RICERCA ITALIANA     

The end of the cold war or the irresistible advance of globalization ? In search of a new interpretative paradigm for the transformation of the international system, 1985-1992

Università degli Studi Roma Tre

Abstract

The research project is based on the joint, coordinated work of five research units. Most of their members have already worked together in the field of international history, with a particular focus on the period between the 1960s to the 1980s and on the evolution of the international system until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of its Eastern European empire. The current project, therefore, is at the same time the logical conclusion of the previous joint initiatives as well as an attempt to rethink the overall interpretive paradigms which so far have guided the research on the postwar international system. For this reason the current proposal includes a number of political scientists and scholars of international relations theory. An interdisciplinary dialogue between theorists and historians was regarded as indispensable to help the whole group develop new interpretations of the transformation of the international system.

The project aims at providing a broad and articulated survey of the transformation of the international system in the period between 1985 and 1992. These chronological limits, however, must be regarded as simple suggestions and not as rigid barriers for a research whose very nature is to move beyond any such restrictions. In this context, the project will try to emphasize not only the policies and strategies of the two superpowers, but also the role of a variety of other state and non-state actors, both European and extra- European. This analytical effort will then be followed by a more theoretical one to systematize the results of the research and elaborate an original interpretive paradigm. The final goal would be to include the end of the bipolar confrontation in a broad long term perspective of the evolution of the international system in the twentieth century.

Inside this general framework, the research units will operate according to their specific competences, namely

- a first unit will work on the evolution of the concept of security through a comparative analysis of the theory and practice of security in the 1980s;
- a second unit will work on the strategies of some key state actors, focusing on both the dynamic of the bipolar confrontation and on the emergence and strengthening of some new extra-European protagonists, with particular attention to China;
- a third unit will discuss the growing difficulties between the United States and Europe in the coordination of their respective policies towards other areas of the world such as the Middle East and Latin America
- a fourth unit will explore in depth a particular case study, that of Great Britain, in order to show how its policy choices can be regarded as already aiming at a transition towards a new vision of the international order;
- a fifth unit will focus on the theoretical dimension, providing to the other ones an exhaustive framework of the theoretical efforts elaborated by political scientists to come to grips with the radical metamorphosis of the international system.

All the issues studied by the local units will then form the object of joint scrutiny and systematic discussion at the national level through a variety of meetings, workshops, seminars, and conferences. A major international conference will mark the conclusion of the project <<<

Principal Investigator

Leopoldo NUTI Università degli Studi ROMA TRE

Research Objectives

The aim of this research project is to give a fresh look at the transformation of the international system in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and to suggest possible integrations to, and revisions of, the explicative paradigms built by historians and political scientists. As we explain in paragraph 2.3 in the description of the program, we certainly do not want to minimize the essential role of the United States and the Soviet Union in the evolution of the system, yet we also want to balance the existing bipolar interpretations by looking at the role of a variety of other state and non-state actors. We also suggest that it may be useful to rethink the concepts of the "end of bipolarity" and of "the end of the cold war" by looking at them in a long term perspective and by taking into account some of the major evolutionary trends which were developed across the twentieth century, and which finally came to the fore during the years which will form the object of our research. Finally, we intend to compare the results of our work with the existing historical and theoretical explanations in order to assess their explicative power.

More in detail, the project will be developed at three different levels

1) In the first place, we intend to broaden the existing bipolar interpretations of the end of the cold war by looking at a number of players which have been rather neglected so far. It is worth mentioning, in this context, that in the early stages of his foreign policy the new Secretary of the PCUS, Mikhail Gorbachev, tried to build up a dialogue with a number of Western European governments, particularly the French, the British and the Italian ones, whose role in bringing about the process of change still needs to be scrutinized in close detail. It is also necessary to deepen our knowledge of the process of regime change in a number of key Eastern European states – in particular Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia – in order to evaluate to what extent their social and political transformation contributed to the overall modification of the system. Finally, we want to move beyond a state-centred paradigm and incorporate in our narrative the role of those non-state actors, such as transnational human rights and pacifist movements, which helped spreading different notions of security and strengthening civil society. In other words, one of the goals of the project is to elaborate a narrative of the transformation of the international system which will be based on a higher number of variables than the current ones.

