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The world had changed tremendously in the 1970s and early 1980s, and in the late 1980s it changed even more. New technologies began to transform the way many people got information, did business, or thought about the future. New forms of economic practices, centered on capital and investment, spread worldwide. New centers of industrial production, especially in Asia, began to take over some of the functions that Europe and North America had developed for more than a century. And, as we have already seen in the Soviet Union, political ideologies also began to change, slowly at first, but then more and more rapidly. By the time the Cold War ended, the world had already changed in ways that made the global ideological conflict less relevant for a large number of people, while other conflicts—ethnic, religious, national, or economic—had become more important.
These late-twentieth-century global transformations implied many things at once. In North America and Europe they meant the spread of market practices less encumbered by social welfare provisions. As a result, when these practices spread further, to countries in which they had so far played less of a role for the individual—the Middle East, India, China, southeast Asia—they were presented as inflexible and unceasing: the harder edge of capitalism. The amazing spread of information through film and television, including global news broadcasts and satellite connections, confronted people with lives of alternatives and affluence in forms few had seen before. To most people, obviously, the lifestyles of Dynasty or Baywatch were quite literally undreamed of. But the global spread of daytime television also helped to put in sharp relief the lives that people actually lived across the globe. And by 1989 many people wanted a better life for themselves and their families, over and beyond what the great socialist and collectivist projects could offer.
The information explosion contributed significantly to the end of the Cold War, especially in the sense that people’s priorities shifted. But a better informed public is not always a more knowledgeable one. Sometimes a sudden flourish of information that immediately and demonstrably contradicts values you have long held dear can lead to cynicism and callousness. Likewise, the breakdown of social structures held in place by authoritarian leaders can create dramatic redefinitions of purpose both within and among preexisting communities. The world experienced all of this—from the Soviet Union to Yugoslavia to China to Latin America—as the Cold War came to an end. Although the conclusion of the global Cold War facilitated the resolution of old confrontations, it also gave rise to new forms of tension worldwide.
The global changes of the 1980s contributed to a general crisis for socialist states. This was not just an eastern European crisis, it was global, in the sense that new socialist states such as Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Mozambique, or Vietnam also came under tremendous pressure to modify or abandon their political choices. As we have already seen, some of this came out of the global antirevolutionary offensive of the Reagan Administration. But the crisis went deeper than that. And in many ways the initial changes in socialist countries of the Global South preceded the changes that took place in eastern Europe. China is of course the big example. But even countries that were aligned with the Soviet Union in the early 1980s began to introduce incentives and markets into their economies. Mozambique is a case in point. By 1982–83 small-scale private enterprise was allowed. In 1986 the country signed a deal with the International Monetary Fund, which, in return for loans and investment, privatized major industries, reduced state spending, and deregulated trade as well as the general economy. In Vietnam, the government had already begun liberalizing trade and agricultural production in 1981. By 1986, before there were any major changes in the USSR and eastern Europe, Vietnam introduced the Đŏi Mői (Renovation) program, which brought market principles to much of the economy.
These changes away from the plan and toward the market happened at the same time as the beginning of a major shift in the center of the world’s economic activity from the North Atlantic states to eastern Asia. This transition is a long process, which is still ongoing. But its origins, at least in a full-scale form, can be traced back to the decade before the Cold War ended. The shift had many causes. The global spread of capital and technology was one. Developments in transport and patterns of consumption were others. The easy exploitation of reasonably well-skilled pools of labor under authoritarian, market-friendly regimes in Asia also stimulated capitalist growth. But perhaps most important was the unprecedented access to markets in Western countries that made export-led models of growth possible. And the latter was a direct consequence of the way the Cold War was fought in its final stage, when the United States built crucial alliances with Asian countries to keep the Soviet Union and its allies at bay.
The massive expansion of global markets coincided with the expansion of US power globally. Contrary to what many had thought in the 1970s (and would think again in the 2010s), the reorientation of the world’s key nodes of industrial production away from the United States did little to harm America’s centrality in world affairs. Since many of the ideas, practices, technologies, and products that spread worldwide were in their origins American, the United States appeared to be more important than ever. And the massive deficit spending the Reagan Administration undertook, mainly for military purposes, stimulated both domestic consumption and foreign investments in the United States. It also, of course, expanded the American position as by far the most powerful country in terms of its armed forces.
The US economic benefits from globalization would, in hindsight, stand out as a moment more than a general trend. But it was enormously significant because of the timing: the full extent of US global hegemony was at its peak when the Cold War came to an end. This is, of course, different from arguing that US power, pure and simple, ended the Cold War. But the two are obviously related. The same global developments that undermined the socialist countries and that made eastern Asia a hub for the further expansion of capitalism also made the Reagan expansion possible. And it was this expansion that convinced many, including former enemies, that US economic practices on most things from marketing, to corporate management, to financial (de)regulation were worth emulating. The global transformations at the end of the Cold War therefore seemed to privilege the United States in ways that former US leaders could hardly believe was achievable.
THE CLEAREST EVIDENCE for the centrality of the United States could, ironically enough, be found in China. After the Maoist regime had made anti-Americanism the staple of its foreign policy and had broken with the Soviets to a large extent because Khrushchev attempted to stabilize relations with the Americans, Mao himself toward the end of his life began cooperating with the United States to improve China’s security. Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s successor as Chinese leader, took the cooperation with the Americans much further than Mao in his wildest imagination would have thought possible. Deng’s aims were mostly economic. He believed that China’s technological backwardness weakened it and made it a more likely victim for Soviet aggression. But he also wanted to improve the standard of living for the Chinese people. As his plane took off for his first visit to the United States in 1979, Deng instructed his advisers in what he saw as a key lesson of the twentieth century: “Whoever work with the Americans will gain, while those who try to oppose them will fail.”1
Deng Xiaoping was born in 1904 in a small village in northeastern Sichuan Province. He had worked in France in his youth, where he joined the Communist Party, and later served the Comintern in Moscow. Back in China he worked loyally with Mao Zedong, even though he admitted that he found some of the Chairman’s more recondite plans difficult to understand. Purged twice as a “Rightist” during the Cultural Revolution, Deng came back with a vengeance after Mao’s death in 1976. A fiery man with an iron work ethic, Deng had been dubbed “little red pepper” by his workmates in France. This was not only because he stood barely five feet tall and liked his home province’s spicy cuisine; it was also because he was, always, a man in a hurry, for himself and for his country. By 1978 the leaders of the Maoist Left, including the Chairman’s wife, Jiang Qing, had been arrested, and China put on a new course toward economic reform.
To begin with, Deng and his advisers had few clear ideas about how to change China. What they did know was that the past had been a disaster. The common realization of how bad things were was in a way their most important weapon. Instead of catching up with the advanced economies, China in the 1960s and ’70s had fallen further and further behind. It was as if all their efforts, all the intensity of the political campaigns, all the willingness to sacrifice for the common good, especially among young people, had led to nothing. On his visit to the United States, Deng saw an affluence and abundance that was almost beyond comprehension. He could not sleep at night, he reported to his colleagues. The thought of how much China had to do to catch up kept him awake.
Deng’s greatest strength in moving China forward was his willingness to experiment. And unlike Gorbachev in Moscow ten years later, the Chinese leader had something to build on that was outside of the Plan. As Communist authority fragmented during the Cultural Revolution, a few communes and work collectives in the southern provinces had clandestinely begun to introduce market mechanisms in their business practices. They had done so not so much to earn lots of money but rather out of sheer self-preservation. If the Maoist campaigns were to return, they thought, they had to have something to live on. In the 1960s their children had died of hunger. They were determined that should not happen again. By 1974 some of these units had set up barter agreements and indirect credit arrangements, as well as different forms of fee-charging services. In border areas some units engaged in smuggling and currency fraud. Some agricultural communes allowed families to sell produce they had cultivated themselves, and keep the profit.
This was the market as conscious rebellion against a system that simply did not deliver. It was small-scale and easily snuffed out. In cases when inspectors or zealots caught those responsible, they could go to prison for years. But when the central government, slowly and tentatively, began experimenting with market concepts after 1978, these people were ready. With others who had similar ideas, the getihu (private traders, or, perhaps better, guerrilla entrepreneurs) began diversifying and investing. After 1981 many of their activities were legalized, even though for years some of what they did was in a legal gray zone. Most of them did not mind, as long as they could earn money without being threatened with prison or execution.
In Beijing, China’s reformist leaders did not make policy with these people in mind, though the getihu represented the kind of dynamism that some of them would like to see more of. Deng’s reform plans had three main aims: to get access to modern technology, to increase production, and to keep the Communist Party in power unopposed. Under these main aims, there were distinct subsections. Deng wanted to increase exports (to earn hard currency) and strengthen the military (to guard against a Soviet attack and keep the party in power). He also wanted to decentralize economic decision-making. One of the key targets for Deng’s ridicule was the Beijing bureaucrat who now, safe from Cultural Revolution upheavals, simply added another half percent to planned output for each year.
But the road to reform was in no way straightforward. The party was faction-ridden and politically divided. Many of Deng’s colleagues, not surprisingly, thought that models for socialist China should be sought in socialist Yugoslavia or Hungary, not in the capitalist West. Allowing private enterprise was especially difficult. The Chinese name for the Communist Party, Gongchandang, literally means “the Party of Common Property.” Under Mao, party leaders had spent years denouncing market experiments in other socialist countries. To now turn around and endorse such practices in China was hard. But Deng drove them on. “We permit some people and some regions to become prosperous first, for the purpose of achieving common prosperity faster,” he told CBS’s Mike Wallace in 1986.2
Deng’s first steps, beyond allowing small-scale private enterprise in trade and services, was to decollectivize agriculture. He dissolved the People’s Communes and introduced a household responsibility system. This meant that families were allocated a plot of land from which they had to deliver a set output to the state, but were free to trade any surplus privately. Agricultural production shot up. Farmers started to save money. Sometimes they pooled their money to start small enterprises in their villages or the nearest town. State-owned enterprises were allowed to sell surplus products and set their own prices for them. Foreign investment was encouraged in special economic zones, where foreign companies could invest freely and retrieve their profits, as long as they were willing to share their technological know-how with Chinese companies.
While Deng was a daring experimenter in economic policy, he was much less certain in international affairs. He knew that he needed a good relationship with the United States and linked Chinese foreign policy closely to that of Washington. Having imbibed Mao’s perception of the Soviet Union as a deadly threat to China, Deng believed that working with the Americans provided protection as well as economic opportunities. And the United States was happy to oblige. For both Carter and Reagan, China was the key Cold War ally, equal if not greater in importance than western Europe or Japan. Having at first been shocked at Chinese poverty and underdevelopment, the Americans assisted growth through loans, technology transfers, and access to foreign markets. If China was to work with the United States to put pressure on the Soviet Union, then its domestic situation had to improve.
