The Last Decade of the Cold War

From Conflict Escalation to Conflict Transformation

Olav Njolstad, Olav Njolstad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135754129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Militär- & Seefahrtsgeschichte

The 1980s was a period of almost unprecedented rivalry and tension between the two main actors in the East-West conflict, the United States and the Soviet Union. Why and how that conflict first escalated and thereafter, in an amazingly swift process, was reversed and brought to its peaceful conclusion at the end of the decade is the topic of this volume.With individual contributions by eighteen well-known scholars of international relations and history from various countries, the book addresses the role of the United States, the former Soviet Union, and the countries of western and eastern Europe in that remarkable last decade of the Cold War, and discusses how particular events as well as underlying political, ideological, social, and economic factors may have contributed to the remarkable transformation that took place.

PART I:
THE 1980s IN HISTORICAL
CONTEXT

1
The 1980s Revisited or the Cold War as History—
Again

Michael Cox

The overwhelming majority of the chapters in this book plot the course of the end of the Cold War and the transition in the East-West relationship from conflict escalation to conflict transformation, culminating with the extraordinary events of 1989 and 1991–the first of which saw the effective collapse of Soviet power in Eastern Europe, and the second of which witnessed the implosion of the USSR itself. This is a story that has been told several times before, and will no doubt be told several times again as different scholars try to plant their own theoretical and intellectual flag on this particular patch of important historical territory.¹ The discussion thus far has certainly been a fascinating one, which has been enriched by the active intellectual role played in it by many of the key actors who happened to be present at disintegration.² It is also a debate without end which has already divided writers and scholars almost as much as that other great story concerning the beginning of the conflict in the months and years following World War II. It would be pointless here to try to sum up this discussion. But it is at least worth mentioning that what happened between 1989 and 1991 has given rise to at least half a dozen theories about its probable causes, precipitated something of a crisis in the discipline of international relations (not to mention the now defunct subject of Sovietology), given Cold War studies a major shot in the arm, and forced quite a few scholars to wonder about the more general claims of the social sciences, given the latter’s abysmal record in actually predicting what happened.³ Not bad for an event which only a few years prior to its actual occurrence had been deemed to be most unlikely, and a decade earlier almost inconceivable!⁴

The task I have been allotted here is at one level somewhat easier than that being performed by some of the other participants, insofar as I have not been asked to write a detailed chapter based on what we historians like to refer to as ‘original research’. On the other hand, it might be considered to be a good deal more taxing because unlike most of the other contributors I have been asked to answer some fairly large (in fact, impossibly huge) questions, not just about the 1980s in particular—though I will saying something about that—but about the Cold War in general. Naturally, being a rather literal sort of person I have actually read the questions; moreover, being a teaching academic I am bound to follow the advice I always give to my own students before they enter the exam hall: that is, always make sure you answer the questions set and not those one would have preferred to have been asked, or those you had actually prepared an answer for. It is easy to give advice: far more difficult, however, to take it yourself. That said, I will endeavour in this somewhat schematic, and I hope provocative chapter, to answer the questions set.

First, the questions themselves. These, in rough order, ask what was the Cold War all about, an apparently easy question with a fairly obvious answer. But as we all know, things are never quite what they appear to be. The second asks why did the Cold War endure for over 40 years, another deceptively easy question to which there is no easy or ready-made answer. Finally, where does the 1980s itself fit into the longer history of the Cold War, if in fact it fits in at all. These questions, I would suggest, raise another set of issues, which relate, directly and indirectly, to the way historians have thought about the Cold War. One I am bound to ask, which is: how well did we really understand the Cold War when it was actually in progress? I ask this for the fairly self-evident reason that if we comprehended it as well as we thought we did at the time, then why did we fail almost completely to anticipate its demise in the 1980s?⁵ This in turn connects to a second problem concerning our understanding of the Cold War now. As historians, we all agree that we now know more about the Cold War, even if we do not know as much as some writers appear to think we know. The big issue, though, is whether or not this new material has brought us any closer to answering the important as opposed to the little questions about the Cold War. I would want to suggest it might not have done.⁶ Indeed, a case could be made that while our detailed knowledge of the Cold War has improved considerably, theoretical thinking about the relationship has not. Moreover, some of the ‘new’ thinking which has been done, rather than taking the debate forward, has tended to lead to the repetition of some fairly old truths.

Finally, I want to say something about the difficult problem of perspective. Here I would insist (or at least raise the possibility) that modern historians have, in their different ways, been deeply influenced in how they think about the course of the Cold War by the fact that one of the two protagonists died such a speedy, almost painless death in 1991. Perhaps this is unavoidable. However, it does carry risks: one is the distinct tendency in some writing to search for symptoms of the Soviet system’s decay and decline long before they began to make themselves manifest; and the other is to take it as read that the Cold War was always likely to end in the way in which it did (assuming it was going to end at all).⁷ This is not only being doubly wise after the event. It also ignores the very obvious point that, until the late 1970s at least, few assumed the West could, or would, win the Cold War. In fact, a strong case could be made that until the final decade of the conflict, many people were of the opinion that it was the USSR, and not the United States, that was pulling ahead internationally. Certainly, Soviet leaders showed no signs of giving up the struggle or going under during the 1970s.⁸ It is critically important to remember this—in part because it makes what happened during the 1980s look even more incredible, and partly because it forces us to think more carefully about how we write and think about the Cold War as a living phenomenon. The astonishing events between 1989 and 1991 provoked, and continue to provoke, questions that few of us ever expected to be asking. But we should be careful not to assume that, because these events happened, there was a natural and smooth progression leading ineluctably towards the final denouement. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it is something that should be avoided like the plague by all serious historians.⁹

