Liberal International Theory and Imagining the End of the Cold War

2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Grieco
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
International Theory ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

Liberal international theory foresaw neither the end of the east–west rivalry nor the fall of the Soviet Union. However, from the 1960s up through the 1980s, several liberal international theorists put forward insightful analyses of the evolution of the cold war, its changing importance in world affairs and the problems that increasingly confronted the Soviet Union. Well before the fall of the Berlin Wall, several liberal international writers sensed that the cold war was abating, that this abatement was important for world politics and that the Soviet Union was having serious problems in maintaining its status as a superpower with an Eastern European empire.

3. International history 1900–99

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Len Scott
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Total War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This chapter focuses on some of the principal developments in world politics from 1900 to 1999: the development of total war, the advent of nuclear weapons, the onset of cold war, and the end of European imperialism. It shows how the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union became the key dynamic in world affairs, replacing the dominance of — and conflict among — European states in the first half of the twentieth century. It also examines the ways that the cold war promoted or prevented global conflict, how decolonization became entangled with East–West conflicts, and how dangerous the nuclear confrontation between East and West was. Finally, the chapter considers the role of nuclear weapons in specific phases of the cold war, notably in détente, and then with the deterioration of Soviet–American relations in the 1980s.

Trust, but Verify

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This book uses trust—with its emotional and predictive aspects—to explore international relations in the second half of the Cold War, beginning with the late 1960s. The détente of the 1970s led to the development of some limited trust between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lessened international tensions and enabled advances in areas such as arms control. However, it also created uncertainty in other areas, especially on the part of smaller states that depended on their alliance leaders for protection. The chapters in this volume look at how the “emotional” side of the conflict affected the dynamics of various Cold War relations: between the superpowers, within the two ideological blocs, and inside individual countries on the margins of the East–West confrontation.

‘Gentlemen, you are Mad!’: Mutual Assured Destruction and Cold War Culture

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan T. Berend
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Lewis Mumford

In the year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the historian and critic Lewis Mumford made a dramatic attack on the insanity of the nuclear age. In his article entitled ‘Gentlemen: You are Mad!’, Mumford said: ‘We in America are living among madmen. Madmen govern our affairs in the name of order and security’. According to Mumford, the modern superweapon society, for all its technological supremacy, was unable to recognise the looming disaster. People were sleepwalking towards the abyss of atomic war. The Cold War arms race created and served to maintain what Winston Churchill termed ‘the balance of terror’. By the end of the 1960s, both the United States and the Soviet Union had more than enough nuclear weapons to withstand a first strike and still be able to retaliate. This article explores how mutual assured destruction (MAD) was reflected and refracted in European culture and society from 1950 to 1985, and shows how film and fiction played a key role in highlighting the potential effects of MAD – a global nuclear holocaust.

From Stalin to Mao

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elidor Mëhilli
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Small Country ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
East German ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This book interprets socialism as a form of globalization by telling the unknown history of a small country that found itself entangled in some of the biggest developments of the Cold War. Within two decades, Albania went from fascist Italian rule to Nazi occupation, a brief interlude as a Yugoslav satellite, and then to a heady period of borrowings—government advisers, brand new factories, school textbooks, urban plans, and everything in between— from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. With Soviet backing, Albania’s regime launched a bold experiment: turn illiterate peasants into conscious workers. Ambitious but poor, the country also turned into a contact zone between East German engineers, Czech planners, and Hungarian geologists who came to help build socialism from scratch. Then, the socialist world shattered. During the Sino-Soviet conflict of the 1960s, Albania’s party clique switched allegiance to China, seeing in Mao’s patronage an opportunity to keep Stalinism alive. Combining an analysis of ideology with a keen sense of geopolitics, this book explores this strange connectivity of socialism, showing how socialism created a shared material and mental culture—still evident today across Eurasia—but it failed to generate political unity.

Intelligence Failure Theory

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Copeland
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Failure Theory ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Intelligence Failure ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Intelligence Failures

Intelligence failures are commonly understood as the failures to anticipate important information and events, such as terrorist attacks. Explanations for intelligence failure generally include one or more of the following causal factors: organizational obstacles, psychological and analytical challenges, problems with warning information, and failures of political leadership. The earliest literature on intelligence failures is found in the 1960s, having developed in the context of the Cold War. At the time, the stable bipolar system was threatened by periodic surprises that promised to alter the balance of power. With tens of thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other, the United States and the Soviet Union spent a great deal of time and energy assessing each other’s intentions and capabilities and trying to avoid a catastrophic surprise. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, scholarship on intelligence failure decreased substantially. In the meantime, this scholarship diversified to include topics such as the environment, human rights, drug trafficking, and crime, among other things. Surprises in these areas were perhaps more frequent, but were less consequential. However, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, interest in both scholarly and journalistic analyses of intelligence failures has once again increased.

scholarly journals Changes in Europe and the USSR: An Overview for Southern Agriculture and Agribusiness

1991 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.B. Penn
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Market Orientation ◽  
European Region ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Sufficient Time ◽  
Political Pluralism ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

The world was astonished in 1989 by the initial collapse of socialist institutions and subsequently by the pace at which change swept across the Eastern European region. For a time, even the Soviet Union seemed to be moving toward greater political pluralism, market orientation and the effective end of the Cold War. It is now approaching two years since this political convulsion began (in Poland). This is sufficient time to enable the transition programs to take form, and to permit informed speculation about the potential for their success and, ultimately, how the Eastern European and Soviet situations could affect the farming and food sectors of our economy.

