Understanding the End of the Cold War

The end of the Cold War is arguably the most important event to hit the discipline of international relations since the first chair in the subject was created at Aberystwyth in 1919. Academics in the field almost universally failed to predict it and our theories didn’t appear to explain it, and this spawned both heated debate and new thinking within the field. What follows is a brief sketch with pointers to resources on the topic – some well known, others less so.

John Gaddis’ “International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War” is a good place to start. Gaddis places the blame for IR failing to predict the Cold War ending as it did squarely with the deterministic social-science approach to the discipline that failed to accept indeterminacy, even as the sciences themselves were embracing unpredictability. Ted Hopf’s response and their correspondence the next volume is worth reading too, particularly for his more fundamental critique that it was not so much the theories themselves as the sociology of the discipline that prevented scholars asking the right questions.

Michael Cox, in contrast, focuses his contribution for Volume 3 of Sage’s Twentieth Century International Relations on the empirical reasons for the failure. The implication of Cox’s argument is that it was poor information rather than poor theory that lay at the heart of IR’s inability to forsee peaceful Soviet collapse.

Of course, some scholars did get close to predicting the way in which the Cold War would end, notably the macro-sociologist Randall Collins. In his “What Theories Predicted the State Breakdowns and Revolutions of the Soviet Bloc?” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Vol. 14 (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1992) he critically evaluates the quality of both his own and others’ predictions.

Of course, in assessing the causes of failure to predict the end of the Cold War, a great proletarian spanner is thrown in the works by the degree of disagreement as to the direct causes of that event itself. Was it Reagan’s policies, as Patman contends? The effects of the Afghanistan War, and not anything intrinsic to the Cold War itself, that precipitated a collapse of empire, a thesis advanced by Reuveney and Prakash? A shift in ideas within Soviet elites, as per Matthew Evangelista among others, or shifts in the external environment as proposed by Deudney and Ikenberry? Indeed, such is the complexity of the event that Ned Lebow and Stein resort to ‘non-linear confluence’ as their preferred model of causation to explain the events of 1989-91 in Richard Hermann’s volume ‘Ending the Cold War’. Such is the confusion that James Lee Ray and Bruce Russet feel the need to reassure us that despite appearances, the end of the Cold War doesn’t render scientific prediction in international politics obsolete.

The main target of this plethora of explanations and acknowledgement of complexity is neorealist theory. The classic hatchet-job is done by Richard Ned Lebow in his “The Long Peace, the end of the Cold War and the failure of Realism”. Constructivist explanations, such as those from Koslowski and Kratochwil and Tuomas Forsberg, reflect the boom in this post-positivist approach. Innepolitik is back in vogue in Matthew Evangelista’s “Paradox of State Strength”.

However, it is not for nothing that realism has been the dominant paradigm of international relations since the Peloponnesian War. Despite having taken quite a beating, realism fights back off the ropes. Stephen Walt provides a strong defense of realism in light of the end of the Cold War and Brooks and Wohlforth first reevaluate the supposed ‘landmark case for ideas’ and later emphasise the role of economic constraints in Wohlforth’s edited volume Cold War Endgame. However, perhaps the most perceptive of all the realist defences is Wohlforth’s first attempt in 1995-6, which despite constructing a realist account chides realists for thinking that because such an explanation is possible that somehow realism stands unbowed.

The end of the Cold War ensures that IR theory is a more plural and epistemologically varied place. Risse-Kappen and Grunberry therefore accurately call the end of the Cold War “A Time of Reckoning” in Allan and Goldmann’s edited volume, and for Wohlforth it was certainly a “Reality Check”. Hopmann’s review essay provides excellent coverage of recent theoretical developments.

International Relations is surely a better place for these developments and the debate that produced them. The ‘neo-neo’ debate that obsessed the discipline for so long now seems as irrelevant and obscure as it surely was. Whether IR theory is any better placed to predict major events in international politics is debatable, probably doubtful, but that International Relations is better equipped to explain those events when they happen is indisputable.

A Long Goodbye

What Gorbachev’s effort to get out of Afghanistan can tell us about how a President Obama might face the challenge of withdrawing from Iraq.

Barack Obama’s progressive supporters have been upset by his recent statements on Iraq. Yet his recent “move to the center” on the war should not be particularly surprising. After all, no matter how opposed he may have been to the war in 2003, in 2008 he would be taking over as commander in chief of the world’s most powerful nation and military with commitments all over the world. His advisors have pointed out, no doubt, that how he handles the situation will determine how he is seen by his detractors at home and how the US is seen abroad for years to come.

