There is no doubt that Michael Cotey Morgan's book will be a landmark work: it offers a remarkable study of the negotiations of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) which, between 1972 and 1975, structured east-west relations and resulted in the signature of the Helsinki Final Act on August 1975. Based both on archival records and on many works that since the early 2000s have been devoted to the CSCE, this book is an indispensable overview of the immense historiographical effort that the Helsinki process has generated. M. C. Morgan completes the huge European and North American research movement that has shed light on the stakes, the course, and the consequences of the CSCE on Cold War Europe, with the exception that instead of focusing on the point of view of a single country or group of countries, the author provides a comprehensive analysis of the CSCE negotiations. We can therefore only welcome the publication of such a book, which can already be considered a key volume.

Thanks to extremely fluid writing and a scriptwriting effort that reflects the extent to which the CSCE constituted a human and diplomatic adventure, with characters sometimes colorful and events often unexpected, Morgan succeeds in the feat of rendering in great detail the particular atmosphere of this meeting and, more broadly, that of east-west relations during the 1970s. Each issue raised by the CSCE—human rights, state sovereignty, non-interference in internal affairs, contacts between people, economic and commercial cooperation—is contextualized: the author perfectly demonstrates that the Helsinki process was a reflection of its time, that no theme of the discussion was randomly selected. All of them were constitutive of Cold War history and the balance of power between the two blocs. Thus, the author always takes care to confront points of view and to deconstruct the decision-making processes within the blocs and within the CSCE. That is the case, for example, in Chapter 6 on the Helsinki “Third Basket” (which dealt with human contacts, information, and cultural exchanges): the author analyzes the Soviet internal debate on how to limit the scope of this basket at a time when the message of the dissidents was better known in the west and respect for human rights was becoming an essential issue in western societies (183).

Therefore, Morgan places the CSCE in the context of the global contestation of established order that the two blocs faced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and makes the conference a response to this societal challenge. At the same time, he highlights the main fault-lines between the two superpowers on the one hand, and western Europeans on the other, regarding the future of European security and, consequently, the CSCE: even though all of them considered that the “work of peacemaking” (74) had not been completed in the aftermath of World War II, the Soviet and American leaders believed that only east-west stabilization could perpetuate peace in Europe; on the contrary, France and the Federal Republic of Germany thought that maintaining the division of Europe was a major obstacle to achieving a lasting peace. In underlining this opposition, Morgan shows that regardless of where we stood, the CSCE was seen as a step toward the resolution of World War II consequences: some saw it as a way of freezing the status quo, others considered it as an instrument to overcome the Iron curtain.

Thus, in line with recent works on the CSCE, the author demonstrates how west Europeans managed to impose the idea of a peaceful change of borders so as not to prevent Germany from being unified one day, and did everything to weaken the Brezhnev doctrine on limited sovereignty. Above all, Morgan poses in a very clear and well-founded manner the basis of the debate on the link between state sovereignty and respect for human rights that westerners wanted to place on an equal footing, thus responding to demands of their public opinions and weakening the Westphalian system of international relations. We can simply regret that the study of west European positions only favors France and the FRG to the detriment of other countries, and fails to consider the significant role of European Political Cooperation (EPC) in the drafting of the Final Act.