ABSTRACT
In the second half of the 1960s the Warsaw Pact threatened to be paralysed by the division between the ‘one’ (Romania) and ‘the six’ (the rest). The dynamics between the ‘six’ on the one hand and Romania on the other took an altogether different turn in the course of 1968. Although Romania was clearly isolated during the PCC meeting in Sofia in March 1968, since it was the only country at that meeting that did not support the non-proliferation treaty, there was another country that tended to develop into an anomaly within the WP: Czechoslovakia. However emphatically the new Czechoslovak leader, Alexander Dubcek, still stuck to the position of the other five at the beginning of March 1968, the Czechoslovak leadership had begun to develop its own idiosyncratic kind of communism from its plenum in January 1968 onwards, which culminated in a process of internal reforms usually known as ‘the Prague Spring’. In this chapter the Prague Spring will be analysed from the perspective of
the multilateral decision making of the five WP countries that eventually agreed to invade Czechoslovakia to put an end to the reforms on 21 August 1968. This chapter will accordingly distinguish itself from the previous ones, as it deals with most of the protagonists from the Warsaw Pact, but not explicitly with the institution in itself. An understanding of the multilateral decision making during the Prague Spring is, however, essential in gauging the evolution of the WP in the period afterwards, and a detailed examination of the decision making might also serve to debunk conventional wisdoms on the alleged role of the alliance in this critical period. In most historiography to date the international ramifications of the Prague
Spring are viewed from the perspective of bilateral Czechoslovak-Soviet relations.2 Although a tendency has developed quite recently to view the decision making in a somewhat broader perspective, especially in some excellent
articles by the Harvard historian Mark Kramer, the latest historiography has still failed to distinguish between multilateral decision making by several WP countries, and Warsaw Pact decision making.3 This perhaps explains why it is often assumed that the invasion in Czechoslovakia was in fact a ‘Warsaw Pact invasion’.4 This distinction is, however, crucial. The Warsaw Pact owes much of its reputation as a Soviet instrument to its alleged involvement in the invasion in Czechoslovakia. Immediately after the invasion in Czechoslovakia, US President Lyndon B. Johnson and his top aides even assumed in a National Security Council meeting that the invasion was conducted by the Warsaw Pact, and concluded that ‘[t]here is a great difference between the Warsaw Pact and NATO with respect to internal affairs of members’, as ‘NATO is operative only in the event of international aggression and grants no rights to a member to intervene in the affairs of another’.5 An analysis of the hypothetical role of the WP in the Prague Spring is therefore crucial in order to examine whether the invasion in Czechoslovakia verily revealed a fundamental distinction between NATO and the WP.
