A New Security System for the "Common European Home" and Soviet Access to Western Technology

Muskingum College ^ | J. Ransom Clarke

[Askel5]

Excerpted from ...

The Literature of Intelligence:
A Bibliography of Materials,
with Essays, Reviews, and Comments

J. Ransom Clark
Vice President for Administration
Muskingum College

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The Common European Home

The slogan of the "Common European Home" was actually put forward as early as November 23, 1981 by CPSU General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev in a speech in Bonn, West Germany. Mikhail Gorbachev made it a key principle of Soviet foreign policy in a major speech in Prague in April 1986. As with many of the slogans of "new thinking," the details of what the Soviets understood the "Common European Home" to mean were not explicitly stated. Nevertheless, it was an appealing, catchy slogan that quickly became an integral part of international discourse during the "post-Cold War" era.

In an article in the August 27, 1988 issue of Austria's Volksstimme newspaper, senior Gorbachev advisor Vadim Zagladin explained how the Soviets envisioned the "Common European Home" evolving. He stated:

Our concept of the "common European home" is an attempt to advance even further on the basis of [the CSCE] Helsinki [process]. This concept envisages the following final goals:

- In the military sphere: the establishment of firm, concrete guarantees for peace on the continent, including the elimination of the existing asymmetries in armaments, arms reduction, and the elimination of the nuclear threat.

- In politics: deepening equal and constructive cooperation and completely solving all upcoming problems at, the negotiating table for the mutual benefit of all European states and peoples.

- In the economy: the establishment of a common European mechanism that permits all European countries - without violating the interests of any country or any integrated group - to draw maximum benefit from equal cooperation, both among themselves and among the economic groups on the continent.

- In culture: the establishment of a mechanism of cooperation that permits us to more deeply recognize, appreciate, and enrich our common cultural heritage.

- In the humanitarian sphere: the establishment of structures that make it possible not only to solve the developing humanitarian problems on a mutually acceptable basis, but also to guarantee real trust among the people and the working out and confirmation of a way of thinking conducive to all-European demilitarization, substituting the partner image for the enemy image even though the partner may have views different from one's own.

The Soviets sought to make the multilateral CSCE forum the concrete foundation of the "Common European Home," in the process downgrading the importance of institutions such as NATO (which, after all, operated on the premise of the maligned "enemy image"), the European Community (which did not allow equal access for all "European countries," i.e., the then-Soviet bloc), and CoCom, the Coordinating Committee of industrial countries in charge of limiting the export of militarily significant Western technology to the Soviet bloc, which violated the principle of equal cooperation for all European countries. An article in issue number 9 of New Times in 1990 declared that CoCom "interferes with the laying of a good foundation for the Common European Home."

The "Common European Home" slogan, by its very nature, implicitly excluded the United States and Canada. On the "state-to-state" level, the Soviets denied this, and stressed that the U.S. and Canada would be welcome to join all-European organizations. But in the non-state-to-state sphere of mass communications and perceptions, Soviet propagandists were well aware that championing the concept of the "Common European Home" would naturally tend to encourage feeling of European separateness from the United States and Canada. In this way, the traditional Soviet goal of splitting the NATO alliance was pursued by conciliatory, political means, rather than the confrontational, military methods of the Cold War.

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A New Security System in Europe

In the June 4, 1990 issue of Time magazine, Gorbachev sketched out a bold new vision of a world without military alliances, such as NATO. He stated:

My own vision comes down to this: not only should military confrontation between the alliances come to an end, but alliance-based coexistence should become a thing of the past. ...Politically, we are already entering a new phase that should be characterized by the establishment of permanent security structures instead of NATO and the Warsaw Treaty Organization.

By this time, of course, the Warsaw Pact had ceased to exist as an instrument of Soviet policy, so Gorbachev had little to lose by proposing its dissolution. In contrast, he had much to gain by suggesting that NATO be scrapped.

As a substitute for NATO, one Soviet front group publication that the CSCE become the embryo of a new security system for Europe, rather than existing Western structures such as NATO or the West European Union. An article in the June 1990 issue of Peace Courier, the publication of the Soviet-controlled World Peace Council, stated, "The CSCE is the body which should develop the new security structure in Europe, while the existing military alliances should be allowed to wither away." In another variant, two Soviet generals suggested, in the October 1990 issue of Mezhdunarodnaya Zhizn, "a re-forming of NATO and the Warsaw Pact (while it still legally exists) from military-political blocs into a single Common European Security Alliance."

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Technology Sharing

Soviet leaders also sought to use the conciliatory techniques of "new political thinking" to gain access to Western technology, especially militarily-relevant technology. In October 1991, just before he was reappointed Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze suggested in the Soviet weekly New Times (issue number 40, 1991) that the United States share with the USSR the technology it had developed for the Strategic Defense Initiative, ostensibly for the purpose of improving "early warning of natural calamities" and other benign, "all-human" purposes. Shevardnadze wrote:

We are no longer adversaries. We have exchanged statements to this effect. ...Who is going to object that to the fact that the superpowers share the common interest of preventing terrorist attacks against them coming from a third party? That means that we can and must cooperate, share technologies and scientific achievements.

...SDI elements can be used for the solution of such global problems as ecological monitoring, early warning of natural calamities, and an effective navigation system.

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