Concluding Remarks

 		 
    Clausewitz once established that "War is the Continuation of Politics by Other Means".

 
    In this essay I hope to have shown that the Warsaw Treaty Organization had the dual function of both carrying out political tasks on behalf of its dominant power, the Soviet Union, and if these methods failed, then continue by those "other means" referred to by Clausewitz, that is, by waging war. The curious feature of the WTO was, that the ones it was to wage war against were its own members.

 
    I will not bother to draw any conclusions proper in this section of my essay from the material presented, because the whole piece of work has an highly argumentative character. The conclusions and the theses are asserted in the previous chapters. However, I would like to stress that knowing the role of the Warsaw Pact in recent political history may help us understand the predicaments of contemporary East European power politics.

 
    During the last century Russia has at its worst been a regional military power; at its best a global superpower. Its political significance is not likely to be reduced in a future Europe. Russia, and the Soviet Union as its predecessor, has a long tradition of regarding Eastern Europe as its legitimate buffer zone against Western invasion. Though the rise of nuclear warheads on European soiled rendered the traditional buffer zone-thinking largely obsolete, there still today is a widely held assumption that a possible war Europe would be fought by conventional means. In such an analysis depth of defense is a necessary prerequisite for military success.

 
    The forty years of Soviet last say in the internal affairs of the Eastern European states under the thin disguise of the multilaterality of the WTO led many Russians to see the politics of domination as something just and urgent for both the survival and the national pride of Russia. This is a particularly common perception among members of the elites of the communist heyday, many of whom still today enjoy positions of considerable political power. The conservative putsch of 1991 bore the marks of such resentment felt at the demise of the Soviet empire and the unilateral troop withdrawals that it prompted. The cause for a more forceful assertion of Russian interests in Eastern Europe has later been championed by nationalists, communists and frustrated military men (in which third group the two former enjoy a disproportionate representation).

 
    The East Europeans, on the other hand, are understandably frightened by Russian chauvinism after forty years of impudent suppression within Warsaw Pact frameworks. It is obvious that the new regimes of the former Soviet allies feel anguish at the risk of Russia reverting back to old rule either at free elections or as a result of the ever worsening mortification of the armed forces.