The Helsinki Accords that helped define the European security order for nearly half-a-century emerged not from the victory or the collapse of one state or bloc, but from compromise amid heightened Cold War tensions. On the 50th anniversary of the Accords, as part of our series ‘Stories of People- and Planet-centred Cooperation’, Sean Howard explores how Europe needs to revitalise the spirit of Helsinki now more than ever.
On 01 August 1975, the ‘Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe Final Act’ was signed by all states (minus Albania) in the Euro-Atlantic space reaching, in the words of the once-famous phrase, “from Vancouver to Vladivostok”. Known simply as the ‘Helsinki Final Act’ after its neutral place of negotiation – over three tense years – and signature, the Act sought to reset European security on the basic lines laid down in both the UN Charter and UN Declaration of Human Rights, envisioning a community of nations matching respect for state sovereignty and territorial integrity with respect for the rights and integrity of human beings.
Naturally enough, given thirty years of Cold War trampling on both the Charter and Declaration, cynicism sprang eternal. “Does all this mean what it says?” an 02 August Guardian editorial asked. “Yes, said Mr. Brezhnev on Thursday, though will they believe him in Prague?” – where a reformist democratic socialist experiment had been crushed seven years before. “Yes, said Mr. Ford yesterday, though will they believe him in Chile?” – where an elected democratic socialist government had been overthrown just two years before.
The newspaper, though, added a qualified ‘Yes’ of its own, arguing that while only the “balance of nuclear terror has kept the continent peaceful” since 1945, the “Helsinki agreement now offers the opportunity to make cooperation instead of terror the basic reason for not getting killed by your neighbour.” Despite the many noisome compromises involved – tacit western recognition of Soviet occupation of the Baltic states; tacit Soviet recognition of American domination of NATO Europe – the “merit of Helsinki is that it covers as much common ground as could be found and that much of it could be fruitful”, especially in lowering military tensions and budgets. “Fewer men-at-arms mean more money”, the Guardian anticipated, “for other, more benevolent things, and if both sides reduce their forces fairly security is not endangered.”
From Helsinki to Paris
A decade into the Helsinki era, however, the cynics seemed vindicated by developments including martial law in Poland, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the election of a US President pledging victory over the ‘Evil Empire’, and a ‘Euromissile’ crisis seemingly presaging the truly Final Act of nuclear war. Writing in 2022,American scholar John Feffer remembered being in Helsinki during ceremonies marking the tenth anniversary of the signing “when I came across a number of protesters holding signs. ‘Betrayal!’ said one of them. ‘Appeasement!’ said another.”
But the false dawn was followed by a true one, the commitment of a new Soviet leadership to take both key aspects of the Final Act – relinquishing war and respecting human rights – seriously, while adding a crucial third dimension: a nuclear-weapon-free world. For Mikhail Gorbachev, forging common cause with western peace movements and eastern dissident movements, Helsinki held the promise of a general restructuring – perestroika – and irreversible opening – glasnost –of not just Soviet but European and world politics.
In November 1990 a more radical iteration of Helsinki was agreed. The CSCE’s unanimously adopted ‘Charter of Paris for a New Europe’ was designed not merely to update the Final Act but to raise the curtain on a continental transformation, a ‘flipping of the script’ from military to human security rooted in euphoric certainty that “Europe is liberating itself from the legacy of the past”. “After the end of the Cold War,” Feffer wrote, “the Helsinki Accords became institutionalized in the OSCE” – the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, as the CSCE became known in 1995 – “and briefly that promised to be the future of European security.” “After all,” he added, “the collapse of the Soviet Union” and dissolution of the Warsaw Pact meant “NATO no longer had a reason for existence,” at least not as a heavily-militarized, nuclearized alliance serving to marginalize, and likely to antagonize, even a post-Soviet Moscow.
