Common European Home

• 1. Introduction

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  The "Common European Home" was a geopolitical concept created and championed by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. At its heart lay a simple but radical question: could a continent divided by rival military blocs, nuclear arsenals, and opposing ideologies find a way to live together under one shared roof? That question, posed in the final years of the Cold War, would travel from the streets of Prague to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, from Rome's city hall to a private meeting between two leaders in Bonn. What did Gorbachev actually mean by the phrase? Who else had used it before him, and why? And when Eastern Europe began to tremble with the prospect of revolt, was the concept a genuine vision or a calculated maneuver to hold the Soviet sphere together?

• 2. Before Gorbachev

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  Leonid Brezhnev reached for a version of this language first. During a visit to Bonn, West Germany, in 1981, he used the phrase in what analysts later read as an attempt to sow discord between the United States and its European allies. The goal, in that reading, was to moderate American policy by appealing to Europeans' sense of a shared continental identity distinct from Washington's. Brezhnev's invocation was tactical rather than visionary. It was not accompanied by any formal framework or institutional proposal. The phrase lingered at the edges of Soviet rhetoric, waiting for a different leader and a different moment to give it weight.

• 3. Prague, April 1987

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  Gorbachev had gestured toward the idea as early as a 1985 statement, calling the Old World "our common house." But the formulation that lodged in the diplomatic imagination came in April 1987, when he visited Czechoslovakia and delivered his main address in Prague. There he declared his government's opposition to the division of the continent into military blocs, to the accumulation of weapons in Europe, and to anything that fed the threat of war. The "all-European house," he said, acknowledged a certain integral whole even among states belonging to different social systems and opposing military-political blocs. He insisted the concept included both current problems and real possibilities for their solution. Eastern European analysts at the time read this rhetoric with suspicion. Their working interpretation was that Gorbachev was using the language of European unity to prevent an outright revolt of Eastern European countries from the Eastern Bloc.

• 4. Bonn and the Competing Vision

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  On the 12th of June 1989, Gorbachev arrived in Bonn for private talks with Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Richard von Weizsacker. The following day, Kohl and Gorbachev signed a joint declaration that endorsed national self-determination, mutual reductions in nuclear and conventional forces, and a Common European Home in which Canada and the United States would have a role. The journalist Jim Hoagland framed what was happening in competitive terms: he wrote that Gorbachev's "Common European Home" and President George H. W. Bush's competing phrase "Europe Whole and Free" were two ways of describing the same underlying reality. That reality was an economic and ideological collapse of Soviet power happening at precisely the moment the European Community was gaining new dynamism and economic clout. Hoagland also noted that by borrowing Charles de Gaulle's geographical definition of Europe as stretching "from the Atlantic to the Urals," Gorbachev was working to keep Soviet presence prescribed within that boundary.

• 5. Strasbourg and Rome

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  On the 6th of July 1989, Gorbachev addressed the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and gave the concept its most explicit philosophical statement. He declared that the philosophy of the Common European Home ruled out the probability of an armed clash and the very possibility of force or threat of force, whether alliance against alliance, inside the alliances, or anywhere else. He argued that a doctrine of restraint should replace the doctrine of deterrence. He called this not a play on words but the logic of European development prompted by life itself. Months later, on the 29th of November 1989, Gorbachev was en route to the Malta summit with President George H. W. Bush when he stopped in Rome. He spoke the next day at the Rome City Council, sketching the Common European Home as a commonwealth of sovereign and economically interdependent nations. He then proposed a 1990 meeting of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the following day he met with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican City.

• 6. What Analysts Made of It

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  Robert D. Hormats viewed the nascent European Community as ideally positioned to embody the Common European Home. He pointed to its moral, political, and social strength alongside its economic weight. Ronald D. Asmus took a more critical view of Gorbachev's underlying assumptions. He noted that the vision was premised on the belief that reform in Eastern Europe could be controlled and that reformist communist parties would continue to play an important role in their countries' politics, including in the German Democratic Republic. That premise would prove fragile as the months of 1989 unfolded. Coit D. Blacker offered a third lens: Soviet leadership, he wrote, appeared to have believed that whatever authority the Soviet Union might lose in Eastern Europe would be more than offset by a net gain in influence over Western Europe. The three analysts, taken together, mapped a concept that was simultaneously idealistic, strategically self-serving, and built on assumptions that history was already in the process of overthrowing. The Malta summit Gorbachev attended after leaving Rome would itself become one of the defining moments of that unraveling.