HY320      One Unit
The Cold War Endgame

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Based upon a variety of primary sources from multiple countries, this course will explore why and how in the second half of the 1980s the global East-West conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union transformed itself so suddenly and peacefully into the collapse of (European) communism, German unification and the end of the USSR and her empire, while China took an entirely different exit from the Cold War era. In doing so, we will ask what was the correlation between "high" and "low politics" in these events and processes? Topics will include: the onset of détente and neue Ostpolitik; the impact of Helsinki (1975) and human rights; détente's death, Euromissiles and the war in Afghanistan; the second Cold War of the early 1980s, pacifism and transatlantic turmoil; the Pope and the Polish crisis of 1980-81; Gorbachev's new thinking and reforms in the USSR; Reagan and Gorbachev: superpower summitry; the Chinese crackdown and the eastern European revolutions; German unification: domestic and international aspects; Kohl, Mitterrand and the road to the European Union; the collapse of the Soviet 'empire'; the Baltic independence struggle, Yeltsin and the Moscow coup; Soviet disintegration and Yugoslavia’s implosion; explanations and interpretations of the Cold War endgame. In each seminar we will draw on a combination of primary and secondary material. But in our wider discussions, we will also be “applying history” to the present, asking how the desire to build a “better” post-Wall world came to unravel in strife and warfare by 2022. Why did the new world order, brought about so peacefully, descend into disorder and conflict? Whatever happened to the ideas of genuine compromise-forging across the East-West divide? How was it possible that after some 80 years of “peace”, “war of conquest” returned to Europe? What caused the present backlash against the very notions of freedom and democracy that people so craved and so forcefully demonstrated for in 1989?

2 hours of seminars in the Spring Term.
20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.
20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

Students will be required to present one short class paper during the AT or the WT as well as to submit a practice essay (up to 1,500 words) and one gobbet answer (up to 500 words) during the AT.

There will also be opportunity to do a 90min. timed written exercise consisting of an essay and gobbet answer in late WT.

A detailed course outline and reading list, subdivided by weekly topics, as well as a document pack will be available at the beginning of the course on Moodle. The following works are recommended as essential reading: K Spohr, Post Wall Post Square (2019); P Zelikow & C Rice, To Build a Better World (2019); V Zubok, Collapse (2021); S Dockrill, The End of the Cold War Era (2005); O A Westad et al (eds), The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vols 2-3 (2010); M E Sarotte, 1989 (2009); Hal Brands, The Unipolar Moment (2016); A Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (1996); R L Garthoff, The Great Transition (1994); Idem, Détente and confrontation (1985); J Levesque, The Enigma of 1989 (1997); C S Maier, Dissolution (1997); H Adomeit, Imperial Overstretch (1998); R Summy & M E Salla (eds), Why the Cold War Ended (1995). Also students should familiarise themselves with the Cold War International History Project homepage (http://www.wilsoncentre.org) and in particular: Bulletins No 5 'Cold War Crises', No 8-9 'The Cold War in the Third World and the Collapse of Detente in the 1970s', and No 12/13 'The End of the Cold War'.

Exam (100%), duration: 180 Minutes in the Spring exam period