Disengagement

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Disengagement became part of the vocabulary of international politics after World War 11. It was offered as an alternative policy prescription to the perilous face-to-face confrontation, especially in central Europe, of opposing political systems and armed forces equipped with nuclear weapons capable of total destruction. The essence of disengagement is the separation of the contending forces and the creation, in the intervening territory, of a non-aligned state (or states) with political, social, and economic systems equally acceptable (or unacceptable) to both adjacent powers, including a level of military forces that by itself does not constitute a significant threat to either side.

A second, but less common, definition of disengagement pertains to areas where a variety of powers contend for dominant influence and where, as in the Middle East during the post-1945 epoch, there is great political instability but not a direct military confrontation of major powers. Here disengagement describes a national policy characterized by aloofness and watchful nonintervention, rather than the withdrawal of two forces pitted face to face.

This article will deal with disengagement primarily in its first, more usual, sense.

The term distinguished. Disengagement policies must be distinguished from three antecedent practices of interstate relations in the period between the World Wars: the policy of cordon sanitaire; the creation of buffer states; and the existence of corridors.

A cordon sanitaire is a territory separating two powers who if they combined in a single land mass might constitute a threat to other nations. Thus the principal victor powers in World War i sought to keep Germany and Russia apart by creating between them a belt of nations consisting of the Baltic states, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, whose sovereignty was to be guaranteed by the major Western powers.

Buffer states are weak states existing by leave of their preponderant neighbor, whose military, political, and economic interests they serve. An example is Belgium, which owed its independent existence, from 1831 to World War ii, to its chief neighboring powers, Great Britain and France, who used it to establish a balance of power favorable to them.

A corridor is a strip of territory giving a state access to a remote component part across the sovereign territory of a neighboring state. Pomerania constituted the link between East Prussia and the rest of Germany until 1919. The Versailles Treaty gave Pomerania to Poland, in order to allow it access to the Baltic Sea, thereby separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany and creating the so-called corridor across Poland, which became a major source of tension between the two countries.

Disengagement policies seek to separate two mutually antagonistic powers, unlike the cordon sanitaire, which was employed to keep potential allies apart. The states from which foreign troops are withdrawn—or disengaged—would not favor the policy interests of any one neighbor; buffer states, on the other hand, exist by sufferance of neighbors whose interests they serve. Disengagement policies aim to eliminate the impediments to direct contact between people of a given nationality instead of perpetuating the uncertainties of access that result from the establishment of corridors.

These distinctions can be further clarified by citing the circumstances of central European politics following World War ii. While no effort to create a cordon sanitaire has been made in Europe since 1945, East and West Germany have been kept divided because of the fear that a reunified Germany might constitute a new international danger. Most disengagement policies aim at the reunification of Germany to eliminate the tensions resulting from continued partition. The nations of the Warsaw Pact, stretching along the western and southwestern frontiers of the Soviet Union from Finland to Bulgaria, are in effect buffer states serving Russia’s security interests. A principal aim of Western disengagement proposals is withdrawal of the U.S.S.R.’s forces and the reduction of its influence in eastern Europe, so as to reinstate a balance of power in that area. A corridor in fact exists linking West Germany with Berlin across the territory of the East German state. Disengagement proposals aim at the elimination of the barriers to free air, road, rail, and canal connections with Berlin. Thus the concept of disengagement is not only distinguishable from the practices of cordon sanitaire, buffer state, and corridor, but disengagement proposals aim at eliminating vestiges of these historically antecedent practices to be found in Europe today as part of the cold war status quo.

Plans for disengagement. Since 1945 the concept of disengagement has been implicit in a variety of plans evolved to meet the situation in central Europe, where the two supernuclear powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, who feared only each other, failed to agree on the future of Germany as a whole and refused to withdraw their military forces, which enforced their political interests in East and West Germany.

