The final act: the Helsinki Accords and the transformation of the Cold War

Abstract

‘Of course I was scared. It would have been insane not to be scared … One of the problems in the world today is that not enough people are sufficiently frightened by the dangers of nuclear war’ (p. 22). So spoke Nikita Khrushchev after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Although it is impossible to draw a direct link between that event and the signing of the Helsinki Final Act (HFA) in 1975, this was the time, as Michael Cotey Morgan puts it in this deeply researched and beautifully written book, when ‘the superpowers realized that their fates were now intertwined’ (p. 22). There are many reasons why the HFA matters, and Cotey Morgan does justice to them all: a watershed of the Cold War; the first pan-European summit since the Napoleonic Wars; a fight over constitutive principles of international order and parallel conceptions of legitimacy; and an event that accelerated the decline of the USSR. But the most intriguing reason lies with the book's central argument that, far from representing a balanced trade-off, the HFA signalled the victory of the western alliance. ‘On every significant point, the West prevailed’ (p. 5), Cotey Morgan writes. A frustrated KGB officer agreed, dismissing the HFA as ‘a monumental act of weakness’ by the USSR (p. 5). Given the nebulosity surrounding the actual text, this is noteworthy. As a diplomat put it at the time: ‘You are not supposed to understand it. Neither do we, and, what's more, we meant it that way’ (p. 1). Although its silences turned out to be as significant as its clearest passages, the HFA was no suicide note. On the contrary, it is a deeply thought through and significant document which was meant to benefit both sides—‘a declaration of interdependence’ (p. 145).