We All Fall Down: The Dismantling of the Warsaw Pact and the End of the Cold War in Eastern Europe

At the Madrid summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in July 1997, the sixteen allies voted to add three more: the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. In the NATO Review, the leaders of these three countries— all former Warsaw Pact members—introduced themselves to the rest of the membership two years ahead of their joining. Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski heralded the alliance “overriding the divisions at Yalta” that had split Europe. He stressed Poland's commitment to playing a critical role in the European security order, the shared values between NATO's current members and its newest, and the 90 percent support in his country for NATO membership.¹ His Czech counterpart, President Václav Havel, celebrated the opportunities created in 1989 for the countries of Eastern Europe to “make their own decisions.”² The Czech Republic, Havel declared, was unequivocally choosing NATO for more than just security; Prague and the other members of the alliance shared a common set of values. Hungary's foreign minister, László Kovács, also pledged Budapest's sustained contributions to European security in the future.³

NATO's eastward expansion was the culmination of a highly contingent process begun a decade earlier at the end of the Cold War.⁴ Its wisdom remains debated to this day.⁵ But the Eastern Europeans’ perspective is largely missing from debates over the end of the Cold War and the roots of NATO's expansion.⁶ The retreat of Soviet power from Eastern Europe from 1989 to 1991 is a story told almost exclusively from the perspective of architects in Moscow or onlookers in Washington. The central character is usually Mikhail Gorbachev, either because his “new thinking” led him to grant Eastern Europe its freedom—or because his mismanagement of the Soviet reform project gave him no other choice.⁷ The formalization of the Soviet withdrawal, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the role of the Pact's own non-Soviet members in bringing it down remain afterthoughts.

The superpowers were not the only ones that shaped events: the non-Soviet members of the Warsaw Pact, too, had agency.⁸ I use new archival evidence from Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania to show how policymakers east of the Iron Curtain navigated and shaped the end of the Cold War and why they made the choices they did. Across Eastern Europe, historical documents from these five former Pact members’ diplomatic, intelligence, military, and party-political repositories are now accessible, making it possible to reconstruct Eastern European diplomacy during the Cold War's denouement, a time of extraordinary change in international politics. These countries grasped what it would take to adapt and succeed in the post–Cold War world, broke out of the strictures of the Warsaw Pact after 1989, hastened its demise over Soviet objections in 1991, and moved closer to the sturdier Western institutions that they rapidly came to see as better serving their economic, security, and other needs over the course of the 1990s. By the end of the decade, most would be members of both NATO and the European Union.

This evidence challenges long-standing imperial tropes about the Warsaw Pact in the alliance politics literature.⁹ John Oneal writes off the Pact as lacking the requisite “independent, voluntary behavior” to be considered an alliance.¹⁰ Glenn Snyder also dismisses the Pact as a “cloak for [Soviet] imperial domination.”¹¹ Stephen Walt, too, explains away Moscow's relationship with the rest of the Pact as “imperial” and the alliance's other members as “under de facto Soviet control.”¹² John Lewis Gaddis similarly dismisses the Pact as “managed from Moscow, in the classic manner of old-fashioned empires. … The result was surely subservience.”¹³ But historians of the Soviet Union like Sheila Fitzpatrick have long challenged such depictions, using new materials from the Soviet archives to refute the so-called totalitarian model of absolute state control of a powerless, passive society by a monolithic, authoritarian regime in Moscow.¹⁴ These ideas apply to the Warsaw Pact as well. Historians of Eastern Europe are writing what Vojtech Mastny dubs a “new history of Cold War alliances,” demonstrating in new and unexpected ways that Eastern European states used both agency and leverage to drive alliance policy.¹⁵

Four principal themes shaped the foreign policy choices of the non-Soviet members of the Pact. First, Eastern European policymakers resolved to destroy the Warsaw Pact that bound them to the Soviet Union and differentiated them from the rest of Europe. Given the chance to make a break from the Soviet Union, new, democratic governments were determined to exercise and demonstrate their newfound independence. Second, they also decided early on to cast their lot in with Western Europe. That meant participating in its security organs where possible, which brought the benefit of U.S. protection, and in economic and political institutions such as the European Economic Community (EEC). The economic opportunities in the West were of particular significance to the East, newly free to seize them. Third, Eastern Europe took a dim view of the ideas, which abounded at the time, to base new European security architecture on institutions that included the Soviet Union, such as the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE). The Eastern Europeans saw a new international order coalescing around old Western institutions. Particularly wary of what trajectory the Soviet Union would take as Gorbachev's leadership seemed to grow increasingly tenuous, they did not want fragile new institutions that might not be able to contain an uncooperative Soviet Union. Without ruling out new institutions, they also wanted reliable Western institutions that would protect them from Moscow, as opposed to new ones that gave the Soviet Union a say in their security. Fourth, events and preferences changed at a breakneck pace. Not only did Eastern European officials take the initiative quickly, beginning to gravitate westward, but key leaders changed their views on the future in mere months, often coaxed by (usually more junior) policymakers who wanted to go further, faster.

Viewed from Eastern Europe, therefore, success in the post–Cold War world necessitated integrating into existing international institutions, above all those that originated west of the Iron Curtain. Critically, both reformers like Havel (the dissident playwright who became Czechoslovakia's first democratically elected leader since 1948) and figures like Wojciech Jaruzelski (the architect of martial law in Poland in the early 1980s) reached the same conclusion. In Poland and Romania, those who had once led Communist regimes were now steering their countries away from the Soviet Union and toward the West. These leaders were not liberal Europhiles; they were pragmatists.¹⁶ NATO was a critical part of this shift. Eastern European policymakers, wary of turbulence in the Soviet Union that they believed threatened any attempt to build new, pan-European security institutions, sought the security of a robust political and military framework that promised both security and economic benefits. Joining the alliance would come with security guarantees from the United States, to be sure, but that was far from the Eastern Europeans’ only goal. NATO membership would be a vehicle for valuable cultural, economic, and political—as well as security—integration.

