Helsinki, diplomacy and the peace movement THE FOLLOWING are major extracts from a document written in response to the Prague Appeal by the West Berlin group of the European Network for East-West Dialogue. This contribution deals with the question of what attitude to take toward the Helsinki Accords, and examines critically the possibilities for, and the limitations of, official action by the governments in both parts of Europe.
In the preamble of your appeal, you call on us in the West to respond to it. The urgency, as you quite rightly see it, of such a demand reveals the fact that dialogue between the independent movements in the West and in the East is not yet something that can be taken for granted. We hope that our public response will prompt others in the peace movement to take part in the discussion. Can the CSCE point a way forward?
The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (SCE) aroused very little interest in the Western peace movement. The reason for this is that it put aside the question of military disarmament. In the meantime, there was the Conference on Disarmament in Stockholm in 1984. But there also they did not deal with real disarmament.
There have only been discussions on arms control, in which the United States and the Soviet Union negotiated virtually on their own. The European allies only got crumbs from the negotiating table. The dominant role of the United States and the Soviet Union is explained by their nuclear supremacy and by the fact that the Europeans regard nuclear weapons as the decisive element for their security. In our peace movement, there is little interest in such negotiations.
You say that the CSCE is a forum of equal partners. That is formally true. But the loyalty of the countries in each European bloc to their respective dominant power is very strong, and would have led to the failure of the subsequent conferences, if the neutral countries had not each time rebuilt avenues of dialogue.
The CSCE has been built on the basis of the division between blocs and it is always in danger of being used to counter the phenomena of the breakup of the bloes, or as a guarantor of the division of Europe between US and Soviet spheres of influence, as well as of the immutability of social relations.
The CSCE process was able to have a dynamism in the 1970s because of a partial convergence between the interests of the Soviet Union and the United States. These powers were also pushed along this path by their European allies. In the present period, the proposal for turning to the leaders and denouncing their failure to respect their commitments flowing from the CSCE seems, quite simply, too general.
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Bloc loyalty will not allow any big advances. It seems to us, however, that it would be sensible for the peace movement to undertake a constructive dialogue with the neutral countries in order to arrive at a promising way forward for the CSCE process.
In West Germany, the question arises whether the policy of the SPD [Social Democratic Party of Germany ] toward the CSCE might not be a useful prop for the peace movement. In opposition the SPD has come out against some American arms projects and developed a policy to suit European and German interests.
However, the SPD imposes three conditions on the CSCE: the blocs are necessary for the stability of Europe; the internal political stability of the Warsaw Pact governments is necessary; East-West relations can only be influenced politically through official channels.
In the last analysis, this leads to endorsing all the decisions of NATO, to the SPD taking its distance from movements such as Solidarnose and to its excluding all dialogue between the independent peace groups in the East and in the West. This rigid framework leaves us little room for intervening in the discussions that have taken place in the framework of the CSCE.
Your appeal prompted us to re-read the documents of the CSCE. It is astonishing to see what the governments themselves committed themselves to. And despite all the positive promises, such as for example, openings for journalists to work, openings for meetings of professional groups at the time of East-West conferences and so forth, the fact remains that the reality is not in line with the fine words of Helsinki, far from it.
In the third part of the Helsinki Accords, we read "the possibilities for extensive trips ... for professional or personal reasons" must be widened You know as well as we do that you cannot travel freely and that we are often prevented from going to the East.
The states participating in this conference also claimed to want "to promote a freer circulation of periodical and nonperiodical material coming from other participating countries ... Such publications will also be available in reading rooms." Today, as before, political literature is still being excluded, including your document and ours.
It is no coincidence that the examples cited apply to relationships in the East. By comparison with the brutal oppression you face, conditions differ considerably here in the West. But even for us, we have to continually renew the fight over the 16 relationship between citizens and the state. We live under parliamentary democracy, and nonetheless the parliament has come out for the deployment of new missiles on our territory, while two-thirds of the population was against it.
