New Histories of the End of the Cold War and the Late Twentieth Century

Abstract

The twentieth anniversary of communism's collapse in Eastern Europe saw a torrent of new publications on those momentous events. In an essay for the New York Review of Books Timothy Garton Ash complained that for all the work that has gone into explaining the transitions of that year 'we have learned little new about the causes and social dynamics of the mass, popular actions that actually gave 1989 a claim to be a revolution, or chain of revolutions'. Yet what is striking about that older literature from the vantage point of 2016 is not the dominant focus on high politics but that scholars in 2009 wrote confidently about the forward progression from communist collapse to liberal democracy and European integration. Nationalism and socialism were seen as (mostly) ideas of the past. NATO had incorporated most of the former Warsaw pact. The Arab Spring was welcomed as part of the international turn toward democracy and away from authoritarianism. Russia might not have been happy with the state of the world, but in 2009 Putin seemed to be working with the existing reality.