A useful historical parallel is the Soviet experience in trying to get out of Afghanistan. Mikhail Gorbachev, a reform minded leader who came to power in March 1985, faced a similar dilemma to the one Obama will face if elected. He was opposed to the war but was afraid of the consequences a withdrawal of Soviet troops might have on Moscow’s relationships with its numerous allies and clients. On the day he became General Secretary he jotted down a note saying that the Soviet Union needed to find a way out of Afghanistan, but do it in stages.

A US withdrawal from Iraq would most likely lead to an increase in violence, at least in the short term. It could mean increased influence for Iran. It could mean that US allies in the region and beyond, no matter their views on the war, begin to doubt Washington’s commitment and look elsewhere for support. All of the above could become ammunition for conservatives at home, much like the collapse of South Vietnam became a rallying point for conservatives in the late 1970s.

All of this could happen even if the US stays in Iraq for 10 years. The long term consequences for the US, as well as the region, might be more severe. But politics is a short term business. President Obama would have to think about the 2012 election, when the consequences of a withdrawal could be used against him.

That is why I was not surprised to hear that Obama was “modifying” his stance on troop withdrawal. After an uproar from his progressive supporters, he explained himself at a speech in Georgia on July 8: “We have to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in…You’ve got to be sure our troops are safe, you have to be sure the country doesn’t collapse.”

Gorbachev made similar statements on numerous occasions between 1985 and 1989, when the withdrawal, in closed, official meetings. Here he is at Politburo meeting in February 1987:

We could leave [Afghanistan] quickly…and blame everything on the previous leadership, which planned everything. But we can’t do that. They’re worried in India, they’re worried in Africa. They think that this will be a blow to the authority of the Soviet Union in the national-liberation movement. Imperialism, they say, if it wins in Afghanistan, will go on the offensive.

Indeed, Moscow’s numerous allies were worried about the implications of a withdrawal and the collapse of a fellow communist state and made their concerns known to Soviet officials. Gorbachev felt Moscow could not take these concerns lightly.

Gorbachev spent several years trying to find ways to make possible a Soviet withdrawal that did not bring about the collapse of the communist regime in Kabul and the attendant blow to Soviet prestige. This included economic aid as well as a policy of national reconciliation to bring opposition elements into the Kabul government. Most of these, however, resembled efforts undertaken between 1980 and 1985. Only when it had become clear that these efforts were failing that Moscow really started to move towards a withdrawal, which finally began in May 1988. In the meantime, the Soviet 40^th army continued to lose over 1000 dead per year and many more wounded.

Contrary to the expectations of US intelligence officials and many in Moscow, the Kabul regime survived without Soviet troops as long as Moscow kept sending economic aid and materiel. Soviet prestige did not collapse as a result of the withdrawal – on the contrary, it allowed Moscow to improve relations not only with the United States but also with China and some nations in the Middle East.

Which brings us back to Obama. A delay in the withdrawal may be justified, but only if he has a serious plan of what will happen during that period. His desire to talk to Iran is a good start- that country is a regional power and will no doubt carry weight in Iraq long after foreign troops are gone. Yet if he has a concrete plan to make sure the Iraqi army is more reliable than it is now or that the government is more stable he has not shown it.

My fear is that President Obama may, like Gorbachev, spend precious time reinventing the wheel or waiting for already failing programs to work. The delay may placate some of his conservative critics, but it will also be costly in terms of live lost and treasure spent. And it may erode his political capital as well, making his task of improving Washington’s relationship with the rest of the world much more difficult.

Of course, the United States is not the Soviet Union, Obama is not Gorbachev, Iraq is not Afghansitan. Yet the concerns that leaders of powerful empires face in trying to extricate their armies from such wars are similar. Obama’s supporters who would like to see him bring the troops home will most likely be disappointed, just as those who hoped Gorbachev would bring the troops home right after coming to power were to see the war drag on for almost four more years.

Call for Papers - GWU-LSE-UCSB Graduate Cold War Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS - 2009 International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War

Three partner institutions the Cold War Studies Centre at LSE IDEAS, the George Washington University Cold War Group (GWCW), the Center for Cold War Studies (CCWS) of the University of California Santa Barbara, are pleased to announce their 2009 International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War, to take place at the London School of Economics on April 24-26 2009.