Through 1964 more than a hundred different plans for the disengagement of East and West military forces in central Europe had been put forward by national governments, individual statesmen, prominent ex-leaders, and private individuals and groups. (For a listing, see Hinterhoff 1959, pp. 414–442.) A distinguishing feature of these plans is that all concern the future of Germany. Solutions for the divided state of Germany range from U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes’s 1946 proposal for a 25-year four-power treaty guarantee against further aggression from a united, disarmed Germany to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 plan for withdrawal of foreign troops from all of Europe, creation of an atom-free zone in central Europe, and retention of the status quo of a divided Germany. Over the years, the concept of disengagement evolved from taking measures to deal with renewed threats of German aggression to creating broad neutral zones in Europe. These zones would require dismantling of nonindigenous military installations and either retaining the political status quo or providing for the reunification of Germany under changed circumstances. This evolution of plans, none of which received support from both East and West, was marked by specific proposals of the Polish foreign minister, Adam Rapacki; the leader of the British Labour party, Hugh Gaitskell; and the chairman of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, George F. Kennan, Each of these statesmen proposed major changes in the stance and policies of the major powers in Europe; the essential common denominator of the three proposals was the disengagement of American and Russian forces.

The first version of the Rapacki plan, in October 1957, provided for an atom-free zone covering Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and West Germany, with a four-power guarantee but no withdrawal of foreign forces or changes in the alliances of the powers. The second version, in November 1958, and a later revision added provisions for reducing and eventually withdrawing foreign forces from the zone, with appropriate control measures. The Gaitskell plan was publicized in lectures at Harvard University in January 1957 and differed from the Rapacki plans in that it provided for the reunification of East and West Germany in the context of a restricted armaments zone from which foreign troops were to be gradually withdrawn, the zone to include, in addition to Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and possibly Rumania. This arrangement was to be guaranteed by a European security pact, which both the Soviet Union and the United States would sign. The Rapacki plans, which appeared to have support from the Soviet government, were rejected by the major NATO powers. The Gaitskell plan was unacceptable to the Soviet bloc and was also rejected by the West German government of Konrad Adenauer.

Ambassador Kennan’s disengagement policy proposals were in some ways the best thought out, and their elaboration in the Reith lectures over the BBC in the autumn of 1957 (later published as Russia, the Atom and the West, 1958) provoked widespread public discussion and controversy involving high political leaders of the major powers. Kennan had gained an international reputation for framing and defining the West’s policy of containment (1947). For Kennan, disengagement was a logical successor policy to containment, which by the mid-1950s had pitted effectively equal powers hard against one another, creating an inflexible situation in which either an incident or a misinterpretation of intentions could unleash world-wide nuclear destruction. He held that this danger could only be reduced through the separation of military forces and the reuniting of Europe through a negotiated settlement of the German problem. Specifically, Kennan proposed reunifying Germany and joining it with Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary in a zone from which NATO and Soviet troops would be withdrawn. The balance of power in the zone would be maintained by national armed forces and militia. Germany’s freedom to associate with NATO or the East would be restricted, while Germany and the other states constituting the zone would receive guarantees from NATO and the Warsaw Pact powers who would join in a European security pact.

Criticisms of disengagement. In the heated debate stirred up by Kennan’s proposals, the entire concept of disengagement was sharply criticized. Some critics took issue with the concept because it was diametrically opposed to the idea of forcing a unilateral withdrawal of the Russian army and liberating eastern Europe from communist domination. Other critics, including some of Kennan’s former colleagues, such as Dean Acheson (1958), opposed and ridiculed disengagement on a variety of other grounds. Foremost among these was the charge that the idea of disengagement rested on a fundamental misunderstanding of national and international power. According to this view, a classic imperialist power such as the U.S.S.R. could not realistically be expected to keep from disrupting the precarious balance in a relatively weak territory from which forces of the major powers had been withdrawn. A parallel criticism was that a disengagement in Europe would be inherently unequal. Soviet Russia’s forces would withdraw several hundred miles, whereas U.S. forces woul be pulled back thousands of miles across the Atlantic. Another major criticism was that disengagement could not achieve any positive result because the essential danger is in the confrontation of missiles poised thousands of miles apart. Indeed, some argued that disengagement would create a vacuum in central Europe and increase the danger that the missiles would be used because they would be the only resort in the event of an incident (Acheson 1958).

