journal of european integration history revue d'histoire de l ...

94
Vladislav Zubok
in European life since the Treaty of Rome. Even earlier a group of relatively young
communist theoreticians had written and discussed the issues of European integration
in the journal “The Issues of Peace and Socialism” and had promoted them in
their various official capacities in the central party and state hierarchy. One of
them, Georgi Shakhnazarov, an expert of the International Department of the Central
Committee CPSU, became an eminent political scientist-advocate of the new
world order of interdependence. Nevertheless, the deep conservatism and antiintellectualism
of the Brezhnev leadership kept it immune to academic debates and
innovative writings. Only after Brezhnev’s death, in the brief interregnum of Yuri
Andropov, those new voices began to be heard in the political spheres.
The Gorbachev leadership that replaced the septuagenarian generation in the
Kremlin, was oriented to fundamental domestic reforms of the USSR and viewed
the Cold War tensions and arms race as a costly burden, a legacy of the past. Soon
Gorbachev and his new foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze launched a campaign
to improve relations with the West as a preparatory step to domestic transformation.
The new leadership discarded the “two camps” language of Stalin and
Andrei Zhdanov, as well as the “Brezhnev doctrine.” Since late 1986 Gorbachev
and his liberal-minded advisers on foreign policy had begun to look at Western
Europe as a possible locomotive of another “détente”, particularly because, in the
view of the Kremlin, Western European countries had already played this role at
the end of the 1960’s. In late March 1987, after having met with Margaret Thatcher,
Gorbachev said in his inner circle that “we have a poor knowledge of Europe” and
stressed that the USSR “needed” Europe both for domestic perestroika and foreign
policy.
“We cannot live without such a partner as Western Europe (...). The Helsinki process
gives us new opportunities, and we should reach a new stage [of it]. An important
task is to utilize the scientific-technical potential of Western Europe, all the more
since our friends from COMECON have already gotten stuck there (...). One should
see Europe as it is. Take this reality, the integrationist processes. What is there to our
advantage, what is not?” 21
As in many other areas, the new views of the reformist Soviet leadership on
European integration were non-systematic, rather eclectic and improvisational. Initially,
it expected to end the Cold War by dissolving the opposing blocs, the Warsaw
Treaty and NATO, into an all-European structure of the “Europe from Atlantic
to the Urals”, a “Common European Home”, as a result of a convergence between
the Western European and the Eastern bloc. These schemes, taken at their own
value, were more slogans than realistic policies, a curious combination of Soviet
(almost Khrushchevian) historic optimism and newly-liberated political imagination.
However, these schemes reflected a new vision of world interdependence and
unity, as opposed to the Stalinist philosophy of class hatred and polarization. Gorbachev
himself gravitated in his ideological vagaries towards various revisionist
schools of communist creed who represented the “historic compromise” of classes
21. A. Chernyaev, Shest let s Gorbachevim. Po dnevnikovim zapiziam [Six Years with Gorbachev. The
notes from the diary], Moscow 1993, p.140.