XIII. Meeting of the PCC, Prague, 25-26 January 1972
Editorial Note
By 1972, with détente reaching its climax, the Soviet project for a conference on security and cooperation in Europe had become the central topic of the PCC deliberations. The main purpose of the deliberations was to ensure a unified and coordinated stand by all Warsaw Pact members regarding the preparation of the conference, which had been advancing, though much more slowly than the Soviet Union had originally bargained for. The Western nations pressed for an expansion of its agenda by including in it not only the recognition of the political status quo, which was Moscow's main priority, but also an array of issues related to human rights, conducive to altering the status quo.
In his important keynote speech, Brezhnev was moderately optimistic that the Western governments would not succeed in pursuing their "class interests" at the prospective conference. In his opinion, the conference should at least lay foundations of a new European security system, even though a substitution of the existing military blocs with a collective security system, while desirable, was not realistic to expect. In his view, the alliances should be preserved for time being and agree on the inviolability of borders, nonuse of force or the threat of force, and noninterference in each other's internal affairs. They should hold regular political consultations, also extraordinary ones if required by crises, create an European political organ in the form of a consultative committee or secretariat, and eventually conclude an agreement on political cooperation.
Confident that the conference could be held soon, perhaps still in 1972, Brezhnev tried to expand its agenda by including in it "military détente." This vague term referred in Soviet parlance to anything that would diminish the importance of NATO to the West, thus shifting the thrust of East-West rivalry from the military to the nonmilitary competition, in which he believed the Soviet Union was gaining the upper hand.
Concerning reductions of Soviet troops and armaments, however, Brezhnev nevertheless announced that "unfortunately the situation is such that we cannot yet do it." The PCC members, with the usual exception of Romania, reaffirmed their commitment to the further institutionalization of the Warsaw Pact as agreed at their March 1969 meeting, although they did not make any progress in that direction.
Vojtech Mastny
