cover image The Promises We Keep: Human Rights, the Helsinki Process, and American Foreign Policy

The Promises We Keep: Human Rights, the Helsinki Process, and American Foreign Policy

William Korey. Not Avail, $45 (529pp) ISBN 978-0-312-09118-7

Korey, director of international policy research for B'nai B'rith from 1976 to 1990, has written a book for experts, an extensively researched, blow-by-blow account of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), launched in Helsinki in 1975. While the Soviet Union, the CSCE's main sponsor, had thought it would legitimate Soviet power in Eastern Europe, in fact its tenets ultimately led to pressure on the Soviets about their human rights record and arguably helped foster the fall of communism. Korey has examined documents and interviewed diplomats to reconstruct CSCE debates, meetings and decisions. He describes Henry Kissinger's skepticism abut the principles of the Helsinki Final Act; the growth of Andrei Sakharov's monitoring organization, the Helsinki Watch Group, in the Soviet Union; the signatories' agreements to increased rights to religious practice and emigration in 1989 Vienna negotiations; and the contribution of U.S. negotiator Max Kampelman. Though Korey sees the CSCE as a success, he notes that neither it nor any other international organization has been able to curb violence in the former Yugoslavia and other European ethnic flashpoints. (Aug.)