, the Western position was bound to change; the Soviet leaders were about to realize their hopes. As part of their ambitious strategy of detente with the USSR and China, President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his National Security Adviser, were more open than their predecessors to negotiations with Moscow—and perhaps less troubled by the nature of the Soviet regime: as Kissinger explained to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Sep 19th 1974, international detente should not be made to wait upon Soviet domestic reforms.

Thus, in December 1971, NATO ministers met in Brussels and agreed in principle to take part in a European Security Conference. Within a year a preparatory session was under way in Helsinki, Finland; and in July 1973, still in Helsinki, the official Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe opened. Thirty-five countries (including the US and Canada) participated—only Albania declined to attend. Over the ensuing two years the Helsinki conferees drew up conventions, drafted agreements, proposed ‘confidence-building’ measures to improve East- West relations and much else besides. In August 1975 the Helsinki Accords were unanimously approved and signed.

On the face of things, the Soviet Union was the major beneficiary of the Accords. In the Final Act, under ‘Principle I’, it was agreed that the ‘participating States will respect each other’s sovereign equality and individuality as well as all the rights inherent in and encompassed by its sovereignty, including in particular the right of every State to juridical equality, to territorial integrity.’ Moreover, in Principle VI, the participating States undertook to ‘refrain from any intervention, direct or indirect, individual or collective, in the internal or external affairs falling within the domestic jurisdiction of another participating State, regardless of their mutual relations’.

Brezhnev and his colleagues could not have wished for more. Not only were the political divisions of post- war Europe now officially and publicly accepted, and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the GDR and other satellite regimes officially conceded; the Western powers had for the first time foresworn all ‘armed intervention or threat of such intervention against another participating State’. To be sure, the chances that NATO or the US would ever actually invade the Soviet Bloc had long since been negligible: indeed, the only country that had actually engaged in such armed intervention since 1948 was the Soviet Union itself… twice.

But it was an illustration of Moscow’s endemic insecurity that these clauses in the Helsinki agreements, together with Principle IV affirming that ‘the participating States will respect the territorial integrity of each of the participating States’, were accorded such significance. Between the agreements with West Germany, and the Helsinki Accords’ retrospective confirmation and acceptance of Potsdam, the Soviet Union had finally achieved its objectives and could rest easy. In return, as it seemed, the Western participants in the Conference had sought and obtained little more than unobjectionable pro forma clauses: social, cultural and economic cooperation and exchanges, good faith collaboration to address outstanding and future disagreements, etc, etc.

But also included in the so-called ‘third basket’ of Helsinki principles was a list of the rights not just of states, but of persons and peoples, grouped under Principles VII (‘Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief’) and VIII (‘Equal rights and self- determination of peoples’). Most of the political leaders who signed off on these clauses paid them little attention —on both sides of the Iron Curtain it was generally assumed that they were diplomatic window dressing, a sop to domestic opinion, and in any case unenforceable: under Principles IV and VI, outsiders could not interfere in the internal affairs of signatory states. As one embittered Czech intellectual remarked at the time, Helsinki was in practice a re-run of Cuius Regio, Eius Religio: within their borders, rulers were once again licensed to treat their citizens as they wished.

It did not work out that way. Most of the 1975 Helsinki principles and protocols merely gift-wrapped existing international arrangements. But Principle VII not only committed the signatory states to ‘respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.’ It also enjoined all thirty-five states to ‘promote and encourage the effective exercise of civil, political, economic, social, cultural and other rights and freedoms’, and to ‘recognize and respect the freedom of the individual to profess and practice, alone or in community with others, religion or belief acting in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience’.

From this wordy and, as it seemed, toothless checklist of rights and obligations was born the Helsinki Rights movement. Within a year of getting their long-awaited international conference agreement, Soviet leaders were faced with a growing and ultimately uncontrollable flowering of circles, clubs, networks, charters and individuals, all demanding ‘merely’ that their governments stick to the letter of that same agreement, that—as enjoined by the Final Act—they ‘fulfill their obligations as set forth in the international declarations and agreements in this field’. Brezhnev had been right to count upon Henry Kissinger and his hard-headed successors to take seriously the non- intervention clauses at Helsinki; but it had never occurred to him (nor indeed to Kissinger) that others might take no less seriously the more utopian paragraphs that followed.[219]

In the short run the Soviet authorities and their colleagues in eastern Europe could certainly suppress easily enough any voices raised on behalf of individual or collective rights: in 1977 the leaders of a Ukrainian ‘Helsinki Rights’ group were arrested and sentenced to terms ranging from three to fifteen years. But the very emphasis that Communist leaders had placed upon ‘Helsinki’ as the source of their regimes’ international legitimacy would now come to haunt them: by invoking Moscow’s own recent commitments, critics (at home and abroad) could now bring public pressure to bear on the Soviet regimes. Against this sort of opposition, violent repression was not just ineffective but, to the extent that it was public knowledge, self-defeating. Hoist by the petard of their own cynicism, Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues had inadvertently opened a breach in their own defenses. Against all expectation, it was to prove mortal.

XVI. A Time of Transition

‘In retrospect our biggest single mistake was to have allowed the elections to go ahead. Our downfall can be traced from there’.

Brigadier Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho