Word: helsinki
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Amid glowing pledges to promote ''better relations among nations," 35 heads of government* gathered in the capital of Finland one year ago this week to sign a document that a small army of negotiators had taken two years to prepare. Today the vaunted Helsinki agreement remains what it was from the start: more ceremony than substance. There has been so little improvement in East-West relations that can be credited to the accord that the spirit of Helsinki has become increasingly dispirited...
...anniversary is being observed enthusiastically enough in the Soviet Union, which is celebrating the occasion with special television programs, endless newspaper articles and the publication of a book. After all, the Russians were the original sponsors of Helsinki, and their dominance of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, a fact for more than a generation, was legitimized by the accord. This kind of quasi-juridical sanction had long been a major goal of Kremlin foreign policy...
...where President Ford has banned the word detente from his political year lexicon, the anniversary is being all but ignored. One reason is that some of NATO's initial hesitations have been justified: the gains of Communists in Southern Europe are partly attributable to the post-Helsinki mood, in which the threat of international Communism has appeared to be further diminished. Yet the West's main fear, that a Helsinki-inspired euphoria would lead to sharp cutbacks in defense spending by NATO nations, seems so far to have been unfounded...
After a period of petulance over criticism of its record on human rights, Moscow early this year switched to a policy of visible compliance with Helsinki through what are known in diplomatic parlance as "small steps," such as eased travel restrictions on foreign newsmen and inviting Western observers to Soviet military exercises. More recently, the Soviets have been marking time on new Helsinki initiatives of their own, while rapping Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, which broadcast into Russia and Eastern Europe, and Washington's public opposition to Communist participation in Western European governments, as violations of the Helsinki...
That reflects what many regard as the Helsinki accord's main value: as a yardstick for measuring East-West relations, and thus part of the process of refining them. The accord's clearest failing has been its inability to bring East and West any closer to reducing or limiting their levels of armaments. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, for example, have been almost completely deadlocked since President Gerald Ford and Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev met at Vladivostock in November 1974. There also has been little progress in the three-year-old Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR...