The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War by Morgan Michael Cotey (review)

Abstract

SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 588 Morgan, Michael Cotey. The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War. America in the World. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2018. xi + 396 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.00: £27.00. The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War is a truly international history of the process that led to the signing oftheHelsinkiAccordsin1975anditsaftermath.TheHelsinkiAccordswerethe outcome of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and in the book, Michael Cotey Morgan analyses the process which was initiated by Leonid Brezhnev, negotiated for almost three years by hundreds of diplomats, and finally signed by thirty-five European, Soviet, and North American heads of state. The Final Act debunks the many myths and simplifications about the Helsinki agreement that have surrounded it ever since 1975 and is an extremely valuable contribution to the current reevaluation of the late Cold War. The book is organized chronologically around three main questions: ‘Why was the CSCE created in the first place? Why did the Final Act take the shape that it did? And how did it influence the Cold War?’ (p. 4). Morgan argues that while the CSCE’s significance was underestimated at the time, the Final Act proved very consequential for Europe and its place in the international system, and the 1975 Helsinki Summit should therefore claim its prominence as the successor to the 1815 Congress of Vienna or the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. This emphasis on the importance of the CSCE and the resulting European order also elevates the West and the role some key Western actors, such as Willy Brandt, Georges Pompidou and Richard Nixon, played in the process, but Leonid Brezhnev is also in the midst of the narrative, which takes into account the context of the Cold War. One of the most astonishing things about the Helsinki process is how many diverse actors were involved. The dominant actors were the United States and the Soviet Union, but the dividing Iron Curtain did not govern the process. Morgan does a great job of showing how the hundreds of diplomats involved in negotiating the process could advance and retreat at different points in time; indeed it comes out very clearly how diplomatic the process actually was. The preparatory talks took longer than anyone had suspected, with delegations arriving in Geneva in September 1973 and completing their work in July 1975. Chapter four, ‘The Meaning of Security’, discusses the workload, bureaucracy, tactics and personalities, and brings out ‘the mixture of tedium and exhilaration that characterized life at the CSCE’ (p. 114). The Western media was not very interested in the preparatory talks but, as instructed from above, the Soviet and Eastern bloc media discussed the overall process in a positive light, criticizing the ‘Western governments for demanding too much’ (p. 112). The Soviet delegation in Geneva was by far the largest, with Anatolii REVIEWS 589 Kovalev leading a team of experienced negotiators who proved themselves to be invested in improved East-West relations. The major negotiators from the Western side often sent junior diplomats, mainly to signal that they ‘would be prepared to walk away if the Soviets refused to compromise’ (p. 113). By focusing on all the different actors involved, Morgan debunks the myth of the Helsinki Process being solely a bilateral, superpower project. Even if the process and the outcome of the Helsinki agreement greatly influenced the way the Cold War developed, giving the West an upper hand on pretty much ‘every significant point’ (p. 5), no actor was too small to have a voice in the process; no political culture was by default out of the loop. Of course there were dominant actors, but the detailed descriptions of the actual negotiations make it clear that this was a diplomatic project. Morgan also takes into account the parallel structure of established Cold War organizations, such as NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It was not obvious to especially the Western leaders to leave disarmament off the agenda for Helsinki, but in the end, Nixon and Brezhnev reached a compromise which the other leaders accepted even if some felt like it had been a...