Word: bucharest
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...problems. The U.N. Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972, was marred by Third World claims that the rich nations, having gained their wealth by polluting the environment, now wanted to curb pollution and thus keep the nonaligned poor. The 1974 World Population Conference in Bucharest ran into a similar problem. China, which has one of the world's most comprehensive birth-control programs as well as its largest population (more than 800 million), charged that overpopulation was not a real concern for the poor countries. The issue, lectured the Chinese, was the draining away...
Those two sardonic comments, overheard by a Western official, summarize the undercurrent of apprehension inside the Rumanian and Yugoslav governments in the wake of the Helsinki agreement. Both fear that the Soviet Union may be tempted to increase its pressure on Bucharest and Belgrade to forswear or curtail their independent ways...
Every Turn. During the 22 months of negotiations that preceded Helsinki, diplomats from Bucharest and Belgrade tried at every turn to gain guarantees against outside interference in their internal affairs. The thrust of their efforts was to seek a repudiation of the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, which Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev proclaimed after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. It asserts that the Soviet Union has the right to come to the assistance of any fraternal country where socialism is endangered...
Though Moscow had hoped to hold a European Communist summit conference within the next few months, the meeting has been postponed until next year-largely because the Rumanians and Yugoslavs have defied Soviet attempts to hammer out a unified European Communist position on China. Both Bucharest and Belgrade have been cultivating their relations with Peking. Recently, Yugoslavia has even improved its traditionally hostile relations with neighboring Albania, Peking's surrogate in Europe (and the only European state that boycotted the Soviets' cherished Security Conference). Both Yugoslavia and Rumania pressed hard -and successfully-for a visit from President Ford...
...reasons are varied. For one thing, many Americans paid little attention to the rhetoric and ceremony at Helsinki or the crowds that cheered Ford as he joined in an impromptu folk dance in Bucharest. Residents of Los Angeles were more concerned over their inept baseball Dodgers. No speech in Helsinki could have distracted New Yorkers from grumbling about the city's financial crisis. Where there was a response, it seemed small and partisan. In Cleveland, only about a fifth of the crowds at the city's annual All Nations Festival gathered to hear Dr. Michael Pap, director...