Read on Twitter
The Helsinki Accords were signed 45 years ago #otd - but they weren't the revolution in human rights politics that many claim they were. https://historyned.blog/2015/08/01/40-years-later-rethinking-the-helsinki-accords-and-human-rights/
The GDR along with the rest of the Eastern Bloc had accepted the validity of international human rights for years before the Helsinki Accords were signed - they even thought that international human rights law was on their side and disadvantaged the West. Some in the West agreed.
The narrative that the Helsinki Accords forced the Eastern Bloc to accept human rights erases the socialist world's earlier adoption of human rights ideas and in the process imagines a false turning point in which the West forced the Eastern Bloc into accepting Western values.
The historical erasure of state socialist human rights politics is part of the broader academic and popular erasure of ideas and conceptions of human rights that do not fit within a narrow rubric in which they are assumed to be Western, liberal democratic and individualistic.
As a result, it creates a false narrative of how the Cold War ended as part of a wider misunderstanding of how human rights function in social movements and as a catalyst for political and social change.
If you don't believe me based on a twitter thread, you can read the longer version with footnotes: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/human-rights-dictatorship/CA24E3C6642E790BAEA9D806F492EFB2
