ABSTRACT
While the Helsinki Final Act set the Euro-Atlantic area on a new path to cooperation, idealism over the usual realpolitik of the Cold War was short-lived. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan marked a final withdrawal from this path. Likewise, the US support for anti-communist forces around the world, for example, the Contras in Nicaragua, did little to help. While neither Afghanistan nor Nicaragua was part of the CSCE area, Soviet and American actions did little to improve trust between the two superpowers. However, the environment began to change with the dock workers strike in Poland in 1981, the change in Soviet leadership, and finally the rise to power in 1985 of Mikhail Gorbachev as Premier of the Supreme Soviet. Despite the Soviet invasions in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet leadership failed to send troops during the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1981. The failure to send troops to Poland to help suppress the dock workers strike illustrates a change in the Brezhnev Doctrine of military intervention in Central Europe. This showed a clear break with the Brezhnev Doctrine introduced in Chapter 2. Yet, this change could have been forecast from the signing of the Final Act. Indeed, the document says that
[states] will respect each other’s sovereign equality and individuality as well as all the rights inherent in and encompassed by its sovereignty, including in particular the right of every State to juridical equality, to territorial integrity and to freedom and political independence.
