Keyword – cold war
Takács, Róbert:
From Helsinki to Belgrade
Médiakutató, 2020. nyár, XXI. évf., 2. sz.
The 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the anchorage of the post-1945 European status quo was seen as the success of Soviet diplomacy. However, by declaring the free movement of people and ideas, and by admitting the respect for human rights as a basic principle of relations between states, its Basket III gave a trump card for Western powers against communist countries. Questions of information policy, including the travel opportunities and working conditions of journalists, the availability of Western press in communist countries, were also listed among these issues. These issues, which were rather unfavourable for the members of the Soviet bloc, rose to an important battlefield of the Cold War ideological struggle in international politics after 1975. This study reconstructs and analyses how Hungarian foreign policy related to these issues before and during the Belgrade conference. It examines if it was capable of transcending defensive attitudes, and whether it could insert the questions of media and information into its broader objectives within Basket III.