An agent-based model (ABM) is a computational model for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous agents
(both individual or collective entities such as organizations or
groups) in order to understand the behavior of a system and what governs
its outcomes. It combines elements of game theory, complex systems, emergence, computational sociology, multi-agent systems, and evolutionary programming. Monte Carlo methods are used to understand the stochasticity of these models. Particularly within ecology, ABMs are also called individual-based models (IBMs). A review of recent literature on individual-based models, agent-based
models, and multiagent systems shows that ABMs are used in many
scientific domains including biology, ecology and social science. Agent-based modeling is related to, but distinct from, the concept of multi-agent systems or multi-agent simulation
in that the goal of ABM is to search for explanatory insight into the
collective behavior of agents obeying simple rules, typically in natural
systems, rather than in designing agents or solving specific practical
or engineering problems.
Agent-based models are a kind of microscale model that simulate the simultaneous operations and interactions of multiple
agents in an attempt to re-create and predict the appearance of complex
phenomena. The process is one of emergence,
which some express as "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts".
In other words, higher-level system properties emerge from the
interactions of lower-level subsystems. Or, macro-scale state changes
emerge from micro-scale agent behaviors. Or, simple behaviors (meaning
rules followed by agents) generate complex behaviors (meaning state
changes at the whole system level).
Individual agents are typically characterized as boundedly rational, presumed to be acting in what they perceive as their own interests, such as reproduction, economic benefit, or social status, using heuristics or simple decision-making rules. ABM agents may experience "learning", adaptation, and reproduction.
Most agent-based models are composed of: (1) numerous agents
specified at various scales (typically referred to as
agent-granularity); (2) decision-making heuristics; (3) learning rules
or adaptive processes; (4) an interaction topology; and (5) an environment. ABMs are typically implemented as computer simulations,
either as custom software, or via ABM toolkits, and this software can
be then used to test how changes in individual behaviors will affect the
system's emerging overall behavior.
History
The
idea of agent-based modeling was developed as a relatively simple
concept in the late 1940s. Since it requires computation-intensive
procedures, it did not become widespread until the 1990s.
Early developments
The history of the agent-based model can be traced back to the Von Neumann machine, a theoretical machine capable of reproduction. The device von Neumann
proposed would follow precisely detailed instructions to fashion a copy
of itself. The concept was then built upon by von Neumann's friend Stanislaw Ulam,
also a mathematician; Ulam suggested that the machine be built on
paper, as a collection of cells on a grid. The idea intrigued von
Neumann, who drew it up—creating the first of the devices later termed cellular automata.
Another advance was introduced by the mathematician John Conway. He constructed the well-known Game of Life.
Unlike von Neumann's machine, Conway's Game of Life operated by simple
rules in a virtual world in the form of a 2-dimensional checkerboard.
The Simula
programming language, developed in the mid 1960s and widely implemented
by the early 1970s, was the first framework for automating step-by-step
agent simulations.
1970s and 1980s: the first models
One of the earliest agent-based models in concept was Thomas Schelling's segregation model, which was discussed in his paper "Dynamic Models of Segregation" in
1971. Though Schelling originally used coins and graph paper rather
than computers, his models embodied the basic concept of agent-based
models as autonomous agents interacting in a shared environment with an
observed aggregate, emergent outcome.
In the late 1970s, Paulien Hogeweg and Bruce Hesper began experimenting with individual models of ecology.
One of their first results was to show that the social structure of
bumble-bee colonies emerged as a result of simple rules that govern the
behaviour of individual bees. They introduced the ToDo principle, referring to the way agents "do what there is to do" at any given time.
In the early 1980s, Robert Axelrod hosted a tournament of Prisoner's Dilemma
strategies and had them interact in an agent-based manner to determine a
winner. Axelrod would go on to develop many other agent-based models
in the field of political science that examine phenomena from ethnocentrism to the dissemination of culture. By the late 1980s, Craig Reynolds' work on flocking
models contributed to the development of some of the first biological
agent-based models that contained social characteristics. He tried to
model the reality of lively biological agents, known as artificial life, a term coined by Christopher Langton.
The first use of the word "agent" and a definition as it is
currently used today is hard to track down. One candidate appears to be
John Holland and John H. Miller's 1991 paper "Artificial Adaptive Agents in Economic Theory", based on an earlier conference presentation of theirs. A stronger and earlier candidate is Allan Newell, who in the first Presidential Address of AAAI (published as The Knowledge Level) discussed intelligent agents as a concept.
At the same time, during the 1980s, social scientists,
mathematicians, operations researchers, and a scattering of people from
other disciplines developed Computational and Mathematical Organization
Theory (CMOT). This field grew as a special interest group of The
Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS) and its sister society, the
Operations Research Society of America (ORSA).
1990s: expansion
The
1990s were especially notable for the expansion of ABM within the
social sciences, one notable effort was the large-scale ABM, Sugarscape, developed by
Joshua M. Epstein and Robert Axtell
to simulate and explore the role of social phenomena such as seasonal
migrations, pollution, sexual reproduction, combat, and transmission of
disease and even culture. Other notable 1990s developments included Carnegie Mellon University's Kathleen Carley ABM, to explore the co-evolution of social networks and culture. The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) was important in encouraging the development of the ABM modeling platform Swarm under the leadership of Christopher Langton.
Research conducted through SFI allowed the expansion of ABM techniques
to a number of fields including study of the social and spatial
dynamics of small-scale human societies and primates. During this 1990s timeframe Nigel Gilbert
published the first textbook on Social Simulation: Simulation for the
social scientist (1999) and established a journal from the perspective
of social sciences: the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS). Other than JASSS, agent-based models of any discipline are within scope of SpringerOpen journal Complex Adaptive Systems Modeling (CASM).
Through the mid-1990s, the social sciences thread of ABM began to
focus on such issues as designing effective teams, understanding the
communication required for organizational effectiveness, and the
behavior of social networks. CMOT—later renamed Computational Analysis
of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS)—incorporated more and more
agent-based modeling. Samuelson (2000) is a good brief overview of the
early history, and Samuelson (2005) and Samuelson and Macal (2006) trace the more recent developments.
In the late 1990s, the merger of TIMS and ORSA to form INFORMS,
and the move by INFORMS from two meetings each year to one, helped to
spur the CMOT group to form a separate society, the North American
Association for Computational Social and Organizational Sciences
(NAACSOS). Kathleen Carley was a major contributor, especially to
models of social networks, obtaining National Science Foundation funding for the annual conference and serving as the first President of NAACSOS. She was succeeded by David Sallach of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, and then by Michael Prietula of Emory University.
At about the same time NAACSOS began, the European Social Simulation
Association (ESSA) and the Pacific Asian Association for Agent-Based
Approach in Social Systems Science (PAAA), counterparts of NAACSOS, were
organized. As of 2013, these three organizations collaborate
internationally. The First World Congress on Social Simulation was held
under their joint sponsorship in Kyoto, Japan, in August 2006. The Second World Congress was held in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., in July 2008, with George Mason University taking the lead role in local arrangements.
2000s
More recently, Ron Sun developed methods for basing agent-based simulation on models of human cognition, known as cognitive social simulation. Bill McKelvey, Suzanne Lohmann, Dario Nardi, Dwight Read and others at UCLA
have also made significant contributions in organizational behavior and
decision-making. Since 1991, UCLA has arranged a conference at Lake
Arrowhead, California, that has become another major gathering point for
practitioners in this field.
2020 and later
After the advent of large language models,
researchers began applying interacting language models to agent based
modeling. In one widely cited paper, agentic language models interacted
in a sandbox environment to perform activities like planning birthday
parties and holding elections.
Theory
Most computational modeling research describes systems in equilibrium
or as moving between equilibria. Agent-based modeling, however, using
simple rules, can result in different sorts of complex and interesting
behavior. The three ideas central to agent-based models are agents as
objects, emergence, and complexity.
Agent-based models consist of dynamically interacting rule-based
agents. The systems within which they interact can create
real-world-like complexity. Typically agents are
situated
in space and time and reside in networks or in lattice-like
neighborhoods. The location of the agents and their responsive behavior
are encoded in algorithmic
form in computer programs. In some cases, though not always, the
agents may be considered as intelligent and purposeful. In ecological
ABM (often referred to as "individual-based models" in ecology), agents
may, for example, be trees in a forest, and would not be considered
intelligent, although they may be "purposeful" in the sense of
optimizing access to a resource (such as water).
The modeling process is best described as inductive.
The modeler makes those assumptions thought most relevant to the
situation at hand and then watches phenomena emerge from the agents'
interactions. Sometimes that result is an equilibrium. Sometimes it is
an emergent pattern. Sometimes, however, it is an unintelligible mangle.
In some ways, agent-based models complement traditional analytic
methods. Where analytic methods enable humans to characterize the
equilibria of a system, agent-based models allow the possibility of
generating those equilibria. This generative contribution may be the
most mainstream of the potential benefits of agent-based modeling.
Agent-based models can explain the emergence of higher-order
patterns—network structures of terrorist organizations and the Internet,
power-law distributions
in the sizes of traffic jams, wars, and stock-market crashes, and
social segregation that persists despite populations of tolerant people.
Agent-based models also can be used to identify lever points, defined
as moments in time in which interventions have extreme consequences, and
to distinguish among types of path dependency.
Rather than focusing on stable states, many models consider a
system's robustness—the ways that complex systems adapt to internal and
external pressures so as to maintain their functionalities. The task of
harnessing that complexity requires consideration of the agents
themselves—their diversity, connectedness, and level of interactions.
Framework
Recent
work on the Modeling and simulation of Complex Adaptive Systems has
demonstrated the need for combining agent-based and complex network
based models. Describe a framework consisting of four levels of developing models of
complex adaptive systems described using several example
multidisciplinary case studies:
Complex Network Modeling Level for developing models using interaction data of various system components.
Exploratory Agent-based Modeling Level for developing agent-based
models for assessing the feasibility of further research. This can e.g.
be useful for developing proof-of-concept models such as for funding
applications without requiring an extensive learning curve for the
researchers.
Descriptive Agent-based Modeling (DREAM) for developing descriptions
of agent-based models by means of using templates and complex
network-based models. Building DREAM models allows model comparison
across scientific disciplines.
Validated agent-based modeling using Virtual Overlay Multiagent
system (VOMAS) for the development of verified and validated models in a
formal manner.
Other methods of describing agent-based models include code templates and text-based methods such as the ODD (Overview, Design concepts, and Design Details) protocol.
The role of the environment where agents live, both macro and micro, is also becoming an important factor in agent-based modelling and
simulation work. Simple environment affords simple agents, but complex
environments generate diversity of behavior.
Multi-scale modelling
One
strength of agent-based modelling is its ability to mediate information
flow between scales. When additional details about an agent are needed,
a researcher can integrate it with models describing the extra details.
When one is interested in the emergent behaviours demonstrated by the
agent population, they can combine the agent-based model with a
continuum model describing population dynamics. For example, in a study
about CD4+ T cells (a key cell type in the adaptive immune system), the researchers modelled biological phenomena occurring at different
spatial (intracellular, cellular, and systemic), temporal, and
organizational scales (signal transduction, gene regulation, metabolism,
cellular behaviors, and cytokine transport). In the resulting modular
model, signal transduction and gene regulation are described by a
logical model, metabolism by constraint-based models, cell population
dynamics are described by an agent-based model, and systemic cytokine
concentrations by ordinary differential equations. In this multi-scale
model, the agent-based model occupies the central place and orchestrates
every stream of information flow between scales.
Agent-based modeling has been used extensively in biology, including the analysis of the spread of epidemics, and the threat of biowarfare, biological applications including population dynamics, stochastic gene expression, plant-animal interactions, vegetation ecology, migratory ecology, landscape diversity, sociobiology, the growth and decline of ancient civilizations, evolution of ethnocentric behavior, forced displacement/migration, language choice dynamics, cognitive modeling, and biomedical applications including modeling 3D breast tissue formation/morphogenesis, the effects of ionizing radiation on mammary stem cell subpopulation dynamics, inflammation, and the human immune system, and the evolution of foraging behaviors. Agent-based models have also been used for developing decision support systems such as for breast cancer. Agent-based models are increasingly being used to model pharmacological
systems in early stage and pre-clinical research to aid in drug
development and gain insights into biological systems that would not be
possible a priori. Military applications have also been evaluated. Moreover, agent-based models have been recently employed to study molecular-level biological systems. Agent-based models have also been written to describe ecological
processes at work in ancient systems, such as those in dinosaur
environments and more recent ancient systems as well.
In epidemiology
Agent-based models now complement traditional compartmental
models, the usual type of epidemiological models. ABMs have been shown
to be superior to compartmental models in regard to the accuracy of
predictions. Recently, ABMs such as CovidSim by epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, have been used to inform public health (nonpharmaceutical) interventions against the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Epidemiological ABMs have been criticized for simplifying and unrealistic assumptions. Still, they can be useful in informing decisions regarding mitigation
and suppression measures in cases when ABMs are accurately calibrated. The ABMs for such simulations are mostly based on synthetic populations, since the data of the actual population is not always available.
Examples of ABM use in epidemiology
Program
Year
Description
EpiCast
2021
Simulates the spread of disease throughout the population of the United States of America.
Covasim
2021
SEIR model implemented in Python with an emphasis on features for studying the effects of interventions.
OpenABM-Covid19
2021
Epidemic model of the spread of COVID-19, simulating every
individual in a population with both R and Python interfaces but using C
for heavy computation.
JUNE
2021
Epidemic model used in the UK names after June Almeida.
