A Polish diplomat experienced distress in his post in Moscow in the mid-1970s. He stood on the stand among the diplomatic corps. When a military parade started on Red Square and dozens of tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery guns and rocket launchers began to roll in, our older colleague commented in French that these were “les chevaliers de la détente” parading on the square, which did not necessarily mean that had in mind the Soviet operators of the relaxation of tension between East and West. Because in French, “détente” is not only political relaxation, but also as much as a trigger. Someone reported the Polish diplomat and he had some unpleasantness from his innocent little joke. He returned from the post ahead of time. But this joke quite accurately reflected the essence of militaristic thinking in the politics of the USSR, but also in Putin’s policy. Because as much as it paid lip service to détente Russia has always wanted (even if it did not have to) to prepare for war.
As mentioned, the term “détente” was used to refer to the process of easing tensions between the sides to the Cold War in the 1970s, and it entered the catalogue of doctrines of international politics for good.
First ideas of the doctrine had come before that. They were a symptom of confrontation fatigue and the search for a more flexible alternative to containment. As late as June 1953, Churchill himself proposed an intermediate solution between hard containment and a big deal compromise with the Soviets. He argued that ten years of relative peace combined with the development of science and technology could change the world, read: erode the influence of communism.
The Geneva Summit of USA, USSR, UK and France in 1955 was to be the first step towards an end to the Cold War. But negotiating a neutral status for Austria turned out to be the maximum that could have been achieved then. The vision of Germany’s future remained an unsolvable problem. Khrushchev did not see what he would get in return for consent to reunification.
In the mid-1950s, the concepts of diluting arms in Central Europe and reducing the military presence of the USSR and the USA appeared. In 1957 Rapacki submitted a proposal for a nuclear-free zone in Central Europe. George Kennan, the architect of containment himself, became an ardent supporter of this concept. Undoubtedly, the reaching of the overkill capacity by both blocks was one of the important prerequisites for détente.
It was assumed that relaxation was conceptually born in the mind of Charles de Gaulle. He decided that if the Soviets saw that Western Europe would show independence from the USA in its relations with the East and it would prove that it was not only a satellite of America, then the USSR would increase the scope of freedom of Eastern European states, loosen its grip and soften its caustic policy. France, of course, overestimated its capabilities. And it overestimated Moscow’s readiness to give more political space to the satellites. There were also in the US supporters of a policy of building bridges. Brzeziński himself in the 1960s believed that the West could, by favoring internal reforms in socialist countries, push them towards social democratic models.
De Gaulle’s declarations about the durability of the Polish western border and other gestures towards the socialist camp may have gained sympathy, but it was in Bonn that the key to détente lay. Under Adenauer, who was morbidly rejecting any proposals to weaken US defense commitments, it was not an option to launch a normalization offer. But the coming to power of the social democrats in Germany changed the situation radically. And the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 extinguished the West’s eagerness to support the liberation tendencies in the East. In the meantime, de Gaulle himself left politics, but his thought was picked up elsewhere, in the ranks of the German social democrats.
The detente in Europe was achieved mainly by the Ostpolitik of Chancellor Willy Brandt, which led to the agreement on the status of West Berlin (1971), the normalization of bilateral relations between the USSR and Poland with West Germany (1970), and the admission of both German states to the United Nations. The Nixon administration initially viewed Ostpolitik with high suspicion. It later picked up detente as a tactical measure, a temporary change of style in long-term geopolitical struggles. It saw it as an opportunity to have a direct positive impact on communist societies, to knock out the arguments about the existential threat from the West and its aggressiveness from the authorities’ hand, and to open up eastern societies.
Because the United States, above all, needed time and peace to leave Indochina and heal the wounds after the defeat in Vietnam.
The European economic miracle fostered relaxation. In several countries of Western Europe, the 1960s was a period of an unprecedented economic growth. The countries of Western Europe started looking at Eastern Europe in terms of new trade opportunities. And in the countries of Central Europe, the benefits of intensifying economic contacts were noticed.
