19

European Portents

By 1982 many people were saying that the Cold War had returned to where it had been before the détente process began. Some were even arguing that Reagan had started a “new Cold War,” as if the conflict had ever gone away completely. But even for those who had observed the fighting of the Cold War in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and south and southeast Asia in the 1970s, the conflict in the 1980s seemed to take on a new and more dangerous dimension. There was the relentless military buildup, which had taken a new and hazardous turn. The threat of nuclear war was ever more immediate, especially as both sides were developing new, lighter, and more easily targetable weapons. And there was the rhetoric, which by 1982–83 had reached fever pitch. Reagan spoke of the USSR as “the focus of evil in the modern world.” The Soviets spoke of Reagan as the new Hitler. “Reagan’s vulgar speeches show the true face of the military-industrial complex. They have long sought such a figure. Now, they have finally found it in the form of Reagan,” said Iurii Andropov, who after Brezhnev’s death in 1982 replaced him as Soviet leader.¹

The Cold War in the early 1980s was very perilous, probably more so than at any other time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. But there were other trends as well. China began to move away from the hypercentralization of economic power that had been its ideal under Mao. Some countries that had identified themselves as belonging to the Third World began experimenting with reforms that opened them to market practices both domestically and internationally. But first and foremost there was the beginning transformation of Europe, where western European integration and economic expansion increasingly created an irresistible attraction for countries east of the Iron Curtain. So strong was the pull that even the reinvigorated Superpower Cold War could not entirely deter it, especially since one Superpower—the USSR—was no longer altogether certain what its aims in Europe truly were.

LIKE THE INTENSIFICATION of the Superpower conflict, the transformation of the Cold War in Europe can be traced back to the Portuguese revolution of 1974. For Europeans, much less preoccupied with events in Africa than the Superpowers were, the issue was not so much the character of the regimes in Luanda or Maputo. It was what would come out of the change of government in Lisbon. While most western Europeans celebrated Portugal’s turn away from a Fascist-style dictatorship, they also worried about the effect a Communist takeover outside the Soviet zone could have on the continent’s future. The issue was not so much about the Portuguese Left overall. It was mainly about the resurgent Portuguese Communist Party, which went out of its way to proclaim its support for the USSR and its ideals at a time when patience with these ideals ran thin outside of the Soviet bloc.

The Portuguese revolution happened at a time when significant parts of the western European radical Left had begun to feel that the legacy of the Russian October Revolution was becoming less and less relevant for their own political practice. The so-called New Left of the 1960s had of course proclaimed this already, but their reach was limited. When the Italian Communist Party (PCI), followed by the Spanish and the French, in the late 1960s began saying that they believed in a transition to socialism only through elections and parliaments, the effect was much greater. But the new PCI leader, the charismatic and vigorous Enrico Berlinguer, did not stop there. Berlinguer wanted to re-create western European Communism as a democratic alternative in the West. He also wanted to put pressure on the eastern European parties to reform and respect human and democratic rights. Especially after the Chilean coup in 1973, in which the Left had been destroyed, Berlinguer argued for a “historic compromise” between Catholic and Communist parties in Europe to safeguard democracy. His Eurocommunism proved popular in Italy and beyond.

On a European level, the Portuguese revolution pitted Berlinguer’s Eurocommunists against Soviet support for the doctrinaire Portuguese Communist Party. Privately, to other like-minded Communists and Social Democrats, including West Germany’s Brandt and Sweden’s Olof Palme, Berlinguer admitted that it would be a disaster for the Left in Europe if the Portuguese Communists came to power. In a sure sign of how western European politics was shifting, the opposition to Communist rule in Portugal brought together some strange bedfellows: Eurocommunists, Social Democrats, Catholic groups, and the CIA all in different ways attempted to strengthen the non-Communist alternatives. When the Portuguese Socialists under Mario Soares came to power in 1976, with a radical Social Democratic agenda, there were sighs of relief all around in the western European capitals, as well as in Washington.

In spite of their community of purpose over Portugal, successive US Administrations nonetheless distrusted and feared the Eurocommunists. The Americans believed that Berlinguer’s real aim was to become part of the government and then to seize power from within. The Soviets had even more reason to dislike the constant hectoring from the Italians about their own policies. Brezhnev was shocked when Berlinguer said openly, in Moscow, that democracy was a “historically universal value upon which to base an original socialist society” and furious when the Italian called NATO a “shield useful for constructing socialism in freedom.”² Even so, Moscow had little alternative but to continue to support the western European Communist parties both politically and financially, for fear of losing all influence among them.

In the United States the main worry concerning Europe was to hold the NATO alliance together as the Cold War grew colder in the late 1970s. Ever since the 1940s some US policy-makers had worried about western European, and especially West German, instincts for compromising with the Soviets rather than confronting them. Most often such suspicions had been misplaced. The western Europeans had, after all, built NATO, together with the Americans, in order to defend themselves against what they saw as a threat from the East. Very often the differences on key defense issues between the United States and its main allies had been in terms of tone, not content. And even if the Americans bore by far the greatest military and financial burden in the defense of western Europe, Washington had been keen to let the Europeans be part of making decisions. The deliberative decision-making within NATO helped convince all allies that they were there on equal terms, and not just as staffage in a global Cold War.

But as Superpower détente began to collapse, many western European leaders were worried about what would follow. Détente, they thought, had served Europe well. It had opened up new avenues for contact across the Iron Curtain. Trust-building measures between the military alliances had made Europeans feel more secure, and these western European leaders were themselves vested in the détente processes. It was their project, not just the Superpowers’. Not surprisingly, they were looking for ways to keep European détente alive even when relations between Moscow and Washington seemed to be in free fall.

