ABSTRACT
The Prague Spring and the invasion of the Eastern European ‘coalition of the willing’ in Czechoslovakia on 21 August 1968 have put such a stamp on the year 1968 in Eastern Europe that it is easy to forget that there were still several unresolved issues within the Warsaw Pact that initially demanded more attention than the situation in Czechoslovakia. Although the Romanian dissent on a non-proliferation treaty had been neutralised by issuing a separate declaration of the ‘six’ during the PCC meeting in Sofia on 6-7 March 1968, further proposals on military reforms had been postponed to the next PCC meeting, as it was impossible to bypass Romania on the reforms of an alliance of which it was itself a member. The WP’s only official organ remained the PCC, and no consensus had been reached on intra-allied coordination on military and foreign policy issues. The question of the intergovernmental versus supranational nature of the alliance’s institutions had not yet been resolved, nor had the Bucharest Declaration on European Security of July 1966 been complemented by a more concrete proposal. The WP had even been sidelined through the multilateral decision making during the Prague Spring. The WP, accordingly, found itself in limbo until the next PCC meeting in March 1969. This chapter thus deals with the same period as the previous one, but from
a totally different angle. Instead of assessing the role of the WP during the Prague Spring, it aims to examine the functioning of the alliance by focusing on the issues that have been central to the rest of this book. Even though the WP played no role in resolving the crisis in Czechoslovakia, the customary issues, such as WP military reforms and European security, did not grind to a halt during the Prague Spring. On the contrary, business continued (almost) as usual, and during the first PCC meeting after the Prague Spring, in March 1969, several issues were resolved that had been dominating WP discussions throughout the 1960s. According to Mastny, this meeting even represented the PCC’s ‘landmark event’.2 Against the backdrop of the German question and the Sino-Soviet split the issues of reforms and European security will be
analysed during the period that also witnessed Dubcek’s rise and fall: starting with the PCC meeting in Sofia in March 1968, and finishing with the one in Budapest in March 1969, this chapter will trace a decisive period in the evolution of the WP, in which the alliance was confronted with a simple question: to consolidate or to disintegrate.