A chronological treatment illuminates the striking speed of both events and policy changes from 1989 to 1991. Leaders east of the crumbling Iron Curtain recognized their short-term window of opportunity to lock in long-term benefits and took it.¹⁷ Section 1 covers the transformative year of 1989. Even before the night of November 9, when East Germans brought down the Berlin Wall, policymakers across the Warsaw Pact had been devising ways to distance themselves from Moscow. Afterward, it was immediately obvious that the Eastern bloc would change. Section 2 focuses on East Germany in the first half of 1990. Leaders in East Berlin were determined not to let the superpowers obstruct German reunification. Meanwhile, the rest of the Pact, which had spent the Cold War warning of the dangers of German militarism and revanchism, now insisted that only Germans should decide whether to reunify, undermining their Soviet ally's efforts to retain control. Section 3 covers the same early 1990 period but focuses on the rest of Eastern Europe. There, policymakers began to integrate with Western institutions wherever they could. Section 4 centers on the Warsaw Pact's June 1990 summit, the first Political Consultative Committee meeting since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Already, the drive to demolish the Pact was evident. Section 5 discusses the Eastern Europeans’ efforts through the latter half of 1990. The push to end the Pact and integrate with Western economic, political, and security institutions accelerated in part because of increasing policy coordination among soon-to-be-former members, particularly the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. But these states also worked to hedge against Moscow's sharp reversal of its approach to the region, as they watched the domestic situation within the Soviet Union deteriorate. Before the conclusion, section 6 illustrates how, in 1991, all these efforts came to fruition with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.

It has become a truism to say that 1989 changed everything for Europe. But European leaders—especially those who came to power after the revolutions of that year had brought down Communist regimes—recognized that the paradigm shift in policy at home would have to mean a commensurate change in foreign policy, too.¹⁸ The Warsaw Pact, the politico-military alliance that bound them to the Soviet Union, would have to change, and quickly. A new crop of leaders in Eastern Europe envisioned remaking Europe's security order, above all by bridging East and West.¹⁹

Hungary led the charge. In a two-day Central Committee meeting in February 1989, Hungary's leadership had ended its own Communist Party's monopoly on politics.²⁰ At the end of that month, the Hungarian Politburo deemed the border-security regime “tantamount to incarceration” and ordered the fences on the border with Austria dismantled and the border guards’ strength cut by hundreds per year.²¹ To reinforce Hungary's new openness, Budapest would host a conference in the spring of 1989 on “Europe and European Cooperation on the Eve of the 1990s,” to which it would invite everyone from the usual Western European Communist parties to British and Canadian Tories.²²

Hungary's foreign minister, Péter Várkonyi, vowed that the country's sovereignty would no longer be “compromised on the pretext of protecting socialism. … The main objective of our international political program is to reduce the importance of military blocs …or to phase them out, … taking advantage of the resulting political and economic benefits.”²³ In a similar vein, Mátyás Szűrös, the chair of the National Assembly's Foreign Affairs Committee, announced that “we are even more open to partners in the West” and other “developed economies” around the world.²⁴ This meant not just longtime European interlocutors like West Germany, but also Israel and South Korea. Unilateral defense spending cuts—far outstripping those of the Soviet Union—were a key component of this effort to open Hungary's society and economy.²⁵ Polish diplomats, too, stressed their “efforts to draw closer to Western European institutions,” such as NATO and the EEC, as central to Warsaw's foreign policy already in January 1989.²⁶

Hungarian leaders had identified one of the key issues in the Eastern European debate over the future: relations with the West. Even before the Berlin Wall had fallen, Budapest feared a future in which the current permissive context evaporated. What if the Soviet political transformation were abandoned, or worse, reversed? What if hard-liners ousted Gorbachev as general secretary and tried to reassert control over Eastern Europe by force?²⁷ A meeting of Communist parties in September 1989, for example, was so conservative in its focus on “the dictatorship of imperialism” and its refusal to acknowledge reforms (“the word perestroĭka … never occurred,” one Hungarian diplomat observed) as to be irrelevant to Budapest's reality. Clearly, they warned, not everyone in Moscow shared Gorbachev's view of Eastern Europe's future.²⁸

The fall of the Berlin Wall accelerated the changes already underway in Eastern Europe.²⁹ Clearly the Pact would have to be overhauled, and almost certainly to the detriment of its military elements, which made little sense with the Iron Curtain coming down—and with new governments coming into power not interested in maintaining the fiction of a rapacious West. The Soviet Union staunchly resisted efforts to demilitarize the Pact. So too did Bulgaria, looking warily at the escalating violence in neighboring Yugoslavia, and embroiled in its own dispute with NATO member Turkey over Sofia's policy of forced assimilation of its Turkish minority.³⁰ In fact, only the Hungarians and the Czechoslovaks believed that the 1990s would be the decade of disarmament. They decided in December 1989 to begin negotiations with Moscow to completely remove Soviet troops from their respective territories. Soviet military installations dotted the Eastern European landscape, and though Gorbachev had begun the process of reducing their garrisons in late 1988 with a much-lauded speech to the United Nations, it was too little, too late.³¹ Prague considered those “leases to be invalid because they were concluded under duress” and those troops’ presence to be a violation of international law.³² For the Czechoslovaks in particular, with memories of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion that crushed the Prague Spring, this was “a political, but also a psychological, issue. … The pan-European balance of power cannot depend on the situation created by military intervention.”³³

Soviet leaders, it seemed, were already thinking about how to make NATO seem like the malign actor in Europe's transformation. But their putative allies—the ones actually transforming—suspected that it was the Soviet Union that was acting in bad faith. After all, Moscow refused to provide basic information about the Soviet nuclear and conventional military presence on its own territory.³⁴ Although Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze conceded that the 1968 invasion was wrong, he also insisted that Moscow needed guarantees of “stability” and “balance” in Europe before bringing Soviet troops home. On that issue, some feared going too far, too fast. The Poles, for example, doubted that they should disarm while their German neighbors unified and grew stronger; to them, a withdrawal of Soviet troops was not entirely welcome.³⁵

East Germany's fate was clear in the first months of 1990: it would exit the Warsaw Pact.³⁶ German unification caused concern on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Nobody made that clearer than the Soviets, who warned of West German machinations behind events in the East, disguised as “pan-Europeanism.” Moscow's representatives predicted that “greater Germany” would become a nuclear power, destabilize the continent, and trigger an “explosion” of nationalism. Soviet officials insisted that it was in all of Europe's interest for the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) to survive as an independent state rather than to unify with the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). To that end, it pledged to help East Berlin resist Bonn's pressure. And even if Hungarian diplomats thought that the Soviets were being hyperbolic and overestimating their ability to shape events, they thought that the Germans were being equally naive and ahistorical. Reassurances that the process launched in 1989 was no “Anschluss” were welcome, but Nazi aggression was not easily forgotten.³⁷

