by Tony Judt
After Brandt was forced out of office by a spy scandal in 1974 his successors in the Chancellery—the Socialist Helmut Schmidt and the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl—never deviated from the general line of Ostpolitik, pursuing it not only in public diplomacy but also through multiple links with the GDR, official and unofficial, all designed to facilitate human contacts, smooth relations, alleviate fears of West German revanchism and generally ‘normalize’ Bonn’s relations with her eastern neighbors—accepting, in Brandt’s words after signing the Moscow Treaty that acknowledged Germany’s post-war frontiers, that ‘with this Treaty, nothing is lost that had not long since been gambled away’.
There were three distinct constituencies whom the framers of Ostpolitik had to consider if they were to succeed in their ambitions. Western Europeans needed reassurance that Germany was not turning East. French President Georges Pompidou’s first response to the Moscow Treaty had been to make encouraging overtures to Great Britain—British membership of the European Community now held out the attraction of providing a counterweight to a less pliable Germany. The French were eventually appeased by German promises to anchor the Federal Republic ever more firmly in West European institutions (much as Pompidou’s successors would be reassured by Germany’s commitment to a common European currency following German unification two decades later); but in Paris as in Washington, remarks such as those of Finance Minister Helmut Schmidt in 1973, depicting a ‘changing world’ in which ‘the traditional categories of East and West’ were losing significance, were not soon forgotten.
The second constituency was Germans on both sides of the divide. For many of them Brandt’s Ostpolitik brought real dividends. Contact and communication between the two Germanies burgeoned. In 1969 a mere half-million phone calls had been placed from West to East Germany. Twenty years later there were some forty million. Telephone contact between the two halves of Berlin, virtually unknown in 1970, had reached the level of ten million calls per year by 1988. By the mid-Eighties most East Germans had virtually unrestricted access to West German television; indeed, the East German authorities even went so far as to lay cable into the ‘valley of the clueless’ around Dresden (so-called because of local topographical impediments to West German television signals), in the wishful belief that if East Germans could watch West German television at home they would not feel the need to emigrate. These and other arrangements, including the reuniting of families and the release to the West of political prisoners, redounded to the credit of Ostpolitik and reflected the Communists’ growing confidence in the West German policy of ‘stability’ and ‘no surprises.’
The rulers of East Germany had particularly good reason to be pleased with these developments. In September 1973 the United Nations recognized and admitted East and West Germany as sovereign states; within a year the German Democratic Republic was diplomatically recognized by eighty countries, including the USA. In an ironic echo of changes in Bonn, the GDR’s own leaders stopped referring to ‘Germany’ and instead began speaking with growing confidence of the GDR as a distinctive and legitimate German state in its own right, with a future of its own—rooted, they now insisted, not just in ‘good’, anti-Fascist Germans but in the soil and heritage of Prussia. Whereas the 1968 constitution of the GDR spoke of a commitment to unification on the basis of democracy and socialism, the phrase is absent in the amended constitution of 1974, replaced by a vow to remain ‘forever and irrevocably allied with the USSR.’
There were also more immediate and mercenary grounds for official GDR interest in Ostpolitik. Since 1963 the GDR had been ‘selling’ political prisoners to Bonn for cash, the sum depending upon the ‘value’ and qualifications of the candidate. By 1977, in order to obtain the release of a prisoner from East German jails, Bonn was paying close to DM 96,000 per head. Among the diplomatic achievements of the new policy was the institutionalizing of cross-border family reunification: for this the authorities in Pankow charged an additional DM 4,500 per head (a bargain—in 1983 the Romanian dictator Ceauşescu was charging Bonn DM 8,000 a person to allow ethnic Germans to leave Romania). By one estimate, the total amount extracted from Bonn by the GDR, in return for releasing 34,000 prisoners, reuniting 2,000 children with their parents, and ‘regulating’ 250,000 cases of family reunification, was by 1989 close to DM 3 billion.214
One of the unintended consequences of these developments was the virtual disappearance of ‘unification’ from the German political agenda. To be sure, reunification of the divided country remained the Lebenslüge (‘life-lie’) of the Federal Republic, as Brandt put it. But by the mid-Eighties, a few years before it unexpectedly took place, re-unification no longer mobilized mass opinion. Polls taken in the Fifties and Sixties suggested that up to 45 percent of the West German population felt unification was the ‘most important’ question of the day; from the mid-Seventies the figure never exceeded 1 percent.