Recently, agent based modelling and simulation has been applied
to various domains such as studying the impact of publication venues by
researchers in the computer science domain (journals versus
conferences). In addition, ABMs have been used to simulate information delivery in ambient assisted environments. A November 2016 article in arXiv analyzed an agent based simulation of posts spread in Facebook. In the domain of peer-to-peer, ad hoc and other self-organizing and
complex networks, the usefulness of agent based modeling and simulation
has been shown. The use of a computer science-based formal specification framework coupled with wireless sensor networks and an agent-based simulation has recently been demonstrated.
Agent based evolutionary search or algorithm is a new research topic for solving complex optimization problems.
In team science
In
the realm of team science, agent-based modeling has been utilized to
assess the effects of team members' characteristics and biases on team
performance across various settings. By simulating interactions between agents—each representing individual
team members with distinct traits and biases—this modeling approach
enables researchers to explore how these factors collectively influence
the dynamics and outcomes of team performance. Consequently, agent-based
modeling provides a nuanced understanding of team science, facilitating
a deeper exploration of the subtleties and variabilities inherent in
team-based collaborations.
Prior to, and during the 2008 financial crisis, interest has grown in ABMs as possible tools for economic analysis. ABMs do not assume the economy can achieve equilibrium and "representative agents" are replaced by agents with diverse, dynamic, and interdependent behavior including herding. ABMs take a "bottom-up" approach
and can generate extremely complex and volatile simulated economies.
ABMs can represent unstable systems with crashes and booms that develop
out of non-linear (disproportionate) responses to proportionally small changes. A July 2010 article in The Economist looked at ABMs as alternatives to DSGE models. The journal Nature
also encouraged agent-based modeling with an editorial that suggested
ABMs can do a better job of representing financial markets and other
economic complexities than standard models along with an essay by J. Doyne Farmer
and Duncan Foley that argued ABMs could fulfill both the desires of
Keynes to represent a complex economy and of Robert Lucas to construct
models based on microfoundations. Farmer and Foley pointed to progress that has been made using ABMs to
model parts of an economy, but argued for the creation of a very large
model that incorporates low level models. By modeling a complex system of analysts based on three distinct behavioral profiles – imitating, anti-imitating, and indifferent – financial markets were simulated to high accuracy. Results showed a correlation between network morphology and the stock market index. However, the ABM approach has been criticized for its lack of
robustness between models, where similar models can yield very different
results.
ABMs have been deployed in architecture and urban planning to
evaluate design and to simulate pedestrian flow in the urban environment and the examination of public policy applications to land-use. There is also a growing field of socio-economic analysis of
infrastructure investment impact using ABM's ability to discern systemic
impacts upon a socio-economic network. Heterogeneity and dynamics can be easily built in ABM models to address wealth inequality and social mobility.
ABMs have also been proposed as applied educational tools for diplomats in the field of international relations and for domestic and international policymakers to enhance their evaluation of public policy.
In water management
ABMs
have also been applied in water resources planning and management,
particularly for exploring, simulating, and predicting the performance
of infrastructure design and policy decisions, and in assessing the value of cooperation and information exchange in large water resources systems.
Organizational ABM: agent-directed simulation
The
agent-directed simulation (ADS) metaphor distinguishes between two
categories, namely "Systems for Agents" and "Agents for Systems." Systems for Agents (sometimes referred to as agents systems) are
systems implementing agents for the use in engineering, human and social dynamics,
military applications, and others. Agents for Systems are divided in
two subcategories. Agent-supported systems deal with the use of agents
as a support facility to enable computer assistance in problem solving
or enhancing cognitive capabilities. Agent-based systems focus on the
use of agents for the generation of model behavior in a system
evaluation (system studies and analyses).
Self-driving cars
Hallerbach
et al. discussed the application of agent-based approaches for the
development and validation of automated driving systems via a digital
twin of the vehicle-under-test and microscopic traffic simulation based
on independent agents. Waymo has created a multi-agent simulation environment Carcraft to test algorithms for self-driving cars.It simulates traffic interactions between human drivers, pedestrians
and automated vehicles. People's behavior is imitated by artificial
agents based on data of real human behavior. The basic idea of using
agent-based modeling to understand self-driving cars was discussed as
early as 2003.
Implementation
Many ABM frameworks are designed for serial von-Neumann computer architectures,
limiting the speed and scalability of implemented models. Since
emergent behavior in large-scale ABMs is dependent of population size, scalability restrictions may hinder model validation. Such limitations have mainly been addressed using distributed computing, with frameworks such as Repast HPC specifically dedicated to these types of implementations. While such approaches map well to cluster and supercomputer architectures, issues related to communication and synchronization, as well as deployment complexity, remain potential obstacles for their widespread adoption.
A recent development is the use of data-parallel algorithms on Graphics Processing Units GPUs for ABM simulation. The extreme memory bandwidth combined with the sheer number crunching
power of multi-processor GPUs has enabled simulation of millions of
agents at tens of frames per second.
Integration with other modeling forms
Since
Agent-Based Modeling is more of a modeling framework than a particular
piece of software or platform, it has often been used in conjunction
with other modeling forms. For instance, agent-based models have also
been combined with Geographic Information Systems
(GIS). This provides a useful combination where the ABM serves as a
process model and the GIS system can provide a model of pattern. Similarly, Social Network Analysis
(SNA) tools and agent-based models are sometimes integrated, where the
ABM is used to simulate the dynamics on the network while the SNA tool
models and analyzes the network of interactions. Tools like GAMA provide a natural way to integrate system dynamics and GIS with ABM.
Verification and validation
Verification and validation (V&V) of simulation models is extremely important. Verification involves making sure the implemented model matches the
conceptual model, whereas validation ensures that the implemented model
has some relationship to the real-world. Face validation, sensitivity
analysis, calibration, and statistical validation are different aspects
of validation. A discrete-event simulation framework approach for the validation of agent-based systems has been proposed. A comprehensive resource on empirical validation of agent-based models can be found here.
As an example of V&V technique, consider VOMAS (virtual overlay multi-agent system), a software engineering based approach, where a virtual overlay
multi-agent system is developed alongside the agent-based model. Muazi
et al. also provide an example of using VOMAS for verification and
validation of a forest fire simulation model. Another software engineering method, i.e. Test-Driven Development has been adapted to for agent-based model validation. This approach has another advantage that allows an automatic validation using unit test tools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernity Postmodernity (post-modernity or the postmodern condition) is the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist aftermodernity. Some schools of thought hold that modernity ended in the late 20th
century – in the 1980s or early 1990s – and that it was replaced by
postmodernity, and still others would extend modernity to cover the
developments denoted by postmodernity. The idea of the postmodern
condition is sometimes characterized as a culture stripped of its
capacity to function in any linear or autonomous state like regressive
isolationism, as opposed to the progressive mind state of modernism.
Postmodernity can mean a personal response to a postmodern society, the conditions in a society which make it postmodern or the state of being that is associated with a postmodern society as well as a historical epoch. In most contexts it should be distinguished from postmodernism, the adoption of postmodern philosophies or traits in the arts, culture and society. In fact, today's historical perspectives on the developments of postmodern art
(postmodernism) and postmodern society (postmodernity) can be best
described as two umbrella terms for processes engaged in an ongoing
dialectical relationship like post-postmodernism, the result of which is the evolving culture of the contemporary world.
Some commentators deny that modernity ended, and consider the post-WWII era to be a continuation of modernity, which they refer to as late modernity.
Uses of the term
Postmodernity is the state or condition of being postmodern – after or in reaction to that which is modern, as in postmodern art (see postmodernism). Modernity is defined as a period or condition loosely identified with the Progressive Era, the Industrial Revolution, or the Enlightenment. In philosophy and critical theorypostmodernity refers to the state or condition of society which is said to exist after modernity, a historical condition that marks the reasons for the end of modernity. This usage is ascribed to the philosophers Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard.
One "project" of modernity is said by Jürgen Habermas to have been the fostering of progress by incorporating principles of rationality and hierarchy into public and artistic life. (See also post-industrial, Information Age) Lyotard understood modernity as a cultural condition characterized by constant change in the pursuit of progress. Postmodernity then represents the culmination of this process where constant change has become the status quo and the notion of progress obsolete. Following Ludwig Wittgenstein's critique of the possibility of absolute and total knowledge, Lyotard further argued that the various metanarratives of progress such as positivist science, Marxism, and structuralism were defunct as methods of achieving progress.
The literary critic Fredric Jameson and the geographer David Harvey have identified postmodernity with "late capitalism" or "flexible accumulation", a stage of capitalism following finance capitalism, characterised by highly mobile labor and capital and what Harvey called "time and space compression". They suggest that this coincides with the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system which, they believe, defined the economic order following the Second World War. (See also consumerism, critical theory.) Other academics, such as the archaeologist Artur Ribeiro, also identify postmodernity with late capitalism. Though in the case of Ribeiro, he places the start of modernity at the beginning of the Bretton Woods system.
Those who generally view modernity as obsolete or an outright failure, a flaw in humanity's evolution leading to disasters like Auschwitz and Hiroshima, see postmodernity as a positive development. Other philosophers, particularly those seeing themselves as within the Modern Project, see the state of postmodernity as a negative consequence of holding postmodernist ideas. For example, Jürgen Habermas and others contend that postmodernity represents a resurgence of long running Counter-Enlightenment ideas, that the modern project is not finished and that universality
cannot be so lightly dispensed with. Postmodernity, the consequence of
holding postmodern ideas, is generally a negative term in this context.
Postmodernity is a condition or a state of being associated with changes to institutions and creations and with social and political results and innovations, globally but especially in the West since the 1950s, whereas postmodernism
is an aesthetic, literary, political or social philosophy, the
"cultural and intellectual phenomenon", especially since the 1920s' new
movements in the arts. Both of these terms are used by philosophers,
social scientists and social critics to refer to aspects of contemporary
culture, economics and society that are the result of features of late
20th century and early 21st century life, including the fragmentation of
authority and the commoditization of knowledge (see "Modernity").
The relationship between postmodernity and critical theory,
sociology and philosophy is fiercely contested. The terms
"postmodernity" and "postmodernism" are often hard to distinguish, the
former being often the result of the latter. The period has had diverse
political ramifications: its "anti-ideological ideas" appear to have
been associated with the feminist movement, racial equality movements, LGBT movements, most forms of late 20th century anarchism and even the peace movement as well as various hybrids of these in the current anti-globalization movement.
Though none of these institutions entirely embraces all aspects of the
postmodern movement in its most concentrated definition they all
reflect, or borrow from, some of its core ideas.
History
Some authors, such as Lyotard and Baudrillard, believe that modernity
ended in the late 20th century and thus have defined a period
subsequent to modernity, namely postmodernity, while others, such as Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens, would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by postmodernity. Others still contend that modernity ended with the Victorian Age at the turn of the 20th century.
Postmodernity has gone through two relatively distinct phases:
the first beginning in the late 1940s and 1950s and ending with the Cold War (when analog media with limited bandwidth
encouraged a few, authoritative media channels), and the second
beginning at the end of the Cold War (marked by the spread of cable
television and "new media" based on digital means of information dissemination and broadcast).
The first phase of postmodernity overlaps the end of modernity and is part of the modern period(see lumpers/splitters, periodization). Television became the primary news source, manufacturing decreased in importance in the economies of Western Europe and the United States
but trade volumes increased within the developed core. In 1967–1969 a
crucial cultural explosion took place within the developed world as the baby boom generation,
which had grown up with postmodernity as its fundamental experience of
society, demanded entrance into the political, cultural and educational
power structure. A series of demonstrations and acts of rebellion –
ranging from nonviolent and cultural, through violent acts of terrorism –
represented the opposition of the young to the policies and
perspectives of the previous age. Opposition to the Algerian War and the Vietnam War,
to laws allowing or encouraging racial segregation and to laws which
overtly discriminated against women and restricted access to divorce,
increased use of marijuana and psychedelics, the emergence of pop cultural styles of music and drama, including rock music
and the ubiquity of stereo, television and radio helped make these
changes visible in the broader cultural context. This period is
associated with the work of Marshall McLuhan, a philosopher who focused on the results of living in a media culture
and argued that participation in a mass media culture both overshadows
actual content disseminated and is liberating because it loosens the
authority of local social normative standards.
The second phase of postmodernity is "digitality" – the increasing power of personal and digital means of communication including fax machines, modems, cable and high speed internet,
which has altered the condition of postmodernity dramatically: digital
production of information allows individuals to manipulate virtually
every aspect of the media environment. This has brought producers into
conflict with consumers over intellectual capital and intellectual property and led to the creation of a new economy whose supporters argue that the dramatic fall in information costs will alter society fundamentally.
Digitality, or what Esther Dyson
referred to as "being digital", emerged as a separate condition from
postmodernity. The ability to manipulate items of popular culture, the
World Wide Web, the use of search engines to index knowledge, and
telecommunications were producing a "convergence" marked by the rise of "participatory culture" in the words of Henry Jenkins.
One demarcation point of this era is the liberalization of China in the early 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Francis Fukuyama wrote "The End of History?" in 1989 in anticipation of the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
He predicted that the question of political philosophy had been
answered, that large scale wars over fundamental values would no longer
arise since "all prior contradictions are resolved and all human needs
satisfied." This is a kind of 'endism' also taken up by Arthur Danto who in 1964 acclaimed that Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes asked the right question of art and hence art had ended.
Descriptions
Distinctions in philosophy and critical theory
The
debate on postmodernity has two distinct elements that are often
confused; (1) the nature of contemporary society and (2) the nature of
the critique of contemporary society. The first of these elements is
concerned with the nature of changes that took place during the late
20th century. There are three principal analyses. Theorists such as Alex Callinicos and Craig Calhoun
offer a conservative position on the nature of contemporary society,
downplaying the significance and extent of socio-economic changes and
emphasizing a continuity with the past. Secondly, a range of theorists have tried to analyze the present as a
development of the "modern" project into a second, distinct phase that
is nevertheless still "modernity": this has been termed the "second" or
"risk" society by Ulrich Beck, "late" or "high" modernity by Giddens, "liquid" modernity by Bauman, and the "network" society by Manuel Castells. Third are those who argue that contemporary society has moved into a
literally post-modern phase distinct from modernity. The most prominent
proponents of this position are Lyotard and Baudrillard.