Internally, the East Germans acknowledged that the rest of Europe did not embrace the idea of a unified, powerful Germany. A “leap forward” in German military power could spell disaster.³⁸ But the worst-case security scenario for East Germany would be a NATO that extended beyond the Oder and Neisse rivers and perhaps all the way to the Bug River that divides Poland from the Soviet republics of Ukraine and Belarus. Already in early 1990, many in East Berlin feared that NATO's eastward expansion—including, but not limited to, East German integration—would be perceived as such a threat in Moscow that the Soviet Union would use violence to undo or at least to stop it, and Europe would be plunged into chaos.³⁹

According to Havel, thinking along the same lines as the East Germans, the unification of Germany would need to take place in accordance with the Soviet Union's interests as much as those of the other victorious powers of World War II (France, the United Kingdom, and the United States), and as part of a pan-European process.⁴⁰ But a March 1990 meeting of the Warsaw Pact's foreign ministers made clear that this would be difficult to achieve. Mere months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Shevardnadze and Soviet policymakers grudgingly accepted unified Germany as a NATO member but insisted that the occupying powers keep troops on its territory. Attempting to make this palatable, Shevardnadze proposed creating joint brigades modeled on the Franco-German Brigade, stood up in 1987. But the Czech delegation felt that they had a better idea—the vehicles of post–Cold War European integration (and German reunification) should be “the best institutions of Western European integration”—above all NATO and the EEC.⁴¹ Hungary's position was also clear: the future of East Germany was not a matter for the Warsaw Pact per se, but for independent decisions by each of its members. “There is no common position,” concluded Polish Foreign Minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski. But everyone except the Soviet Union agreed that Moscow should have no special role in the German question “as the victor of World War II … [because] the decision to unify belonged to the Germans.” Far from amplifying Soviet preferences, Warsaw Pact members were now coalescing against Moscow on the future of Germany, one of the defining issues of the Cold War.⁴²

East Germany's first civilian defense minister, Rainer Eppelmann, had been a leader of the peace movement and labeled a threat to national security by the East Berlin regime. Now, he was tasked with maintaining it through reunification. Military blocs, Eppelmann proclaimed, were a thing of the past. NATO and the Warsaw Pact would become purely political alliances. “Fighting one's own people who happen to belong to NATO has become nonsensical. The process of unification is irreversible…. We want European thinking!”⁴³ But Eppelmann's rapidly conceived solution was more befuddling than reassuring. A unified Germany, he argued, should maintain two armies corresponding to the two soon-to-be-former German states, with one force a NATO member and one in the Warsaw Pact.⁴⁴

Unsurprisingly, Eppelmann's Soviet counterparts did not support this idea. The military commander of the Warsaw Pact, Army General Pyotr Lushev, complained that only the Pact's members were disarming (even if they were actually slashing defense budgets for economic reasons) while NATO was doing nothing of the sort. Eppelmann elaborated on his dual-military scheme to the Soviet officer, explaining that both alliances would remake European security by transforming into political entities, which Eppelmann took as a given. That Germany would be a NATO member, also a given, did not need to mean that NATO's military influence would expand eastward. Even after unification, East Germany's Nationale Volksarmee should remain independent from West Germany's Bundeswehr, each remaining on its respective former territory. And so long as U.S. and NATO troops remained in the former West Germany, Soviet troops should remain in the East.⁴⁵ Lushev did not engage with these curious ideas.⁴⁶

Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Dmitriĭ Iazov, by contrast, expressed his displeasure in a series of meetings with Eppelmann in spring 1990. He first and foremost denounced Eppelmann's “incomprehensible” decision to change his department's name to the Ministry for Disarmament and Defense. He bemoaned the decommunization of Eastern European militaries, never acknowledging the state-wide decommunizing that drove it. And he complained that while the United States had not withdrawn one soldier from Europe, the Soviet Union's ostensible allies were demanding Soviet withdrawals and seemed intent on breaking the Warsaw Pact.⁴⁷ As for Eppelmann's proposal for two German armies, Iazov concluded that “the existence of two armies in one state is unreal.” Who would fund such a force? It certainly would not be the Soviet Union, amid rising public hostility to the Soviet presence.⁴⁸

After his meetings with Iazov, Eppelmann warned that “because of a strong affinity for the West, due to concrete political and economic interests, the Eastern Europeans could shortly withdraw from the [Warsaw Pact] individually” and lock the Soviet Union out of the future European security order.⁴⁹ To Lushev, it was unthinkable that a state as powerful as the Soviet Union could be excluded from any viable post–Cold War international order, especially in Europe. Events, and above all Eastern European preferences, were changing more quickly than the Soviet leaders could keep up with.⁵⁰

In April, top East German leaders visited Moscow to reassure Soviet policymakers. Premier Lothar de Maizière, the first democratically elected and last leader of East Germany, tried to strike a balance between his government's intention to leave the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet fear of NATO shifting eastward. But the ongoing presence of Soviet troops was untenable. Emboldened citizens complained about noise, traffic, and pollution from Soviet bases. To illustrate this situation, de Maizière raised the issue of East Germany's complement of Oka short-range ballistic missiles: The military had destroyed their launchpads, but nobody knew enough about the weapons to dismantle them safely. Would the Soviet Union mind taking them back?⁵¹

Moscow's allies expected that international institutions would play a key role in the post–Cold War. They thus began to look for new international forums in which to exercise their independence from Soviet dictates. Initially, the twenty-three NATO and Warsaw Pact members as well as the thirty-five CSCE signatories held talks to discuss disarmament and confidence-building measures. Over time, new opportunities to the west presented themselves.⁵² At the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the North Atlantic Assembly, the Western European Union, and the European Parliament, Hungarian diplomats used early observer-status invitations to make it clear that they belonged in these Western institutions on a permanent basis.⁵³ Earlier in 1989, Czechoslovakia had tried to join the Council of Europe only to be rebuffed as a nondemocracy. With free elections on the horizon, the door was opening. Of course, the value was largely symbolic, but at a time of such rapid and profound change, symbols mattered because they reassured publics and policymakers alike that more tangible, consequential progress was possible.⁵⁴

Junior policymakers were particularly determined to make the most of the opening during the 1990s. Pact members had in the late 1980s begun to convene young diplomats, who displayed none of their seniors’ restraint or concern for Soviet sensitivities. At a January 1990 meeting, the Czechoslovak delegation rejected the idea that they had any “natural common interests” with the Soviet Union. When all the Eastern European delegations stressed their belief that NATO was the essential vehicle for creating a common European home, the Soviet delegation had nothing to say.⁵⁵ But the meeting also laid out another reality of the post–Cold War: that the states of Eastern Europe, as they adjusted to new circumstances, would compete with one another for influence with and material assistance from the West.⁵⁶ Meanwhile, Moscow denounced the rampant “mistrust and suspicion” within the Warsaw Pact.⁵⁷ The West was exploiting the events of late 1989 for its own end, Soviet representatives insisted; and to make matters worse, the naive countries of Eastern Europe seemed to be playing directly into its hands.⁵⁸

