Collective security Eastern style

The Warsaw Pact is formed under the leadership of the Soviet Union

Alarmed at Soviet expansion in East and Central Europe after the Second World War, the Western European countries (without West Germany) reacted in 1949 by founding a defensive military alliance called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Deciding that they could trust West Germany and that they needed their assistance in any military response to a Soviet invasion, Great Britain, France and other Western European countries later negotiated the admission of a newly rearmed West Germany to NATO. Failing in its attempts to prevent this move, the Soviet Union responded to the Paris Agreements (5 May 1955), which finalized this development, by concluding a “Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance” with its satellite states, signed in Warsaw on 14 May 1955. East Germany acceded to the military part of this alliance after rearmament in early 1956.

The agreement signed in Warsaw mirrored NATO by establishing a military alliance guaranteeing mutual military assistance between the signatories in the event of an attack. However, there were clear differences between the two systems. The armed forces of all the socialist treaty states were placed under the command of the Red Army, and the obligations of the signatory states included the provision of any assistance required by the Soviet Union to maintain its repressive rule over its satellite states. Consequently, whilst the treaty was known in the East as the “Warsaw Treaty”, the West spoke of the “Warsaw Pact”.