The Prague Summit scheduled to take place in November this year will decide the future of many former communist countries, including Bulgaria, that hope to join NATO. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have already made it. Now, everyone expects to see the next lucky candidates.

However, being part of a military alliance recalls some unpleasant memories for these countries. This week (May 14) marked the 48th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact, the powerful alliance that was used by the former Soviet Union to dominate Eastern Europe.

The Warsaw Pact

It is often acknowledged that the history of mankind is written by its victors. For no other continent is this truer than Europe. Empires and ideologies have triumphed, perished and fallen into oblivion through the centuries. One of these ideologies was the communist, and its major instrument was the Warsaw Pact.

Knowing the role of this formidable military force that not long ago ruled half of the European continent may help understand the dilemmas and anxieties of present Eastern European security policies, the dynamics of bloc politics, Russian objections to a future NATO enlargement and the equally keen Eastern European avocations of it.

For nearly 50 years Europe was divided into two ideologically opposed spheres of interest. The sovereign ruler of the Eastern one was the Soviet Union. The Soviet interest in Eastern Europe has a long historical standing and can be explained by a number of intertwined reasons. A traditional perception, dating back to the days of Peter the Great, considers the Eastern European region as Russia's natural and rightful sphere of interest.

The political and military alliance of the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialist states was formed in 1955 as a counterweight to NATO, created in 1949. During much of its early existence, the Warsaw Pact essentially functioned as part of the Soviet Ministry of Defence. In fact, in the early years of its existence the Warsaw Pact served as one of the Soviet Union's primary mechanisms for keeping its Eastern European allies under its political and military control.

The Soviet Union used the Warsaw Pact to erect a facade of collective decisions and actions around the reality of its political domination and military intervention in the internal affairs of its allies. This was seen in major events like the Polish October of 1956, the Hungarian Revolution of that same year and the Prague Spring of 1968. In the three cases, the Warsaw Pact was use as a justification of actual interference in the internal affairs of the three countries.

Since its inception, the Warsaw Pact has reflected the changing pattern of Soviet-Eastern European relations and manifested problems that affect all alliances. The Warsaw Pact evolved into something other than the mechanism of control the Soviet Union originally intended it to be and, since the 1960s, has become less dominated by the Soviet Union.

Thus, in 1962 Albania stopped participating in Warsaw Pact activities and formally withdrew from the alliance in 1968. The organisational structure of the Warsaw Pact also has provided a forum for greater intra-alliance debate, bargaining, and conflict between the Soviet Union and its allies over the issues of national independence, policy autonomy, and Eastern European participation in alliance decision making.

Bulgaria and the end of the Pact

In the mid-1990s, as other Eastern European archives, the main political archives in Bulgaria from the period 1944-1975 were made public. In 1999 the most strictly guarded Bulgarian Communist Party Politburo special collection of "Directives B" from 1946-1989, containing more than 900 files, was also declassified.

In his study on "Bulgaria and the End of the Warsaw Pact", published in 1999, Yordan Baev*, a Bulgarian historian, wrote that in the global confrontation of the Cold War period, the Balkans played a secondary role in comparison with the concentration of forces and permanent confrontation in Central Europe.

The declassified documents showed the particularly close relations between the long-lasting Bulgarian ruler Todor Zhivkov and his Soviet counterparts, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev.

"Even the obvious mutual coolness of Zhivkov's relations with Mikhail Gorbachev after 1986 was compensated for by the close contacts maintained between the State and Party administrations of both countries at all levels," Baev said. "This is particularly important for the contacts between top military, security and diplomatic officers, who even after the dramatic changes that had taken place in Eastern Europe in 1989 kept the habit and practice of coordinating their attitudes and actions," Yordan Baev concluded.

The first meeting of the Political Consultative Committee (PCC) of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation after Mikhail Gorbachev's coming into power took place in October 1985 in Sofia. This regular session had originally been planned to be held in January of that year but was postponed because of the illness and death of Gorbachev's predecessor, Konstantin Chernenko. Immediately after being elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev had the opportunity to see what the view of the members of the Warsaw Pact about its future was. And no surprises he encountered...

