Abstract
The Berlin and Cuban crises constituted a turning point in postwar European history. It soon became widely recognized, especially in the capitals of the two superpowers, that in the age of nuclear and missile technology, war could no longer be an acceptable means of managing relations among European states. Furthermore, it was understood that a relationship of “negative interdependence” between the East and West was a tragic fact of life in the nuclear age. One repercussion of this new knowledge was the more or less hidden acceptance of a new order of priorities in European politics: security superseded justice, at least in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban and Berlin crises.
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Endnotes
Urho Kekkonen, President’s View (London: Heinemann, 1982), pp. 114–115.
Regarding the Finnish-Soviet “note crisis” of the fall of 1961, see Max Jakobson, Veteen Piirretty Viiva (Helsinki: Otava, 1980), pp. 247–292. Jakobson does not insist that the Soviets would have threatened to deploy—in compliance with the 1948 Finnish-Soviet Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance—nuclear weapons on Finnish territory. President Kekkonen, in fact, bluntly disputed speculations about the possibility that the Soviets would have sent a note to Helsinki in order to get permission to deploy Soviet nuclear weapons on Finnish soil after his arrival from Novosibirsk. Yet these speculations have never really ceased. In fact, Kekkonen’s initiative to establish a nuclear-free zone in Scandinavia could be seen as a logical step toward a multilateral arrangement to eliminate the deployment option definitively. Of course, Finland would not permit the deployment, although no agreement could be reached on the zone.
For a Finnish scholarly work dealing with the “note crisis,” see Risto E.J. Penttila, Finland’s Search for Security Through Defence, 1944–89 (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 93–110.
See also Alpo Rusi, “The Note Crisis as an Incident of Nuclear Politics” (in Finnish), Turun Sanomat, April 8, 1990.
With respect to Soviet military policy in the early 1960s, see, for example, Raymond L. Garthoff, Soviet Military Policy (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), pp. 113–123.
Kenneth Dyson, ed., European Detente (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), p. 4.
See, for example, Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 339, or more generally,
Willy Brandt, People and Politics: The Years 1960–1975, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978).
John Erickson, “The Soviet Union and European Detente,” in European Detente, ed. Dyson, pp. 172–197. In the 1960s and 1970s, in the Soviet perspective, detente embodied elements of both cooperation and conflict; hence it can be regarded as only a modus vivendi between the two antagonistic systems. Detente even involves an intensification of ideological competition while the increasingly pointless arms race is phased out and subjected to monitoring. See Klaus von Beyme, The Soviet Union in World Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 65.
For brief accounts of the development of the CSCE process, see Kenneth Dyson, “The CSCE: Europe Before and After the Helsinki Final Act,” in European Detente, ed. Dyson, pp. 83–112; and John Borawski, From the Atlantic to the Urals (New York: Pergamon Brassey’s, 1986), pp. 6–11.
See J. Sizoo and R.T. Jurrjens, CSCE Decision-Making: The Madrid Experience (The Hague, Boston and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), pp. 24–27; see also Borawski, From the Atlantic to the Urals, pp. 8–9.
Quoted from J. Sizoo and R. T. Jurrjens, CSCE Decision-Making, p. 27. The CSCE process will be dealt with in greater detail later in this study. In May 1969, the Finnish government sent a memorandum to 32 governments, including those of the United States and Canada, offering to act as host for an East-West European security conference. The Finnish government argued that its initiative was completely independent because Finland was a small neutral state and because its action was taken out of a sense of responsibility for “the peaceful development of Europe.” On the bases of the responses to the memorandum, the Finnish government appointed Ambassador Ralph Enckell, a highly esteemed career diplomat, to visit the capitals of all the countries involved to further elaborate the agenda and other details related to the conference. Ambassador Enckell’s “shuttle diplomacy” was successful and on the basis of his report the Finnish government sent invitations to 35 countries to meet in Espoo, a town near Helsinki, to discuss the details of convening the CSCE in the fall of 1972. For the documents related to the preliminary talks on the CSCE, see Leo Tujunen, “A Conference on European Security? Background to the Finnish Government’s Proposal,” European Review 19, no. 4 (Autumn 1969), pp. 15–16.
