Key points

• The causes of the end of the cold war are to be found not only in internal and external conditions considered separately but in the interaction between the two.

• The separation of the communist bloc from capit­alism, though not apparently disadvantageous to communism until the 1970s, left it at an increas­ing relative disadvantage to the capitalist West.

• Growing consciousness of relative disadvantage was a factor in the collapse of communism.

Conclusion

The end of the cold war removed more or less at a stroke the structural and ideological conditions which underlay superpower conflict over the previ­ous forty years. This in itself seemed to promise a general relaxation of tension and a reduction in the threat of major, especially nuclear, war. To the extent that superpower conflict lay behind regional con­flicts in various parts of the world, then the end of the cold war held out the possibility of resolution of these conflicts. On the most optimistic reading, con­ditions were now present for a new world order in which American power, in concert with other mem­bers of the UN Security Council, would serve as a global stabilizer. One writer, expressing the trtumph­allsm which characterized some early American reac­tions to the end of the cold war, talked of a 'unipolar moment' (Krauthammer 1990-1). The Gulf War of 1991 was taken by some to be the model for a new type of collective international action in which the UN, with strong US backing, would act as its foun­ders had intended as a genuine collective security organization. Beyond this, the end of the cold war would bring a 'peace dividend' both financial and political. Nations could now afford to expend fewer resources on military and foreign policy, and devote it to domestic growth.

At the opposite extreme was the view that the cold war had served to stabilize international politics, that indeed it had fostered the long peace of the post-war years, defined as the absence of war between the major powers (Gaddis 1986). From this perspective the end of the cold war was therefore a destabilizing event, however much one might wel­come the collapse of communism. The most pessim­istic predictions were of chaos and violence in the successor states of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as long-suppressed national and ethnic forces achieved expression, and a general rise in global instability (Mearsheimer 1990).

There is little point in attempting to draw up a simple balance sheet between these two positions, since both optimists and pessimists could find evidence to support their contentions. Each new development in international politics contained potentially positive and negative tendencies and events moved swiftly in the decade following the end of the cold war. It is more appropriate to ask how the end of the cold war affected the broad environ­ment in which international conflict took place. More specifically, what principles of order, if any, now underpinned the international system?

In the immediate aftermath of the end of the cold war, analysts tended to focus on the disappearance of cold war structures and agendas. Ideas about possible futures of the international system, as outlined above, were initially either vague or reflective of assumptions born in the cold war. As the dust settled from the cold war, however, a number of possible ways of describing the new realities, not all of them mutually exclusive, emerged. Some envisaged multipolarity based either on three major economic blocs—North America, especially after the signing of the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) in 1993, the European Union, and East Asia—or on a larger number of dominant powers (Rusi 1997; Kegley and Wittkopf 1999) while others favoured 'uni-polarity', based on the dominance of the United States in the international system. George Bush's 'new world order' promised a Wilsonian scheme of internationalism, based (like Woodrow Wilson's) on the assumption of strong American backing for mechanisms for settling international disputes, pre­venting aggression, securing international justice. If this concept lasted for only a short time, it was because it was so closely associated with prosecution of the Gulf War. The ambiguous outcome of the war, which raised a host of questions about the motives and effects of the UN-backed coalition's intervention in Iraq and left Saddam Hussein in power, failed to substantiate the claims made for the 'new world order'. Nevertheless, discussion of developments in global 'governance', at the core of which lay the UN and its associated institutions, suggested an increas­ing role for internationalist ideas and institutions (Halliday 1999: 121-4).

Undoubtedly, as the new millennium approached, the most discussed paradigm for the post-cold war international order was 'globalization'. Its attractiveness lay in its ability to encompass at once processes, especially transnational exchanges of information, goods, and finance, and structures, including those based on relations between non­governmental organizations as well as nation-states. Furthermore, globalization could be shown to have had a history and to that extent it could be employed to link the period of cold war with what preceded it and followed it (Clark 1997). Finally, globalization could be linked to the central question of the role of the United States in the post-cold war world since the United States was the most globalizing of all world powers in the extent of its economic, cultural, political and military reach.

In the early 1990s, estimates of the United States varied greatly. Despite the prevalence of 'triumphalists' such as Charles Krauthammer (1990-1) and Francis Fukuyama (1992), the influence of 'declinists' such as Paul Kennedy (1998) remained strong and he was joined by other interpreters from across the political spectrum, including Samuel Hunting­ton (1993 and 1996). To many observers, 'winning the cold war' did not remove the challenges to Amer­ican power from rival economies such as Japan's or (in Huntington's interpretation) from cultural ant­agonists in the form of the Muslim world. In the sec­ond half of the 1990s, however, the combination of crisis in the Asian economies and a sustained boom in the United States economy led to a revised assessment of the United States and of its role in international politics. While some observers asked 'whatever happened to the Pacific century?' (Foot and Walter 1999) others noted that the 'American century' (announced in 1941 by Henry Luce) was far from over. Whether the American century was to be praised or deplored was scarcely the issue, wrote one American scholar of the left. The fact was that 'American standards of all kinds are the standard of globalization' (Cumings 1999: 294).

Given the potential speed of chance in inter­national politics, it could not be assumed that this state of affairs would continue indefinitely, not least because globalization inspired opposition as well as endorsement. Indeed, as long as globalization pro­ceeded, it was likely that fragmentation and other countervailing processes would also exert some force (Clark 1997). As for the cold war, it seemed now firmly to be part of history.