18 - The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe

Summary

The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe emerged at the confluence of two developments. Since the early 1950s, the USSR and Poland had demanded internationally sanctioned security arrangements against the rise of a rearmed West Germany by way of legal recognition of their contested post-World War II borders. In comparison, the European Communities wanted to overcome the legacy of the war through the guarantee of human rights throughout all of Europe. This conflict between the Communist focus on the supremacy of statehood and the Western emphasis on individual rights came to a denouement at the CSCE in 1972-75. The Socialist Camp did not receive a legal guarantee of its borders, while it had to concede on human rights. Yet the impact of human rights on the European Socialist Camp, which Western European governments had expected for the period afterwards, did not happen immediately. Poland would ultimately receive a guarantee for its post-war borders after the end of the Cold War in 1989/91. But the Final Act of the CSCE neither prevented the suppression of human rights in the Socialist Camp until the late 1980s nor saved the GDR from collapse and absorption into the FRG by 1990.