This book is a comparative study of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the USSR - as multinational, federal communist states - and the reaction to these parallel collapses of European and US foreign policy.

In this book, Allen Lynch challenges the common wisdom that the revolutionary events in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the end of the cold war. Instead, he argues that the cold war was actually resolved by the early 1970s, as evidenced by the tacit acceptance of a divided Germany and Europe. More recent events thus overthrew not the cold war but the post-cold war order in East-West and U.S.-Soviet relations. And-often to their surprise and consternation-leaders of the governments involved must now face formidable new forces created by German unity and nationalism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, which were contained efficiently-if at times brutally-by the post-cold war order. In its three sections, the book reviews historical, contemporary, and future-oriented themes, respectively. Lynch begins by exploring the deeper logic of the cold war and how it was resolved by the 1970s. He then presents an overview of recent Soviet domestic and foreign policy processes as they affect East-West relations. The concluding section considers the future, with special emphasis on the implications of a disintegrating USSR for U.S. foreign policy.

In this book, Allen Lynch challenges the common wisdom that the revolutionary events in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the end of the cold war. Instead, he argues that the cold war was actually resolved by the early 1970s, as evidenced by the tacit acceptance of a divided Germany and Europe. More recent events thus overthrew not the cold war but the post-cold war order in East-West and U.S.-Soviet relations. And-often to their surprise and consternation-leaders of the governments involved must now face formidable new forces created by German unity and nationalism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, which were contained efficiently-if at times brutally-by the post-cold war order. In its three sections, the book reviews historical, contemporary, and future-oriented themes, respectively. Lynch begins by exploring the deeper logic of the cold war and how it was resolved by the 1970s. He then presents an overview of recent Soviet domestic and foreign policy processes as they affect East-West relations. The concluding section considers the future, with special emphasis on the implications of a disintegrating USSR for U.S. foreign policy.

This examination of what specialist observers of foreign policy with the Soviet Union have been saying to each other over the past 20 years which shows how such phenomena as nuclear warfare, western prosperity and the Sino-Soviet split have forced analysts to diverge sharply from traditional Leninist orthodoxy. The result has been a Soviet analysis of world politics that is considerably more complex and politically sophisticated than westerners often assume. This is manifested in an increasingly multipolar world view, accepting the continued existence of the USA, in which the USSR is seen as an integral component of an international system, rather than simply as the centre of a unique and expanding system of its own. Fundamental to this changing perspective is the perception that no Soviet interests could possibly be served by nuclear war, in whatever form. In an extended preface, Allen Lynch examines the impact of the recent Gorbachev reform initiative upon the intellectual basis of Soviet foreign policy.