The socialist camp saw relaxation as an opportunity to legitimize not only the territorial order in Europe, but also the political order.
In the pan-European dimension, the détente policy resulted in the signing of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1975. In 1973, negotiations on the reduction of the armed forces and armaments in Central Europe began.
Globally, the USSR and the USA negotiated the first Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement (SALT) in 1972. It was also possible to break the deadlock in other dimensions of disarmament (a convention on the prohibition of bacteriological weapons or an agreement on ballistic defense were concluded).
The joint Apollo-Soyuz flight in 1975 became a media symbol of the new era of cooperation.
The main idea of détente was readiness to cooperate and negotiate. Cooperation was to prevail over competition, dialogue over war preparations. It was supposed to give the right of an audible voice to smaller states, so far dominated by both hegemons. Indeed, the European satellites of the USSR began to dynamise their foreign policy (still strategically controlled by Moscow at all times), and engage in political contacts and economic ties with the West on a scale unprecedented since the partition of Yalta. Non-bloc states (neutral and non-aligned states) also benefited from détente.
Theorists described two dimensions of détente: political (normalization of relations, development of political contacts) and military (disarmament, confidence-building measures). There was supposed to be a strong feedback loop between them. However, it was not always visible (e.g. the permanent stalemate in the MBFR negotiations on the reduction of conventional weapons in Central Europe did not yield to any political impulses).
At the same time, the West stepped up its human rights offensive. Nixon demanded Jewish emigration from the USSR, the West unanimously insisted that human rights be included in the CSCE principles, and Carter made human rights the backbone of US foreign policy. Reagan (in alliance with Thatcher) took human rights ideology to an even higher level, albeit under an openly anti-communist banner. He considered his mission to convince the Soviets of the need to abandon communism. He was seen as a precursor to the concept of democratic peace.
The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan ended the period of détente At his first press conference as president in 1981, Ronald Reagan announced that “détente is a one-way street that the Soviet Union used to pursue its goals.” And he announced an end to this policy. This proved that the foundations of the détente policy were quite fragile. It took only a little to let go of the effort to ease the tensions. The disappointment of détente, however, was understandable. On both sides. The West was frustrated with the lack of regime liberalization in the socialist countries, and the East with the expected economic profits (e.g. the COCOM export control system and restrictions were maintained all the time). And the European détente remained a hostage of the global rivalry between the two powers. The symbolic grave of the European détente became Afghanistan, quite peripheral issue from the European point of view. Experts in the communist East associated end of détente with the economic crisis in the West (the impact of the oil crisis), which was to deepen internal contradictions there, which resulted in the domination of conservative political forces.
Instead, Reagan proposed his own doctrine. The Reagan Doctrine provided for any support to be given to anti-communist forces in countries in the sphere of Soviet influence. He supported the mujahideen, armed the contras in Nicaragua, and wanted to extirpate communist influence wherever he could. The enemies of our enemies became our friends. The subversive tactics of the communists of the 1940s and 1950s were reproduced.
It is assumed that the second period of détente began after Mikhail Gorbachev took power in the USSR.
It must be admitted that even after the advent of Gorbachev, despite his internal reforms and declarations, as well as initiatives in the field of foreign policy, the process of breaking distrust was slow.
I watched as these deposits of mistrust were removed in the field of European disarmament. In March 1989, new negotiations began in Vienna on conventional disarmament (CFE) among NATO and Warsaw Pact countries, and negotiations on confidence- and security-building measures (CSBM) among all CSCE states. Despite the quite constructive basic starting position submitted by the Warsaw Pact states (the framework proposal was submitted in March 1989 by Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Hungary on the forum of confidence-building measures, but of course it was written in Moscow and agreed among the full group of allies), the West remained cautious in its expectations.
