The Phenomenon of the Cold War
1. That span of time was dubbed “Cold war,” a period of “neither war nor peace” and “the long peace”. Which of the labels do you think is more appropriate?
2. The Wall Street Journal on June 18, 2001 wrote: "Ideological wars, unlike physical ones, don't fit neatly into time lines that start with a first short fired and end with an armistice". Do you agree with the statement? How does it apply to the Cold war period?
3. Is the beginning of the Cold war easily defined?
4. Concerning the end of the Cold war, some analysts say that it came on October 3, 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall (the Iron Curtain) and the ensuing crumbling of the Socialist camp. Another opinion holds that the Cold war ended on December 8, 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. For many the preferred point of reference is the Charter of Paris. Still others agree with Jack Straw, British Foreign Secretary, who argues that the historic moment came on May 15, 2002 in Iceland where the NATO-Russia agreement was formalized by the respective foreign ministers to be signed a fortnight later by the heads of state in Rome (Italy). According to Mr. Straw, the 2002 Reykjavic summit was destined to go down in history as "the Cold War Funeral".
Which view do you share? (Back it up with at least three arguments to make your case convincing).
5. According to Text 7 the main causes of the Cold War phenomenon lie in: a) Soviet expansionism, b) American imperialism, c) the bipolar structure of the world. What arguments can be found to rationalize each of the three approaches? Which of the explanations seems most valid to you? What factors precipitated the Cold War? Can you name any other causes of systemic conflict after 1945? Why is the analysis of its origins still a subject of controversy in the academic and political quarters?
6. How did the Cold War develop? Can you single out any historical events that made up its landmarks? What episodes marked its peaks? How did both superpowers use their interventionist instruments to prevent changes within their respective spheres of influence? How did they confront each other in the Third World? What period do Americans call the Second Cold War? Is it correct to conceive of the Cold War as a consistent relationship of unrelieved hostility, rivalry and tension? Or is it possible to stipulate periods of détente in its course?
7. How did the arms race between the two superpowers evolve?
8. What was diplomacy like at that period? How did it function?
9. What can be said about the competition of the two powers in the economic field?
10. In what way were the Cold War propaganda campaigns orchestrated? What clichés were typical of the Cold War rhetoric? How was anti-communism used and abused by the West? What forms did the political inquisition of the McCarthy era assume?
11. How did the atmosphere of enmity and suspicion begin to fade towards the mid-1980s?
12. What personalities were the architects of detente?
13. Academic analyses revolve around another broad question: why did the Cold War end? How can you rationalize the demise of the Cold War?
14. What kind of crisis did the end of the Cold War occasion in conventional International Relations theory? Why did none of the major theories of world politics anticipate the end of the Cold War?
15. What were the domestic political, economic and cultural consequences of the Cold War for the protagonists? And at the personal level, how did the Cold War shape the lives of all who experienced it?
16. To sum it up, what can be said about the winners and the losers in the Cold War? Were there any?
17. There are many people who believe that the bipolar world in the Cold War period made much more sense than the conflict-ridden world that emerged after its crash. This issue seems to have moved to the fore of the Cold War debate at the turn of the century. Do you see eye to eye with these politicians and researchers or their opponents? In other words, was the Cold War a blessing or a curse for mankind?
18. Is the Cold War a thing of the past or does it still cast its shadow on the present-day world we live in?
TASK 24.Translate the text into Russian. Get ready to discuss it.
A List of Questions
1. What did the Berlin Wall symbolize?
2. Why did it fall?
3. Did the fall of the Berlin Wall come as a surprise (like a bolt from the blue) or did any earlier events signal the future collapse?
4. What were the immediate consequences of that event?
5. What New World Order did 1989 usher in?
6. What effect did the year of 1989 have on people’s treatment of the discipline of International Relations?
Text 7.
