The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered. Inquiries into the Evolution of an Underestimated Alliance, 1960-1969

Abstract

In this book Laurien Crump examines to what extent the Warsaw Pact inadvertently provided the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact (NSWP) members with an opportunity to assert their own interests, emancipate from the Soviet grip, and influence Warsaw Pact (WP) policy in the period 1960-1969. In the shadow of the increasingly urgent German Question and the escalating Sino-Soviet split, the alliance evolved into a body of multilateral consultation, in which the NSWP members not only obtained increasing leeway, but also managed to exercise leverage over the Soviet Union, which served the WP’s evolution into a multilateral alliance. Crump traces this development through six thematic case-studies, which focus on particular issues from a multilateral perspective, and analyses how the WP inadvertently developed a new dynamics in the 1960s, which caused the emancipation of some NSWP countries and the multilateralisation of the alliance at large. The Albanian obstruction in 1961 heralded the alliance’s gravest crisis, and paved the way for Romanian emancipation from the Soviet Union. At the same time, the second Berlin Crisis enabled the East German and Polish leaders to use the alliance to assert their national interests, whereas the Kremlin was increasingly forced to adopt the position of a mediator. In the second half of the 1960s the NSWP members’ clashing interests on issues such as the Vietnam War, non-proliferation, WP reforms and European Security determined the debates within the alliance. Although the invasion of five socialist countries in Czechoslovakia in August 1968 was conducted outside a WP framework, the fact that Romania did not participate exacerbated the differences between its members. This nevertheless sparked further debates, which surprisingly culminated in consolidation and consensus on WP reforms and the proposal for a European Security Conference in 1969. These genuinely contested compromises sealed the alliance’s evolution into a multilateral alliance. Empirical evidence accordingly suggests that the widely held assumption within historiography of the WP as a mere Soviet instrument is a misconception. This is not only the first monograph based on primary sources on the WP since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing opening of the Eastern European archives, but it is also unprecedented in its challenge of the unfounded, but persistent, assumption within historiography of the WP as a mere instrument of Soviet power. By analysing hitherto neglected archival evidence from archives in Berlin, Bucharest and Rome, and examining the Soviet alliance from a radically novel perspective, this dissertation aims to offer new insights into the multilateral dynamics of power within the Soviet bloc, while contributing to New Cold War history. This new angle is particularly overdue, since there is a sharp asymmetry between the scant study of the role of the Soviet Union’s Eastern-European allies in the WP and the amount of recent research on the influence of America’s Western-European allies in NATO. This book therefore also serves to shed a new light on the dynamics of alliances in general, which is an especially relevant issue at a time when alliances such as NATO face internal challenges.