A Star-Studded Summit Spectacular

It was show time in Helsinki. This week's summit spectacular might be titled Goodbye to World War II. Others thought of it as Dreams of Detente. Still others would prefer to call it Much Ado About Nothing, The Grand Illusion or perhaps even The Decline of the West. A few days before the show opened, the conference received some bad reviews from critics who labeled it The Betrayal of Eastern Europe. But fortunately they will not be present at the premiere to put a damper on the show.

In any case, the cast being assembled at Helsinki is indisputably topnotch. The star was unquestionably that durable ex-heavy Leonid Brezhnev. Co-starring in a role that his fans are a little uneasy about is Gerald Ford, who is coming up fast as a jovial but strong character actor. Among the performers sharing the limelight will be French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, Rumanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. In all, leaders or representatives of 35 states will gather at Helsinki, including spokesmen for the Vatican and every European country except myopic, Maoist Albania. Everyone seemed to be groping for a phrase that would sum up the spectacle. Departing slightly from theatrical images, a European delegate murmured: "Helsinki will be a living Madame Tussaud's, the greatest show of living waxworks on earth."

The Helsinki meeting was bound to provoke skepticism, coming as it does less than a week after the end of the Apollo-Soyuz flight, another extravaganza that seemed more important for political show business than for substance. Unlike the Congress of Vienna (see box page 18), the Helsinki congress --the final phase of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE)--will probably not be remembered by history as much of a landmark. Its main official business will be the signing of a 100-page, 30,000-word joint declaration that is known so far as simply the "Final Act."

Callous Rejection. Despite its cotton-candy quality of diplomatic ambiguity, the document has been harshly condemned by some American political conservatives, as well as by leading dissident Soviet critics of detente (see story page 23), as a capitulation by the West to Soviet power diplomacy and a callous rejection of the cause of freedom in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In addition to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's jeremiads, Senator Henry Jackson accuses Ford of fostering "the illusion that substantive progress toward greater security in Europe has been made." As for the issue of Russian rule over the Baltic states, Jackson charges that "the President's signature on the CSCE documents will be invoked by the Soviets as a sign of the West's retreat from this crucial point of principle." Equally critical is Senator James Buckley, who asks: "What the devil is in [the declaration] for the West?"

In fact, as Washington officials took pains to point out, the document that Ford will be signing is not a treaty with the force of law; rather it is, in the words of one diplomat, a "declaration of good intentions." As such, it is a token of detente, which, with all its dangers, probably remains the world's best hope for avoiding nuclear war. The declaration also is a symbol of the fact that while strong enmity between Communist and Western systems remains, the cold war tensions that beset Europe for a generation have continued to abate. For all the doubts about the meeting's real significance, it nonetheless offers an impressive historical perspective: it takes place 30 years after American and Soviet troops met at the Elbe, 27 years after the Berlin airlift, 26 years after the birth of NATO, 22 years after the death of Stalin, and 19 years after Nikita Khrushchev told the West, "We will bury you!" The Helsinki charter formalizes the boundaries and power balances created by recent history, thereby marking a theoretical end to World War II.

Before the leaders get to sign the declaration, they will have to endure an ordeal by rhetoric. Each leader will deliver a 20-minute speech (the time limit, like the declaration, is not enforceable), and each will listen to as many of the other speeches as he can bear to.

Almost all the statesmen will seize the occasion to do some bilateral negotiating. Hundreds of such meetings will take place (though nowhere near as many as the potential maximum of 1,190, presumably). Ford is expected to confer at least twice with Brezhnev, for instance, about the SALT II negotiations and the currently stalled Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) talks in Vienna. Chancellor Schmidt has let it be known that he hopes to see every Eastern European party leader, starting with Brezhnev, Poland's Edward Gierek and East Germany's Erich Honecker. Giscard and Wilson can be expected to do the same, if only to avoid being outpointed by Schmidt. Leaders of economically hard-pressed East-bloc nations will huddle with any Western leader who can promise them credits on technology.

