With some slight delay, the political rhythms of the Cold War usually followed military developments. Tensions were highest in the late 1950s, since both sides could pursue their cause with convictions unsullied by failure. They reached their peak in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. In the 1960s, despite numerous alarms, both sides lost their expectations of a simple victory. International communism was all but paralysed by the Sino-Soviet split which in 1969 came close to a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Beijing; the mighty USA was immensely disheartened by its inability to coerce the diminutive state of Vietnam; and NATO was profoundly disrupted by de Gaulle. In the 1970s, therefore, both Soviets and Americans felt sufficiently contrite to give greater emphasis to the process that was cleverly labelled
détente
. The initial Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) at Vienna were soon joined by political discussions leading to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. In the 1980s tensions rose again after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979)—the Kremlin’s Vietnam—and the declaration of martial law in Poland (1981). At all stages, in fact, one could observe a subtle mixture of threats and relaxations. There were early moments of
détente
in the coldest years of confrontation, and frigid intervals in the so-called era of
détente
. Certainly in
Europe, where no open warfare occurred in four decades, it is probably less accurate to talk of the Cold War than, in a French commentator’s phrase, of the ‘Hot Peace’. It was a fever which rose and fell many times.
Economic relations could never reach their potential levels. The West was reluctant to sell advanced technology of military value. The American COCOM list grew to contain many thousands of forbidden commercial items. The East, for its part, believed strongly in economic self-sufficiency, preferring backwardness to dependence on capitalist imports. By the late 1970s Soviet harvest failures regularly caused panic purchases of vast quantities of US grain, whilst 50 per cent of Soviet oil production was earmarked for loss-making trade within the CMEA.
Cultural relations remained conservative in scale and content. Tours by the Bolshoi Ballet and the Red Army Choir, or the Mazowsze folk dance ensemble, were exchanged for visits by various western orchestras or the Royal Shakespeare Company. The Soviet bloc countries set great store by the Olympic Games, where their state-sponsored athletes performed very well. Sport was used as a political instrument, most openly by the US boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980, and Soviet retaliation at Los Angeles in 1984.
Diplomatic relations were beset by obstacles of all sorts. The Security Council of the UN was paralysed for 40 years, most frequently by the Soviet veto. The war of spies reached grotesque proportions: Western intelligence was penetrated at the highest levels by Soviet recruits in Britain, and by East German agents in Bonn. In the 1950s, in the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy, reasonable fears about the activities of communist agents in the USA caused a totally unreasonable witch-hunt. Successive American embassies in Moscow were so riddled with bugging devices that they had to be abandoned. There was no trust.
The origins of
détente
go right back to the start of the Cold War. Stalin once offered to permit the reunification of Germany in return for American disengagement. At the Geneva meeting in 1955 when President Eisenhower met Stalin’s successors, the West was surprised again by far-reaching Soviet proposals for disarmament. 1959 saw Khrushchev at Camp David, and Macmillan, in Cossack hat, in Moscow. But the developing dialogue was withered by the U2 incident, by the second Berlin crisis, and, most severely, by the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba.
The U2 was a high-altitude American spy-plane, supposedly immune to attack. In 1960 a flight from Turkey was shot down over the Volga. Eisenhower was foolish enough to deny the existence of all such operations until Khrushchev produced the pilot and the damning evidence of his duties.
The Berlin crisis of 1961 had been brewing for years. The stream of refugees from East to West was gathering pace. Ten thousand crossed in the last week of July 1961 alone. The Kremlin had repeatedly threatened to sign a unilateral treaty with the DDR, and to terminate the rights of four-power occupation. The Soviets held overwhelming local military superiority. But the West made no move. Then, on 13 August 1961, the Wall was built. The young President Kennedy was being
tested as never before. Privately relieved that the Wall had lessened the chances of a second Berlin blockade, he did not react militarily; instead, he staged a propaganda coup. Standing beside the Wall, he shouted defiantly in his inimitable Boston drawl, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’.
