In a narrative-redefining approach, Engaging the Evil Empire dramatically alters how we look at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Tracking key events in US-Soviet relations across the years ...between 1980 and 1985, Simon Miles shows that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as both superpowers determined that open diplomacy was the best means of furthering their own, primarily competitive, goals. Miles narrates the history of these dramatic years, as President Ronald Reagan consistently applied a disciplined carrot-and-stick approach, reaching out to Moscow while at the same time excoriating the Soviet system and building up US military capabilities. The received wisdom in diplomatic circles is that the beginning of the end of the Cold War came from changing policy preferences and that President Reagan in particular opted for a more conciliatory and less bellicose diplomatic approach. In reality, Miles clearly demonstrates, Reagan and ranking officials in the National Security Council had determined that the United States enjoyed a strategic margin of error that permitted it to engage Moscow overtly. As US grand strategy developed, so did that of the Soviet Union. Engaging the Evil Empire covers five critical years of Cold War history when Soviet leaders tried to reduce tensions between the two nations in order to gain economic breathing room and, to ensure domestic political stability, prioritize expenditures on butter over those on guns. Miles's bold narrative shifts the focus of Cold War historians away from exclusive attention on Washington by focusing on the years of back-channel communiqués and internal strategy debates in Moscow as well as Prague and East Berlin.
After decades of turmoil and trauma, the Brezhnev era brought stability and an unprecedented rise in living standards to the Soviet Union, enabling ordinary people to enjoy modern consumer goods on ...an entirely new scale. This book analyses the politics and economics of the state's efforts to improve living standards, and shows how mass consumption was often used as an instrument of legitimacy, ideology and modernization. However, the resulting consumer revolution brought its own problems for the socialist regime. Rising well-being and the resulting ethos of consumption altered citizens' relationship with the state and had profound consequences for the communist project.
The book uses a wealth of sources to explore the challenge that consumer modernity was posing to Soviet 'mature socialism' between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. It combines analysis of economic policy and public debates on consumerism with the stories of ordinary people and their attitudes to fashion, Western goods and the home. The book contests the notion that Soviet consumers were merely passive, abused, eternally queuing victims and that the Brezhnev era was a period of 'stagnation', arguing instead that personal consumption provided the incentive and the space for individuals to connect and interact with society and the regime even before perestroika. This book offers a lively account of Soviet society and everyday life during a period which is rapidly becoming a new frontier of historical research.
China's role in the United Nations has been a significant one. Yet, Samuel Kim contends, as far as the literature on Chinese foreign policy is concerned, the People's Republic of China still remains ...outside the heuristic framework of the global community. In a comprehensive macro-analysis of Chinese global politics, Professor Kim probes China's image and strategy of world order as manifested through its behavior in the UN.
The author draws upon a wide range of previously untapped primary sources, including China's policy pronouncements and voting record and over a hundred personal interviews with UN delegates and international civil servants. He finds that Chinese participation has made the United Nations not only more representative but also more relevant as the global political institution responding to the challenge of establishing a more humane and just world order.
Originally published in 1979.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Few moments in history have seen as many seismic transformations as 1979. That single year marked the emergence of revolutionary Islam as a global political force, the beginning of market revolutions ...in China and Britain that would radically alter the international economy, and the first stirrings of the resistance movements in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Strange Rebels, veteran journalist Christian Caryl shows how the world we live in today and the problems that plague it began to take shape in this pivotal year. Weaving the story of each of these counterrevolutions into a brisk, gripping narrative, Strange Rebels is a groundbreaking account of how these upheavals marked a startling conservative challenge to communist and socialist systems around the globe, giving birth to our modern age in the process.
After the end of World War II, the United States, by far the dominant economic and military power at that time, joined with the surviving capitalist democracies to create an unprecedented ...institutional framework. By the 1980s many contended that these institutions--the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund--were threatened by growing economic nationalism in the United States, as demonstrated by increased trade protection and growing budget deficits.
In this book, Robert Gilpin argues that American power had been essential for establishing these institutions, and waning American support threatened the basis of postwar cooperation and the great prosperity of the period. For Gilpin, a great power such as the United States is essential to fostering international cooperation. Exploring the relationship between politics and economics first highlighted by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and other thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Gilpin demonstrated the close ties between politics and economics in international relations, outlining the key role played by the creative use of power in the support of an institutional framework that created a world economy.
Gilpin's exposition of the in.uence of politics on the international economy was a model of clarity, making the book the centerpiece of many courses in international political economy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when American support for international cooperation is once again in question, Gilpin's warnings about the risks of American unilateralism sound ever clearer.
This book focuses on the globalisation of the Cold War in the years 1975-85, highlighting the transformation from bipolar US-Soviet competition to global confrontation.
Offering a detailed analysis ...of this fundamental shift that occurred during this period, as well as the interconnections of this process with the new industrial-technological revolution, this book demonstrates how the United States returned to a position of global economic leadership. In so doing, the book aims to challenge the traditional and misleading paradigm that interprets the gradual development of the Cold War in basic bipolar terms; in fact, most of the factors triggering superpower attitudes and interplay were linked to a complex web of relations with their allies, as well as to the political, economic, social, ideological and military factors structurally intrinsic to the 'peripheral' regions where the confrontation actually took place.
Many of the essays in this volume focus on the foreign and security policies of the United States, with the aim of reassessing the Carter administration as the foundation for Reagan's final show-down with the Soviet Union. The contributors, however, go beyond the traditional patterns of foreign policy analysis, giving due attention to transnational phenomena and institutional histories that better explain the gradual transformation in the years that prepared the world for the post-Cold War globalisation era.
This book will be of much interest to students of Cold War studies, international history, US foreign policy, European politics and IR in general.
Max Guderzo is Professor of the History of International Relations and holds the Jean Monnet Chair of the History of European Unification at the University of Florence.
Bruna Bagnato is Associate Professor of the History of International Relations at the University of Florence.
The expert contributors examine the end of détente and the beginning of the new phase of the cold war in the early 1980s, Reagan's radical new strategies aimed at changing Soviet behavior, the ...peaceful democratic revolutions in Poland and Hungary, the events that brought about the reunification of Germany, the role of events in Third World countries, the critical contributions of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and more.
Trust, but Verify Martin Klimke, Reinhild Kreis, Christian F. Ostermann
11/2016, Volume:
33
eBook
Trust, but Verify uses trust-with its emotional and predictive aspects-to explore international relations in the second half of the Cold War, beginning with the late 1960s. The détente of the 1970s ...led to the development of some limited trust between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lessened international tensions and enabled advances in areas such as arms control. However, it also created uncertainty in other areas, especially on the part of smaller states that depended on their alliance leaders for protection. The contributors to this volume look at how the "emotional" side of the conflict affected the dynamics of various Cold War relations: between the superpowers, within the two ideological blocs, and inside individual countries on the margins of the East-West confrontation.
