Transparency and American Primacy in World Politics by James J. Marquardt

Author:James J. Marquardt [Marquardt, James J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317006701
Goodreads: 29373821
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1972–1989

Over the course of twenty turbulent years in the latter half of the Cold War, some three–dozen countries participated in wide–ranging discussions on improving East–West relations. With its efforts at reducing tensions, fostering economic ties, and advancing human rights in the Soviet bloc, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) is celebrated as having helped create the favorable international conditions that contributed to the Cold War’s end. Early on in the CSCE process, the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact (as well as Europe’s non–aligned countries) agreed in principle that international tensions – and especially the mutual fear of surprise attack – might be lessened if countries on either side of the East–West divide knew more about each other’s conventional military activities. The US and its NATO allies criticized the Soviet Union and the other member states of the Warsaw Pact for the “excessive secrecy” surrounding their conventional military activities and wanted them to subject these activities to outside scrutiny. The US in particular came to view military–technical confidence–building measures, first advanced by West Germany,61 as a mechanism to tame Warsaw Pact conventional military power in Central Europe by holding the Soviet Union and its allies accountable to a general standard of military conduct. More generally, the US maintained any initiative that opened and made the Soviet Union accountable to its neighbors (and its own people) would advance containment and transform the Communist bloc, thereby hastening the demise of the Soviet threat.

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