Michael Morgan’s The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War (2018) debunks some widely held notions and generalized ignorance about East-West rapprochement in the 1970’s to show how the central question on the table, East and West, was legitimacy. “Historians commonly describe the Helsinki Final Act as a quid pro quo: the West ratified the continent’s borders and, in exchange, the soviets agreed to certain provisions on human rights,” he explains. “This shorthand misrepresents the agreement. Instead of cementing the status quo, the Final Act established the rules for revising it,” (135). In an interview on Fresh Air (NPR with Terry Gross, April 8, 2019), Nathaniel Rich, author of Losing Earth (2019) suggested that the almost climate change agreement of 1979 fell by the wayside because Presidential adviser, John Sununu, believed that it was just a piece of paper. Kissinger certainly felt that way about CSCE, at least, early on, and Gerald Ford insisted that it was not so, (130, 208, 218, 222). Morgan points out how “the presence or absence of a comma” could make a difference, (141). The future of the planet, in terms of cooperation or annihilation, seemed to hinge on where European borders would go, an inheritance from World War I; (see Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, 2014) and even, more precisely, on German reunification, epicenter in Berlin, a legacy of World War II, (see Gerhard Weinberg’s World War II: A Very Short Introduction, 2014). The real lesson seems to be about how unresolved local situations, meaning situations resolved only to the liking of hegemonic superpowers, tend to crawl out from under the floorboards and bite superpowers on the heel later on, with huge potential for global consequences.  One wonders, though, if a dispute over Lima or Kinshasa could ever cause as much of an uproar.

An important question emerges from Morgan’s argument about the very nature of diplomacy, and its specific challenges in the period analyzed, (142). Those who consume it via news media and chauvinist distortion might tend to think negotiated solutions to difficult problems are easy and obvious, (or impossibly onerous and universally untrustworthy).  But the complex process of the Final Act demonstrates how open to debate the rules of international relations really are. We see complex negotiation, dubious translation, uncertain ratification, endless backtracking, secret backchannels, tolerance for ambiguity and military blackmail on the other side of the globe as factors that can make or break a treaty or agreement. Intermediate level agents, like Brandt and Pompidou, even minor figures like Malta’s Mintoff, (199) can play surprisingly important roles. In this sense, diplomacy cannot be considered a given, but a hard-won artefact of political culture that can easily slip away. LBJ, at least in Brian Cranston’s interpretation of him misquotes Clausewitz saying “politics is war carried out by other means,” Clausewitz, in fact, said, “war is diplomacy carried out by other means,” I believe. I am not convinced that we have, in fact, overcome a more primitive diplomacy, in the style of Attila the Hun, though I do hope he doesn’t make it to Austin anytime soon.

Everybody loves human rights. It’s like asking undergrads, “who wants beer?” Morgan shows how it became part of a global human conscience during this period (127) but that the very noble-sounding concept can mean different things to different people. Brezhnev, who thought of himself romantically as Lenin’s heir, though his advisors could never get him to read a book, nevertheless would not shrink from what others might call human rights violations when it was his responsibility to protect the revolution (124, 136). I might add that even Chile’s infamous dictator, Augusto Pinochet, called himself “the voice of the voiceless” (meaning the poor rich people who had no one to defend them from the hungry masses), and those he tortured and murdered got rebranded as “humanoids” who did not deserve  human rights. That put them beyond the reach of activists and self-righteous US Senate committees. More on just how tricky human rights can be is available in Sarah B. Snyder’s concise volume, From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy (2018). The examples she chooses, including Chile, Rhodesia, South Korea, Greece and China, reveal just how complicated balancing Machiavelli and Jefferson can be. After Dick Cheney, it has become more difficult to make a case for human rights, if one still claims US citizenship.

Morgan points out that the Soviets sometimes pointed to proletarian internationalism as their counterpoint for universal respect for sovereignty and human rights, (136, 139). It must be hard to say anything else if, while advocating world peace, you just sent tanks to Prague three years before. I have an irresistible anecdote, (yes, about Chile), from the 1980’s. Communist Youth League members were trained to expect the Stalinization, after the revolution. That meant getting rid of other leftist groups so that the true revolution could be victorious. And yet, after Carabineros arrested three semi-clandestine communist militants in 1985, slit their throats and left them on a backroad near Santiago, I went to the wake at the Vicaría de la Solidaridad. At precisely 12 noon, left fists were raised, and everyone there sang La Internacional, Spanish version. When they are after you, it is easy to overlook the failings of those who might speak up on your behalf.

The point about creating a legal fiction in order to get along with the other half of the world is revealing, (124). The Spanish Empire made no bones about that, and Latin American republics still have entire downtown districts dedicated to notaries who draw up arcane legal documents to represent their clients’ interests in terms that Byzantine law codes (some of which date back to the Roman Empire) can process. The modern west doesn’t do legal fiction, though, and I think this is where Kissinger and Brezhnev misunderstood each other. It seems to me the real breakdown is not communist-capitalist, but Platonist-Aristotelian. The Marxist universe is Platonist. Platonic “reality” exists in an alternative sphere where theories work, and things are perfect. The world we see is “in the cave” is just shadows on the wall, a hopeless illusion that doesn’t matter as much as signed documents and speeches. The Western way, on the other hand, is Aristotelian, pragmatic, measurable and ruthless. (Snyder observes that Kissinger also thought human rights in Pinochet’s Chile was meaningless fluff.) I might even be persuaded to say there is some Parmenides in Brezhnev’s changeless world, and an unhealthy dose of Heraclitus in the unsustainable burning of fossil fuels that the West can’t live without.

I would point to two other ideas for further study. The end of Bretton Woods (145) made economics a huge deal, upsetting the Western apple cart and preventing the Eastern one to ever get set up. The importance of economic systems reminds the reader of Berry Eichengreen’s detailed argument in Golden Fetters, The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939. Soviet inefficiency, which Morgan refers to in Chapter 5, comes out brilliantly in Stephen Kotkin’s engaging essay, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000, (2008). Gorbachev’s challenge, to unblock the soviet economy, was easier said than done. Kotkin describes the phenomenal waste of planned economy. Productivity was measured in tonnage, so automobiles were built heavy, like tanks. As production limped along with a huge hangover, literal and figurative, the state squandered material resources and ideological credibility. It wasn’t the Marxism. It was the bureaucracy.