A Helsinki process for the Middle East?

By Peter Feaver

I have a quick reaction to Chris’s post on the necessity of raising human rights whenever President Obama finally sits down to negotiate with the Iranian regime. Perhaps it is time to revive the idea of some sort of Helsinki process for the Persian Gulf region.

Recall that the Helsinki Accords were devised as a way of accommodating various conflicting desiderata of the sort of dilemmas identified by Chris: more expansive diplomacy with the Soviet Union that did not exacerbate transatlantic divides; maintaining progress on security/arms control negotiations without sacrificing the human rights dimension; leveraging the Soviet Union’s interest in broader economic contacts; and so on. The process itself was a compromise, and like all compromises it resembled a camel more than a stallion. It certainly came in for a fair amount of criticism at the time, much of it well-grounded.

Yet it played a key role in sowing seeds and nurturing shoots of freedom that helped ultimately to undo the Soviet empire. The Soviets agreed to the human rights basket within the Helsinki process primarily because they believed that it could be contained and perhaps even used as a club for some tendentious bashing of human rights "violations" in the West. But what the Helsinki process also did was legitimize and institutionalize the human rights issue within international engagement of the Soviet Union. That proved far more consequential in the long run than did the efforts contained in the security basket.

Something like that process could be of considerable value in the Gulf region. Properly constructed, it would eclipse the activities of that embarrassing self-parody, the UN Commission on Human Rights. If the regional/multilateral efforts aimed at shoring up Iraq were going gangbusters, one might be reluctant to launch this kind of Helsinki process now for fear of siphoning off momentum. But despite the best efforts of both the Bush and Obama administrations, I think the regional effort on Iraq is about as strong as it is ever going to be. A broader effort just might goose the other along and, in any case, could hardly slow it down.

Of course, the Helsinki model has one bitter pill for American foreign policy: it requires the participation of all regional players on an equal footing, which would include Iran. This would necessarily involve some "legitimation" of Iran that successive administrations from either party have been reluctant to grant. Doing so on the heels of the regime’s brutal crackdown is an even more distasteful prospect.

But, as Chris reminds us, we will be stuck with the regime that emerges. There may be a way of dealing with that regime that incurs short run costs and long run benefits. The Soviet Union thought it was buying with Helsinki its long-sought goal of international legitimacy for its ill-gotten post-World War II gains. Instead what it bought was something far more important: the legitimation of voices of internal accountability and protest. Could something like that work this time with Iran?