Protocol Problems. The Finnish government has been bending every effort to make sure that the conference will be remembered as a grand success. It has employed as many as 3,500 workers since mid-July to make ready for the huge meeting. The white-marble Finlandia House in downtown Helsinki has been equipped with special conference tables and translating equipment. The government planned to requisition at least 2,500 of the city's 4,000 hotel rooms (thereby creating a problem for 1,500 doctors who are due this week for an international conference on blood transfusion). Police leaves have been canceled throughout Finland, and the 1,800-man Helsinki force has been bolstered with 800 special troops. Although Finland has no known terrorist groups and no organizations have publicly opposed the conference, police were nonetheless watching for foreign troublemakers, like West German anarchists associated with the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Early in the planning stage, the Finns sensibly decided that the normal rules of protocol were too cumbersome for such a star-studded gathering. Instead they arranged everything according to alphabetical order (in French). The biggest protocol problem of all was President Urho Kekkonen's formal dinner on the first night. After two months of discussion, the Finns decided to ask each delegation to send its four most senior members to the dinner; the ranking member of each delegation will be seated closest to the host and to U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim at a gigantic C-shaped banquet table. The dinner menu and wine list remained a state secret, at least partly because Kekkonen, under local pressure to serve a Finnish sparkling wine,* was privately determined to offer French champagne.

The declaration that the leaders will sign this week took 22 months to produce. "I felt at times as if I were in a time warp," groans one of the 375 diplomats who participated in the negotiations in Geneva. The completed document has five parts: a preamble stating the conference's general goals (of "peace, security, justice and cooperation") and four major sections known for no discernible reason as "baskets." The area of greatest Soviet interest is Basket One, which covers the inviolability of frontiers, peaceful settlement of international disputes, nonintervention in internal affairs, the right of self-determination of peoples and other articles of cooperation and good faith. Basket Two, which was of particular interest to the East bloc and some smaller Western European nations, covers agreements regarding economic, scientific and environmental cooperation.

Basket Three is the major area of Western concern. It deals with increased human contacts between East and West, includes the flow of information, the right of travel, improved working conditions for journalists and cooperation in matters of culture and education. The fourth basket--by far the weakest--involves follow-up arrangements. It merely provides that senior officials of the signature nations will meet in 1977 to see how the agreements are being observed. The charter is regarded as a single document rather than as four linked but separate agreements (which the Soviets wanted, presumably to be able to play down the importance of Basket Three).

The participants have varying views about the importance of the document. The Soviets, who have been plumping for a European security agreement for more than 20 years, hailed the declaration as a triumph for their foreign policy. There is no doubt that Leonid Brezhnev was anxious to have the treaty signed and sealed before the convening of the 25th Soviet Party Congress in Moscow next February.

On the whole, the agreement is a faithful reflection of the current state of detente --and as such it is deliberately, and at times even infuriatingly vague. The Soviets see it as a mirror of the past, a static definition of their zone of control and influence. But for Western Europe as well as such Communist nations as Rumania, Poland, Yugoslavia and Hungary, it is a dynamic document, a charter for continuing and expanding contacts between West and East. The provisions for a 1977 follow-up are, according to one Rumanian diplomat, "a lifeline for us."

"In contrast to the enthusiasm of their leaders," reports TIME'S chief European correspondent William Rademaekers, "the vast majority of Eastern Europeans appear to be either indifferent or cynical about the Security Conference. At worst, they regard it as an extension of the 1945 Yalta Conference which delivered Eastern Europe into the Soviet sphere. At best, they acknowledge that it puts some pressure on Communist regimes to relax travel restrictions, gives easier access to Western information, and perhaps slightly widens the room for maneuver between the Soviet and East European brands of Communism. There are no longer any illusions in Eastern Europe about crusades for freedom. Those were shattered by Soviet tanks in East Berlin in 1953, in Budapest in 1956 and in Prague in 1968. That is why the documents to be signed in Helsinki are creating so little interest among the peoples of Eastern Europe. In the absence of any hope for political freedom, they have turned to the pursuit of materialistic goals: a summer cottage, a Japanese stereo set or--the greatest of all Communist status symbols --a new car."

During the early deliberations, Washington regarded the Security Conference as primarily a European show --in part, a reflection of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's preference for bilateral rather than multilateral negotiations. Nonetheless, American officials now argue, the U.S. and its European allies were able to extract important concessions from the Soviets. "We sold it [U.S. cooperation on the conference] for the German-Soviet treaty," Helmut Sonnenfeldt, an aide to Kissinger has said. "We sold it for the Berlin agreement," the accord that settled such matters as the status and means of access to West Berlin, "and we sold it again for the opening of the MBFR," the chronically deadlocked talks about reducing the size of military forces in Central Europe.

