NATO – A Bridge Across Time - Newsdesk Media

Opposite: Pope John Paul II, Poland, June 1979
Below: Helsinki, Finland, August 1, 1975, where 35 Heads of State signed the European Treaty for Security.
From left: Erich Honecker, East Germany’s First Secretary; U.S. President Ford; Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky;
Belgian Prime Minister Leo Tindemans; Bulgarian Prime Minister Todor Zhivkov; Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau
softening had its limitations. Revolts were
bloodily suppressed, like in Berlin in 1953
or Budapest in 1956. In 1968, attempts
to give the governing Communist Party
in Czechoslovakia a human face were
quashed by military force.
All these revolts were accompanied by
silence from the West. The Atlantic Pact
protected Western Europe, but we the
citizens of the worse part of Europe were
left to ourselves, thereby extinguishing
all hope. The feeling of being abandoned
by the West was an enduring syndrome
and forced us to adapt to the new reality.
Rebellion was a crazy idea and Soviet
policy seemed triumphant. The Helsinki
conference (1975) gave the final seal on
the decisions made at Yalta, where it was
decided that the countries of Central
Europe would remain in the Soviet
sphere of influence but would be able to
decide their own internal policy. Yalta
gave the promise, therefore, of being a
Finlandization rather than a Sovietization
of Central Europe.
Helsinki was a return to the language
of Yalta and a so-called “third basket”
was added regarding civil liberties, the
adoption of which Soviet diplomacy
regarded as trying to fit a square peg in a
round hole. Luckily, the elite that formed
the opposition in the Soviet Union,
Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary
were of a different opinion. The ideology
of human rights became the core of the
emerging democratic opposition.
This was helped by the Eastern policy
(Ostpolitik) of Willy Brandt, the leader
of the German Social Democratic Party.
By improving relations with Moscow and
Warsaw, Brandt destroyed the radical
anti-German rhetoric, which was the only
effective way to integrate the communist
regime with an anti-communist society.
It had been easy to convince Poles,
who well remembered Nazi brutality
in Poland, that Germany remained a
threat – a bomb that could explode at
any moment. Anyone who criticized
the communist government could be
accused of supporting German revisionist
policy. The fact that successive German
governments refused to recognize the
Polish border on the rivers Oder and
Neisse made it all the easier.
Brandt’s policy, and also the decisions
made at the Helsinki Conference,
coincided paradoxically with a new wave
of democratic movements in Central and
Eastern Europe. Voices started to come
out of Russia from great scholars such as
Sakharov and writers like Solzhenitsyn,
while Ukraine and Lithuania started to
talk of national freedoms. In Poland,
the Workers’ Defence Committee was
established, and in Czechoslovakia the
Charter 77 movement started. President
Carter announced that human rights
were central to his policy, and in 1978 a
cardinal from Kraków, Karol Wojtyła,
became Pope. The world had changed.
The policy of détente had two faces; the
first face was Nixon’s Realpolitik, namely
treating the world as it was within the
borders that existed. The second face
of the policy was détente with a human
face. This was the policy of Carter and
Zbigniew Brzezinski.
In August 1980, a wave of strikes
spread through Poland, which in
consequence led to the establishment of
the Solidarity trade union by people from
the democratic opposition, which was
in actual fact a national confederation
for Polish freedom. The communist
dictatorship, which liked to call itself the
dictatorship of the proletariat, lost its
legitimacy through a proletarian revolt.
It was the greatest moral and political
defeat that the communist dictatorship
had suffered. The communist authorities
answered this defeat with the only
weapon they had – military force.
U.S. President Ronald Reagan said at
the time the famous words “empire of
evil.” For us Poles, those words were much
more pleasing than they were for many
Americans. For us, the military crackdown
on Solidarity highlighted the Manichaean
26 The Atlantic Council