*
The Cuban crisis of the following October brought the Cold War to the brink. Kennedy had come out of the Berlin crisis, and his earlier meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna, convinced of his failure to impress Moscow with America’s determination. Next time, he had to give proof of firmness. He increased US commitments to South Vietnam. When aerial photography revealed the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuban silos only 90 miles off the coast of Florida, he decided that the Kremlin must be forced to back down. The only question was how. Washington rejected a surgical air strike in favour of putting Cuba into quarantine. For a week the world held its breath; then the Soviet missiles were withdrawn. The USA undertook to withdraw its own missiles from Turkey, and refrain from invading Cuba.
29
Disarmament talks dragged on for decades. The Geneva offer foundered over Soviet refusals to allow inspection. In 1963 the Moscow Agreement banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere, but only after enormous damage had been caused to the global environment. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 was designed to maintain the monopoly of the five existing nuclear powers and, in particular, to exclude China. It failed on all counts, except as a temporary brake. The first round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) reached an interim conclusion in 1972 after four years. SALT II ground along until blocked by the US Congress in 1980. The further stage of trying to negotiate an absolute reduction in the size of military arsenals, as opposed to limiting their rate of increase, proceeded from the mid-1970s onwards. Talks on Mutual Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR), concerning conventional armaments, were located in Vienna for fifteen years. The Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), concerning nuclear weapons, were located in Madrid from 1982. Thirty years of intergovernmental talking proved as impotent as the series of popular campaigns against nuclear weapons which attracted considerable support in the West in the early 1960s, and again in the early 1980s.
Direct European involvement in Cold War diplomacy inevitably took second place to the main US-Soviet confrontation. But it gradually asserted itself from the mid-1950s onwards. In 1957, with Soviet agreement, Poland presented the UN with the Rapacki Plan for a nuclear-free zone in central Europe, and in 1960 the Gomułka Plan for a nuclear freeze in the same area. Nothing much ensued. In 1965 the Polish Catholic bishops published an open letter to their counterparts in Germany, stating their readiness ‘to forgive and to be forgiven’. This courageous initiative, denounced as traitorous by the communist governments, pointed a clear way forward through the moral fog of fear and hatred.
Soviet policy in Eastern Europe played heavily on the German bogey, and communist propaganda made huge efforts to keep wartime germanophobia alive. In West Germany the strident voice of the expellees carried considerable weight with Christian Democrat governments; and the unregulated fate of their Eastern homelands only served to keep passions simmering. The prevailing political climate only began to thaw in the late 1960s, largely through the good offices of the German Churches, who thereby prepared the way for the
Ostpolitik
of Chancellor Willy Brandt.
The
Ostpolitik
or ‘Eastern Policy’, launched in 1969, was based on consistent short-term, mid-term, and long-term objectives. In the immediate situation, Brandt sought to break the deadlock in East-West relations which had set in after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Ever since the full recognition of the Federal Republic, West Germany had pursued the so-called Hallstein Doctrine, refusing to deal with any government (except the USSR) which dealt with the DDR. The result had been almost total isolation from all of Germany’s Eastern neighbours. After breaking the ice, Brandt then sought to establish a
modus vivendi
with the DDR, and with other members of the Soviet bloc. Over 10,20, or perhaps 30 years, he hoped that growing intercourse between Western and Eastern Germany would soften the regime in East Berlin, and lead to eventual reconciliation. On the first two scores the
Ostpolitik
undoubtedly gained its objectives. On the third it had the opposite effect from that intended. Indeed, it is not certain that Brandt ever really expected Germany to be reunited. During his retirement, he admitted: ‘Reunification is the lie of German political life.’
