ABSTRACT

The documents signed at the November 1990 session of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) officially codified the status of the Soviet military as the only military superpower in Europe. Prior to CSCE, the Soviets had signed a series of historic treaties agreeing to the unification of Germany, the scheduled withdrawal of Soviet garrisons from eastern Germany by 1994, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia and Hungary by mid-1991. The Baltic states in particular looked upon Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary as models for a post-Soviet regional system. In contrast, when the Soviet army carried its war of national liberation from the Nazis into Eastern Europe, it brought along symbolic East European armies. Though the West never used Brezhnev’s terminology, it had for all practical purposes previously accepted the right of the Soviet military to intervene in the “national security zone” of the Soviet defense ministry.