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Helsinki Accords

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Helsinki Accords
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International agreement signed in 1975, designed to reduce tension between the Soviet and Western blocs. It was an attempt to secure common acceptance of the post-World War II status quo in Europe, including the division of Germany. The accords, signed by all the countries of Europe (except Albania) as well as the U.S. and Canada, were nonbinding and lacked treaty status. They were sought by the Soviet Union to gain implicit recognition of its postwar hegemony in eastern Europe. In return, the U.S. and its western European allies pressed for respect for human rights and cooperation in economic, scientific, and other humanitarian areas. Follow-up meetings in Belgrade (1977 – 78), Madrid (1980 – 83), and Ottawa (1985) were marked by strong criticism of Soviet human-rights abuses and by Soviet counteraccusations. A 1990 conference in Paris formally ended the Cold War and recognized German reunification.

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US History Encyclopedia: Helsinki Accords
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As part of the emerging East-West détente, in November 1972 talks opened in Helsinki to prepare for a Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Between 3 July 1973 and 1 August 1975, representatives of thirty-five states, including the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, the Vatican, and all of the European states except Albania, discussed the future of Europe.

On 1 August 1975 leaders from the participating nations signed the Helsinki Final Act. It included three "baskets." Basket I contained a "Declaration on Principles Guiding Relations between Participating States." It legitimated the present borders within Europe, outlawed the use of force, prohibited intervention in the internal affairs of any state, and required respect for human rights and the self-determination of peoples.

Basket II addressed "Cooperation in the Field of Economics, of Science and Technology, and of the Environment." It sought to encourage increased East-West trade, scientific collaboration, and industrial management, and recognized the interdependence of societies across Europe.

Basket III dealt with "Cooperation in Humanitarian and other Fields." It provided a basis for increased person-to-person contacts between Eastern and Western Europe, encouraged the freer movement of peoples and ideas, and promised to facilitate the reunification of families long separated by Cold War conflict.

Critics were quick to point out that these agreements lacked enforcement mechanisms. Moreover, they gave the communist governments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe legitimate standing as equals with the democratic regimes in the West. The Helsinki Accords, however, also legitimized human rights in the most repressive parts of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Dissidents, like the founders of "Charter 77" in Czechoslovakia, used the language of the Helsinki Accords to justify their criticisms of communist governments. Many of the dissidents inspired by the Helsinki Accords led the anticommunist revolutions of 1989. In addition, many of the "new thinkers" in the Soviet Union who attained power after 1985—including Mikhail Gorbachev—explained that they hoped to build a more humane European civilization, as outlined in the Helsinki Accords. Seeking stability, Soviet leaders signed the Final Act in 1975; in so doing they unleashed domestic forces they could not control.

Bibliography

English, Robert. Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Garthoff, Raymond L. Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1994.

Maresca, John J. To Helsinki: The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1973–1975. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1985.

Russian History Encyclopedia: Helsinki Accords
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Signed at the Finnish capital of Helsinki on August 1, 1975, the Helsinki Accords were accepted by thirty-five participating nations at the first Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The conference included all of the nations of Europe (excluding Albania), as well as the Soviet Union, the United States, and Canada. The Helsinki Accords had two noteworthy features. First, Article I formally recognized the post-World War II borders of Europe, which included an unwritten acknowledgement of the Soviet Union's control over the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which the USSR had annexed in 1940. Second, Article VII stated that "the participating States recognize the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms." This passage, in theory, held the Soviet Union responsible for the maintenance and protection of basic human rights within its borders.

Although the Soviet government was never serious about conforming to the human rights parameters defined by the Helsinki Accords, the national leadership under General Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev believed that its signing of the document would improve the Soviet Union's diplomatic position with the United States and other Western countries. Specifically, the state wished to foster the perception that it was as an equal player in the policy of détente, in which both superpowers sought to relax Cold War tensions. What the regime did not anticipate, however, was that those outside the Soviet Union, as well as many of the USSR's own citizens, would take the Accords seriously. Soon after the Soviet delegation returned from Finland, a number of human rights watchdog groups emerged to monitor the USSR's compliance with the Accords.