2) This first phase of the project will not, however, be sufficient to understand the complexity of the change that took place in the timeframe of our research. Thus, it must combined with the identification of those long term developments which run across the whole XX century and which finally burst out in its last two decades. We will particularly focus on such trends as the gradual opening up and integration of world markets (or, if one prefers, the growing importance of globalization); the emergence of a series of extra-European actors which moved from the periphery and from a marginal position in the system towards its core and a much more central role, (particularly India and China but also, to a certain extent, Africa and Latin America, which eventually accepted to be included in an economic network that they initially shunned aside); the growing importance of technology in determining both economic growth and the ranking of the major powers; the increasing weight of raw materials and energy resources in conditioning economic development; the reprise and progress of European integration, not just as a healing process for the wounds of the past or as a mercantilist tool for protecting Europe from the risks of a sudden exposure to the competition of global markets, but also as a formula to endow the countries of the continent with a capacity for external projection and for participating in the global governance of the international system; and the long-term influence of the elaboration of new concepts of security which helped to make obsolete the old Cold War mindset.

3) Finally, the project will move from this analytical phase to a theoretical reflection on the existing interpretive paradigms. Obviously we cannot anticipate the conclusions that the dialogue between the research units will reach. We can, however, already make clear that none of the members of the project feels entirely at ease with the explanations and interpretations that in the past decade or so historians and political scientists have put forward to clarify the metamorphosis of the international system. Thus we can define the first two phases of the project as somewhat instrumental to the elaboration of the third one, which will consist of a major theoretical effort to include the end of the bipolar system into the broader context of the social and political transformations of the whole century. This broader perspective, moreover, should enable the project to see whether its conclusions are also applicable to the post cold war era, and allow a better understanding of the repeated crises of the 1990s and of the contemporary international system. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

The richness of the literature on the transformation of the international system between the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s hardly seems to justify a new research effort. Historians and political scientists have studied in depth those momentous events, protagonists have written their memoirs in scores. And yet, this impressive wealth of essays and studies suffers from two important limitations: on the one hand, a strictly bipolar narrative seems to have established its hegemony over the interpretations, while on the other there is an excessive fragmentation in the analyses of the events, which often fall short of providing a long term perspective. This research project, therefore, came about as the result of long discussions about the shortcomings of the existing scholarly paradigms among the participants in this research project and between them and their international partners.

At the root of the current limitations there is a dual problem. One is the inevitable immediacy of the existing literature, the other is the more substantive one of defining the object of the research. The first can be dealt with by locating new primary sources and by starting a close interdisciplinary dialogue between scholars of international relations, both historians and political scientist. As for the second one, we need to clarify the question to be addressed: should we ask ourselves 1) what were the causes of the end of the cold war, or 2) how should one interpret the most important transformation of the international system in the last fifty years? Selecting the first definition inevitably implies a certain amount of oversimplification: by choosing to study the "end of the cold war", we lock ourselves up in a conceptual cage defined by the word "war", which entails the existence of a winner and a loser in order to explain what happened. This is a dead-end street, since it already contains an obvious reply and leads us to the existing bipolar interpretations of the object of our research. Some of them emphasize the "victory of the United States", described as the leader of the free world, and presented as the creator of a number of strategies which eventually broke the enemy's resistance; other ones, on the contrary, are inclined to see the causes of the implosion and the disintegration of the Soviet Union either in the "maturity" of the choices of its last leader, influenced by his contacts with a number of open-minded Westerners, or in a wide array of internal problems (often totally unrelated with the international confrontation with the United States).

