لخّصلي

The states-system is an organic kaleidoscope. Historical forces of wealth, demography, military power, personal ambitions and ideology shake the pieces into constantly shifting patterns of alliances and enmity. But as we watch these changes occurring in the course of history we notice too that the component pieces of the picture alter in size. States grow, then shrivel; they rise and decline in power over the ages. And much of the fascination of the study of international relations lies in the attempt to understand how the various patterns work: whether a single state becomes so massively powerful as to be utterly dominant; whether several great powers, with minor allies perhap~, can be kept in balance with each other; whether rapid changes in relative power can be managed without the violence of war.
The era of the cold war produced a simple pattern. Two states, the United States and USSR, grew to such colossal strength as, between them, to dominate most of the planet. Like a giant bar magnet this international system led to a clustering of minor states round the two superpower poles. This bipolar world was rendered even simpler by two other factors. One was the ideological hatred which kept the two ends determinedly poles apart: capitalism and Communism were mutually repellent. The other factor was the possession by both superpowers of nuclear weapons. Any attempt by one superpower to neutralise the strength of the other would, probably entail mutual annihilation. The simple dual balance of power was sustained by the balance of terror.
To discard our two analogies, we may say, alternatively, that the cold war was characterised by three major features: geopolitical relationships, ideological tensions and an arms race. I t will be useful briefly to explain each of these.
The foHowing quotation places the cold war in historical perspective:
There are at the present time two great nations in the world. . . . I allude to the Russians and the Americans....The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of the people; the Russian centres all the authority of society in a single arm. The principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude. Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.Those words, written by the French politician and scholar Alexis de Tocqueville, were published in 1835.
It was not, however, until after the Second World War that Tocqueville's forecast became reality and the two giant powers became bitter rivals. By about 1950 the two power blocs seemed solidly in place. The United States spawned military, naval and air bases across both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Spanning the Atlantic was the command system integrating the forces of North America and Western Europe - the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). The Soviet Union, for her part, had substantial forces in place in the satellite Communist states of Eastern Europe, as weH as fraternal Communist regimes in Asia, most notably China.
A non-aligned movement of primarily Afro-Asian states also grew up. Its object was to prevent the Third World from being attracted into the magnetic fields of either the American-dominated or the Soviet-dominated worlds. Even so, this did not stop the superpowers from trying to draw Third World countries into their spheres of influence - the United States operating mainly in Latin America, the Soviet Union, mainly in the Middle East and then Africa. One US Secretary of State, John Foster DuHes (1952-9),even went as far as to suggest that non-alignment was immoral. The cold war was a struggle between good and evil. The Americans were the righteous and should be supported.
The cold war was, therefore, not just apower political rivalry in the traditional sense -like that between Rome and Carthage in the third century BC or between France and Britain in the eighteenth century, for instance. It contained the intensifying element of ideology. On the one side was materialist Communism in its brutalised Stalinist form. On the other, Western capitalist democracy, sometimes expounded with Christian overtones.
The teachings of Karl Marx provided a secular creed as an alternative to spiritual religions. Heaven, paradise or nirvana was to be attained on this earth by means of radical economic and social changes. This promise or threat of revolution (depending on one's point of view) was achallenge to existing orders. When the revolution became reality in Russia in 1917 the hopes of the disadvantaged and the fears of the contented were stirred into agitated life. For some four decades after 1945 a growing number of countries tried the experiment. However, fears came increasingly to overwhelm hopes as, in so many countries which acquired Communist governments, revolution was succeeded by bloody terror and the iron discipline of the police state. Even the promised economic advantages failed to materialise to any evident degree.
As evidence accumulated of the apparent capacity of Com- munism to spread and of its tendency to adopt an authoritarian style, so the governments ofthe Western world became increasingly hostile to the ideology. Its atheism offended Christians; its authoritarianism worried those who appreciated the values of political and civil freedom; and its challenge to private wealth and the market economy frightened those who believed these conditions to be beneficial. In this last category we may count Western financial and commercial interests operating in underdeveloped countries where the appeal of Communism rendered their investments and profits vulnerable to nationalisation.
