December 29, 2006
Gerald Ford and Eastern Europe II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:45 PM EST On Wednesday, after watching the coverage of Gerald Ford’s death, Josh Zeitz posted about Ford’s once-notorious remark in his 1976 debate with Jimmy Carter, when Ford stated, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” This remark was seen at the time, and since, as idiotic, and is generally thought to have been one of the factors that cost Ford a very close election. Josh seeks to rehabilitate this remark, pointing out that given a chance to clarify it, Ford asserted that “I don’t believe . . . that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. Each of these countries is independent, autonomous, it has its own territorial integrity, and the United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.” Josh asks, “Was Ford wrong? Not necessarily. . . . Romania’s leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, maintained a stubborn independence of Moscow. Under Ceausescu, Romania was the only Warsaw Pact nation to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel after the Six Day War and to criticize the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Similarly, under the leadership of Marshal Tito, Yugoslavia effectively maintained a neutral stance during the Cold War. . . . I know less about Poland. . . . But I imagine Ford had something specific in mind when he singled out Warsaw for its independence of the Kremlin.” Josh generously defers to what he takes to be my more specialized training in Eastern European history, and asks what Ford might have been thinking about in the Polish case. The short answer is, I can’t imagine. Communist Poland was a case of despotism tempered by riot, but the degree to which riot tempered despotism was unpredictable and always limited. There had been substantial riots in 1956 and 1970, crushed by military and paramilitary force, but also leading to some softening of Communist rule. Following the 1970 riots, in which the Army and militia killed at least 40 people and wounded another thousand or so, the Polish Communist leader Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had risen to power as a response to the riots of 1956, fell in his turn. The Soviet Union is thought to have vetoed his replacement by what it apparently took to be the excessive nationalism of the peculiarly anti-Semitic Mieczyslaw Moczar; in the event, Edward Gierek got the job. Signatories of the Warsaw Pact had pledged not to interfere in any Pact member’s internal affairs and to respect one another’s sovereignty and independence, but Hungary and Czechoslovakia were also members of the Pact; those provisions of the Pact were garbage. So it seems absolutely right to say that the Soviet Union dominated Poland, as well as East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. There were unclear but real limits to permissible change; if you went too far, you risked invasion, “invited” by a political rival of the reforming leadership so in theory not a violation of the Warsaw Pact. The perceived certainty of this response encouraged local Communists to use force against reformers or revolutionaries; they could claim that they were avoiding the greater savagery of a Soviet invasion, as in Hungary in 1956 and to a much lesser extent in East Germany in 1953. This is what happened in Poland in 1981, when Wojciech Jaruzelski used the Army against Solidarity: Jaruzelski claimed he was avoiding a Soviet invasion, but some evidence suggests that Jaruzelski was refused the use of the Soviet troops that he had himself requested. Still, the Soviets clearly dominated Poland, and the Red Army was the final guarantor of Communist power in all Warsaw Pact states. It seems absurd to think that Brezhnev, unwilling to see Communism overthrown in Afghanistan, would have allowed that outcome in Poland. What about Ceausescu’s Romania? Ceausescu, like his predecessor Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, had been opposed to Soviet control because he did not want to de-Stalinize. Romanian autonomy in foreign policy may have been tolerated because Romanian domestic arrangements, which were extremely repressive by European Communists standards, were no threat to the legitimacy of Communist rule in any other Warsaw Pact state. Had Romania coupled democratization to occasional and rather modest provocations in foreign policy, my guess is that Moscow would have intervened quite violently. Tito’s Yugoslavia was a genuinely different case. Tito’s Communists had come to power both on the backs of Russian tanks, and as a result a partisan campaign, waged by forces that by the end of the war may have amounted to 800,000 combatants. When the Red Army withdrew, Tito’s own army was sufficient to maintain control of the country, which they did, killing what may have amounted to a couple of hundred thousand opponents in the process. After his rift with Stalin in 1948, Tito’s Yugoslavia was a truly independent state, although no one was sure its independence would survive Tito’s death; in the 1960s and 1970s, NATO frequently modeled World War III as an outcome of a Yugoslavian succession crisis, with Warsaw Pact forces called in by one of the contenders for power. Tito’s independence had several causes, the most important being Tito’s command of a real and victorious army, but another probable cause being a border with a NATO state, and a coast along which military reinforcements could have landed. So on balance, Ford’s remarks in that 1976 debate were nonsense. Whether the United States conceded it or not, most European Communists states were under Soviet domination. So why did Ford make that absurd remark? Partly, I think, because he had signed the Helsinki Accords, which for the first time acknowledged Soviet postwar territorial gains in Europe, and which were widely taken to acknowledge the permanence of Soviet control of the Warsaw Pact satellites, and to grant that control a degree of legitimacy. The Helsinki Accords were criticized by Americans from both the left and the right. No one then realized how great a contribution the civil rights provisions of Helsinki would make to the erosion of Soviet rule. Détente—the easing of tensions with the Communist world—may have been a prudent policy, but lower tensions achieved at the price of people’s hopes for liberty grated a bit on many Americans, and not least on voters with relatives in Warsaw Pact states. So Ford did what most Kissingerian “realists” do when called upon to acknowledge some of the uglier parts of their creed in public. He lied. In his defense, I freely acknowledge that he may have been lying to himself, along with the rest of us; he was in that respect a much more decent man than most Kissingerian “realists” tend to be. One lesson of this is that Americans do not consistently like Kissingerian “realism,” and they can exact an electoral price when politicians too nakedly endorse such a doctrine. We have what is often mocked or otherwise stigmatized as a Wilsonian streak, or some other sort of local idealism, which comes and goes, and when it comes a cropper, we get sour about its advocates and skeptical about their motives. This may be such a moment. On the other hand, when that idealism shows up and doesn’t come a cropper, it can do things like destroy slavery, or defend the independence of China in the face of savage Japanese militarism, or set up a democracy in Japan, or put our cities at risk to maintain democracy in Western Europe, and we are periodically proud of such achievements. John Quincy Adams memorably declared that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” which is usually true but not always, and even when it is true, Americans can be uneasy about the uglier implications of that doctrine. We can be particularly uneasy about people who will not call monsters by their proper name.
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