ABSTRACT
Few topics of Cold War history have provoked as much scholarly debate as its beginning and its end. In one camp are those who insist on the primacy of the US role in ending the confl ict, and especially the vision of Ronald Reagan.1 For these scholars, it was the combination of Reagan’s vision of a world without nuclear weapons, his toughness in relations with Moscow, and his ability to articulate the superiority of the American way of life that helped to demonstrate the bankruptcy of the Soviet model. Nonsense, say others – the Cold War ended not because of anything Reagan did, but because of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s determination to reform the Soviet Union and, in so doing, end the Cold War competition with the United States.2 International Relations theorists have been vocal as well, arguing that explanations for the end of the Cold War need to be found in structural causes – namely, Soviet economic problems and the large debts of East European states.3 Others have justly argued that any account of the Cold War’s end needs to pay equal, if not greater, attention to what took place in Europe and the actions of elites there.4 And as the chapters that follow demonstrate, one must also take into account the role of transnational institutions and movements like Solidarity in Poland and of paradigms like neoliberalism, in order to understand the end of the Cold War.
