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The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War

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The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War H-Diplo H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-21 on The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War Discussion published by George Fujii on Monday, January 6, 2020 H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-21 Michael Cotey Morgan. The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. ISBN: 9780691176062 (hardcover, $35.00/£30.00). 6 January 2020 | https://hdiplo.org/to/RT21-21 Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii Contents Introduction by Vladislav Zubok, London School of Economics and Political Science.. 2 Review by James Cameron, King’s College, London.. 6 Review by Jonathan Hunt, University of Southampton.. 9 Review by Rósa Magnúsdóttir, Aarhus University.. 12 Review by Gottfried Niedhart, University of Mannheim... 14 Author’s Response by Michael Cotey Morgan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 16 Introduction by Vladislav Zubok, London School of Economics and Political Science Michael Cotey Morgan has written a well-researched and important book that makes us revisit an unfinished discussion about the causes of enormous changes in Europe, from the Cold War divisions to the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet implosion. Morgan locates the starting point of all this in the Helsinki Final Act. In his view, the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) is an event in European history that is comparable in significance to the Treaty of Westphalia, the Congress of Vienna, and the Yalta conference. It marked the beginning of the erosion and crumbling of the Soviet Communist order and set Western liberal order on the track of unexpectedly quick victory. The author’s ideas stem from historiography produced after Daniel Thomas published his book,The Helsinki Effect. The book is also a response to Sarah Snyder’s influential book on the “transnational network” of human rights activism that she claimed significantly contributed to the collapse of Communism.[1] “Helsinkiphilia” became almost a fad among theorists in International Relations, who tend to ascribe the end of the Cold War bipolarity to ideational and normative causes. Some of us, who grew up during the Cold War and under the hollow ideocracy of the Soviet regime, remain sceptical of this trend, particularly on the impact of non-government human rights activism. The recent return of power-politics and the crisis of the liberal international order substantiates this Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-21 on The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War. H- Diplo. 01-06-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/5675280/h-diplo-roundtable-xxi-21-final-act-helsinki-accords-and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Diplo scepticism. In his book, Morgan is less ebullient than his predecessors. “The Helsinki Final Act,” he concludes, “did not cause the end of the Cold War…nor was the collapse of communism in Europe inevitable” (253). Still, the book in many ways remains loyal to the trend. One of Morgan’s major assumptions is that Communism fell and the Soviet Union dissolved to a great extent because of transportation and transplantation of Western ideas, norms, and concepts to Eastern Europe and into the minds of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his enlightened advisers (236-237). We will return to this assumption later. The book addresses three questions: why was the CSCE created, why did the Final Act take the shape that it did, and how did it influence the Cold War? (4) In answering these questions, Morgan carried out impressive research: he worked in many archives in many European languages, encased his findings in an impressive historical framework, and articulates his concepts with nuance and clarity. The book elevates the almost-forgotten CSCE process to the major development that shaped European history and global international affairs. This process, Morgan claims, grew out of a massive crisis of legitimacy that shook the West and the East. It was, however, the Soviet side that was more active than Western side, and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev who set the process in motion. In a sense, the book argues, Brezhnev offered a deal to Western countries, one that involved reaching an ‘eternal peace’ with the Soviet Union, which would no longer be a revisionist power but instead would be a major stake-holder in an international order. This vision, if realized, could have led to a ‘one order, two systems’ combination. Morgan considers this proposal to have been an illusion that was never really feasible. Yet it was this illusion, as his book demonstrates, that accounted for Soviet concessions, without which the Helsinki Final Act would have never taken its revisionist shape. Namely, it became a set of norms based on the non-use of force and on a strictly Western liberal interpretation of human rights inside sovereign states. After 1974 the U.S. government, which had initially been dismissive of the CSCE, supported the process. The West, acting as a team, then turned the Soviet proposal “into a tool for waging cold war by other means” (10) and ultimately into a weapon to undermine communist regimes. The Soviet leaders were deceived: instead of reaping the benefits of modernisation from rapprochement with the Western developed economies, they fell into a trap. In their search for an elusive and illusory partnership with the West, they accepted a set of Western-promoted norms of international legitimacy that directly threatened the Soviet geopolitical assets that had been conquered in 1945. The H-Diplo roundtable discussion of the book, as should be expected, produces a gamut of opinions. Gottfried Niedhart read Morgan’s book through critical lenses. For him, Morgan clearly overrates the Helsinki effect as a single factor. The review challenges the book on its main conclusions to all three questions. First, Niedhart doubts that the CSCE was a response to a “crisis of legitimacy” in the West. Second, “there was no finality in the Final Act,” as it was not a milestone, but only an episode in the messy and complex process of European detente. Finally, there is no sufficient proof that the Final Act was a crucial factor in undermining Communist regimes or that it influenced Gorbachev when he consented to the reunification of Germany inside NATO in May-July 1990. In contrast, James Cameron, Jonathan Hunt, and Rósa Magnúsdóttir admire the book without reservations. For Cameron it is a “perfectly balanced treatment of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act;” even “the 100-plus pages of footnotes is a joy in itself.” Hunt declares that Morgan “filled the residual ditch” in the historiography of the international human rights and claims that “the sheer breadth of Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-21 on The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War. H- Diplo. 01-06-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/5675280/h-diplo-roundtable-xxi-21-final-act-helsinki-accords-and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Diplo archival research on display brings every individual spark into sharper relief.” Cameron and Hunt believe that Morgan’s research offers a final confirmation of the narrative that had been mapped out by Thomas and Snyder. Both reviewers credit Morgan with a discovery of how the Western countries translated the Soviet project of the European conference into “an almost complete victory for the West.” They do not mention the fact that this thesis was first advanced and explained by Richard Davy in a seminal article in 2009. [2] Morgan’s praise for Western diplomatic victory in the CSCE process reads almost like a textbook explanation of the advantages that democratic free countries have over closed societies: free discussion and diversity brings out the best of creativity. In this account, Western allies outperformed the Soviets even in a quarter where authoritarians usually have a natural advantage: patience and perseverance (254). I wonder, however, how much of this praise is deserved? Or perhaps in this particular case the Western democracies had an unusually mellow opponent? Morgan and two of the reviewers dwell on the remarkable phenomenon of Soviet negotiating behaviour at the CSCE. It was not a usual Andrei Gromyko-style steadfast and dogged Soviet diplomacy. Brezhnev’s bizarre fixation on the success of the conference was linked to his search for domestic legitimacy, which was framed in terms of international agreements and treaties. As a result, Morgan writes, the Soviet leader “was reluctant to drag negotiations out” (255). This is an understatement: relentless pressure drove Brezhnev and his allies to produce a speedy conclusion of the conference. Cameron wonders why the authoritarian leader of the Communist regime “was willing to run far greater risks in his attempts to prove the Soviet regime’s domestic and international legitimacy than any leader of democratic West.” Hunt agrees that Brezhnev’s concessions left “fatal chinks in the Warsaw Pact’s armour,” using the words “poetic,” “ironic,” “perverse,” and “striking” in his description of the strange need of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union for Western legitimation. Perhaps, Hunt wonders, it was “the halting humanization of Soviet society after Stalin’s death” that explains this anomaly. He even concludes, in an echo of the thoughts of George Kennan, that “the seeds” of the fall of the Soviet Union were “planted over a decade before in ways that were quasi-intentional.” Morgan does admit that he could not fully resolve this mystery and refers to the paradoxes of Soviet power in the 1970s.
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