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Observations of an Expat: Revive Détente

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Observations of an Expat: Revive Détente
World leaders signing Helsinki Accord - Google Photo

Détente was a Cold War process which found its diplomatic expression in the Helsinki Accords. This semi-legal agreement was signed in the Finnish capital in July 1975 by 33 European heads of government and the American president and Canadian prime minister.

By Tom Arms

Remember Détente? If you do you are definitely getting on in years. It was one of the diplomatic buzzwords of the 1970s and played a major role in reducing East-West tensions and, many say, helped bring about the end of the Cold War.

Well, if the world manages to avoid a war in Ukraine, it might be time to think about a revived Détente because the Russian problem did not end with the Cold War.

Détente was a Cold War process which found its diplomatic expression in the Helsinki Accords. This semi-legal agreement was signed in the Finnish capital in July 1975 by 33 European heads of government and the American president and Canadian prime minister.

I say semi-legal because it was not a formal treaty. That would have required parliamentary approval of all the signatory countries and there were many in America—and other NATO countries —who were unhappy with the accords. But despite the absence of a formal binding law, Helsinki carried significant moral diplomatic weight.

The main cause of American unhappiness was a clause which bound the participating countries to respect the existing borders and territorial integrity of all the countries in Europe. This was seen as a massive diplomatic coup for the Soviet Union because the West was saying that it would not attempt to push the Soviets out of the Baltic States, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus and Ukraine.

In short, the Helsinki Accords appeared to accept de facto Soviet control of Eastern Europe. In return, the Soviets would stop threatening Western Europe and start talking with the US about limiting nuclear weapons.

There was a drawback for the Soviets. They had to accept that ‘human rights’ in the Eastern Bloc was a legitimate concern of the West. The result was the creation of organizations such as Helsinki Watch (now Human Rights Watch) who worked with Western governments to maintain a constant pressure on Moscow for human rights breaches. Their persistent badgering was another reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

The Helsinki Accords did not say that borders could never change. At the insistence of the Irish and a few others, a clause was inserted to allow borders to change “peacefully” along the lines of the self-determination of the inhabitants. So when the Soviet Union collapsed, the various nations were allowed to set up their own governments without breaching the accords, which did not have the force of law anyway.

The ghosts of Helsinki and Detente are still with us in the form of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It is a fairly toothless organization with 3,406 Vienna-based employees. It could do much more.

The political conditions that gave rise to the Détente process and the Helsinki Accords have in one sense been totally transformed and in the other remained the same.  The Soviet Union no longer exists as a socialist alternative to the capitalist West. Most of the countries they controlled are now members of NATO and the EU or wannabe members of the Western Alliance. Instead of trying to protect itself with troops in Poland, Russia is now trying to protect itself from troops in Poland.

However, the geopolitical paranoia that drove the policies of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev continues in the person of Vladimir Putin and would probably dominate Russian foreign policy whoever sat on the Kremlin throne. This means that Russia will always feel threatened and threaten Western Europe, and in particular those states that have acted as a traditional buffer between the two halves of the continent.

For Washington, Russia ceased to be a major concern with the end of the Cold War. It shifted its focus to the rising threat of China. The fact that Moscow still controlled the world’s largest nuclear arsenal was an inconvenience but little more. Besides, it was time for the European members of the Western Alliance, to assume responsibility for their own security and defence.

So Russia was defeated. Its buffer disappeared and it was being side lined at best and ignored at worse by its former chief opponent. Like so many playground bullies it started threatening others in order to achieve the attention it felt it deserved and used its paranoia to justify its actions.

Moscow needs reassurance that post-Cold War Europe is not an anti-Russian construct. In order to stop threatening it needs to not feel threatened.

Perhaps more than ever, Europe needs a new Détente process and a new Helsinki Agreement to reduce tensions and reassure the Russians that their former satellites are not out for revenge or that the US and Western Europe have unfinished business with Moscow.

[author title=”Tom Arms ” image=”https://sindhcourier.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Tom-Arms-Journalist-Sindh-Courier.jpg”]Tom Arms is foreign editor of LDV, and author of “The Encyclopedia of the Cold War” and the recently published “America Made in Britain.”[/author]