Introduction

Historical events do not come with labels upon them, telling us precisely how important they are. Only the passage of time can do that, and it may take years. Communist Chinese Prime Minister Chou En Lai is reported to have said, in reply to a question about the significance of the French Revo­lution, that 'it's too soon to tell'. Nevertheless, some events are sufficiently momentous in their immediate effects for us to be able to say with confidence that something important has happened, even if full explanations are as yet unattainable.

The events of 1989-91, from the collapse of the Iron Curtain to the dismantling of the Soviet Union in December 1991, represent a turning point in three respects. First, they marked the end of the broadly bipolar structure, based on US-Soviet rivalry, which the international system had assumed since the late 1940s.

A second set of important changes took place at the level of the nation-state. Former communist states experienced serious problems of transition, ranging from economic collapse, which affected them all, to (in the case of the Soviet Union, Czecho­slovakia, and most explosively Yugoslavia) the dis­integration of the state itself. Even those states which maintained communist systems, such as China, North Korea, and Cuba, faced enormous challenges, since they had to accommodate them­selves to positions of increased marginality. Yet those states not in the throes of post-communist transition were also forced to redefine their national interests and roles in the light of the radical change in the international balance of power. This applied as much to large states such as the United States, whose pol­icies had been premised on the Soviet threat, as to small states in the Third World which had been to a greater or lesser degree 'client' states of the super­powers. The general point is that the end of the cold war enforced a redefinition of national interests on all states and in some cases a reshaping of the states themselves.

The third important indicator of change in the end of the cold war lay in new or modified roles for international organizations. Most obviously the end­ing of the virtually automatic split in the United Nations (UN) Security Council along cold war lines, which had found the United Sates and the Soviet Union routinely using the veto against each other's proposals, released the potential for the UN to work as a genuinely collective body. The novel possibility of consensus on major issues in the Security Council did not ensure that the UN would act decisively or with authority—it was still a creature of the states which composed it and they continued to guard their national sovereignties—but it did remove one obstacle to collective decision-making and one which had crippled the UN during the cold war (see Ch. 17).

The end of the cold war also had an impact on various multilateral treaty organizations. The War­saw Pact (or Warsaw Treaty Organization) was dis­banded, while the North Atlantic Treaty Organiza­tion (NATO) straggled to reconceive itself in a con­text in which European security as a whole was being redefined. Questions too were raised about possible roles for other existing European security organiza­tions such as the Western European Union (WEU) and the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE). The European Union (EU) debated expansion of its membership to include nations from Eastern Europe. However tentative these ges­tures, however unrealized the ambition to create a new European and a new international order, the end of the cold war forced such questions on to the agenda (see Ch. 20).

In short, the end of the cold war saw radical change at the system level, at the level of the nation-state, and in international organizations. Domestic politics also underwent transformation, most obvi­ously in those nations which overthrew communism but also in the United States, where to a considerable extent moral and cultural issues (such as drags) displaced the ideological and security issues characteristic of the cold war agenda.

Before examining the causes and consequences of these transformations, two preliminary points must be made. The first has to do with what is meant by the term 'cold war'. It has been used in two distinct senses: first, in a narrow sense to refer to the years between the Truman doctrine (1947) and the Krush­chev thaw of the mid-1950s, during which virtually unrelieved antagonism existed between the super­powers. To the extent that the open antagonisms of these years were reproduced later in, for example, the Kennedy years and the first Reagan administra­tion, then the term cold war is also applied to these instances. The term refers to a certain kind of behaviour, characterized by open ideological con­frontation. Such periods of cold war alternated with periods of detente (1953-60, 1969-75, 1985-9), dur­ing which negotiations and tension reduction were firmly on the agenda.

The second meaning of 'cold war', and the one which is adopted here, has to do with the structure rather than the behaviour of East-West relations. To the extent that key elements of that structure remained continuous throughout the post-war period, then cold war refers to the whole period from the late 1940s to the late 1980s. Viewed from this perspective, detente was part of the cold war rather than a departure from it, in that while there was behavioural change in periods of detente, the funda­mental structure of US-Soviet relations remained constant. When we talk of the end of the cold war we therefore mean the end of that structural condition which was defined by political and military rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, ideological antagonism between capitalism and communism, the division of Europe, and the exten­sion of conflict at the centre to the periphery of the international system.

A second preliminary point involves the relation­ship between the collapse of communism and the end of the cold war. On the face of it, they are one and the same thing. The great game of US-Soviet conflict ended when one of the competitors gave up the fight. However, while it is true that com­munism's demise was the proximate cause of the end of the cold war, it is wrong to suggest that it is to be wholly explained in these terms. In what follows we shall analyse the end of the cold war with refer­ence to three sets of factors: (1) internal develop­ments in the Soviet bloc; (2) external forces in the form of Western policies towards the Soviet bloc; and (3) the changing relative position of the Soviet bloc with respect to the West. This will be followed by a discussion of the immediate global con­sequences of the end of the cold war. The chapter will end with some inevitably tentative ideas about possible futures.