New Borders. Since 1954, the Soviets have shown an almost pathological desire for a formal recognition of the postwar political frontiers of Europe: an acceptance by the West of the Russian conquest of the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, and of Soviet hegemony over Europe east of the Elbe. An easing of tensions on Moscow's western flank became more crucial as the Chinese threat from the east increased. Throughout most of the 1960s, efforts toward detente in Europe foundered on the issue of German reunification. After Willy Brandt became West German Chancellor in 1969, however, his government concluded treaties with the Soviet Union, East Germany and Poland that recognized the Polish-East German border along the Oder-Neisse rivers and the frontier between the two Germanys. Despite this achievement, the Russians continued to press for a European security conference. Brandt once asked Brezhnev why he was so anxious to secure it. "A document," answered Brezhnev. "We want a document."

Initially, in addition to wanting to legitimize postwar border changes, the Soviets also sought to set up some kind of security council--a "permanent standing organ," as delegates jocularly referred to it--that would police the new borders and provide Moscow with a formal base for criticizing Western policies. The Russians gradually backed away from this second objective, mainly because they belatedly realized that any security council would direct its criticisms eastward as well as westward. The fact that the two nations most interested in a permanent council were Yugoslavia and Rumania--Eastern Europe's most independent-minded Communist states --was extremely unsettling to Moscow. In the end, delegates settled for the fourth basket's provision for a follow-up meeting in Belgrade two years from now.

A Basic Error. As the Russians had hoped, the final form of the declaration states that "the participating states regard as inviolable all one another's frontiers ... and will refrain now and in the future from assaulting these frontiers." With characteristic ambiguity, however, it also says: "They consider that their frontiers can be changed, in accordance with international law, by peaceful means and by agreement." This latter point was the sine qua non for the West German government, since it provides, at least hypothetically, for the eventual reunification of Germany.

Some observers believe that the Russians made a basic error in their negotiating tactics. Once Brezhnev had publicly scheduled the 25th Soviet Party Congress for next February, he was caught in a tight squeeze. To meet that deadline, he had to get the Security Conference completed, then move to a new SALT agreement and a successful trip to Washington. In the end, the Russians simply had to make more concessions than they wanted to on Basket Three. "We didn't even have to go to our fallback positions on most of the Basket Three issues," says one Western negotiator. "They were so eager for a July summit that the whole basket fell into place within two weeks."

To the U.S., the Security Conference was and is far less important than either SALT or MBFR. Only in the final stage at Geneva, when it appeared that some substantial gains might be possible in Basket Three, did the U.S. become fully engaged. Washington had been worried that the conference might mislead many Europeans into a false euphoria about the progress of detente. The fact that the Russians fought so hard against the so-called "confidence-building measures" (such as advance notification about military maneuvers) in Basket One went a long way toward dispelling that fear. "Nobody's going to disband NATO because of this conference," declared one American official.

In truth, Basket Three contains little in the way of concrete Soviet commitments. It states, for example, that the signatories "will encourage" the import of foreign publications and "the number of places where these publications are on sale." In addition, they "will encourage" wider showing and broadcasting of foreign films, and "will examine in a favorable spirit" requests for journalists' visas. They "will favorably consider" applications to enter or leave their territories temporarily, and will "favorably examine" cases of family reunification. Nothing is guaranteed; yet, as one American analyst noted, "for the first time the Russians have accepted such issues as legitimate topics for multilateral international discussion. They can no longer sweep them aside as purely domestic issues."

Brezhnev Doctrine. Interestingly, the conference was by no means a classic confrontation between East and West. The Rumanians, for example, led the fight for insertion of sentences that would implicitly erode the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine--the right of Moscow to interfere in East bloc internal affairs. On a few issues, chiefly those concerning the permanence of frontiers, the Soviets found themselves at times on the side of the West. The West Germans were adamant about phrasing that would not preclude German reunification--a notion that had little appeal to anyone else. "German reunification," said a Dutch diplomat, "would mean either war or the end of the West." Somewhat remarkable for any Eastern European, even a Rumanian, was the comment by one Rumanian negotiator that American troops in West Germany --whose status is not affected by the Helsinki declaration--are "a most positive force for stability."