The Cold War as History

If there is one thing that can be said with any certainty about the long academic debate about the meaning of the Cold War it is that it was remarkably intense and often deeply divisive. One British historian referred to it in typically understated fashion as being ‘somewhat vitriolic’,¹⁰ and this seems as good a way as any of describing the discussion before 1989—particularly that centrally and critically important part of it which took place in the United States. Most Europeans, it would be fair to say, often felt like spectators in this battle of ideas; and though we might all have had a dog to support in this particular fight—and to be fair, the different dogs in question did occasionally glance up from their bickering to see what we might be saying—it is difficult not to feel that this was, by and large, an American discussion, dominated by Americans and shaped by American preoccupations largely concerning the role of the United States in the Cold War. None the less, the discussion impacted on us all and certainly Europeans made their mark (though much less than they would like to imagine) in a highly complex discussion about the deeper causes of the East-West impasse.¹¹ Perhaps how complex can be best appreciated by merely listing the extraordinary range of academic opinion there was about the conflict in general, and the period between 1945 and 1950 in particular.

Thus, depending on intellectual taste, political preference and methodological stance, writers interpreted the transition from wartime alliance to post-war confrontation in at least one of the following ways: as a belated response by the West to the Soviet refusal to allow free elections in Eastern Europe, a defensive Western reaction to the threat of Soviet military power, reasonable concerns in Washington about the further spread of communism to western Europe, a more general crisis in the balance of power caused by Germany’s defeat in World War II, misperceptions on both sides about the other’s intentions, the American practice of atomic diplomacy, a clash of social systems and possibly civilizations, US hegemony, Open Door expansion (to create an open world economy favourable to US interests), domestic political pressures, the military-industrial complex, bureaucratic politics, learning the (wrong) lessons of history, a security dilemma, and ideas and values. If that long list does not satisfy, one can always blame it all on the perfidious British, who according to one school of thought at least, helped start it all either as a way of breaking the back of US isolationism by playing to anticommunist fears in the United States, or by pursuing its own imperial ambitions, which were bound to end in an extended conflict with Soviet Russia.¹² All this (and no doubt much more) has led at least one leading European historian of the Cold War to conclude that there would appear to be as many answers to the question about how the contest began, ‘as there are scholars who have researched the subject’.¹³ Louis Halle made much the same point several years ago. There is not just one Cold War, he argued in an almost post-modern vein, but many. In fact, according to Halle, there would seem to be ‘as many Cold wars as there are individual minds’, and ‘none of them’, he concluded, was even ‘the “true” Cold War’.¹⁴

Of course, most academics have tried (and still try) to make sense of all this by simplifying, and perhaps the biggest simplification we have all made has been to reach for our Hegelian triad of Cold War theories. First, as we tell our students as if they were attending a bible class, there were the traditionalists. This was an odd amalgam of writers ranging from straight-forward apologists for US foreign policy to realist critics like George Kennan and Hans Morgenthau. This ‘school’ disagreed about a great deal, including how to define the Soviet threat, and the means by which the United States should respond to it. What they did agree about, however, was that the basic cause of the Cold War had to be sought in an analysis of the Soviet Union, and in the way in which this totalitarian regime, with its unique pre-revolutionary history and aggressive communist system fundamentally opposed to capitalism, conducted itself outside of its own borders. The responsibility for the Cold War therefore lay with the USSR. Not so, claimed the revisionists from Wisconsin led by the remarkable, and remarkably influential William Appleman Williams. The USSR was too weak, its foreign policy too defensive, and its leaders too cautious, for Russia to seek confrontation with the United States. If nothing else, it was just not in its interests to do so. Hence, the underlying sources of the antagonism had to be unearthed somewhere else, and that somewhere, according to the revisionists (and I simplify), was not Soviet ideology and Soviet capabilities taken together—the favourite topics of the traditionalists—but the refusal of the much more powerful United States to co-exist with a system so different from its own; a system, moreover, which kept the doors of its own rather pathetically weak empire closed to US economic penetration. Hence, said the revisionists, don’t blame the insecure Russians for what happened after 1946 or 1947. They, after all, had fewer options than the Americans. Instead, blame the United States.

Not surprisingly, such an explanation, which laid all the responsibility for the Cold War at the door of the United States while providing little in the way of an explanation as to why US policy-makers might have been concerned about the USSR after World War II, did not find ready admirers everywhere: and one who perhaps admired the revisionists more in the 1970s than he was to do later was John Gaddis—the final synthesis in our very brief journey through Hegel.¹⁵ Whether Gaddis aimed to go beyond more traditional accounts by integrating the insights of the revisionists (while rejecting their method), or simply aimed to make traditionalism intellectually more capable of dealing with radical attack, remains unclear.¹⁶ It is not even clear that he advanced a new theory of the Cold War. However, what he did do—much to the relief of most liberal intellectuals—was to plot a middle, and more comfortable, course between two essentialist positions, one of which looked for the key to the Cold War in a study of Russian and Soviet history, and the other of which sought to grasp its dynamics through a detailed analysis of US political economy and the drive for an Open Door. This, I think, was critical. Post-revisionism no doubt succeeded for all sorts of good academic reasons, including the close attention it paid to American archives, its recognition of the messy character of the US foreign policy process, and (it has to be said) the quite brilliant way in which Gaddis himself managed to synthesize a mass of complicated material and still tell an interesting story without losing the plot. But, one suspects, it did particularly well because it took the political sting out of the debate and guided it back...