1989- The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe Read online

  5. In her autobiography, she described the wonder and challenge of entering into an adulthood unexpectedly rich in new opportunities, individual freedoms, and consumer goods, but at the price of leaving behind all the familiar certainties and identities of her parents’ world. In particular, Hensel still recalls the first moment that she knew nothing would ever be the same again: when her usually apolitical mother took her to a protest march in their hometown of Leipzig in October 1989. Up until then, she remembers a life concerned mainly with hitting the marks set for her by socialist teachers and peers. That night, as she marched with her mother and university students, “I thought, for the first time in my life, that something was happening to the country that had always been my homeland, that I did not know anything about it, and that no adult could tell me where it would lead.” Hensel’s book, Zonenkinder (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004) or “Children of the Zone,” was published in English as After the Wall (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). For a discussion of the controversy caused by the book, disliked by those who did not agree with her characterization of a new generation, see Tom Kraushaar, ed., Die Zonenkinder und Wir: Die Geschichte eines Phänomens (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004). For an account from an East German woman of a similar age, but with a different and much more politicized upbringing, see Claudia Rusch, Meine freie deutsche Jugend (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2003).

  6. See the preface for the names of specific scholars who have argued this way. In general, I have tried to keep the scholarly apparatus out of the main text, so that the lay reader may follow the story without digressions for experts’ debates.

  7. A number of works suggest that the East German government intentionally opened the wall; to cite one example, see the analysis in Joseph Held, ed. The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 376ff. For the argument that German unification is a closed chapter with no further relevance for NATO expansion, see Mark Kramer, “The Myth of a No-NATO-Enlargement Pledge to Russia,” Washington Quarterly 32, no. 2 (April 2009): 39–61. The American policymaker quoted above is Robert Hutchings, although he is not alone in holding this view; see Robert Hutchings, “The European Question, Revisited,” in The Legacy of 1989, ed. German Marshall Fund (Washington, DC: German Marshall Fund, 2009), 6. Finally, interview with Lord Douglas Hurd, London, March 17, 2009. The full hour-long interview that I conducted with Lord Hurd was recorded, and is available to researchers at the Mudd Library, Princeton University, thanks to Lord Hurd’s generous decision to open it with no restrictions.

  8. As John Lewis Gaddis has put it, “The most striking anomaly of the Cold War was the existence of a divided Europe, within which there resided a divided Germany, within which there lay a divided Berlin.” John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 115.

  9. As Raymond L. Garthoff has argued, “While the end of the Cold War was virtually assured by the end of 1989, there remained the very important and difficult task of negotiating the terms of the liquidation of the division of Germany, and thereby of Europe. This was the ‘endgame’ in winding down the Cold War.” See Raymond L. Garthoff, “The U.S. Role in Winding Down the Cold War, 1980–9,” in The Last Decade of the Cold War: From Conflict Escalation to Conflict Transformation, ed. Olav Njølstad, 191 (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 191.

  10. I use this metaphor of an architectural competition as a “problematizing redescription” of the issue at hand, to highlight the most important aspects. This term comes from Ian Shapiro, The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 202.

  11. Hannes Adomeit, Imperial Overstretch: Germany in Soviet Policy from Stalin to Gorbachev (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1998), 560, uses it in a particularly insightful manner.

  12. This understanding of a competition is superior to other frequently used metaphors, such as a ball game or Russian roulette. In these, contests take place on an empty field, the results are final when the whistle blows or the last gun fires, and the next contest begins de novo. None of this is true of politics. As Alexander George has argued, the critical question of any simplifying device “is whether the loss of information and condensation of the explanation jeopardizes the validity of the generic knowledge and its utility for diagnosing and dealing with new instances of that phenomenon.” The architectural concept allows for condensation but also for nuance. Alexander L. George, “Case Studies and Theory Development: The Method of Structured Focused Comparison,” in Diplomacy: New Approaches in History, Theory, and Policy, ed. Paul Gordon Lauren (New York: Free Press, 1979).

  13. Westad observed that he was repeatedly struck “by how instructive the European example is for understanding what happened in the Third World.” Odd Arne Westad, “Devices and Desires: On the Uses of Cold War History,” Cold War History 6, no. 3 (August 2006): 373–76; quotation is on 374. Westad is agreeing on this point with comments made by William Wohlforth. See Stephen G. Brooks and William Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War,” International Security 25, no. 3 (Winter 2000–2001): 5–53; William Wohlforth, The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions during the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). For more on the consequences of the end of the Cold War, see Bernd Stöver, Der Kalte Krieg, 1947–1991: Geschichte eines radikalen Zeitalters (Munich: Beck, 2007), 471–75.

