The End of the Cold War

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The End of the Cold War
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• The 3 main dimensions of the Cold War
• Ideological
• Communism vs. capitalism, revolutionary processes
• Geopolitical
• The Soviet Unions emergence after WWII as the
  strongest power in Eurasia
• Military
• The arms race
• What changed by the 1980s

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• IDEOLOGY
• Capitalism boomed
• The information revolution
• Globalization
• New dynamism of the market system
• Decline of the Global Left
• Deepening crisis of state socialism growing
  attractiveness of liberal ideas (markets and
  democracy)
• Western social democracy successful and stalled
• The end of decolonization
• The rise of the New Right Thatcher and Reagan
• Free markets as the universal solution
• Militant anticommunism
• Global counteroffensive against the Left
• The rise of ethnic and religious nationalism

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• GEOPOLITICS
• The Soviet Unions global influence was declining
• China shifted to a semi-alliance with the US
• Western Europe was booming, confident,
  integrating
• In the Middle East, the US worked both sides of
  the Arab-Israeli conflict the USSR was
  marginalized
• In the Third World, USSR was losing allies,
  becoming irrelevant
• Afghanistan became the turning point in Soviet
  fortunes in the Third World

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• THE ARMS RACE
• The economic burden the Soviet economy
  increasingly unable to bear it
• Political futility of the arms race
• Do arms buy security?
• Is major war thinkable?
• Nuclear weapons as a global threat
• The momentum of arms control mutual
  vulnerability and mutual interest in survival
• The rise of new antimilitarism

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• By the mid-1980s, political conditions in the
  Soviet Union matured enough to produce a major
  shift in favour of all-round systemic reforms.
  GORBACHEV
• To enable the Soviet system to adapt to new world
  realities through political and economic reforms,
  the Soviet Union needed to get out of the Cold
  War
• New Thinking in foreign policy was closely
  integrated with the policies of perestroika
  (restructuring) of the entire Soviet system a
  revolution from above