An interesting byproduct of the negotiations was the behind-the-scenes scrapping that took place between the Russians and some of their client states. "The Soviets have never been so clobbered before by their satellites," noted a Dutch negotiator, "and that's bound to leave a mark." Frustrated by the consensus principle, they soon realized they could not easily throw their weight around. "It was a real lesson in democracy for them," said a Rumanian diplomat with a grin. At one point, after a minor disagreement, a Soviet delegate lost his temper and shouted at his Rumanian counterpart: "From the very start you have caused us nothing but trouble!"

Dry Rivers. In the last stages of negotiations, the diplomats worked 18-hour days against a deadline of July 18, finally winding up the bulk of their business at 2:40 a.m. Saturday, July 19. The last hitch was over the description of detente, which the Soviets wanted to call "irreversible." The final wording was "to promote the course of detente"--a riverine allusion that prompted a French diplomat to observe, "There are some pretty dry rivers in Europe." Another problem during the closing days of the negotiations was posed by Malta's Socialist Premier Dom Mintoff, who demanded the insertion of sentences declaring that the signatories would work toward the reduction of armed forces in the Mediterranean and the creation of a federation of European and Arab states. Delegates finally agreed "to promote the development of good neighborly relations with nonparticipating Mediterranean countries"--not much of a concession, but enough to enable the pro-government Malta News to crow: EUROPE BOWS TO MINTOFF.

Who won at Geneva and Helsinki?

On balance, the Soviets probably came out ahead, though they paid for what they gained. The U.S. managed to "limit the damage," in the words of one negotiator, but failed to get the Russians to make concessions in the MBFR talks in Vienna. The Ford Administration is still hopeful, however, that its proposal to remove a "significant" number of tactical nuclear weapons from Europe in return for the withdrawal of a 60,000-man Soviet tank army will provide the basis for movement.

Critics of U.S. policy are on firm ground when they fault the American negotiators for failing to secure other concrete concessions from the Russians --such as a promise of nonintervention in Portuguese affairs, or a clause limiting total military expenditures. The Soviets are currently spending 20% more on military research and development than the U.S., 25% more on arms procurement and 60% more on nuclear-arms research.

Actually, the greatest risk faced by the U.S. in Europe today is the disarray among its Atlantic allies. Recession is rampant; Communism is making dangerous advances in Portugal, Italy and elsewhere. By no means can all of this be blamed on the Soviet Union. The chief fault is the internal weakness of many Western European societies. Yet detente has had the inevitable effect of reducing Western European distrust of Communism and fostering the belief that the danger of Communist subversion is past. To the extent that Helsinki reinforces that belief, it holds danger for the West.

Yet the arguments by Ford's critics carry with them an unwarranted tone of moral superiority--and they come very late in the day. Where were the critics during the earlier stages of the negotiations when Washington could have halted proceedings under the conference's unanimity rule? In acknowledging Europe's existing boundaries, the Security Conference is merely taking note of a 30year-old reality. The current era of detente may not yet have had much impact on the lives of the people of Eastern Europe; but is there a realistic alternative to the hopes contained in Basket Three? There is no possibility in the near future of dislodging the Soviets from Eastern Europe or browbeating them into making any fundamental changes in their system. When the critics say that no matter what the reality, the U.S. should not acquiesce in an immoral situation, they of course have a point. Yet it is also dangerous, year after year, to proclaim moral opposition to a situation the U.S. is powerless to change.

Moral Authority. The Helsinki declaration's provisions for intellectual freedom and cultural interchange may well be ignored by many of the East bloc signatories. No one believes for a moment that the provision about the "inviolability of national boundaries" would prevent the repetition of tragedies like the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, if the Soviets judged it vital to move and ensure the Brezhnev Doctrine. Nonetheless, a reasonable case can be made that the document is not quite so futile as the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, with which it has been compared; that agreement was signed by 64 nations, which pledged to renounce war "as an instrument of national policy" and never to deal with any dispute except "by pacific means." Because it is more modest in scope, the Helsinki declaration has a better chance of being observed by the nations involved. As one State Department official puts it: "There's no court to take anybody into, but this document gives us some moral authority for saying 'You agreed. Why are you not living up to your word?' " In that sense, the big show in Helsinki is unlikely to cause much harm, and may well do more than a little good.

*Made from white currants and not grapes, since Finland grows none. This curious potable tastes a bit like German Sekt.

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