Günter Bischof - The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

68. Geraint Hughes, “British Policy toward Eastern Europe and the Impact of the Prague Spring, 1964–1968,” Cold War History 4, no. 2 (January 2004): 133–35.

69. OPD (68) 17th meeting, 25 September 1968, CAB 148/35, TNA.

70. OPD (68) 45, 17 June 1968, CAB 148/37, TNA.

71. OPD (69) 8 by Michael Stewart on “The long term prospects for East-West Relations after the Czechoslovakian Crisis,” 18 February 1969, CAB 148/91, TNA.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops on 20 August 1968 spelled the end for de Gaulle’s policy of détente, which had been predicated on the Eastern Bloc’s increasing de-ideologization and on its growing independence from Moscow. Many observers have come to the conclusion that, in the wake of these events, government circles in Paris vacillated between disappointment and indifference, yet in view of what we know today, historians are less likely to arrive at such a straightforward picture. What did the policy of détente actually mean to Paris? How was the Soviet invasion assessed? What lessons did the French government draw from it? The archives that have now become accessible enable us to piece together a picture that is both telling and complex. The leading government circles saw the August crisis as proof rather than a refutation of their previously held views, even if this was not in keeping with the majority view at the time.

From 1964 to 1965, Paris was engaged in developing a genuine political dialogue with Moscow. The driving forces were, on the one hand, disappointment with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) arising from the inefficacy of the Elysée Treaty of 1963 and, on the other, a fear that rapprochement between Washington and Bonn might go too far and enable the FRG to take part in the decision-making process concerning nuclear armament. 1Furthermore, there was the will to build a counterweight together with the Soviet Union to the FRG in Europe and, on a global scale, to the United States. 2

Because of the split between Beijing and Moscow (which became obvious in 1964 and was beyond repair) and the resulting weakening of the global standing of the Soviet Union, Charles de Gaulle came to the conclusion that the time was now ripe for his great plan. He considered the de-ideologization of Eastern Europe and a rebirth of independent nations free from Soviet tutelage a genuine possibility. There was in Paris in 1964 the perception that such a development was already discernible. 3It would, therefore, soon be possible for France, once the so-called Yalta gap had been addressed, to pursue a new European policy. The first objective of this political realignment was to be a solution of the German question within a European security framework led by Moscow and Paris. At the same time, on the strength of interstate cooperation within the European Economic Community, France would become Western Europe’s leading power and would ensure a balance of power vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. 4

In this overall concept of a new European security system, the German question played a key role in de Gaulle’s eyes, albeit not without a certain ambiguity. On 18 May 1968, he told Nicolae Ceaus¸escu that the German two-state solution was “temporary and artificial” and that there was only “one German people.” 5However, this statement did not entail a demand for reunification.

During his visit to the Soviet Union in June 1966, de Gaulle told the Soviet party leader Leonid Brezhnev that he was “neither very keen” on German reunification, nor in any great hurry. In any case, Germany would have to offer security guarantees, which meant above all foregoing the possession of atomic, biological, and chemical (ABC) weapons and accepting the borders of 1945. 6

De Gaulle had presumably other forms of rapprochement and/or collaboration between the two German states in mind. In December 1967, an article in Foreign Politics ( Politique étrangère ) caused a stir with its analysis of potentional European security systems. Entitled “European Security Models” (“ Modèles de sécurité européenne ”) and listing its authors simply as a “research group,” the article was, in fact, based on a study by the FrancoGerman Research Committee ( Comité d’études et de recherches franco-allemand or CERFA), 7which was run in close collaboration with the Elysée as well as with West German experts. 8The authors did not envisage reunification for Germany; they preferred the model of the German Union ( Deutscher Bund ) of 1815: “Over more than 50 years this Union safeguarded [Germany’s] internal stability and a European balance of power.” The article described a potential variant of such a union, which would have included the creation of joint agencies headquartered in Berlin, in which the two German states would be represented on equal terms; both the Bundeswehr and the Volksarmee were to be preserved if only in a reduced form and linked to one another through a liaison staff. In this way, a European security system guaranteed by the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France might be a way of overcoming Europe’s division by reversing the division of Germany within that pan-European security system.

As late as May 1968, de Gaulle still believed that the FRG would prove amenable to the realization of this overall concept. He told Ceaus¸escu on 18 May he wanted to encourage Bonn to enter into negotiations with Eastern European countries, including the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR). His relationship with the West German foreign minister Willy Brandt was sufficiently good to warrant such ideas. 9The new European security system whose creation the general had in mind would be taking shape, if necessary, without the involvement of the United States, which tallied well in principle with Soviet intentions. 10The salient point here was that Paris and Moscow would have assumed a dominant position in Europe with Germany under their control. The continuity of de Gaulle’s policy from his journey to Moscow in 1944 to the Franco-Soviet Treaty and the years 1966/1968 has quite rightly been remarked on repeatedly. 11

The reports coming from the French embassy in Prague during Czechoslovakia’s invasion by the Warsaw Pact states were extremely patchy. The embassy had next to no contacts in the population. There were rather pathetic predictions of an early end to Alexander Dubček’s “moral resistance.” 12The embassy in Prague discounted the possibility of a long-term determination on the part of the people to resist the occupation. In psychological and historical terms this was portrayed as proof of the Czechs’ putative pliability that had been in evidence since 1938—an attempt, one might say, to get rid of France’s co-responsibility for the Munich Agreement of 1938. According to this interpretation, the Soviet invasion was not based on ideological but on geostrategic reasoning. The long-term strategic goal, in the words of Ambassador Roger M. Lalouette on 17 September, was the advance to the Mediterranean and the annexation of Czechoslovakia by the USSR. 13His report was given the derisive nickname “the Anschluss telegram” at the Quai d’Orsay. Robert Morisset, active as an embassy inspector at the time and formerly accredited himself at the Prague embassy at the end of the 1950s, made a trip to Prague in September on a tour of inspection of the embassy and its activities.

The first thing he noted was that the embassy had failed to cultivate contacts with the population. He himself talked to ordinary citizens and to intellectuals; in doing so he noticed how deeply rooted in people’s minds was the tendency to advocate liberation, at least as a theoretical possibility. 14