Brezhnev Doctrine

Formulation

In August 1968 Warsaw Pact forces entered Czechoslovakia and ended the Prague Spring. The retrospective justification came in Brezhnev's speech to the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers' Party that November: a threat to socialist rule in one socialist country is a threat to the socialist community as a whole, so the community holds both the right and the duty to intervene.

The formulation contained a logic limiting sovereignty. The sovereignty of a socialist state was valid only within the interests of the socialist community, and the judgement of those interests was made not by the individual state but by the community, which in practice meant the USSR. That is why the name doctrine of limited sovereignty was used in the West.

Application and reaction

The principle was also used to justify the intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. In that case, however, the country intervened in was not a Warsaw Pact member, which raised the further question of how far the socialist community extended.

Reaction inside the socialist camp divided. Romania criticized the 1968 intervention openly and strengthened its independent course, and Yugoslavia, Albania, and China also objected. For the communist parties of Western Europe the event was a decisive turning point. As the Italian and Spanish parties criticized the intervention they began to question the legitimacy of Soviet leadership itself, and that current led into Eurocommunism.

Abandonment

In 1988 and 1989 Gorbachev stated repeatedly that the Soviet Union would not intervene in the course taken by the states of Eastern Europe. As communist governments there were replaced one after another in 1989 the USSR took no military action, and the shift acquired the nickname Sinatra Doctrine in the sense that each country would choose its own way.

The abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine was the condition of the East European transitions. Once the possibility of intervention was removed, internal political balances moved rapidly and the chain of changes in 1989 became possible. The case shows that the withdrawal of the coercive force maintaining order inside a camp was itself the condition on which those regimes had existed.