It was no secret that virtually all the current members of the Pact, with varying degrees of success, were looking to the West and trying to forge relations with existing structures on the other side of the crumbling Iron Curtain. All had an interest in “overcoming the policy of blocs and seeking ways to unite Europe.”⁵⁹ In part, for the Eastern Europeans, this was ideological. The concepts of democracy and civil society, which they associated with Western Europe, had begun to transform their societies in 1989. It also had an important economic component. Czechoslovak policymakers concluded that they would have to completely restructure their economy.⁶⁰ That meant embracing “a new system.”⁶¹ It also necessitated gaining access to the Western marketplace.⁶² Only with more advanced foreign technology could they engineer a “return to Europe.”⁶³ Even before the Berlin Wall came down, the Poles preferred to focus on economic matters that affected their own interests rather than those of the entire Eastern bloc.⁶⁴ Jaruzelski emphasized in his meetings with Gorbachev during a visit to the Soviet Union in April 1990 that improving relations with the West was now his country's top foreign policy priority.⁶⁵ Indeed, at the same time as its Warsaw Pact allies, Moscow asserted its interest in forging potentially profitable links with the EEC, the “economic foundation of the common European home.”⁶⁶

For Moscow, this sense of hope was tinged with insecurity about what roles the Soviet Union, NATO, and the United States would play in Europe. Even the joint statement for the Pact's thirty-fifth birthday in 1990 would be about working more closely with NATO, once its members’ chief bogeyman.⁶⁷ But, as the Eastern Europeans kept reminding the Soviets and others, they had the same rights as every other state—and could now actually exercise them.⁶⁸ As Czechoslovakia's foreign minister, Jiří Dienstbier, put it, “existing institutions are no longer responsive” to the realities in Europe. “Today, the Warsaw Pact and NATO operate in different conditions than in the past. These organizations, which still divide Europe, should be primarily involved in disarmament. We assume that further developments will primarily strengthen their political role and gradually reduce their military role. This process need not be symmetrical, as the two alliances are not identical in many respects.”⁶⁹ Czechoslovakia, for its part, would “make full use of existing multilateral institutions … which could gradually become pan-European.”⁷⁰

After a visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels at the end of February 1990, Dienstbier recognized why existing institutions like it were the better bet for Czechoslovakia. In the Soviet Union—and, indeed, throughout Eastern Europe—democracy's gains were fragile. Germany was a test case for whether NATO was the best way to provide security for both the reunified country and the former members of the Warsaw Pact.⁷¹

Back in Prague, the foreign ministry concluded that Europe was trending toward unification and integration—but lopsidedly, vastly favoring institutions originating in the West. Czechoslovakia's interests and its “predominant European orientation” would be best served by extending these institutions eastward.⁷² Doing so would act as a hedge against the perceived danger of the “political and economic crisis” unfolding in the Soviet Union during 1990.⁷³ If Soviet hard-liners took power, they could undo efforts to build new institutions. Furthermore, embracing Western institutions would keep the United States engaged in Europe, which would diminish the danger that a conservative turn in Moscow would pose to newly free Eastern Europe. Finally, according to Czechoslovak policymakers, the key determinants of power in the future would be economic and technological—two sectors that the West dominated and to which Moscow had little to offer. In “opening up to the world,” Prague was looking westward.⁷⁴ And while NATO might be a stepping-stone, the top priority was to “restore the position of Czechoslovakia in Europe” and “involve our state in pan-European integration processes”—in other words, the EEC—as well as to seek out “a more permanent form of cooperation.”⁷⁵

But not just yet. Both the British and French governments cautioned Dienstbier that Czechoslovakia was not ready for EEC membership: it should start with smaller institutions and work its way up.⁷⁶ The Maastricht Treaty, which would create the European Union in 1993, was still being negotiated, and Western Europeans feared that allowing Eastern European states in would slow, or perhaps scuttle, the arduous process already underway.⁷⁷ And so, the Czechoslovaks took steps to assuage these concerns. They signed on to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to facilitate market access.⁷⁸ They even signed up for the war on drugs.⁷⁹ Dienstbier stressed, however, to his French counterpart Roland Dumas that “accession to the EEC remains a priority” for Czechoslovak foreign policy and that Prague's chief orientation was European.⁸⁰ On security issues, both agreed that isolating the Soviet Union could cause Moscow to reverse its foreign policy or provide ammunition to hard-liners seeking to oust Gorbachev. But Dienstbier and Dumas were also adamant about keeping the United States and Canada in Europe as a counterbalance against the Soviets.⁸¹

When NATO members met in Paris in May 1990, they heard from former enemies now seeking to become allies. Bertram Wieczorek, parliamentary undersecretary in the East German Ministry for Disarmament and Defense, observed that the “Wir sind das Volk” protest slogan in East Germany had given way to the German-wide “Wir sind ein Volk” demand for reunification. He insisted that East Berlin had always been a voice for disarmament and peace and denounced those who saw imminent German reunification as a “Fourth Reich” as alarmists, of which there were plenty in the room. The East Germans did not want to jeopardize anyone's security: “It is not a matter of losing old friends” in the East, Wieczorek insisted, “it is a matter of making new ones.”⁸²

For Moscow, Eastern Europe cutting ties with the Warsaw Pact was naivete, but to Eastern European policymakers it was simply a matter of adapting to new realities. To Bulgaria, the Warsaw Pact was the element of the Cold War–era European system least likely to survive. More likely would be increasing Eastern European participation in formerly Western European security structures, such as NATO, on the path toward fuller European integration. In Warsaw, too, it was clear that NATO was itself adapting to new, post-1989 realities. But unlike the Pact, NATO was not adapting itself out of existence. Soviet leaders were none too pleased. One Hungarian diplomat, for example, found himself buttonholed by a Soviet counterpart who excoriated Budapest and the rest of Eastern Europe for talking about allowing NATO—a hostile bloc, he insisted—to expand right up to the Soviet Union's borders. “We tried to dispel their concerns,” the Hungarian reported coolly.⁸³

