Alliances: Warsaw Pact Murmurs

Is the Warsaw Pact as solid as it seems? As the seven members of the East bloc military alliance prepare to renew their ties, which formally expire in May, there are signs of discord simmering beneath the pact’s outward unity. One such signal flashed last week when East Germany’s Communist Party daily Neues Deutschland prominently reprinted remarks by a senior Hungarian official that seemed to question Moscow’s right to meddle in the internal affairs of its allies.

In the interview, reprinted from the Hungarian trade-union newspaper Nepszava, Deputy Foreign Minister Istvan Roska noted that there were some differences between Warsaw Pact members over the terms that should be written into the 30-year-old treaty’s extension. Roska also observed that pact members are “independent and sovereign countries that without exception respect the principle of nonintervention in (one another’s) internal affairs.” That comment clearly referred to the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, formulated after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, under which Moscow reserves the right to intervene in Eastern Europe wherever socialism is threatened.