Human rights and foreign policy
Patrick Cosgrave
The release of Mr Sharygin after a decade in Russian prison camps raises again the question of the correct attitude of the West to Soviet inhumanity. Most would-be exponents of Realpolitik despise the increasing (if often haphazard and inconsistent) concern of Western writers and politicians with human rights in other countries. In Britain in particular such critics cling to the sacred old adage of the Foreign Office, that it is no concern of ours how other nations, or those in charge of them, organise their affairs: our business is with governments. We recognise particular governments as soon as we are satisfied that they are fully in charge of their countries, and we deal with them accordingly.
As far as it goes, this is a perfectly tenable and logical position, and one for which I have a great deal of sympathy. But there is an interesting division on the subject, both among the members of the American right and among British Tories. President Ford's refusal — on the advice of Dr Kissinger — to meet Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for example, called, forth a memorable and scathing denunciation from the high priest of intellectual American Conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr, in July 1975. At home Mrs Thatcher's evident admiration for the Russian sage, and her frequent references to the refusal of the USSR to meet its commitments under the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Accords, has provoked concern and even hostility among our own supposedly tough-minded rightwing intellectuals. I have in mind, here, particularly Mr George Gale and Mr Maurice Cowling (the Cambridge savant), both of whom, of course, are intensely hostile to Solzhenitsyn, at least as a political prophet. To the tough-minded (or would-be tough-minded), of course, allowing sentiment a place in politics (except for tactical electoral reasons) is a great sin.
Nonetheless, I am convinced that — particularly as far as the USSR is concerned it is the tough-minded and hard-headed exponents of the traditional view who have got the practicalities of the whole matter wrong. To my mind, an insistent and constant concern with human rights in the Soviet Union is — given certain conditions of modern international politics which I will discuss in a moment — a vital part of Realpolitik itself. First, though, there is a simple matter of style, and it is as well to get that out of the way. It is best expressed in the memorable article by Mr Buckley which I mentioned above. 'How clearly, every day that we log the activities of the free nations of the world', he wrote, 'in juxtaposition with those of the enemy, their moral —yes, moral superiority strikes us. There is a genuine integrity in people like Mao Tse-tung, and even such bureaucratic imitations as Leonid Brezhnev.' What provoked Mr Buckley to this outburst was the fact that (as illustrated by the Solzhenitsyn affair) Western leaders so frequently decline to greet, or avoid meeting, and certainly never fete, critics or victims of the Soviet government, while the Soviets and other Communists go out of their way to be 'hail fellow well met' with Western citizens savagely hostile to their own countries; and he instances the fact that while the Russian press virtually ignored an American exhibition mounted under the aegis of détente in Donetsk, it gave acres of space to Mr Brezhnev's fulsome greeting of Angela Davis. I have no doubt that it is a good thing—even if a small good thing — for our people to behave well towards our friends and their enemies when the Communists are doing the reverse. It is never bad to let the other fellow know where you stand.
But the grander question is the attitude — if any — that Western governments ought to take to the treatment by the USSR government of its own citizens within its own borders. Mr Cowling once observed to me that to express the kind of concern and hostility that Mrs Thatcher did at Dorking on the anniversary of the signing of the Helsinki Accords was unquestionably a violation of British national interest. I think he • had in mind that it might threaten AngloRussian trade. In truth, though, we gain little if anything from our trade with Iron Curtain countries, because of the profligacy with which we extend credits to them; and we actually endanger ourselves and our allies by the generosity with which we make the Russians in particular free of our technological discoveries.
And the point of danger is the most crucial of all. Baldwin, commenting once nn the military imbalance between Britain and Nazi Germany, observed that in militarY terms a democracy is always two years behind a dictator. The period could eel" tainly be stretched today. The militarisation of Soviet society (percipiently analysed the other day in The Times by Mr Charles Douglas-Home) is of such an extent as to constitute a phenomenon without parallel in history. The decade-old Soviet-Western talks on mutual and balanced force reductions in the European theatre have wandered along from pleasant by-way to pleas" ant by-way without achieving the slightest in the way of reducing the growing Pre: ponderance of Russian and Russian-backe0 forces in Europe. To take but one of the less familiar ekamples, while NATO divisions have been reduced in strength from fifteen to ten thousand men (because of the re: deployment consequent on governments unwillingness to pay for defence) Russian divisions have been increased in strength from eleven to fourteen thousand men; and there is a plan well under way to have then all armoured. Many British soldiers had to walk to a recent NATO exercise. , A vigorous policy on human rights within the Soviet Union is hardly an answer, and certainly not a really effective one, to this growing disparity of military strength. But the Western politicians and diplomats at Helsinki were not all fools. Many of thei? understood the implications of Baldwin! dictum. They realised that, to the extel1L, that the Russians fulfilled the terms 01 Helsinki, their people would be better informed about the real nature and intell] tions of the Western Alliance. They realise' that any weakcening of the monolithic Soviet structure, such as would be implied by free.r, emigration, would in turn weaken, even 11 only slightly, the Soviet propensity 10 militarism. If it can be argued that the West was foolish to try to set such (even pote° tially) tiny gains against their own reltic" tance to rearm and the constant re" armament of the USSR, it can also be argued that they were doing something. am very glad', Churchill said in Jul?! 1934, 'that the Disarmament Conference Is passing out of life and into history. It is the greatest mistake to mix up disarmament with peace. When you have peace you have disarmament.' If not wholly applicable to a period when it is distinctly possible that Mutually Assured Destruction is on anY military agenda(and when, therefore. mutual restrictions on the development of certain weapons may be achieved without diminished hostility) there was a lot of wisdom in his words. The human rights 'basket' (as it was called) at Helsinki was an attempt to create at least a tiny fraction Of that trust between peoples which weakens the will to war, the most important threat of which arises from the domestic constitution of the USSR. Every human rights cam paign, and every Western gesture in the direction of such a campaign, helps the great cause along. And that, in the nuclear age, is the height of intelligent Rea/pa/Wk.
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