The Soviet leaders portrayed the West as decadent imperialists; American leaders portrayed Communist regimes as terrible autocracies. 'We will bury you,' declared the Soviet leader Khrush- chev, boasting the superiority of the Communist system; US President Reagan, a quarter of a century later, castigated the USSR as an 'evil empire'.
Insults are not lethai; nuclear weapons are. The 'cold war' (a term coined by the American Bernard Baruch in 1947) was 'cold' precisely because the principals did not engage in a 'hot' fighting war with each other. The conftict was prosecuted as a verbal confrontation or as localised wars in each of which only one superpower was directly involved - for example, the United States in Vietnam in the 1960s or the USSR in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Nevertheless, both sides built up immense forces designed for use against each other. Initially these were equipped primarily with conventional weapons. As the years wore on huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons of ever-increasing variety and sophistication were amassed and came to be relied upon in tactical and strategic planning. Theoretically the purpose of these weapons of un- thinkably awesome destructive power was to deter: that is, the threat of their use would inhibit any leader from either starting a war or crossing the nuclear threshold should war in fact break out. The matter of annaments is dealt with in Chapter 3. It is sufficient here to note that by the 1980s the two sides had between them some 50,000 nuclear warheads.
The taut superpower relations, caused by and expressed in these terms, could hardly fail to be a dominant inftuence in international relations generally during the cold war period, 1947-90. Yet relatively simple as the world scene was made by this tension, we must be wary of oversimplifying the picture. In the first place, some members of the superpowers' camps were at times less than wholly loyal or committed to the bipolar model of the world. For instance, President de Gaulle, sensitive of French pride and resentful of American inftuence, in 1966 withdrew French forces from NATO's integrated command. Even more dramatically on the Communist side of the cold war, Soviet forces intervened violently to suppress a popular uprising in Hungary in 1956, and a quarrel between the USSR and China became so aggravated that small-scale skirmishes broke out between contingents of their annies in the late 1960s.
Secondly, it would be wrong to assume from the above survey that relations between the United States and USSR were maintained at a constant sub-zero temperature. To change the metaphor, tension was occasionally wound up, sometimes almost to snapping point - for example, in the Berlin blockade in 1948, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Yet at other times relations were happier. After the death of Stalin in 1953 Khrushchev attempted a policy of 'thaw'. Two years later the American, Soviet, British and French leaders met in a summit conference at Geneva and posed for photographs wreathed in 'Geneva spirit' smiles. It is also true that at no time during the cold war were formal diplomatic relations severed. However, the Cuban missile crisis, which seemed to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war, was a fearful shock to that system. What the tense events of October 1962 revealed was the need for more rapid means of communication for crisis resolution, such as a 'hot-line' (see Chapter 3). The 1970s too, like the 1950s, was aperiod of relaxation, known as detente, when progress was made in two sets of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT).The final thaw
Neither the 1950s thaw nor the 1970s detente were more than fleeting episodes. The change in the relationships between the superpowers and their blocs about 1990 was, however, of deeper significance. By that time most of the participants were willing to seize an opportunity to bring the cold war to a close if it were offered. Dramatic changes in the Soviet Union provided that opportunity.
In March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader. He brought to the task of conducting his country's foreign policy a fresh and flexible mind. From 1985 to 1990 he worked in harmony with a like-minded Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze. Khrushchev had renounced the classical Leninist doctrine of the inevitability of war between Communism and capitalism in 1956. But his alternative of 'peaceful coexistence' had still posited inevitable rivalry, bitter indeed in its prosecution short of war. Gorbachev discarded even this belief in his 'New Thinking'. He wrote: 'The development of a new mode of thinking requires dialogue not only with people who hold the same views but also with those who think differently and represent a philosophical and political system that is different from ours' (Gorbachev, 1987, p.152).Gorbachev had two very compelling reasons for seeking more amicable relations with the West. One was the fearful state of the Soviet economy. Food production and distribution could not cope with the needs of the population; the quality of consumer goods was shoddy; and a massive proportion of the country's wealth was being absorbed by military expenditure. Though it is difficult to make accurate computations for the Soviet Union, it is likely that in 1985, proportionately, it was spending almost three times as much of its wealth on the armed forces as the United States (19 per cent compared with 6.7 per cent).