At the Budapest PCC meeting in 1986, Eastern European leaders once again displayed "full unanimity" and support of Soviet policy. Nevertheless, Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian leader, came up with a proposal for the reduction of the armed forces, armaments, and military expenses by 30 per cent by 1990 and by 50 per cent by the year 2000 as well as the dissolution of the two blocs by the end of the century.

Despite the widely advertised Bulgarian-Soviet friendship and full unanimity, 1987 was the year when mutual distrust began to creep into the personal relations between the two countries' leaders. This was a feeling, which Zhivkov had never let out in his contacts with Khrushchev and Brezhnev. At the same time, Gorbachev's contacts with the "conservative" leaders of East Germany and Czechoslovakia, Erich Honecker and Gustav Husak, became more and more tense while his relations with Ceausescu were strictly formal. Nevertheless, these internal contradictions never came to surface until 1989.

In 1987, a growing confrontation between two Warsaw Pact member countries, Hungary and Romania began to appear clearly, this time over ethnic issues. In Moscow in March, Hungary tried to put forward the issue of its ethnic minority in Transylvania. The consideration of the Romanian-Hungarian differences was waived aside by other participating parties. It was the first time in the history of the Warsaw Pact that a bilateral conflict between its member countries came to light at a multilateral forum.

During the Vienna meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), Hungary again put forward the issue of its differences with Romania and even indirectly sought support from the West. At the same time, the Bulgarian authorities presented a similar ethnic dispute with a NATO member country, Turkey, as a part of an "imperialistic attack against Socialism", but the Eastern European allies, except the USSR, refused to support Bulgaria's claim.

On the eve of the PCC meeting in Warsaw in July 1988, Ceausescu made his most radical proposal for changes in the Pact's organisational structure. On 4 July 1988 a request for urgent bilateral consultations regarding the new Romanian initiative "for democratisation and improvement of the organisation and the functioning of the Warsaw Treaty bodies" was sent to Moscow from Bucharest.

There were five points in the Romanian proposal, the most important of which was the one suggesting taking the PCC out of the Warsaw Pact structures. Thus the Pact would have been transformed from a military-political organisation into a military one.

In a confidential message sent by the Soviet leadership to Sofia, all Romanian proposals were rejected, the main argument being that they "aim at weakening the now existing military organisation of the alliance". The Bulgarian Politburo adopted a special resolution stating that for the time being Ceausescu's letter was not to be answered and the issue be discussed.

During the dramatic year of 1989 two contradictory tendencies in the positions of member countries of the Pact were clearly expressed as early as the conference in Berlin in April. Romania and the GDR openly attacked Moscow and other allies for the "concessions" made to the West and for causing an inner crisis within the "socialist system". On the other hand, Hungary and Poland demanded a less confrontational and "non-bloc" approach, as well as radical reform in the political system.

According to them, this reform should have included the adoption of a pluralistic parliamentary democracy, something unthinkable before. The Czechoslovak leadership, under stress from the "1968 syndrome", undertook strong repressive action within the country. The position of Zhivkov, the "doyen" of the Eastern European communist rulers, reminded to a certain extent of his behaviour during the Czech and Polish crises (1968 and 1980-1981 respectively).

He publicly praised the perestroika and glasnost policy but confidentially criticised "unacceptable concessions" and "power surrender".

After a series of events, on May 17, 1991, Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel addressed an official invitation to his Eastern European colleagues to carry out the Czechoslovak proposal of February to hold a concluding PCC meeting on July 1, 1991, in Prague with the purpose of signing a joint Protocol for the termination of the activities of the Warsaw Pact Organisation. At the agreed date, July 1, 1991, after 36 years of existence, the Eastern European military and political alliance was terminated.

Now, the former Warsaw Pact allies hope to become allies again. But, in another military organisation - NATO. They expect that NATO will bring them stability, security, investment and many other things, but most of all the opportunity to make their own choices...

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* Yordan Baev is Associate Professor of National Security and Conflict Management at the University of National and World Economy and New Bulgarian University in Sofia. He is Vice-President of the Bulgarian Association of Military History and Executive Director of the Center for Conflict Studies as well as the coordinator of the Cold War Research Group-Bulgaria.