The Curtain Rises: Eastern Europe, 1989 : CHAPTER 1 AUSTRIA : The Road to Reform Begins in Vienna : Two years of negotiations bring the first cracks in the walls of the East Bloc.

In the gray and deliberate world of diplomacy, there are moments when decisions are made and agreements are reached whose importance is understood only afterward. It can be a painstaking and finely bargained process, the work of diplomats, and its significance often lies buried in its very detail.

January 19 was a quiet Sunday morning, bitterly cold in Vienna. Outside the Austria Center, the flags of 35 nations flapped impressively in the wind. It was a day of ceremony, yet curiously low key.

Andre Erdos, 46, who headed the Hungarian delegation to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), had been in Vienna since the negotiations opened in December, 1986. And, as a career diplomat of ambassador rank, he was too much of a professional to be overly impressed by the formality of closing ceremonies.

But as he moved through the lobby exchanging pleasantries with his colleagues, he was not without a private sense of triumph at the historic proportions of the documents about to be signed.

Erdos and his government had reason to be pleased: The Vienna negotiations had taken the course they had hoped. The 26 months of delicate and difficult talks were a follow-up to the landmark 1975 Helsinki accords, most famous for their basic declaration on human rights. They advanced the noble generalities set out at Helsinki and committed governments to specific guarantees of human rights: Freedom to travel, freedom of religion, the rights of minorities and prisoners. The Vienna document included a number of measures designed to prevent governments from delaying or denying a citizen’s rights to travel abroad.

“The agreements of the CSCE have no legal force,” Erdos said. “But their moral weight is so strong that it amounts almost to legal weight, and they have had a direct effect on the behavior of nations. Our instructions from Budapest were very liberal. We were to make our views known, even if they differed from those of our allies.”

The views were, in many cases, decidedly different. It had been hard going in the Wednesday afternoon East Bloc caucuses, where the human rights proposals cut most deeply for Hungary’s hard-line neighbors. There, the Hungarians and the Poles formed a kind of liberal front.

Hungary had a clear national agenda--it was opening up to the West, most urgently in economic matters. It wanted friends in the West, the firmer the better, and it wanted business from the West. Hungary could no longer afford to hold on to a domestic legal code that came from another age and ran counter to Western norms--restrictions on travel, tedious visa procedures--and that bogged down the flow of commerce. Budapest wanted an open door, the traffic flowing unhindered in both directions.

The East Germans and the Romanians had their own uncomfortable hard-line axis. The Czechoslovaks, Erdos said, had “no taste and no smell.” They kept their mouths shut, stayed to themselves and went with the majority. The East Germans, at least, were serious diplomats. They found the proposition on freedom of travel hardest to swallow.

The Soviets had taken a long time to come around, the talks roughly spanning the period of time during which Mikhail Gorbachev consolidated his power. As the negotiations proceeded, Erdos and others began to note the periodic absences of the Soviet ambassador to the talks, presumably to consult with Moscow.

And so it was finished. The speeches were read. Erdos put his initials on the document. The Romanians, as expected, said they would sign the document but would feel free to ignore any of its provisions if they happened to conflict with Romania’s “national interests.” And, as expected, the Romanians were roundly condemned.

But the Romanians could not really stain the triumph. The next morning, Erdos packed his two years’ worth of files, loaded them into his car and set out for the three-hour drive to Budapest.

As he crossed the border into Hungary, waiting for the immigration guard to look at his diplomatic passport, it occurred to him, as it often had before, that the fortifications he saw--a fence and guardhouse separating Austria and Hungary--were silly and senseless now, anachronisms. He expected they would come down, sooner rather than later. The agreements he had just put his initials to seemed to assure that.

But Erdos gave no thought to the trouble and excitement he and his compatriots, and that stretch of border wire, were about to bring down on their neighbors. He took back his passport and drove on through the tidy farmland and home to his capital.

The East German official newspaper, Neues Deutschland, reprinted the full text of the Vienna document the day it was signed. A week later, an Amnesty International report accused East Germany of using vaguely written laws and secret trials against persons whose activities the government regarded as suspicious. The report said that among penalties imposed on prisoners of conscience were restrictions on the freedom to emigrate.

Romania’s leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, toured three factories in Bucharest and praised the workers for their efforts, but he noted that the country still had a lot to do before it reached “the highest peaks of progress and civilization.”