The third constituency for Bonn’s new approach, of course, was the Soviet Union. From Willy Brandt’s first negotiations with Brezhnev in 1970, through Gorbachev’s visit to Bonn nearly two decades later, all West German plans for ‘normalization’ to the east passed through Moscow and everyone knew it. In Helmut Schmidt’s words, ‘naturally, German-Soviet relations stood at the centre of Ostpolitik .’ Indeed, once the West Germans and Russians had agreed on the permanence of Poland’s new frontiers (respecting long-established European practice, no one asked the Poles for their views) and Bonn had consented to recognize the People’s Democracies, West Germans and Russians found much common ground.
When Leonid Brezhnev went to Bonn in May 1973, the first such visit by a Soviet Communist Party leader, he and Helmut Schmidt even managed to share warm memories of their common wartime experiences—Schmidt conveniently recalling that he ‘fought for Germany by day and at night privately wished for Hitler’s defeat’. In his memoirs Willy Brandt, who really had opposed the Third Reich from beginning to end, coolly observes that ‘when war reminiscences are exchanged, the fake and the genuine lie very close together’. But if the reminiscences were perhaps illusory, the shared interests were real enough.
The USSR had for many years been pressing for official recognition of its post-war gains and the new frontiers of Europe, preferably at a formal Peace Conference. The Western Allies, the US especially, had long been unwilling to go beyond de facto acknowledgement of the status quo, pending resolution of the ‘German Question’ in particular. But now that the Germans themselves were making overtures to their eastern neighbors, the Western position was bound to change; the Soviet leaders were about to realize their hopes. As part of their ambitious strategy of détente with the USSR and China, President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his National Security Adviser, were more open than their predecessors to negotiations with Moscow—and perhaps less troubled by the nature of the Soviet regime: as Kissinger explained to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Sep 19th 1974, international détente should not be made to wait upon Soviet domestic reforms.
Thus, in December 1971, NATO ministers met in Brussels and agreed in principle to take part in a European Security Conference. Within a year a preparatory session was under way in Helsinki, Finland; and in July 1973, still in Helsinki, the official Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe opened. Thirty-five countries (including the US and Canada) participated—only Albania declined to attend. Over the ensuing two years the Helsinki conferees drew up conventions, drafted agreements, proposed ‘confidence-building’ measures to improve East-West relations and much else besides. In August 1975 the Helsinki Accords were unanimously approved and signed.
On the face of things, the Soviet Union was the major beneficiary of the Accords. In the Final Act, under ‘Principle I’, it was agreed that the ‘participating States will respect each other’s sovereign equality and individuality as well as all the rights inherent in and encompassed by its sovereignty, including in particular the right of every State to juridical equality, to territorial integrity.’ M
oreover, in Principle VI, the participating States undertook to ‘refrain from any intervention, direct or indirect, individual or collective, in the internal or external affairs falling within the domestic jurisdiction of another participating State, regardless of their mutual relations’.
Brezhnev and his colleagues could not have wished for more. Not only were the political divisions of post-war Europe now officially and publicly accepted, and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the GDR and other satellite regimes officially conceded; the Western powers had for the first time foresworn all ‘armed intervention or threat of such intervention against another participating State’. To be sure, the chances that NATO or the US would ever actually invade the Soviet Bloc had long since been negligible: indeed, the only country that had actually engaged in such armed intervention since 1948 was the Soviet Union itself . . . twice.
