(FORTUNE Magazine) – In mid-January we were spending a lot of time trying to figure out the point of the highly heralded human rights agreement being hammered out in Vienna (and finally signed there on January 15). The agreement took 26 months to negotiate and was signed by all 35 members of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), down to and including Monaco, whose prior big contribution to human rights had been the single zero on roulette wheels. We kept reading that the CSCE agreement was extremely important because it put all the Communist countries on record as guaranteeing freedom of travel, association, religion, and quite a few other blessings taken for granted in democracies. But wait. Many of the same freedoms had earlier been guaranteed by the 1975 Helsinki accords, which were then massively ignored or violated in Eastern Europe. Why would things be different this time? One answer: This time things were really spelled out in detail. The fellow from the Christian Science Monitor earnestly pointed out that Helsinki had only one paragraph on freedom of religion, but Vienna had 16. Wow. A net gain of 15 paragraphs. We were also supposed to be impressed by provisions giving citizens the right to monitor the state's human rights progress and giving any signatory the right to ask for bilateral meetings anytime it suspected another country of violating the rules. In this latter situation, the accused country would have to grant a meeting. But somehow we are unimpressed by the right to meet with professional stonewallers. The period just after the signing was a bit of an embarrassment for people dwelling on the human rights breakthroughs accomplished, as the East Bloc celebrated the signing by collectively spitting in their eyes. The Romanians immediately announced that they intended to violate the agreement. Poland's government spokesman announced formally that the country could not honor the freedom-of-travel provision. Bulgarian police arrested the leaders of their own country's monitoring organization. East Germany and Czechoslovakia imprisoned hundreds of human rights activists. In Prague the police turned water cannons on peaceful human rights demonstrators and arrested the leaders of Charter 77 (set up to monitor human rights), including playwright Vaclav Havel. This was on the day after the signing. These events lent a certain poignancy to a letter the conferees received from Charter 77 questioning whether it had made sense at all to sign an agreement with characters who would surely not comply. ''Not only is patience required,'' said the letter, ''but decisiveness.'' Did the West respond decisively? Well, let's see. Our State Department firmly expressed ''regret'' about the goings-on in Prague. But the department did not ask for a bilateral meeting. Possibly it did not want to test its right to hold one.