The beginning of the Chinese economic expansion, which later was to produce such earthshaking consequences for the global economy as a whole, was therefore intimately connected to how the Cold War was fought. As the market took hold in China, and as the overall economy began expanding, the Chinese attraction to Western, and especially American, methods of production, management, and marketing also increased. By the late 1980s, Chinese society was already a very different place from the wearisome, terrorized setting it had been a decade earlier. Some people suffered as social security provisions faded. But more people wanted to make use of the new opportunities that Deng’s reforms offered. Even though most of the economy was still state-controlled, and the Communist Party refused to give up its monopoly on power, China had started a transformation that marked a definitive break with socialist planning models. Its choices were strongly to influence other socialist countries that wanted higher growth through participation in the global economy.
Still, China was not the main focus of those who looked for economic models for the future in the 1980s. Next door, in Japan, an already developed economy was experiencing continuous high growth rates of around 5 percent. At the beginning of the decade, the Harvard social scientist Ezra Vogel had argued that Japan, in many respects, was already the number one country globally. Japan, he argued, “has dealt more successfully with more of the basic problems of post-industrial society than any other country.”3 Comparing the influence of global powers eight years later, the Yale historian Paul Kennedy saw Japan as “enormously productive and prosperous, and getting much more so.”4 It was hard not to conclude that the future, at least in some ways, belonged to Japan.
The argument that Japan had achieved its extraordinary position in spite of (some would say because of) not prioritizing military affairs was tremendously powerful in the debates of the 1980s. It implied that what made countries successful in the late twentieth century was not military power but economic achievement. It also implied that an export-led process of economic growth could lift countries not just out of poverty, but could help them to overtake the major powers of the world. In 1990 Japan’s GDP per capita was higher than that of the United States, and almost seven times higher than that of the USSR. Not surprisingly, other countries wanted to learn from the Japanese model.
A main reason why Japan could concentrate on its own economic growth was of course that the United States not only protected the country militarily but also had facilitated its access to international markets, first and foremost its own. And even though the Reagan Administration publicly voiced its displeasure with Japan’s trading practices, it was very careful to not let economic issues endanger the close alliance between the two countries. This was particularly true after Nakasone Yasuhiro became Japanese prime minister in 1982. Nakasone wanted to keep the US alliance in place but was more of a nationalist both in political and economic terms than his Liberal Democratic Party predecessors. He wanted to improve Japan’s relations with China and the rest of mainland Asia, not least to improve the prospects for Japan’s exports if the United States should prove less amenable as a market in the future. By 1987 Japan was China’s largest trading partner and the second-biggest foreign investor, after the United States. Japan also had extraordinary importance for China as a supplier of loans and technology. No wonder Deng Xiaoping underlined the importance of the relationship while meeting with Nakasone. “The historical friendly relations between Japan and China must continue onto the 21st century, and then to the 22nd, 23rd, 33rd, and 43rd century,” Deng said. “Currently, Japan and China do not have urgent problems. The development of Japan-China relations into the 21st century is more important than all other issues.”5
But by the 1980s Japan and China were not the only Asian economies that grew. Most impressive in terms of growth were the east and southeast Asian “little tigers.” In 1987 Hong Kong’s per capita GDP grew 12.1 percent, South Korea’s 11.2 percent, Taiwan’s 11 percent, and Singapore’s 9.1 percent. All of them had market-oriented economies and export-led industrial growth, with a strong element of state guidance of the overall economy. In other words, they looked a bit like Japan (even though all of them were different in their own ways) but were very unlike the centralized planned economies of the socialist world. None of the little tigers had been expected by economists to do well in international competition; they had few resources and they were far away from most of their markets. But the 1970s had positioned them to take advantage of the changes in the global economy in the decade that followed. They all had well-educated populations, low production costs, and well-managed, ambitious companies. Their businessmen already had commercial contacts in the United States and western Europe, with which their countries had been allied in the Cold War. The little tigers were well placed to roam.
The little big tigers, South Korea and Taiwan, also benefitted enormously from the social and political stability created by successful transitions to democracy. Up to the late Cold War era both had been military dictatorships supported, at least indirectly, by the United States. Thousands of people had died in the struggle for democratic rights. But as the Cold War waned and international tension in the region declined, both South Korea and Taiwan moved to forms of democratic government, the former in 1987 and the latter four years later. The transitions were initiated by the regimes themselves, in part because they believed that their countries would be stronger if they were more democratic. Their gamble that democracy would create better laws and institutions paid off. Both countries are today among the wealthiest in the world.
With the exception of the city-state of Singapore, southeast Asia had not benefitted much from the global changes of the 1970s. Part of the reason was the ongoing wars in Indochina, where Vietnam went almost straight from a war against the United States to a war against the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. No other part of the world suffered more, and for longer, as a result of Cold War conflicts. And the suffering there continued into the 1980s, mainly as a result of Reagan’s Third World strategy. In one of the most perverse twists of the Cold War, the remnants of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, who were fighting the Vietnam-supported government in Cambodia, survived up to 1991 thanks to US and Chinese backing. Hitting back at Vietnam for its alliance with the Soviet Union was the main purpose of this nefarious partnership, but it was also a way for Reagan to tell the Chinese that he was serious about containing the Soviets on the ground. The result was more misery for the Cambodians, and also an undeclared border war between Vietnam and Thailand, from where most of the Cambodian opposition operated.