Examples are not hard to find. The fundamental texts by Raymond Garthoff, Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, Don Oberdorfer, and John Lewis Gaddis, tell what is substantially a bipolar story, based as it is on the analysis of Soviet-American relations. Even more closely centred on the United States is obviously the narrative that comes out of the memoirs of the American protagonists, from Reagan to GHW Bush, from Shultz, to Weinberger, Baker, Matlock, Gates, and Hutchings. The basic argument of this narrative is aptly summarized by the title of Peter Schweizer's book: Victory: the Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the studies on Gorbachev almost unanimously describe the image of a new Soviet leader deeply imbued with the ideas of a new generation of young advisers, who encouraged him to shape a new foreign policy based on an entirely original concept of security. While each of them obviously declines this thesis in a more nuanced fashion, this is by and large the central tenet of the works by Robert English, Jeff Checkel, Matthew Evangelista, Sarah Mendelson, Jacques Levesque, Marie Pierre Rey– and partly by that of Archie Brown as well – and it finds some confirmation in the memoirs of Gorbachev himself, as well as Shevarnadze's, Chernaev's, Arbatov's and other ones.
Both these interpretative schools (ironically defined by Michael Cox as "Reagan won it" and "Gorbachev the Saint") are based on a strictly bipolar assumption– the victory of one actor or the deliberate innovative choice of the other – which the scholars that participate in this project regard as somewhat rigid. They also feel uneasy about the rigid dichotomy which exists in contemporary International Relations Theory, where the two schools of realism and idealism/constructivism have elaborated two strong interpretive paradigms, without however being able to move beyond the confrontational stage and produce a persuasive synthesis. Realist literature, strongly anchored to the concepts of "power" and "national interests", has shown its limits in being unable to deal with the general issue of change and transformation of the international system, and in explaining the passage from one system to another. (Wohlforth, Schweller) Its contribution is still very helpful to explain the correlation of forces in the international system, but realism faces a real challenge in interpreting the process of modification of the system since 1989. The rich constructivist literature, on the other hand, tries to explain the process of system change through the analysis of how norms, culture, identity, trust, persuasion, learning, transnational conceptual flows, intellectual entrepreneurship and many other ideational processes influenced the ending of the superpower rivalry.(Lebow, Risse-Kappen, Kratochwil) In a nutshell, consistent with the work of many of the historians cited above, a number of international relations scholars have stressed the role played by the penetration of Western ideas and culture into the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union itself, a process that can be traced back to the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and its repercussions. Capable as it is of providing a paradigm which is more nuanced and flexible of the realist one, this school still offers an interpretation which is not entirely persuasive as it seems to reduce "material" factors to a very marginal role in order to emphasize ideal and "immaterial" ones.

The many contributions on the evolution of Western Europe, important as they are, have also shown similar limits. The abundant literature on the field of European integration, and above all the one written after 1989, requires therefore a historiographical reflection, since there seems to be a growing hiatus in the field. The more benevolent but generic analyses that somewhat emphatically stress the "success" of the European project and its contribution to the de-legitimization of the Soviet system have given way to a number of more provocative assessments that cast doubt on the validity of the European myths (Milward, Daddow, Gillingham). Political scientists have also begun to question Europe's inclination to respond, rather than to activate, processes of change (Wallace, Karen Smith). Other scholars have been focussing on the meaning of Europe's special governance (Moravscik, Nicolaidis), while other ones are debating the issue of "wider" vs. "deeper" in a long term perspective (Zielonka), relating it to the EU capacity (or lack thereof) of elaborating its own external relations.

Even the field of European security, which has been studied in depth by both historians and political scientists, needs to be addressed from a new perspective. Scholars have examined in detail the evolution of the Euro-Atlantic security concept, stressing how for most of the 1980s the Western Europeans were still deeply anchored to a traditional vision of their national interests. Most studies on European security in the 1980s, therefore, present the European initiatives as a long list of semi-failures: the work of George-Henri Soutou on Franco-German security relations, as well as the essays of Holly Wyatt-Walter, Simon Duke, Anne Deighton and others on the WEU and the intra-European search for a CFSP from the 1980s to the Maastricht treaty, all show the frustrating, difficult quest for an unattainable goal. Faced with a process of transformation which was too rapid and too deep to be framed within the narrow boundaries of visions conditioned by the past, and seemingly incapable of looking at the future, the Europeans failed to come up with an adequate imaginative effort. Sometimes, however, these studies reveal the limits of a narrative which is too teleological and self-contained, and it's incapable of looking at the linkages between what was going on in Western Europe and the events that were about to unfold in the Eastern half of the continent.