  14. The concept of competing visions of modernity comes from James C. Scott, as interpreted by Odd Arne Westad; see Odd Arne Westad, “Bernath Lecture: The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms,” Diplomatic History 24, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 551–65, and The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), introduction, especially 4. Harold James and Marla Stone similarly see 1989–91 as the end of a contest that started with World War I and the creation of the Soviet Union; see Harold James and Marla Stone, eds., When the Wall Came Down (New York: Routledge, 1992), 9.

  15. For an insightful discussion of the fluid nature of sovereignty, see Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

  16. French scholar Marie-Pierre Rey is right to suggest that this concept has not received enough attention; see Marie-Pierre Rey, “‘Europe Is Our Common Home’: A Study of Gorbachev’s Diplomatic Concept,” Cold War History 2 (January 2004): 33–65. See also Jacques Lévesque, “In the Name of Europe’s Future: Soviet, French, and British Qualms about Kohl’s Rush to Unity,” in Europe and the End of the Cold War, ed. Frédéric Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey, N. Piers Ludlow, and Leopoldo Nuti (London: Routledge, 2008), 95–106.

  17. I am grateful to Jan Otakar Fischer for his insights on the subject of heroic modernism.

  18. I am grateful to Piers Ludlow for this and many other points on the interaction between German and European unification. For more on the role of large, multinational institutions in international relations, see Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

  19. James A. Baker with Thomas A. DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), 84. See also Dimitri K. Simes, “Losing Russia: The Costs of Renewed Confrontation,” Foreign Affairs (November–December 2007), online; and Stephen F. Cohen, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

  20. This sentence echoes Jeff Legro’s discussion of work by Juan Linz: “The fate of new regimes depends on their ability to fulfill expectations relative to the claims of the opponents to be able to do so better.” See Jeff Legro, Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 37; Juan Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

  NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

  1. T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1943).

  2. Irina Scherbakova, interview with author, July 12, 2005, Moscow. Scherbakova became a leader of the Memorial Institute in Moscow, dedicated to collecting evidence on former Soviet gulags and protest movements.

  3. Don Oberdorfer, The Turn: From the Cold War to a New Era (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 24; Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 601. On Jahn, see notes 11 and 32, below. For more on the 1980s, see John Ehrman, The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War (New York: Penguin, 2006), chapter 6.

  4. For a description of Christian Gueffroy’s death, see the entry for February 5, 1989, at the online documentation site http://www.chronik-der-mauer.de, available in both English and German.

  5. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 331.

  6. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2008). For more on both the United States and Germany during the Cold War, see Detlef Junker, ed., Die USA und Deutschland im Zeitalter des Kalten Krieges 1945–1990: Ein Handbuch, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2001).

  7. Robert M. Collins, Transforming America: Politics and Culture during the Reagan Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 200. The film also reportedly had a dramatic effect on Reagan personally, inspiring him to rethink his approach to the Soviet Union after seeing an advance screening. See Beth A. Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 115. For a discussion of Warsaw Pact fears about the West, see Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne, eds., A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact (New York: Central European University Press, 2005), 73.

  8. Herbert Grönemeyer’s successful hit song “Amerika” was written in 1984 and appeared on the album 4630 Bochum (see http://www.groenemeyer.de); videos from performances of “Amerika” in concert tour still attract viewers on YouTube’s website today. For more on protests about nuclear weapons, see Lawrence S. Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Disarmament Movement: 1971 to the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 3:145; see also Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons in Europe, 1969–1987: The Problem of the SS-20 (London: Macmillan, 1989).

  9. The lens quotation comes from Matthew Connelly, “Taking off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict during the Algerian War for Independence,” American Historical Review 105 (June 2000): 739–69. On the question of whether the Cold War is a useful construct or not, to cite just a few authors in alphabetical order, see Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons (London: Verso, 1998); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Walter Hixson, The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and US Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); the H-DIPLO discussion thread on this work, 2008; the discussion of some of these works in Jeremi Suri, “The Cold War, Decolonization, and Global Society Awakenings: Historical Intersections,” Cold War History 6, no. 3 (August 2006): 353–63. For a discussion of the Cold War as a “radical age,” see Bernd Stöver, Der Kalte Krieg, 1947–1991: Geschichte eines radikalen Zeitalters (Munich: Beck, 2007).

