ABSTRACT
Politicians, or at any rate their speechwriters, are fond of historical analogies. As British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson was no exception. On 30 July 1975, he told delegates assembled in Helsinki for the third and final stage of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) that, in its territorial coverage and level of representation, their Conference made the ‘legendary Congress of Vienna of 1814 [–15] and the Congress of Berlin of 1878 seem like well-dressed tea parties.’1 The presence in the Finnish capital of leading statesmen from 35 countries, including Canada, the United States, and all the European states except Albania and Andorra, may have warranted such words. But three days earlier, the New York Times columnist, William Safire, had made a rather less flattering comparison. He explained to his readers that they were about to witness a ‘Super Yalta,’ and that the Helsinki summit would put ‘Washington’s seal of approval on the Russian conquest and domination of Eastern Europe.’2
British diplomatic correspondence of the period might seem to lend some credence to this view. On 9 September 1975, just five weeks after the conclusion of Stage III, Sir Terence Garvey, Britain’s Ambassador in Moscow, informed London that security in Europe had meant for the Soviet Union the ‘consolidation and perpetuation of the new territorial and political order in Eastern Europe established by Soviet arms, diplomacy and skulduggery in the years following 1944.’3 He maintained that for the Russians, the key importance of the Helsinki Final Act4 lay in the mutual acceptance of the inviolability of frontiers and the political status quo. The Act’s nonbinding character and the acceptance in its Declaration of Principles that frontiers might be changed by peaceful means would not, he reasoned, prevent them from interpreting Western signatures as confirmation that North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would not set back the map of Europe. ‘Moscow,’ he added, ‘intends that note should be taken of this in Eastern Europe in case anyone there had been hoping for change.’ The Soviet government had gained an international success useful for internal propaganda and a quarry of texts to use against those whom it classed ‘enemies of détente’ in the West.5
