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BAYLIS. Globalization of World Politics_-12 CHA...doc
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Key points

• The end of the cold war offered grounds for both pessimistic and optimistic speculation.

• Both the above approaches could find evidence for their contentions in the varied and conflict­ing tendencies in post-cold war international developments.

• The novelty of the post-cold war international system lay not in the existence of instability and conflict but in the environment in which conflict took place.

• In the aftermath of the cold war, globalization and the future of the United States were con­sidered by many scholars to be closely linked, though countervailing processes to both could be expected to develop.

Box 5.6. Key concepts

Brezhnev doctrine: the idea of 'limited sovereignty' for Soviet bloc nations, which was used to justify the crushing of the reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Civil society: the network of social institutions and practices (economic relationships, family and kinship groups, religious and other social affiliations) which underlie strictly political Institutions. For democratic theorists the voluntary character of the above associations is taken to be essential to the workings of democratic politics.

Common European home: Gorbachev's concept (associated with his New Thinking in foreign policy) of the essential unity of Europe and of the need to overcome the 'artificiality and temporariness of the bloc-to-bloc confrontation and the archaic nature of the "iron curtain"'.

Evil empire: Reagan's term, used in a speech of 1983, to describe the Soviet Union.

New thinking: the general label given by Gorbachev to his reforms in domestic and foreign policy.

Pax Americana: Latin phrase (literally American peace, adapted from Pax Romana) implying a global peace dictated by American power.

Reasonable sufficiency: Gorbachev's term (associated with his New Thinking in foreign policy) for a defence policy which relied on the minimum necessary level of weaponry consistent with national security, and designed to overcome the spiralling dynamics of the nuclear arms race.

Separate paths to socialism: Khrushchev's acknowledgement of the existence of diversity in the Soviet bloc and of the validity (within strict limits) of separate routes to the common socialist goal.

Socialism in one country: Stalin's term used to justify the Soviet Union's departure from the orthodox Marxist view that socialism in the Soviet Union could succeed only in conjunction with socialist revolutions in advanced industrial nations.

QUESTIONS

1 Does an examination of the end of the cold war help in understanding how systemic change occurs in world politics?

2 What do you think Gorbachev hoped to achieve through glasnost and perestroika?

3 What are the connections between change in the Soviet Union and the revolutions in Eastern Europe?

4 Why did changes of leadership in Eastern Europe in the summer and autumn of 1989 fail to stem the collapse of communism?

5 Can you find ways, other than those presented in this chapter, of conceptualizing the relationship between external and internal causes of the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union?

6 Did the West 'win' the cold war?

7 What role, if any, did the Reagan administration play in bringing about the end of the cold war?

8 Why did experts by and large fail to anticipate the collapse of communism?

9 Is the post-cold war international system more unstable than the cold war international system?

10 What ordering principles, if any, operate in post-cold war international politics?

11 Can communism be regarded as a victim of the 'globalization of world polities'?

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

The fullest international history of the end of the cold war is R. Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994) but D. Oberdorfer, The Turn: From the Cold War to a New Era (New York: Touchstone Books, 1992) is a highly intelligent, readable, and comprehensive journalistic account. Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Boston: Little Brown, 1993) gives a blow-by-blow account of the high politics of the years 1989-91. A range of viewpoints is contained in M. Hogan (ed.), The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Long perspectives can be gained from E. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994) who presents the end of the cold war in the light of the twentieth century as a whole, and R. Crockatt, The Fifty Years War: The United States and the Soviet Union in World Politics (London: Routledge, 199S) who covers US-Soviet relations from 1941 to 1991.

On the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union a good place to start is with two books by journalists: A. Roxburgh, The Second Russian Revolution (London: BBC Publications, 1991) and David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (London: Viking, 1993). M. Goldman, What Went Wrong with Perestroika (1992) is good on economic issues. A comprehen­sive and scholarly account is Mike Bowker, Russian Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Company 1997). Eastern European developments are well covered in C. Gati, The Bloc that Failed: Soviet-East European Relations in Transition (Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 1990), K. Dawisha, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev and Reform: The Great Challenge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). On the American side see John L. Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provoca­tions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

WEB LINKS

http://cwihp.sl.edu The Cold War International History Project disseminates new information and perspectives on the history of the cold war.

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