The future of European security—as well as the future of the Warsaw Pact—was the main issue for the first Political Consultative Committee summit meeting held in Moscow in June 1990.⁸⁴ Behind the scenes, Soviet diplomats worried about a “crisis of confidence” in Eastern Europe.⁸⁵ They reassured their allies that the Pact would survive. The Soviets were wide of the mark. At the beginning of 1990, Moscow's allies might have spoken of “the democratization of the Warsaw Pact,” albeit with reservations.⁸⁶ But barely half a year later, they were no longer asking if the Pact would survive—they had resolved to ensure it could not.⁸⁷

That resolve was on full display at the Moscow summit. Ion Iliescu of Romania celebrated the country's first democratic elections, which reoriented its foreign policy. Bucharest's strategic objective was to integrate into European structures for economic and political cooperation. The new realities of international politics changed those structures, but Romania expected that vastly more change would transpire in the East as opposed to the West—after all, the former was changing largely to be more like the latter.⁸⁸ De Maizière of East Germany concurred, seeing both alliances as part of the process of building a new European security order. “A pillar of the bridge of understanding between East and West” which would make that possible, he insisted, would be a unified Germany.⁸⁹ Jaruzelski noted that Poland was already expanding its own contacts with NATO. “In making changes to the Warsaw Pact,” he went on, “we also count on transformation in NATO.”⁹⁰ Those changes to the Pact would have to be radical, stripping out nearly all its military components and rebalancing power among the members at the Soviet Union's expense. But in the end “Europe … should be considered a single security space.”⁹¹ Czechoslovakia's Havel celebrated the fact that, “for the first time, [Pact members] are meeting as sovereign, independent, and equal partners.”⁹² But he saw the Warsaw Pact as a temporary organization fit only for the current transitional period, not beyond. The future belonged to integration, and as such, “Czechoslovakia, as a country located in the center of Europe, [was] establishing close contact with Western European integration groups.”⁹³ Hungary's Prime Minister József Antall went further, welcoming a unified Germany's membership in NATO because it would guarantee the country's full and indivisible sovereignty, as would the U.S. military's continued presence in Europe. There was no point trying to reform the Pact, better instead to focus on building the European security system of the future, which looked much like that of Western Europe's past: NATO.⁹⁴

Gorbachev was not so sure. Yes, the Pact and NATO would likely be subsumed into the as-yet-unrealized future European security order. “The true interests of the Soviet state are to finally overcome the division of the continent and, together with our allies, to integrate into a single Europe. … Some contours of the emerging renewed Europe are already visible,” he observed, “but much is still hidden behind the veil of time.”⁹⁵ The main vector of change in 1990 was democratization; it was right for Germans to decide the future of Germany, and Gorbachev hoped that would be a catalyst for progress and for transcending the bloc structure. The Soviet leader could not ignore that Moscow's allies looked westward for security, much to his dismay. Aligning with the West, he insisted, meant rejecting a common European home and perpetuating Cold War–type divisions.⁹⁶ But for most Eastern Europeans, it was better to risk alienating the Soviet Union than to be stuck in the East. Their main preoccupation was not security; they feared being unable to make the most of all the new economic opportunities in the West.⁹⁷

The Warsaw Pact's first major meeting since the events of 1989 ended with a communiqué extolling its members’ overcoming “the ideological image of the enemy,” which was “no longer in keeping with the spirit of the times.”⁹⁸ The era of blocs was over. In the words of the East Germans, “The conference took place under completely new conditions. For the first time, legitimate representatives of all the participating states, who had won free and democratic elections, took part.”⁹⁹ They were exiting the Warsaw Pact—vividly illustrated by the West German diplomats serving, unprecedentedly, as political advisers to their East German counterparts throughout the meeting.¹⁰⁰ Soviet security interests should not be disregarded, East Berlin's delegation stressed, lest the process of dissolving the Pact become even more difficult.¹⁰¹ Moscow needed security guarantees “beyond theoretical arguments.”¹⁰²

Hungary's delegates saw no need for restraint. It was a new era, and Moscow's security quibbles seemed anachronistic, a relic of a bygone era—just like the Pact itself. Western institutions were the future. NATO, for example, would transform and survive. The Pact was in a death spiral; its Eastern European members were all transitioning to models of governance based on pluralistic democracy, human rights, and market economies. Moreover, its ability to provide security was at best questionable, and only growing more so as Gorbachev's political situation in the Soviet Union deteriorated.¹⁰³ NATO was the more sophisticated tool for cooperation and would likely be the cornerstone of a future pan-European security framework. Hungary was oriented toward Western European integration and enjoyed a head start in that regard from its prior liberal economic policies and trade dealings with the EEC.¹⁰⁴ Thus, Budapest concluded, Hungary's departure from the Pact should be as destructive as possible and bring down the whole house of cards. And if Hungary could not break the Pact on its own, it should work to persuade as many other members as possible to leave as well, with the Czechoslovaks and the Poles most likely to join in and the Soviets now the only serious opponents. Meanwhile, without revealing its plans to leave, Hungary should keep participating in the Pact's “radical reform”—intentionally sabotaging it at every opportunity.¹⁰⁵ “The aim should be to start moving closer to NATO…. Multilateral cooperation would guarantee our security and integration into pan-European institutions.”¹⁰⁶ Those institutions would be built on the Western European framework, Hungarian policymakers concluded. Relations with NATO would need to be formalized and then expanded.¹⁰⁷ To do that, Budapest would need to be seen in the West as “an attractive and serious partner.”¹⁰⁸

Poland participating in “the reconstruction of a disappearing alliance [was] out of the question.”¹⁰⁹ Relations with the West were a top priority. It wanted EEC membership and could already in the summer of 1990 envision a future as a NATO member.¹¹⁰ Warsaw agreed that the Pact's days were numbered, that it was a “temporary, and likely quite short” vestige of the Cold War.¹¹¹ The Poles would not stop the Hungarians from leaving, but they did not yet seem likely to help them do so, either.¹¹² East Germany was particularly preoccupied with how events were perceived in Moscow. On the one hand, East Berlin's diplomats insisted that only “neoconfrontationalist thinking” assumed the alliances would continue to exist.¹¹³ On the other, their superiors eagerly and explicitly anticipated reaping the rewards of NATO and EEC membership after unification.