The conference is an excellent opportunity for graduate students to present papers and receive critical feedback from peers and experts in the field. We encourage submissions by graduate students working on any aspect of the Cold War, broadly defined. Of particular interest are papers that make use of newly available primary sources. A two-page proposal and a brief academic C.V. (in Word or PDF format), should be submitted to IDEAS.cwc2009@lse.ac.uk by 25 January 2009 to be considered. Notification of acceptance will be made by February 24. Successful applicants will be expected to email their papers by March 24. Further questions may be directed to the conference coordinator, Artemy Kalinovsky, at the aforementioned e-mail address.

The conference sessions will be chaired by prominent faculty members from GW, UCSB, LSE and elsewhere. The accommodation cost of student participants will be covered by the organizers (from 24-26 April), but students will need to cover the costs of their travel to London.

In 2003, GW and UCSB first joined their separate spring conferences, and two years later, LSE became a co-sponsor. The three cold war centers now hold a jointly sponsored conference each year, alternating among the three campuses. For more information on our three programs, please visit the respective Web sites:

http://www.ieres.org for GWCW;
http://www.history.ucsb.edu/projects/ccwsfor CCWS; http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/IDEAS for IDEAS-CWSC.

The global 1989?

As we approach the twentieth anniversary of ‘1989 and all that’, it might be worth ducking for cover. Lest we forget, the year ‘1989’ has become something of a cliché, caught in a sense of its own triumphalism, considered by all and sundry (or at least by most) to be the ur-contemporary demarcation point in world historical time, a normative, analytical and empirical referent point par excellence.

Of course, to some extent, this is a perfectly reasonable assumption – it would be pretty odd to claim that 1989 was insignificant, particularly for those living in the former Soviet sphere of influence. But looking back now, some two decades on, is it possible to generate a balance-sheet of 1989’s broader, global significance? In other words, can we assess the impact of ‘1989’ against longer-term historical trends, on key issues in international politics, and on places beyond its immediate zone of impact? And taken from this perspective, perhaps a more complex picture emerges than the conventional wisdom allows: a story of both continuity and rupture, varied across time and place, uneven in origin and outcome.

The ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘what’ of 1989
To that end, it is worth assessing the impact of 1989 in three domains: the ‘when’, the where’ and the ‘what’ i.e. in terms of its temporal, spatial and substantive impact. First, in terms of the ‘when’, 1989 should be understood as a conjunctural rather than as an epochal shift. In other words, 1989 did not mark the emergence and institutionalisation of a novel set of political, economic and social relations. Rather, it materialized out of collapse and implosion – the disappearance, virtually without a shot, of the Soviet Union and, with it, the final strand of the Cold War order, much of which had already melted away, whether by this we mean the ideological rather than the geopolitical dimensions of the Cold War, or the Keynesian post-war settlement institutionalised in the Bretton-Woods agreement. The key ideas and ordering mechanisms of the post-1989 period (marketisation, post-Fordism, neo-liberalism and privatisation) were both ascendant and had taken institutional form well before 1989, and the central legitimating ideas of the epoch (freedom, democracy, self-determination, sovereignty, justice, the market etc.), while powerful and important, were either time honoured or associated with notions of ‘return’, ‘normalcy’, ‘joining in’ and the like. In short, actors at the centre of 1989 sought not to remake international relations in their own image but to actively relinquish power, not least by signing away authority to international organisations ranging from the EU to the IMF.

As such, the shifts and reconfigurations of social, economic and political power associated with 1989, dramatic and extensive though these have been, remain locked primarily within existing relational configurations. To put this in old language, the organic tendencies of the old have reasserted themselves, in a new context, and on a vaster scale. 1989 may have sped up world historical time, but it marked neither its end, nor its beginning. Rather like the bionic man, the post-1989 era is quicker, stronger, faster – we have seen the acceleration of means of organising politics, economics and social life, but not their reformulation.