Nineteen Eighty-Nine as a Watershed
The political and ideological map of international relations - especially but not exclusively in the northern hemisphere – was altered, probably for ever, by the events that occurred during 1989. The nerve center for this annus mirabilis was Central and Eastern Europe where the two halves of Germany were united (or more accurately Eastern Germany folded into the arms of its larger Western compeer) and where the communist system of states in Eastern Europe collapsed. Institutionally the CMEA and the Warsaw Pact were fatalities, while structurally the Cold War division of Europe ceased to have any raison d’etre. The whole complex of events and sequences was symbolized by the extemporaneous destruction of the Berlin Wall, two hundred years after the storming of the Bastille (14 July 1789).
Although some commentators have claimed to see the cause of these changes lying with the Western alliance’s resolute containment of communism, most opinions that are not totally blurred by the ideological wishful thinking chart the changes from within the communist system itself. It is ironic that an ideology which saw contradictions in capitalism should have produced so many of its own: an economy run on the basis of bureaucratically determined input and output figures rather than demand and supply, a polity based upon a fear-framework rather than popular legitimacy, a culture intolerant of intellectual free thinking and dissidence, and a military-industrial complex which overcompensated for the security dilemma. It is now clear that Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Poland under Solidarity were pointers towards the break-up. Polycentrism was not accompanied by enough liberalization. Instead the Brezhnev Doctrine showed the mind-set of the ruling elites. Even those regimes lacking internationally recognized opposition factions and tendencies – such as Bulgaria and Romania – fell to an Eastern European version of the Domino theory.
Finally the Gorbachev Doctrine’s refusal to follow a policy of intervention was crucial. Indeed the clear indication that the internal arrangements for states such as Hungary and Poland was a domestic matter […] was a blank cheque to reform movements to take the initiative. Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the consequent division of Germany had previously been regarded as the principal fruits of victory in 1945, and the Yalta system had been the bed-rock on which the post–1945 Soviet security policy had been built. Instead the liberalization under Gorbachev fed back into the Soviet system itself so that the centrifugal tendencies amongst ethnic groups began openly to challenge control from Moscow. Beginning in the Baltic provinces, a mirror image process of breakdown took place within the former Soviet Union.
The ending of the Cold War and the irrelevance of the Soviet system as a model for Third Word states terminated the bipolar system. Notably in Africa there has been a general movement away from post-independence one-party autocracies towards greater pluralism. Civil wars in Angola and Mozambique have ended, Namibia has become independent and South Africa has entered its post-apartheid phase. In the Middle East the new cooperation between the former Cold War adversaries facilitated a multilateral response to the Kuwait crisis of 1990. New attempts at conflict resolution in the Middle East followed the initiatives of Secretary James Baker and showed a new American willingness to take on the ‘Jewish lobby’ in Congress in order to confront the Israeli government publicly.
The United Nations, the IGO constitutionally charged to have regard to matters of peace and security, enjoyed a renaissance following the removal of Cold War considerations from its decision-making structures. In particular, the unanimity of the Security Council voting procedure now functions in a more consensual environment among the veto powers. Thus the UN was able to maintain an impressive collective security consensus in relation to Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait. The twelve Security Council resolutions passed between August 1990 and February 1991 formed the legal and moral basis for Western intervention in the Persian Gulf War.
Intellectually the events of 1989 and its aftermath have spawned fresh scholarly appraisal of the structures and processes of IR. All the elements which comprise the post–1989 New World Order – the disutility of military force, the reduction of ideological polarization, increased economic interdependence, new emphasis upon wealth/welfare dimensions, an enlargement in the scope and domain of international law and international organizations and new awareness of the environment as an issue area – have been on the agenda since the 1970s. Structurally the events of the annus mirabilis throw into relief the key question: what will replace bipolarity? Some commentators now see the USA as the only superpower, but this conclusion ignores totally the fundamental inability of the American economy to sustain a world role commensurate with this status. Others see multipolarity, particularly in terms of political economy, as more plausible. However, neither model should gainsay the possibility that the system will evince greater regionalism and a tendency towards bloc politics. As a category of states the Third World now stands in contradistinction to the First World of leading states, the Second World of the command economies being henceforth redundant. Notwithstanding its different manifestations, capitalism now stands alone as the benchmark form of economic organization. Gorbachev’s own reluctance to grasp this particular nettle quickly enough in the former Soviet Union may, in retrospect, be seen as his greatest failure.
