ABSTRACT
The centerpiece of Western human rights efforts in the last half of the 1970s was the so-called Helsinki process, the series of pan-European conferences initiated by the summit meeting that adopted the Helsinki accords. The Helsinki conference was the goal of twenty years of Soviet diplomacy and was accepted only reluctantly by the West. The gamble of Helsinki, moreover, was not limited to the Final Act. The weight of the Helsinki process subsequently shifted to a provision that, if not quite double or nothing, certainly kept the diplomatic game going. The public representation was broadened, they said, to placate crucial domestic constituencies. Other delegations at Madrid may have tended to discount US rhetoric. The main new initiative at the conference was the call for yet more conferences. Most of the wrangling centered on the proposal for a post-Madrid Conference on Disarmament in Europe.