The Helsinki process, as it was often called after the conference held there in 1975, was one way of keeping lines to the East open. The right to send observers to military exercises, participation in academic conferences, exchanges in science and technology, and the right for western Europeans to travel freely to eastern Europe (but not, in practice, the other way around) should be upheld in spite of conflicts in other areas, most western European leaders thought. Chiefly, they were preoccupied with trade and economic interaction. And since trade between the blocs in Europe tended to be a one-way street, with the export of western European goods to the east, both sides were keen to find products that could flow in the opposite direction. The one that stood out was Soviet oil and gas, and plans for gas pipelines from Siberia to western Europe had been underway since the mid-1970s. Reagan, predictably, put his foot down. When the western Europeans refused to cancel the project, in 1981 Reagan slapped US sanctions on all companies, including European companies, that contributed to building the pipelines. Although the Americans later relented, considerable damage was done to the perception of transatlantic unity.

In terms of discussion of military strategy the Americans had much less to fear from their allies, although they did not always realize that this was so. When the Carter Administration in 1977 wanted to introduce high-radiation nuclear weapons for battlefield use (so-called neutron bombs) in Europe, most western Europeans leaders went along. They feared the Soviet advantage in conventional forces, especially if there were to be deep cuts in the strategic nuclear arsenals, and believed the neutron bomb could help offset that advantage. Public opinion in almost all western European countries was of a different view. The neutron bomb was decried as an inhumane weapon that killed people and spared property. Exactly the kind of weapon, the western European Left argued, that US capitalists would like to see. When Carter unilaterally cancelled the deployment a year later, those western European leaders who had supported the proposal were furious. They felt that they had gone out on a political limb for nothing.

The German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, was especially angry. He had weathered public opinion on the neutron bomb and felt betrayed. Schmidt, who regarded himself as an expert on strategic matters (and on most other matters, too), had already formed a very low opinion of Carter as a leader. But the West German chancellor, who was by far the most powerful politician in Europe, was also concerned about Soviet intentions. He was especially worried that a combination of Carter’s naiveté and Soviet military strength in Europe could tempt the Americans to compromise with the Soviets, to western Europe’s disadvantage. Schmidt believed that the US position in the world was slipping and that Europeans had to prepare to fend more for themselves. But he was also keen to keep the Americans in Europe to the highest degree possible for strategic reasons, as long as Schmidt himself could influence key decisions in NATO.

What particularly worried western European strategic planners was that the Soviet and Warsaw Pact advantage in conventional forces was being augmented by Brezhnev’s introduction of new highly mobile medium-range ballistic missiles, the SS-20s. The Soviets deployed the new weapons because they knew the missiles they replaced were of very poor quality, and because there were no treaties that prohibited them from doing so. But it was a political mistake because western European leaders felt it to be an attempt at intimidation in troubled times. It was Helmut Schmidt, more than anyone, who cobbled together the NATO response, the so-called double-track decision of December 1979. In it, the NATO partners said they would prepare the deployment of US medium-range Pershing II and cruise missiles in western Europe in response to the Soviet deployment. At the same time, NATO invited negotiations on limiting the number of all medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe on an equal basis, as part of what would be the SALT III talks. This was an important decision. It kept NATO united, sent a clear message to the Soviets, and—maybe most importantly—made it plain that western European leaders more than ever took responsibility for their own defense.

There was to be no SALT III, however. Two weeks after NATO’s double-track decision, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Most western European leaders, except Britain’s new prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, thought Carter overreacted to the Soviet action. “We will not permit ten years of détente and defense policy to be destroyed,” Helmut Schmidt told his colleagues.³ Schmidt, who was in essence Germany’s most pro-American chancellor since Konrad Adenauer, felt that Washington was failing in consulting its allies. He also really started to fear that the world was heading toward Superpower war. He told Carter that West Germany would agree to joint NATO measures against the invasion, but that he himself would keep communication lines with Moscow open. Against US wishes, Schmidt traveled to Moscow in June 1980 to meet with Brezhnev. With his usual bluntness, Schmidt told the aging Soviet leader that he thought the invasion of Afghanistan had been a grave mistake. But he also asked for, and got, Soviet concessions on discussing nuclear arms in Europe. The USSR was willing to talk, Brezhnev said, as long as all nuclear weapons in Europe were part of the discussion.

Brezhnev’s willingness to talk indicated his worry about how fast tensions were rising on a global scale. But the form the initiative took was also meant to pry open differences in NATO. France and Britain had their own nuclear weapons, which they did not want to negotiate over. West Germany did not. The Soviets were still hoping that West Germany’s dependence on the United States and Germany’s position as a Cold War front line state could help Moscow appeal to German nationalist instincts. But the 1980 initiatives on medium-range missiles were soon overtaken by further increases in tension between the two power blocs. By 1983 Cold War anxiety in Europe was at its highest level since the early 1960s because of the rhetorical confrontation between Reagan and the Soviet leaders. More than half of all western Europeans polled believed they would see a war between the Superpowers in their lifetime.