Security matters which have traditionally been seen as the first-order concern of states may now be redefined in broader terms to take account of pressing concerns in issue areas traditionally regarded as fringe events of world politics: migration, population, human rights, environmentalism and ecology/ecopolitics. The elevation of these issues challenges the fundamental premises of the state-centric system. Although this may not amount to what Francis Fukuyama called ‘the end of history’, it certainly points to the end of a particular kind of political geography. At the very least, 1989 altered the landscape of world politics even if it did not altogether eradicate the incidence of surface collisions upon it.
The optimism that initially greeted the events of 1989 and the ‘triumph’ of liberalism and democracy it supposedly symbolized quickly subsided as the epicenter of the revolution, Central and Eastern Europe, witnessed the rise of militant nationalism, communal conflict, ethnic cleansing, failed states and economic collapse during the early 1990s. The new world order confidently expected did not materialize in quite the way that many analysts had hoped. As a result, policy makers and scholars alike have struggled to grasp the nature, scope and domain of world politics in the post–1989 period. The ‘post-Cold War era’ has not acquired an identity or label of its own. Given that it is characterized confusingly both by the forces of integration and fragmentation, the discipline of IR is now in a state of flux. Indeed according to some 1989 signalled the ‘bankruptcy’ of IR since it failed both to predict the revolutionary nature of the events that occurred and the disintegrative consequences that followed.
Graham Evens (and Jeffrey Newnham). The Penguin Dictionary of International Relations, Penguin Books 1988, p.p. 373-375.
NOTES
1. annus mirabilis (Lat.) – a year of marvels (full of calamities and drastic changes).
2. the Brezhnev Doctrine. In the aftermath of the Soviet block’s intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 following the pluralistic tendencies of the ‘Prague Spring’, Pravda, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of the USSR, wrote about the ‘limited sovereignty’ of individual socialist states within a ‘socialist commonwealth’. In November 1968 the idea was given the endorsement of Leonid Brezhnev in a speech to the Fifth Congress of the Polish communist party in which he said that the socialist commonwealth had a right of intervention in the territory of any one of its members whenever forces hostile to socialism threatened its ideological alignment. The cornerstone of what later became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine was the idea that the unity of the communist bloc took precedence over such principles as domestic jurisdiction and equality of states.
The doctrine had unsettling effects on the process of détente with the West, on the other socialist states and particularly on China and the Sino-Soviet conflict. It was used to justify the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979.
3. CMEA (Comecon) – Council of Mutual Economic Assistance established by the Soviet Union in 1949 to integrate the economies of Eastern Europe.
4. the domino theory is an analogy with the way in which a row of dominoes falls sequentially until none remain standing. It was particularly popular with decision-makers in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s who feared that the fall of the pro-American regime in one country might bring about the collapse of the pro-American regimes in the entire region, which would open the door to communism.
5. the Gorbachev Doctrine – Western media term for new initiatives in Soviet foreign policy after 1985 under the tutelage of Mikhail Gorbachev. The reorientation of Soviet domestic society symbolized by the concepts of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) had important external consequences.
6. the Persian Gulf War. The proximate cause of the Persian Gulf War of 1991 was the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait in August 1990 and proclamation that Kuwait was henceforth Iraq’s 19th province.
A coalition of interests acting under the aegis of the UN and with the leadership of the US declared the Iraqi moves to be a threat to international peace and security. The collective response known in America as ‘Desert Shield/Desert Storm’ resulted in the expulsion of Iraq’s forces from Kuwait in 1991 and the imposition upon the defeated Iraqi state of a highly intrusive monitoring regime regarding its weapons acquisition capabilities. President George Bush, Sr. proclaimed that the aftermath of the War heralded the beginning of a New World Order predicated on the notions of collective security and a tutored international order.
7. IR – International Relations.
8. Fukuyama, Francis – prominent American political scientist.