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The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism. By Daniel C. Thomas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. 308p. $49.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.
The Helsinki Final Act was adopted by the Conference on security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in 1975. Among the basic principles for relations among states that were affirmed in the document were the apparently contradictory principles of nonintervention in the internal affairs of states and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. Should a collision between these two principles occur, which one would prevail? It was widely assumed at the time, of course, that the principle of nonintervention would win out. The Soviets and their bloc members apparently had no intention of complying with the human rights principles enshrined in the Final Act, and even Western statesmen such as Henry Kissinger downplayed their importance.
There were actually good reasons for skepticism and even cynicism regarding future compliance with the human rights principles of the Helsinki Final Act. After all, by 1975 the international community had adopted numerous human rights instruments of global and regional scope going back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that nothing had been achieved by those efforts at norm creation, the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of states remained a very powerful one and was, in any case, more often than not invoked by authoritarian and totalitarian governments with great effect to ward off "intervention" in their internal affairs in the name of human rights.
Yet only 15 years after Helsinki, by the end of the decade of the 1980s, communist regimes in Eastern Europe and even in the Soviet Union itself were crumbling and the end of the Cold War...