Leonid Brezhnev died in November 1982 after eighteen years as Soviet leader. He was not mourned by many. Even his closest colleagues had begun to sense that the Soviet Union had come to a standstill during the final phase of his leadership. Brezhnev had without doubt improved the international position of the Soviet Union and made it a military Superpower at a level his predecessors could only have dreamt about. But the foreign expansion of the USSR had taken place at great economic cost and, many Communists felt, at the expense of solving problems at home. Brezhnev’s successor, Iurii Andropov, was selected because his colleagues thought he could handle foreign affairs and provide impetus for necessary adjustments at home. As chairman of the secret police, the KGB, for fifteen years, Andropov had the skill and the ruthlessness needed to shake things up, his aging Politburo colleagues believed.

But Andropov, though aware of the need for domestic reform, was a sick man already when he was made general secretary, and therefore incapable of doing much. He died in February 1984. His replacement, Konstantin Chernenko, was an apparatchik and Brezhnev crony who wanted to keep a steady ship without much thought of reform. Chernenko was also unwell when he was elected. He died after little more than a year in office. Not surprisingly the party cadre and the population in general thought that leadership of the party was drifting. A friend of mine, who lived in Moscow at the time, claimed that his six-year-old son got so used to hearing Chopin’s funeral march on television that he thought it was the Soviet national anthem.

And while an elderly Politburo struggled to stay alive physically and politically, Cold War tensions kept on rising. The Soviets began worrying in earnest about the risk of a US surprise nuclear attack, and took steps to increase surveillance of key Western institutions. The KGB was ordered to keep watch for political, financial, and religious leaders traveling toward nuclear shelters or safe zones, for any increases in the capacity of blood banks, and for hospitals being readied. This intelligence operation, called RIaN (short, in Russian, for “nuclear missile attack”), probably helped convince Soviet leaders that no immediate attack was underway. But tensions remained high. In September 1983 the Soviet air force shot down a civilian Korean airliner that had strayed into Soviet airspace. The Soviets had mistaken it for a US spy plane. All 269 people aboard were killed, 61 of them Americans, including a US congressman.

The Soviets made this terrible case of mass murder even worse in Cold War terms through initially lying about their involvement, claiming that they had not shot down the plane. US Cold War hawks had a field day. Reagan’s UN ambassador, the neoconservative Jeane Kirkpatrick, played US intelligence recordings of transmissions between the Soviet pilots and their air defense command at the UN Security Council. Reagan himself went on national television, calling it “the Korean airline massacre, the attack by the Soviet Union against 269 innocent men, women, and children aboard an unarmed Korean passenger plane. This crime against humanity must never be forgotten, here or throughout the world.”⁴

In November 1983 things got really ugly. For years NATO had held military exercises, usually in the fall, in order to test alliance readiness to withstand a sudden Warsaw Pact attack. The 1983 version, codenamed Able Archer ’83, simulated conflict escalation up to the point when nuclear strikes were launched. The Soviets had been notified about the exercise beforehand, and knew quite a bit about it from their own intelligence sources. Still, when Able Archer got underway, tensions grew. The CIA reported later that Moscow had placed “Soviet air units in East Germany and Poland on heightened readiness.”⁵ There is no reason to believe that the Soviet leaders thought an attack was imminent, but Moscow’s reaction showed just how volatile and dangerous the overall situation was. The world, and Europe especially, was closer to a situation where nuclear war could break out accidentally than it had been for a long time.

The fear that was engulfing the Soviet leaders was not just a product of the pressure they were under from the West. It also came about because the economic and social system they represented seemed to be in trouble. Economic growth was slowing. A decline in oil prices sharply reduced the Soviet state’s foreign income. Andropov and others castigated sloth, corruption, and drunkenness. While no Soviet leader thought that the system they had inherited needed fundamental change, most were aware that it needed reform. The Soviet state, many Communist leaders agreed, was overextended. The high degree of centralization in planning hobbled the economy. Military expenditure was growing too quickly, and the Soviet Union supported too many Third World states and movements that were becoming accustomed to living off Moscow’s largesse. But while questions abounded, few had any answers. And even the questions could not be posed too loudly. The Soviet Union was a dictatorship, and the currency for promotion was loyalty.

If things were not looking too good in the Soviet Union, they were beginning to look even worse in eastern Europe. Granted, many eastern Europeans, in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, for instance, had a standard of living that Soviet citizens could only dream of. But even so, the sense spread of the leaders’ inability to deal with the most pressing problems, including secure and stable supplies of consumer goods. It was not that eastern Europeans on a whole were living worse lives than before. It was that many of them knew how much better people in western Europe were living and how quickly progress was made there. The increased contacts across the Iron Curtain after Helsinki had convinced many eastern Europeans, especially professionals, teachers, and managers, that their lives were much poorer than those lived across the borders in the West. More than before they compared themselves not with their own past, or with the Soviet Union, but with other Europeans whose lives they thought they knew, through glimpses on television, film, or chance encounters.

Something else had changed, too. The fear of German revanchism and expansionism, so much touted by the Soviets, had ceased having much of an impact on younger eastern Europeans. This was important, especially in Poland. Over a third of Polish territory had been German before the war. But Brandt’s Ostpolitik and the high level of interaction with both Germanies had done away with much of the unease that had existed in the past. It left Poles free to be concerned about their own affairs, and they had much to complain about, especially workers and their families. Poland had fallen behind most other eastern European countries in terms of growth. In 1970, when the government tried to raise prices on ordinary goods, workers protested. “What is communism?” went the joke in Warsaw. “It is when everything will be available in stores. In other words, like it was before the revolution.”

