The OSCE may look like an anachronism, but its declaration of principles, developed half a century ago, may well serve as a guide for building dialogue in the new era. This, however, requires components that were lost after 1991: a military-political balance, mutual respect (even if based on fear) and recognition of lines that should not be crossed. There is no readiness for this on the part of the expanded Western Europe today, writes Anton Bespalov, Programme Director of the Valdai Club.
This year, alongside other commemorations, we observe the half-century anniversary of the signing of the Helsinki Final Act – the defining document of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The document opened a new chapter in East-West relations, offering millions hope for a safer world. “Mankind has outgrown the rigid ‘cold war’ armour which it was once forced to wear. It wants to breathe freely and peacefully,” declared Leonid Brezhnev during his 1973 visit to the US, amid preparations for the Helsinki Conference. Time, however, proved his optimism premature – the post-Cold War order diverged sharply from the vision of the Helsinki Accords’ architects.
The uniqueness of the agreement lay in its unprecedented consensus among nations divided by the Iron Curtain. The USSR hailed it as a triumph of Soviet diplomacy – so much so that in 1977, the ten principles of interstate relations from the Final Act were enshrined verbatim in Chapter Four of the new Soviet Constitution, dedicated to foreign policy.
This sense of triumph stemmed from Moscow’s crowning achievement: securing legal and political recognition of World War II’s territorial outcomes in Eastern Europe. For twenty-five post-war years, West Germany had refused to acknowledge either East Germany or the post-1945 frontiers of Poland and the USSR, fuelling legitimate anxieties in Moscow and among its Eastern Bloc allies. Only by the late 1960s did Bonn’s stance soften, culminating in Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik. The treaties of 1970–1973 with the USSR, Poland, the GDR, and Czechoslovakia formalized West Germany’s acceptance of post-war borders, paving the way for a pan-European settlement.
A fragment of a 1958 West German atlas depicting territories that became part of Poland and the USSR in 1945 as “disputed”
According to the prevailing Western narrative, preoccupation with Germany’s post-war borders was Moscow’s “irrational” fixation – a mix of exaggerated fear of German revanchism and a quest for recognition of its European sphere of influence. For Western powers, borders were secondary. As Spanish diplomat Javier Ruperez, a Helsinki negotiator and later OSCE Parliamentary Assembly head, noted: “Neither the Europeans nor the Americans had any plan to reshape the post-World War II map but they did not see any need to give it any further consistency.”
Moreover, the US, a key player in the talks, refused to officially recognize the USSR’s own borders. Before signing the Final Act, President Ford assured Eastern European émigré groups:
“I would emphasize that the document I will sign is neither a treaty nor is it legally binding on any participating side. We have obtained the public commitment of the Warsaw Pact governments to the possibility of peaceful adjustment of borders – a major concession which runs quite contrary to the allegation that present borders are being permanently frozen. The United States has never recognized the Soviet incorporation of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and is not doing so now. Our official policy of non-recognition is not affected by the results of the European security conference.”
Notably, Ford used the word border, absent in the English version of the Final Act, which employs frontier, implying fluidity rather than permanence. This semantic sleight of hand, just like the Soviet evasion of human rights commitments, reveals both blocs’ mutual disingenuousness.
Their desire to ease tensions, however, was genuine. The early 1970s, when the Helsinki process began, were a time of palpable change. Leaders on both sides sensed a new epoch dawning. “The postwar period in international relations has ended,” stated Richard Nixon in his First Annual Report to the Congress on United States Foreign Policy for the 1970’s.
Crucially, the USSR had achieved nuclear parity with the US – rendering mutual annihilation inevitable, regardless of who struck first. This stalemate bred mutual interest in a European code of conduct. The Helsinki dialogue unfolded amid a respect forged by mutual dread, and its principles bolstered continental security for the next fifteen years.
That world vanished in 1991. “The Helsinki idea served agreements between the East and the West when these were understood as two different social systems. But when this division ceased to exist […] the initial idea lost all its meaning,” observed prominent Russian diplomat Anatoly Adamishin on the Final Act’s 30th anniversary. Initially, Moscow failed to grasp that the West saw the Cold War’s end as its victory – with Helsinki as a stepping stone. In the West, the view took hold that the Soviet Union’s (and other Eastern Bloc countries’) commitment to human rights was a time bomb under the entire socialist camp, because Moscow, fixated on the border issue, failed to recognize the threat to the Soviet system itself that came from the third basket.
After 1991, the Western bloc, having preserved its unity, made it unequivocally clear that new rules applied in Europe’s new era. NATO’s actions in the Balkans – the bombings first of Bosnian Serbs and then of Yugoslavia, as well as support for Kosovan separatism – represented a clear departure from both the spirit and letter of Helsinki. Meanwhile, NATO’s eastward expansion, warned against by such diplomatic masters of the previous era as George Kennan, demonstrated that the realities so obvious to statesmen of the 1970s were no longer relevant.
“Several times, over the centuries, Russia has been invaded through Central Europe; so this sensitivity is not novel, or purely the product of Communist dogma,” Nixon declared in the aforementioned 1970 report. “It is not the intention of the United States to undermine the legitimate security interests of the Soviet Union.”
After the Cold War ended, the very concept of Moscow’s “legitimate interests” became meaningless to Western elites intoxicated by their triumph. The confidence-building measures agreed upon in Helsinki came to be portrayed a posteriori as a weapon that had contributed to the Cold War adversary’s defeat. Principles that were not legally binding and were based on the goodwill of the parties came to be presented as rules whose violation would bring inevitable punishment – except when violated by members of the Western community.
The ever-present spectre of nuclear annihilation in the early 1970s imposed a sobering discipline on both sides of the Iron Curtain. While the visceral dread of the Cuban Missile Crisis had faded, the Soviet-led socialist bloc remained an immutable pillar of the global order – one that demanded engagement. “The Soviet Union is here to stay – and it means we must deal with it” became the West’s operative logic during the Helsinki and Geneva talks. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc had a powerful influence on Western foreign policy philosophy. Policymakers became convinced that Russia’s collapse was possible in principle and that the country could be permanently diminished into geopolitical irrelevance – an assumption that continues to shape Western policies today.
From the 2000s onward, Moscow has issued increasingly stark warnings regarding this miscalculation. Its revision of post-Soviet borders, which started in the South Caucasus in 2008 and was followed in 2014 by the adjustment of the borders of Russia itself, was inevitable fallout from the West’s abandonment of Helsinki’s core premise: mutual recognition of legitimate security interests. The erosion began in the 1990s with challenges to the first basket’s security principles. As confrontation with Russia aggravated after February 2022, the West began to dismantle the second basket’s economic framework and the third’s humanitarian provisions (severing cultural ties, obstructing Russian media, weaponising sports). Finland’s NATO accession served as the symbolic epitaph for the Helsinki era.
The OSCE may look like an anachronism against this background, but the declaration of principles, developed half a century ago, may well serve as a guide for building dialogue in the new era. This, however, requires components that were lost after 1991: a military-political balance, mutual respect (even if based on fear) and recognition of those lines that should not be crossed. There is no readiness for this on the part of the expanded Western Europe today. Whether Moscow and Washington can forge such understanding – and how Europe would respond – may become clear in the near future.
Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.