None the less, Willy Brandt’s appearance on the international scene had a very considerable impact. Eastern Europe had not been conditioned to the idea of a German Chancellor who was a socialist with manifestly peaceful intentions. Born the illegitimate son of a Lübeck salesgirl, Brandt (Herbert Frahm, 1913–92) overcame every possible social disadvantage. Having lived in Norway during the war, and fought the Nazis, he had impeccable democratic credentials. What is more, as the Mayor of West Berlin from 1957 to 1963, he had gained a reputation for staunch resistance to communism. When he appeared in Moscow in August 1970, therefore, 25 years after the defeat of the Wehrmacht, he made a great impression. That December in Poland, where he fell to his knees before the memorial to the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto, he made an emotional gesture that was long remembered. In East Berlin, his overtures could not be resisted. Within three years, he had forged a German-Soviet Treaty of Co-operation (1970), a German-Polish Treaty (1970) which drew the sting of Germany’s lost territories, and in 1973 a treaty of mutual recognition with the DDR. The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall were not breached; indeed, they were given a new lease of life. The German problem had not been solved; but it had been fixed in a stable framework of minimal intercourse. Brandt’s conservative opponents accused him of giving away Germany’s birthright. ‘One cannot give away something which has already been
gambled
away,’ was his reply.
Historians will always debate whether West Germany’s
Ostpolitik
served to
prolong the division of Europe or whether, through humiliating compromise, it set the course which eventually led to reunification. The two interpretations are not, in fact, exclusive. It certainly set the tone for the next decade. By ending the boycott of the DDR, it involved the Federal Government in a great deal of expense with no visible return, and a large number of shady operations—such as the scandalous trade in political prisoners, which East Berlin sold off for royal ransoms. By defusing the threat-laden atmosphere of the late 1960s, it opened the way for ‘the era of
détente’
.
Détente
is a diplomatic term of the choicest ambiguity. For those who so wish, it can mean ‘relaxation’ or ‘a mild spell of weather’. It is also the French word for the trigger of a gun. In the context of the 1970s it obviously signified the release of pressure; but whether that release was to have a benign or a deadly effect was entirely open to conjecture.
Apart from Bonn’s
Ostpolitik
and the progress of SALT I, an important spur to
détente
must be found in distant China. In 1972 the American President, Richard Nixon, visited the ageing Chairman Mao, thereby ‘playing the China card’. The bipolar structure of the Cold War was transformed into a new, triangular configuration made up of the Soviet bloc, China, and the West. The Soviet leaders, resigned to an uneasy stalemate with Beijing, felt constrained to stabilize their position in Europe. After all, 30 years after the triumph of Stalingrad the Soviet Union was still having to live without a formal settlement on its Western flank. Discussions started in 1970 and culminated in the Helsinki Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), which ran on from 1973 to 1975.
From the Soviet viewpoint, the Helsinki Final Act took the place of the German Peace Treaty that never was. From the Western viewpoint, it marked a recognition that Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe could not be ended by force, and a decision to make the Soviets buy stability at a high political price. Basket One of the negotiations, on security issues, ended with an agreement to guarantee Europe’s existing frontiers, except for peaceful changes by mutual consent. Basket Two contained measures for extending economic co-operation. Basket Three contained an agreement to promote a wide range of cultural and communication projects, and to guarantee human contacts. This was the political price-tag. From the day that the Final Act was signed in 1975, the regimes of the East had to choose between respecting their citizens’ rights or being exposed for breaking their solemn undertakings.
The Helsinki Final Act was criticized by many as a capitulation to the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe. At the same time, it gave formal encouragement to political dissent throughout the Soviet bloc. In Poland, it gave an early boost to KOR, the predecessor of Solidarity; in Czechoslovakia, to the Charter 77 group led by Václav Havel; and in the Soviet Union, to numerous ‘Helsinki Watch Committees’. It was totally ignored by Andropov’s KGB; but it was taken very seriously by the American administration of President Carter, who, in view of constant Soviet violations, saw no reason to disengage from Europe.
At the end of the 1970s three new faces appeared in the West. In 1978 a Slavonic Pope ascended the throne of St Peter, endowed with a vision of reuniting Christian Europe. In 1979 a woman of great fortitude moved into 10 Downing Street. She was soon to be dubbed, by the Kremlin, ‘the Iron Lady’. In 1980 a retired film actor entered the Oval Office of the White House. The ‘Great Communicator’ was soon to call the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire’. These three personalities breathed a new spirit into East-West relations. All three opposed communism on moral principle; all three were hugely popular in Eastern Europe—more so than in the West; all three looked unhappy with the accommodations of the previous decades. Reagan and Thatcher honed the twin-track policy of NATO, which held out the palm of peace whilst strengthening its military shield.