Latin American Tercermundistas in the Soviet Union

2020 ◽  
pp. 221-240
Author(s):  
Tobias Rupprecht
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Third World ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter complicates conventional understandings of Latin America’s Cold War by looking at the travels of tercermundista intellectuals and activists to all parts of the USSR. Visits of intellectuals from the global South to the Cold War Soviet Union have hardly been studied. Accounts of the history of Cold War Latin America have put the Soviet Union, as a political and intellectual point of reference, aside too readily. The early Cold War was a time of enhanced, and rather successful, Soviet attempts to present their country in a positive light towards the emerging Third World. Those Latin Americans who developed a sense of belonging with the Third World in the 1960s, this chapter demonstrates, were still susceptible to the lures of certain characteristics of the Soviet state and suggested their implementation in their home countries. The reason for the positive perception came, on the one hand, as a result of very lavishly funded and well conducted programmes for Third World visitors in the Soviet Union.

scholarly journals La crise de Berlin de 1961

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-126
Author(s):  
Albert Legault
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Important Indicator ◽  
Stimulus Response ◽  
Berlin Crisis ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Domestic Power

The Berlin Wall was but an episode in what is referred to as the Berlin Crisis of 1961. The latter's context included two other conflicts : a domestic power struggle within the Soviet Union and a race for strategic superiority between the superpowers. The methodology employed makes it possible to show that the Berlin Crisis constituted a hiatus within the much larger conflict of the Cold War. It also reveals that the frequency with which objectives were formulated constitutes a very important « indicator » « reference point » or « signpost » within the crisis process. These findings would tend to demonstrate that the stimulus-response model, nothwithstanding its importance, should be completed by a much more methodical examination of the evolution of the objectives pursued by a State in the conduct of its foreign relations.

Anglo-American Nuclear Weapons Cooperation After the Nassau Conference: The British Policy of Interdependence

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Middeke
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Power ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Value ◽  
East West

The Anglo-American summit at Nassau in December 1962 did not strictly separate Britain's deterrent from the proposed Multilateral Force (MLF). As a result, Conservative governments in the 1960s tried to safeguard maximum British independence in nuclear relations with the United States. The British tried to thwart American initiatives on the mixed-manned MLF; some British officials even hoped to preserve an “independent British deterrent” through nuclear cooperation with France. For the United States, the British deterrent had political value in an intra-alliance or East-West context, but no military or political significance in itself. The MLF idea of bilateral nuclear cooperation with Britain and France was a means to contain French and German nuclear ambitions and to settle Cold War disputes with the Soviet Union. In London, however, leading officials believed that Britain's future as a great power was inextricably linked to the possession of an independent nuclear deterrent. When nuclear independence was lost, the appearance of independence became more important.

The Sakharov-Medvedev Debate on Détente and Human Rights

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 138-174
Author(s):  
Barbara Martin
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet System ◽  
The West ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Andrei Sakharov ◽  
Soviet Dissidents ◽  
East West

Abstract This article examines the debate between Soviet dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Roy Medvedev in the 1970s concerning the Jackson-Vanik Amendment and détente. Although both dissidents stood for East-West détente and democratization of the Soviet system and believed in the possibility of a dialogue with Soviet leaders until 1970, they later diverged in their views about methods of action. As Sakharov lost faith in the possibility of influencing the Soviet regime headed by Leonid Brezhnev, he shifted to a more radical position, adopting the language of human rights and turning to Western politicians and public opinion as an audience for his calls. Sakharov's public embrace of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment was in line with his advocacy of freedom of emigration and his belief that the West should extract concessions in the field of human rights before granting trade benefits to the Soviet Union. Medvedev, by contrast, argued that the amendment was counterproductive insofar as it risked alienating Soviet leaders and triggering adverse results. He considered that détente should be encouraged for its own sake, with the hope that over time it would spur democratization in the country. Medvedev's argument had much in common with the West German leader Willy Brandt's notion of “change through rapprochement,” a concept invoked as a rationale for Brandt's Ostpolitik. Although Sakharov's position earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, the Helsinki Accords showed how détente could serve the cause of human rights even with the Cold War under way.

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