BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Warsaw Pact, or Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO), was a military alliance of seven Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union designed as a counterweight to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance with the goal of the collective defense of Eastern Europe. The text of the treaty, drafted by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, was signed in Warsaw on 14 May 1955. Members of the Warsaw Pact alliance included the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, that is, all communist countries of Eastern Europe with the exception of Yugoslavia. In the eleven articles of the treaty, the contracting parties agreed to seek peaceful solutions to international disputes and to cooperate with other states in all international actions (Articles 1 and 2); to consult with one another on all international issues affecting their common interests and defend each other if one or more of the member states were attacked (Articles 3 and 4); to establish a joint command and a political consultative committee or PCC (Articles 5 and 6). Moreover, member-states pledged to refrain from joining alliances and agreements whose objectives were in conflict with the Warsaw Pact and to allow for the accession of other states regardless of their social and political systems.
The Warsaw Pact was formed in response to the remilitarization and incorporation of West Germany into NATO on 9 May 1955. Prior to the formation of Warsaw Pact, bilateral agreements on mutual aid existed between the Soviet Union and its allies while the unity of the bloc depended primarily on the personal power and informal instruments of control exercised by Stalin. Forming the alliance that reasserted the unity of the bloc and made equal status of Eastern European states visible indicated Soviet adjustments to the politics of détente. The Warsaw Pact existed primarily on paper until the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the first demonstration of the collective military power in joint military exercises that year. By 1979, seventy-one Warsaw Pact military maneuvers took place.
The Warsaw Pact served to strengthen Soviet military and political domination of Eastern Europe by providing legal justification for the stationing of Soviet troops in the region and imposing constraints on independent foreign policy on the part of Eastern European states. Member states fell into two main categories determined, to a large extent, by their geographical location. As a treaty protecting Eastern Europe from potential German aggression and territorial revisionism of post-1945 borders, the Warsaw Pact served vital interests of the Northern Tier countries of the Soviet Bloc: Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, the so-called Iron Triangle or the core of the alliance. The Southern Tier members, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary, located farther away from Germany, had less interest in protection from potential German aggression. At the same time, the Soviet Union was less concerned about South-Eastern Europe because of its less important strategic location and the mountainous terrain difficult for a successful military penetration by the West.
Although controlled by the Soviets, member states of the Warsaw Pact sought to assert their goals and interests. The first challenge to the Soviet system of alliance came as early as 1956 with destalinization and the reform movement in Hungary led by Imre Nagy. His withdrawal of Hungary from the Warsaw Pact prompted the Soviet invasion, a clear violation of the treaty text providing for peaceful settlements to international disputes. Although no collective consultation among the Warsaw Pact member states took place, the military intervention in Hungary was later depicted by Soviets as an action to save socialism on behalf of the Warsaw Pact. The intervention strengthened the role of the Warsaw Pact as a safeguard for internal construction of socialist systems in Eastern Europe. Twelve years later, on the night of 20–21 August 1968, Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia to crush a reform movement, known as the Prague Spring, within the Czech CommunistParty led by Alexander Dubček. This was the only collective military action on the part of the Warsaw Pact, in which 80,000 troops from Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany joined a force of about 400,000 Soviet soldiers. The invasion resulted in the Brezhnev Doctrine, which stated that any challenge to socialism on the part of an Eastern European country would be considered as an attack on the Warsaw Pact thus initiating Soviet military response.
The two successful challenges to the Warsaw Pact came from Albania and Romania, both Southern Tier states controlled by staunchly Stalinist regimes. In 1961, resisting Soviet-led destalinization and détente, Albania informally withdrew from the Warsaw Pact (formal withdrawal took place in 1968). This caused the Soviet Union and its allies to denounce Albanian leaders, impose economic sanctions, and break diplomatic relations with Albania. Starting in 1963, the Romanian regime put similar resistance against Soviet domination by leading increasingly independent foreign policy, establishing diplomatic relations with West Germany in 1967, and condemning the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. By 1970 the Warsaw Pact evolved to include greater participation of Eastern European members in Political Consultative Committee meetings while at the same time solidifying the Soviet leadership by appointing Soviet officers to nearly all bureaucratic posts within the alliance and putting Eastern European troops under direct Soviet control in time of war.
The Warsaw Pact underwent significant evolution during the 1980s. First, the alliance abstained from military response to the wave of strikes and the emergence of the Solidarity free trade unions in 1980–1981 in Poland, a movement that directly challenged the system and the unity of the SovietBloc. Refraining from military action indicated a suspension if not abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine on the part of the Soviet Union. Instead, the Solidarity movement was suppressed internally through the imposition of the martial law by Polish military forces on 13 December 1981. Second, in 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union at the time, proclaimed the Sinatra Doctrine, which renounced Soviet interference in Eastern European affairs and recognized the rights of other states to determine their economic and political systems. This move helped facilitate the collapse of communist regimes and Soviet control throughout the region. The Warsaw Pact was officially dissolved at a meeting in Prague in July 1991. By 1999 former Warsaw Pact members Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO, followed by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004.
See alsoDubček, Alexander; Eastern Bloc; Nagy, Imre; NATO; Soviet Union.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass., 1967.
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Clawson, Robert W., and Lawrence S. Kaplan, eds. The Warsaw Pact: Political Purpose and Military Means. Wilmington, Del., 1982.
Eyal, Jonathan, ed. The Warsaw Pact and the Balkans: Moscow's Southern Flank. New York, 1989.
Holloway, David, and Jane M. O. Sharp, eds. The Warsaw Pact: Alliance in Transition? Ithaca, N.Y., 1984.
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Mackintosh, Malcolm. The Evolution of the Warsaw Pact. London, 1969.
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Malgorzata Fidelis
Encyclopedia of Modern Europe: Europe Since 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction
