Hi, welcome back. This presentation is on the end of the Cold War. It's a period that means a lot to me personally. I was a career diplomat at the time the Cold War ended and was working in the White House and was involved in a lot of this diplomacy and then later wrote a book about some of it. So, this is a near and dear period to me, and actually a pretty happy period in world politics. It begins in the late 1980s. Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, they are genuinely relaxing the tensions between the superpowers. Not just managed conflict, as between Nixon and Brezhnev, this is a real d�tente, and that sense of relaxed tensions is making Gorbachev an enormously popular and admired person all over the world in early 1989. Indeed there's really a widespread sense that the Cold War is over. That Cold Warrior, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, actually uttered those words, the Cold War is over, toward the end of 1988. Reagan's Secretary of State, George Schultz, also said: The Cold War is over. Think a little bit about what that would mean, though, inside the communist system. This is a system that relied on revolutionary discipline, even the discipline, if necessary, to imprison and kill subordinates, if that was need to maintain the rule of the Party. Well, if this is true, then, why do I need to do this? And, in particular, why would I need to kill people to do that? So let's go to the spring 1989, a dynamic period, the dynamism is really kicked off in Poland in March and April of 1989. The Polish military dictatorship, ruling under martial law through the 1980s, decides that the time is right to try to rehabilitate its communist government, picking up on some of the signals they're getting from the Soviet Union. They reach out to negotiate with the Polish opposition. They create a round table conference to work on terms for sharing power. This is a wonderful photograph of the Polish opposition leaders, led by this man, Lech Walesa, arriving for a meeting literally of the round table, getting ready to take their seats. You just get that sense of hard pressed men now wearing their suits and ties to sit down and work out the future of a new Poland. At that roundtable negotiation, they prepare an agreement for elections to be held in June 1989. The ruling Communist Party thinks that they can frame and manage the outcome of this limited election. They'll only allow a certain number of seats to be in play. They think they can keep the non-communist opposition safely confined. It doesn't work out that way. They can't control the outcome of that process. The non-communist electoral turnout is so overwhelming, the mandate so clear, that it becomes obvious that very soon, the Polish government is going to have to yield and allow the government to be taken over by the non-communist opposition. That will unfold later in the summer of 1989. In China, too, springtime in 1989 is full of promise. Remember I talked about Fang-Shou cycles, loosening, tightening? Well, China was going through a cycle of loosening in the late 1980s and momentum was building in early 1989 to carry it further. Thousands and thousands of students and other Chinese gathered in the great ceremonial square in the heart of Beijing, Tiananmen Square, to call for liberalization of China's politics. Indeed, this wonderful photograph that captures the thousands of people assembled in the squares. The banners they're flying. They even built a paper mache statue called the Goddess of Democracy, which you see there facing the traditional portrait of Mao. The leaders of this movement are young people, actually, people like a lot of you. This young man over here shown at the time of early 1989. His name is Wang Dan. He's in his early 20s. This young woman here, Chai Ling, 23 years old. But, spring turns to warmer summer. In China, the conservative leadership, after a period of intense deliberations, decides that the problem is getting out of hand. The protestors' demands just continue to escalate, the leadership finally decides the only thing it can do is to reassert its authority and violently clear the Square. Sunday, June 4, 1989. This is of course the iconic image as the tanks begin rolling in, but I'm afraid that young man isn't able to stop the tanks. This is a glimpse of the scene in Tiananmen Square itself. At the very back there you can see the portrait of Mao that helps orient you to that photograph you saw a moment ago. The debris from where the protesters had been camped out, as armored cars and soldiers now control the Square. But at almost the exact same time, Poland and Hungary in Europe are making some different choices. The Pols are negotiating elections that will be held in July 1989. Solidarity, the dissident movement, wins those elections so decisively that the Polish government feels obliged, by August 1989, to bargain a way for a non-communist government to take power. The Soviets aren't sure what to do about that. They insist that communists at least control the security ministries, that Poland stay in the Warsaw Pact military alliance, but Gorbachev decides to go along with it that summer of '89 in Poland. In Hungary, the communist government in Hungary decides to open its borders and allow its people to travel freely to the West. Here is a bit of the scene as they can begin crossing the borders to Hungary. Why are the Pols and Hungarians doing this? The communist governments did not want to end communism. They thought they could manage these problems, humanize the way they ran their communist states, maybe even sidling towards something that looked like democratic socialism. One side effect of what happened here in Hungary though, is that East Germans, trapped in a state that did not want reform, start fleeing from their country to the fellow communist country Hungary. They can travel freely to another communist country. But then when they travel to Hungary, they start trying to flee to the West through Hungary. It puts incredible pressure on Hungary. Then, when they start trying to choke that off, that flow of German refugees, then they turn to Czechoslovakia in September 1989. When the East German government finally closes off the pathways even to Czechoslovakia, increasingly East Germany is turning itself, the whole country, into a prison camp, even keeping its people from travelling to other communist countries in an effort to somehow avoid the tidal wave of reform. But notice the different choices being made here. Poland and Hungary are making choices towards liberalization and openness. The Chinese, at almost the same time, make a different kind of choice in favor of shutting down reform, using violence if needed. Why, then, are these different choices being made in these different countries? Partly it's because the Polish and Hungarian leaderships thought they could manage the change. The Chinese leadership thought they could not manage it. They were frightened of it, and they decided to use violence to stop it. That Chinese option, that Chinese solution as people called it in 1989, is going to come right into the inbox of the East German leaders in October 1989. Escalating demonstrations in their country, probably the climactic one was in early October 1989 in the city of Leipzig. Here's the scene. Thousands of people gathering. The government knows this protest is going to happen. What are they arguing for, these protesters? Well, here's another snapshot from the protest. You can look at some of their banners, they're interesting. Take this one, for example, in the middle. Coca-Cola, is that all? That's not an anti-American protest, what they're saying in effect is the East German government is just trying to buy us off by bringing in some material goods. They think if we can get a can of Coca-Cola, we're going to be happy. But here what they're talking about that's a banner that reads: Political independence for study, teaching, research. Or here, and I'll just translate this very loosely: It doesn't always have to be a darkness at noon. Is the dawn coming? Well the East German leadership thought hard about what to do about this Leipzig protest. They developed an option for militarily crushing it, the Chinese solution. Even to the point of having allocated all the hospital beds that would be needed for the people that would be injured. They'd gathered the security forces, they're ready to do it. Why didn't they do it then? It's a terrific question, I can give you three reasons. One, increasingly the aging communist leadership was reluctant to kill people for the revolutionary cause. A basic change in hearts and minds from the political ideas that seemed so commonplace for hardened figures and politics on either side, say in the 1920s or 1930s. Two: They looked at their options, they said one option could be Chinese solution. Crush this. Another option could be well maybe we should just have a reform communism in our country. Indeed maybe what we should do in East Germany is just imitate what Gorbachev seems to be doing so successfully in the Soviet Union. Very important, the belief that what Gorbachev was doing was working, would then help to stay their hand in crushing this. Third. When they glanced at the Soviet Union, and Said: What do you think if we use violence? The Soviet Union ostentatiously kept its distance. The Soviet Politburo thinks about it and decides not to crush the demonstration. And at that point, it's clear that East German leadership is going to have to change. They do change their leadership. They adopt a new communist leadership very much in the model of Gorbachev, and Soviets help that process along. Here's another scene from October, 1989, celebrating the 40th anniversary of East Germany, the German Democratic Republic. There's Gorbachev standing next to the aging East German Prime Minister, Erich Honecker. As you can see, Gorbachev is looking at his watch, as if he's wondering how much time Honecker has left. Answer: not much. A few weeks later, Honecker will be gone and the new reformed communist government is trying to think of ways to satisfy the people and make them happy. One of the ministers gets up in a late night press conference in early November 1989 and says you know what, we're going to loosen the rules on how you could travel to the West. And then he goes home. All the people watching him on TV think: What does it mean that he just said this, can we now travel to the West? Tens of thousands of people in the middle of the night begin rushing towards the Berlin Wall. Now, he didn't mean to open up the Berlin Wall, but all those people are rushing to the Wall and the border guards have no instructions on what to do. Thousands more arrive. The border guards are asking themselves, should we shoot, we have no orders to shoot, we don't know what the Minister meant in his press conference either. Finally, they shrugged their shoulders, give way, people swarm over the wall, and you have these amazing scenes, like the one, here, at the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin. Or this one here, or here, as the border guards themselves were gazing in some bemusement. The world sensed a historical moment had arrived. There was an earthquake, but what would the new Europe look like? The American president, George H.W Bush, had been arguing since May 1989, that Europe ought to become a Europe whole and free. He'd been arguing, even in September and October of 1989, that the goal ought to be a unified Germany, echoing the kind of things that American statesmen had talked about in the late 1940s and early 1950s. At the end of 1989 and early 1990, the United States and the West German government, led by Helmut Kohl, rally some very reluctant West Europeans, who are afraid of a reunified Germany, to support unification as the goal for a reconstructed Europe. To be able to manage that process of unification, they developed an international negotiation called the Two Plus Four. The two: East and West Germany; the four: the four powers, United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union, who have vestigial occupation rights, because you know, a peace treaty was never signed with Germany. So the old military occupation rights, dating from World War II, still have to legally resolved, and then combine that, with an internal negotiation of unification. Article 23 was a particular provision in the German constitution that they called their Basic Law. By the way, they called it their Basic Law because it was meant to be an interim document since a constitution couldn't be prepared until there was a unified Germany to work on it. There were a couple of different concepts for unification out there. One was a merger, East and West Germany negotiate common terms for how they will be governed together. Instead, what the West Germans decide, with American backing, it should be a takeover. East Germany should simply be submerged into West Germany. What's the advantage of a takeover? You don't have to negotiate a new kind of German state. Germany had had some troubles with developing republics during the 20th century. Look, if you've got a republic that's working, why invent a new one? That was the logic of early 1990. That was the issue given to East German voters in March of 1990. West German political parties develop partner parties in East Germany putting up election posters like this one, from the Christian Democratic Party�s partner in East Germany, saying: No more socialism. Say yes to freedom and prosperity. Of course, on the other side of the argument, it looked like West Germans, with their financial and political power, were preparing a state treaty, that's what Helmut Kohl is holding in this caricature, to which the little East German prime minister, a man named de Maizi�re, is clearly just a subordinate figure. But one of the West German appeals is That, if there is a merger, East Germans get to have West German money, and their East German deutschemarks can be exchanged for West German deutschemarks one to one. That's what the Germans choose to do. This photograph captures the moment at which literally physically bundles and bundles of West German deutschemarks are brought into the East German banks and are unwrapped in order to hand out the new money to East Germans. As you can see, these bank employees are viewing this as a pretty interesting and happy occasion. During 1990, the surge towards German unity isn't occurring in isolation. Vast arms control treaties are being negotiated to accompany it, including the largest and most ambitious arms control treaty every signed, concluded in the fall of 1990, to reduce the conventional forces on both sides. But that's not all. Germany, wanting to reassure West European countries about what will happen if Germany becomes unified, also supports tighter European integration. So, you see this image in which Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Jacques Delors, you remember him, are looking at the map of a new European community that will include a unified Germany. NATO and the Warsaw Pact, those military alliances confronting each other in the most militarized part of the world, are working out their differences, signing the arms control treaty that I mentioned, so that this division of Europe increasingly is fading away, and very soon, these countries will begin leaving the Warsaw Pact and that whole military organization will start to disintegrate. You know, looking back on this period, everything happened so quickly, it might just seem like a damn broke and the water burst through. And the main reason I'm trying to spend some time unpacking all of this is because, of course, it's an immensely important period in world history. But I just want you to see that it's actually made up of a series of really important choices made by governments in their international relations and in their domestic politics crowded together in a tumultuous period. By the spring and summer of 1990, those choices were coming back to the Soviet Union itself. After all, if you've given up the coercive principle that we're not going to hold people together by force, gee what does that mean for the Soviet Union? Because remember, what does Soviet Union mean anyway? It means that they're a series of different countries, socialist republics, united in a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It�s a principle that says we had a Russian Empire that simply ruled over all these subordinate nationalities. We've replaced a Russian Empire with a Soviet Union. And the veneer, of course, is that all these people are voluntarily united by their solidarity as fellow communists, as fellow socialist republics. The reality, of course, as some of these nationalities had experienced, is that it felt to them like they were living in a Soviet Empire. If the coercive principle breaks down, what happens then to that whole political entity of the Soviet Union? This map gives you a sense of the complexity of the Soviet Union. There is a federation inside the union, a Russian Federation, which itself is a federal republic. And then a series of other autonomous republics, Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, and so on, including these here in the western part of the Soviet Union. What's going to happen? Of course, it's all ruled from the center, from Moscow, but these events in 1989 and 1990 are placing enormous stress inside the center. Gorbachev's leadership is being powerfully challenged by people who are now alarmed by what's going on. They especially see