Post Wall, Post Square. Kristina Spohr
scenario for a peaceful exit from the Cold War; at worst they just had a fictive military strategy for surviving nuclear Armageddon or, at best, diplomatic tactics for managing a muddled competitive coexistence between two adversarial blocs. They could scarcely have been less prepared for the actual ending that came in 1989–91. This book explores why a durable and apparently stable world order collapsed in 1989 and then examines the process by which a new order was improvised out of its ruins.[4]
In order to understand the paths they took and the decisions they made, I peer over the shoulders of key statesmen, watching them struggle to understand and control the new forces at work in their world. These men (and one woman) explored a range of often-conflicting options in an effort to manage events, impose stability and avoid war. Lacking road maps or shared blueprints for a future world order, they adopted an essentially cautious approach to the challenge of radical change – using and adapting principles and institutions that had proved successful in the West during the Cold War. This was undoubtedly a diplomatic revolution, but conducted – paradoxically perhaps – in a conservative manner.
The leaders involved were a small, interconnected group. In Europe, the triangle that particularly mattered was formed by the Soviet Union, the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany: on one level, the political leaders – Mikhail Gorbachev, George H. W. Bush and Helmut Kohl;[5] on another their foreign ministers – Eduard Shevardnadze, James Baker and Hans-Dietrich Genscher.[6] It was within these fields of force that post-Cold War Europe was shaped. On the margins were two potent but increasingly isolated figures: Margaret Thatcher in Britain, who opposed the rapid unification of Germany, and the French president François Mitterrand, who reluctantly participated on the condition that a united Germany must be deeply embedded in Europe.[7] Their interactions with Kohl, especially over the project of European integration, formed a further power-political triangle.[8]
Yet it is a central assertion of my book that we cannot understand post-Wall Europe without taking account of what happened in 1989 on the other side of the world. Under Deng Xiaoping, the People’s Republic of China experienced a dramatically different exit from the Cold War – forever synonymous with the bloodshed in Tiananmen Square on 4 June.[9] China’s gradual entry into the global capitalist economy was therefore counterbalanced by Deng’s determination to maintain the dominance of the Communist Party. This balancing act – so different from Gorbachev’s complete loss of control – moved his country into another orbit. The people power that had played such a central role in Eastern Europe had no analogue here. Deng’s ‘success’ in suppressing it had vast implications that are still being played out in today’s world. So, the European story has to be framed within another, global triangle – itself a continuation of the Sino-Soviet-American ‘tripolarity’ that was emerging in the later stages of the Cold War.[10]
Taken as a whole, these managers of change formed a cohort largely from the same generation, born between 1924 and 1931, with the exceptions of Mitterrand (b.1916) and Deng (b.1904). All of them were marked by the memory of a world at war between 1937 and 1945 and thus shared an acute awareness of the fragility of peace. It is noteworthy that most of them (Kohl and Mitterrand were exceptions) also lost power in 1990–2, so they were never obliged to confront in a sustained way – as political leaders – with the fallout from their actions.
My first three chapters deal with the headline-grabbing upheavals of 1989 – the cutting of Hungary’s Iron Curtain with Austria, the bloodbath in Tiananmen Square, the accidental fall of the Berlin Wall. But the main focus is on what happened in the exhilarating yet alarming era that followed: the era of the post-Wall and the post-Square. The hope that humankind was entering a new age of freedom and sustained peace competed with the dawning recognition that the bipolar stability of the Cold War era was already giving way to something less binary and more dangerous.[11]
The core of the book traces the story of how in 1990–1 the world was reshaped by conservative diplomacy – adapting the institutions of the Cold War to a new era. Although this was led by the West, and particularly by US president George Bush, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was also willing to buy into the process as part of an effort to reorient the Soviet Union’s official ideology towards the ‘common’ values Soviet citizens shared with the West.[12] The resulting rapprochement culminated in a brief era of unprecedented cooperation between the US and the USSR. Their collaborative approach to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was to serve as the centrepiece of what the American president described as the ‘new world order’. Confrontational bipolarity appeared to be metamorphosing into a two-pillar approach to global security, rooted in superpower cooperation within the United Nations and guided by international law.[13]
Both Bush and Gorbachev hoped that this new modus vivendi could serve as the foundation for post-Cold War international relations. America was clearly the senior partner but the cooperation was real. The partnership worked, but it was fragile, precisely because it was overly focused on the relationship between the two men at the apex of their respective states. Bush, Kohl and other Western leaders all clung to Mikhail Gorbachev rather than engaging with the deeper problems of the unravelling Soviet Union. At the end of 1991, the USSR totally disintegrated, forcing Bush to take seriously the man at the helm of post-Soviet Russia, Boris Yeltsin – who was struggling to confront the immense challenge of his country’s transition to capitalist democracy.[14] This new upheaval in global geopolitics, affecting not only Europe but also Asia, obliged Bush to rethink his two-pillar approach.
With the Soviet Union gone and bipolarity a thing of the past, the United States was now pressing with fresh urgency for a truly global US-led free-trading system. Intended to replace the almost moribund 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which no longer seemed adequate to the dynamics of an increasingly globalised world economy, a new World Trade Organisation should embrace the big players Russia and China as they moved out of their respective command economies or ‘Plans’, and offer more support to the developing countries. Yet the US was not alone in seeking to reposition itself in the global economic power play. Japan, with its prodigious economy, was touted as the coming hegemon of the ‘Pacific Century’, whose economic weight would fill the geopolitical vacuum created by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The leadership of communist China had its own ambitions. The Chinese regime survived ‘the Tiananmen Incident’, consolidated its hold on the country and prospered post-Square; over time this would prove far more important, both economically and geo-strategically, than the false dawn of the Rising Sun.[15]
In Europe, too, the peace and stability of the post-war era were starting to fray in 1991 when Yugoslavia became engulfed by a genocidal war. A once firm Balkan polity fractured into warring statelets, triggering massive movements of refugees. These new Balkan wars did not ignite a European or global conflagration, as in 1914, but international leaders struggled to put out the flames.[16]
The splintering of Yugoslavia also raised fears of what Gorbachev himself called the ‘Balkanisation’ of the Soviet Union in 1991.[17] For a while Moscow’s power struggle with Kiev over territory in Ukraine and Crimea seemed even to teeter on the edge of war. Disputes and clashes erupted during 1992 about ownership of the Black Sea Fleet and strategic ports, Russian basing rights and the use of Ukrainian military facilities. And Washington was particularly anxious about the fate of the Soviet nuclear arsenal – now scattered between Russia and three other newly independent post-Soviet republics.
The collapse of Soviet power allowed former clients around the world to assert themselves as ‘renegade’ states. Even after the Kuwait War of 1990–1, the problem of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq remained unresolved, and Kim Il-sung’s North Korea, with its secret nuclear weapons programme, now became a particular headache.[18] This is why the last two chapters of Post Wall, Post Square are devoted to global events in 1992 – a year largely ignored in most accounts of the end of the Cold War, in which problems were spawned that are still with us in the twenty-first century. Notwithstanding the premature triumphalism of some commentators, the Cold War did not end with the simple victory of the United States over the Soviet Union, and the world was not remade in America’s image.[19]
Nowhere did international diplomacy produce swifter and more impressive results than in the unification of Germany. The German question posed a huge challenge because of the country’s problematic place in Europe, its centrality