INTRODUCTION

Catalytic Choices

Two East German Success Stories

One of the new countries created by the Cold War was called the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or, more informally, East Germany. It was the communist Germany.

With its sixteen million inhabitants enjoying some of the highest living standards in the socialist world, as the year 1989 began the GDR seemed solid as a rock. The standard text on East Germany said that it “is apparently one of the world’s most stable regimes.”¹

To pick one kind of GDR success story as 1989 began, consider a scientist, a woman who had established her position in a field founded and dominated by men. She was a researcher working in the GDR’s Central Institute of Physical Chemistry, a part of the country’s Academy of Sciences. She had received her doctorate in physics a few years earlier.

In some ways it was not a difficult job. She did not have to teach. Hardly anyone outside a small circle of fellow scientists could even understand what she did or evaluate her work. Her field was the study of the quantum characteristics of subatomic particles.

The scientist was the daughter of a small-town Lutheran pastor and a former schoolteacher. Her friends used to call her “Kasi” (her last name was Kasner). The communist government did not care much for pastors. But Kasi’s father—who had moved from a parish in West Germany to East Germany in loyal obedience to the Lutheran Church hierarchy—had stayed out of politics. He eventually headed a Lutheran seminary.

Kasi’s father had always been carefully monitored by the efficient and omnipresent East German secret police (the Stasi, short for “State Security” in German). Informers reported that Pastor Kasner appeared to adopt the Communist Party line in the internal politics of the Lutheran Church; he was certainly willing to critique capitalist greed and consumerism.

Life was not always easy. Kasi’s hardworking, “meticulous” father would tell fellow seminarians how “he had left the West out of free will and about how hard he had worked and he nevertheless was convinced that all was in vain and that the Church—even in his lifetime—would shrink and most parishes would lose their pastor.”

Kasi’s mother could not take up a teaching job. She knew how to teach English and Latin. The East German government had little interest in hiring women to teach those subjects, especially not in a small town.

The government-set income was below average. But Kasi’s family made their way, occasionally getting gift packages and money from their relatives in the West.

Kasi was a gifted student in school. As expected from a star student, she had joined the Communist Party’s youth organization. She wore its uniform, with its instantly recognizable indigo blue colors, to school. She won prizes. She studied all the time.

The only foreign language taught was Russian. Kasi devoted herself to becoming fluent in it, enjoying Russian culture. Her other star subject was mathematics, where she was good enough to do well in national competitions.

While Kasi was young, the family could vacation and visit relatives in West Germany. That changed when she was seven years old. When she returned from an August 1961 holiday in Bavaria, East German soldiers were unrolling the barbed wire to fence off the border for good behind what the government called its “antifascist protection wall.”

Kasi remembered how, in church that Sunday, “people cried. My mother cried too. We couldn’t fathom what had happened.” Later, in 1968, her parents were upset by the Soviet-led invasion in Czechoslovakia, a country her family had visited. The invasion crushed that country’s experiment with “socialism with a human face.”

As a schoolgirl, Kasi was no athlete or social standout, but she had friends. She was well organized and helpful to her classmates. Her skill in the Russian language won her a trip to Moscow. She received a place in an elite high school. Again, her grades were excellent. She was invited to go on to a university and receive a rare, prized higher education provided by the state.

At the last moment, though, the precious opportunity to go to a university almost collapsed. With her graduating high school classmates, Kasi joined in staging for the school an anti-imperialist school play. The expected theme would attack the American war in Vietnam. Instead, the students, in a sort of end-of-school rebellious way, performed a play praising the anti-Portuguese liberation movement in Mozambique. They even worked in a quote from a satirical writer who vaguely alluded to a “wall.”

Those in charge were not amused by this play-acting about liberation and references to a “wall” (like the one that now enclosed the East Germans). The school authorities planned to punish all the students by taking away their university admissions. They had used such a punishment before.

Kasi’s father, and other well-connected fathers, all desperately pulled strings to get the decision turned around. They succeeded. The students’ teacher lost his job, but Kasi was able to go on to the University of Leipzig.

