A diplomat who widened room for negotiation amid East-West tension
On 2 October 1957 he presented to the UN General Assembly his plan for a nuclear-free zone comprising Czechoslovakia, Poland, East and West Germany; it was never adopted.
Adam Rapacki was born on 24 December 1909 in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv), and raised in Warsaw. A Polish socialist politician, economist and diplomat, he translated the security demands of the socialist bloc into the language of international negotiation. He proposed a nuclear-free zone in Central Europe in 1957 and called for a European security conference in 1964, helping shape an agenda that fed into the Helsinki process. He was also a Communist politician who served in the PZPR leadership and government, and was nominated for the 1966 Nobel Peace Prize. Regarded as a leader of the party's liberalising wing, he opposed the persecution of people of Jewish origin and was removed as foreign minister in December 1968; he died in Warsaw on 10 October 1970.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1931Joined the Union of Independent Socialist Youth
- 1939–1945Educational and political activity in German prisoner-of-war camps
- 1947–1950Polish Minister of Shipping
- 1950–1956Minister of Higher Education and Science, later Higher Education
- 1956–1968Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs
- 1964Proposed convening a European security conference
- 1968Withdrew from political life after the March events
- 1948–1968PZPR Politburo member (deputy member 1954–56)
- 1968.12Removed as foreign minister for opposing anti-Jewish measures
Related historical events
Diplomacy for a European security conference and the campaign against a nuclear-armed West Germany
Rapacki's late-1950s diplomacy turned on the German question. The central concerns of Polish foreign policy were the West German government's refusal to recognise the Oder-Neisse line as Germany's eastern frontier and its claim that areas that had been German in 1937 were being illegally occupied by Poland. When the West German government asked at the 1955 NATO Council meeting for the Bundeswehr to be armed with nuclear weapons, Warsaw took alarm, and preventing West Germany from acquiring nuclear weapons became the chief aim of Polish diplomacy. The 1956 Suez Crisis, which showed Western unity to be less solid than advertised, encouraged Rapacki to think that disagreements between Britain and France and the United States might be turned to Poland's advantage.
His later diplomacy generalised that problem into a design for European security as a whole. In 1964 he proposed convening a European security and cooperation conference, and he raised the proposal again in New York on 23 September 1966, when he met US Secretary of State Dean Rusk. He said intensive contacts with countries in both Eastern and Western Europe had produced some progress toward holding such a conference, while acknowledging that much preparatory work remained. In his view the conference should take up the basic question of guaranteeing the security of individual states; once that obstacle was removed, economic cooperation among European states would develop naturally, and political questions would be dealt with only at the end of the process of normalisation. The point was to convert a divided Europe from an object of military confrontation into a negotiable security agenda.
He was particularly concerned that NATO consultations on nuclear weapons should not give non-nuclear powers a voice in the use of those weapons, and he stressed European and worldwide non-proliferation agreements, the reduction of conventional forces, and a collective renunciation of the use of force to change the status quo. Rusk replied that the United States was utterly opposed to proliferation and would welcome more East-West contacts, but that the Warsaw Pact could not have a seat at the NATO table with a veto over NATO matters, and that the United States had to be present when the great political problems of Central Europe were discussed; a conference that fails, he said, is worse than no conference. This negotiating line ran from the 1964 proposal into the Helsinki process, and Rapacki pursued it as foreign minister from 1956 to 1968. During the March 1968 events he withdrew from political life in protest against the persecution of people of Jewish origin.