The perceived threat from a heavily militarized Vietnam made the anti-Communist countries in southeast Asia pull more closely together. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which had been set up in 1967, aimed at ensuring “their stability and security from external interference in any form or manifestation in order to preserve their national identities in accordance with the ideals and aspirations of their peoples.”6 But in reality this had meant working closely with the United States against what the leaders of these countries saw as Soviet and Chinese threats. In the 1980s, however, Deng Xiaoping managed to turn generations of distrust between China and conservative southeast Asian leaders around. As the economic interaction between China and southeast Asia grew, the diplomatic relationship also became closer. By 1985 it was clear that Vietnam was facing coordinated pressure from the north and the south to withdraw from Cambodia.
The Vietnamese leadership’s response to this challenge was to deepen reform at home and to prepare to end its military presence in the neighboring countries. Even before Gorbachev was elected in the USSR, the new generation of leaders in Hanoi realized that the Soviet Union would only be of limited value to them in standing up to foreign pressure. The Đ
i M
i reforms, which liberalized the Vietnamese economy in the late 1980s and gave significant room for private enterprise, was built on Deng’s experiments in China but even more so on the experience of the main ASEAN countries. In a move unprecedented for any Communist state, Vietnam increasingly based its negotiations for a withdrawal from Cambodia on the need to draw closer to ASEAN. The first meetings were held in Jakarta, and by 1989 the Vietnamese had made it clear that they would withdraw unilaterally irrespective of the squabbling among the various Cambodian factions. By September 1989 all Vietnamese forces had left. By 1992 Vietnam had a Treaty of Amity and Cooperation with ASEAN and had also normalized its relations with China.
In the early 1980s India also began to step further away from the Cold War. Granted, India had always been an uncomfortable customer at the Cold War table, intent on setting its own rules for its foreign engagements. But since the 1960s it had increasingly come to see its links with the Soviet Union as important to its national security. When Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1980, she began a gradual loosening of the ties to Moscow. Part of this was in response to the renewed intensity of the Cold War. Gandhi did not want India to be seen as too tied to the USSR as matters heated up. In spite of her abhorrence of Islamism and sympathy with the secular reform aims of the Communist Afghan government, she was uneasy at the effects of the Soviet invasion. In particular, the Indian prime minister was concerned with the unprecedented US support for Pakistan that the invasion produced. In her meetings with President Reagan in 1982, Gandhi went out of her way to stress that India wanted good relations with the United States, and that she wanted the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan.
But India’s new rebalancing of its foreign relations came up against Reagan’s insistence on providing ever more advanced military aid to Pakistan. After Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984, the new prime minister, her son Rajiv Gandhi, began seeing Gorbachev as the answer to India’s foreign policy dilemmas. Here was a new Soviet leader who deemphasized strict ideological concerns and placed economic development at the core of his foreign policy agenda. Rajiv Gandhi saw, earlier than most, some of the transformation of the global economy that was going on, and wanted India to go through its own perestroika, giving more room to markets, private initiative, and economic globalization. He believed Gorbachev to be a kindred spirit. The Delhi Declaration the two signed in 1986 shows more Indian influence than Soviet:
1. In the nuclear age, mankind must develop a new political thinking and a new concept of the world that provides sound guarantees for the survival of mankind.
2. The world we have inherited belongs to present and future generations alike—hence we must give priority to universal human values.
3. Human life must be acknowledged [as] the supreme value.
4. Non-violence must become the basis of human co-existence.7
Though Gorbachev and Gandhi may have been right that the abolition of the Cold War would lead to a more peaceful world, other events in Asia did not exactly point in that direction. The war between Iraq and Iran that broke out in 1980 has been called the first post–Cold War war, and this is correct as far as the lack of ideological motives are concerned. The Iraqi attack on Iran was largely motivated by the prospect of territorial gain and the fear of Iranian collusion with Iraq’s minority Shia Muslims. The Soviets, who had been big supporters of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, told the Iraqis they did not see much sense or meaning in the war. Moscow was afraid that the Iraqi attack would push Iran back into the arms of the United States. The Reagan Administration, on the other hand, did not warm to either of the two belligerents, though it was more concerned about the prospects of Iranian expansion than anything Saddam was doing. One Administration official is said to have quipped that it was a pity that both sides could not lose. Meanwhile the war developed into a form of confessional conflict, with Sunni Arabs battling Shia Persians. Almost a million people died in a needless, aimless struggle, in which the two sides took turns in having the upper hand and the only people to prosper were European and Asian arms manufacturers.
The slow end to the Cold War brought little but misery to the Middle East. In Africa the situation was very similar to begin with, but ended with some rays of hope. Since the 1960s Superpower interventionism, projects of European racial supremacy, and misguided high modern development concepts had wreaked havoc with the continent. For most of the 1980s this situation continued. In southern Africa the white supremacist regime in South Africa continued to wage war against its neighbors and oppress the black majority. The United States assisted the survival of the regime through trade and investment, and by opposing international sanctions. In Zaire (Congo) Mobutu continued his rampant exploitation of his own people, supported through a Cold War partnership with Washington. And in Ethiopia the officers of the Dergue clung to their project of socialist transformation, assisted by the USSR, while their country slowly fell to pieces around them. Elsewhere, military dictatorships abounded. Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings took power in Ghana in 1979, aged thirty-two. Master Sergeant Samuel Doe did the same in Liberia the following year, aged twenty-nine. It was not a pretty picture.