that some of the republics in the Soviet Union themselves are demanding the right to secede. No republic was more in the forefront of those demands than Lithuania, bordering the Baltic Sea. They had a crisis over Lithuania in May 1990, the Soviet Union begins cutting off vitally needed energy supplies to Lithuania to try to bring them back into the line, but the issue is: Are they willing to use force? Are they willing to kill a lot of Lithuanians to keep Lithuania inside the Soviet Union? The international community, of course, is urging Gorbachev not to use force. There are hectic debates when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union holds its party congress in August of 1990. Gorbachev is challenged in particular by this man, Yegor Ligachev, a party leader from Moscow. He wonders where all this is going to go. Gorbachev increasingly abandons the practices of relying on collective leadership among the whole party Politburo. He concentrates more and more authority in his hands and the circle around him. He does that partly so that he can bring the German issues to a conclusion and sign the German settlements, first in this deal concludec with the West Germans in July of 1990 in the Caucasus. There is Gorbachev, his wife, Raisa, Helmut Kohl, and his foreign minister, the Liberal Party leader, Hans Dietrich Genscher. And then in the international agreement, the final settlement on Germany. I actually participated in these negotiations, and here's the American team signing that agreement in Moscow in September 1990. By the way that young woman right there is named Condi Rice. In early October 1990, Germany is celebrating its peaceful unification. Here are the crowds gathered in front of the disused German Parliament Building, the old Reichstag, what will become the seat of a new, unified Bundestag, with this emblem representing the German people. But back in the Soviet Union, the Moscow center is splitting, polarizing. Gorbachev's foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, this man right here, he warns the Americans: The dictatorship is coming. In January 1991, there is another phase in the Lithuanian crisis. Gorbachev is on the verge of declaring national martial law, using force to crush the dissidents; he holds back though. Bottom line he, Gorbachev, is not going to accept massive bloodshed, a Chinese solution, to hold these republics in line. From that moment on, the process of disintegration accelerates. Now as you can see from this map, the Soviet Empire in East Europe already is splintering. All of these countries beginning to find their own way. Germany reunifying in the fall of 1990. Really the remarkable thing is that, except in the overthrow of the communist dictatorship in Romania, this is accompanied by almost no bloodshed. In August 1991, the military, the right wing, try to overthrow Gorbachev in order to institute martial law and hold the Soviet Union together. The coup is defeated, not so much by Gorbachev himself, who's being kept prisoner by the coup plotters. It's defeated by one of the nationalist movements, a Russian nationalist movement led by a politician named Boris Yeltsin, who wants to break Russia away from the rest of the Soviet Union. And at the end of 1991, the Soviet Union is no more. It does break up into its constituent parts. You can see here, the map of the new Russian Federation with constituent republics within that vast federation. But then, new independent states, three of them the Baltic, White Russia, Ukraine, and so on. Do you remember when we talked about how, after World War I and the break up of all these empires, there was all this disorder and the definition of new nation states? Well, that process was happening all over again, with the breakup of this empire. You can see, for example, the extreme complexity of what was happening in the former Soviet Caucasus, as different ethnic groups and national entities organize themselves into new states or state-lets. So let's now pause for just a moment and reflect on this extraordinary story. If you read a lot of histories of the Cold War, it is actually worth asking the question exactly when did the Cold War end. There's a theory that it ended in 1986. Gorbachev's in power. It's clear that a confrontation between the two systems is on the way down. Did it end at the end of 1988, when people like Margaret Thatcher were announcing that the Cold War is over? Or did it end in the fall of 1990, when Germany was unified and when an arms control agreement began winding down the military confrontation of the two sides? Or did it only end at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union itself broke up? It's not just a parlor game, because by asking that question, in a way, we're asking: Well, I'll know when the Cold War was over, if you'll tell me what the Cold War was about. If you�ve followed the argument of this course, the Cold War was just the last great chapter in a hundred year long struggle about how to organize modern industrial societies. We introduced that theme much earlier in this class. So if you think the Cold War is a chapter in that long, sometimes violent argument, when did that clash about how to organize these modern societies really seem to make a decisive turn toward ending? My argument is that, in Europe, that point is really here, around 1990, because of those crucial agreements that let people go their own way and begin moving towards variants of social democracy. But it's interesting to note that in Asia your answer might really be quite different. It can be that the Cold War starts winding down by the end of the 1970s. Or it can be that, you know what, maybe the Cold War in Asia only had an armistice and never quite ended at all. We'll come back to some of those themes as we take the story forward to today's generation, next week. See you then.