The question of future Soviet policy came to the fore again in the summer of 1990. Gorbachev's reforms had unleashed changes in Eastern Europe that were positive at the time, East Germany's top foreign policy officials warned, but could lead to new problems. Complete disarmament was not feasible, nor was abandoning the state's right to join security (and other) alliances. European security structures should focus on predictability. Thus, when they discussed the two most likely ways forward, East German officials saw a clear favorite. On the one hand, only Moscow preferred a collective security architecture that rendered NATO and the Warsaw Pact irrelevant. (These schemes tended to call for unified Germany to be a temporary member of both alliances, which the East Germans deemed absurd.) On the other, NATO members preferred to update their alliance for new realities, and to East Berlin this was the only feasible way forward. Perhaps a pan-European security organization would come to fruition, but until then, unified Germany's place was in NATO.¹¹⁴ President George H. W. Bush and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had already publicly endorsed a unified Germany within NATO.¹¹⁵ The East Germans had been warned by top Soviet policymakers, however, that everyone remaking Europe needed to conceive of “a possible post-Gorbachev period” in Soviet politics, in which Moscow would undo its arms reductions and, left unsaid, its political reforms.¹¹⁶ Keeping Moscow out of Europe could thus have disastrous consequences, the Soviets warned. But so too, Eppelmann noted to Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, could binding Eastern Europe to Moscow.¹¹⁷

At the June 1990 summit in Moscow, Eastern Europe's position was clear: the Pact should be abolished if it could not be reformed to represent all equally rather than be a tool of Soviet domination.¹¹⁸ “The politicization of the Warsaw Treaty is its last chance,” the East Germans concluded. But they would not be the ones to initiate this process of shifting the alliance's focus from military to political issues—they were on their way out.¹¹⁹ In fact, nobody would. When talk began of imbuing the civilian secretary general position with authority to act on behalf of the organization (à la NATO), Poland made it clear that Warsaw would not host any of the infrastructure of its eponymous alliance. Such infrastructure would have to be in Moscow, which would reinforce the Pact's reputation as a Soviet-dominated institution.¹²⁰ Hungary was explicit: “We want to not only be Eastern Europeans, but to integrate into the whole of Europe.”¹²¹ Czechoslovakia's Havel concurred. His country's policy was “firmly rooted in a European future.”¹²² Broader institutions like the CSCE were welcome to Prague, but they were a complement to joining the West, not a substitute for it.

After the Moscow summit, Pact members kept meeting to discuss how to reform the alliance. But from the first meeting, it was clear that only the Soviets and, to a much lesser extent, the Bulgarians had any interest in retaining it. Everyone else wanted to dismantle the Warsaw Pact. They were happy to see NATO and other Western institutions survive in perpetuity. Though Hungary's representatives repeatedly stated that Budapest wanted out of the Pact, Czechoslovakia and Poland resisted any effort to reform the Pact—especially the politically minded reform needed to keep it viable—and thus condemned it to death.¹²³ Shortly thereafter, Hungary's foreign minister visited Prague and confirmed that the Czechoslovaks were increasingly certain that the Pact's collapse would be a good thing.¹²⁴ Meanwhile, Hungary's ministry of defense declared it would no longer participate in joint military exercises, preferring instead to spend its diminishing training budget on confidence-building measures with NATO countries.¹²⁵ It was no surprise, therefore, that NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner planned to visit Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland on his first trip to Eastern Europe.¹²⁶ The Hungarians had already been meeting with NATO leaders. Foreign Minister Géza Jeszenszky stressed to Wörner “our commitment to Western values, our Europeanness, and the coincidence of Hungarian and European interests.”¹²⁷ In fact, the Hungarians’ drive to quit the Warsaw Pact and to keep the United States in Europe was rooted in its pan-European orientation. “Hungary is interested in creating a pan-European security system based on well-functioning European organizations,” Jeszenszky concluded.¹²⁸

Moscow wanted to transform the Pact into “a treaty of member states, equal in rights, established on a democratic basis”—a political alliance—and would accept abandoning all of the Pact's military components in order to make at least that happen.¹²⁹ The rest of the alliance wanted out. Budapest's delegation declared that NATO was no longer the adversary (by now boilerplate in Pact circles). In fact, they observed, NATO members were doing the most to help the states of Eastern Europe address their political challenges in the wake of 1989. The “cardinal element” of Hungarian foreign policy going forward would be good relations with all Europe, not just the eastern half.¹³⁰ The Warsaw Pact had become “anachronistic,” the Hungarian delegate declared. “So, it's time to dismantle it!”¹³¹ Prague and Warsaw also stressed the importance of building good relations with NATO, which would be easier to do from outside the Warsaw Pact. “We proceed from the premise that today the NATO states are our partners, and not, as it was previously thought, opponents,” the Polish delegate concluded. “Poland has no political goals that distinguish us from NATO.”¹³²

Gradually, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland began to work together. A meeting of the three in August 1990 revealed that Warsaw was in fact much more open to destroying the Pact that its representatives had shared in alliance-wide forums. “The government must now demonstrate that it is leading Poland towards sovereignty and independence,” they explained, “[and] will not allow Poland to come under Soviet rule again.”¹³³ Meanwhile, Moscow's motives were also becoming clearer to the three countries. The Soviets wanted to maintain the facade of great-power status by holding on to their own alliance (opposite the United States’ NATO) and to influence political developments in Eastern Europe, especially Germany. They also sought to maintain a physical buffer zone with the West. Prague's representatives bemoaned this “maximalist” and “unrealistic” Soviet position, but they understood that Gorbachev needed to save face both internationally and at home, particularly with his increasingly restive generals.¹³⁴ Hungary was more concerned about its own future, and continued Pact membership could become an obstacle to Budapest's “European aspirations.”¹³⁵

By late 1990, the Soviet Union was collapsing—at least economically, maybe even politically. That disintegration threatened to undo not only Gorbachev's gains at home but also Eastern Europe's new foreign policy course.¹³⁶ Closer ties with NATO were essential, and when Secretary General Wörner visited Prague in September 1990, his hosts were eager to demonstrate their growing closeness to the Atlantic alliance and the wide space for relations between Prague and Brussels. Czechoslovakia did not want to see NATO disbanded or diminished, and in fact welcomed a continued U.S. presence in Europe. Doubtful that Gorbachev would succeed in his massive program of reforms in the Soviet Union, Prague needed to hedge against a new regime in Moscow, which it doubted would be more liberal than that of the embattled Soviet leader. As such, NATO could gradually take on some pan-European functions, and Czechoslovakia would participate straight away in the Atlantic alliance's nonmilitary elements such as economics, ecology, and energy. At a time when many were talking about the CSCE as a replacement for both NATO and the Pact, Czechoslovak policymakers made it clear that it was at most a complement to NATO, and certainly not a substitute.¹³⁷ Now was not the time to build fragile new institutions with a fragile quasi-democratic Soviet Union. NATO could help span the “deep ditch of social and economic disparities,” in West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher's memorable formulation, which remained where the Berlin Wall had stood.¹³⁸ NATO would not only shape security structures but also mitigate the threat of economic collapse in Eastern Europe, which would be democratization's undoing.¹³⁹

When Wörner visited Warsaw, his Polish hosts heralded the “far-reaching convergence of the basic political goals of Poland and … the most important political and military alliance in the world today.”¹⁴⁰ With NATO on Poland's border after German reunification, this was a critical relationship for Warsaw, not only in and of itself, but also as a vehicle for Poland's aspirations to join other Western European institutions.

