Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 1 – Thirty-nine
years ago today, the leaders of 35 governments signed the Helsinki Final Act of
the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, an event that Soviet
officials viewed as a triumph but one that in fact put in motion forces that
triggered the end of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and
then the USSR itself.
In a commentary on this anniversary,
Aleksandr Golovkov says that agreement not only had that effect but also
transformed the world into one in which the invocation of human rights is
rapidly becoming a threat for the Russian Federation’s sovereignty, all of
Moscow’s nuclear weapons not withstanding (chaskor.ru/article/fatalnyj_triumf_sovetskoj_diplomatii_18866).
The Helsinki Accords were the
culmination of détente, he argues, and included ten points, the most important
of which were a commitment to recognize the existing borders and systems of
Europe as permanent -- Golovkov doesn’t say but the US took an exception on the
case of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries – and to observe human
rights.
The Soviet side saw the former as a
triumph that would end any Western campaign to “roll back” communism and did
not view the latter as a threat that could not be easily parried. But in fact,
the Helsinki Accord’s call for respecting human rights and basic freedoms was
to prove the death knell for the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union.
Soviet-style socialism which was “ideally adapted for solving the tasks of
national survival in the extreme conditions of the pre-war, war and post-war
period,” he argues, “could not compete with democratic capitalism during the
period of the comparatively peaceful co-existence of the two systems.”
The Helsinki Final Act triggered or at least emboldened
human rights activists in the socialist block, Golovkov says, and “dissident
activity” spread “from Berlin to Magadan,” involving an entire country, Poland,
only five years after the Accords were signed in the Finnish capital.
Indeed,
he continues, the final act made the Polish rising possible because by
recognizing the borders of Poland as permanent, Helsinki eliminated any need
for Poles to rely on the Soviet Union to maintain the borders of Poland that
Stalin had imposed on them after World War II. Poles could then protest without
fear of losing their country.
The
events in Poland threatened to spread into a series of “bloody revolutions and
counter-revolutions” across Eastern Europe and to draw in Soviet forces. But happily
for the East Europeans, the Soviet system after 1985 changed fundamentally, and
the communist leaders in Eastern Europe quickly surrendered their positions.
Ultimately, Moscow did the same.
According
to the Moscow commentator, the West today “shamelessly” invokes what he says
are the “hopelessly outdated” human rights provisions of Helsinki to weaken its
geopolitical opponents, as when the International Court in the Hague decalred
that “the self-proclaimed independence of Kosovo does not contradict the norms
of international law.”
Further, Golovkov insists, “there is no place
for the Helsinki equality of sovereignty in the community of developed and
developing countries subordinate to the United States.” State sovereignty is
recognized only according to the place of any particular state in “a hierarchy
defined by its own resources of influence and closeness to the Washington
super-sovereign.”
There
can be “not talk about the equality of nations. Those who are stronger, above
all the former allies of the US feel themselves confident. The weak, including
all the onetime parts of the socialist camp in pursuit of comfort and security
use every means possible” to win support from the US.
“Interference
in the internal affairs of those who do not have the strength to oppose it is
becoming common practice,” he says, and the most frequently invoked basis for
that interference is the need to protect human rights, the very principle that
was declared by the Helsinki Final Act in 1975.
The
consequences of this development, Golovkov says, are already in evidence in the
Balkans and Eastern Europe more generally, but many Russians assume that it won’t
have an impact on their country because of “its rockets, oil dollars and the
great power status inherited from the USSR and the Russian Empire.”
“But everything
in the world is interconnected,” the commentator says in what must be the most
disturbing recollection on this anniversary of the impact of the Helsinki final
Act . And if the bell is tolling for someone in Europe, he concludes, it will
soon be tolling for Russia as well.
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