Finally , the existing literature that deals with the great events of 1989 often finds it hard to frame those events into a broader picture: the change of the Polish regime (studied in particular by Levesque and Paszkowski), as well as the dramatic sequence in Germany that climaxed with the fall of the Wall, were so unexpected that they are sometimes explained by resorting to the role of chance (Hertle's actors without a director) or of events spinning out of control (Mastny's Gorbachev and the unexpected liberation of Eastern Europe). With the partial exception of the books of Zelikow/Rice and by von Plato, which look at the international dimension of German reunification, what is missing from this picture is an attempt to link the events in Eastern Europe and Germany to the overall context. Nor is there any analysis of the impact of the new visions of security in the Eastern European countries, since their influence has been studied mostly with regard to the Soviet Union.

In short, a close reading of the literature about the foreign policy of all the powers, great and mid-sized, shows a profound, significant, conceptual gap between the sequence of the events as they evolved up to 1988 and the great revolutions of 1989. Until 1988, almost all the foreign policy initiatives developed by both blocs were aiming towards a gradual modification of the international system in order to make possible a stable and jointly-controlled détente, but not the radical dismantling of the system. The common trend was towards a joint management of the system, not its overturning: the US expected to cooperate with a reformed Soviet Union which had adopted the rules and codes of behaviour of the West, and that in any case needed the American support to continue its plan of domestic reforms; Gorbachev, on the other hand, envisaged for the Soviet Union a difficult transition towards a reformed socialism which could breathe some new life into an economy and a society bordering on stagnation; and Western Europe was expecting yet another step forward, important but not dramatic, in its slow progress towards closer forms of economic cooperation. One of the key issues in any analysis of the transformation of the international system, therefore, is the need to explain such a sudden hiatus between the expectations of a moderate, limited change – important and remarkable as it may have been – and the dramatic upheavals of 1989: the real difficulty, which the existing literature has not been able to overcome yet, is to work out a theoretical linkage between the breathtaking changes of 1989 and the broader, long-term international context. Some interpretations seem to hint at a causal relationship between the revolutions in Poland, Hungary and Germany and the previous policy choices of both the US and the Soviet Union, thus forcibly inscribing the events of 1989 in a rigidly bipolar narrative: but if the Soviet and the American reactions were paramount in determining the evolution of the events and in conditioning their final outcome, it seems much more difficult to define to what extent, if any, Washington and Moscow might be identified as the ultimate causes of the beginning of the process of regime change in Poland or Hungary. Alternatively, other interpretations seem to stress the unpredictability of those events, almost as if trying to subtract them to the search for a rational explanation: almost as if contingency and fate could provide an explicative paradigm which could remove those events from the stream of history.

The existing interpretive approaches, therefore, fail to provide an adequate conceptual framework for filling the gap between the historical narratives and the events of 1989. In order to acquire new perspectives it is necessary to develop a broader, more articulate conceptual framework which will verify the existing hypotheses, introduce new ones, and take into account a larger number of explicative variables. This is the challenge that the research project intends to pick up, at the same time trying to keep a solid, well-grounded research profile which will be presented in detail in paragraph 2.4.


- International connections and partnerships

From a methodological perspective, the project can rely on a well-established cooperation with a large number of international research institutions which have been working on these issues for a long time. In Europe, in particular, the project can rely on a close partnership with the Cold War Studies Centre of the London School of Economics, the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact based at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, the MGIMO in Moscow, a number of French scholars at the University of Paris I and Nantes, and of British ones at the St. Antony College in Oxford. In the United States, members of the research units have cooperated for a long time with some of the main research centres on the Cold war, in particular the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington D.C., the National Security Archive, and the Cold War Studies Group at George Washington University. Thanks to this large group of international connections, the project can be included in an international network which for many years has been active in promoting the declassification of new documentation collections and in locating new documentary collections, both private and public ones, in Western Europe as well as in the countries of the former Soviet bloc. <<<