Another set of issues concerns the nature of critique, often replaying debates over (what can be crudely termed) universalism and relativism, where modernism is seen to represent the former and postmodernity the latter. Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler pursue this debate in relation to feminist politics, Benhabib arguing that postmodern critique comprises three main elements; an anti-foundationalist concept of the subject and identity, the death of history and of notions of teleology and progress, and the death of metaphysics
defined as the search for objective truth. Benhabib argues forcefully
against these critical positions, holding that they undermine the bases
upon which feminist politics can be founded, removing the possibility of
agency, the sense of self-hood and the appropriation of women's history
in the name of an emancipated future. The denial of normative ideals
removes the possibility for utopia, central for ethical thinking and
democratic action.
Butler responds to Benhabib by arguing that her use of
postmodernism is an expression of a wider paranoia over
anti-foundationalist philosophy, in particular, post-structuralism.
A number of positions are ascribed
to postmodernism – Discourse is all there is, as if discourse were some
kind of monistic stuff out of which all things are composed; the subject
is dead, I can never say "I" again; there is no reality, only
representation. These characterizations are variously imputed to
postmodernism or poststructuralism, which are conflated with each other
and sometimes conflated with deconstruction, and understood as an
indiscriminate assemblage of French feminism, deconstruction, Lacanian
psychoanalysis, Foucauldian analysis, Rorty's conversationalism, and
cultural studies ... In reality, these movements are opposed: Lacanian
psychoanalysis in France positions itself officially against
poststructuralism, that Foucauldian rarely relate to Derridideans ...
Lyotard champions the term, but he cannot be made into the example of
what all the rest of the purported postmodernists are doing. Lyotard’s
work is, for instance, seriously at odds with that of Derrida
Butler uses the debate over the nature of the post-modernist critique
to demonstrate how philosophy is implicated in power relationships and
defends poststructuralist critique by arguing that the critique of the subject
itself is the beginning of analysis, not the end, because the first
task of enquiry is the questioning of accepted "universal" and
"objective" norms.
The Benhabib-Butler debate demonstrates that there is no simple
definition of a postmodern theorist as the very definition of
postmodernity itself is contested. Michel Foucault rejected the label of postmodernism explicitly in interviews yet is seen by many, such as Benhabib,
as advocating a form of critique that is "postmodern" in that it breaks
with utopian and transcendental "modern" critiques by calling universal
norms of the Enlightenment into question. Giddens rejects this
characterisation of "modern critique", pointing out that a critique of
Enlightenment universals was central to philosophers of the modern
period, most notably Nietzsche.
Postmodern society
Jameson views a number of phenomena as distinguishing postmodernity from modernity. He speaks of "a new kind of superficiality" or "depthlessness" in which models that once explained people and things in terms of an "inside" and an "outside" (such as hermeneutics, the dialectic, Freudianrepression, the existentialist distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity, and the semiotic distinction of signifier and signified) have been rejected. In a word, Structuralism has been rejected.
Second is a rejection of the modernist "Utopian gesture", evident in Van Gogh,
of the transformation through art of misery into beauty whereas in the
postmodernism movement the object world has undergone a "fundamental
mutation" so that it has "now become a set of texts or simulacra". Whereas modernist art sought to redeem and sacralize the world, to give
life to world (we might say, following Graff, to give the world back
the enchantment that science and the decline of religion had taken away
from it), postmodernist art bestows upon the world a "deathly quality…
whose glacéd X-ray elegance mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a
way that would seem to have nothing to do with death or the death
obsession or the death anxiety on the level of content" (ibid.). Graff
sees the origins of this transformative mission of art in an attempted
substitution of art for religion in giving meaning to the world that the
rise of science and Enlightenmentrationality had removed – but in the postmodern period this is seen as futile.
The third feature of the postmodern age that Jameson identifies is the "waning of affect" – not that all emotion has disappeared from the postmodern age but that it lacks a particular kind of emotion such as that found in "Rimbaud's magical flowers 'that look back at you'". He notes that "pastiche eclipses parody" as "the increasing unavailability of the personal style" leads to pastiche becoming a universal practice.
Jameson argues that distance "has been abolished" in
postmodernity, that we "are submerged in its henceforth filled and
suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft
of spatial co-ordinates". This "new global space" constitutes
postmodernity's "moment of truth". The various other features of the
postmodern that he identifies "can all now be seen as themselves partial
(yet constitutive) aspects of the same general spatial object". The
postmodern era has seen a change in the social function
of culture. He identifies culture in the modern age as having had a
property of "semi-autonomy", with an "existence… above the practical
world of the existent" but, in the postmodern age, culture has been
deprived of this autonomy, the cultural has expanded to consume the
entire social realm so that all becomes "cultural". "Critical distance",
the assumption that culture can be positioned outside "the massive
Being of capital"
upon which left-wing theories of cultural politics are dependent, has
become outmoded. The "prodigious new expansion of multinational capital
ends up penetrating and colonizing those very pre-capitalist enclaves
(Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity".
Social sciences
Postmodern sociology
can be said to focus on conditions of life which became increasingly
prevalent in the late 20th century in the most industrialized nations,
including the ubiquity of mass media and mass production, the rise of a
global economy and a shift from manufacturing to service economies. Jameson and Harvey described it as consumerism,
where manufacturing, distribution and dissemination have become
exceptionally inexpensive but social connectedness and community have
become rarer. Other thinkers assert that postmodernity is the natural
reaction to mass broadcasting in a society conditioned to mass
production and mass politics. The work of Alasdair MacIntyre
informs the versions of postmodernism elaborated by such authors as
Murphy (2003) and Bielskis (2005), for whom MacIntyre's postmodern
revision of Aristotelianism poses a challenge to the kind of consumerist ideology that now promotes capital accumulation.
The sociological view of postmodernity ascribes it to more rapid
transportation, wider communication and the ability to abandon
standardization of mass production, leading to a system which values a
wider range of capital than previously and allows value to be stored in a
greater variety of forms. Harvey argues that postmodernity is an escape
from "Fordism", a term coined by Antonio Gramsci
to describe the mode of industrial regulation and accumulation which
prevailed during the Keynesian era of economic policy in OECD countries
from the early 1930s to the 1970s. Fordism for Harvey is associated with
Keynesianism in that the first concerns methods of production and
capital-labor relations while the latter concerns economic policy and
regulation. Post-Fordism is therefore one of the basic aspects of postmodernity from Harvey's point of view.
Artifacts
of postmodernity include the dominance of television and popular
culture, the wide accessibility of information and mass
telecommunications. Postmodernity also exhibits a greater resistance to
making sacrifices in the name of progress discernible in
environmentalism and the growing importance of the anti-war movement. Postmodernity in the industrialised core is marked by increasing focus on civil rights and equal opportunity as well as movements such as feminism and multiculturalism
and the backlash against these movements. The postmodern political
sphere is marked by multiple arenas and possibilities of citizenship and
political action
concerning various forms of struggle against oppression or alienation
(in collectives defined by sex or ethnicity) while the modernist
political arena remains restricted to class struggle.
Theorists such as Michel Maffesoli
believe that postmodernity is corroding the circumstances that provide
for its subsistence and will eventually result in a decline of
individualism and the birth of a new neo-Tribal era.
According to theories of postmodernity, economic and technological conditions of our age have given rise to a decentralized, media-dominated society in which ideas are only simulacra,
inter-referential representations and copies of each other with no
real, original, stable or objective source of communication and meaning.
Globalization, brought on by innovations in communication, manufacturing and transportation is often cited as one force which has driven the decentralized
modern life, creating a culturally pluralistic and interconnected
global society lacking any single dominant center of political power,
communication or intellectual production. The postmodernist view is that
intersubjective, not objective, knowledge will be the dominant form of discourse
under such conditions and that ubiquity of dissemination fundamentally
alters the relationship between reader and that which is read, between
observer and the observed, between those who consume and those who
produce.
Postmodernity as a shift of epistemology
Another conception of postmodernity is as an epistemological shift.
This perspective suggests that the way people communicate and justify
knowledge (i.e. epistemology) changes in conjunction with other societal
changes, that the cultural and technological changes of the 1960s and
1970s included such a shift, and that this shift should be denoted as
from modernity to postmodernity. [See French (2016), French & Ehrman (2016), or Sørensen (2007)].
Criticisms of the postmodern condition can broadly be put into four
categories: criticisms of postmodernity from the perspective of those
who reject modernism
and its offshoots, criticisms from supporters of modernism who believe
that postmodernity lacks crucial characteristics of the modern project,
critics from within postmodernity who seek reform or change based on
their understanding of postmodernism, and those who believe that postmodernity is a passing, and not a growing, phase in social organization.
After the end of the Second World War in 1945, during which the US and USSR had been allies, the USSR installed satellite governments in its occupied territories in Eastern Europe and North Korea by 1949, resulting in the political division of Europe (and Germany) by an "Iron Curtain". The USSR tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949, four years after their use by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and allied with the People's Republic of China, founded in 1949. The US declared the Truman Doctrine of "containment" of communism in 1947, launched the Marshall Plan in 1948 to assist Western Europe's economic recovery, and founded the NATO military alliance in 1949 (matched by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact in 1955). The Berlin Blockade of 1948 to 1949 was an early confrontation, as was the Korean War of 1950 to 1953, which ended in a stalemate.
Writer George Orwell used cold war,
as a general term, in his essay "You and the Atomic Bomb", published 19
October 1945. Contemplating a world living in the shadow of the threat
of nuclear warfare, Orwell looked at James Burnham's predictions of a polarized world, writing:
Looking at the world as a whole,
the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the
reimposition of slavery... James Burnham's theory has been much
discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological
implications—that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and
the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at
once unconquerable and in a permanent state of "cold war" with its
neighbours.
In The Observer
of 10 March 1946, Orwell wrote, "after the Moscow conference last
December, Russia began to make a 'cold war' on Britain and the British
Empire."
The first use of the term to describe the specific post-war geopolitical confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States came in a speech by Bernard Baruch, an influential advisor to Democratic presidents, on 16 April 1947. The speech, written by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope, proclaimed, "we are today in the midst of a cold war." Newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann gave the term wide currency with his book The Cold War. When asked in 1947 about the source of the term, Lippmann traced it to a French term from the 1930s, la guerre froide.
The roots of the Cold War can be traced to diplomatic and military tensions preceding World War II. The 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent Treaty of Brest-Litovsk,
where Soviet Russia ceded vast territories to Germany, deepened
distrust among the Western Allies. Allied intervention in the Russian
Civil War further complicated relations, and although the Soviet Union
later allied with Western powers to defeat Nazi Germany, this cooperation was strained by mutual suspicions.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, disagreements about the future of Europe, particularly Eastern Europe,
became central. The Soviet Union's establishment of communist regimes
in the countries it had liberated from Nazi control—enforced by the
presence of the Red Army—alarmed
the US and UK. Western leaders saw this as Soviet expansionism,
clashing with their vision of a democratic Europe. Economically, the
divide was sharpened with the introduction of the Marshall Plan
in 1947, a US initiative to provide financial aid to rebuild Europe and
prevent the spread of communism by stabilizing capitalist economies.
The Soviet Union rejected the Marshall Plan, seeing it as an effort by
the US to impose its influence on Europe. In response, the Soviet Union
established Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) to foster economic cooperation among communist states.
The United States and its Western European allies sought to strengthen their bonds and used the policy of containment against Soviet influence; they accomplished this most notably through the formation of NATO, which was essentially a defensive agreement in 1949. The Soviet Union countered with the Warsaw Pact
in 1955, which had similar results with the Eastern Bloc. As by that
time the Soviet Union already had an armed presence and political
domination all over its eastern satellite states, the pact has been long
considered superfluous. Although nominally a defensive alliance, the Warsaw Pact's primary function was to safeguard Soviet hegemony over its Eastern European
satellites, with the pact's only direct military actions having been
the invasions of its own member states to keep them from breaking away; in the 1960s, the pact evolved into a multilateral alliance, in which
the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact members gained significant scope to pursue
their own interests. In 1961, Soviet-allied East Germany constructed the Berlin Wall to prevent the citizens of East Berlin from fleeing to West Berlin, at the time part of United States-allied West Germany. Major crises of this phase included the Berlin Blockade of 1948–1949, the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1945–1949, the Korean War of 1950–1953, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Suez Crisis of that same year, the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and the Vietnam War of 1955–1975. Both superpowers competed for influence in Latin America and the Middle East, and the decolonising states of Africa, Asia, and Oceania.
Détente collapsed at the end of the decade with the beginning of the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. Beginning in the 1980s, this phase was another period of elevated tension. The Reagan Doctrine led to increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, which at the time was undergoing the Era of Stagnation. This phase saw the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introducing the liberalizing reforms of glasnost ("openness") and perestroika
("reorganization") and ending Soviet involvement in Afghanistan in
1989. Pressures for national sovereignty grew stronger in Eastern
Europe, and Gorbachev refused to further support the Communist
governments militarily.