The large-scale workers’ protests in 1970 frightened the Polish government. With Soviet consent, it tried to borrow its way out of the crisis. Just like countries in Latin America, the Poles and other East Bloc governments found western banks and institutions eager to lend money in the 1970s. Poland was seen as a solid borrower: it had a stable system of government and at least some products that could be exported (coal, ships, and agricultural produce). Nobody really considered the inefficiency of production and the shoddiness of the products, which led to nobody outside the East Bloc wanting to buy their goods. The Polish Communists borrowed about $20 billion up to 1977, when the patience of their Western creditors started to run out. The regime had to increase prices, again, in order to pay back its loans.

Like in 1970, Polish workers would not accept worse conditions without a fight. They felt things were bad enough already. And by 1978 they had a new inspiration for their struggle. The deeply Catholic Polish working class that year celebrated the election of a Polish Pope. The first non-Italian elected since the sixteenth century, Karol Cardinal Wojtyła took the name John Paul II. He had been the archbishop of Kraków, a vigorous and athletic man of fifty-eight, a theological conservative who had always been close to workers in his home country. The Communist leaders simply did not dare refuse him permission to visit Poland after his election. More than a quarter of the Polish population saw him in person to celebrate mass during his tour of the country in 1979. “If we accept all that I have dared to affirm in this moment, how many great duties and obligations arise?” the pontiff asked his countrymen. “Are we capable of them?… It is impossible without Christ to understand this nation with its past so full of splendor and also of terrible difficulties.… Let your Spirit descend,” prayed John Paul, “and renew the face of the earth, the face of this land.” His audience chanted: “We want God, we want God.”⁶

In August 1980 the workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk went on strike. Led by the young electrician Lech Wałęsa, the workers occupied the shipyard and demanded improved pay and working conditions. When other factories joined in the strike, the demands were expanded to include free trade unions, freedom of expression, and the release of political prisoners. With strikes spreading and other groups joining the workers, the Polish Communist Party gave in to some of the demands. Desperate to get its working class to cooperate in increasing production, the government felt that it had little choice but to give in. At the end of the month, Communist negotiators had agreed to a new independent trade union, Solidarity, as well as the release of prisoners and most of the workers’ economic demands. The talks inside the shipyard, with Wałęsa and other workers’ leaders challenging the profusely sweating Communist cadre in their suits and ties, were shown live on television. It was a sight most Poles never thought they would live to see.

By 1981 Solidarity had almost ten million members and its own publications and publishing houses. The Communist government tried to keep censorship in place, but with less and less success. The party itself was badly split on how to handle the Solidarity challenge. Some leading members, including the new first secretary, Stanisław Kania, wanted to build a lasting compromise with Solidarity and other non-Communist groups. They wanted all parts of Polish society to be responsible for the dire economic situation the country was in. They still wanted the Communist Party in charge in order to stave off a Soviet intervention. But all other matters were negotiable, at least over time. As could be expected, Moscow and the other Warsaw Pact capitals brought enormous pressure to bear on the Poles. They wanted Kania replaced, Solidarity banned, and censorship expanded. Their support went to the defense minister, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who replaced Kania as first secretary in October 1981.

On 13 December 1981 Jaruzelski introduced martial law and cracked down on Solidarity. Five thousand of its leaders were arrested. The new regime brought back heavy censorship, and military units patrolled the streets. To disgruntled Communist Party members, Jaruzelski claimed that he had introduced martial law because of the clear and immediate risk of a Soviet Red Army invasion. This was almost certainly untrue. When Jaruzelski developed the plan for martial law together with the Soviets, they pushed him to implement it, while making it clear that if the operation failed the Red Army would not intervene to bail him out. After Afghanistan, with economic problems mounting and Superpower tension increasing, the Soviet Union simply could not risk moving their forces into Poland. Andropov had put it in very clear terms to the Moscow Politburo on 10 December:

We cannot risk such a step. We do not intend to introduce troops into Poland. That is the proper position, and we must adhere to it until the end. I do not know how things will turn out in Poland, but even if Poland falls under the control of “Solidarity,” that is the way it will be. And if the capitalist countries pounce on the Soviet Union, and you know they have already reached agreement on a variety of economic and political sanctions, that will be very burdensome for us. We must be concerned above all with our own country and about the strengthening of the Soviet Union.⁷

Perspectives were starting to shift in other eastern European countries, too, though more slowly than in Poland. Hungary under János Kádár had long had the most liberal political regime in the Warsaw Pact. In the 1980s its economy was slowing, and like Poland, it had made up for the shortfall through Western loans. But Hungary also had more economic interaction with the West than any other Soviet bloc country. Since 1976 the Buda Heights, so destroyed in the fighting in 1945, had had its own Budapest Hilton Hotel. Visitors from other eastern European countries used to scramble up the hillside just to gawk at its turrets. Hungarians themselves were relatively free to travel. In 1985 more than five million Hungarians traveled abroad, about a third of them to western Europe. One of them reported later on her experiences: “I was so overwhelmed when I went to the West for the first time that I couldn’t even process all the information I was bombarded with during those three weeks.… In Eastern Europe we had to fight to have the very rights Westerners took almost for granted.… There was fresh food in the markets, even at weekends, and I didn’t have to stand in a long queue to buy a loaf of bread.”⁸

The people of Hungary or Czechoslovakia regarded themselves less and less as “eastern Europeans” left by others for Soviet domination. Instead they began recasting themselves as central Europeans, under occupation by a strange, oriental Soviet culture. If, say, Norway or Portugal were part of the European mainstream, why were not they? In Hungary the opposition was mainly intellectual or commercial. In Czechoslovakia, after 1968 a much harsher dictatorship, the opposition demanded political rights and the undoing of the regime imposed after the Soviet invasion. Charta ’77 was a manifesto of political dissidents, ranging from underground rock bands to leading opposition figures, such as the playwright Václav Havel. It condemned political oppression in Czechoslovakia: “Freedom of public expression is inhibited by the centralized control of all the communication media and of publishing and cultural institutions. No philosophical, political or scientific view or artistic activity that departs ever so slightly from the narrow bounds of official ideology or aesthetics is allowed to be published; no open criticism can be made of abnormal social phenomena; no public defense is possible against false and insulting charges made in official propaganda.”⁹

The Prague rock group Plastic People of the Universe put it more succinctly: “Whoever is now twenty, he wants to vomit with disgust.”¹⁰ The band members were arrested. Havel was arrested, too. He was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment in 1979.

