Past as Prelude: History in the Making of a New World Order by Meredith Woo-Cumings & Michael Loriaux

Author:Meredith Woo-Cumings & Michael Loriaux [Woo-Cumings, Meredith & Loriaux, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781000312591
Google: b7utDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 52887628
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

Summary and Interpretations

What happened in the Soviet Union and in the international system from 1964 to 1991, then, seems to parallel in important ways what happened in Russia and in the international system from 1825 to 1881. We find, first, similar trends at home and abroad during the tenure of the leaders who preceded Mikhail Gorbachev and Alexander II, that is, Leonid Brezhnev (1964-1982) and Nicholas I (1825-1855). These were times when relations among the dominant states in the international system were relatively peaceful and cooperative and when the Soviet Union and Russia were making stronger and stronger claims to power in the international system. There are domestic homologies as well—for instance, the brief stab at reform during the early days of the tenure of Gorbachev and Alexander II followed by quite conservative domestic policies, rising corruption, and finally, a gradual decline in the capacity of the state to control itself and society.

By the end of these two administrations, however, it is clear that Russia was confronting a number of interrelated difficulties. Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union led to an unravelling of razriadka (détente), and the Soviet engagement in Afghanistan was going nowhere, just as in the nineteenth century, tensions among the members of the Concert weakened the capacity of these states to cooperate and eventually led some to wage war on Russia in the Crimea. However, what seemed to be political-military problems were actually much more. Russia, like the Soviet Union, was revealed to be a paper tiger. The economy and the social structure were backward, and the political system was inefficient and corrupt. Moreover, the future looked even grimmer, given the failure of Russia to participate in the trends overtaking the West at the time: an industrial revolution, considerable expansion of global trade, and the growing popularity of the ideas of the French Revolution. Thus the crisis that developed at the end of the reigns of Brezhnev and Nicholas I reflected not just the problems of the moment but also the likelihood that these problems would only worsen in the future, particularly given the trend in both periods in support of liberalizing politics and economics.

Immediately upon coming to power, Gorbachev and Alexander II pursued what Stephen Sestanovich has termed for the Gorbachev era a "diplomacy of decline" and both leaders launched major reforms. These reforms attempted to catch up with political and economic innovations in the West and therefore to create the necessary underpinnings for Soviet and Russian claims to being great powers in the international system. However, their desires both to maintain and to modernize the system, coupled with the sheer enormity of the task before them and the deleterious effects of the reforms on stability at home and in the empire, worked in both cases to compromise the gains of reform and the support at the top for the leader and the project of reform.

But the reforms in both cases had dramatic effects on the international system. The Soviet Union and Russia

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