Warsaw Pact

File:Warsaw Pact seal.png

Unofficial Seal of the Warsaw Pact

Distinguish from the Warsaw Convention, which is an agreement among airlines about financial liability.

The Warsaw Pact or Warsaw Treaty, officially named the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance, was a military organization of Central and Eastern European Communist states. It was established in 1955 to counter the perceived threat from the NATO alliance (which had been established in 1949). The creation of the Warsaw Pact was prompted by the integration of a "re-militarized" West Germany into NATO via ratification of the Paris Agreements. The Pact lasted throughout the Cold War until, following the collapse of Communist states in Europe and political changes in the Soviet Union, countries began withdrawing in 1991. The Warsaw Pact was officially dissolved in July 1991.

Members

Former Members of Warsaw Pact

• Soviet Union
• Albania (withdrew its support in 1962 over ideological differences, formally left in 1968)
• Bulgaria
• Czechoslovakia
• East Germany (joined in 1956; left in October 1990)
• Hungary
• Poland
• Romania

All the Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe were signatories except Yugoslavia. The members of the Warsaw Pact pledged to defend each other if one or more of the members were attacked. The treaty also stated that relations among the signatories were based on mutual noninterference in internal affairs and respect for national sovereignty and independence. The noninterference rule would later be de-facto violated with the interventions in Hungary (Hungarian Revolution, 1956) and Czechoslovakia (Prague Spring, 1968). In both cases however the intervening forces claimed to have been invited, and thus the rules were not considered formally violated.

Albania stopped supporting the alliance in 1961 as a result of the Sino-Soviet split in which the hard-line Stalinist regime in Albania sided with the People's Republic of China, and officially withdrew from the pact in 1968.

In East Berlin on 24th Sep 1990, East Germany signed a treaty with the Soviet Union that East Germany's membership would end on 3rd Oct 1990 (i.e., the date of German reunification).

History

During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the government, led by Prime Minister Imre Nagy, announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. In response, Soviet troops entered Hungary, and crushed the uprising in two weeks, using the Warsaw Pact as a justification. No other Warsaw Pact countries participated in the military intervention.

Warsaw Pact forces were utilised at times, such as during the 1968 Prague Spring, when they invaded Czechoslovakia to overthrow the reform movement that was being led by Alexander Dubček's government.

Lieutenant General Vaclav Prchlik had already denounced the Warsaw Pact in a televised news conference as an unequal alliance and declared that the Czechoslovak Army was prepared to defend the country's sovereignty by force, if necessary. On August 20, 1968, a force consisting of 23 Soviet Army divisions entered Czechoslovakia. Taking part in the invasion were also one Hungarian, two East German and two Polish divisions along with one Bulgarian brigade. Romania refused to contribute troops.

This intervention was explained by the Brezhnev Doctrine, which stated "When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries." Implicit in this doctrine was that the leadership of the Soviet Union reserved to itself the right to define "socialism" and "capitalism". Thus, "socialism" was defined according to the Soviet model, and anything significantly different from this model was considered to be a step towards capitalism.

After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Albania protested by formally leaving the Warsaw Pact, although it had stopped supporting the Pact as early as 1962. The Romanian leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu denounced the invasion as a violation of both international law and of the Warsaw Pact's principle of mutual non-interference in internal affairs, saying that collective self-defense against external aggression was the only valid mission of the Warsaw Pact.

NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries never engaged each other in armed conflict, but fought the Cold War for more than 35 years often through 'proxy wars'. In December 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev, then leader of the Soviet Union, proposed the so-called Sinatra Doctrine which stated that the Brezhnev Doctrine would be abandoned and that the Soviet Union's European allies could do as they wished. Soon thereafter, a series of political changes swept across Central and Eastern Europe, leading to the end of European Communist states.

Ironically there are many examples of soldiers of the Warsaw Pact serving alongside NATO soldiers on operational deployments under the auspices of the United Nations, for example Canadian and Polish soldiers both served on the UNEFME (United Nations Emergency Force, Middle East - also known as UNEF II) mission, and Polish and Canadian troops also served together in Vietnam on the International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS).

One historical curiosity is that after German reunification in October 1990, the new united Germany was a member of NATO (East Germany's Warsaw Pact membership ended with reunificaton), but had Soviet troops stationed in its eastern territory nevertheless.

After 1989, the new governments in Central and Eastern Europe were much less supportive of the Warsaw Pact, and in January 1991 Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland announced that they would withdraw all support by July 1st that year. Bulgaria followed suit in February, and it became clear that the Pact was effectively dead. The Warsaw Pact was officially dissolved at a meeting in Prague on July 1st, 1991. (See also Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe)

Post-Warsaw Pact

On 12 March, 1999, former Warsaw Pact members and successor states Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joined NATO. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia followed suit in March 2004.

On May 1st, 2004, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia became members of the European Union. This group is followed in 2007 by Romania and Bulgaria.

In November 2005 Poland decided to make its military archives of the Warsaw Pact publicly available through Institute of National Remembrance. About 1,300 documents were declassified in January 2006 and the remaining (about 100) documents are being evaluated for future declassification by a historical commission.

See also: Collective Security Treaty Organization and Shanghai Cooperation Organization

References

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  - The Warsaw Pact
• Modern History Sourcebook: The Warsaw Pact - *Parallel History Project: NATO and the Warsaw Pact documents