The Soviet and eastern European attacks on dissidents helped delegitimize Marxism-Leninism in the eyes of most people elsewhere. In the USSR the few outspoken political dissidents who existed were imprisoned or exiled. In some cases they were committed to psychiatric hospitals, where they were pumped with drugs intended to make them docile and cooperative. Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet dissident who in 1976 was “exchanged” for the imprisoned Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalán, had spent years in psychiatric institutions. So had General Piotr Grigorenko, a Red Army officer who protested political oppression in the Soviet Union. The physicist Andrei Sakharov, one of the founders of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a dissident body set up to monitor Soviet (non-)compliance with the 1975 Helsinki Accords, was spared such humiliating treatment. But that was only because he was one of the fathers of the Soviet nuclear program and the winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize. Instead Sakharov was sent in internal exile to the city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), where he was kept under strict surveillance and away from the international press. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, read by his wife Elena Bonner, Sakharov stressed “the link between defense of peace and defense of human rights,… [only] the defense of human rights guarantees a solid ground for genuine long-term international cooperation.”¹¹

The East German authorities prided themselves both on economic progress and on sophisticated methods of controlling any potential opposition. But from the late 1970s on it was clear that at least the former of these aims was in trouble. Compared to other countries in the Soviet bloc the GDR was still doing well. Its people had the highest standard of living and the highest productivity. But the all-pervasive secret police, the Stasi (short for State Security Service), which kept individual files on more than a third of all East Germans, reported that all was not well. The curious shortages that people were subjected to (coffee disappeared from the shelves for a while in 1976, bananas and oranges in 1979) made some East Germans unhappy, especially as many of them could watch on television the abundance of goods in West Germany. The Stasi was still able to contain any kind of open opposition and East Germans did, on the whole, obey the government. But the East German leaders knew that they had to improve the economy. As they grumbled among themselves, what the GDR competed against was not Poland or Bulgaria, but the most advanced industrial economy in the Western world, which also happened to be German.

Like most other eastern European countries, the GDR tried to stimulate its economy by getting loans from the West, and especially from West Germany. The East German problem in the 1980s was not, by itself, the level of indebtedness, but the decline in hard currency exports that would make it possible to service this debt. In the 1950s and ’60s East Germany had lots of products, from optics to cars, that could be sold outside the Soviet bloc. These exports slowed in the 1970s. By the 1980s East Germany was entirely outcompeted by southern European and Asian countries that could make better products for a lower price. The East German attempt at using its technological know-how to produce computers for export failed entirely. Nobody wanted big and clunky East Germans machines that were not compatible with anything produced outside the Soviet bloc.

For the East German leaders, keeping détente alive increasingly became a not-too-sophisticated form of blackmail against West Germany. West Germans were allowed to visit the East, but only if they exchanged a certain sum of hard currency into East German marks, worthless outside of the GDR. East Berlin threatened to cut off contacts if West Germany did not provide further loans or agree to economic deals, always with the East German mark rated at parity with the West German deutschmark. The new conservative West German government under Helmut Kohl, who replaced Helmut Schmidt in 1982, continued these concessions to East Berlin. Like Schmidt, Kohl believed that some form of contact was better than no contact. Most shocking of all, the West German government had to pay in hard currency for each East German who was allowed to leave for the West. Not surprising that by the mid-1980s some Germans in the east had started feeling that they, as a people, were quite literally held hostage by a failed government. But almost all of them restricted their complaints to family and close friends alone.

East Germany’s fundamental problem was that it was simply too close to the biggest success story in Europe, the Federal Republic of Germany. And through the FRG, it was too close to the processes of European integration that by the mid-1970s had been swinging into high gear. On its own, compared to countries on the European periphery or outside of Europe, the GDR might still look OK. But compared to the industrial and financial powerhouse in the west, it seemed almost like a failed state. And West Germany was now building on its success to advance further integration among all the capitalist states in Europe, exactly the kind of system that East Germany could not be part of.

