Learning from history? From Soviet collapse to the ‘new’ Cold War

Abstract

Many moments in what we now rather lamely call the ‘end of the Cold War’ have been examined in detail. However, within the extraordinarily rich literature that has arisen over the past 25 years, little attention has been paid thus far to one very important problem: the part played by ‘history’ in shaping the way different actors tried to make sense of what was going on around them in a time of rapid transition.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor David Stevenson of the Department of International History at LSE for some shrewd comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

¹ Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London: Abacus, 2002), 32.

² For different explanations as to why experts may have failed to “predict” the collapse of Soviet power see Michael Cox, ed., Rethinking the Soviet Collapse: Sovietology, The Death of Communism and the New Russia (London: Pinter, Cassell, 1998).

³ See Jacques Levesque's seminal study on the unexpected revolution of 1989. The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

⁴ For a good overview see Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (London: The Bodley Head, 2009).

⁵ For a selection of essays on the possible reasons for the end of the Cold War drawn from this journal see Michael Cox, ed., The End of the Cold War – 25 Years On (London: Routledge & Taylor, 2014). Online: bt.ly/ColdWar25.

⁶ For further discussion on the role of the past and memory in shaping policy preferences at key historical moments see Michael G. Fry, ed., History, the White House, and the Kremlin: Statesmen as Historians (London: Pinter, 1991); Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Patrick Finney, Remembering the Road to World War II. International History, National Identity, Collective Memory (London: Routledge, 2011); David B. MacDonald, Thinking History, Fighting Evil: Neoconservatives and the Perils of Analogy in American Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009).

⁷ For a useful discussion on this issue see Thomas W. Smith, “History, Analogy and Policy Realism”, in History and International Relations, ed. Thomas W. Smith (London: Routledge, 1999), 61–91.

⁸ On the uses and abuses of “history” in general see Margaret Macmillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (New York: Modern Library Edition, 2008), esp. 167–168.

⁹ On whether or not policymakers are “historically illiterate” see Jeff Record, “Perils of Reasoning by Historical Analogy: Munich Vietnam, and the American use of Force since 1945”, March 1998, Occasional Paper no. 4, Center for Strategy and Technology, Air War College, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/cst/occppr04.htm.

¹⁰ I take this wonderfully evocative phrase from the excellent Cyril Buffet and Beatrice Heuser, eds., Haunted by History: History and International Relations (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998).

¹¹ Ernest May, “Lessons of the Past”: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

¹² On Acheson's fears about post-WWII British decline see Robert J. MacMahon, Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order (Washington D.C.: Potomac Books, 2009), 48, 58.

¹³ John T. McNay, Acheson and Empire: The British Accent in American Foreign Policy (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001).

¹⁴ Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department (New York: Norton, 1969), 726.

¹⁵ John Foster Dulles, “Challenge and Response in United States Foreign Policy”, Foreign Affairs 36, no. 1 (1957): 25–43.

¹⁶ Michael Cox, “Western Capitalism and the Cold War System” in War, States and Society, ed. Martin Shaw (New York: St Martin's Press, 1984), 136–194.

¹⁷ George Liska, Imperial America: The International Politics of Primacy (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins Press, 1967), 48.

¹⁸ Paul Keal, Unspoken Rules and Superpower Dominance (London: Palgrave, Macmillan, 1983).

¹⁹ John L. Gaddis, “The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System”, International Security 10, no. 4 (1986): 99–142.

²⁰ See the relevant sections in Campbell Craig, Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau and Waltz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

²¹ Michael Cox, “Hans J. Morgenthau, Realism and the Rise and Fall of the Cold War” in Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans J. Morgenthau, ed. Michael C. Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 166–194.

²² Kenneth Waltz, “The Stability of a Bipolar World”, Daedalus 93, no. 3 (1964): 881–909.

²³ Anton DePorte, Europe Between the Superpowers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).

²⁴ Mary Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 27.

²⁵ Michael Cox and Steven Hurst, “His Finest Hour?’ George Bush and the diplomacy of German unification”, Diplomacy and Statecraft 13, no. 4 (2002): 123–150.

²⁶ A.J.P. Taylor, The Course of German History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1945), 1.

²⁷ This extraordinary quote from Mitterrand can be found in the official Patrick Salmon, Keith Hamilton and Stephen Twigge, eds., Documents on British Policy Overseas. Series III. Volume VIII. German Unification 1989–1990 (London: Taylor & Francis, 2009), 164–165. Hereafter Documents.

²⁸ Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des Kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918 (Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag Gmbh, 1961).