At the next meeting to discuss the Pact's future, in September 1990, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland were more of a united front, though Budapest still wanted to dismantle it the fastest. All worked together to block a Soviet proposal to make the dissolution of the Pact contingent on the creation of a new pan-European security system (they saw NATO as playing that role) and to expand the Pact's political organs to represent its members in dealing with NATO (they had every intention of doing that by themselves). The Polish government expressed concern about undermining Gorbachev's position at home with aggressive moves that might precipitate his ouster, undoing all the progress achieved over the last year.¹⁴¹

Hungarian diplomats celebrated having persuaded their Czechoslovak and Polish counterparts to “catch up.” Together, they kept working within the regular Pact reform meetings to strip out any statements in documents that the Warsaw Pact had any value or future. By the end of 1990, only Bulgaria wanted to continue military cooperation with the Soviet Union.¹⁴² The most the Pact's other non-Soviet members would allow was a consultative body focused on the processes of disarmament in general—and Soviet military withdrawal from Eastern Europe in particular. In other words, they would support only policies that would weaken the Pact's existence over the longer term.¹⁴³

As 1990 came to a close, NATO Secretary General Wörner stressed that the new Europe must be built with the Soviet Union as a member so long as it continued its reform trajectory.¹⁴⁴ But that future became less certain after the violence in Vilnius, Lithuania, at the very beginning of 1991, which prompted many Pact members to accelerate their efforts to break apart the alliance lest the Soviets use force elsewhere—perhaps even beyond their crumbling borders.¹⁴⁵ Although Gorbachev declared his willingness to “participate on equal terms” with the rest of the Pact's members to dismantle the Pact, they were not interested in continuing the relationship, even on more equitable terms.¹⁴⁶

Moscow was thus supposed to take the final step in November 1990 at another Political Consultative Committee meeting. Thanks to the Eastern Europeans, Moscow's efforts to reform the Pact had failed. But the Soviets put off what was now seen as inevitable. In Budapest, observers posited two reasons for why Moscow postponed the summit. First, Gorbachev did not want the rapid pace to lead the world to conclude that the smaller Eastern European states had forced his hand (which they had). Second, he wanted to avoid dismantling the Pact in Budapest on November 4, the anniversary of the Soviet invasion in 1956 to prevent Hungary from leaving it.¹⁴⁷

As the Pact collapsed from within, its members observed NATO's “transformational tendencies” as it began acting like a pan-European institution that was not just focused on security issues. Given the unpredictability of Soviet policy, and against the backdrop of the vivid images of the Soviet military cracking down on Lithuanian independence in January, there was enormous value in an established entity with a more-or-less predictable superpower at the helm for the nations of Eastern Europe.¹⁴⁸ Thus, at the Visegrád Castle in Hungary, the leaders of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland met to coordinate a “common approach to European structures.”¹⁴⁹ Their first objective was to “work for the swift termination of the Warsaw Pact” and “develop cooperation with NATO … in a common spirit.”¹⁵⁰ Their goal was not to build new institutions, but “coordinating their efforts to integrate into [existing] European institutions.”¹⁵¹

Ultimately, Gorbachev did not participate in the end of the Warsaw Pact. The embattled Soviet leader did not want to sign his name on the document marking the formal end of Moscow's sphere of influence, hard won in World War II.¹⁵² Nor would he have relished listening to all of the Soviet Union's allies denounce the security system that Moscow built. Not only had the Cold War frozen development in Eastern Europe, of which the shambolic Romanian economy was a prime example; it had also stymied the natural development of relations among states within the continent, decried Romanian Foreign Minister Adrian Năstase. Now, he concluded, Romania had its eyes on relations with NATO in particular.¹⁵³ Viktor Valkov, foreign minister of Bulgaria, still expressed concern about his country's security, but he saw no need to continue membership in the Pact because Bulgaria could not rely on it for help. Furthermore, without the “image of the enemy,” the logic behind politico-military alliances no longer held.¹⁵⁴ NATO had had staying power because it prioritized the political over the military. The Warsaw Pact did not. It could not be reformed and was only an obstacle to its members’ foreign policy aspirations. Poland's Skubiszewski similarly observed that the realities of the 1990s were not those of the 1950s. The Pact failed to meet the security and political needs of its members—not that it ever really had, as a mere facade of cooperation. Poland wanted a “New Europe,” which looked much more like the continent's west than its east.¹⁵⁵ Jeszenszky spoke of not only the impossibility of justifying the Warsaw Pact in the current era but also Hungary's ambitions: “full integration into the general European system in the fields of politics, economics, security, and law.”¹⁵⁶ Institutions such as NATO and the EEC, he insisted, were about not just common markets or common defense but also common values. Dienstbier similarity declared Czechoslovakia's intention to further integrate with Western Europe, its natural home, and with NATO.¹⁵⁷

Foreign Minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh had the unenviable job of representing the Soviet Union at the gathering. Shevardnadze's successor as of the end of 1990, Bessmertnykh began with a reminder that the Warsaw Pact had been a key part of the post–World War II security structure in Europe, which “gave us all decades of peace,” though he acknowledged that it had not been without turmoil.¹⁵⁸ He called on NATO to follow the Pact's lead and dismantle itself as well. Pointedly, Bessmertnykh warned that if any of the countries in the audience were to become NATO members, it would have “negative consequences” for the strategic situation in Europe.¹⁵⁹ Bessmertnykh's speech landed with a thud. So too did Lushev's. The outgoing Supreme Commander of the Unified Armed Forces of the Warsaw Pact praised the soon-to-be-defunct alliance at length, concluding that his tenure—coming to an end with the abolition of his position—had been a success.¹⁶⁰