These criticisms were eloquently refuted by Kennan in an article, “Disengagement Revisited” (1959), in which he accused opponents of disengagement of seeking the ideal military posture, which “is simply the enemy of every political détente or compromise.” This article and other writings by proponents of disengagement focused on the problems of Germany’s partition which, they argued, could not continue indefinitely. Unless reunification were achieved through East-West negotiations resulting in disengagement, direct West German dealings with Moscow would become a constant threat that could disrupt NATO, while eastern Europe remained under communist domination.

The future of disengagement. Research and writing on disengagement falls into the general field of international political research, chiefly pertaining to Europe. Theoretically the concept could be applied to situations in other parts of the world; for example, to the confrontation between Arab and Israeli forces. The term has in fact been applied to United States policy of the 1960s in the Middle East, adopting the second and less common definition of disengagement, described above, as a policy of watchful nonintervention (Nolte 1964). But it is understandable that the focus of disengagement proposals and research has been on the critical European situation, where the principal nuclear powers confront one another. Recent scholarly efforts to deal with this situation fall into two categories: (1) proposals, plans, and formulas for the achievement of disengagement; and (2) discussions of its feasibility in the context of evolving East and West strategies and goals. Apart from Hinterhoff’s book, only Michael Howard’s Disengagement in Europe (1958) concerns itself exclusively and explicitly with evaluating the prospects of these policy prescriptions. In Howard’s opinion, the adoption of any disengagement proposal is unlikely as long as German reunification on terms acceptable to a West German government is to be a primary result. This result remains inimical to the stated aims of the Soviet government. In addition, West Germany’s territory and its armed forces play a central role in NATO’s defense against possible aggression; a scheme in which West Germany is excluded from NATO is, therefore, likely to require too great a sacrifice in terms of present Western strategy. Beyond these considerations, it needs to be noted that most proposals for disengagement are characteristically all-inclusive formulas providing for instant resolution of a complex of problems. Although the problems of Berlin, Germany, eastern Europe, nuclear strategy, and disarmament may be inextricably interrelated, any sharp or wholesale change in this delicate structure poses even greater dangers than its continuance; formulas for radical change are, therefore, likely to remain unacceptable to both sides. Possibly the only practical disengagement proposals that can be implemented are those of George Kennan and the few others who do not prescribe formulas for salvation but rather encourage the adoption of new attitudes and aims. The West will have to recognize the existence of Soviet Russia’s influence in central Europe for the foreseeable future, while Russia will have to realize that hegemony in Europe can be achieved only at a catastrophic price. These new attitudes may then lead to compromises by both sides and to the gradual unraveling of the network of conflicts.

Gerald Freund

[See alsoContainment; International Politics.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acheson, Dean 1958 The Illusion of Disengagement. Foreign Affairs 36:371–382.

Gaitskell, Hugh 1957 The Challenge of Coexistence. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Hinterhoff, Eugene 1959 Disengagement. With a fore-word by John Slessor. London: Stevens.

Howard, Michael 1958 Disengagement in Europe. Harmondsworth, Middlesex (England) and Baltimore: Penguin.

Kennan, George F. 1947 The Sources of Soviet Conduct. Foreign Affairs 25:566–582. ? This article was written under the pseudonym X.

Kennan, George F. 1958 Russia, the Atom and the West. New York: Harper.

Kennan, George F. 1959 Disengagement Revisited. Foreign Affairs 37:187–210.

Nolte, Richard H. 1964 United States Policy and the Middle East. Pages 148–182 in American Assembly, The United States and the Middle East. Edited by Georgiana G. Stevens. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.