The debates around the Prague Appeal FOR SOME TIME the question of the division of Europe has become increasingly important in the internal debates of the peace movement. It is principally around this theme that the dialogue between the peace groups in the East and the West has begun. The place accorded to this question at the last four conventions of the European Nuclear Disarmament campaign (END) attests to the sensitivity to it in the ranks of the movement. After the international meeting in Perugia, Italy, in 1984, a Network for an East-West Dialogue was set up at the initiation of Dieter Esche, the German Greens' deputy to the European Parliament. This Network organized an initial forum on the theme "Europe and peace, 40 years after Yalta," in West Berlin, in February 1985, and is preparing a second one for this coming April in Milan to be called "The Helsinki Accords: a mirage or a hope for Europe?" The following aricle outlines the debate
PEACE MOVEMENT the manner of approaching the question of peace, the immediate stakes are not the same in the West and in the East. (2) In the former, the movements have stressed above all the fight against missile deploy. ment. They have centered their demonstrations around this question and have demanded measures leading to unilateral disarmament. In the latter countries, the peace activists have posed first of all, and sometimes exclusively, the problem of democratic rights of expression and of organization, without which all discussion and proposals for action for peace sound like pure abstractions.
Charter 77 [Czech human rights group] has played a not insignificant role in this debate, even though it is not defined as a peace organization. Although Czechoslovakia has no peace movement comparable to that in East Germany, the signers of the . Charter have on several coccasions addressed open letters to the antiwar movement in the West. By their having taken such a position, no matter what the disagreements they may have had in this regard, the Charter's authors have given impetus to the debate among peace activists of other countries in Easter Europe. Their address to the END convention in Amsterdam in July 1985 (called the Prague Appeal and centering on the question of the Helsinki Accords) elicited responses by the dozens, as many from the East as from the West. These contributions revealed more than just slight differences with the point of view expressed by the authors of the Appeal as to the true meaning and implication of the Helsinki Accords.
The authors of the appeal reproach the antiwar movement for not having made more of a document that they see as representing a peace pledge on the part of the signatory states. However, many people in the debate, skeptical of the peaceful intentions of the present governments, did not hide their doubts about the worth of international treaties that, by simply not being applied, can become worthless scraps of paper. That is one of the reasons given by the Polish KOS [Committee of Social Resistance] - a clandestine organization linked to Solidarnose - for refusing to sign the Prague Appeal. Most people rebelled at the idea that the status quo should just be accepted since that runs completely counter to the perspective of dissolution of the military blocs.
On the situation in the Netherlands see the article by Wineke 't Hart in 'international Viewpoint, : No. 78, June 17, 1985. On Great Britain and the spanish State see 'IV" No. 79, July 1, 1985.
2. See 'IV" No. 79, July 1, 1985.
11 that has ensued on this issue. JACQUELINE ALLIO
The problem of the division of Europe has been highlighted since the Western peace movement, in spite of the breadth of its mobilizations, began to suffer successive reverses in a series of countries with the deployment of US missiles. These defeats have entailed more profound questioning of the strategy put forward up until now. The inability to make the governments of the NATO countries retreat from the demented arms race has shown what weight the policy of the status quo, established by the Yalta agreements in 1945 and ratified by the Helsinki Accords 30 years later, bears in the maintenance of the respective hegemonies of American imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy on the two parts of Europe. The massive mobilizations last autumn in Great Britain, the Netherlands and the Spanish state demonstrate that the peace movements in these countries have not been defused but that they have recoiled is undeniable. (1) Moreover, the question of alliances - with the organized workers' movement or with independent peace groups in the East - is being posed all the more sharply in face of the need to conquer the enemy and create a new relationship of forces on the national and international scale. The ability of the movement to set forth perspectives for action while taking into account
International Viewpoint 24 March 1986 their combined political problems has also been an important advance. A difficult dialogue
Dialogue with the independent groups of Eastern Europe has not always been easy and a number of obstacles and misunderstandings have had to be overcome. First of all there are difficulties in communicating directly because of the risk of repression which independent peace activists in the East run by holding meetings in their own countries and in the light of the obstinate refusal of the authorities to grant them visas necessary. to attend international forums held in the West. Also, the projection of a favorable image of the Western peace movements put forward by the bureaucracy in most of the Eastern European countries is sure to provoke an understandable mistrust.
There is also the problem that certain organizations in the West, anxious to maintain a good relationship with the official committees in the East even to the point of sacrificing their relationship with independent activists who have suffered repression, are seen as traitors. Even aside from the basic differences in
PEACE MOVEMENT
On the question of democratic freedoms, the Prague Appeal is sufficiently ambiguous to give rise to quite contradictory commentaries.
Those, particularly in the East, who entertain illusions about "Western democracy" and in whose eyes the United States is all-virtuous, reproach the authors of the Appeal for not acknowledging that the only military aggressor is the Soviet Union. (In the following dossier see the text of Politikus with Peter Uhl's sharp response.) Others, like the activists of the East-West initiative of West Berlin, or we ourselves, feel the need in their responses to stress the daily violations of democratic rights in the West, best illustrated by the scorn with which the elected governments treat the opinions of the majority of the population, particularly in the realm of military policy.
Nearly all the contributions insist on the total absence of democratic freedoms in the East, a point that is not explicitly confronted in the Appeal. The question of the unification of Europe
Another theme - for us an essential one - on which the text remains silent is that of the social, economic and political transformations without which there can be no question of an independent and democratic Europe. The East German contribution, which we are publishing in the dossier that follows and which is signed by leading individuals in the independent peace movement of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), has the merit of confronting this problem head-on. For the signatories of this text it is a prerequisite and decisive question for the unification of our continent on a peaceful basis. How can we imagine putting an end to the division if we do not attack the roots of the evil? If we do not strike at the logic of an economic system in the West that is the cause of all social and political injustice, of unemployment, of poverty, of the destruction of the environment? And in the East, if we do not attack the maintenance of a totalitarian regime in which a bureaucratic minority, monopolizing the management of the means of production, denies the most elementary needs of the masses in order to preserve its own privileges, goes one better than the imperialist military policy and imposes an absurd economic policy, which is catastrophic for the development of the country and for the standard of living?
It is in this context that the debate over the division of Europe and the historical, political and social context 12
DOCUMENT in which that division occurred assumes such importance. We hope that the forum which will be held in Milan on April 11-13, will push for. ward the debate on the various problems that are raised in the extracts we are publishing and particularly on the question of the division of Germany, to which we have not been able to grant the space that it merits in the dossier that follows.
For our part, we are convinced that the antiwar movement can only exist as a mass social movement if it is articulated around slogans of a simple and immediate nature, comprehensible to everyone. In this sense, the demands for unilateral disarmament addressed to governments remain absolutely current whether they turn on the withdrawal of the deployed nuclear missiles or on any other aspect of a military policy that we are challenging. But to simply say that is not enough to resolve the crisis the movement is undergoing, a crisis both of stategy and leadership. In order to overcome this crisis it will be necessary to define an orientation that takes into account the realities of the economic and social systems on both sides of "the Iron Curtain" and the necessity for their radical transformation in order for the perspective of a united, democratic and peaceful Europe to become a reality. It is because the debate launched by the publication of the Prague Appeal helps to proceed along this road that we have decided to publish important extracts from it. We begin our dossier with the text of the Appeal itself.