CONCLUSION

Abstract

The emergence of the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’ following the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 in no sense represented a qualitative shift in Soviet attitudes towards the concept of sovereignty: rather, it constituted a continuation of the Soviet Union’s traditional use of the concept as a weapon in the armoury of Soviet foreign policy, a weapon employed for both offensive and defensive purposes. In Eastern Europe after the Second World War, this ‘weapon’ was used (albeit ineffectively) by the Kremlin to cover the ugly fact of Soviet domination. However, as the postwar history of Soviet-Yugoslav relations, and the history of international relations within the Soviet bloc of states has shown, this weapon has put itself at the service of more than one East European master. From the first years of ‘socialist international relations’, Yugoslavia insisted upon its right to genuine, as distinct from purely formal , sovereignty. Within the Soviet bloc, the gap between the idea of sovereignty and (for the Soviet Union) its disagreeable reality has narrowed since the Stalin era — unless we regard sovereignty as an ali-or-nothing condition, it seems reasonable to argue that the Peoples Democracies contained within the Soviet bloc are more ‘sovereign’ now than in the late 1940s. However, if three eventful decades have loosened the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe, they have not weakened the Soviet grasp of elementary logic: thus the phrase ‘independent sovereign state’, if taken literally, necessarily implies ‘independent of the Soviet Union’.