Warsaw Pact Founded
The Warsaw Pact was signed in May 1955, six years after NATO and nine days after West Germany joined it. The timing is the whole explanation. The Soviet Union had objected for years to German rearmament, had proposed a neutral unified Germany in 1952 and been refused, and had even applied to join NATO in 1954 in a move nobody took seriously. When the Federal Republic became a member on 5 May 1955, Moscow formalised what already existed. The bloc had been controlled since the late 1940s through bilateral treaties, Soviet garrisons, and communist parties whose leaderships were appointed from Moscow, and the pact added a joint command with a Soviet marshal permanently at its head. Its practical use was almost entirely internal. It was never employed against NATO and was used twice against its own members: in Hungary in 1956, where Soviet forces intervened after Nagy announced withdrawal from the pact, and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, where five member armies invaded to end the Prague Spring — which produced the Brezhnev doctrine, holding that a threat to socialism in one country was the concern of all. Albania left in 1968 and Romania refused to take part. Poland's own crisis in 1980 and 1981 was handled by the Polish army under martial law, on the calculation that an invasion would be worse for everyone. The pact dissolved itself in July 1991, sixteen months after the Berlin Wall opened. Most of its former members are now in NATO. The asymmetry with NATO is worth stating plainly. One alliance lost members who chose to leave and the other invaded them, and the pact's own troops were used against its own populations twice in thirty-six years and against the other side never.
- Year: 1955 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