Remains of the "Iron Curtain" in the Czech Republic, 2014
In February 1946, George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram"
from Moscow to Washington helped to articulate the US government's
increasingly hard line against the Soviets, which would become the basis
for US strategy toward the Soviet Union. The telegram galvanized a
policy debate that would eventually shape the Truman administration's Soviet policy. Washington's opposition to the Soviets accumulated after broken promises by Stalin and Molotov concerning Europe and Iran. Following the World War II Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, the country was occupied by the Red Army in the far north and the British in the south. Iran was used by the United States and British to supply the Soviet
Union, and the Allies agreed to withdraw from Iran within six months
after the cessation of hostilities. However, when this deadline came, the Soviets remained in Iran under the guise of the Azerbaijan People's Government and KurdishRepublic of Mahabad. On 5 March, former British prime minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous "Iron Curtain"
speech calling for an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets, whom
he accused of establishing an "iron curtain" dividing Europe.
A week later, on 13 March, Stalin responded vigorously to the speech, saying Churchill could be compared to Adolf Hitler insofar as he advocated the racial superiority of English-speaking nations
so that they could satisfy their hunger for world domination, and that
such a declaration was "a call for war on the USSR." The Soviet leader
also dismissed the accusation that the USSR was exerting increasing
control over the countries lying in its sphere. He argued that there was
nothing surprising in "the fact that the Soviet Union, anxious for its
future safety, [was] trying to see to it that governments loyal in their
attitude to the Soviet Union should exist in these countries."
European military alliances
European economic blocs
Soviet territorial demands to Turkey regarding the Dardanelles in the Turkish Straits crisis and Black Sea border disputes were also a major factor in increasing tensions. In September, the Soviet side produced the Novikov telegram, sent by the Soviet ambassador to the US but commissioned and "co-authored" by Vyacheslav Molotov;
it portrayed the US as being in the grip of monopoly capitalists who
were building up military capability "to prepare the conditions for
winning world supremacy in a new war". On 6 September 1946, James F. Byrnes delivered a speech in Germany repudiating the Morgenthau Plan
(a proposal to partition and de-industrialize post-war Germany) and
warning the Soviets that the US intended to maintain a military presence
in Europe indefinitely. As Byrnes stated a month later, "The nub of our program was to win the
German people ... it was a battle between us and Russia over minds ..."
In December, the Soviets agreed to withdraw from Iran after persistent
US pressure, an early success of containment policy.
By 1947, US president Harry S. Truman
was outraged by the perceived resistance of the Soviet Union to
American demands in Iran, Turkey, and Greece, as well as Soviet
rejection of the Baruch Plan on nuclear weapons. In February 1947, the British government announced that it could no longer afford to finance the Kingdom of Greece in its civil war against Communist-led insurgents. In the same month, Stalin conducted the rigged 1947 Polish legislative election which constituted an open breach of the Yalta Agreement. The US government responded by adopting a policy of containment, with the goal of stopping the spread of communism. Truman delivered a speech calling for the allocation of $400 million to intervene in the war and unveiled the Truman Doctrine, which framed the conflict as a contest between free peoples and totalitarian regimes. American policymakers accused the Soviet Union of conspiring against the Greek royalists in an effort to expand Soviet influence even though Stalin had told the Communist Party to cooperate with the British-backed government.
Enunciation of the Truman Doctrine marked the beginning of a US bipartisan defense and foreign policy consensus between Republicans and Democrats focused on containment and deterrence that weakened during and after the Vietnam War, but ultimately persisted thereafter. Moderate and conservative parties in Europe, as well as social
democrats, gave virtually unconditional support to the Western alliance, while European and American Communists, financed by the KGB and involved in its intelligence operations, adhered to Moscow's line, although dissent began to appear after 1956. Other critiques of the consensus policy came from anti-Vietnam War activists, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the anti-nuclear movement.
Marshall Plan, Czechoslovak coup and formation of two German states
The labeling used on the Marshall Plan economic aid to Western Europe.Map of Cold War-era Europe and the Near East showing countries that received Marshall Plan aid. The red columns show the relative amount of total aid received per nation.Construction in West Berlin under Marshall Plan aid
In early 1947, France, Britain and the United States unsuccessfully
attempted to reach an agreement with the Soviet Union for a plan
envisioning an economically self-sufficient Germany, including a
detailed accounting of the industrial plants, goods and infrastructure
already taken by the Soviets. In June 1947, in accordance with the Truman Doctrine, the United States enacted the Marshall Plan, a pledge of economic assistance for all European countries willing to participate. Under the plan, which President Harry S. Truman signed on 3 April 1948,
the US government gave to Western European countries over $13 billion
(equivalent to $189 billion in 2016). Later, the program led to the
creation of the OECD.
The plan's aim was to rebuild the democratic and economic systems of Europe and to counter perceived threats to the European balance of power, such as communist parties seizing control. The plan also stated that European prosperity was contingent upon German economic recovery. One month later, Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947, creating a unified Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Council (NSC). These would become the main bureaucracies for US defense policy in the Cold War.
Stalin believed economic integration with the West would allow Eastern Bloc countries to escape Soviet control, and that the US was trying to buy a pro-US re-alignment of Europe. Stalin therefore prevented Eastern Bloc nations from receiving Marshall Plan aid. The Soviet Union's alternative to the Marshall Plan, which was
purported to involve Soviet subsidies and trade with central and eastern
Europe, became known as the Molotov Plan (later institutionalized in January 1949 as the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance). Stalin was also fearful of a reconstituted Germany; his vision of a
post-war Germany did not include the ability to rearm or pose any kind
of threat to the Soviet Union.
In early 1948, Czech Communists executed a coup d'état in Czechoslovakia (resulting in the formation of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic), the only Eastern Bloc state that the Soviets had permitted to retain democratic structures. The public brutality of the coup shocked Western powers more than any
event up to that point and swept away the last vestiges of opposition to
the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress.
In an immediate aftermath of the crisis, the London Six-Power Conference was held, resulting in the Soviet
boycott of the Allied Control Council and its incapacitation, an event
marking the beginning of the full-blown Cold War, as well as ending any
hopes at the time for a single German government and leading to
formation in 1949 of the Federal Republic of Germany and German Democratic Republic.
The twin policies of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan
led to billions in economic and military aid for Western Europe, Greece,
and Turkey. With the US assistance, the Greek military won its civil war. Under the leadership of Alcide De Gasperi the Italian Christian Democrats defeated the powerful Communist–Socialist alliance in the elections of 1948.
Outside of Europe, the United States also began to express
interest in the development of many other countries, so that they would
not fall under the sway of Eastern Bloc communism. In his January 1949
inaugural address, Truman declared for the first time in U.S. history
that international development would be a key part of U.S. foreign policy. The resulting program later became known as the Point Four Program because it was the fourth point raised in his address.
All major powers engaged in espionage, using a great variety of spies, double agents, moles, and new technologies such as the tapping of telephone cables. The Soviet KGB
("Committee for State Security"), the bureau responsible for foreign
espionage and internal surveillance, was famous for its effectiveness.
The most famous Soviet operation involved its atomic spies that delivered crucial information from the United States' Manhattan Project,
leading the USSR to detonate its first nuclear weapon in 1949, four
years after the American detonation and much sooner than expected. A massive network of informants throughout the Soviet Union was used to
monitor dissent from official Soviet politics and morals. Although to an extent disinformation had always existed, the term itself was invented, and the strategy formalized by a black propaganda department of the Soviet KGB.
Based on the amount of top-secret Cold War archival information that has been released, historian Raymond L. Garthoff
concludes there probably was parity in the quantity and quality of
secret information obtained by each side. However, the Soviets probably
had an advantage in terms of HUMINT
(human intelligence or interpersonal espionage) and "sometimes in its
reach into high policy circles." In terms of decisive impact, however,
he concludes:
We also can now have high confidence in the judgment that
there were no successful "moles" at the political decision-making level
on either side. Similarly, there is no evidence, on either side, of any
major political or military decision that was prematurely discovered
through espionage and thwarted by the other side. There also is no
evidence of any major political or military decision that was crucially
influenced (much less generated) by an agent of the other side.
According to historian Robert L. Benson, "Washington's forte was 'signals' intelligence – the procurement and analysis of coded foreign messages," leading to the Venona project or Venona intercepts, which monitored the communications of Soviet intelligence agents. Moynihan
wrote that the Venona project contained "overwhelming proof of the
activities of Soviet spy networks in America, complete with names,
dates, places, and deeds." The Venona project was kept highly secret even from policymakers until the Moynihan Commission in 1995. Despite this, the decryption project had already been betrayed and dispatched to the USSR by Kim Philby and Bill Weisband in 1946,as was discovered by the US by 1950. Nonetheless, the Soviets had to keep their discovery of the program
secret, too, and continued leaking their own information, some of which
was still useful to the American program. According to Moynihan, even President Truman may not have been fully
informed of Venona, which may have left him unaware of the extent of
Soviet espionage.
Clandestine atomic spies from the Soviet Union, who infiltrated the Manhattan Project during WWII, played a major role in increasing tensions that led to the Cold War.
In addition to usual espionage, the Western agencies paid special attention to debriefing Eastern Bloc defectors. Edward Jay Epstein
describes that the CIA understood that the KGB used "provocations", or
fake defections, as a trick to embarrass Western intelligence and
establish Soviet double agents. As a result, from 1959 to 1973, the CIA
required that East Bloc defectors went through a counterintelligence
investigation before being recruited as a source of intelligence.
During the late 1970s and 1980s, the KGB perfected its use of espionage to sway and distort diplomacy.[59]Active measures
were "clandestine operations designed to further Soviet foreign policy
goals," consisting of disinformation, forgeries, leaks to foreign media,
and the channeling of aid to militant groups.[60] Retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin described active measures as "the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence."[61]
During the Sino-Soviet split, "spy wars" also occurred between the USSR and PRC.[62]
In September 1947, the Soviets created Cominform to impose orthodoxy within the international communist movement and tighten political control over Soviet satellites through coordination of communist parties in the Eastern Bloc. Cominform faced an embarrassing setback the following June, when the Tito–Stalin split obliged its members to expel Yugoslavia, which remained communist but adopted a non-aligned position and began accepting financial aid from the US.
Besides Berlin, the status of the city of Trieste
was at issue. Until the break between Tito and Stalin, the Western
powers and the Eastern bloc faced each other uncompromisingly. In
addition to capitalism and communism, Italians and Slovenes, monarchists
and republicans as well as war winners and losers often faced each
other irreconcilably. The neutral buffer state Free Territory of Trieste,
founded in 1947 with the United Nations, was split up and dissolved in
1954 and 1975, also because of the détente between the West and Tito.
The US and Britain merged their western German occupation zones into "Bizone" (1 January 1947, later "Trizone" with the addition of France's zone, April 1949). As part of the economic rebuilding of Germany, in early 1948,
representatives of a number of Western European governments and the
United States announced an agreement for a merger of western German
areas into a federal governmental system. In addition, in accordance with the Marshall Plan, they began to re-industrialize and rebuild the West German economy, including the introduction of a new Deutsche Mark currency to replace the old Reichsmark currency that the Soviets had debased. The US had secretly decided that a unified and neutral Germany was undesirable, with Walter Bedell Smith
telling General Eisenhower "in spite of our announced position, we
really do not want nor intend to accept German unification on any terms
that the Russians might agree to, even though they seem to meet most of
our requirements."
Shortly thereafter, Stalin instituted the Berlin Blockade (June
1948 – May 1949), one of the first major crises of the Cold War,
preventing Western supplies from reaching West Germany's exclave of West Berlin. The United States (primarily), Britain, France, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and several other countries began the massive "Berlin airlift",
supplying West Berlin with provisions despite Soviet threats.
The Soviets mounted a public relations campaign against the
policy change. Once again, the East Berlin communists attempted to
disrupt the Berlin municipal elections, which were held on 5 December 1948 and produced a turnout of 86% and an overwhelming victory for the non-communist parties. The results effectively divided the city into East and West, the latter
comprising US, British and French sectors. 300,000 Berliners
demonstrated and urged the international airlift to continue, and US Air Force pilot Gail Halvorsen created "Operation Vittles", which supplied candy to German children. The Airlift was as much a logistical as a political and psychological
success for the West; it firmly linked West Berlin to the United States. In May 1949, Stalin lifted the blockade.
In 1952, Stalin repeatedly proposed a plan
to unify East and West Germany under a single government chosen in
elections supervised by the United Nations, if the new Germany were to
stay out of Western military alliances, but this proposal was turned
down by the Western powers. Some sources dispute the sincerity of the
proposal.
Media in the Eastern Bloc was an organ of the state,
completely reliant on and subservient to the communist party. Radio and
television organizations were state-owned, while print media was
usually owned by political organizations, mostly by the local communist
party. Soviet radio broadcasts used Marxist rhetoric to attack capitalism,
emphasizing themes of labor exploitation, imperialism and war-mongering.
Along with the broadcasts of the BBC and the Voice of America to Central and Eastern Europe, a major propaganda effort began in 1949 was Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, dedicated to bringing about the peaceful demise of the communist system in the Eastern Bloc. Radio Free Europe attempted to achieve these goals by serving as a
surrogate home radio station, an alternative to the controlled and
party-dominated domestic press in the Soviet Bloc. Radio Free Europe was a product of some of the most prominent
architects of America's early Cold War strategy, especially those who
believed that the Cold War would eventually be fought by political
rather than military means, such as George F. Kennan. Soviet and Eastern Bloc authorities used various methods to suppress Western broadcasts, including radio jamming.
American policymakers, including Kennan and John Foster Dulles, acknowledged that the Cold War was in its essence a war of ideas. The United States, acting through the CIA, funded a long list of
projects to counter the communist appeal among intellectuals in Europe
and the developing world. The CIA also covertly sponsored a domestic propaganda campaign called Crusade for Freedom.
The rearmament of West Germany was achieved in the early 1950s. Its main promoter was Konrad Adenauer,
the chancellor of West Germany, with France the main opponent.