After the expansion of the European Community (EC) to include Britain, Ireland, and Denmark in 1973, the European Commission pushed ahead with plans for further integration. Helped by the West German and French governments, plans for direct elections to the European Parliament were passed. So were plans for a single western European market in which people, goods, services, and capital could move freely across borders. Such steps were needed, many European leaders thought, if their countries were not to fall behind the United States and Japan in economic development. While these plans took time to be fully implemented, just moving toward them undoubtedly stimulated European economies, including the West German, which otherwise would have been seen as stagnating (at least compared with the growth of the three previous decades). They also encouraged competition, heightened efficiency, and facilitated the spread of technology. But first and foremost the work to create a union of European states signaled the strength of a common set of ideas, which had not always been visible in European cooperation before. In their Stuttgart Declaration from 1983, western European leaders committed themselves “to create a united Europe, which is more than ever necessary in order to meet the dangers of the world situation, capable of assuming the responsibilities incumbent on it by virtue of its political role, its economic potential and its manifold links with other peoples.”¹²

The sense that the intensification of the Cold War created a pressure to speed up both the form and the extent of European integration was visible in all western European capitals. Greece was fast-forwarded to become a full member of the EC in 1981. Spain and Portugal joined in 1986. These were to a high extent Cold War decisions (which US leaders, by the way, very strongly supported). In being offered EC membership, the countries of southern Europe signed up to a form of socially responsible capitalism, in which they would receive aid if, but only if, they forwent the revolutionary alternative. And aid they did get, both before and after they became full members of the EC. By the late 1980s these poorest countries in Europe were seeing a massive lift in enterprise, welfare, and average income. I remember a Portuguese farmer from impoverished Alentejo explaining to me in 1988 why he no longer supported the Communist Party: European aid, he said, made hope of a better life possible.

The expansion of the EC to encompass southern Europe was of enormous significance for the Cold War. For eastern Europeans it held out the promise that they, too, could join a European community. For people in Prague or Budapest it was difficult to understand why farmers in Alentejo or fishermen in Crete could benefit from European integration while they could not. This perception was a time bomb under Soviet rule in eastern Europe. It signaled that the alternative to a division of Europe into power blocs might not be war or dislocation, but a world in which countries joined up to decide their own future without Superpower control. The worst enemy of Communist control was not NATO military maneuvers, but the promise of affluence when walls through Europe were removed.

Another consequence of the speeding up of the European integration process was the expansion of regional identities. Instead of focusing solely on the state they lived within, more and more Europeans began thinking of themselves as members of regions that either transcended state borders or stood out within these borders. German-speaking Italians in South Tyrol could link up more closely to people on the other side of the Austrian border. French-speaking Walloons in Belgium connected to their counterparts in France. In Spain Catalans and Basques demanded recognition as separate nationalities. Some of this led to conflict, but in most cases the concept of there being a common European integration process within which smaller nationalities could find their place even without full national independence helped ameliorate the tension between regions and states.

The question, however, was what would happen where Cold War division lines separated distinct European regions. By the mid-1980s the many links that had historically connected Bratislava, Budapest, and Vienna, three old capitals at the heart of Europe, became easier to see. Writers in all three countries began referring to their location in central Europe, even if the Cold War borders that separated them were still in place. In the Balkans identity issues were becoming increasingly complex. Hungarians in Romania were protesting the harsh treatment they received from the Ceauşescu government. Albanians in Yugoslavia had begun demanding independent rights. And elsewhere inside Yugoslavia agitation for the rights of the individual nations, Croats and Slovenes especially, had been stepped up. Some believed that such problems could only be solved within a wider framework for European integration. But so far the Cold War stood in the way, and the capacities of the European institutions were in no way up to the task of breaking down such barriers on their own.

Not all governments in Europe saw their interests served by a deepening integration in all areas, as the Stuttgart Declaration had called for. Margaret Thatcher, the free market ideologue who had become British prime minister in 1979, was a strong supporter of a western European common market. She also believed that the EC could help “realizing our common European strength to ensure the further spread of democracy and freedom and justice,” as she put it to the European Parliament in 1986.¹³ But she was profoundly skeptical of further political integration and feared both for British sovereignty and its “special relationship” with the United States. The latter was mirrored in the close personal relationship Thatcher had with Ronald Reagan, who other western European leaders, at least at first, regarded as a dogmatic dimwit.

Thatcher’s status was augmented by her successful war against Argentina for control of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. It was a conflict that in the eyes of the rest of the world, at least, came out of nowhere. After the Argentinian military regime took over the British-controlled islands of roughly 1,800 people in 1982, Thatcher sent a full British naval expedition eight thousand miles to reconquer them. The Reagan Administration, focused on the Cold War and worried about the stability of the Argentinian military regime against its Leftist challengers, wanted time for mediation. “I think an effort to show we’re all still willing to seek a settlement,” Reagan told the British prime minister on the telephone, “… would undercut the effort of… the Leftists in South America who are actively seeking to exploit the crisis.” Thatcher would have nothing of it. “This is [about] democracy and our island, and the very worst thing for democracy would be if we failed now,” she told the president.¹⁴ The British took back the islands, with almost a thousand lives lost, most of them Argentinians. The war did little damage to the British-American relationship, but it did remind Reagan that there were other conflicts that needed handling besides the Cold War.

French leaders’ biggest concern with the European integration process was how to prevent West Germany from becoming too predominant politically as well as economically. France had been a driver for European integration, and this approach continued under François Mitterrand, the Socialist who was elected president in 1981. Mitterrand at first seemed to set out on a more Left-wing course for France, and to the consternation of the Americans included several Communists in his government. But after his first year and a half in power, with the French economy in real trouble, the new president switched tack. Instead of talking about tax increases and nationalizations, Mitterrand moved toward fiscal and monetary prudence in an attempt to make French industry more competitive within Europe. The Communists were quietly dropped from his government, and the concept of a French Left alternative to “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism went out the window. All over western Europe, Mitterrand’s Right turn was of great significance. It meant that a free market social and economic model would be in the driver’s seat in an expanded EC, even if there were still marked differences between Mitterrand’s France and Thatcher’s Britain.

