Thirty-five years ago, on August 1, 1975, nearly all the Old World countries, plus the United States and Canada, managed to reach political consensus on all key issues and signed the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Helsinki, the capital of Finland.
The conference involved every European country except Albania, which had opted for self-isolation since the early 1960s, but all the other states, both "capitalist" and Communist, preferred compromise to confrontation.
It was the Soviet-led Communist bloc that had initiated the Helsinki conference as part of the policy of detente, or the "relaxation of international tensions," to quote the Soviet press. In fact, detente was one of the most important trends to emerge during the Brezhnev era, now primarily referred to as an "epoch of stagnation." However, Soviet foreign policy of that time was more dynamic than stagnant.
The Helsinki Final Act did not end the Cold War. In 1978-1979, Nicaragua was torn apart by a civil war indirectly involving both the Soviet Union and the United States. That same year, the U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan. And the United States invaded Grenada, a Caribbean island, in 1983. However, the Helsinki conference did manage to stabilize the situation in Europe and preserve the regional status quo.
Each conference participant managed to gain at least something. Notably, the Helsinki Final Act formalized the inviolability of postwar European borders. This benefited the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries to a greater extent than the West. Moreover, the document formalized Germany's division into West and East, both of which signed the act separately, as well as what at the time seemed to be the permanent inclusion of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia into the U.S.S.R.
In response, the Western European partners hoped that the document's principle of non-interference in domestic affairs of other states, including not using military force for such purposes, would be implemented, and that this would prevent a repetition of the events of 1956 and 1968, when Moscow sent military contingents to Hungary and Czechoslovakia in order to quell anti-Communist dissent.
RIA Novosti
