Carles Pérez-Desoy Fages
Diplomatic Law Professor
On December 26, 1991, half an hour after Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation speech as president of the Soviet Union, the red flag with the hammer and sickle was definitely lowered from the dome of the Kremlin. It is a historical moment of extraordinary drama, in which some have placed the effective end of the “Short Twentieth Century” and which can be easily relived on Youtube.
It should not be forgotten that the implosion of the USSR was preceded by the fall of the Warsaw Pact, made up, on the basis of the Yalta agreements, of the countries of Eastern Europe which had been occupied by the Red Army in 1945 and which constituted the so-called Soviet glacis, a concept coined by Soviet military doctrine to define a buffer or security zone. The future of the glacis, and most particularly the question of German reunification, was the subject of all kinds of hazy speculation during the Cold War. Shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, a dim-witted Mitterrand had said that German reunification was not a matter of years but of decades. An anecdote that illustrates well the unexpectedness of the Soviet collapse.
The keystone of that seemingly invulnerable Soviet empire was the so-called Brezhnev doctrine – after the name of the Soviet leader of the time – or the doctrine of the limited sovereignty of the Warsaw Pact countries, coined in blood and fire by the Red Army in Budapest in 1956 and in Prague in 1968. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by the Czech writer Milan Kundera or the melancholic film Cold War by Pawel Pawlikowski reflect well that dramatic moment in history when geopolitics weighed like a slab on people’s lives.
In the end, the Soviet glacis finally collapsed due to the unexpected replacement of the Brezhnev Doctrine by the Sinatra Doctrine, formulated in 1989 by the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs Eduard Shevarnadze in allusion to Frank Sinatra’s well-known song “My Way”. And also, as has been written, and repeatedly recalled by Vladimir Putin, because of President Bush (senior)’s promise to Gorbachev -later unfulfilled- that, in exchange for allowing the reunification of Germany, NATO would not expand beyond German territory.
Thirty years later, the Brezhnev doctrine, although nobody mentions it, is once again topical. The song is different, but the melody, as is often the case with history, is the same. And for the first time since the end of the Cold War, in the international press, but also in Washington and Moscow, there is open talk of the possibility of direct intervention by the two powers because of the situation in Ukraine.
What has happened to bring the crisis to the point of explosiveness to which it seems to have reached?
A few days ago, the Italian-based analysis group Geopoliticalcenter published an editorial in which it stated that Moscow, obsessed by what it considers to be Washington and NATO’s maneuvers to reduce Russia to the rank of a regional power without the right to a sphere of influence or a security zone, perceives Ukraine as an unsinkable aircraft carrier just a stone’s throw from its border.
Beyond the more or less subjective assessments that may be made from Washington or Moscow, it is a historical fact that during the Cold War the concepts of sphere of influence and security zone served to guarantee stability and the balance of power among the nuclear powers and, as the Geopoliticalcenter editorial reminds us, “any attempt to significantly erode these elements has always led to extreme situations, if not imminent war”, with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 as the most notorious example.
In 1979 in her book L’empire éclaté, the French historian Hélène Carrère d’Encausse predicted the fall of the USSR as a consequence of the problem of nationalities, which none of the Kremlinologist experts were able to see at the time. But unfortunately such predictions are infrequent. There are no crystal balls to predict the future in international politics, nor, as far as we know, in other areas of life.
But everything seems to indicate that, beyond the political and diplomatic pyrotechnics we are seeing these days, as well as the media smoke that inevitably hinders analysis, the ghost of Leonidas Brezhnev – Ukrainian, by the way – and the old doctrine of limited sovereignty seems to hover over the trenches. And, in this regard, it is worth not forgetting the planned NATO summit to be held in Madrid in 2022, where the strategic future of the organization will be discussed. An important debate that Moscow undoubtedly aspires to condition, which could explain to a large extent all this war rhetoric.
© This article was originally published in Diari de Girona / All rights reserved.