It is tempting to see the increase in small-scale terrorist activities in western Europe in the late 1970s as a reaction against the end of the sharp Left/Right divides in official politics. The small minorities of the extreme Left or Right who believed that the postwar western European states were illegitimate and exploitative had moved toward terrorism in the 1960s. But it was only a decade later that groups such as the West German Rote Armee Fraktion, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, and the Italian Brigate Rosse were firmly established. The spectacular acts of terrorism that they, and their rivals on the Right, carried out up to the end of the 1980s were probably a sign of how such groups were losing out within ordinary political competition. But even so, the murders of the head of the German Employers’ Union Hanns Martin Schleyer by Baader-Meinhof in 1977 and of the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro by the Brigate Rosse the following year shook up politics all over Europe.

But much worse for East-West relations were the suspicions in Bonn and elsewhere of collaboration between the Communist regimes in the East and terrorists in the West. Several Baader-Meinhof terrorists received military training in the East, and the East German Stasi supplied them with information about West German attempts at capturing them. East Germany and Bulgaria also facilitated links between western European terrorists and extremist movements in the Middle East and Japan, such as the Palestinian PFLP-GC (the Abu Nidal group) and the Japanese Red Army, a tiny terrorist organization operating in the Middle East. This was a dangerous game. Some eastern European and Soviet officials may have believed that it would help them destabilize societies in the West. In reality it reminded western leaders of the illegitimate character of the eastern regimes themselves and helped make the Cold War more risky.

Western European terrorism also helped governments undermine other challenges to their policies. But attempting to taint young people’s protest movements of the 1970s and ’80s with smears of terrorist links backfired in the longer run. Especially after Ronald Reagan became US president, groups that advocated nuclear disarmament moved into the mainstream, as did environmental movements. In October 1983, more than three million western Europeans participated in rallies against NATO missile deployments. In London and in Bonn at least 250,000 people marched, under slogans such as “Ban the Bomb” and “Stop Nuclear Suicide.” The West German Green Party, which was founded in 1980, linked disarmament with ending environmental destruction on both sides of the Iron Curtain. They got significant support for their positions: two-thirds of all West Germans polled in 1983 opposed new NATO missiles in Europe under any circumstance.¹⁵

What was new with the western European protest movement in the 1980s was that it was increasingly directed against militarism and oppression both in the West and the East. The campaign group European Nuclear Disarmament (END), launched in 1980, demanded the withdrawal of Soviet SS-20 missiles as well as saying no to new NATO weapons. What was worse from a Soviet perspective, many of the END leaders had close contacts with dissidents in eastern Europe. E. P. Thompson, a veteran British peace campaigner and former Communist, declared that “there is an immediate link between real disarmament and the development of democratic movements in the Socialist states. Furthermore, the creation of democratic movements in them is a precondition for forcing the Socialist states to disarm.”¹⁶ In the 1980s, the European Left seemed to have rediscovered the link between rights and liberties and Left-wing politics. The Helsinki process gave nuclear protesters an opportunity to meet with dissidents such as Havel in Czechoslovakia or with disenchanted members of the Communist Party in Hungary. They discovered that they had much in common on a broad set of concerns.

One such issue was the environmental degradation that the Cold War in Europe had contributed to. Not only were military industries big polluters, but nuclear energy, toxic waste, and deforestation were in many people’s minds connected to the Cold War competition for production. Political parties such as the Greens and movements such as END made these links in their campaigns, sometimes criticizing the East as much as the West. But environmental criticism of the Cold War also found its way into the political mainstream. The youth wings of all the main West German parties believed that East-West agreements on “common security” were a precondition for solving acute environmental problems. Even the West German Christian Democrats, now in power under Helmut Kohl, in its 1984 program saw the reduction in polluting industries and the universal use of catalytic converters in cars as part of Germany’s core international policies.¹⁷

But it was not only Europeans who were concerned about the wider effects of the Cold War. To a degree that would have astonished his European detractors, US president Ronald Reagan had begun worrying that nuclear war could break out by accident, or that the Soviet Union could feel pushed into launching a first strike on the West. Reagan believed that the United States was winning the Cold War. A sunny optimist by nature, the president felt that America’s greatness had been restored by his election and by his actions during his first two years in office, including the military buildup. He also believed that the rest of the world was gradually turning in America’s direction, toward free markets and democracy. Any nuclear conflict would destroy these natural processes, Reagan thought. Especially after the Able Archer affair, the president began thinking more seriously about how conflict could be avoided. “I feel the Soviet are so defense minded, so paranoid about being attacked,” Reagan wrote in his diary, “that without being in any way soft on them we ought to tell them no one here has any intention of doing anything like that. What the hell have they got that anyone would want?”¹⁸

Ever since he became president, Reagan had been preoccupied with finding ways in which the United States could be protected against a nuclear attack. He found the principles of mutually assured destruction to be morally contentious and personally repugnant. The thought of himself ever having to use the nuclear launch codes horrified Reagan, who as president avoided most briefings or simulations in which he would have to do so. Instead, the president in 1983 commissioned a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which would focus on preventing nuclear missiles from ever reaching the US mainland. Dubbed “Star Wars” by its detractors, these plans imagined the use of space-based lasers to destroy incoming missiles. Even some of the president’s own science advisers suggested that it would not work, or at least not within a generation or so. But Reagan persisted, pouring billions into his new pet program.

