The project below is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) as part of the VENI-scheme (1 October 2017 - 30 September 2021).

The multilateralization of European Security

Conducting the Cold War through the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (1972-90) 

In the wake of the crisis in Ukraine and the Russian annexation of Crimea ‘the question of war and peace has returned to our continent’, as several foreign ministers recently emphasized. With a ‘new Cold War’ seemingly in the offing, they appealed to salvage European security through multilateral, Pan-European diplomacy. This idea is far from new. During the second half of the Cold War there was a diplomatic process of all European countries, the US and Canada, which served exactly that purpose. This project aims to examine how the so-called ‘Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe’ (CSCE) contributed to a peaceful conduct of the Cold War and its conclusion. Researching archives on bothsides of the former Iron Curtain, I will trace the role of the CSCE in establishing a multilateral and continuous political dialogue, and thus bridging the Cold War divide throughout its existence (1972-90).

As a cooperative process between rivalling parties, rather than an organization of likeminded countries, the CSCE is a fascinating case of multilateral diplomacy. The joint effort of thirty-five countries to explore common notions of European security and cooperation during two decades of international tensions is unique. My investigation is based on the working hypothesis that the CSCE thus led to the ‘multilateralization of European security’, as I call it, and as such transcended the East-West antagonism. Through a comparative historical analysis of the practices of the participating countries, I will analyze how the ‘multilateralization of European security’ contributed to overcoming the Cold War divide. A further investigation into this process from a long-term, Pan-European, and pericentric perspective serves both scholarship and society. My findings will not only shed a new light on the CSCE as a historical process. They can also teach us how to resolve international tensions through multilateralizing European security today. 

The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered: Inquiries into the Evolution of an Underestimated Alliance (1960-1969)

NB: This was the topic of my PhD research, which I completed in late 2013. I received my doctorate with distinction (cum laude) in January 2014.

Empirical evidence suggests that the widely held assumption within historiography of the Warsaw Pact (WP) as a mere Soviet instrument is a misconception. Faced with several crises in the early sixties, such as the Sino-Soviet Split and the second Berlin-Crisis, the WP evolved into a body of multilateral consultation, in which the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact (NSWP) members not only obtained increasing leeway, but also managed to exercise leverage over the Soviet Union, which served the WP’s consolidation into a genuine alliance. I therefore question to what extent the WP inadvertently developed a new dynamics in the sixties, which caused the multilateralisation of the alliance at large and the emancipation of some NSWP countries.

The hiatus in historiography that I intend to address is both empirical, since (multi-archival) primary research on the WP is conspicuous in its absence, and conceptual, since the alliance tends to be analysed from the perspective of the Soviet Union, or, at most, at a bilateral level, instead of the multilateral NSWP angle. In empirical terms, most of the research on the WP itself dates from the early eighties and has become obsolete after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, since it was based on little, if any, primary evidence. Its emphasis on Soviet hegemony and the WP as the Soviet Union’s ‘transmission belt’ has nevertheless prevailed in current historiography. In conceptual terms, I aim to straddle the current divide in historiography between the monographs which focus on the development of the Cold War or the Soviet bloc, but fail to pay any explicit attention to the WP, and the books (mostly collections of articles) on the WP, which tend to treat its existence in isolation, while separating it from the broader context of the Cold War. This new angle is particularly overdue, since there is a sharp asymmetry between the scant study of the role of the SU’s Eastern-European allies in the WP and the amount of recent research on the influence of America’s Western-European allies in NATO. This thesis therefore also serves to shed a new light on the dynamics of alliances in general, which is particularly relevant at a time when alliances such as NATO face internal challenges.

My findings are based on extensive multi-archival research. I have chosen to focus on the archives in Bucharest and Berlin, in which I have already done extensive archival research, since they represent two extreme ends of the NSWP-spectrum. Moreover, both party leaderships had a particularly great stake in the dynamics of the WP in the sixties (recognition of the GDR and the assertion of Romanian ‘independence’ respectively). in addition I shall also conduct archival research in the Fondazione Gramsci of the Italian Communist Party in Rome, in order to provide an intra-communist, but extra-WP perspective, which is thus more objective.