But it was an illustration of Moscow’s endemic insecurity that these clauses in the Helsinki agreements, together with Principle IV affirming that ‘the participating States will respect the territorial integrity of each of the participating States’, were accorded such significance. Between the agreements with West Germany, and the Helsinki Accords’ retrospective confirmation and acceptance of Potsdam, the Soviet Union had finally achieved its objectives and could rest easy. In return, as it seemed, the Western participants in the Conference had sought and obtained little more than unobjectionable pro forma clauses: social, cultural and economic cooperation and exchanges, good faith collaboration to address outstanding and future disagreements, etc, etc.
But also included in the so-called ‘third basket’ of Helsinki principles was a list of the rights not just of states, but of persons and peoples, grouped under Principles VII (‘Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief’) and VIII (‘Equal rights and self-determination of peoples’). Most of the political leaders who signed off on these clauses paid them little attention—on both sides of the Iron Curtain it was generally assumed that they were diplomatic window dressing, a sop to domestic opinion, and in any case unenforceable: under Principles IV and VI, outsiders could not interfere in the internal affairs of signatory states. As one embittered Czech intellectual remarked at the time, Helsinki was in practice a re-run of Cuius Regio, Eius Religio: within their borders, rulers were once again licensed to treat their citizens as they wished.
It did not work out that way. Most of the 1975 Helsinki principles and protocols merely gift-wrapped existing international arrangements. But Principle VII not only committed the signatory states to ‘respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.’ It also enjoined all thirty-five states to ‘promote and encourage the effective exercise of civil, political, economic, social, cultural and other rights and freedoms’, and to ‘recognize and respect the freedom of the individual to profess and practice, alone or in community with others, religion or belief acting in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience’.
From this wordy and, as it seemed, toothless checklist of rights and obligations was born the Helsinki Rights movement. Within a year of getting their long-awaited international conference agreement, Soviet leaders were faced with a growing and ultimately uncontrollable flowering of circles, clubs, networks, charters and individuals, all demanding ‘merely’ that their governments stick to the letter of that same agreement, that—as enjoined by the Final Act—they ‘fulfill their obligations as set forth in the international declarations and agreements in this field’. Brezhnev had been right to count upon Henry Kissinger and his hard-headed successors to take seriously the non-intervention clauses at Helsinki; but it had never occurred to him (nor indeed to Kissinger) that others might take no less seriously the more utopian paragraphs that followed.215
In the short run the Soviet authorities and their colleagues in eastern Europe could certainly suppress easily enough any voices raised on behalf of individual or collective rights: in 1977 the leaders of a Ukrainian ‘Helsinki Rights’ group were arrested and sentenced to terms ranging from three to fifteen years. But the very emphasis that Communist leaders had placed upon ‘Helsinki’ as the source of their regimes’ international legitimacy would now come to haunt them: by invoking Moscow’s own recent commitments, critics (at home and abroad) could now bring public pressure to bear on the Soviet regimes. Against this sort of opposition, violent repression was not just ineffective but, to the extent that it was public knowledge, self-defeating. Hoist by the petard of their own cynicism, Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues had inadvertently opened a breach in their own defenses. Against all expectation, it was to prove mortal.
XVI
A Time of Transition
‘In retrospect our biggest single mistake was to have allowed the elections
to go ahead. Our downfall can be traced from there’.
Brigadier Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho
‘Spain is the problem, Europe is the solution’.
Ortega y Gasset
‘Europe is not just about material results, it is about spirit. Europe is a state
of mind’.
Jacques Delors
In Northern Europe, domestic and international change was played out against the ever-present backdrop of these Great Power dealings and the East-West division of the continent. But in Mediterranean Europe local concerns dominated. Until the early Seventies, Spain, Portugal and Greece were peripheral to Europe in more than just a geographical sense. Despite being ‘Western’ in their Cold War allegiance (Portugal and Greece were members of NATO), all three countries stood otherwise quite apart. Their economies—heavily dependent upon the remittances of a surplus rural workforce employed abroad, and a growing tourist trade—resembled those of other countries on Europe’s southern perimeter: Yugoslavia, or Turkey. The standard of living in southern Spain and most of Portugal and Greece was comparable to that of Eastern Europe and parts of the developing world.
