How the Helsinki Final Act Changed My Life

There have only been two Party leaders in the GDR since 1945, Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker (Martin McCauley, 1979 and 1983a; Childs, 1983). Hence there has only been one succession and it was anything but smooth. Ulbricht had caused Brezhnev and the Soviet leadership offence over his stand on the Berlin question. Moscow was keen to secure a Berlin Agreement without which the process of detente in Europe could not develop. Berlin was a necessary stage on the road which eventually led to the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. The decision to unseat Ulbricht may have been taken at the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in Moscow in March–April 1971. Brezhnev had no doubts about the identity of the new man. Kronprinz Erich Honecker had assumed that role for several years. Moscow made its intentions clear in a telegram congratulating the Socialist Unity Party (SED) on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its founding. Instead of Brezhnev, Secretary General of the CPSU, sending fraternal greetings to Ulbricht, First Secretary of the SED, the telegram was unsigned and was from the CC, CPSU to the CC, SED. It spoke highly of the roles played by Wilhelm Pieck and Otto Grotewohl in building up the SED. The main architect of the SED’s rise to power, Walter Ulbricht, was not even mentioned.

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which prior to 1 January 1995 was named the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE),' is not user friendly. Its change in name, complex structure and nomenclature, use of obscure terminology, consensus decisionmaking process, and tendency to produce elaborate and bureaucratic procedures, most of which have never been used,2 can seem like a Kafkaesque nightmare. However, in the twenty years since the adoption of the Helsinki Final Act3 in 1975, the OSCE4 has been through a number of phases. At its best, it has been a means of keeping channels of communication open during the

Throughout the historic development, conflicts have constantly existed in all the countries of the world and every level of society. Civilization’s perpetual struggle for freedom, independence, justice, and self-determination has many times grown into a direct or indirect confrontation between the opposing sides. However, World War I and World War II were one of the major transformative events in the history of the twentieth century, which resulted in the deaths of millions of humans and numerous destructive consequences. Furthermore, the wars and their results have fundamentally changed the World Order in post-war Europe and the US. The article aims at providing a better understanding of the phenomenon of war, conflict, and intervention. It also seeks to examine their place in contemporary international relations of today. In particular, the article has aimed to analyze a historical overview of the social, political, and cultural conflicts and studies, how it has been transformed in a modern era of the twenty-first century. The paper is concluded by highlighting the major principles of the UN on war and intervention since the organization is “Based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its members”. The norms of the Helsinki Final Act and Just War Theory are also highlighted in the context. This study has been prepared as a result of examining articles and books written by many authors who have influential opinions in the field of wars, conflicts, and interventions. The article is particularly helpful to those scholars interested in peace and conflict studies.

Russia became a great power fighting for supremacy in the area between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea; the USSR met its objectives at the end of WW2; post-Cold War Russia looked initially as a normal state, but started to act aggressively after 2000; Russia did so neglecting its obligations in accordance with the UN Charter and the Helsinki Final Act; Moscow’s 2022 aggression on Ukraine calls into question even Russia’s great power status.