Washington had the decisive voice. It was strongly supported by the
Pentagon (the US military leadership), and weakly opposed by President
Truman; the State Department was ambivalent. The outbreak of the Korean
War in June 1950 changed the calculations and Washington now gave full
support. That also involved naming Dwight D. Eisenhower
in charge of NATO forces and sending more American troops to West
Germany. There was a strong promise that West Germany would not develop
nuclear weapons.
Widespread fears of another rise of German militarism necessitated the new military to operate within an alliance framework under NATO command. In 1955, Washington secured full German membership of NATO. In May 1953, Lavrentiy Beria,
by then in a government post, had made an unsuccessful proposal to
allow the reunification of a neutral Germany to prevent West Germany's
incorporation into NATO, but his attempts were cut short after he was executed several months later during a Soviet power struggle. The events led to the establishment of the Bundeswehr, the West German military, in 1955.
In 1949, Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army defeated Chiang Kai-shek's United States-backed Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist Government in China. The KMT-controlled territory was now restricted to the island of Taiwan,
the nationalist government of which exists to this day. The Kremlin
promptly created an alliance with the newly formed People's Republic of
China. According to Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad,
the communists won the Civil War because they made fewer military
mistakes than Chiang Kai-Shek made, and because in his search for a
powerful centralized government, Chiang antagonized too many interest
groups in China. Moreover, his party was weakened during the war against Japan.
Meanwhile, the communists told different groups, such as the peasants,
exactly what they wanted to hear, and they cloaked themselves under the
cover of Chinese nationalism.
Confronted with the communist revolution in China and the end of the American atomic monopoly in 1949, the Truman administration quickly moved to escalate and expand its containment doctrine. In NSC 68,
a secret 1950 document, the National Security Council proposed
reinforcing pro-Western alliance systems and quadrupling spending on
defense. Truman, under the influence of advisor Paul Nitze, saw containment as implying complete rollback of Soviet influence in all its forms.
United States officials moved to expand this version of containment into Asia, Africa, and Latin America, in order to counter revolutionary nationalist movements, often led by communist parties financed by the USSR. In this way, this US would exercise "preponderant power," oppose neutrality, and establish globalhegemony. In the early 1950s (a period sometimes known as the "Pactomania"), the US formalized a series of alliances with Japan (a former WWII enemy), South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and the Philippines (notably ANZUS in 1951 and SEATO in 1954), thereby guaranteeing the United States a number of long-term military bases.
One of the more significant examples of the implementation of containment was the United Nations US-led intervention in the Korean War. In June 1950, after years of mutual hostilities, Kim Il Sung's North Korean People's Army invaded South Korea. Stalin had been reluctant to support the invasion but ultimately sent advisers. To Stalin's surprise, the United Nations Security Council backed the defense of South Korea, although the Soviets were then boycotting meetings in protest of the fact that Taiwan (Republic of China), not the People's Republic of China, held a permanent seat on the council. A UN force of sixteen countries faced North Korea, although 40 percent of troops were South Korean, and about 50 percent were from the United States.
US Marines engaged in street fighting during the liberation of Seoul, September 1950
The US initially seemed to follow containment, only pushing back North Korea across the 38th Parallel and restoring South Korea's sovereignty while allowing North Korea's survival as a state. However, the success of the Inchon landing inspired the US/UN forces to pursue a rollback strategy instead and to overthrow communist North Korea, thereby allowing nationwide elections under U.N. auspices. General Douglas MacArthur
then advanced into North Korea. The Chinese, fearful of a possible US
invasion, sent in a large army and pushed the U.N. forces back below the
38th parallel. The episode was used to support the wisdom of the containment
doctrine as opposed to rollback. The Communists were later pushed to
roughly around the original border, with minimal changes. Among other
effects, the Korean War galvanised NATO to develop a military structure. The Korean Armistice Agreement was approved in July 1953.
NATO and Warsaw Pact troop strengths in Europe in 1959
In 1953, changes in political leadership on both sides shifted the dynamic of the Cold War. Dwight D. Eisenhower
was inaugurated president that January. During the last 18 months of
the Truman administration, the American defense budget had quadrupled,
and Eisenhower moved to reduce military spending by a third while
continuing to fight the Cold War effectively.
On 18 November 1956, while addressing Western dignitaries at a
reception in Moscow's Polish embassy, Khrushchev infamously declared,
"Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you", shocking everyone present. He would later claim he had not been referring to nuclear war, but the
"historically fated victory of communism over capitalism."
Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, initiated a "New Look" for the containment strategy, calling for a greater reliance on nuclear weapons against US enemies in wartime. Dulles also enunciated the doctrine of "massive retaliation",
threatening a severe US response to any Soviet aggression. Possessing
nuclear superiority, for example, allowed Eisenhower to face down Soviet
threats to intervene in the Middle East during the 1956 Suez Crisis. The declassified US plans for retaliatory nuclear strikes in the late
1950s included the "systematic destruction" of 1,200 major urban centers
in the Soviet Bloc and China, including Moscow, East Berlin and
Beijing.
In spite of these events, there were substantial hopes for détente when an upswing in diplomacy took place in 1959,
including a two-week visit by Khrushchev to the US, and plans for a
two-power summit for May 1960. The latter was disturbed by the U-2 spy plane scandal, however, in which Eisenhower was caught lying about the intrusion of American surveillance aircraft into Soviet territory.
While Stalin's death in 1953 slightly relaxed tensions, the situation in Europe remained an uneasy armed truce. The Soviets, who had already created a network of mutual assistance treaties in the Eastern Bloc by 1949, established a formal alliance therein, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955. It stood opposed to NATO.
Hungarian flag (1949–1956) with the communist coat of arms cut out was an anti-Soviet revolutionary symbol
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 occurred shortly after Khrushchev arranged the removal of Hungary's Stalinist leader Mátyás Rákosi. In response to a popular anti-communist uprising, the new regime formally disbanded the secret police, declared its intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and pledged to re-establish free elections. The Soviet Army invaded. Thousands of Hungarians were killed and arrested, imprisoned and deported to the Soviet Union, and approximately 200,000 Hungarians fled Hungary. Hungarian leader Imre Nagy and others were executed following secret trials.
From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly and repeatedly
threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. He claimed that Soviet
missile capabilities were far superior to those of the United States,
capable of wiping out any American or European city. According to John Lewis Gaddis, Khrushchev rejected Stalin's "belief in the inevitability of war," however. The new leader declared his ultimate goal was "peaceful coexistence". In Khrushchev's formulation, peace would allow capitalism to collapse on its own, as well as giving the Soviets time to boost their military capabilities, which remained for decades until Gorbachev's later "new thinking"
envisioning peaceful coexistence as an end in itself rather than a form
of class struggle.
The events in Hungary produced ideological fractures within the
communist parties of the world, particularly in Western Europe, with
great decline in membership, as many in both western and socialist
countries felt disillusioned by the brutal Soviet response. The communist parties in the West would never recover.
In 1957, Polish foreign minister Adam Rapacki proposed the Rapacki Plan
for a nuclear free zone in central Europe. Public opinion tended to be
favourable in the West, but it was rejected by leaders of West Germany,
Britain, France and the United States. They feared it would leave the
powerful conventional armies of the Warsaw Pact dominant over the weaker
NATO armies.
During November 1958, Khrushchev made an unsuccessful attempt to
turn all of Berlin into an independent, demilitarized "free city". He
gave the United States, Great Britain and France a six-month ultimatum
to withdraw their troops from the sectors of West Berlin, or he would
transfer control of Western access rights to the East Germans.
Khrushchev earlier explained to Mao Zedong that "Berlin is the testicles of the West. Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin." NATO formally rejected the ultimatum in mid-December and Khrushchev
withdrew it in return for a Geneva conference on the German question.
Like Truman and Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy supported containment. President Eisenhower's New Look policy had emphasized the use of less expensive nuclear weapons to deter
Soviet aggression by threatening massive nuclear attacks on all of the
Soviet Union. Nuclear weapons were much cheaper than maintaining a large
standing army, so Eisenhower cut conventional forces to save money.
Kennedy implemented a new strategy known as flexible response. This strategy relied on conventional arms to achieve limited goals. As part of this policy, Kennedy expanded the United States special operations forces,
elite military units that could fight unconventionally in various
conflicts. Kennedy hoped that the flexible response strategy would allow
the US to counter Soviet influence without resorting to nuclear war.
To support his new strategy, Kennedy ordered a massive increase
in defense spending and a rapid build-up of the nuclear arsenal to
restore the lost superiority over the Soviet Union. In his inaugural
address, Kennedy promised "to bear any burden" in the defense of
liberty, and he repeatedly asked for increases in military spending and
authorization of new weapons systems. From 1961 to 1964, the number of
nuclear weapons increased by 50 percent, as did the number of B-52
bombers to deliver them. The new ICBM force grew from 63
intercontinental ballistic missiles to 424. He authorized 23 new Polaris
submarines, each of which carried 16 nuclear missiles. Kennedy also
called on cities to construct fallout shelters.
European colonial empires in Asia and Africa all collapsed in the years after 1945.
Nationalist movements in some countries and regions, notably Guatemala, Indonesia and Indochina, were often allied with communist groups or otherwise perceived to be unfriendly to Western interests. In this context, the United States and the Soviet Union increasingly competed for influence by proxy in the Third World as decolonization gained momentum in the 1950s and early 1960s. Both sides were selling armaments to gain influence. The Kremlin saw continuing territorial losses by imperial powers as presaging the eventual victory of their ideology.
The United States used the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to undermine neutral or hostile Third World governments and to support allied ones. In 1953, President Eisenhower implemented Operation Ajax, a covert coup operation to overthrow the Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. The popularly elected Mosaddegh had been a Middle Eastern nemesis of Britain since nationalizing the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. Winston Churchill told the United States that Mosaddegh was "increasingly turning towards Communist influence." The pro-Western shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, assumed control as an autocratic monarch. The shah's policies included banning the communist Tudeh Party of Iran, and general suppression of political dissent by SAVAK, the shah's domestic security and intelligence agency.
The non-aligned Indonesian government of Sukarno
was faced with a major threat to its legitimacy beginning in 1956 when
several regional commanders began to demand autonomy from Jakarta.
After mediation failed, Sukarno took action to remove the dissident
commanders. In February 1958, dissident military commanders in Central
Sumatra (Colonel Ahmad Husein) and North Sulawesi (Colonel Ventje Sumual) declared the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia-Permesta Movement aimed at overthrowing the Sukarno regime. They were joined by many civilian politicians from the Masyumi Party, such as Sjafruddin Prawiranegara, who were opposed to the growing influence of the communist Partai Komunis Indonesia. Due to their anti-communist rhetoric, the rebels received arms, funding, and other covert aid from the CIA until Allen Lawrence Pope, an American pilot, was shot down after a bombing raid on government-held Ambon in April 1958. The central government responded by launching airborne and seaborne military invasions of rebel strongholds at Padang and Manado.
By the end of 1958, the rebels were militarily defeated, and the last
remaining rebel guerilla bands surrendered by August 1961.
In the Republic of the Congo, also known as Congo-Léopoldville, newly independent from Belgium since June 1960, the Congo Crisis erupted on 5 July leading to the secession of the regions Katanga and South Kasai. CIA-backed President Joseph Kasa-Vubu ordered the dismissal of the democratically elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and the Lumumba cabinet in September over massacres by the armed forces during the invasion of South Kasai and for involving Soviets in the country. Later the CIA-backed Colonel Mobutu Sese Seko quickly mobilized his forces to seize power through a military coup d'état, and worked with Western intelligence agencies to imprison Lumumba and
hand him over to Katangan authorities who executed him by firing squad.
In British Guiana, the leftist People's Progressive Party (PPP) candidate Cheddi Jagan
won the position of chief minister in a colonially administered
election in 1953 but was quickly forced to resign from power after
Britain's suspension of the still-dependent nation's constitution. Embarrassed by the landslide electoral victory of Jagan's allegedly
Marxist party, the British imprisoned the PPP's leadership and
maneuvered the organization into a divisive rupture in 1955. Jagan again won the colonial elections in 1957 and 1961, despite
Britain's shift to a reconsideration of its view of the left-wing Jagan
as a Soviet-style communist at this time. The United States pressured
the British to withhold Guyana's independence until an alternative to Jagan could be identified, supported, and brought into office. In Malaya, the British colonialists suppressed the communist anti-colonial rebellion.
Worn down by the communist guerrilla war for Vietnamese full independence and handed a watershed defeat by communist Viet Minh rebels at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu,
the French accepted a negotiated abandonment of their neo-colonial
stake in Vietnam right in 1954. On June 4, France granted full
sovereignty to the anti-communist State of Vietnam, an independent country within the French Union. In the Geneva Conference in July, peace accords were signed, leaving Vietnam divided between a pro-Soviet administration in North Vietnam and a pro-Western administration in South Vietnam at the 17th parallel north.
Between 1954 and 1961, Eisenhower's United States sent economic aid and
military advisers to strengthen South Vietnam's pro-Western government
against communist efforts to destabilize it.
Many emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America rejected
the pressure to choose sides in the East–West competition. In 1955, at
the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, dozens of Third World governments resolved to stay out of the Cold War. The consensus reached at Bandung culminated with the creation of the Belgrade-headquartered Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. Meanwhile, Khrushchev broadened Moscow's policy to establish ties with India
and other key neutral states. Independence movements in the Third World
transformed the post-war order into a more pluralistic world of
decolonized African and Middle Eastern nations and of rising nationalism
in Asia and Latin America.
