JEFFREY HERF
123
Polish parliament
£Tee
to debate foreign and defense policy offers the oppor–
tunity for ending the asymmetrical pressures on democratic and dictatorial
regimes of the postwar era. Public debate, an inquiring press, governments
accountable to parliaments mean that the Polish and Hungarian governments
will
have to justifY their policies at home, and that the Soviet Union will have
to be accountable to its alliance partners in Europe. We do not come to
Cracow to call for apocalyptic and pointless gestures about dissolving the
blocs. But the normalization of public debate over your own foreign and
defense policies would be a most welcome change from the postwar system.
The character of regimes, more than weapon systems alone, is decisive in
how states relate to one another.
The strictly geopolitical approach is too narrow.
It
cannot adapt to po–
litical change. FOl-ty-five years ago, it would have been hard to imagine a
democratic West Germany, not to mention a democratic Italy, Portugal, and
Spain. In
1945,
who would have predicted that France and West Germany
would be the closest of allies, or West German
Ostpolitik?
More freedom and
democratization in Poland and Eastern Europe, and in the Soviet Union,
should they continue, can be a stabilizing factor for peace in Europe because it
increases trust between states. How, for example, can West European
democracies fully trust Warsaw Pact countries, so long as political opposition
in regard to all questions, including foreign and defense policy, is not permit–
ted? Imagine how different East-West politics might look with free elections.
functioning parliaments with effective power, a fi-ee and skeptical press, and
public opinion and public opinion polls, in East Germany, Hungary, Poland,
and the Soviet Union? lfthat were to be the case, the basic asymmetry of
regimes of the postwar peace would be surmounted. Public controversy and
debate over foreign and defense policy would take place in Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union, no less than in Western Europe and the United States.
The pressures on governments to compromise would, for the first time, be
equal. I look forward to seeing the expression on the Soviet negotiator'S face
as he or she faces critical questions from Soviet and East European journal–
ists asking why the Soviet Union is being so stubborn and unreasonable in
negotiations with the West.
1think there is a tacit understanding in the United States that deploy–
ments ofAmerican intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Western Europe
in the fall of
1983
was a turning point in postwar history. They meant the
defeat of the Breshnev-Gromyko-Andropov effort to drive the United States
out of Europe through a policy of accumulating ever more military force in
the form of the SS-20 arsenal. That defeat led the Soviet Union to reassess
its policy, and, in
1987,
to accept the famous "zero-zero" option offered by
President Reagan in November
1981
which the Russians had previously
