Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

On question number one, the USSR wagered on a body known as the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), to be renamed the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 1995. A child of the ephemeral East–West detente of the mid-1970s, it functioned as a roundtable for members of both alliances and Europe’s neutral countries. At a CSCE summit in Paris in November 1990, 32 nations initialled a Charter of Paris for a New Europe, saluting as their target the ‘Europe whole and free’ first hailed by Bush in 1989.[13] Soviet delegates talked up the CSCE as a replacement for both the Warsaw Pact and NATO. But it was an informal grouping with a tiny staff and budget; it had no collective security mission or integrated military command; and it operated only by consensus. Unlike in NATO, which also has a consensus rule, there was no tradition of deferring to US preferences, which devalued the CSCE in the eyes of the Americans. The CSCE, as Baker summed it up, was ‘an extremely unwieldy and frustrating organization’ whose bylaws ‘give the smaller states of Europe veto power over issues far beyond their standing’.[14]

In another tack, Gorbachev, in several pronouncements after he disowned the Brezhnev Doctrine, advocated the ‘Finlandisation’ of East Central Europe. Post-1945 Finland was neutral in foreign affairs, traded extensively with the Soviet Union and was self-governing in its domestic affairs. Gorbachev lauded Finlandisation during a visit to Helsinki in October 1989: ‘To me, Finland is a model of relations between a big country and a small country, a model of relations between states with different social systems, a model of relations between neighbours.’[15] The former US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, weighed in on Gorbachev’s side. ‘In the long run’, he asked in an op-ed, ‘aren’t arrangements in Finland more useful to Soviet security than those in Eastern Europe? Is it possible to devise arrangements that would give the Soviets security guarantees (widely defined) while permitting the peoples of Eastern Europe to choose their own political future?’[16]

Neither recipe could have been implemented unrevised. For the CSCE to be the linchpin, it would have had to be boosted administratively and financially. At some point, it would have had to displace NATO and the EC as the primary regional organisation for collective security and economic integration. As long as the much heartier NATO and EC continued to function at their previous level and did not face challenges to their raison d’être, the West would have little incentive to empower an alternative body, particularly one where the heir to its long-time adversary had an equal say. Many regarded Finlandisation as tarnished by its power asymmetries, and Finnish–Soviet relations since 1945 had fluctuated over time; Finlandisation was not one prototype but several.[17] A more relevant precedent may have been ‘Austrianisation’, harkening back to the imposition of neutrality on post-war Austria by great-power dictate in 1955. It was missing from the conversation, other than a succinct reference by Kissinger in June 1990.[18]

The 22 NATO and Warsaw Pact states in November 1990 signed a Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), delineating ceilings for armaments for what were still the two blocs, and created an inspection and verification regime to build confidence and reinforce stability. A follow-up at Helsinki in 1992 set limits on military personnel. Other than the CFE, which was about hardware and manpower and not about how or against whom they were to be used, no all-encompassing security framework for Europe was given serious consideration in the twilight of the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact, the ‘socialist community’ that it shielded having melted away, voted to disband in February 1991; COMECON followed suit that June. The Western duo of NATO and the EC was now the only game in town.