Soviet client treaties were drafted in Moscow and concluded in days

Evidence

From these documents, it would appear that a draft treaty was brought from Moscow and subsequently modified in whatever negotiations took place between the arrival of the Soviet delegation in Cairo on 25 May and the signature of the treaty on 27 May. In this there is a striking difference with the Soviet-Finnish treaty of 1948. The first suggestion for that treaty came in a letter from Stalin to the Finnish president, dated 23 February. Four days later, the president sent a brief acknowledgment, pointing out that foreign treaties required parliamen­ tary approval. On 5 March, the Finnish president received the written views of parliamentary groups. Negotiations between the two governments began on 25 March, and the treaty was signed on 6 April. A Finnish diplomat, contrasting this with the speedy conclusion of the treaties between the Soviet Union and its East European neighbors, pointed to the timetable of negotiation as “an eloquent assertion of Finnish independence, and a demonstration of the democratic process.” The Soviet-UAR treaty was initiated, negotiated, and concluded in three days. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 975

Categorization

• XREF: Actually a 1990 note by a Western observer deconstructing Cold War-era treaty provenance — but the analytic mode (reading a document’s drafting through comparison of parallel texts) parallels Said’s contrapuntal reading method.