Meeting of the seven representatives of the Warsaw Pact countries. From left to right: Gustáv Husák, Todor Zhivkov, Erich Honecker, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Wojciech Jaruzelski and János Kádár
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Established on 14 May 1955, The Warsaw Treaty Organisation (also known as the Warsaw Pact) was a political and military alliance between the Soviet Union and several Central and Eastern European countries.
The Warsaw Pact was effectively devised to counterbalance North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a security alliance between the United States, Canada and 10 Western European countries that was established with the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on 4 April 1949.
By joining the Warsaw Pact, its members granted the Soviet Union military access to their territories and attached themselves to a shared military command. Ultimately, the pact granted Moscow a stronger hold over the dominions of the USSR in Central and Eastern Europe.
The Presidential Palace in Warsaw, where the Warsaw Pact was signed in 1955
Image Credit: Pudelek / Wikimedia Commons
By 1955, treaties already existed between the USSR and neighbouring Eastern European countries, and the Soviets already exerted political and military dominance over the region. As such, it could be argued that the establishment of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation was superfluous. But the Warsaw Pact was a response to a very particular set of geopolitical circ*mstances, specifically the admission of a remilitarised West Germany into NATO on 23 October 1954.
In fact, prior to West Germany’s admission into NATO, the USSR had sought a security pact with Western European powers and even made a play to join NATO. All such attempts were rebuffed.
As the treaty itself states, the Warsaw Pact was drawn up in response to a “new military alignment in the shape of ‘Western European Union’, with the participation of a remilitarised Western Germany and the integration of the latter in the North-Atlantic bloc, which increased the danger of another war and constitutes a threat to the national security of the peaceable states.”
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De facto Soviet control
The pact’s signatories were the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). While the pact was billed as a collective security alliance, much like NATO, in practice it reflected the USSR’s regional dominance. Soviet geostrategic and ideological interests typically overrode genuinely collective decision making and the pact became a tool to control dissent in the Eastern Bloc.
The United States is sometimes held up as NATO’s hegemonic leader but, realistically, any comparison with the role the Soviet Union played in the Warsaw Treaty Organisation is wide of the mark. While all NATO decisions require a unanimous consensus, the Soviet Union was ultimately the Warsaw Pact’s only decision-maker.
The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 was an inevitable consequence of the institutional collapse of the Communist leadership in the USSR and throughout Eastern Europe. A chain of events, including the reunification of Germany and the overthrowing of Communist governments in Albania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union itself, collapsed the edifice of Soviet control in the region. The Cold War was effectively over and so was the Warsaw Pact.
A Warsaw Pact badge bearing the inscription: ‘Brothers in Weapons’
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The Warsaw Pact’s modern legacy
Since 1990, the year of Germany’s reunification, NATO’s intergovernmental alliance has grown from 16 to 30 countries, including numerous former Eastern Bloc states, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Albania.
It’s perhaps telling that NATO’s expansion east came in the wake of the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact on 1 July 1991, a moment that signalled the end of the Soviet Union’s hold over Eastern Europe. Indeed, by the end of that year, the Soviet Union was no more.
After the dissolution of the USSR and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, NATO’s perceived expansion began to be viewed with suspicion by Russia. In the 20th century, the potential enrolment of former Soviet states like Ukraine into NATO proved particularly troubling for some Russian powerholders, including Vladimir Putin.
In the months preceding the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin was unequivocal in his insistence that Ukraine, a former member state of the Soviet Union, must not join NATO. He insisted that NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe equated to an imperialist land grab in a region that was previously united (under effective Soviet control) by the Warsaw Pact.
The Warsaw Pact was a collective defence treaty established by the Soviet Union and seven other Soviet satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania (Albania withdrew in 1968).
The original members included the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Albania. Although the Soviets claimed that the organization was a defensive alliance, it soon became clear that the primary purpose of the pact was to reinforce communist dominance in Eastern Europe.
A mutual defence treaty between Communist states was signed on 14 May 1955. Communist Bloc Conclave: The Warsaw Pact conference, 11 May 1955, Warsaw, Poland.
For 36 years, NATO and the Warsaw Pact never directly waged war against each other in Europe; the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies implemented strategic policies aimed at the containment of each other in Europe while working and fighting for influence within the wider Cold War on the ...
The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) is an intergovernmental military alliance in Eurasia consisting of six post-Soviet states: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan, formed in 2002.
Thus, some new basis to permit the continued presence of Soviet troops in these two countries was necessary; the Warsaw Pact provided this. It also established terms under which the Soviet Union could claim legitimacy for its armed presence in other Eastern European countries, if necessary.
The contracting parties declare that they will act in the spirit of friendship and co-operation with the object of furthering the development of, and strengthening the economic and cultural relations between them, adliering to the principles of mutual respect for their independence and sovereignty, and of non- ...
NATO turned 75 this year, and remains the most powerful and most successful alliance in the history of mankind: It has deterred cataclysmic war, allowed almost 1 billion people to thrive under a shield of peace, and more than doubled its initial size because of the eagerness of so many nations to join it.
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As World War II transformed both the United States and the USSR, turning the nations into formidable world powers, competition between the two increased. Following the defeat of the Axis powers, an ideological and political rivalry between the United States and the USSR gave way to the start of the Cold War.
As the Soviet Union already had an armed presence and political domination all over its eastern satellite states by 1955, the pact has been long considered "superfluous", and because of the rushed way in which it was conceived, NATO officials labeled it a "cardboard castle".
By the late 1980s political changes in most of the member states made the Pact virtually ineffectual. In September 1990, East Germany left the Pact in preparation for reunification with West Germany. By October, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland had withdrawn from all Warsaw Pact military exercises.
After the democratic revolutions of 1989 in eastern Europe, the Warsaw Pact became moribund and was formally declared “nonexistent” on July 1, 1991, at a final summit meeting of Warsaw Pact leaders in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
In May 1955, the Soviet Union institutionalized its East Euro- pean alliance system when it gathered together representatives from Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Roma- nia in Warsaw to sign the multilateral Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, which was identical to their ...
In November 1992, Poland made NATO membership an explicit goal of its foreign and security policy, stating that “the strategic objective of Poland in the [1990s] is membership in NATO and the Western European Union”. After three years of steadily closer relations, Poland had clearly and unequivocally decided on NATO.
What was one major difference in the way NATO and the Warsaw Pact were created? NATO involved the participation of the countries of Eastern Europe, while the Warsaw Pact involved Western Europe. The Warsaw Pact was primarily a military agreement, while NATO was primarily an economic agreement.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949 by the United States, Canada, and several Western European nations to provide collective security against the Soviet Union. NATO was the first peacetime military alliance the United States entered into outside of the Western Hemisphere.
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