Map
showing greatest territorial extent of the Soviet Union and the states
that it dominated politically, economically and militarily in 1960,
after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 but before the official Sino-Soviet split of 1961 (total area: c. 35,000,000 km2)[G]
After 1956, the Sino-Soviet alliance began to break down. Mao had
defended Stalin when Khrushchev criticized him in 1956 and treated the
new Soviet leader as a superficial upstart, accusing him of having lost
his revolutionary edge. For his part, Khrushchev, disturbed by Mao's glib attitude toward
nuclear war, referred to the Chinese leader as a "lunatic on a throne".
After this, Khrushchev made many desperate attempts to
reconstitute the Sino-Soviet alliance, but Mao considered it useless and
denied any proposal. The Chinese-Soviet animosity spilled out in an intra-communist propaganda war. Further on, the Soviets focused on a bitter rivalry with Mao's China for leadership of the global communist movement. Historian Lorenz M. Lüthi argues:
The Sino-Soviet split was one of the key events of the Cold War,
equal in importance to the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban
Missile Crisis, the Second Vietnam War, and Sino-American rapprochement. The split helped to determine the framework for the Cold War period 1979–1985 in general, and influenced the course of the Second Vietnam War in particular.
Clockwise from top left: Sputnik 1, Apollo 11 Moon landing, Space station Mir
On the nuclear weapons
front, the United States and the Soviet Union pursued nuclear
rearmament and developed long-range weapons with which they could strike
the territory of the other. In August 1957, the Soviets successfully launched the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), and in October they launched the first Earth satellite, Sputnik 1. This led to what became known as the Sputnik crisis. The Central Intelligence Agency
described the orbit of Sputnik 1 as a "stupendous scientific
achievement" and concluded that the USSR had likely perfected an
intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching 'any
desired target with accuracy'.
The launch of Sputnik inaugurated the Space Race. This led to a series of historic space exploration milestones, and most notably the ApolloMoon landings from 1969 by the United States, which astronaut Frank Borman later described as "just a battle in the Cold War." The public's reaction in the Soviet Union was mixed. The Soviet
government limited the release of information about the lunar landing,
which affected the reaction. A portion of the populace did not give it
any attention, and another portion was angered by it. A major Cold War element of the Space Race was satellite reconnaissance, as well as signals intelligence to gauge which aspects of the space programs had military capabilities. The Soviet Salyut programme,
conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, put a crewed space station in long
term orbit; two of the successful installations to the station were
covers for secret military Almaz reconnaissance stations: Salyut 3, and Salyut 5.
During the whole duration of the cold war, the US and the USSR represented the largest and dominant space powers of the world. Despite their fierce competition, both nations signed international
space treaties in the 1960s which would limit the militarization of
space.
The first research of anti-satellite weapon technology also came about during this period.
Later, the US and USSR pursued some cooperation in space as part of détente, notably the Apollo–Soyuz orbital rendezvous and docking.
In Cuba, the 26th of July Movement, led by young revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, seized power in the Cuban Revolution on 1 January 1959. Although Fidel Castro's first refused to categorize his new government
as socialist and repeatedly denying being a communist, Castro appointed
Marxists to senior government and military positions.
Diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States
continued for some time after Batista's fall, but President Eisenhower
deliberately left the capital to avoid meeting Castro during the
latter's trip to Washington, D.C. in April, leaving Vice President Richard Nixon to conduct the meeting in his place. Cuba began negotiating for arms purchases from the Eastern Bloc in March 1960. The same month, Eisenhower gave approval to CIA plans and funding to overthrow Castro.
In January 1961, just prior to leaving office, Eisenhower
formally severed relations with the Cuban government. That April, the
administration of newly elected American President John F. Kennedy mounted the unsuccessful CIA-organized ship-borne invasion of the island by Cuban exiles at Playa Girón and Playa Larga in Santa Clara Province—a failure that publicly humiliated the United States. Castro responded by publicly embracing Marxism–Leninism, and the Soviet Union pledged to provide further support. In December, the US government began a violent campaign of terrorist attacks against civilians in Cuba, and covert operations and sabotage against the administration, in an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government.
The emigration resulted in a massive "brain drain"
from East Germany to West Germany of younger educated professionals,
such that nearly 20% of East Germany's population had migrated to West
Germany by 1961. That June, the Soviet Union issued a new ultimatum demanding the withdrawal of Allied forces from West Berlin. The request was rebuffed, but the United States now limited its security guarantees to West Berlin. On 13 August, East Germany erected a barbed-wire barrier that would eventually be expanded through construction into the Berlin Wall, effectively closing the loophole and preventing its citizens from fleeing to the West.
Aerial photograph of a Soviet missile site in Cuba, taken by a US spy aircraft, 1 November 1962
The Kennedy administration continued seeking ways to oust Castro
following the Bay of Pigs invasion, experimenting with various ways of
covertly facilitating the overthrow of the Cuban government. Significant
hopes were pinned on the program of terrorist attacks and other
destabilization operations known as Operation Mongoose, that was devised under the Kennedy administration in 1961. Khrushchev learned of the project in February 1962, and preparations to install Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba were undertaken in response.
Alarmed, Kennedy considered various reactions. He ultimately responded to the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba with a naval blockade,
and he presented an ultimatum to the Soviets. Khrushchev backed down
from a confrontation, and the Soviet Union removed the missiles in
return for a public American pledge not to invade Cuba again as well as a
covert deal to remove US missiles from Turkey.
The Cuban Missile Crisis (October–November 1962) brought the world closer to nuclear war than ever before. The aftermath led to efforts in the nuclear arms race at nuclear disarmament and improving relations, although the Cold War's first arms control agreement, the Antarctic Treaty, had come into force in 1961.
The compromise embarrassed Khrushchev and the Soviet Union
because the withdrawal of US missiles from Italy and Turkey was a secret
deal between Kennedy and Khrushchev, and the Soviets were seen as
retreating from circumstances that they had started. In 1964,
Khrushchev's Kremlin colleagues managed to oust him, but allowed him a peaceful retirement. He was accused of rudeness and incompetence, and John Lewis Gaddis
argues that he was also blamed with ruining Soviet agriculture, bringing
the world to the brink of nuclear war, and becoming an "international
embarrassment" when he authorized construction of the Berlin Wall. According to Dobrynin, the top Soviet leadership took the Cuban outcome as "a blow to its prestige bordering on humiliation".
In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, Cold War participants struggled
to adjust to a new, more complicated pattern of international relations
in which the world was no longer divided into two clearly opposed
blocs. From the beginning of the post-war period, with American help Western
Europe and Japan rapidly recovered from the destruction of World War II
and sustained strong economic growth through the 1950s and 1960s, with
per capita GDPs approaching those of the United States, while Eastern Bloc economies stagnated.
The Vietnam War
descended into a quagmire for the United States, leading to a decline
in international prestige and economic stability, derailing arms
agreements, and provoking domestic unrest. America's withdrawal from the
war led it to embrace a policy of détente with both China and the Soviet Union.
Backed by the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, an organization of Khmer pro-Soviet Communists and Khmer Rouge defectors, Vietnam invaded Cambodia on 22 December 1978. The invasion
succeeded in deposing Pol Pot, but the new state struggled to gain
international recognition beyond the Soviet Bloc sphere. Despite the
international outcry at Pol Pot regime's gross human rights violations,
representatives of the Khmer Rouge were allowed to be seated in the UN General Assembly, with strong support from China, Western powers, and the member countries of ASEAN.
Following the destruction of the Khmer Rouge, the national
reconstruction of Cambodia was hampered, and Vietnam suffered a punitive
Chinese attack. Although unable to deter Vietnam from ousting Pol Pot, China
demonstrated that its Cold War communist adversary, the Soviet Union,
was unable to protect its Vietnamese ally. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
wrote that "China succeeded in exposing the limits of...[Soviet]
strategic reach" and speculated that the desire to "compensate for their
ineffectuality" contributed to the Soviets' decision to intervene in Afghanistan a year later.
In the 1973 oil crisis, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
cut their petroleum output. This raised oil prices and hurt Western
economies, but helped the Soviet Union by generating a huge flow of
money from its oil sales.[204]
As a result of the oil crisis, combined with the growing influence of Third World alignments such as OPEC and the Non-Aligned Movement,
less powerful countries had more room to assert their independence and
often showed themselves resistant to pressure from either superpower. Meanwhile, Moscow was forced to turn its attention inward to deal with
the Soviet Union's deep-seated domestic economic problems. During this period, Soviet leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin embraced the notion of détente.
Under President John F. Kennedy, US troop levels in Vietnam grew from just under a thousand in 1959 to 16,000 in 1963. South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem's heavy-handed crackdown on Buddhist monks in 1963 led the US to endorse a deadly military coup against Diem. The war escalated further in 1964 following the controversial Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which a US destroyer was alleged to have clashed with North Vietnamese fast attack craft. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave President Lyndon B. Johnson broad authorization to increase US military presence, deploying ground combat units for the first time and increasing troop levels to 184,000. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev responded by reversing Khrushchev's
policy of disengagement and increasing aid to the North Vietnamese,
hoping to entice the North from its pro-Chinese position. The USSR
discouraged further escalation of the war, however, providing just
enough military assistance to tie up American forces. From this point, the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) engaged in more conventional warfare with US and South Vietnamese forces.
The Tet Offensive
of 1968 proved to be the turning point of the war. Despite years of
American tutelage and aid, the South Vietnamese forces were unable to
withstand the communist offensive and the task fell to US forces
instead. At the same time, in 1963–1965, American domestic politics saw the triumph of liberalism. According to historian Joseph Crespino:
It has become a staple of twentieth-century historiography that
Cold War concerns were at the root of a number of progressive political
accomplishments in the postwar period: a high progressive marginal tax
rate that helped fund the arms race and contributed to broad income
equality; bipartisan support for far-reaching civil rights legislation
that transformed politics and society in the American South, which had
long given the lie to America's egalitarian ethos; bipartisan support
for overturning an explicitly racist immigration system that had been in
place since the 1920s; and free health care for the elderly and the
poor, a partial fulfillment of one of the unaccomplished goals of the
New Deal era. The list could go on.
Nuclear testing and Use of Outer-Space treaties
The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
was signed on August 5, 1963, by the United States, the Soviet Union,
and over 100 other nations. This treaty banned nuclear weapons tests in
the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater, restricting such tests to
underground environments. The treaty followed heightened concerns over the militarization of
space, amplified by the United States' Starfish Prime test in 1962,
which involved the detonation of a nuclear device in the upper
atmosphere.
To further delineate the peaceful use of outer space, the United Nations facilitated the drafting of the Treaty
on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and
Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies,
commonly known as the Outer Space Treaty. Signed on January 27, 1967,
by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom, it
entered into force on October 10, 1967. The treaty established space as a
domain to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes, prohibiting the
placement of nuclear weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction in
orbit or on celestial bodies.
In answer to the Prague Spring, on 20 August 1968, the Soviet Army, together with most of their Warsaw Pact allies, invaded Czechoslovakia. The invasion was followed by a wave of emigration, including an
estimated 70,000 Czechs and Slovaks initially fleeing, with the total
eventually reaching 300,000. The invasion sparked intense protests from Yugoslavia, Romania, China, and from Western European countries.
Although indirect conflict between Cold War powers continued through
the late 1960s and early 1970s, tensions were beginning to ease. Following the ousting of Khrushchev, another period of collective leadership ensued, consisting of Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary, Alexei Kosygin as Premier and Nikolai Podgorny as Chairman of the Presidium, lasting until Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the preeminent Soviet leader.
Following his visit to China, Nixon met with Soviet leaders in Moscow. These Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
resulted in landmark arms control treaties. These aimed to limit the
development of costly anti-ballistic missiles and nuclear missiles.
Nixon and Brezhnev proclaimed a new era of "peaceful coexistence" and established the groundbreaking new policy of détente
(or cooperation) between the superpowers. Meanwhile, Brezhnev attempted
to revive the Soviet economy, which was declining in part because of
heavy military expenditures. The Soviet Union's military budget in the 1970s was massive, 40–60% of the federal budget and 15% of GDP. Between 1972 and 1974, the two sides also agreed to strengthen their economic ties, including agreements for increased trade. As a result of their meetings, détente would replace the hostility of the Cold War and the two countries would live mutually. These developments coincided with Bonn's "Ostpolitik" policy formulated by the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, an effort to normalize relations between West Germany and Eastern
Europe. Other agreements were concluded to stabilize the situation in
Europe, culminating in the Helsinki Accords signed at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975.
The Helsinki Accords, in which the Soviets promised to grant free
elections in Europe, has been called a major concession to ensure peace
by the Soviets. In practice, the Soviet government significantly curbed
the rule of law, civil liberties, protection of law and guarantees of property, which were considered examples of "bourgeois morality" by Soviet legal theorists such as Andrey Vyshinsky. The Soviet Union signed legally-binding human rights documents, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
in 1973 and the Helsinki Accords in 1975, but they were neither widely
known or accessible to people living under Communist rule, nor were they
taken seriously by the Communist authorities. Human rights activists in the Soviet Union were regularly subjected to harassment, repressions and arrests.
The pro-Soviet American business magnate Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum often mediated trade relations. Author Daniel Yergin, in his book The Prize, writes that Hammer "ended up as a go-between for five Soviet General Secretaries and seven U.S. Presidents." Hammer had extensive business relationship in the Soviet Union stretching back to the 1920s with Lenin's approval.According to Christian Science Monitor
in 1980, "although his business dealings with the Soviet Union were cut
short when Stalin came to power, he had more or less single-handedly
laid the groundwork for the [1980] state of Western trade with the
Soviet Union."