This short analysis attempts to find and highlight the most important reasons that determined the deterioration of the international imagine of the communist regime from Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania. Although after 1968 – the year when the Romanian leader publicly condemned Czechoslovakia’s invasion by the Red Army –, Romania’s image in the Western countries was excellent, during the ’80s the whole capital of sympathy completely disappeared. Nicolae Ceaușescu’s anti-Soviet foreign policy made him a so-called “spoiled child” of the West. In 1989, the Romanian dictator remained the only Stalinist leader from European countries, paradoxically an anti-Soviet Stalinist leader. In my opinion there were three very important events that determined the irreversible degradation of the regime’s image abroad: Helsinki Final Act in 1975; General Ion Mihai Pacepa’s (vice-leader of Foreign Information Department of Romanian Intelligence) run to the USA and last but not the least, Mikhail Gorbachev’s election as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. (CPSU) I started from the hypothesis that these three moments were somehow decisive for Ceaușescu’s decline in the eyes of his own people and mainly in international relations. From methodological point of view I tried to explain briefly how and in what measure the three mentioned events and their consequences changed maybe irreversibly the image of Romanian dictator mainly abroad. I tried also to make a short comparison between Ceaușescu’s situation in 1968 and his position in the 1980’s. I strived to identify the main reason for which the popularity level of Ceaușescu’s regime decreased so much. In the year 1968, in August, Romanian leader was at the apogee of his popularity in Romania and in international relations as well. Due to his courageous attitude towards Kremlin, the Western powers perceived somehow Romanian leader as a kind of a new Iosip Broz Tito. We could identify a paradox concerning Ceaușescu’s policy. Even though an anti-Soviet leader until the end in his foreign policy, internally, the Romanian leader turned out to be a fervent Stalinist. During 1980’s the most draconian measures were implemented because the dictator intended to pay all the external debt of the Romanian state. In this way, he wanted to affirm Romania’s independence in international affairs. Unfortunately the costs and the sacrifices of the Romanian population were huge. For the international deterioration of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s „regime”, I have to take into consideration the international context in the late 1980’s, the improvement of the bilateral relations between Moscow and Washington and, as a consequence, the end of the ideological conflict. The Cold War will be over soon. The regional circumstances in Central and Eastern Europe are also very important and I must take them into account. Kremlin had decided to replace Brezhnev’s doctrine of the limited sovereignty with so-called Sinatra Doctrine. Thus, the countries from Soviet sphere were able to choose their own ways and to build their own destinies. The end of the Cold War and refolutions from Central and Eastern Europe made impossible the survival of the last Stalinist regime. The paper also attempted to distinguish a few elements of continuity in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s foreign policy (mainly regarding USSR-Romania relations), unlike in his domestic policy. In this respect one can speak about a few elements of discontinuity. Romanian foreign policy position could be called quasi non-alignment or extended autonomy.

The historiography of the Cold War has witnessed a revived interest in non-material factors such as culture and ideology. Although this incipient cultural history of the Cold War has focused mainly on the period from 1945 until the early 1960s, the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 turned ideas into potent factors of international politics when East European opposition groups began to expose how their governments violated the accord's human rights provisions. By putting the emergence of one such opposition group, the Polish Workers' Defense Committee, in an international context, this article extends Cold War cultural history into the 1970s and 1980s, tracing how human rights ideas affected international and domestic politics. The Communist states' willingness to put up with the human rights provisions in the Helsinki Final Act was not sufficient to “shame” them internationally. Instead, what happened is that Western leftists, after encountering East European dissidents, increasingly perceived human rights as a precondition for the success of their own political project and hence revoked what Robert Horvath calls the “revolutionary privilege” long granted to Communist regimes. Because Communism's identity was so closely related to its struggle with the West, this criticism was particularly damaging. Only within the dynamics of a cultural framework from earlier stages of postwar history did transnational human rights advocacy become effective.

On 21 July 1975, only days before the Helsinki Final Act was to be signed, a New York Times editorial insisted that the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the meeting that had produced the landmark document, “should not have happened.”1 The newspaper urged the US government to withhold its signature because the negotiations had given the Soviets everything they had demanded in exchange for precious little. Too often, the solidarity within NATO that was essential for success had proved elusive, putting the Western alliance under strain and allowing the Soviets to advance their agenda with ease.2 In the editorial’s view, the US government had failed to defend Western interests and preserve the integrity of the alliance.

OSCE Insights: Leveraging a Broad Mandate 50 years after the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, Russia’s war against Ukraine continues to challenge the OSCE as a vital pillar of European security. However, the papers in this volume of OSCE Insights demonstrate how the OSCE, including the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, has used its broad mandate to run activities even in the absence of cooperative security. Contributions discuss topics such as the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly's experience in counter-terrorism, the OSCE's efforts to mitigate the risks of climate change, and conflict management options in Ukraine.