SDI horrified the Soviets. Not only did it break with the principles they had got so used to during the SALT negotiations, and therefore, in their view, made the world a more dangerous place; but they also knew that their side did not have the technology to compete and could not afford massive new investments in science and technology in order to catch up with the United States. Like their US counterparts, most Soviet experts doubted that SDI was implementable, at least anytime soon. But Soviet leaders could not take the risk of the Americans getting such weapons without any response. Such retaliation, most experts believed, could only come through new offensive technologies or through massive increases in the throw weight of Soviet missiles, well beyond what the SALT agreements would allow for.

Moscow’s reaction to Reagan’s dreams of a space-based interceptor program against nuclear missiles exemplified the widening gap in technology between West and East. By the mid-1980s the West was ahead in most fields, from satellites to fiber-optic cables to computers. These advances were made possible by alliances between government funding—often military—and commercial companies that delivered the goods. Soviet scientists and engineers had no problem understanding the progress that was made in the West. They could probably have delivered the same results for the Soviet Union, if there had been a system in place flexible enough to put such technology into production. It was at the production end that the Soviet Union was lagging behind, by design as much as by inertia.

Satellites provide a good example. Up to the 1970s the Soviet Union was ahead in satellite technology. Its Ekran satellites delivered television to millions of Soviet citizens in Siberia and the Pacific provinces well before any such system existed in the West. But the Soviets, intentionally, did not see satellite TV as a means for commercial purposes, and its international propaganda broadcasts were more likely to make viewers turn their TVs off than on. In the early 1980s American satellite stations began sending US news, sports, series, and movies across the globe, in many cases accessible for anyone who could afford a satellite dish. The message of consumerism was an integral part of the new TV stations’ appeal. And it was eagerly received by most of those who could receive it.

The successes of commercial television indicated that in many parts of the world people’s priorities were beginning to change. This turn toward consumerism went along with fundamental changes in the global economy that got underway in the 1970s. As we have seen, the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of fixed rates, regulated trade, and capital controls led to a sense of crisis in the West, and especially in the United States. But it also reflected a relative improvement in the economic position of others, above all in Asia. All over the globe, except in the Communist countries, people were reinventing themselves as consumers of products that earlier on had either not existed or been out of reach for anyone but the top layers of society. From clothes to electronics, from cosmetics to air conditioners, prices fell as competition and the number of potential consumers both increased. Not surprisingly, container-shipping capacity almost tripled during the 1980s.

Much of what happened in the global economy after the early 1970s privileged the United States. Although its economic position as a country relative to others continued to slip, its position at the center of the world’s financial system continued. The dollar remained the world currency, and freed from previous constraints, the US government made sure its value remained low in order to encourage both US exports and foreign investments in the United States. But the United States could also draw advantages from the globalization of trade and finance in the 1980s. US banks and, especially from the mid-1980s, US investment companies could easily invest in foreign markets, knowing that they had access to the one currency most other people wanted. New financial instruments and technologies from the United States predominated worldwide.

The global financial revolution of the 1980s transformed the world economy and thereby changed the landscape of one of the main battlefields of the Cold War. The massive increase in investments, often in forms that nobody would have thought of before the 1970s, was made possible by a combination of government deregulation and advances in information technologies. Well before electronic information became a consumer staple, financial services put it to work in providing investors with real-time information on markets and economic trends. The combination of telecommunication and computing power—what we today know as the Internet—was first developed in the United States for military purposes. But it was as revolutionary for financial services as for defense networks, and it tied the world of capital together around American inventions and American principles.

The turn toward consumerism outside of the United States also helped US businesses. Makers of more traditional goods often complained that they were outcompeted by cheap imports, and even top-notch electronics and cars were often produced better and cheaper outside the United States. But the ideas, designs, and technologies on which they were built were often American. Personal computers, for instance, were mainly based on American (or at least US-owned) technology, giving rise to companies such as Apple and Microsoft. What seemed a revitalization of the world’s hunger for American products, including its music and film, helped sustain Reagan’s rhetoric about freedom and choice being quintessential American values. By the mid-1980s neoconservative politics upheld neoliberal economics, and vice versa.

The United States did not create globalization, or consumerism for that matter, as economic weapons in the Cold War. But the Reagan Administration did use its influence over major financial institutions to limit the economic room for maneuver of anyone outside of Europe suspected of choosing a socialist development model allied with the Soviet Union. The access to credit for countries such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola, or Vietnam was next to nonexistent, forcing them to rely on support from the Soviets and eastern Europeans, which was less and less forthcoming. Even more important, however, for the opponents of capitalism worldwide was the sense that global trends and norms were moving in opposition to them and their ideals. Margaret Thatcher’s mantra that “there is no alternative” to capitalism in its neoliberal form seemed to be a self-fulfilling prophesy, including for those who resented its implications.

Even though these sentiments had come on rather suddenly and would turn out to be a passing phase, at least in their most doctrinaire form, they were remarkably powerful by the mid-1980s. To begin with, both Reagan and Thatcher seemed to struggle to get control of the economy, and their monetarist remedies were widely ridiculed. The 1982–83 recession was the deepest the United States had experienced since the late 1950s. What created the recovery, it could be argued, was less monetarist principles than massive US deficit spending, mainly for military purposes, combined with the creation of global markets, not least in financial terms. But this did not matter to those who believed that monetarism and other forms of neoliberal economics would save the world from the threat of Communism and from the insidious introduction of socialism in the West. Neither did it matter much to them that Reagan borrowed more money than all his predecessors combined, or that the cost of public services grew significantly during Thatcher’s time in power. Their message far overshadowed their practices. And that message—that individual freedom mattered more than society’s needs—resonated far beyond those who had ever heard about monetarist policies.