Key points

• Opinion about the American role in ending the cold war has tended to polarize: either the Reagan hard line forced the Soviet Union to its knees or Reagan's policies were immaterial or actually served to prolong the cold war.

• Soviet-American relations did not change over­night with the advent of Gorbachev. The United States responded cautiously to his initiatives.

• Gorbachev's new thinking in foreign policy over­threw the conventional wisdom of Soviet foreign policy.

• Gorbachev's concessions, which helped to pro­duce the INF Treaty and generally improve the climate of Soviet-American relations, were pro­moted initially in a controlled fashion but tended to become more unilateral and sweeping as the pace of domestic reform quickened.

• The story is not simply one of Soviet concessions. The United States made some significant move­ment too, indicating that a polarized interpret­ation of the end of the cold war is too simple and schematic.

The interaction between internal and external environments

Isolation of the communist system from the global capitalist system

The end of the cold war is not to be explained only in terms of specific decisions or policies of the super­powers. There are some factors which are given in the underlying conditions of the relationship between East and West. The most important of these was the isolation of the Soviet Union and the com­munist bloc from the modernizing current of capital­ism. Initially, communist doctrine had held that the success of the Bolshevik Revolution could only be guaranteed by the spread of revolution, preferably throughout the world but in any event to the developed nations of Europe. When this did not happen in the years immediately following 1917 Sta­lin invented the doctrine of socialism in one country to justify the restriction of the Revolution to Russia. The subsequent extension of communism to Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, and Cuba after the Sec­ond World War was in theory a stepping-stone to world revolution but in practice the advance of communism coincided with the expansion of world capitalism in what Eric Hobsbawm has called 'the golden years' (Hobsbawm 1994). The clash of these two processes, of course, gave the cold war its global character during and after the 1950s (see Ch. 4).

For our purposes the most important feature of these developments was the continued separation of the communist and capitalist blocs, a symbol of which was the Soviet Union's refusal to participate in the US Marshall Plan for post-war reconstruction (1948-52). The Soviet Union believed, with justifica­tion, that the conditions for participation demanded by the United States, which involved opening the Soviet bloc to Western investment and hence to Western economic and political leverage, would undermine the autonomy of the Soviet system and leave it at a disadvantage with respect to the West. Nor did the decision to undertake separate develop­ment initially seem to harm the Soviet bloc. During the 1950s Soviet growth rates actually exceeded those of all the capitalist nations except West Ger­many and Japan (Munting 1982: 132, 137; Van der Wee 1987: 50). Clearly this was from a low starting point and barely hid structural weaknesses in indus­trial production and agriculture. Nevertheless, the gross figures were impressive, and the launch of Sputnik in 1957 ahead of the US space satellite pro­gramme appeared to suggest considerable dynamism in the Soviet economy, sufficient at least to offer a real military threat to the West. Khrushchev announced in 1960 that he expected the Soviet economy to out-produce the United States within ten years and there were many in the West across the political spectrum who believed him.

From the perspective of the end of the cold war, the West's anxiety in the 1950s and early 1960s looks misplaced. We know that Soviet growth rates slowed in the 1960s and fell sharply in the 1970s and 1980s, and that the Soviet leadership's motive for detente with the West in the 1970s was in part to gain imports of 'high tech' goods in recognition of the Soviet Union's increasing backwardness. The key conclusion to be drawn is that the Soviet bloc suf­fered not merely from low levels of growth and productivity in absolute terms but from increasing relative disadvantage with respect to the West. The world was changing around the Soviet bloc, bearing out Trotsky's prediction (considered heretical by Sta­lin in the late 1920s) that a Soviet island of commun­ism could not survive in a capitalist sea.

Crucially too, Soviet bloc efforts to develop fuller trade links, greater travel opportunities and cultural exchanges with the West exposed the vulnerability of communism to Western economic and cultural influence rather than strengthening it. Economically this was manifested in the debts owed by such nations as Poland and Hungary to Western banks. Culturally, citizens of Eastern Europe were increas­ingly able to make comparisons between their own lives and those lived in the West. West German TV, for example, was widely viewed in East Germany and Czechoslovakia; Radio Free Europe and similar sta­tions beamed their programmes to the Eastern bloc. One must also take account of the growth of the trans-European peace movement in the 1970s, which linked anti-nuclear and pro-democracy forces on both sides of the Iron Curtain. While there is dis­pute about how far such pressures influenced gov­ernment policies in the West, it is plausible to assume that they helped to generate the ferment in Eastern Europe (Thompson 1990; Kaldor 1995). In short, isolationism and economic autarky (separate development in isolation from world trade), which had arguably fostered growth and ideological cohe­sion in the Eastern bloc in the early post-war period, later became a liability and was ultimately impos­sible to sustain.

It is helpful to view the cold war as having been composed of two distinct but overlapping systems:

1. A cold war system which was defined by US-Soviet antagonism, the nuclear stand-off, and the extension of these central conflicts to the periphery of the international system.

2. The global capitalist system which was defined by the expansion of production and trade and growing economic interdependence.

The Soviet Union's existence was defined and limited by the cold war, while the United States was a full, indeed the chief, participant in the growth of world capitalism. However great the United States' economic problems from the 1970s onwards—and they were considerable—they were not such as to produce the disabling crisis of political legitimacy experienced by the Soviet Union. One way of putt­ing this is to say that the United States was never wholly consumed by the cold war, politically or eco­nomically. By contrast, the Soviet Union, limited as it was by ideology and history to a debilitating isol­ationism, was unable to meet the challenge posed by the globalization of the capitalist political economy and Western consumer culture (Crockatt 1995: 370-1).