“It was Cold War and we wanted to win”: Human rights, “détente,” and the CSCE

The signing of the Helsinki Final Act was accompanied by much discussion in the Western media. The New York Times called it a sell-out: the West had sanctioned the partition of Europe, and no legally binding results had been obtained in return. To make matters worse, the document would be signed by heads of states rather than foreign ministers.1 The Wall Street Journal asked rhetorically whether détente meant that the US president became the chief apologist for the Soviet Union.2 The influential commentator of the French paper Le Monde, André Fontaine, called it a “diplomatic gadget which no one will read.”3