In southern Africa the situation was especially acute. After their debacle in Angola in 1975–76, where they were defeated by a combination of local and Cuban forces, the apartheid regime in South Africa withdrew into the areas it controlled militarily. The new prime minister, P. W. Botha, was a racial ideologue, who believed that white South Africa was better off the less contact it had with the rest of the continent. For him, the vesting Suid-Afrika (fortress South Africa) was what was important, not what his supporters disparagingly termed “civilizing blacks elsewhere.” In 1979 Botha helped the British and Americans push the white settler regime in Rhodesia to accept the Lancaster House Agreement, by which the country became majority-governed Zimbabwe in 1980. Their assumption, later proved correct, was that the election winner, Robert Mugabe, was more intent on establishing his own power than risking it through any form of cooperation with the Soviet Union.
On other matters, internal and external, the Cold War became increasingly important in southern Africa in the 1980s. Botha viewed his own regime as essentially anti-Communist. His argument for clinging to the fiction of “independent” homelands for blacks within South Africa was that majority rule would mean a victory for Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC), which was in alliance with the South African Communist Party. South Africa also continued to occupy the neighboring country of Namibia (also known as South West Africa), in spite of countless UN resolutions demanding its withdrawal. Meanwhile, Botha stepped up the policy of trying to destabilize the next-door countries of Angola and Mozambique, on the pretext that they were allied with the Soviet Union and gave refuge to ANC exiles. The South African military carried out hundreds of incursions into the territory of neighboring states, with the explicit aim of killing leaders of the ANC resistance or soldiers of the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO). Southern Africa seemed to be a powder keg ready to explode.
Besides South Africa itself, Angola was the center point of the Cold War in Africa. The MPLA government that had taken power with Cuban help in 1975 was closely allied with Havana and Moscow. Although the South African regime seemed ready to live with that as a fact, the Reagan Administration’s support for the Angolan opposition led to a flaring up of the civil war there. The leader of the opposition UNITA movement, Jonas Savimbi, was one of the poster boys of Reagan’s antirevolutionary offensive in the postcolonial world. By 1984 Savimbi’s guerrillas were receiving money, weapons, and training from the CIA. As Reagan put it to his advisers the following year: “We want Savimbi to know that the cavalry is coming.”8 In 1986 the Americans even supplied UNITA with fifty anti-aircraft Stinger missiles. The fact that UNITA was allied with the South Africans and was responsible for massive human rights violations in the areas it controlled did not matter to Reagan. The important thing was to use the conflict to put further pressure on the Soviets and on the Cubans to withdraw from Africa.
P. W. Botha was a reluctant participant in Angola’s renewed civil war. He cherished the idea of destabilizing the regime in Luanda, but was worried about trusting the Americans or engaging too many of his own troops. What tipped the balance was the increased warfare in South African–controlled Namibia. To alleviate the pressure on themselves, the Angolan government had allowed SWAPO guerrillas to increase strikes from Angolan territory into their homeland. In 1987 Botha decided to teach the MPLA a lesson, while helping UNITA, which was on the defensive in spite of recent US aid. The South African invasion quickly turned into a stalemate. In the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale—the largest military engagement in Africa since World War II—Cuban and Angolan troops held their own against the advancing South African forces. Inside South Africa public opinion quickly turned against the war, especially after Botha had to call up the reserves in early 1988. Even to white South Africans, Botha’s regime increasingly seemed to deliver little but war, instability at home, and continued international isolation.
To many observers, both in Africa and elsewhere, it seemed strange that the Reagan Administration continued to fan the flames of war in southern Africa while talking peace with the Soviets in Moscow. To some extent this difference in policy was the result of real divisions within the Administration, with key State Department officials pushing for negotiations to end regional conflicts while many NSC staffers continued to emphasize covert operations in support of anti-Communists. But it is doubtful whether the president himself perceived it as a split in policy. For Reagan, forcing the Soviets and Cubans out of Africa had always been a key aim. In his view, Gorbachev could only become a US partner if he agreed to a full withdrawal from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Reagan’s approach was maximalist: he wanted to benefit as much as possible from Soviet weakness when the opportunity was there.
After Cuito Cuanavale, all sides in the Angolan conflict began slowly to edge toward a negotiated solution. The improved relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union played a decisive role. Both sides pushed their allies toward an agreement. On the US side, Reagan was under increasing pressure from Congress, which had already imposed comprehensive sanctions on South Africa against the president’s wishes. The two diplomats in charge of coordinating Soviet-US cooperation on Africa, Chester Crocker and Anatolii Adamishin, also hit it off personally. Crocker played “a brilliant role,” according to Adamishin.9 In December 1988 the parties reached a linked agreement on Cuban withdrawal from Angola and Namibian independence.