For a classical analysis of this type, see Arnold Horelick and Myron Rush, Strategic Power and Soviet Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), chapters 11 and 12.
See Graham Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), in particular, pp. 45–46. Allison tried to place the Cuban missile crisis in a wider and much more complicated context, which rules out simplistic and clear-cut explanations of the crisis.
This observation was made by Charles R. Planck in The Changing Status of German Unification in Western Diplomacy, 1946–1966 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), pp. 43–44.
See also Timothy W. Stanley and Darnell M. Whitt, Detente Diplomacy: The United States and European Security in the 1970s (New York: The Dunellen Publishing Company, 1970), p. 29.
On the Kennedy administration’s hopes for detente, see Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), pp. 891–892. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, an academic theory of convergence encouraged such hopes. Briefly, the convergence theory hypothesized that both the socialist and capitalist socioeconomic systems could, in the longer term, approach each other and constitute a “unified” system. John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the proponents of the theory, was close to President Kennedy.
For a classical examination of convergence, see Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington, Political Power: USA/USSR (New York: Viking Press, 1965), pp. 419–436.
Ibid., p. 51. Regarding the motivations for de Gaulle’s “Europeanism,” see also Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 400–401. For a historical analysis of France’s European policy between 1945 and the mid-1960s, see, for example, Hans A. Schmitt, European Union: From Hitler to de Gaulle (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1969), pp. 78–83.
For a general study of West German Ostpolitik under Kurt Georg Kiesinger and Willy Brandt, see William Griffith, The Ostpolitik of the Federal Republic of Germany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978).
See also Boris Meissner, Die Deutsche Ostpolitik 1961–1970 (Köln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1970).
Frank A. Ninkovich, Germany and the United States (Boston: Twayne, 1988), p. 151.
For the text of the Harmel Report, see Texts of Final Communiques Issued by Ministerial Sessions of the North Atlantic Council, the Defense Planning Committee, and the Nuclear Planning (Brussels: NATO Information Service, 1975), pp. 198–202. For a discussion, see Roger Morgan, The United States and West Germany: A Study in Alliance Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 179–180.
This book does not deal in greater detail with the process of rapprochement between the two German states in 1969–1973, but does try to define its status within the general process of detente in Europe. For discussion, see Helmut Kistler, Die Ostpolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1966–1973 (Bonn: Bundeszentrals für Politische Bildung, 1982), pp. 27–28.
Richard Lowenthal, “The German Question Transformed,” Foreign Affairs 63, no. 2 (Winter 1984–85) pp. 307–308.
Willy Brandt, People and Politics, p. 99. On U.S. suspicions regarding Ostpolitik, see Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little Brown, 1979), pp. 408–409. See also Kissinger’s discussions of Bahr, Brandt and Ostpolitik in the second volume of his memoirs, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), pp. 144–147.
For further discussion, see Alpo Rusi, “Finlandization without Finland?” in Yearbook of Finnish Foreign Policy, 1987 (Helsinki: Finnish Institute of International Affairs, 1988), pp. 13–16.
On the increasing support for Ostpolitik, see Gebhard L. Schweigler, National Consciousness in Divided Germany (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1975), p. 144 ff;
for various pertinent opinion polls see Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Germans: Public Opinion Polls, 1967–1980, rev. ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), pp. 119 ff.
This is particularly evident in retrospect. See, for example, William E. Griffith, “The Security Policies of the Social Democrats and the Greens in the FRG,” in Security Perspectives of the West German Left, ed. William Griffith et al. (Washington, DC: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1989), pp. 1–20, particularly p. 1.
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© 1991 Institute for East-West Security Studies
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Rusi, A.M. (1991). The Rise of Detente. In: After the Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21350-4_3
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