During the negotiations on confidence-building measures (CSBM), we decided, among the Polish delegation in Vienna, to accelerate the process of breaking the barriers. Then, in the spring of 1989, I developed a Polish proposal for the exchange of military information. It deviated from the assumptions of the traditional position of the Warsaw Pact, among others in terms of the degree of detail of this information. Throughout the 1980s, the Warsaw Pact held the position that information could only be broken down to the division level. Even at the Stockholm conference, where there was a groundbreaking consent of the Warsaw Pact to conduct inspections, on the issue of the so-called disaggregation of information, the USSR persisted in the stubbornness that it was not ready to go down below the level of the division. In my draft, I proposed to go down to the regiment level. Because I knew from the work within the Warsaw Pact Disarmament Commission that this level of disaggregation of information the USSR was ready to accept in the context of the reduction of conventional weapons. Submitting such a concept (as the West wanted) to negotiations on confidence-building measures not only at the very start would then remove the biggest problem in the context of confidence-building measures, but would also give credibility to our constructive position at the CFE negotiations.
The head of our delegation, Ambassador Włodzimierz Konarski, had full conviction as to the considerable positive implications, also for the image of Poland, of making such a proposal. Despite his undisguised concerns about how the Soviets might react to such rushing ahead, he took me with him and went with the project to the USSR ambassador, Oleg Grinevskyi. Interestingly, Grinevskyi was not accompanied in our consultations by the chief military adviser, General Viktor Tatarnikov, but by Gennady Yevstafiev (commonly indicated by negotiators as a KGB resident). They listened, but promised nothing. After a few days, however, they passed on to us the positive reaction of Moscow (with changes, admittedly, but not on fundamental issues). Konarski could not believe it. And for me it was a clear signal that the USSR (or at least the political decision-makers in Moscow) wanted success in the negotiations in Vienna. We, as Poland, submitted at the so-called Working group A of the CSBM negotiation a document with this new approach and draft stipulations. Negotiations on confidence-building measures went then in full swing.
Distrust had to be broken at the earliest, of course, among the military establishments. Despite Gorbachev’s several years of perestroika, the resistance among the generals of the Warsaw Pact to a adopt a new look at the West was inertly prohibitive. A convenient occasion for its dismantling was a seminar on military doctrines. The need for a dialogue on doctrines was already mentioned in the Jaruzelski Plan of 1988. When the Americans made a similar suggestion in Vienna, we immediately took action. I prepared (with the general contribution of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Polish Institute of International Affairs) a Polish proposal on the holding of a CSCE seminar in Vienna as part of negotiations on confidence-building measures. We submitted it at the beginning of June 1989. And at the end of June, at the joint initiative of the foreign ministers: Hans-Dietrich Genscher of Germany and Tadeusz Olechowski of Poland, a symposium was held, which was a kind of test of the usefulness of such an idea. The test was successful. The agenda of the CSCE seminar was efficiently agreed and in January 1990 dozens of generals from NATO and the Warsaw Treaty (as well as neutral states) arrived in Vienna. For the first time in their lives, they met face to face with the military commanders they used to be about to fight. They knew their personal characteristics, they knew a lot about them, but they could never see and talk to them live, even through an interpreter. For three weeks the generals discussed the doctrines. They changed depending on the subject. They came and went. The deliberations themselves were numb-formal. What was happening outside the walls of the Hofburg was much more important. Daily range of lunches and cocktails, heurigers and abendbrots. There was undoubtedly something of the atmosphere of the Congress of Vienna of 1815 in it, although no decisions were made at the time. For permanent delegates of states residing in Vienna, the provision of continuous care and logistical assistance of the guests’ stay became quite a challenge. But the success, although immeasurable, because it was atmospheric, exceeded expectations. However, while I was working on the project for the next seminar, I heard one big groan from my NATO colleagues: “No three weeks! Maximum three days! ”. I didn’t really agree with it, but what I could do. The breakthrough, however, was done.
Many of the then officers of the Warsaw Pact countries later brought their armies into NATO. Without any psychological blockages. Unfortunately, the next generations of Russian generals did not get rid of the blockades. Until today. Russia (Putin’s) cannot live without the enemy. And without war.