Among those organizations that arose after the signing of the accords was Helsinki Watch, founded in 1978 by a collection of Soviet dissidents including the notable physicist Andrei D. Sakharov and other human rights activists living outside the USSR. Helsinki Watch quickly became the best-known and most outspoken critic of Soviet human rights policies. This collection of activists and intellectuals later merged with similar organizations to form an association known as Human Rights Watch. Many members of both Helsinki Watch and Human Rights Watch who were Soviet citizens endured state persecution, including trial, arrest, and internal exile (e.g., Sakharov was exiled to the city of Gorky) from 1977 to 1980. Until the emergence of Mikhail S. Gorbachev as Soviet general secretary in 1985, independent monitoring of Soviet compliance with the accords from within the USSR remained difficult, although the dissidents of Helsinki Watch were never completely silenced. After the introduction of openness (glasnost) and restructuring (perestroika) under Gorbachev in the late 1980s, however, these individuals' efforts received much acclaim at home and abroad. The efforts of Helsinki Watch and its successor organizations served notice in an era of strict social control that the Soviet Union was accountable for its human rights obligations as specified by the Helsinki Accords.

Bibliography

Civnet: A Website of Civitas International. (2003). "The Helsinki Accords." <http://www.civnet.org/resources/document/historic/helsinki.htm

Luxmoore, Jonathan. (1990). Helsinki Agreement: Dialogue or Discussion? New York: State Mutual Book and Periodical Service.

Nogee, Joseph and Donaldson, Robert, eds. (1992) Soviet Foreign Policy since World War II, 4th ed. New York: Macmillan.

Sakharov, Andrei D. (1978). Alarm and Hope. New York: Knopf.

—CHRISTOPHER J. WARD

Wikipedia: Helsinki Accords
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For the set of principles on human experimentation, see Declaration of Helsinki.
Erich Honecker (DDR, left) and Helmut Schmidt (FRG) in Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe held in Helsinki 1975.

The Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, known as the Helsinki Final Act, Helsinki Accords or Helsinki Declaration, was the final act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe held in Helsinki, Finland during July and August of 1975. Thirty-five states signed the declaration (the USA, Canada, and all European states except Albania and Andorra), which was an attempt to improve the relations between the Communist bloc and the West.

Contents

Articles of confederation

The Act's "Declaration on Principles Guiding Relations between Participating States" (also known as "The Decalogue") enumerated the following 10 points:

Reception and impact

The document was seen both as a significant step toward reducing Cold War tensions and as a major diplomatic boost for the Soviet Union at the time, due to its clauses on the inviolability of national borders and respect for territorial integrity, which were seen to consolidate the USSR's territorial gains in Eastern Europe following the Second World War. Considering objections from the Canada, Spain, Ireland and other states, the Final Act simply stated that borders in Europe should be stable, but those borders could be changed by peaceful means.[1]:65 U.S. President Gerald Ford also reaffirmed that US non-recognition policy of the Baltic states' (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) forced incorporation into the Soviet Union had not changed. Leaders of other NATO member states made similar statements.[1]:65

However, the civil rights portion of the agreement provided the basis for the work of the Moscow Helsinki Group, an independent non-governmental organization created to monitor compliance to the Helsinki Accords (which evolved into several regional committees, eventually forming the International Helsinki Federation and Human Rights Watch). While these provisions applied to all signatories, the focus of attention was on their application to the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, including Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. Soviet propaganda presented the Final Act as a great triumph for Soviet diplomacy and for Brezhnev personally.[1]:65

According to the Cold War scholar John Lewis Gaddis in his book "The Cold War: A New History" (2005), "Leonid Brezhnev had looked forward, Anatoly Dobrynin recalls, to the 'publicity he would gain... when the Soviet public learned of the final settlement of the postwar boundaries for which they had sacrificed so much'... '[Instead, the Helsinki Accords] gradually became a manifesto of the dissident and liberal movement'... What this meant was that the people who lived under these systems — at least the more courageous — could claim official permission to say what they thought."

Chancellor of Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) Helmut Schmidt, President of German Democratic Republic (East Germany) Erich Honecker, U.S. president Gerald Ford and Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky

The Helsinki Accords served as the groundwork for the later Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), established under the Paris Charter.

Signatory states

In French alphabetical order

Heads of states, heads of governments and leaders of ruling parties

Absent

References

  1. ^ a b c Hiden, John; Vahur Made, David J. Smith (2008). The Baltic question during the Cold War. Routledge. p. 209. ISBN 0415371007. 

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