ABSTRACT
The foundation of the Warsaw Pact on 14 May 1955 at first sight seems an anomaly. The absence of a preceding bargaining process defies most theories on the formation of alliances,2 and the foundation of a military alliance seems out of sync with Khrushchev’s zeal for détente and disarmament. The WP was, after all, founded by a Soviet leadership, which preferred ‘peaceful coexistence’ to further confrontation. After the death of the Soviet despot Joseph Stalin in the spring of 1953, his successors had embarked on a much more conciliatory course towards the West. Four days before the Warsaw Pact’s foundation Stalin’s eventual successor, Nikita Khrushchev, had even put forward the Kremlin’s ‘most credible disarmament proposal to date’, and one day after its foundation Khrushchev signed the Austrian State Treaty, which entailed the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Austria, including Soviet ones, and declared Austria neutral.3 In the wake of the WP’s foundation, Khrushchev chose to demilitarise the Cold War still further, and withdrew Soviet troops from, inter alia, Romania and Finland. Moreover, there were already perfectly functioning bilateral treaties between the Soviet Union and its satellites in place, which explains why the WP has often been considered ‘superfluous’.4