The southern African agreement was a high point in dismantling Cold War conflict in the Third World. It would of course not have been possible without years of careful work through the UN and in international public opinion by those who opposed the apartheid regime. It would also have been unlikely without the Cubans matching South African military power at Cuito Cuanavale. But in essence it symbolized Gorbachev’s commitment to a withdrawal from the Third World. “I personally don’t think they are going to build socialism in this part of the world,” admitted Adamishin at the signing of the accords. Fidel Castro went along with the process, in part because he believed Cuba had achieved what it had sought in southern Africa all along: security for Angola and independence for Namibia. But he resented the manner in which the Soviets had acted above his head, and expressed his concern in letters to Gorbachev. The Soviet leader’s key foreign policy adviser Anatolii Cherniaev was scathing:
“The Beard” [Castro] wasted the revolution and now he is ruining the country, which is spiraling toward a total mess. It’s true that he will not stop in his demagoguery about orthodox Marxism-Leninism and going “to the end”; since this is the last thing he can use to preserve his “revolutionary halo.” But this halo is already a myth.… Nobody reckons with Cuba in South America, it is no longer setting any kind of example. The Cuban factor has waned. A break in relations?… he is only going to harm himself. We will only win, and save 5 billion doing it. Are people going to grumble about this? Yes, some will: the dogmatists and dissenters from the “revolutionary camp” and the Communist Parties that are becoming extinct, whose time has passed.10
Against Cherniaev’s advice, Gorbachev decided to go to Cuba to see Castro in April 1989. With the southern Africa deal done, neither side found it useful to rehash their differences over that event. Instead Castro, who knew how dependent his regime was on Soviet support, took the initiative in discussing a solution to the crisis in Central America. He knew that Gorbachev would like to see such a solution, which was one of the key concerns of the new US Administration of George H. W. Bush. But Castro also hoped that Cuba would be able to extricate itself before it was left alone in support of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and their revolutionary allies in Central America as Soviet assistance waned. Castro had always been a skeptic about the chances of survival for Left-wing regimes in Central America without some kind of settlement with the United States. As the Cold War receded, the Cuban leader hoped that such an arrangement could be found.
The Sandinista government in Nicaragua had been fighting for its life against a US-led onslaught since the early years of the revolution. Not only did the United States arm, train, and equip Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries (the Contras), but it also attempted to strangle the country economically through preventing Nicaraguan exports. The ostensible reason for US hostility, the way Reagan portrayed it, was Nicaraguan support of Left-wing guerrillas in neighboring El Salvador, who were fighting the military and paramilitary Right-wing groups. El Salvador—one of the most socially unequal and politically unstable countries in Latin America—would probably have seen massive unrest even if there had been no Nicaraguan support for the Left. But Reagan used the El Salvador crisis to put further pressure on the Sandinistas.
Reagan’s problem was that the US intervention in Central America was far from popular among Americans, who were weary of a Vietnam-like scenario closer to home. A 1984 poll showed that only 30 percent supported Reagan’s policy there.11 The massive human rights violations of the Salvadorian military also harmed the Administration’s attempts at supporting them against Left-wing guerrillas. The murder of the antiregime Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero, as he celebrated mass in the San Salvador cathedral in 1980, was an atrocity too far for many Americans, as was the killing, by sniper fire, of thirty-five mourners at his funeral. Throughout the 1980s, Reagan had to fight Congressional attempts to cut all US aid to the Contras and to the Salvadoran government. By the time the Iran-Contra scandal broke, in the fall of 1986, it was clear that the president would not be able to fund his Central American campaign much longer without serious conflict with US lawmakers. Reagan still persisted, but his efforts were less and less effective, both with regard to US public opinion and toward the fighting parties in Central America.
Indicative of how the Cold War ended, it was initiatives by regional groups of countries that finally began resolving the civil wars in Central America. Mexico, as the biggest country in the region, played a key role, but it was Costa Rica’s president Óscar Arias who in 1988 presented the peace plan that would underpin negotiated solutions. When Castro and Gorbachev met in Havana in February 1989 this was, in effect, the plan they chose to support. The Sandinistas had little choice but to go along, as had the Contras, whom Congress threatened with losing all support if they did not agree to lay down their weapons in exchange for free and fair elections to be held in 1990.
While the end of the decade brought some hope for the peoples of Central America, the situation in Latin America as a whole during the 1980s was contradictory and confusing. The region as a whole saw a series of dramatic ends to years of military dictatorships and a gradual return to civilian rule. In Peru in 1980, Bolivia in 1982, Uruguay in 1984, and Brazil in 1985, new governments were elected. In Argentina the military junta, which had been guilty of countless human rights violations in the name of anti-Communism and the Cold War, collapsed in the wake of their attempt to seize the Falklands in 1982. Even Chile, where a ruthless military government under Augusto Pinochet had been in place since the 1973 coup, was transformed in 1988 when the dictator lost what was intended to be a mere pro forma referendum on his continued rule. Pinochet’s Cold War rhetoric against the Left no longer impressed the Chilean middle classes. Like middle classes elsewhere, they sought stability, legality, and international recognition. Pinochet’s regime could not deliver any of these standards.
Pinochet’s fall was surprising to his supporters in Washington. They believed that in spite of the regime’s brutality, Pinochet would be forgiven by the majority because of the market-oriented economic reforms his advisers had carried out. But like almost all Latin American countries, whatever their economic orientation, Chile had turned out to be profoundly susceptible to the international debt crisis of the early 1980s. During the previous decade, governments in Latin America had borrowed heavily to finance economic expansion and public investments, especially in infrastructure and education. Many countries of different ideological persuasions, such as the Right-wing military dictatorship in Brazil, the radical nationalist dictatorship in Peru, and the semidemocratic government in Mexico, had aimed at centrally planned, state-led industrialization processes. State-owned companies were at the forefront of this expansion. By the early 1980s there were more than six hundred state enterprises in Brazil, making up almost half of all bigger companies. In Mexico there were more than a thousand, a fivefold increase since the early 1970s. Even though many of these companies did reasonably well in commercial terms (especially, of course, those that were monopolies or near monopolies), they were dependent on massive amounts of capital for their expansion, according to plans set by the governments.
