Abstract
For Leonid Brezhnev, the signing of the Helsinki Final Act on 1 August 1975 was a tearful victory “unprecedented in history,” affirming the Soviet Union’s legitimacy, territorial status quo, and Leninist approach to international relations (211). Michael Morgan’s masterful account of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and its founding document, however, shows otherwise. The CSCE was hardly the resounding success that the Soviets claimed, or the “quid pro quo” often described by other scholars in which the United States, Canada, and its Western European allies merely exchanged the recognition of Eastern Europe’s postwar borders for a vague commitment to human rights. Instead, the negotiations, which extended over three years beginning with preparatory talks in 1972 and ending with the Helsinki summit in the summer of 1975, were above all else a “product of [their] era” that reflected a “particular conception of peace” (275). That peace was authored by the West, Morgan contends, and his illuminating and highly anticipated new history reminds us of how little the Western allies gave away in the course of launching the CSCE.
In the mid-1960s, the Warsaw Pact countries called for a conference on the future of Europe’s security, though initially to no avail. Even in the environment of détente, the allies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) worried that Brezhnev’s invitation might undermine public confidence in the alliance—or worse, amount to acceding to Soviet control over Eastern Europe, if not eventually across the entire continent. Morgan convincingly argues that the concept of the CSCE emerged out of dual crises of legitimacy in the East and West; this tension rose out of the paradoxical reality of détente itself, that at its best, growing interdependence lessened the need for either alliance to exist. Along this vein, Morgan offers one of his most weighty claims: the CSCE was as consequential as the major diplomatic conferences that demarcate the history of international relations, such as the Congress of Vienna and the Paris Peace Conference. Responding to diverging interpretations of the late Cold War, Morgan asserts that the Final Act was much more than a human rights declaration and instead drove at the core of the meaning of peace itself by defining a “common concept of legitimacy for all of Europe” (6). Rather than legitimizing the Brezhnev Doctrine and its attendant understanding of fixed borders, the CSCE made language available for changing frontiers and the eventual unification of Germany within a vision of “pan-European architecture” (247). In this way, the CSCE and the Helsinki Final Act were not only milestones toward the settlement of the Cold War, but played key roles in defining the terms on which the Cold War ended.
Morgan’s authoritative account reframes what we know about the end of the Cold War by weaving the CSCE into its broader context. As a watershed in the forging of East–West relations, the CSCE fostered interdependence even as disagreements arose within both blocs about the terms of the negotiations. Here Morgan offers another interpretive gem, highlighting how NATO’s internal disagreements revealed a pluralist and decentralized mode of deliberation that allowed the Western allies to navigate changing proposals and challenging negotiations with the Soviet bloc. Also expanding the chronology of the CSCE beyond the mid-1970s, Morgan probes the different worldviews that the leaders of each bloc brought into the conference. With limited attention to the daily progress and inner workings of each stage of the conference, Morgan moves away from individual actors in favour of the key issues and ideas at stake in the CSCE. Although the conference was meant to advance Brezhnev’s grand strategy, the Western allies successfully inched the negotiations toward the recognition of universal principles such as freedom of movement and human rights, even as the Final Act affirmed sovereignty and non-intervention. Thus, the Western allies were able to undermine not only the Brezhnev Doctrine, but also the Soviet outlook in general.
Careful not to claim that the Final Act ended the Cold War, Morgan takes the bold step of designating the Final Act a “lodestar” (247) in the creation of the post-Cold War order, given how the principles of the Final Act provided the conceptual architecture unifying Germany and setting Europe on its path to integration. A few questions naturally arise about the connections between rhetoric and reality: how much did the Helsinki negotiations affect other major international issues and conflicts? While Morgan states that the shocks of the 1970s did not have a significant impact on the CSCE, did the East–West negotiations matter beyond Europe, such as in the Arab–Israeli conflict or the Angolan Civil War? Did Helmut Kohl’s invocation of “peaceful change of frontiers” mean that the Final Act really anchored the very idea of Europe into the 1980s and 1990s (16)? Relatedly, how much did the CSCE unravel the Brezhnev Doctrine when it was Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist program that decisively pushed the Soviet Union away from territorial invasion? Moreover, readers will find that in spite of the frequent mention of human rights, any longer engagement with more recent historical interpretations of human rights in history is absent. While Morgan guides us to think about the connections between the negotiations and the stakes for international order and peace at large, we are left to apply those lessons to specific international questions, lest this book balloon in size.
Neither procedure nor biography, The Final Act does what the best international histories do and charts the evolution of the idea of peace itself through its contingent and unpredictable crucible at Geneva and Helsinki, in a process that Morgan argues amounted to “the most ambitious undertaking of an era of ambitious diplomacy” (2). This rich account weaves together diplomatic, political, economic, and intellectual histories to raise the CSCE to a level of historical significance that specialists of international history and international relations would be remiss to ignore.