HY432      One Unit
From Cold Warriors to Peacemakers: the End of the Cold War Era, 1979-1999

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

We explore international relations from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, examining tensions, rivalries and linkages not merely between the Western and Communist blocs, but also within them. We will study the events reflecting the shift from the era of bipolarity to the post-Cold War world. The aim is to address in historical perspective – from the vantage point of Russia’s “War of Conquest” in Ukraine which destroyed the post-Wall order – the diplomacy of the end of the East-West conflict, China’s exit from the Cold War, German reunification, Soviet disintegration, Yugoslavia’s bloody implosion, European integration, NATO enlargement, and Russia’s stillborn democracy. The domestic bases of as well as the political relations between the leading figures (Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Reagan, Bush, Deng, Thatcher, Major, Mitterrand, Delors and Kohl) and respective government machineries will be covered. While zooming in on these leaders’ political thought, we will study their political practice, their decision-making skills and their statecraft. This political agency will be juxtaposed with an analysis of major structural changes—notably post-Wall. For we will examine the adaptation of international organisations and international law to the unexpected, highly conflictual realities of the 1990s (from the Kuwait crisis to the humanitarian intervention in Kosovo). In sum, major topics include Thatcherism; Reaganomics; Gorbachev's new thinking; defusing the nuclear arms race; the 1989 revolutions; Kohl’s unification drive; the Chinese Solution; Soviet collapse; Russia’s failed “westernisation” and integration; the Gulf War of 1991 and the Balkan Wars 1991-1999; America’s unipolar moment and the end of history?; from the EC to the EU; the evolution of Europe’s security architecture; new world (dis)order?

20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.
20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.
2 hours of seminars in the Spring 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 AT or WT. They are encouraged to submit a practice essay (1,500-2,000 words) during AT and to write a timed essay in the WT Reading Week.

A detailed course outline and reading list, subdivided by weekly topics, as well as selected documents will be available at the beginning of the course on Moodle. Key books include:

• Kristina Spohr, Post Wall, Post Square (2019);
• Philip Zelikow & Condoleezza Rice, To Build a Better World (2019);
• Hal Brands, The Unipolar Moment (2016);
• Vladislav Zubok, Collapse (2021);
• Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds, eds, Transcending the Cold War (2016)
• Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (1993);
• EHH Green, Thatcher (2006);
• Julius W Friend, The Long Presidency, France in the Mitterrand Years (1998);
• George Bush & Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (1999);
• William Taubman, Gorbachev (2018);
• Misha Glenny, The Balkans 1804-1999 (2012);
• Saki Dockrill, The End of the Cold War Era (2005);
• Kenneth Dyson and Kevin Featherstone, The Road to Maastricht (1999);
• Sean Kay, NATO and the Future of European Security (1998);
• Daniel S. Hamilton and Kristina Spohr, eds, Open Door: NATO and Euro-Atlantic Security After the Cold War (2019).

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