Promotion and protection of European identity rights of persons belonging to nationalminorities are part of human rights protection system developed universally under the UnitedNations and, respectively, in the Regional Council of Europe, Organization for Security andCooperation in Europe and other European institutions. International instruments adopted bythe OSCE human dimension that is circumscribed, and are political in nature (so there are nottreated) contributed to a great extent, the development of catalog rights identity for peoplewho belong to national minorities, the evidence of evolution ordination mechanisms andregulations and safeguarding the rights of the category listed and, last but not least, to outlinea programmatic directions and certain standards in this field. Documents to be examined, aswell as other regulatory and industry (universal or regional) that aim at protecting minorities"does not authorize any activity that is contrary to fundamental principles of internationallaw, or other obligations under international law or provisions of the Helsinki Final Act, inparticular the principle of sovereignty and territorial integrity of states".

This chapter discusses the impact of the imposition of martial law in Poland in December 1981 on a follow-up meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation (CSCE) in Madrid. Thus, the chapter complicates the widely held view of the Final Act of the CSCE as a milestone for the human rights revolution of the 1970s, arguing instead that six years after the Final Act had been signed the position of human rights in international politics remained strongly contested and highly precarious. To make this point, this chapter focuses particularly on the response of the US, the UK, West Germany, France, and Italy to events in Poland. Thus, this chapter demonstrates that, when confronted with massive human rights violations in Poland, the US government did not invoke the CSCE's human rights provisions so much as try to use the situation in Poland as a pretext to end the entire CSCE process. West European governments, on the other hand, insisted on the CSCE Final Act's noninterference clause. It was only a rag-tag alliance of activists from Western civil societies – trade unionists, Cold War hardliners, French Left-wing intellectuals, even peace activists – which pushed their governments to pressure Warsaw to respect human rights.

The CSCE/OSCE is linked in public opinion to one of the following headings: Helsinki Final Act and Cold War; arms control and disarmament; crisis management and conflict prevention. This picture is not completely incorrect in that it indicates more than 20 years of CSCE/OSCE history. Being no more than a series of conferences from 1973 to 1990, the ‘old’ CSCE attempted to bridge East and West, and it mainly contributed to developing military aspects of security in Europe. Following the collapse of the former Eastern bloc, the ‘new’ CSCE, later renamed the OSCE, was called upon to assist in managing the epochal change involving the resurgence of regional crises, and it has been equipped with a fully developed organizational and instrumental structure to that end. The most prominent examples of CSCE/OSCE activity in the areas of conflict prevention, crisis management, and post-conflict peacebuilding, are places such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chechnya, or Albania.

Slovakia was a part of Czechoslovakia. In 1948, the communists came to power in this state. In the religious Slovakia, their main blow was directed against the Catholic Church. The oppression lasted until 1968, when the reform communist stream came to power for eight months. The Slovak Organization for the Protection of Human Rights was established, which brought together not only political prisoners but also all those who wanted to promote respect for human rights. The organization was banned after the military intervention of five Warsaw Pact states in Czechoslovakia in August 1968. There has been a campaign of atheism since then. There were trials of religious activists, sanctions against students, and the still unclear murders of priests. Although Czechoslovakia acceded to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 on Security and Cooperation, it continued to violate fundamental human rights and freedoms. A group of Czech activists issued a Declaration of Charter 77 in protest. Charter 77 was difficult to accept for the Slovak, predominantly Catholic dissent, for the Marxist orientation of several representatives of this Czech group. No Slovak was represented in the leadership of Charter 77. The hope for change in Slovakia was represented by the underground church. Its mainstream was represented by the secretly consecrated Bishop Ján Ch. Korec, Silvester Krčméry and Vladimír Jukl. Thanks to the activities of the underground church, pilgrimage sites came to life, a samizdat was issued, in 1987 a mass petition was organized for religious rights, and in 1988 a violently suppressed demonstration for human and civil rights took place in Bratislava.

This article takes issue with American historians of the Cold War who assert that the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 endorsed the post-war division of Europe, and that its results were accidental or surprising. The article demonstrates that the nine members of the (then) European Community, with important support from neutrals and non-aligned, resisted strong pressure from Moscow and Washington to confirm the status quo. Instead, they ensured that the Final Act became an agenda for change.

