Sinatra Doctrine
The Sinatra Doctrine describes the Soviet policy under Mikhail Gorbachev , which allowed the Warsaw Pact states to regulate their internal affairs with sovereignty.
The name of the doctrine after Frank Sinatra alluded to the song My Way , which he made world famous, and was intended to symbolize the possibility of the Warsaw Pact states (namely Poland and Hungary ) to be able to pursue their own internal reforms and without outside interference while the previous Brezhnev doctrine justified the invasion of the Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring in 1968. As a result, the Eastern Bloc countries began democratic reforms, which in 1989 led to the opening of the Iron Curtain and, as a result, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War .
On October 25, 1989, Gorbachev visited the Finnish President Mauno Koivisto in Helsinki . On that day, both declared that they would refrain from using violence against an opposing alliance, a neutral state or a state of their own alliance.
"The Soviet Union, a Eurasian government with nuclear weapons, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and member of the Warsaw Treaty Organization, and Finland, a neutral northern European non-nuclear state [...] declared their determination to implement the following principles and priorities in Europe [ ...] to implement [...] No use of force can be justified, neither through a military-political alliance against another, nor within these alliances, nor against neutral countries of any party. "
So this was a clear explanation, not just for Finland . The press spokesman for the then Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and member of the delegation during the meeting in Helsinki, Gennady Gerasimov , announced to the Western press that Gorbachev had published a "Sinatra Doctrine". He explained the term to the journalists on site by saying:
"You know the Frank Sinatra song, I Did It My Way? Poland and Hungary are now doing it their way. I think the 'Brezhnev Doctrine' is dead. "
literature
- Sovetsko-finljandskaja Deklaracija: Novoe myšlenie v dejstvii . Izvestia, October 26, 1989.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Christopher Jones: Gorbacev's Military Doctrine and the End of the Warsaw Pact . In: Torsten Diedrich, Winfried Heinemann, Christian F. Ostermann (eds.): The Warsaw Pact - From the foundation to the collapse 1955 to 1991 . Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86153-504-1 . P. 257.
- ^ 'Sinatra Doctrine' at Work in Warsaw Pact, Soviet Says . In: Los Angeles Times on October 25, 1989.
- ^ Bill Keller: Gorbachev, in Finland, Disavows Any Right of Regional Intervention . In The New York Times on October 26, 1989.