One drain, of skilled manpower as well as money, was the development of missiles and guidance systems for nuclear weapons. Gorbachev recognised that the nuclear arms race was not only costly but dangerous. In a key speech in 1986 he declared: 'nuclear weapons harbour a hurricane which is capable of sweeping the human race from the face of the earth.' Consequently, he announced the imperative need 'to terminate the material prepara- tions for nuclear war' (Gorbachev, 1986, p. 80).
The Soviet leader rapidly translated his 'New Thinking' into effective action. He held summit conferences with the US Presidents - with Reagan at Reykjavik in 1986 and Washington in 1987 and with Bush on board ship in Maltese waters in 1989. At the Washington summit the two superpowers signed the Intermediate- range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty - the first agreement actually to reduce stockpiles of nuclear weapons, namely, land-based medium- range missiles (see p. 19). Gorbachev also unilaterally started to withdraw some forces from the territories of the East European states (see p. 20). Soviet troops were also withdrawn from their bloody involvement in the Afghan civil war. In the United Nations Soviet delegates adopted a much more co-operative attitude, notably in supporting the United States in its initiative to condemn and then engage in war with Iraq over her seizure of Kuwait in 1990-1 (see Chapter 12).
The most startling events took place in Eastem Europe. Their outcome was materially affected by Gorbachev's policy of non- intervention. After the Second World War the presence of the Red Army ensured the establishment of Communist govemments in the countries of Eastem Europe. Normal contact with the West was prevented by what Churchill called the 'Iron Curtain'. The chink in that barrier, namely, continued access between the eastem and western sectors of Berlin, was sealed by the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Behind the Iron Curtain discontent periodically broke out in popular demonstrations, which were suppressed by force. In 1968 the Soviet leader justified this interference on the grounds that it was necessary to maintain 'socialism' in the region; this was known as the 'Brezhnev Doctrine'.
Even before the emergence of Gorbachev the system was starting to unravel in Poland. In 1980 popular riots forced the Party leader to resign; and the trade union 'Solidarity' was formed, free of any Communist Party control. Would Soviet forces move in as they had in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968? The ailing Brezhnev stayed his hand.
Then, from the summer of 1989 to the spring of 1990, exciting events rapidly followed each other. In Poland Solidarity, having turned into a political party, defeated the Communist Party in elections and the first non-Communist took office as prime minister in an East European state since the start of the cold war. Hungary opened its frontier with Austria, allowing (via Czechoslovakia) an exodus of discontented East Germans to West Germany. In East Germany the Berlin Wall was breached. In Czechoslovakia, the formerly imprisoned playwright Vaclav Havel became President, following a relatively peaceful 'velvet revolution'. In Romania, in contrast, a violent revolution was necessary to rid the country of the hated and mentally unbalanced dictator Ceau~escu.
By 1991 nothing was left of the former Soviet 'empire' in Eastern Europe. East Germany was merged into the Federal Republic with surprisingly little complaint from Gorbachev. Free elections placed non-Communist parties in power in much of the area. The Soviet- style secret police and command economy systems were being dismantled. Tbe new governments conducted negotiations with the USSR for the removal of its remaining troops. Early in 1991 the Soviet-controlled military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, and economic grouping, Comecon, were disbanded.
Tbe Americans and West Germans greeted these changes most happily. Reagan dropped his 'evil empire' style of rhetoric; while his successor, George Bush, emphasised his readiness to work co- operatively with both the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe, even to the extent of providing economic assistance for the restructuring of their economies. President Mitterrand of France and Chancellor Kohl of Germany also proffered the hand of friendship. MrsThatcher, the Prime Minister of Britain from 1979 to 1990, alone remained guarded, warning that the enthusiasm of 1989-90 might be misplaced if Gorbachev's hold on power proved more tenuous than appeared at that time.
The end of the cold war was formally recognised at a meeting in Paris in November 1990. The twenty-two heads of government or state of the NATO and Warsaw Pact alliances issued a Declaration, which stated: 'The signatories solemnly declare that, in the new era of European relations which is beginning, they are no longer adversaries, will build new partnerships and extend to each other the hand offriendship' (text reprinted, NATO Review, December 1990, pp. 26-7). .
At the start of the century's final decade the international scene was confusing. The old cold war certainties lay in ruins. Yet its legacy could not be utterly ignored in the difficult task of constructing a new international system.