| The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) influenced United States foreign policy, Soviet-American relations, and the end of the Cold War in many ways, and important connections developed between American foreign policy and the series of follow-up meetings to the CSCE that collectively became known as the "Helsinki process." Lengthy Soviet efforts to secure recognition of European postwar borders, which was the initial impetus for the CSCE, unintentionally created institutions and social norms that became prominent forces in the collapse of the Soviet bloc. A transnational network of groups and individuals, including politicians, diplomats, human rights experts, and ethnic interest groups, utilized the Helsinki process to affect political change in Eastern Europe, and this multilateral, transnational diplomacy shifted the course of American-Soviet relations and the Cold War.; The Helsinki Final Act came to play a powerful role in changing the Cold War. The human rights principle, the human contacts provisions, and the follow-up mechanism of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, which was the culmination of three years of CSCE negotiations, all spurred the development of a transnational network of activists pushing for reform in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. With the power of public opinion behind the network, human rights activists moved the topic into the forefront of international relations. As a result, human rights became an important element of Cold War diplomacy, and efforts to achieve implementation of the Helsinki Final Act contributed significantly to the end of the Cold War.; This dissertation explores the role of the Helsinki process in the end of the Cold War, chronicling the process from the initial Soviet 1954 request for a European security conference to the far-reaching reform enacted by Gorbachev. Across this time period, it analyzes the role of transnational advocacy in the international political diplomacy that shaped the Cold War and its collapse. |
