ABSTRACT
The fate of the Warsaw Pact already seemed to have been sealed upon its foundation. The stigma of a ‘cardboard castle’, which North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) officials attached to it when it was founded in 1955, has endured, and its subsequent demise in 1991 seems to vindicate such a derogatory approach to the Warsaw Pact (WP). It suggests that the WP was a pale reflection of NATO, which at best provided the Soviet ‘satellites’ with a pro forma platform to express their opinions, but in fact enabled the Soviet Union to keep them more tightly in its grip. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Warsaw Pact nevertheless became as much an instrument for the decision making within Eastern Europe from 1960 onwards as NATO was on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Although all non-Soviet Warsaw Pact (NSWP) countries have now become members of NATO, their experience with multilateral diplomacy was shaped within its former nemesis. Moreover, questions that currently prevail within international and European politics, such as the role of Russia, the nuclear question, (Eastern) European integration, the limits of sovereignty, institutional reforms and European security, also dominated the debates within the Warsaw Pact in the 1960s. An in-depth study of this seminal period in the evolution of the WP is not only crucial to understanding the Cold War at large, but also provides a new prism for viewing contemporary politics. In the historiography to date the Warsaw Pact is generally considered a
Soviet instrument, ‘used to continue the total subordination of the smaller East European governments to the Kremlin’s actual aims and policy in the post-Stalin era’.2 The opening of the Eastern European archives since the end of the Cold War has, however, facilitated research into the Warsaw Pact from the perspective of the Soviet Union’s allies. The picture that emerges from a multi-archival analysis of the WP in archives ranging from Bucharest to Berlin and Rome reveals the shortcomings of its one-sided treatment in historiography.3 This book therefore examines to what extent the Warsaw Pact
inadvertently provided the NSWP members with an instrument to assert their national interests, emancipate themselves from the Soviet grip, and influence international politics in the period 1960-69. It also measures the impact of this process on the alliance itself, which acquired a dynamic of its own in the 1960s, and analyses how the smaller allies’ struggle for emancipation served to multilateralise the alliance. The ‘emancipation’ of the Eastern European countries from ‘satellites into
junior allies’ has already been analysed by the American foreign policy analyst Zbigniew Brzezinski, who shrewdly observes that ‘the East European margin of autonomy increased greatly’ in the first half of the 1960s, in his seminal book The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict.4 He nevertheless fails to link this process of ‘de-satellitization’ to the alliance to which these ‘junior allies’ belonged, and even calls the Warsaw Pact ‘a useful forum for the articulation of unanimity, expressing ritualistically the bloc’s support of Soviet foreign policy initiatives versus the West’.5 Although the role of a particular NSWP member within the alliance has recently been the subject of a number of Eastern European monographs and essays, these tend to address the national perspective of the country in question, without examining the dynamics within the alliance as a whole.6
