The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered: International Relations in Eastern Europe, 1955–69 by Crump Laurien (review)

Abstract

SEER, 98, 2, APRIL 2020 386 anti-American discourse. Several publications are omitted, such as Andrei Fateev’s study of Soviet anti-American campaigns after the war (Obraz vraga v sovetskoi propagande, 1945–1954 gg., Moscow, 1999), and perhaps less important but nevertheless relevant, Margaret Peacock’s Innocent Weapons, on Soviet childhood policies during the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2014), or Peter Carlson’s account of Khrushchev’s 1959 trip to the States, K Blows Top (New York, 2009). I also regret that the author does not address the concept of ‘anti-Americanism’ by incorporating more recent works, such as Max Paul Friedman’s Rethinking anti-Americanism (Cambridge, 2012). A more ambitious alternative to Magnúsdóttir’s plan would have been to use the myth of the ‘meeting on the Elbe’ (mentioned several times in the book) as a template. Université de Lille Andrei Kozovoi Crump, Laurien. The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered: International Relations in Eastern Europe, 1955–69. Routledge Studies in the History of Russia and Eastern Europe, 22. Routledge, London and New York, 2015. xxv + 322 pp. Map. Illustrations. Chronology. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £100.00: $148.00. The best way to describe Laurien Crump’s new study of the Warsaw Pact is that it pursues a direct, straightforward line of argument, without even a hint of deviation or hesitation. Whereas the late 1940s were characterized by Stalin’s ruthless quest for domination over Eastern Europe, witnessed above all (but not only) by the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform in June 1948 and the subsequent witch-hunts against ‘Titoists’ in all East European Communist parties, the period after 1955, and especially after 1960, saw a ‘paradigm shift’ (p. 3) in the nature of international relations within the Soviet bloc. Through their rivalries with each other, their different (and sometimes maverick) approaches to the big issues of the day — the German question, the Sino-Soviet split, the Vietnam war, nuclear non-proliferation, the Prague Spring — and their willingness to assert their own national agendas when it came to borders, external security and relations with the West — the six non-Soviet members of the Warsaw Pact were able to emerge as respected junior partners in that alliance, rather than as mere recipients of top-down orders from Moscow. This ‘multilaterization’ of the Warsaw Pact reached a climax in March 1969, when the Budapest meeting of its Political Consultative Committee (PCC) managed to agree a common agenda for détente with the West. The PCC’s joint international plea for a European security conference caught the attention of NATO precisely because it bore the imprint of a mature, professional coalition REVIEWS 387 of interests seeking to overcome the more negative aspects of the East-West conflict in what was rapidly becoming a less bipolar, less imperial and thus more uncertain, post-1960 world order. Romania’s inclusion in the appeal was especially important, as the latter had not taken part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia — allowing all concerned to divorce the Warsaw Pact itself from this latter episode. Aside from Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, the Communist leaders who feature most prominently in Crump’s account are the East German Walter Ulbricht, the Poles Władysław Gomułka and Adam Rapacki, the Romanians Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceauşescu and, albeit in 1968–69 only, the Hungarian János Kádár. All of them, she shows, were capable of pressing the particular ‘national’ interests of their own states, whether in Warsaw Pact meetings, bilateral discussions with the Kremlin or (in Romania’s case) through independent dialogue with Bonn, Washington, Hanoi and Beijing. Crump’s analysis of the parallels between Ceauşescu and NATO’s foremost rebel in the 1960s, Charles de Gaulle, is especially impressive, not least as she convincingly manages to reconcile her argument that Romania was able to uphold its new-found political independence from 1964–65 with the fact that it actually stayed within the Warsaw Pact’s military structures. However, her use of the terms ‘dissent’ and ‘emancipation’ to describe state-centred means and ends is unduly restrictive and — barring a few references to Ceauşescu’s temporary status as a national...