Стр. 22 - V

Электронное приложение к журналу «Международная жизнь»
Author : E. Osipov
Candidate of Science (History), Senior Research Associate, Institute of General History, Russian Acad-
emy of Sciences, Candidate of Science (History)
THE FIRST DAY of August of this year was the
40th anniversary of the signing of the Helsinki Final
Act, the final result of the Conference on Security
and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) which was the
central theme of the international relations of the
early and mid-1970s. That pan-European conference,
which continued for more than two years, is a forum
unparalleled in scale in postwar history and can only
be compared to the Congress of Vienna, a meeting
that was the reason for another anniversary date in the 2015 calendar - the bicentennial of its
closure was marked in June. The essence of the Helsinki process is impossible to fathom out
without analyzing the stance of France in the sixties and seventies. In that period, France took
a position different from what was advocated by the rest of Western civilization, and stood for
cooperation between the two mutually opposing blocs.
Despite the different visions of European security in Eastern Europe and France, it was obvious
that a pan-European forum would, at the end of the day, be an act promoting détente - a process
inspired by Paris.
As regards the agenda, from the very start France and the rest of the future Western participants
were in favor of not only security but also cooperation issues being raised at the conference.
Distinctively, the French vision of the cooperation part of the agenda included debates on two
separate blocks of issues - economy, on the one hand, and cultural and humanitarian contacts,
on the other.
The Americans reacted harshly to this presumed French tactic. They insisted that setting up the
commissions with their concrete mandates was a condition set by the West for the conference
to take place and could not be a bargaining chip.
The Helsinki Final Act of the CSCE, signed on August 1, 1975, became one of the most out-
standing events in 20th-century international relations. Decisions on first-and third-basket issues
were the most important and concrete achievements enshrined in it. The Act represented a
combination of Eastern and Western, largely Soviet and French, positions. Whereas the first-
basket decisions recorded the definitive recognition of the security status quo, which was what
Moscow had been pressing for, the third-basket decisions embodied, if incompletely, French
ideas of future cooperation in Europe, and, in fact, represented dynamic détente, one of the
principal objective of France's foreign policy.
One can have various assessments of the Final Act. For instance, the French political scientist,
philosopher, and journalist Raymond Aron wrote during the signing of the Final Act: "The
France and the Helsinki Final Act