XXII. Meeting of the PCC, Warsaw, 15-16 July 1988
Editorial Note 

The PCC met at the point in time when the strategic turnaround of the Gorbachev leadership was in full course yet its corrosive effects on the integrity of the Warsaw Pact had not yet become evident. The immediate task was preparation for the negotiations on the reduction of conventional forces (CFE) and the complementary negotiations on confidence-building measures (CBM), both within the framework of the CSCE talks in Vienna.

Gorbachev's speech presented a generally optimistic view of the recent changes both in the international relations and within the Warsaw Pact, with an emphasis on demilitarization of the East-West relationship. He urged building bridges to the new Bush administration as well as between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. He envisaged the latter relationship as being transformed from a source of tension to one of the foundations of European stability.

Gorbachev singled out reductions of conventional forces and armaments as the foremost priority, which was subsequently expressed in the public declaration issued by the PCC. In a sharp departure from previous Soviet policies, he perceived the need to identify the most important asymmetries between the Warsaw Pact and NATO and urged to rectify themwithin one or two years. In order to prevent a "relapse to undesirable developments," he advocated the establishment of a "Center for the Reduction of Military Threat in Europe," which would be above blocs and include neutral and nonaligned countries as well, thus constituting the first step toward the "creation, together with the West, of a structure of security and confidence."

In a discussion among the Warsaw Pact defense ministers, Marshal Iazov supported Gorbachev by dwelling on the need to present truthful figures about the size of Soviet troops and armaments, noting that the enemy in any case knew the figures down to the tens of thousands of men and thousands of tanks. He further observed that "one cannot keep anything secret anymore" since there were by now even American inspectors in Soviet armament plants.

Gorbachev stressed the importance of cooperative efforts by the Warsaw Pact countries in striving for the new European security environment the Soviet Union desired. He spoke favorably about the proposal of the Polish Sejm for a "European Reykjavik," which meant an all-European summit with US and Canadian participation that would discuss further reductions of conventional forces and armaments with the view toward increasing Western trust in the Warsaw Pact and rectifying enemy images in the public eye. For this reason, he urged the promotion of contacts between parliamentarians of the two alliances, which had already been initiated by Poland and Hungary. Among the NATO countries, he favored particularly West Germany, whose approach to nuclear weapons he described as being closer to that of the Warsaw Pact than to that of West Germany's own NATO allies.

Having grasped the linkage between security and human rights, the Soviet leader acknowledged that the latter had become a legitimate concern of the world community. He accordingly advocated talking seriously about the subject and developing humanitarian contacts in ways that would not give the West an opportunity to hamper disarmament negotiation by dwelling on human rights issues.

In exploring new functions of the alliance, Gorbachev called for intensified cooperation within the Warsaw Pact in matters concerning human rights. He expressed confidence that security would increasingly be assured by "moving from the sphere of the relationship between military potentials to the political sphere."

While not only Hungary but also Bulgaria supported the Soviet Union in approving of further concessions to Western positions on human rights, Gorbachev's optimistic views of international developments were questioned by Honecker and Ceauşescu. By then East Germany and Romania, which had traditionally been on the opposite sides on issues regarding the integrity of the Warsaw Pact, had achieved a rapprochement on grounds of common opposition to what they considered as threatening to the integrity of the alliance, in part because of Gorbachev's destabilizing new policies.

Ceauşescu harped on negative tendencies in the international development and remained skeptical about the progress of disarmament. Honecker praised the Warsaw Pact's new disarmament policy but urged stronger opposition to Western demands for changes in the communist countries' internal systems. More accurately than Gorbachev, they both perceived the threat that the new Soviet policies posed to the integrity of the alliance.

Vojtech Mastny