Until the early 1980s, the international lending market continuously expanded. The influx of hard currency deposits from oil-rich Middle Eastern countries to Western and Japanese banks, the so-called petro-dollars, made for easy money. And, for most of the decade, the return through interest or investments in Europe or the United States was low, thereby privileging more risky but also more potentially rewarding lending to developing countries, especially in Latin America. But in 1979 interest rates in the United States increased dramatically, in some cases going up to 20 percent, a fourfold hike in less than two years. At the same time instability in raw material prices, on which most Latin America economies still depended, grew further. These fluctuations, within a long-term downward trend, made it more difficult either to pay back loans or get new ones. By 1982 many big banks refused to lend more. In August that year Mexico defaulted on its debts. This set off a chain reaction, in which the US government scrambled to prop up the banks, while pushing for debt negotiations among the debtor countries, the banks, and the international financial institutions, especially the IMF.
For the Reagan Administration, the Latin American defaults were not only the result of Latin profligacy and waste; they were also welcome opportunities to spread the gospel of free markets and neoliberal economies. The price the IMF exacted for helping Latin American restructure their debt was called “structural adjustment,” meaning the recipient countries accepted neoliberal elements in their domestic economies, such as privatization, import liberalization, and abolishing subsidies and social spending. The short-term results were catastrophic for the Latin American economies. Economic growth stagnated. Incomes dropped, especially in urban areas, and unemployment rose to very high levels. Inflation hit the middle class and working class alike. The only good outcome of what Latin Americans call La Década Perdida (the Lost Decade) was the collapse of the military dictatorships, which, by common consent, had helped cause the economic meltdown and did not have the power to stand up against US demands.
The moves away from dictatorship and toward more accountable forms of government in many parts of the world at the end of the Cold War were much helped by invigorated international debates on rights and norms. Many of these debates questioned the strong and in some places almost overwhelming role of the state in Cold War politics. The Cold War had helped states to expand their power over people and communities almost everywhere. Even in the United States, where so many ideological positions privileged individual freedoms and rights, the practice had been toward an enlargement of the capacity of the federal government. The argument, everywhere, had been won by the combined needs of military preparedness and social improvement. The former was to fend off enemy expansion. The latter was to organize society better and to present it as the model for the future. But by the 1980s these forms of thinking were coming under pressure both in the East and the West. In the Soviet Union, Gorbachev began to reconsider the established belief that more state power was the solution to all problems. In the United States and Britain neoliberals challenged the very foundation that postwar state interventionism was built on: that capitalism functioned better if it was regulated by governments. While before the state seemed to be the answer (or at least a part of it), now, for some, it was the mother of all ills.
But the shift in thinking was not only connected to economic or social issues. It also dealt with human rights and legal protections for the individual. And most surprisingly, perhaps, nongovernmental organizations and pressure groups often took the lead in pushing states, of both ideological persuasions, to respect such rights and norms. Amnesty International, which had existed since 1961, expanded its membership dramatically from the late 1970s on. Other groups, such as Human Rights Watch and Helsinki Watch, appeared in the wake of the 1975 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Campaigns against the human rights violations of Latin American dictatorships, such as Chile or Argentina, grew in the region itself as well as in western Europe and North America. In some cases, the campaigners were the same young people who had protested against Soviet attempts at silencing its domestic opposition. They celebrated the physicist Andrei Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonner, who had helped set up a group to monitor their country’s compliance with the Helsinki Accords in Moscow in 1976. These were important signs that the Cold War divide was, at least to some people, becoming less important than universal rights and duties. Dissidents in Czechoslovakia or Poland could count on increasing support across the political spectrum in the West. Meanwhile, other identities manifested themselves in protests for basic rights. In Catholic Poland as well as in Protestant East Germany, Christian churches affirmed the rights of their countrymen as citizens. In Muslim countries clerics began to speak out against unlawful imprisonments. “Rights talk” seemed, at least for a while, to overtake the insistence on Cold War ideological rectitude.
Nothing exemplifies the shifts in the political terrain better than the success of the international campaigns to end apartheid in South Africa. For years the main Western countries, and especially the United States and Britain, had turned a mostly deaf ear to protests against the blatant forms of racism through which the white minority there ruled. South Africa was too strategically important and too mineral rich to be put beyond the pale. More often than not, Western leaders had felt a certain empathy with white South Africans, even though they objected to the methods they used to rule the black majority. But by the mid-1980s, as global protests spread against the injustice with which South Africa was ruled, the policy of “constructive engagement” with white South Africa came under increasing pressure. While the UN demanded economic sanctions and an embargo against South Africa, the international anti-apartheid movement got increasing attention for its cause. The 1988 pop concert at Wembley Stadium in London to celebrate the seventieth birthday of imprisoned ANC leader Nelson Mandela became a global sensation, watched live by more than six hundred million people around the world. Featuring a stunning array of artists, from the Bee Gees to Whitney Houston and Eric Clapton, the event made it more difficult to condemn Mandela as a “Communist,” as both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had done in the past. By the end of the 1980s, even those who had shown sympathy with the South African government in the past were turning against it, accepting that the abolition of apartheid was a common task across Cold War boundaries.
