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 >>>

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 >>>

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 >>>