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8 Historically Speaking September/October 2007 Why Did the Cold War End Peacefully? The Importance of Europe Vojtech Mastny Hardly more than twenty years ago a major hot war in Europe seemed a very real possibility. Yet a few years later the Cold War was over. And soon the Soviet Union, an essential party to the conflict, was gone. How and why did this happen? It has been said the decline and fall of Soviet Union as an imperial power was inevitable. No empires last forever, and the Soviet one was deeply flawed. But if this was so, how come no historians or political scientists, not to mention politicians, were able to predict its end? Could it be that what happened was accidental rather than inevitable, and therefore impossible to predict? Certainly the rise to power of so untypical a Soviet leader as Mikhail Gorbachev was accidental, as well as critical for changing the direction of the Cold War. The direction first started changing on the Soviet rather than the Western side. And this change could only have been effected, ironically, by someone equipped with the vast arbitrary powers that the top leader enjoyed under the authoritarian Soviet system. Did Gorbachev exercise them, as was the impression he gave to French President François Mitterrand, with a "great, quick, and supple mind" and a "true sense of realities?" Or was he, as his critics maintain, a bungler who did not know what he was doing—fortunately or unfortunately, depending on one's point of view? In any case, if Gorbachev deserved the Nobel Peace Prize he received , it was less for his actions than his inaction— for not resorting to violence when he could have done so with devastating results. But was it he or the "profound forces" of history that accounted for the outcome? Those forces had certainly been at work: the economic decline of the Soviet state, the futility of the arms race, the diminishing faith in communist ideology, to name but a few. But none of them gave a clear indication of where it could lead. The Soviet economy, though sick, was nowhere near a collapse when, as one observer put it, "an unlikely doctor [started] employing untried medicine." Nor was the Soviet Union incapable of keeping up, had it wanted to, with the pace of U.S. military spending under President Reagan, as some of his uncritical admirers would have it. And the retreat from ideology, both cause and effect of Gorbachev's "new thinking ," aimed at revitalizing rather than discarding the Soviet system. Were there any developments that would point in a more definite direction? It is only fair to focus on the role of Europe. It was there that the Cold War started, leading to the division of the Continent, and where it also ended, with Europe's unification. Moreover, as long as the conflict lasted, Europe was the most likely place to become the main batdefield. There was always President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signing the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Reduction Treaty, December 8, 1987. © Bettmann/CORBIS . something surreal about the nuclear confrontation between the superpowers whereas in Europe memories of war fought on its soil were all too real. The arms control agreements between the superpowers, no matter how important for other reasons, were notably irrelevant in the lead up to the 1 989 revolutionary upheaval in Eastern Europe, which shattered the balance of power they were designed to maintain. That development is usually traced to 1985. At that time, however, there seemed to be more disarray in the West dian in the East. The policies of the Reagan administration strained U.S. relations with Western Europe, weakening the cohesion of die Atlantic alliance. The communist part of Europe, to be sure, had its problems, too, but hardly anyone thought them to be unmanageable. Its apparent stability , rather than instability, was the reason why Gorbachev made it clear to its leaders early on that they were on their own in dealing with their problems. He cared litde about the region, and preferred to let both its reformist and anti-reformist regimes do much as mey pleased without Soviet interference...

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