²⁹ Ronald J. Granieri, “A.J.P. Taylor and the ‘Greater’ German Problem”, The International History Review, (March 2001): 28–50

³⁰ See Carol Fink and Bernd Schaefer, Ostpolitik, 1969–1974, European and Global Responses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Cyril Buffet, “Rapallo: Sirens and Phantoms”, Haunted by History, 235–258.

³¹ Frederick Bozo, Mitterrand, The End of the Cold War and German Unification (London: Berghahn Books, 2009).

³² The “bad Germans” remark was made by Mitterrand on 20 January 1990 in a meeting in Paris with Thatcher. See James Blitz, “Mitterrand feared emergence of ‘bad’ Germans”, FT.Com, 9 September 2009.

³³ On why a “reunited Germany could present various disadvantages to our interests” see “Draft Paper on German Reunification”, drafted by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on 11 October 1989, Documents, 50.

³⁴Documents, 105.

³⁵Documents, 502–508.

³⁶ As a very frustrated UK ambassador admitted in January 1990: “Despite our supportive line on the German wish to achieve unity through self-determination, the UK is perceived here” in West Germany “as the least positive of the three western allies”; and he added and “the least important”. Documents, 190. On growing American dismay with Mrs Thatcher's negative attitude towards developments in Germany, see also Documents, 31–33.

³⁷ When the German Empire was formally proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in January 1871 following the successive military defeats of Denmark, Austria and France, Disraeli pronounced that this was the second European revolution in under a century but “a greater political event than the French”, quoted in Christopher Clark, The Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 552.

³⁸ The controversy concerning what Germany did or did not agree to in order to get a French go ahead on reunification has rumbled on ever since Germany was formally reunited. Hubert Vedrine who was a close adviser to Mitterrand at the time is quite clear in his own mind. “Mitterrand”, he recalls, “did not want reunification without advances towards greater European integration”. This in turn meant Germany giving up the deutschmark and adopting the euro. As he notes: “The currency was the only topic open to debate”. According to Der Spiegel documents from the German Foreign Office show that a “West European alliance threatened to form up against Bonn”; indeed, that even “Franco-German relations were on the verge of collapsing” unless a deal could be struck. “Mitterrand even warned the government in Bonn point-blank that it could soon be left stranded in Europe as high and dry ‘as in 1913’ if it did not accept French terms. Quoted from Michael Sauga, Stefan Simons and Klaus Wiegrefe ‘You get unification, we get the euro’, Der Spiegel, 1 October 2010.

³⁹ Ronald D. Asmus, Opening NATO's Door: How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 4.

⁴⁰ The term “western cocoon” was used privately by US adviser Robert Blackwill. He even talked of German membership of NATO effectively “surrounding” Kohl. Kohl, he felt, should be encouraged in thinking of himself as being of “equal rank” in historical terms as two other great German statesmen - Bismarck and Adenauer. Cited in Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Level: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (London: Warner Books, 1994), 188.

⁴¹ “[T]he Germans could not rely uniquely on their right of self-determination and simply push for unification themselves. The Four Powers rights still overlay Germany's sovereignty”. Quote from Kristina Spohr, “German Unification: Between Official History, Academic Scholarship, and Political Memoirs”, The Historical Journal, 43, no. 3 (2000): 887.

⁴² Quote from Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 206. Unsurprisingly, Plokhy draws the rather obvious conclusion from his research that the end of the USSR had very little, if anything, to do with American policies.

⁴³ See Mark Kramer's “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union”, Journal of Cold War Studies, 5, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 3–42; 6, no. 4 (Fall 2004) pp. 3–64; and 7, no. 1 (Winter 2005) pp. 3–96. See also Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 303–335.

⁴⁴ Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), esp. 233–369.

⁴⁵ See the CIA assessment of April 1991 which argued that “economic crisis, independence aspirations and anti-Communist forces are breaking down the Soviet empire and the system of governance”. Quoted in Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983–1991, updated edition (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 450.

⁴⁶ David Arbel and Ran Edelist, Western Intelligence and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1980–1990 (London: Frank Cass, 2003).

⁴⁷ Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (London: Warner Books; Princeton University Press, 1994), 414.

⁴⁸ Cited in Andrei Grachev, Gorbachev's Gamble: Soviet Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 202.

⁴⁹ Beschloss and Talbott, At the Highest Levels, 346.

⁵⁰ In his insider study Matlock contrasts the greatness of Reagan and Gorbachev with the less than great performances of their respective successors. Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (New York: Random House, 2004).

⁵¹ See Jack Matlock, Autopsy of an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1995).

⁵² According to one study, the fall of all great powers or empires in history has inevitably led to further decline marked by “long periods of economic and demographic weakness”. In the case of Europe “it was not until the year 1000 that Europe recovered the population levels it had attained at the height of the Roman expansion in AD 200”. See J.K.F. Thomson, Decline in History: The European Experience (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 190.