1980s “rights talk” was connected to the other emerging global discourse, which could be called “identity talk.” With the Cold War ideological divide receding, more and more groups reacted against states that had ignored individual and group identities, be it along religious, linguistic, or ethnic lines. While human rights activists spoke about universal principles, nationalists or religious activists spoke about rights and duties embedded in them on behalf of their communities. The state they lived in had suppressed these communities, went the argument, and now they needed to reassert themselves. In some cases, such as among Basques or Catalans in Spain, or in the Baltic republics in the USSR, the Cold War was seen as having been an argument for their suppression. In other cases, the Cold War was seen as a kind of emergency, a frozen world that kept states together well beyond their “sell by” date. The most striking example was the federal republic of Yugoslavia, where centrifugal forces were soon to cause disastrous results. Even the Serbs, the largest population group in Yugoslavia, worried about their future. In a 1986 memorandum, the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences said,
Unlike national minorities, portions of the Serbian people, who live in other republics in large numbers, do not have the right to use their own language and alphabet, to organize politically and culturally, and to develop the unique culture of their nation. Considering the existing forms of national discrimination, present-day Yugoslavia cannot be considered a democratic state.… The guiding principle behind this policy has been “a weak Serbia, a strong Yugoslavia” and this has evolved into an influential mind-set: if rapid economic growth were permitted the Serbs, who are the largest nation, it would pose a danger to the other nations of Yugoslavia. And so all possibilities are grasped to place increasing obstacles in the way of their economic development and political consolidation.12
But the main region for a massive shift from a Left-Right divide to a new form of politics was in the Middle East. There the Islamist revolution in Iran had provided inspiration for new groups based on religious identity and on a new, political and fundamentalist interpretation of the Quran. Up to the early 1980s political interpretations of Islam, both Sunni and Shia, had mainly identified with the Cold War political Right. The Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, for instance, was a profoundly conservative organization that battled the Middle Eastern Left, whether Communist, socialist, or Ba’athist. But during the 1980s Islamists increasingly turned against both socialism and capitalism, and against both the Soviet Union and the United States. Egyptian and Saudi extremists played an important role in this turn. For them, the United States was at least as guilty in helping infidel Arab regimes suppress real Muslims as was the Soviet Union. They wished to wage war against Israel and its American supporters. But they also wanted to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. One of them, Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian Islamist who headed a key Pakistan-based support network for the Afghan mujahedin, argued that “whoever can, from among the Arabs, fight jihad in Palestine, then he must start there. And, if he is not capable, then he must set out for Afghanistan. For the rest of the Muslims, I believe they should start their jihad in Afghanistan.… The sin upon this present generation, for not advancing towards Afghanistan, Palestine, the Philippines, Kashmir, Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, etc., is greater than the sin inherited from the loss of the lands which have previously fallen into the possession of the Kuffar [the infidels].”13
By the time the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan got underway, networks of internationalist Islamists were being formed in Afghanistan and in neighboring Pakistan. Osama bin-Laden, a Saudi who was a sometime collaborator and sometime rival of Azzam, organized his own group, which he called al-Qaeda (the Base). Bin-Laden had been allied with the Afghan Islamist radicals Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who—while receiving plentiful weapons and supplies from the United States—had turned increasingly anti-American. Like Azzam, bin-Laden and his sponsors saw Afghanistan as just one battle in the war to liberate Muslims from foreign control. But taking Kabul, the capital, was first on their list of priorities, and with the Soviet pullout in 1989 they believed that their time had come.
Even without the Red Army, the Islamist conquest of Afghanistan turned out to be more complicated than the somewhat naïve jihadists first believed. Facing its moment of truth, the Afghan Communist government fought better than its opponents. Even if Washington and the Pakistanis continued their support for the mujahedin, while the Soviet Union gradually ended most of its involvement, the opposition was not able to take Kabul. Some local Afghan leaders found, not surprisingly, that they feared the more radical Islamists and their foreign jihadi friends more than they feared Najibullah’s government. As their offensives failed, the mujahedin started to fragment. By 1991, when the Communists finally started running out of supplies, there was already a full-blown civil war among some of the opposition groups. The mujahedin’s final rush toward Kabul in April 1992 saw Afghanistan descend into total chaos. Hekmatyar, who wanted to take the city on his own, clashed with a coalition of other factions, including some of his former Islamist friends, and lost. His response was to shell the capital using heavy artillery he had taken from the former government forces. It was an unedifying spectacle, leading to a US disengagement and the despair of foreign Islamists. For Osama bin-Laden the Afghan debacle was an important lesson. Only through ideological training, committed internationalism, and strict organization could the cause of jihad be furthered in the future, he believed. Bin-Laden set out for Sudan but was to return to Afghanistan, and to history, five years later.
The processes that ended the Cold War were manifold and complex, just like its origins had been. The end of the global conflict created enormous opportunities for good, as witnessed in southern Africa or southeast Asia. But not all issues were resolved, and some regional legacies lingered, such as in Korea, in the Middle East, or in the Balkans. Sometimes the outcome was contradictory. The economic hardships imposed on many Latin Americans often outweighed the celebrations over the return to more democratic and responsive forms of government. And some of the ideologies that overtook the Cold War dichotomy, religious fanaticism or nationalist self-obsession first among them, were as dangerous for the people caught up in them as the ideological struggles between capitalism and socialism had been. Still, the end of the Cold War opened up new possibilities for people everywhere. In some cases they made use of them to make a better world. This is not least true for Europe, the continent where the Cold War arguably began and where it was to end.