Kissinger and Nixon were "realists" who deemphasized idealistic goals
like anti-communism or promotion of democracy worldwide because those
goals were too expensive in terms of America's economic capabilities. They rejected "idealism" as impractical and too expensive, and neither
man showed much sensitivity to the plight of people living under
Communism. Kissinger's realism fell out of fashion as idealism returned
to American foreign policy with Carter's moralism emphasizing human
rights, and Reagan's rollback strategy aimed at destroying Communism.
In the 1970s, the KGB, led by Yuri Andropov, continued to persecute distinguished Soviet dissidents, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, who were criticising the Soviet leadership in harsh terms. Indirect conflict between the superpowers continued through this period
of détente in the Third World, particularly during political crises in
the Middle East, Chile, Ethiopia, and Angola.
In 1973, Nixon announced his administration was committed to seeking most favored nation trade status with the USSR, which was challenged by Congress in the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The United States had long linked trade with the Soviet Union to its
foreign policy toward the Soviet Union and, especially since the early
1980s, to Soviet human rights policies. The Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which was attached to the 1974 Trade Act, linked the granting of most-favored-nation to the USSR to the right of persecuted Soviet Jews to emigrate. Because the Soviet Union refused the right of emigration to Jewish refuseniks, the ability of the President to apply most-favored nation trade status to the Soviet Union was restricted.
Although President Jimmy Carter tried to place another limit on the arms race with a SALT II agreement in 1979, his efforts were undermined by the other events that year, including the Iranian Revolution and the Nicaraguan Revolution, which both ousted pro-US governments, and his retaliation against the Soviet coup in Afghanistan in December.
Protest in Amsterdam against the deployment of Pershing II missiles in Europe, 1981
The period in the late 1970s and early 1980s showed an intensive
reawakening of Cold War tensions and conflicts. Tensions greatly
increased between the major powers with both sides becoming more
militant. Diggins says, "Reagan went all out to fight the second cold war, by supporting counterinsurgencies in the third world." Cox says, "The intensity of this 'second' Cold War was as great as its duration was short."
In April 1978, the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan in the Saur Revolution. Within months, opponents of the communist regime launched an uprising in eastern Afghanistan that quickly expanded into a civil war waged by guerrilla mujahideen against government forces countrywide. The Islamic Unity of Afghanistan Mujahideen insurgents received military training and weapons in neighboring Pakistan and China, while the Soviet Union sent thousands of military advisers to support the PDPA government. Meanwhile, increasing friction between the competing factions of the PDPA—the dominant Khalq and the more moderate Parcham—resulted
in the dismissal of Parchami cabinet members and the arrest of Parchami
military officers under the pretext of a Parchami coup. By mid-1979,
the United States had started a covert program to assist the mujahideen.
In September 1979, Khalqist President Nur Muhammad Taraki was assassinated in a coup within the PDPA orchestrated by fellow Khalq member Hafizullah Amin, who assumed the presidency. Distrusted by the Soviets, Amin was assassinated by Soviet special forces during Operation Storm-333
in December 1979. Afghan forces suffered losses during the Soviet
operation; 30 Afghan palace guards and over 300 army guards were killed
while another 150 were captured. In the aftermath of the operation, a total of 1,700 Afghan soldiers who surrendered to Soviet forces were taken as prisoners, and the Soviets installed Babrak Karmal, the leader of the PDPA's Parcham faction, as Amin's successor. Veterans of the Soviet Union's Alpha Group have stated that Operation Storm-333 was one of the most successful in the unit's history. Documents released following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s revealed that the Soviet leadership believed Amin had secret contacts within the American embassy in Kabul and "was capable of reaching an agreement with the United States"; however, allegations of Amin colluding with the Americans have been widely discredited. The PDBA was tasked to fill the vacuum and carried out a purge of Amin
supporters. Soviet troops were deployed to put Afghanistan under Soviet
control with Karmal in more substantial numbers, although the Soviet
government did not expect to do most of the fighting in Afghanistan. As a
result, however, the Soviets were now directly involved in what had
been a domestic war in Afghanistan.
President Reagan publicizes his support by meeting with Afghan mujahideen leaders in the White House, 1983.
Carter responded to the Soviet invasion by withdrawing the SALT II
treaty from ratification, imposing embargoes on grain and technology
shipments to the USSR, and demanding a significant increase in military
spending, and further announced the boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, which was joined by 65 other nations. He described the Soviet incursion as "the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War".
President Reagan with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during a working luncheon at Camp David, December 1984The world map of military alliances in 1980
In January 1977, four years prior to becoming president, Ronald Reagan bluntly stated, in a conversation with Richard V. Allen,
his basic expectation in relation to the Cold War. "My idea of American
policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say
simplistic," he said. "It is this: We win and they lose." In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the 1980 presidential election, vowing to increase military spending and confront the Soviets everywhere. Both Reagan and new British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher denounced the Soviet Union and its ideology. Reagan labeled the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and predicted that Communism would be left on the "ash heap of history," while Thatcher inculpated the Soviets as "bent on world dominance." In 1982, Reagan tried to cut off Moscow's access to hard currency by
impeding its proposed gas line to Western Europe. It hurt the Soviet
economy, but it also caused ill will among American allies in Europe who
counted on that revenue. Reagan retreated on this issue.
By early 1985, Reagan's anti-communist position had developed into a stance known as the new Reagan Doctrine—which, in addition to containment, formulated an additional right to subvert existing communist governments. Besides continuing Carter's policy of supporting the Islamic opponents of the Soviet Union and the Soviet-backed PDPA government in Afghanistan, the CIA also sought to weaken the Soviet Union itself by promoting Islamism in the majority-Muslim Central Asian Soviet Union. Additionally, the CIA encouraged anti-communist Pakistan's ISI to train Muslims from around the world to participate in the jihad against the Soviet Union.
Pope John Paul II provided a moral focus for anti-communism; a visit to his native Poland in 1979 stimulated a religious and nationalist resurgence centered on the Solidarity movement trade union that galvanized opposition, and may have led to his attempted assassination two years later. In December 1981, Poland's Wojciech Jaruzelski reacted to the crisis by imposing a period of martial law. Reagan imposed economic sanctions on Poland in response. Mikhail Suslov,
the Kremlin's top ideologist, advised Soviet leaders not to intervene
if Poland fell under the control of Solidarity, for fear it might lead
to heavy economic sanctions, resulting in a catastrophe for the Soviet
economy.
US and USSR/Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles, 1945–2006
The Soviet Union had built up a military that consumed as much as 25 percent of its gross national product at the expense of consumer goods and investment in civilian sectors. Soviet spending on the arms race and other Cold War commitments both caused and exacerbated deep-seated structural problems in the Soviet system, which experienced at least a decade of economic stagnation during the late Brezhnev years.
Soviet investment in the defense sector was not driven by military necessity but in large part by the interests of the nomenklatura, which was dependent on the sector for their own power and privileges. The Soviet Armed Forces
became the largest in the world in terms of the numbers and types of
weapons they possessed, in the number of troops in their ranks, and in
the sheer size of their military–industrial base. However, the quantitative advantages held by the Soviet military often
concealed areas where the Eastern Bloc dramatically lagged behind the
West. For example, the Persian Gulf War demonstrated how the armor, fire control systems, and firing range of the Soviet Union's most common main battle tank, the T-72, were drastically inferior to the American M1 Abrams, yet the USSR fielded almost three times as many T-72s as the US deployed M1s.
By the early 1980s, the USSR had built up a military arsenal and army
surpassing that of the United States. Soon after the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, President Carter began massively building up the United
States military. This buildup was accelerated by the Reagan
administration, which increased the military spending from 5.3 percent
of GNP in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 1986, the largest peacetime defense buildup in United States history. The American-Soviet tensions present during 1983 was defined by some as
the start of "Cold War II". While in retrospective this phase of the
Cold War was generally defined as a "war of words", the Soviet's "peace offensive" was largely rejected by the West.
Tensions continued to intensify as Reagan revived the B-1 Lancer program, which had been canceled by the Carter administration, produced LGM-118 Peacekeeper missiles, installed US cruise missiles in Europe, and announced the experimental Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed "Star Wars" by the media, a defense program to shoot down missiles in mid-flight. The Soviets deployed RSD-10 Pioneerballistic missiles targeting Western Europe, and NATO decided, under the impetus of the Carter presidency, to deploy MGM-31 Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe, primarily West Germany. This deployment placed missiles just 10 minutes' striking distance from Moscow.
After Reagan's military buildup, the Soviet Union did not respond by further building its military, because the enormous military expenses, along with inefficient planned manufacturing and collectivized agriculture, were already a heavy burden for the Soviet economy. At the same time, Saudi Arabia increased oil production, even as other non-OPEC nations were increasing production. These developments contributed to the 1980s oil glut, which affected the Soviet Union as oil was the main source of Soviet export revenues. Issues with command economics, oil price decreases and large military expenditures gradually brought the Soviet economy to stagnation.
After ten-year-old American Samantha Smith wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov expressing her fear of nuclear war, Andropov invited Smith to the Soviet Union.
On 1 September 1983, the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 with 269 people aboard, including sitting Congressman Larry McDonald,
an action which Reagan characterized as a massacre. The airliner was en
route from Anchorage to Seoul but owing to a navigational mistake made
by the crew, it flew through Russian prohibited airspace. The Soviet Air Force treated the unidentified aircraft as an intruding U.S. spy plane and destroyed it with air-to-air missiles. The incident increased support for military deployment, overseen by
Reagan, which stood in place until the later accords between Reagan and
Mikhail Gorbachev. During the early hours of 26 September 1983, the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident occurred; systems in Serpukhov-15 underwent a glitch that claimed several intercontinental ballistic missiles were heading towards Russia, but officer Stanislav Petrov correctly suspected it was a false alarm, ensuring the Soviets did not respond to the non-existent attack. As such, he has been credited as "the man who saved the world". The Able Archer 83
exercise in November 1983, a realistic simulation of a coordinated NATO
nuclear release, was perhaps the most dangerous moment since the Cuban
Missile Crisis, as the Soviet leadership feared that a nuclear attack
might be imminent.
American domestic public concerns about intervening in foreign conflicts persisted from the end of the Vietnam War. The Reagan administration emphasized the use of quick, low-cost counterinsurgency tactics to intervene in foreign conflicts. In 1983, the Reagan administration intervened in the multisided Lebanese Civil War, invaded Grenada, bombed Libya and backed the Central American Contras, anti-communist paramilitaries seeking to overthrow the Soviet-aligned Sandinista government in Nicaragua. While Reagan's interventions against Grenada and Libya were popular in the United States, his backing of the Contra rebels was mired in controversy. The Reagan administration's backing of the military government of Guatemala during the Guatemalan Civil War, in particular the regime of Efraín Ríos Montt, was also controversial.
Meanwhile, the Soviets incurred high costs for their own foreign
interventions. Although Brezhnev was convinced in 1979 that the Soviet war in Afghanistan would be brief, Muslim guerrillas, aided by the US, China, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, waged a fierce resistance against the invasion. The Kremlin sent nearly 100,000 troops to support its puppet regime in
Afghanistan, leading many outside observers to dub the war "the Soviets'
Vietnam". However, Moscow's quagmire in Afghanistan was far more disastrous for
the Soviets than Vietnam had been for the Americans because the conflict
coincided with a period of internal decay and domestic crisis in the
Soviet system.
A senior US State Department official predicted such an outcome as early as 1980, positing that the invasion resulted in part from a:
...domestic crisis within the Soviet system. ... It may be that the thermodynamic law of entropyhas ... caught
up with the Soviet system, which now seems to expend more energy on
simply maintaining its equilibrium than on improving itself. We could be
seeing a period of foreign movement at a time of internal decay.
By the time the comparatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985, the Soviet economy was stagnant and faced a sharp fall in foreign
currency earnings as a result of the downward slide in oil prices in the
1980s. These issues prompted Gorbachev to investigate measures to revive the ailing state.
An ineffectual start led to the conclusion that deeper structural
changes were necessary, and in June 1987 Gorbachev announced an agenda
of economic reform called perestroika, or restructuring. Perestroika relaxed the production quota
system, allowed cooperative ownership of small businesses and paved the
way for foreign investment. These measures were intended to redirect
the country's resources from costly Cold War military commitments to
more productive areas in the civilian sector.
Despite initial skepticism in the West, the new Soviet leader
proved to be committed to reversing the Soviet Union's deteriorating
economic condition instead of continuing the arms race with the West. Partly as a way to fight off internal opposition from party cliques to his reforms, Gorbachev simultaneously introduced glasnost, or openness, which increased freedom of the press and the transparency of state institutions. Glasnost was intended to reduce the corruption at the top of the Communist Party and moderate the abuse of power in the Central Committee. Glasnost also enabled increased contact between Soviet citizens and the
Western world, particularly with the United States, contributing to the
accelerating détente between the two nations.
The beginning of the 1990s brought a thaw in relations between the superpowers.
In response to the Kremlin's military and political concessions, Reagan agreed to renew talks on economic issues and the scaling-back of the arms race. The first summit was held in November 1985 in Geneva, Switzerland. A second summit was held in October 1986 in Reykjavík, Iceland. Talks went well until the focus shifted to Reagan's proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which Gorbachev wanted to be eliminated. Reagan refused. The negotiations failed, but the third summit (Washington Summit (1987), 8–10 December 1987) led to a breakthrough with the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
(INF). The INF treaty eliminated all nuclear-armed, ground-launched
ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500
kilometers (310 and 3,420 mi) and their infrastructure.
During 1988, it became apparent to the Soviets that oil and gas
subsidies, along with the cost of maintaining massive troops levels,
represented a substantial economic drain. In addition, the security advantage of a buffer zone was recognised as irrelevant and the Soviets officially declared that they would no longer intervene in the affairs of satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe. George H. W. Bush and Gorbachev met at the Moscow Summit in May 1988 and the Governors Island Summit in December 1988.
Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly
apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political
structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that
process. Kenneth S. Deffeyes argued in Beyond Oil that the Reagan administration encouraged Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil to the point where the Soviets could not make a profit selling their oil, and resulted in the depletion of the country's hard currency reserves.
Brezhnev's next two successors, transitional figures with deep roots in his tradition, did not last long. Yuri Andropov was 68 years old and Konstantin Chernenko
72 when they assumed power; both died in less than two years. In an
attempt to avoid a third short-lived leader, in 1985, the Soviets turned
to the next generation and selected Mikhail Gorbachev. He made significant changes in the economy and party leadership, called perestroika. His policy of glasnost freed public access to information after decades of heavy government censorship. Gorbachev also moved to end the Cold War. In 1988, the USSR abandoned its war in Afghanistan and began to withdraw its forces. In the following year, Gorbachev refused to interfere in the internal affairs of the Soviet satellite states, which paved the way for the Revolutions of 1989. In particular, the standstill of the Soviet Union at the Pan-European Picnic
in August 1989 then set a peaceful chain reaction in motion, at the end
of which the Eastern Bloc collapsed. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and with East and West Germany pursuing re-unification, the Iron Curtain between the West and Soviet-occupied regions came down.
By 1989, the Soviet alliance system was on the brink of collapse,
and, deprived of Soviet military support, the communist leaders of the
Warsaw Pact states were losing power. Grassroots organizations, such as Poland's Solidarity movement, rapidly gained ground with strong popular bases.
The Pan-European Picnic took place in August 1989 on the Hungarian-Austrian border.
The Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 in Hungary finally started a
peaceful movement that the rulers in the Eastern Bloc could not stop. It
was the largest movement of refugees from East Germany since the Berlin
Wall was built in 1961 and ultimately brought about the fall of the
Iron Curtain. The patrons of the picnic, Otto von Habsburg and the Hungarian Minister of State Imre Pozsgay, saw the planned event as an opportunity to test Mikhail Gorbachev's reaction. The Austrian branch of the Paneuropean Union,
which was then headed by Otto von Habsburg, distributed thousands of
brochures inviting the GDR holidaymakers in Hungary to a picnic near the
border at Sopron. But with the mass exodus at the Pan-European Picnic
the subsequent hesitant behavior of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of
East Germany and the non-interference of the Soviet Union broke the
dams. Now tens of thousands of media-informed East Germans made their
way to Hungary, which was no longer willing to keep its borders
completely closed or to oblige its border troops to use armed force. On
the one hand, this caused disagreement among the Eastern European states
and, on the other hand, it was clear to the Eastern European population
that the governments no longer had absolute power.
East German leader Erich Honecker lost control in August 1989.
In 1989, the communist governments in Poland and Hungary became the
first to negotiate the organization of competitive elections. In
Czechoslovakia and East Germany, mass protests unseated entrenched
communist leaders. The communist regimes in Bulgaria and Romania also
crumbled, in the latter case as the result of a violent uprising. Attitudes had changed enough that US Secretary of State James Baker
suggested that the American government would not be opposed to Soviet
intervention in Romania, on behalf of the opposition, to prevent
bloodshed.
The tidal wave of change culminated with the fall of the Berlin Wall
in November 1989, which symbolized the collapse of European communist
governments and graphically ended the Iron Curtain divide of Europe. The
1989 revolutionary wave swept across Central and Eastern Europe and peacefully overthrew all of the Soviet-style Marxist–Leninist states: East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria; Romania was the only Eastern-bloc country to topple its communist regime violently and execute its head of state.
At the same time, the Soviet republics started legal moves towards potentially declaring sovereignty over their territories, citing the freedom to secede in Article 72 of the USSR constitution. On 7 April 1990, a law was passed allowing a republic to secede if more
than two-thirds of its residents voted for it in a referendum. Many held their first free elections in the Soviet era for their own
national legislatures in 1990. Many of these legislatures proceeded to
produce legislation contradicting the Union laws in what was known as
the 'War of Laws'. In 1989, the Russian SFSR convened a newly elected Congress of People's Deputies. Boris Yeltsin was elected its chairman. On 12 June 1990, the Congress declared Russia's sovereignty over its territory and proceeded to pass laws that attempted to supersede some of the Soviet laws. After a landslide victory of Sąjūdis in Lithuania, that country declared its independence restored on 11 March 1990, citing the illegality of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. Soviet forces attempted to halt the secession by crushing popular demonstrations in Lithuania (Bloody Sunday) and Latvia (The Barricades),
as a result, numerous civilians were killed or wounded. However, these
actions only bolstered international support for the secessionists.
A referendum for the preservation of the USSR
was held on 17 March 1991 in nine republics (the remainder having
boycotted the vote), with the majority of the population in those
republics voting for preservation of the Union in the form of a new
federation. The referendum gave Gorbachev a minor boost. In the summer
of 1991, the New Union Treaty,
which would have turned the country into a much looser Union, was
agreed upon by eight republics. The signing of the treaty, however, was
interrupted by the August Coup—an
attempted coup d'état by hardline members of the government and the KGB
who sought to reverse Gorbachev's reforms and reassert the central
government's control over the republics. After the coup collapsed,
Russian president Yeltsin was seen as a hero for his decisive actions,
while Gorbachev's power was effectively ended. The balance of power
tipped significantly towards the republics. In August 1991, Latvia and
Estonia immediately declared the restoration of their full independence
(following Lithuania's 1990 example). Gorbachev resigned as general
secretary in late August, and soon afterwards, the party's activities
were indefinitely suspended—effectively ending its rule. By the fall,
Gorbachev could no longer influence events outside Moscow, and he was
being challenged even there by Yeltsin, who had been elected President of Russia in July 1991.
Later in August, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Communist party, and Russian
President Boris Yeltsin ordered the seizure of Soviet property.
Gorbachev clung to power as the President of the Soviet Union until 25
December 1991, when the USSR dissolved. Fifteen states
emerged from the Soviet Union, with by far the largest and most
populous one (which also was the founder of the Soviet state with the October Revolution in Petrograd), the Russian Federation,
taking full responsibility for all the rights and obligations of the
USSR under the Charter of the United Nations, including the financial
obligations. As such, Russia assumed the Soviet Union's UN membership and permanent membership on the Security Council, nuclear stockpile and the control over the armed forces.
In his 1992 State of the Union Address,
US President George H. W. Bush expressed his emotions: "The biggest
thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this:
By the grace of God, America won the Cold War." Bush and Yeltsin met in February 1992, declaring a new era of "friendship and partnership". In January 1993, Bush and Yeltsin agreed to START II, which provided for further nuclear arms reductions on top of the original START treaty.
Changes in national boundaries after the end of the Cold War
In summing up the international ramifications of these events, Vladislav Zubok stated: 'The collapse of the Soviet empire was an event of epochal geopolitical, military, ideological, and economic significance.' After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia drastically cut military spending, and restructuring the economy left millions unemployed. According to Western analysis, the neoliberal reforms in Russia culminated in a recession in the early 1990s more severe than the Great Depression as experienced by the United States and Germany. Western analysts suggest that in the 25 years following the end of the
Cold War, only five or six of the post-communist states are on a path to
joining the rich and capitalist world while most are falling behind,
some to such an extent that it will take several decades to catch up to
where they were before the collapse of communism.
Decommunization
Stephen Holmes of the University of Chicago
argued in 1996 that decommunization, after a brief active period,
quickly ended in near-universal failure. After the introduction of lustration,
demand for scapegoats has become relatively low, and former communists
have been elected for high governmental and other administrative
positions. Holmes notes that the only real exception was former East Germany, where thousands of former Stasi informers have been fired from public positions.
Holmes suggests the following reasons for the failure of decommunization:
After 45–70 years of communist rule, nearly every family has
members associated with the state. After the initial desire "to root out
the reds" came a realization that massive punishment is wrong and
finding only some guilty is hardly justice.
The urgency of the current economic problems of postcommunism makes
the crimes of the communist past "old news" for many citizens.
Decommunization is believed to be a power game of elites.
The difficulty of dislodging the social elite makes it require a totalitarian state to disenfranchise the "enemies of the people" quickly and efficiently and a desire for normalcy overcomes the desire for punitive justice.
Very few people have a perfectly clean slate and so are available to fill the positions that require significant expertise.
Compared with the decommunization efforts of the other former constituents of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union, decommunization in Russia has been restricted to half-measures, if conducted at all. Notable anti-communist measures in the Russian Federation include the banning of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (and the creation of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation) as well as changing the names of some Russian cities back to what they were before the 1917 October Revolution (Leningrad to Saint Petersburg, Sverdlovsk to Yekaterinburg and Gorky to Nizhny Novgorod), though others were maintained, with Ulyanovsk (former Simbirsk), Tolyatti (former Stavropol) and Kirov
(former Vyatka) being examples. Even though Leningrad and Sverdlovsk
were renamed, regions that were named after them are still officially
called Leningrad and Sverdlovsk oblasts.
The Spasskaya Tower had kept its red star and did not restore the two-headed eagle present before communist takeover.
Conversely, decommunization in Ukraine started during and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 With the success of the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, the Ukrainian government approved laws that outlawed communist symbols. In July 2015, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko signed a set of laws that started a six-month period for the removal of communist monuments (excluding World War II monuments) and renaming of public places named after communist-related themes. At the time, this meant that 22 cities and 44 villages were set to get new names. In 2016, 51,493 streets and 987 cities and villages were renamed, and 1,320 Lenin monuments and 1,069 monuments to other communist figures removed. Violation of the law carries a penalty of a potential media ban and prison sentences of up to five years.The Ministry of the Interior stripped the Communist Party of Ukraine, the Communist Party of Ukraine (renewed), and the Communist Party of Workers and Peasants
of their right to participate in elections and stated it was continuing
the court actions that started in July 2014 to end the registration of communist parties in Ukraine. By 16 December 2015, these three parties had been banned in Ukraine; the Communist Party of Ukraine appealed the ban to the European Court of Human Rights.
The Cold War had provided external stabilizing pressures. Both the
United States and the Soviet Union had a vested interest in Yugoslavia's
stability, ensuring it remained a buffer state in the East-West divide.
This resulted in financial and political support for its regime. When
the Cold War ended, this external support evaporated, leaving Yugoslavia
more vulnerable to internal divisions.
As Yugoslavia fragmented, the wars began after Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in 1991. Serbia, under Slobodan Milošević, opposed these moves. The Bosnian War
(1992–1995) was the most brutal of the Yugoslav Wars, characterized by
ethnic cleansing and genocide. International organizations, including
the United Nations, struggled to manage the violence. NATO eventually
intervened with airstrikes in Bosnia (1995) as part of Operation Deliberate Force and later in Kosovo (1999) as part of Operation allied force.
These interventions marked the transition of NATO as a deterrent to the
Soviet Union, to also functioning at the time as an active peacekeeping
and conflict-resolution force.
Influence
The post-Cold War world is considered to be unipolar, with the United States the sole remaining superpower. The Cold War defined the political role of the United States after
World War II—by 1989 the United States had military alliances with 50
countries, with 526,000 troops stationed abroad, with 326,000 in Europe (two-thirds of which were in West Germany) and 130,000 in Asia (mainly Japan and South Korea). The Cold War also marked the zenith of peacetime military–industrial complexes and large-scale military funding of science.
Since the end of the Cold War, the EU has expanded eastwards into the former Warsaw Pact and parts of the former Soviet Union.
Cumulative US military expenditures throughout the entire Cold War
amounted to an estimated $8 trillion. Nearly 100,000 Americans died in
the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Although Soviet casualties are difficult to estimate, as a share of
gross national product the financial cost for the Soviet Union was much
higher than that incurred by the United States.
Millions died in the superpowers' proxy wars around the globe, most notably in eastern Asia.Most of the proxy wars and subsidies for local conflicts ended along
with the Cold War; interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, as
well as refugee and displaced persons crises have declined sharply in
the post-Cold War years.
However, the aftermath of the Cold War is not considered to be
concluded. Many of the economic and social tensions that were exploited
to fuel Cold War competition in parts of the Third World remain acute.
The breakdown of state control in a number of areas formerly ruled by
communist governments produced new civil and ethnic conflicts,
particularly in the former Yugoslavia. In Central and Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War has ushered in an era of economic growth and an increase in the number of liberal democracies, while in other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, independence was accompanied by state failure. It has been posited by several scholars that the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of communism as a global force in the post-Cold War era allowed neoliberalcapitalism to become the dominant global system, which has resulted in rising economic inequality.
The Cold War endures as a popular topic reflected in entertainment
media, and continuing to the present with post-1991 Cold War-themed
feature films, novels, television and web series, and other media.
Interpreting the course and origins of the conflict has been a source
of heated controversy among historians, political scientists, and
journalists. In particular, historians have sharply disagreed as to who was
responsible for the breakdown of Soviet–US relations after the Second
World War; and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was
inevitable or could have been avoided. Historians have also disagreed on what exactly the Cold War was, what
the sources of the conflict were, and how to disentangle patterns of
action and reaction between the two sides.
Although explanations of the origins of the conflict in academic
discussions are complex and diverse, several general schools of thought
on the subject can be identified. Historians commonly speak of three
different approaches to the study of the Cold War: "orthodox" accounts,
"revisionism", and "post-revisionism".
"Orthodox" accounts place responsibility for the Cold War on the Soviet Union and its expansion further into Europe. "Revisionist" writers place more responsibility for the breakdown of
post-war peace on the United States, citing a range of US efforts to
isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War
II. "Post-revisionists" see the events of the Cold War as more nuanced and
attempt to be more balanced in determining what occurred during the Cold
War. Much of the historiography on the Cold War weaves together two or even all three of these broad categories.
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