⁵³ Harold James, The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

⁵⁴ Adam Smith wrote: “When the German and Scythian nations overran the western provinces of the Roman empire, the confusions which followed so great a revolution lasted for several centuries. The rapine and violence which the barbarians exercised against the ancient inhabitants interrupted the commerce between the towns and the country. The towns were deserted, and the country was left uncultivated, and the western provinces of Europe, which had enjoyed a considerable degree of opulence under the Roman empire, sunk into the lowest state of poverty and barbarism.” An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Edward Gibbon in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (also published in 1776) was equally scathing about the “priest ridden superstitious dark times” that followed the barbarian destruction of the Roman empire.

⁵⁵ On Carr's views on self-determination and the nation state, see Andrew Linklater, “E.H.Carr: Nationalism and the Future of the Nation State” in E.H.Carr: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Michael Cox (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 234–257. See also Michael Cox, ed., E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), esp. ix–lviii.

⁵⁶ Obviously, the speech delivered by Bush in Kiev in 1991 caused him great embarrassment, so much so, that several years later he felt compelled, not to defend it, but instead to argue that he had been “misunderstood by critics”. See “Bush Snr. Clarifies ‘Chicken Kiev speech’”, Washington Times, 23 May 2004.

⁵⁷ Sergei Karaganov, quoted in Roger Cohen, “Russia's Weimar Syndrome”, The New York Times, 1 May 2014.

⁵⁸ See my less reverential attempt to rethink the Marshall Plan, one that necessitated a rebuttal by five leading American historians! Michael Cox and Caroline Kennedy Pipe, “The Tragedy of American Diplomacy? Rethinking The Marshall Plan”, Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 97–134.

⁵⁹ See Kirmal Kumar Chundra, “Marshall Plan, German Unification and the Economics of Transition”, Economic and Political Weekly 31, no. 22, (1 June 1996): 1307.

⁶⁰ James Mann, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 337–338.

⁶¹ Barry Eichengreen and Marc Uzan, “The Marshall Plan: Economic Effects and Implications for Eastern Europe and the former USSR”, Economic Policy 7, no. 14 (April 1992): 14–75. See also J. B. De Long and Barry. Eichengreen, “The Marshall Plan: History's Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program”, in Postwar Economic Reconstruction and Lessons for the East Today in Rudiger Dornbusch et al eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 189–230.

⁶² Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era, 455.

⁶³ Michael Cox, “The necessary partnership? The Clinton presidency and post-Soviet Russia”, International Affairs, 70, no. 4 (1994): 635–658.

⁶⁴ For three rather different takes on the same issue using different sources see Mark Kramer, “The Myth of a No-NATO-Enlargement Pledge to Russia,” Washington Quarterly 23, no. 3 (April 2009): 29–62; Mary Sarotte, “Perpetuating U.S. Preponderance: the 1990 Deals to ‘Bribe the Soviets Out’ and ‘Move NATO In’”, International Security 35, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 110–137; and Kristina Spohr, “Precluded or Precedent-Setting? The ‘NATO Enlargement Question’ in the Triangular Bonn-Washington-Moscow Diplomacy of 1990–1991”, Journal of Cold War Studies 14, no. 4 (Fall 2012): 4–54.

⁶⁵ See Jack Matlock's most recent discussion of the issue. “NATO Expansion: Was there a Promise?”, JackMatlock.com, 3 April 2014.

⁶⁶ The issue of Russian grievance against the West following the end of the Cold War is dealt with in a balanced and sensitive way by G. John Ikenberry and Dan Deudney, “The Unravelling of the Cold War Settlement”, Survival 51, no. 6 (December 2009–January 2010): 39- 61

⁶⁷ Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 185–191.

⁶⁸ Strobe Talbott, “America Abroad: The Fear of Weimar Russia” Time.Com, 4 June 1990.

⁶⁹ Andrei Melville, “Weimar and Russia: is there an Analogy”, paper delivered 13 April 1994 to the “Weimar and Russia Forum”, Institute of International Studies, U.C. Berkeley. Online.

⁷⁰ Gregory Freidin, “Weimar Russia?”, Los Angeles Times, 7 January 1996.

⁷¹ William J. Perry, “Weimar Russia”, Hoover Digest no. 1, 30 January 1998.

⁷² Niall Ferguson and Brigitte Granville, “Weimar Germany and Contemporary Russia: High Inflation and Political Crisis in Comparative Perspective”, Voprosii Ekonomiki, 1997.

⁷³ Niall Ferguson, “Look Back at Weimar and Start to Worry about Russia”, The Telgraph Online, 1 January 2005.