The end of the post-Cold War era
Feffer’s call, echoed by other progressive security analysts, for a ‘Helsinki 2.0’ initiative appeared three weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the calamitous termination of a botched ‘post-Cold War era’, indeed poisoned by the pyrrhic victory of NATO expansion. As early as 1992, pro-western Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev resorted to a fake speech at a CSCE Summit in Stockholm replete with the kind of “Great Russia” rhetoric now routinely spouted for real. An hour later, he returned to the podium, telling a shaken audience that his deadly serious joke was directed at NATO’s “essentially unchanged goals” of supremacy and dominance: “you should all be aware,” he pleaded, “of the real threats on our road to a post-Communist Europe”.
“The Ukraine conflict”, Feffer wrote, “is a symptom of this much deeper conflict” between visions of what ‘indivisible security’ – a foundational Helsinki concept, consolidated in the Paris Charter – can and should mean in Europe and beyond: between the traditional zero-sum calculus of military power (to defend or attack, deter or destroy, influence or intimidate) and the ‘new thinking’, in Gorbachev’s phrase, of mutual security in a radically demilitarized, completely denuclearized, post-bloc ‘common Euro-Atlantic home’.
In the latter case, ‘indivisible security’ links the common interests of states while aligning agendas of national and human security, freeing, in the disarming process, huge amounts of financial, human, social and intellectual resources for the “other, more benevolent things” we all need, including what Feffer calls “the most effective decarbonization strategy around: demilitarization.” In the former case, as in NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept, ‘indivisible security’ refers only to the internal cohesion and unity of one bloc, a frankly Orwellian debasement of the term. Or as NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said at Chatham House on 09 June, before warning that without massive rearmament “you better learn to speak Russian”: “There is no longer East or West – there is just NATO.” Ironclad, lockstep, indivisible…
Back to Helsinki, via San José
Advocacy of Helsinki 2.0 remains unextinguished, even by three years of fire in Ukraine. In June 2024, for example, Marc Saxer argued in Internationale Politik Quarterly that a Helsinki 2.0 “formula”, based on the “combination of universality” of human rights” and military “non-interference” could “pave the way today for a détente” re-establishing a “generally binding framework” that “enables the negotiation of collective solutions to problems,” backed with the kind of conflict prevention, conflict resolution and peacebuilding institutions and mechanisms that the OSCE has never been allowed to properly develop.
“For the West,” Saxer concludes, Helsinki Revisited would mean “saying goodbye to the liberal euphoria of the years following the end of the Cold War and focusing on maintaining a normatively thinner order with the same rules for all states.” Perhaps, though, the results might prove more positive, fostering conditions for a ‘discursive shift’ from violence to non-violence as the sine qua non of sustainable security in an age of war-fueled existential risk?
Where, though, now that Helsinki is a NATO capital, should any ‘Helsinki 2.0’ talks be held? In December 2022 I modestly proposed San José, capital of Costa Rica, which has enjoyed high levels of both national and human security since abolishing its armed forces – in the midst of a war-torn neighbourhood – in 1948.
And because such a location would also underscore the critical connection of European to world, and especially Global South, security, we could symbolically aim for a San José signing ceremony in 2030, the year the UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals are supposed to be met, many of them requiring deep cuts to global military expenditure, all of them implying a shift to a ‘strength through peace’ paradigm.
Yes, this would be just eight years after Russia’s illegal invasion of its neighbour; but here, too, the Helsinki precedent can be a lantern in the storm. In August 1968, a Guardian editorial – ‘Jackboots Again Over Eastern Europe’ – warned that without NATO “rearmament” to prove its “readiness,” the seeds would be sown for “another war”. Fortunately, that knee-jerk resort to the tried-and-failed formula of ‘peace through strength’ was not heeded, and instead seeds of peace, détente, diplomacy and disarmament were sown.
And while they lie dormant, they’re not dead yet.
The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.
Image Credit: US President Gerald Ford, General Secretary of the Communist party of the USSR Leonid Brezhnev and Soviet Prime Minister Andrei Gromyko in Helsinki during the CSCE 1975 conference. via SwissInfo.
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