With the decision taken, its members began preparing for a “funeral for the Warsaw Treaty, which like all funerals, would be unpleasant.”¹⁶¹ In Prague in July 1991, the Pact's members gathered to implement the decisions of the preceding February and abolish it. They did not do so with heavy hearts. Czechoslovakia was already negotiating an association agreement with the EEC and opening its markets to free trade. As Eastern Europe celebrated its newfound sovereignty, Prague willingly relinquished some to Brussels in the name of European integration.¹⁶² For President Zhelyu Zhelev of Bulgaria, the dissolution of the Pact was the logical culmination of the events of 1989 and the ensuing transformation of European politics. It had been based on “unequal and undemocratic cooperation.”¹⁶³ Now, Bulgaria was engaged in “building a united and free Europe” without institutions that had as much historical baggage as the Warsaw Pact—NATO and the EEC, by contrast, were Sofia's future.¹⁶⁴ That theme recurred. Iliescu declared that Romania was “for a united, peaceful and democratic Europe, for a general European security and cooperation system.”¹⁶⁵ Reaching out to NATO was his top priority to that end. Havel celebrated the end of Europe's unnatural division, “damaging totalitarian ideology,” the “hegemony of the great powers,” and “unjust alliances.”¹⁶⁶ He did not hide what was next for his country: “Our goal is to integrate Czechoslovakia with Western Europe,” which was a “natural” reflection of political, economic, and cultural affinities between Czechoslovakia's people and the West.¹⁶⁷ “We are guided by the conviction that we must build an indivisible Europe,” Poland's Prime Minister Jan Krzysztof Bielecki explained, with “room for all states.”¹⁶⁸ But that meant full sovereignty, and certainly did not mean Eastern Europe embracing neutrality or becoming a “buffer zone.”¹⁶⁹ Antall, again representing Hungary, acknowledged the “moral victory” of reform in the Soviet Union that had enabled the meeting in Prague to dismantle the Pact.¹⁷⁰ Abandoning the Warsaw Pact was “clearing [the] way to Europe” and would speed Budapest's entry into the continent's networks, particularly NATO, the core of Europe's security architecture, and the EEC, the engine of European politics. “The doors of Europe are open” to those who share its values, Antall summarized. “Everyone … must move forward on the European path.”¹⁷¹

Vice President Gennadiĭ Ianaev represented the Soviet Union in Prague. He conceded that the future belonged to European integration and cast the Pact as part of that process. “The years of the Warsaw Pact's existence were years of peace in Europe,” he declared—in Prague of all places.¹⁷² Now its members were continuing that peace-loving legacy by adapting to new realities. NATO, Ianaev maintained, with its nuclear weapons and rapid reaction forces, no longer had a reason to exist either. He concluded by reassuring his audience that the Soviet Union had no “imperial inklings.”¹⁷³

Czechoslovak diplomats commended themselves for working with Poland and Hungary to “eliminate one of the last relics of the Cold War.”¹⁷⁴ The future belonged to Western institutions like NATO, even if it too was born of the Cold War. Already, agreements were being signed to send Czechoslovak officers to the U.S. International Military Education and Training program to learn how Washington managed its national security apparatus.¹⁷⁵ Moscow expressed its dissatisfaction with these developments to the Czechoslovak delegates, who conceded that the Soviet Union could still “significantly influence the situation” in Eastern Europe, even though it was “no longer a military and political hegemon.”¹⁷⁶ They would have to take Soviet views into account—while resisting Moscow's efforts to “neutralize” Eastern Europe. But they would also need to balance against the Soviet Union by developing and deepening relations with the United States, NATO, the EEC, and the other institutions that they saw as crucial to the post–Cold War international system.¹⁷⁷ In fact, most wondered if the Soviet Union itself would survive, as Gorbachev and his reforms appeared “exhausted.”¹⁷⁸

The communiqué produced in Prague endorsed a “pan-European process of creating new security structures.”¹⁷⁹ But its signatories individually did not. They wanted to make the burgeoning cooperation with NATO “permanent, and preferably contractual.”¹⁸⁰

The largely peaceful revolutions of 1989 fostered the end of the division of Europe and the dawn of a new, post–Cold War international system. But though the system was new, the institutions on which it was built were not. International institutions like NATO and the EEC with their roots in the West endured, and the countries of Eastern Europe wanted in.¹⁸¹

They were able to do so, of course, only with the acquiescence of these institutions’ members. Much has been made of remarks by U.S. President George H.W. Bush in 1990 that Washington must not “let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat…. We prevailed,” Bush summed up the Cold War's end, “they didn't.”¹⁸² British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made the same point, albeit more delicately, when she insisted on the need to “bring the new democracies of Eastern Europe into closer association with the institutions of Western Europe … to overcome divisions between East and West in Europe.”¹⁸³

Archival records in Bucharest, Budapest, East Berlin, Prague, and Warsaw show that these states had as much interest in overcoming those divisions as did Brussels, London, and Washington. Eastern Europe had agency; in fact, its states wanted to go further, faster. The expansion of Western institutions into the former territory of the Eastern bloc was not simply a Western project to cement the gains of the end of the Cold War. Rather, the states of the crumbling Warsaw Pact promptly recognized that the international system was changing, that the post–Cold War order would be built on international institutions, and that, by and large, those institutions already existed in Western Europe.

In this process of rapid transformation and adaptation, four themes stand out in Eastern European policy. First, these states wanted to demonstrate their sovereignty by breaking out of—and breaking apart—the Warsaw Pact. Second, they sought the prosperity and security promised by deeper integration with the rest of Europe, including but not limited to NATO and the EEC. Third, they were skeptical of ideas such as an expanded CSCE that included the Soviet Union (or, after December 1991, the Russian Federation), wary of a revisionist Moscow having a say in their future prosperity or security. Fourth, they adapted at speed. In just over two years, Eastern European policymakers were confronted with such a steady stream of new information that their preferences could not help but evolve quickly.

The key concerns that crystallized in policymakers’ minds at the very beginning of the 1990s, even when they were members of the Warsaw Pact, persisted over the ensuing decades. Their eventual NATO membership was not inevitable, but it was the culmination of their own efforts, since 1989, to break out of the Pact and cement their ties with the West.

For their valuable comments on earlier drafts and helpful discussions, the author thanks Jordan Baev, Matěj Bílý, Susan Colbourn, Dimiter Dimov, James Goldgeier, Daniela Kolenovská, Paul Lenormand, Andrew Preston, Timothy Sayle, Joshua Shifrinson, Vít Smetana, Joseph Torigian, and the anonymous reviewers. The author also thanks participants in seminars and panels at the 2023 meeting of the American Historical Association, the Bulgarian Center for Advanced Study, the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge University, the Institute of Contemporary History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, the Service Historique de la Défense of France, Sciences Po Paris, and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. The author gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Duke University Program in American Grand Strategy, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Stanton Foundation.