⁷⁴ Quote from Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary in Fred Lucas, “White House: US and Russia are not in new Cold War”, The Blaze, 14 April 2014.

⁷⁵ Masha Gessen, The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012).

⁷⁶ See Alexander J. Motyl and Walter C. Clemens Jnr., “From Weimar to Nazi Russia”, Global Asia Forum. 2 April 2014, http://www.globalasia.org/Forum/Detail/40/from-weimar-to-nazi-russia.html. This article is especially rich in dangerous historical analogies: it compares Putin's Russia to Hitler's Germany, and by implication Putin with Hitler.

⁷⁷ Thane Gustafson, Capitalism Russian-Style (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

⁷⁸ Fiona Hill, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Washington D.C.: Brookings Press, 2013).

⁷⁹ Putin's precise words announcing the annexation of Crimea were: “We have every reason to assume that the infamous policy of containment, conducted in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, continues today. They are constantly trying to sweep us into a corner because we have an independent position ”, Vladimir Putin: The rebuilding of “Soviet” Russia, BBC, 8 March 2014. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26769481.

⁸⁰ On Putin and the past see David Satter, It Was a Long Time Ago, and it Never Happened Anyway (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).

⁸¹ Edward Lucas, The New Cold War; How the Kremlin menaces both Russia and the West (London: Bloomsbury, 2008).

⁸² Robert Legvold, “The New Cold War”, Moscow Times. 4 April 2014.

⁸³ Stephen Cohen, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives; From Stalinism to the New Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

⁸⁴ Kotkin, Armageddon Averted, 135.

⁸⁵ Tim Congdon, “Russia May Dominate World Maps, but it is an Economic Pygmy Compared with the Developed Nations as a Bloc”, Standpoint 61 (April 2014): 23.

⁸⁶ Figures from Sam Jones, “Northern Exposure”, Financial Times, 9 April 2014.

⁸⁷ See for example the front cover of The Spectator’ on 22 February 2014 which proclaimed “Today Sochi, tomorrow the world”. The picture there also displayed a cartoon of Putin in a quietly menacing pose sitting in a leather arm chair stroking a globe of the world.

⁸⁸ Fyodor Lukyanov, a former Kremlin adviser, summed up Putin's dilemma and Putin's assertiveness thus: “Putin realised that if he wanted to regain Russia's former status in the world he had to act quickly”. “The country” was he believed “at the peak of its capacities and in the years to come those capacities will start to decrease even without sanctions because the [current economic and political] model is exhausted. It should be done now not in three or four years”. Quoted in Ben Hoyle and Lettice Crawley Peck, “Nostalgia trip – Putin taps Soviet mood to tighten rule”, The Times [London], 2 May 2014.

⁸⁹ John Hulsman, “It's time to read the writing on the wall: Why the West no longer exists”, Cityam.com/forum. London, 22 April 2014, 20.

⁹⁰ A former Reagan official, Kenneth Adelman, insisted that Russia by 2014 was not only weaker than the West, but “far weaker” than the old Soviet Union with an army only one-fourth the size, a smaller nuclear arsenal, and an economy shrinking and “going down”. Quoted in Christopher Snyder, “Is American tension with Russia renewing the Cold War?”, 8 May 2014, FoxNews.com. http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/05/08/is-american-tension-with-russia-renewing-cold-war/.

⁹¹ Anders Aslund quoted in Dominic Lawson, “Let Me Put it in Black and White: Putin is no Grandmaster”, Sunday Times, [London], 20 April 2014.

⁹² By spring 2014 even the Russian authorities admitted that there had been $50bn in capital flight during the first four months of the year – almost as much as the whole of 2013. The European Central Bank put the figure much higher, at something close to $200bn. See Ben Hoyle, “Sanctions start to bite as $200bn. bleeds from Russia”, The Times, [London], 14 May 2014.

⁹³ David M. Herszenhorn, “Russia Economy Worsens Even Before Sanctions Hit”, New York Times, 16 April, 2014.

⁹⁴ Quoted in Geoff Dyer, “Washington Taps Cold War Strategy to Deal with Putin”, Financial Times, 24 April 2014.

Michael Cox is Professor Emeritus of International Relations and Founding Co-Director of IDEAS at the London School of Economics and Political Science. A former chairman of the European Consortium for Political Research, he is also an Associate Research Fellow at Chatham House and the Royal United Services Institute, London. The author and editor of over 20 books his latest volumes include Soft Power and US Foreign Policy (2009), The Global 1989 (2010), his best-selling US Foreign Policy (2^nd edition 2011), and US Foreign Policy and Democracy Promotion (2012). E-mail: [email protected]