ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that European governments – East and West – came to see multilateralism as an opportunity to stretch their room for manoeuvre in a Cold War order largely dominated by the superpowers. As small countries strove to become more influential, they used multilateralism as an instrument to both bolster their foreign policies within the bipolar Cold War framework and alter the dynamics within their respective alliances. It responds to the call of New Cold War History to investigate the role of smaller powers on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and it offers a unique analysis of Eastern and Western Europe simultaneously. The chapter overall deals with the smaller powers’ room for manoeuvre in four different multilateral contexts, namely the Warsaw Pact, the European Community/European Political Cooperation, NATO, and the overarching context of the European security conference/the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe in the period 1965–1975. It adds to the most recent historiography that challenges the conventional bipolar Cold War paradigm that sees European security as shaped by the superpowers only, as it proves that small powers had an explicit stake and active role in the process of defining what security meant on the European continent.