  10. Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 61; Jens Gieseke, Der Mielke-Konzern: Die Geschichte der Stasi 1945–1990 (Munich: Deutsche Velags-Anstalt, 2006), 71–72, 107, 248. For further basic information on the Stasi and the history of East Germany, see Hermann Weber, Die DDR 1945–1990 (Munich:Old-enbourg Verlag, 1993). On the technology of espionage, see Kristie Mackrakis, Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  11. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk and Tom Sello, eds., Für ein freies Land mit freien Menschen: Opposition und Widerstand in Biographien und Fotos (Berlin: Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft, 2006), 312 (photo), 321–24; online biographical information about Jahn at http://www.chronik-der-wende.de.

  12. Jacques Lévesque, “The Messianic Character of ‘New Thinking’: Why and What For?” in The Last Decade of the Cold War: From Conflict Escalation to Conflict Transformation, ed. Olav Njølstad (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 159–76. For more on the development of socialist thought in postwar Europe, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005).

  13. See “The President’s Private Meeting with Gorbachev,” December 7, 1988, 1:05 to 1:30 p.m., Governor’s Island, New York; Memorandum of Conversation (hereafter Memcon), drafted by T. J. Simons, executive secretariat, NSC, records 8890931, system file, vertical file, “Governor’s Island,” Reagan Library, Simi Valley, California. For more on Reagan’s background, see Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  14. See Kotkin, Armageddon Averted, 67, 88; Raymond Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1994), 390–91.

  15. Csaba Békés and Melinda Kalmár, “The Political Transition in Hungary, 1989–90,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 12–13 (Fall–Winter 2001): 78. For more on 1968, see Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  16. On the significance of anniversary dates as a mobilization factor, see Steven Pfaff and Guobin Yang, “Double-Edged Rituals and the Symbolic Resources of Collective Action: Political Commemorations and the Mobilization of Protest in 1989,” Theory and Society 30, no. 4 (August 2001): 539–89.

  17. Andrew J. Nathan, Perry Link, and “Zhang Liang,” eds., The Tiananmen Papers: The Chinese Leadership’s Decision to Use Force against Their Own People—in Their Own Words (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), 359.

  18. The Chinese Red Cross estimate, and Gorbachev’s reaction, is given in Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union (Part 2),” Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 33–34, see in particular footnotes 86, 88. See also Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, “China as a Factor in the Collapse of the Soviet Empire,” Political Science Quarterly 110, no. 4 (Winter 1995–96): 501–19. For more on the Chinese leadership, see Renee Chiang, Adi Ignatius, and Bao Pu, eds., Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009).

  19. Erich Mielke’s orders of June 10, 1989, are reprinted and translated in Cold War International History Project Bulletin 12–13 (Fall–Winter 2001): 209.

  20. Egon Krenz was on a trip to the West German city of Saarbrücken at the time. He informed West German television reporters that the Chinese Communists had only done what was necessary “to restore order” and remarked that the images of the massacre were simply fictional nightmares produced by Western media. Quoted in “Am Leben bleiben,” Der Spiegel 24 (June 12, 1989): 27. See also Egon Krenz’s memoirs, Egon Krenz, Wenn Mauern fallen (Vienna: Neff, 1990).

  21. Krenz quoted him verbatim: the problem had been a lack of education, but now it had been addressed; as a result, “it was possible to turn a bad thing into a good thing.” Egon Krenz, “Vorlage für das Politbüro des ZK der SED, Betr.: Besuch der Partei- und Staatsdelegation der DDR [Deutsche Demokratische Republik] unter Leitung des Genossen Egon Krenz in der VR China vom 25. September bis 2. Oktober 1989,” Bek. Protokoll Nr. 43/5 vom 17.10.1989, J IV 2/2A/3247, Stiftung/Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen (hereafter SAPMO).

  22. Tucker,
“China as a Factor.”

  23. Vladimir Putin, with Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President Putin, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 69–76.

  24. “East European Independent News Agency report,” July 13, 1989, samizdat, Czechoslovak Documentation Center, Scheinfeld, VIA Collection, copy translated and distributed as document 26 to the National Security Archive Prague Conference (hereafter PC).