1989: The Struggle to Create Post–Cold War Europe (review)

Although previous books have examined the international diplomacy that led to German unification and the development of a new structure for post–Cold War Europe, Mary Sarotte's work will heretofore become the standard text. Her highly engaging, well-paced account heightens the reader's attention by making the high stakes of the negotiations clear, humanizing her principal actors, and capturing the mood and intrigue of the diplomacy. In addition, her book is the product of impressive archival research in France, Germany, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as interviews with numerous key actors. Conceptually, Sarotte's book is one of the first to treat 1989 not as an endpoint in international relations but as a beginning. Another recent example is Jeffrey A. Engel's excellent edited collection, The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Although her account largely leaves the causes and dynamics of the 1989 revolutions aside, she makes important contributions to the debate over the end of the Cold War, arguing that the opening of the Berlin Wall was highly contingent, that the United States was not the dominant player in these events, and that the changes in 1989–1990 have lasting significance for Europe and transatlantic relations.

After the Berlin Wall is breached in the first chapter, Sarotte focuses her attention, as key leaders at the time did, on the debates regarding construction of a European structure in the aftermath of the Cold War. She effectively evokes the intense uncertainty during 1989 about the shape intra-European relations would take, employing architectural terminology to explore the various models considered. She explains the four proposed models and why, given considerable time and political constraints, the "prefab model" of "taking the West's prefabricated institutions, both for domestic order and international economic and military cooperation, and simply extending them eastward" (p. 8) emerged as the consensus choice among Western leaders in mid-1990. In Sarotte's view, the "prefab model" promoted stability but was not the best choice because it led to continuing tension in Europe. For example, she addresses Russia's current, awkward relationship with the West, suggesting it was perpetuated by the decisions made in 1989 and 1990 when an opportunity for cooperation with Russia existed and was lost. Sarotte is not alone in suggesting that decisions made, worldviews developed, and analyses written in 1989 have important significance today. But, whereas many of the other books published in the fall of 2009 to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall examine U.S. conceptions of the end of the Cold War for their influence on the United States invasion of Iraq—for example, the essays by Jeffrey A. Engel and by Melvyn P. Leffler in Engel, ed., The Fall of the Berlin Wall; and Michael Meyer, The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall (New York: Scribner, 2009)—Sarotte keeps her focus firmly on Europe.

Given her forward-looking approach, Sarotte devotes far more attention than other recent studies of 1989 to how the unanticipated opening of the Berlin Wall caught policymakers unprepared to confront German unification and a post–Cold War Europe. One of the many strengths of her account is the way she demonstrates how the backgrounds of the key actors, particularly their experiences during World War Two, influenced their attitudes toward possible German unification. Sarotte sees considerable European agency, arguing that the United States, and therefore the Soviet Union as well, "stepped back" from events. Although the George H. W. Bush administration receives credit for helping to shape events, Sarotte's account unfortunately reduces Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders to rather reactionary roles. Later, she becomes increasingly critical of Gorbachev's conduct of Soviet diplomacy, describing at one point his "penchant for indecision and procrastination" (p. 101). Even as Sarotte disparages Gorbachev's performance, her...