All three countries were governed in the early 1970s by authoritarian rulers of a species more familiar in Latin America than Western Europe; the political transformations of the post-war decades seemed largely to have passed them by. In Portugal—ruled by António Salazar from 1932 to 1970—and Spain, where General Franco had staged his military coup in 1936 and ruled unchallenged from 1939 to his death in 1975, hierarchies of authority from another era were frozen into place. In Greece, a military cabal had overthrown king and parliament in 1967; thence-forward, the country was governed by a junta of colonels. The spectre of their unstable past hovered oppressively across the unpromising future prospects of all three countries.
The recent history of Greece, like that of Spain, was heavily back-shadowed by civil war. In the post-World War Two years, the Communist KKE terrorized villages under its control, leaving a legacy of fear and associating the radical Left in many Greek memories with repression and atrocity. After the Communists abandoned the struggle, in October 1949, it was the Left’s turn to suffer sustained repression. Wartime partisans (including many who had fought against the Germans in earlier years) were forced into foreign exile for decades to come. Those who remained, together with their children and even their grandchildren, were forbidden public sector employment until well into the seventies. At the notorious prison on the island of Makronisos, Communists were detained at length and treated with notorious brutality.216
But the political divisions of Greece, however tidily they appeared to fold into Cold War categories, were always dominated by distinctive local concerns. In March 1949, at the height of the Tito-Stalin struggle, the slavishly pro-Moscow KKE issued a radio announcement (from Bucharest) endorsing demands for an independent Macedonia. By encouraging the territorial fragmentation of Yugoslavia this was intended to weaken Tito, but it had no such effect. Instead it undercut for a generation the domestic credibility of Greek Communism, by suggesting
that a Communist victory would result in autonomy for the Macedonian north, with its Slav and Albanian minorities, and thence to the break up of the Greek state.
If this mattered so much, it was because Greek nationalism was peculiarly insecure, even by regional standards. Permanently on the qui vive for conflict with their former imperial masters in Turkey, in a state of war with Albania since 1940 (a circumstance left un-remedied until 1985), and unwilling to concede even the fact of a large Slav community abutting their frontiers with Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, Greece’s conservative post-war politicians emphatically opted for order and stability over democracy or post-war reconciliation. Conflating old Greek concerns with new international divisions the Greek king, his army and his ministers presented themselves to the West as the most reliable allies in an unstable region.
They were well compensated for their loyalty.217 In February 1947, the Treaty of Paris obliged Italy to cede the Dodecanese islands to Athens. Greece was a major beneficiary of American aid, both following the pronouncement of the ‘Truman Doctrine’ and under the Marshall Plan. The country was admitted to NATO in 1952 and the Greek armed forces were the happy recipients of copious practical assistance with planning and matériel. Indeed, the role of the army was to prove crucial. The British had originally hoped to bequeath to liberated Greece a properly non-political army and modern police force; but in the circumstances of time and place, this proved impossible. Instead, the Greek army emerged from eight years of war as uncompromisingly anti-Communist, royalist and undemocratic, its allegiance to NATO and to its American colleagues considerably firmer than any commitment to the political institutions or laws of its own state.
Indeed—and much like the traditional Spanish officer corps in this respect—Greek officers saw themselves, rather than the ephemeral constitutional documents they were sworn to defend, as the guardians of the nation and its integrity. The army was active from the outset in post-war Greek political life: in the national elections of the early Fifties, the victorious ‘Greek Rally’ Party was led by Marshal Alexandros Papagos, commander of the government forces in the Civil War. Until 1963 the military were happy enough to give their support to Constantine Karamanlis, who led the re-named Greek Rally party (now the National Radical Union) to election victories in 1956, 1958 and again in 1961—though he was suspected after the last and greatest of these successes of widespread electoral fraud.