INTERVIEW: HELMUT SONNENFELDT WITH PHILIP GEYELIN Helmut Sonnenfeldt, now a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institute, was born in Berlin and became a U.S. citizen in 1944. A graduate of SAIS, he was thL· review's first editor. Later he served as a Soviet scholar and director of intelligence and research in the State Department, moved to the White House to become senior member of the National Security Council staff, and then returned to the State Department as counselor under Secretary KL·singer. In 1976 he was "traduced," in ^singer's words, by a series of newspaper columns that elevated a confidential account of an informal policy dmussion to the level of a "Sonnenfeldt Doctrine." The incident was shortly caught up in the presidential campaign of that year as evidence of a supposed "softness" toward the Soviet's role in Eastern Europe—"an absurd accusation," according to Kttsinger, "reflecting a woeful ignorance of the convictions and contributions of an outstanding public servant" whose "superb analyses" have been confirmed "with the passage of time to be penetrating, shrewd, and wL·^" In the following interview with Philip Geyelin, syndicated columntit and editor-in-residence at The Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute, SAIS, Mr. Sonnenfeldtdxcusses the circumstances surroundingthe matterofthe "Sonnenfeldt Doctrine" and updates hL· views on current issues having to do with Poland in particuhr, and East-West refations in general. GEYELIN: You have become unjustlyfamous as a consequence ofhavingyour name attached to a doctrine having to do with Eastern Europe and our policy toward the Soviets. How did that all come about? SONNENFELDT: It came about because there was a discussion of American policy toward the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in a meeting in London of the American Chiefs of Mission in Europe in December 1975. It was a 161 162 SAIS REVIEW rather freewheeling discussion which, after a lapse of several weeks, the State Department decided to paraphrase in a very condensed form in order to give the participants a summary of what had been said. The particular telegram that contained this nonverbatim account was given to a number of journalists by somebody in the government, and two of them [Evans and Novak] chose to give it some play by picking some of the phrases out of the discussion relating to Eastern Europe, changing the phrases, and making it appear as though I had advocated essentially the incorporation of Eastern Europe into the Soviet Union as a way of keeping Eastern Europe quiet. It's hard to say why precisely this newspaper story received as much attention and currency as it did. One reason, no doubt, was that it came against the background ofa critique, misplaced in my opinion, ofthe Helsinki Final Act, and the widespread allegations made in late 1975 and early 1976 in connection with the presidential campaign that the U.S. administration had sold out Eastern Europe permanently to the Soviet Union. As events have shown, both the critique of the Helsinki Final Act, and the version of American policy toward Eastern Europe attributed to me, were quite erroneous . Therefore, the debate that resulted, if it can be dignified by that term, was quite unnecessary, and in any event wholly distorted. It did not address the genuine issues and dilemmas we have always faced when making policy toward Eastern Europe, but especially since Eastern Europe has been in flux since the early 1970s. GEYELIN: What was the policy you meant to convey ? SONNENFELDT: The policy discussed at the meeting, and on which I commented, was the policy of differentiating between the countries of Eastern Europe, encouraging internal change, and urging more active and normal relations with the Western world to the extent that it was in the United States' power to do so. At the same time this policy recognized that in terms of power the Soviet Union was nearby and had demonstrated a capability and a readiness to employ its raw power whenever it felt that developments in the East European countries were getting out of control. In other words, the discussion did not come to any firm conclusions about this set of problems. It highlighted the complexity of conducting a policy of fostering change...

In June 2008, just prior to the outbreak of the August 2008 Georgia-Russia war, Russian president Dmitri Medvedev made a speech in a meeting with German political, parliamentary, and civic leaders in which he called for a new Euro-Atlantic political, legal, and strategic relationship: Atlanticism as a sole historical principle has already had its day. We need to talk today about unity between the whole Euro-Atlantic area from Vancouver to Vladivostok….It is hard to escape the conclusion that Europe’s current architecture still bears the stamp of an ideology inherited from the past. Our predecessors during the Cold War years managed to draw up the Helsinki Final Act (which, as the legal foundation for the European system, has withstood the test of time despite all the difficulties encountered), and so why should we not be able to take the next step today? Namely, drafting and signing a legally binding treaty on European security in which the organizations currently working in the Euro-Atlantic area could become parties.1 KeywordsWorld Trade OrganizationSecurity CouncilLiberal Democratic PartyMilitary SpendingMissile DefenseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.