- Called, in the West, the Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions Talks
(MBFR), these were initially aimed at reducing troop levels to 700,000 army
personnel (and 900,000 army and air force combined) on each side. All
Warsaw Pactcountries participated in the talks, as did allNATOcountries
with the exception of France, Iceland, Portugal and Spain. However there was
never very much chance of success, because the Western interpretation of
‘mutual and balanced’ involved a much greater sacrifice on the part of the
Warsaw Pact, whose main strength at this time was simply their greater troop
strength. The talks were politically useful to various members of the two blocs
for their own reasons, so they continued for 15 years, finally being ended only
in 1988 because the new world climate had produced a much more hopeful
alternative. This alternative, which came to be known as the Conventional
Forces in Europe talks, began in late 1987 and rapidly developed some basic
guidelines. Firstly they were to cover the whole of Europe ‘from the Atlantic to
the Urals’. Secondly they were to delimit not only troop strengths, and those
quite strictly, but also weapon types. Limits were to be placed on tanks,
armoured fighting vehicles, artillery and combat helicopters. There were
inevitable definitional problems, for example how heavy did an armoured
vehicle have to be before it became a tank? There were also problems about the
share of force cuts which should come from each national contingent of the
blocs, and about verification inspections and timetables. All of these were dealt
with in a considerable spirit of co-operation, but the negotiations were
continually outpaced by external political events. Essentially what happened
was that the troop levels and deployments agreed upon, very roughly a
reduction of 30%, were actually considerably higher than the individual
preferences of both sides, and complicated by separate agreements within
the Warsaw Pacts for the removal of Soviet troops from the territories of other
formerSoviet bloccountries. The treaty was signed in late 1990, a very short
time for so complex a document, but even so history had overtaken it because
the Warsaw Pact had already collapsed, Germany had been reunited and little
more than a year later the Soviet Union itself was dissolved.
Convergence Thesis
This is the name given to the argument, first formally developed by political
scientists in the 1950s but foreshadowed byWeberand others much earlier,
thatsocialistandcapitalistsocieties would inexorably grow more and more
alike. The reasons for this prediction vary, but they all have to do with a theory
ofbureaucracyand assumptions about the kind of organization needed to
ensure rational policies and efficient decision-making. The basic idea is that
planning is paramount in modern societies, and that all forms of planning and
administrative control are, whatever their supposed ideological complexion,
Convergence Thesis