Second, can we map the ‘where’ of ‘1989’? Certainly there is much that we know: the emergence of US primacy, the break up of the Soviet Union, the hastening of EU enlargement, and a set of important regionally variegated experiences in Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and so on. And we have many ways to describe this world: as US imperium; as “one superpower, many great powers”; or as Richard Haass offers us, “nonpolar”. But as Saskia Sassen, Phil Cerny, Eric Swyngedouw and others argue, the spaces of 1989 are complex, fractured and, to a great extent, issue- and/or region-dependent. The global interlaces with the regional, the transnational, the international, the national and the local in complex spatial amalgams. It may be that at the heart of this picture lies a process of denationalisation: the withering away of the national frame as the primary site for the articulation of security, redistribution, status and identity claims. But even here there are countervailing trends: the renationalisation of security functions via anti-terrorist legislation, the Patriot Act or the CCTV-isation of everyday life; the emergence of sovereign wealth funds and other such etatist economic policies; or the continued hold of the national over cultural and social domains as witnessed by the fervency of debates on migration, multiculturalism, citizenship and the like.

In this sense, 1989 has bought us both closer and further apart: closer in terms of an intense acceleration of intersocietal integration, particularly in terms of economies, peoples and ideas; further apart in that this homogenisation has a doppelganger in the form of a return to the local, whether visited in claims of local autonomy, ethnic identity, or anti-immigration movements. Again, therefore, there is a fundamental contradiction in play: combined interactivity alongside uneven differentiation; universality and fragmentation; singularity and fracture.

This picture does not alter considerably when considering the ‘what’ of 1989: its substantive agenda: the globalisation of finance sits uneasily alongside the emergence of sovereign wealth funds; the re-emergence of nationalism next to heightened internationalism (whether in favour of intervention in Iraq or in protest against it); the rise in secularism is matched by increased religiosity. The key point here, on which George W. Bush has been unusually prescient, is that “we know that they’re out there, we just don’t know who they are”.

Blessings and curses
Given this picture of complexity and contradiction, it is unsurprising that our concepts and frames are struggling to keep up. And that is both the blessing and curse of 1989: it has allowed us to leave behind some of the more obscuring blinkers of the pre-1989 era, but it has not yet offered us much in their place. We are in an era where we know what we are post (modern, Westphalian, imperial and so on), but have little sense of where we are and what is to come. Whether we understand 1989 as bionic man, historical landmark, symbolic stamp or remain sceptical about its importance, one thing is clear: 2009 should be a year of careful reflection rather than hubristic triumph.

The Global 1989, edited by Chris Armbruster, Mick Cox and George Lawson will be published in 2009.

Zubok, Leffler...

Since fellow IDEAS blogger Nick Kitchen has started us off with a post on IR theory, I’m going to take the liberty of writing on of the first posts from the history side of our humble office on Aldwych.

The two most awaited items in Cold War history this past academic year were Melvin Leffler’s For the Soul of Mankind and Vlad Zubok’s A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev. Both books have received their share of attention, reviews, and each became the subject of an H-Diplo roundtable discussion. Both books are ambitious efforts to bring together existing cold war scholarship with the authors’ on research. Yet both authors clearly see themselves as doing the work of cultural interpreters. Zubok does this more directly by offering English language readers a view not only on the evolution of Soviet elites from the Stalin era to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also on their interaction with other cultural phases and phenomena – dissidents, bards, shestedisitanyki, nationalists, separatists and so on.
Both books also do a good job of illuminating some of the more complex statesmen of the Cold War era. Leffler, for example, gives a very helpful introduction to Reagan’s personality and the shaping of his political views, as well as on the in-fighting within his administration and how it affected US-Soviet relations in the 1980s. Zubok, who has already contributed to a better understanding of Stalin, Khruschev, and their contemporaries as well as Mikhail Gorbachev, brings out Leonid Brezhnev in a way that none have attempted.

Brezhnev’s name is normally associated with zastoy, the period of stability and stagnation in the Soviet Union. As for foreign policy, he is remembered for such costly adventures as the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1979). His apparent ill health and mental decline in the late 1970s and until his death in office in 1982 make it tempting to dismiss him as a figure-head more interested in collecting cars and medals than in making policy. Without denying his failures as a leader, Zubok highlights Brezhnev’s singular contribution to détente, his obsession with preventing nuclear war and his genuine efforts to reach out to US leaders. Most importantly, he was willing to face down the opponents of détente and arms reduction within his own ruling elite.

That having been said, it was disappointing to see how little we learn about someone as important and enigmatic as Yuri Andropov. Although biographies of Brezhnev’s successor have proliferated in Russia, few are serious works. Even the best, by the former dissident Roy Medvedev, leaves much to be desired. More on that later…