Our governments and NATO have to more and more impose their concept of security by high-handed moves, as is shown by the recent installation of the missiles an hour after the decision in parliament. Another example is the numerous judicial proceedings against the participants in blockades of military installations.
Why have we presented these examples? It is because they should make it clear that the CSCE as an instrument of state diplomacy hardly likely to lead to positive developments in the short term and that what was good for the peoples in the Helsinki Accords will be partially reversed. If we reflect, as we began to do with respect to the CSCE process, we then have to distinguish the different levels of diplomacy, to see the possibilities that exist for the independent groups active in the East and in the West.
More decisive is what the CSCE could mean for our work right now. As far as its demands go, the new peace movement in West Germany is no different than the one in the 1950s. But it is new because it is working in new socio-historic circumstances. Security policy must be wrested from the control of the military and diplomatic apparatuses that have gone out of control by the intervention of the citizens themselves. Such a process of democratization is being accomplished in West Germany, for example in the women's movement or the ecology movement.
In this respect, we see our East-West dialogue as a start in democratizing East-West relations through the development of a "citizens' power," which can exert an influence on the institutional power without replacing it. We must test still more precisely what meaning the CSCE could have in this context. East-West "Citizens' power"
There are certainly possibilities in cultural, youth and scientific exchanges. But the institutional framework must be assessed as accurately as possible.
The second taboo you touch on [after German Unity] is the withdrawal of all foreign troops from the Easter and Western European coun tries. This is inseparable from a new peaceful order in Europe. How could this peaceful order emerge as long as there is no peace treaty with the Germans. The troops of the victorious powers are present without any fixed time limit, until there is such a treaty (cf. Article 3 of the treaty of the stationing of troops from the three Western allies in West Germany and the corresponding arrangement between the Soviet Union and East Germany).
Moreover, the four (!) allies in 1972 reciprocally reconfirmed in the Berlin accord [on relations between the two German states] their right of occupation as conquerors. This limited sovereignty of the two German states and the occupation of Berlin would be incompatible with a peaceful order organized on familiar lines.
We hold this view not only because the present situation does not permit the right of self-determination but also because it serves as the justification for the military pacts, for the presence of Soviet troops and their nuclear weapons in the East European border countries, as well as for the corresponding presence of the Western allies, at least of the Americans.
To this extent, the treaties between West Germany and the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia, like the ones between East Germany and the Soviet Union, are ersatz peace treaties.
We think that the two taboos you touch on [German unity and withdrawal of foreign troops] have to be broken simultaneously in order to overcome the partition of Europe. As a first step on the military level, certain measures could be taken, in particular troop reduction, monitoring of chemical and bacteriological weapons and nuclear-free zones.
On the economic level, our objective could be attained through intensive East-West trade involving a simultaneous exchange of technologies. Because of our daily experience with an ultrabureaucratized superstructure such as the EEC, we are less inclined than you to see a rapprochement between the EEC and COMECON as a propitious sign for a peaceful evolution in Europe.
We see the enlargement of the EEC as too closely linked to extending NATO for us to be able to see in it a positive sign for the future of Europe. Does it not rather represent an enlargement of the West European economic and military bloc? Would it not have been more significant for the future of a united Europe if Spain and Portugal had joined the group of neutral European countries instead of increasing one of the bloes?
The EEC has helped little to eliminate poverty on the peripheral areas of Western and Southern Europe. No one talks any longer about the International Viewpoint 24 March 1986
DOCUMENT
PEACE MOVEMENT hope for a democratic evolution in this economic bloc. In the shadow of the Brussels EEC bureaucracy and the decisions of the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament has hardly any significance. We also are apprehensive about the new developments in the framework of the West European Union (WEU). (1) Building a common arms industry does not favor the political emancipation of West Europe but corresponds rather to the desire to make it into a third big military power.