She had originally thought of studying medicine. Instead, she decided to concentrate on physics. This was a field as far from politics as she could possibly get. Naturally she had to take her required classes in Marxist political economy. She also did a little work on the side as a barmaid in the student watering hole, the Thirsty Pegasus.

Ninety percent of her classmates were men. One became her boyfriend, then her husband. As a married couple, it was easier to persuade the state housing office to assign them an apartment. She and her husband both pursued advanced studies. His field was optics. She stayed with physics.

At an initial job interview, the Stasi recruited Kasi to become an informant. She would have become one of millions planted in practically every workplace. Kasi dodged this duty. She found a way to put the Stasi recruiters off without getting in trouble. “My parents always told me to tell Stasi officers that I was a chatterbox and someone who couldn’t keep my mouth shut. And I also told them that I didn’t know if I could keep this secret from my husband.”

She did manage to keep at least one secret from him. It was a big one. He was quite surprised when “suddenly one day she packed her bags and left the apartment we shared.” The couple had grown apart after a few years together.

Kasi kept her husband’s last name, by which she was now known. She completed her doctoral work in 1986 after eight years of not-too-hurried postgraduate research. She published an article in a peer-reviewed Western journal, Chemical Physics.

Again a single woman, childless, she made a quiet life for herself. The GDR did not have much resources and infrastructure for lab research in subatomic particles. She and her friends at the research institute, including a skeptical fellow physicist with whom she became close, would frequently talk politics. They were not “political” people, but they were attentive.

Kasi was not outspoken. But she was observant. She was careful. And she had a dry sense of humor. Being scientists, she and her friends had unusual access to books and travel, although their activities were carefully monitored. She was even allowed to make a trip to the West, to visit West Germany.

In the late 1980s, in private conversation, she and her friends would analyze the arguments of East German dissenters. These dissidents were usually in prison or exiled to the West. Their books were banned in the GDR but illegal copies were smuggled around. Kasi and her friends also would discuss the unrest and martial law in nearby Poland, which they had visited. They would discuss the fascinating news coming out of Moscow, about the reform plans of the Soviet Union’s new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. With her Russian, Kasi could herself read the Soviet newspaper Pravda to dissect the latest developments. She and her friends could usually tune in to a West German radio station or TV, if they were lucky enough to share a TV.

As 1989 began, the thirty-four-year-old scientist had her usual routines. She took bike rides on country roads. She had her weekly sauna and drinks with a friend. She did nothing to worry the Stasi, nothing to call attention to herself. The head of her department at the research institute thought she was a good worker. “One gets the impression,” he said, that “she is on to something, she works diligently toward a goal but she is also a woman who has a mind of her own.”

As 1989 began, another young professional was carving out a successful career in East Germany. He was an intelligence officer. He worked on the Stasi’s side of the street. He and his Stasi friends were making a good living watching the East German people and any foreigners who happened to be passing through, including the Soviet troops and civilians based in the country. Though he was not German, this particular watcher was fluent enough in the German language to be able to pass as one. “I have two natures,” he would say, “and one of them is German.”

With his wife and two baby girls he was living in the East German city of Dresden, in the southeastern corner of the country, not far from the border with Czechoslovakia. The watcher lived in an apartment complex shared by Stasi families.

He was Russian, a citizen of the Soviet Union. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet secret service, then called the KGB. The lieutenant colonel was living the dream.

When he was a boy of fifteen, young Volodya had been entranced by the most popular movie in the Soviet Union that year, called The Shield and the Sword. He had watched it again and again. The movie’s fictional hero was a Soviet secret agent, a major. The major had pretended to be a German in order to infiltrate the ranks of the enemy forces. There the secret agent changed history, a heroically successful spy and saboteur. Decades later, Volodya could still remember the lyrics of the movie’s theme song, “Whence Does the Motherland Begin.” He recalled being inspired by the film’s story of how “one man’s effort could achieve what whole armies could not.”

Volodya was a child of the working class. His family was from a great city once called St. Petersburg, renamed Leningrad by the new Soviet Union.

Volodya’s parents’ lives were molded by war. In 1941, the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union. Their armies reached the outskirts of Leningrad. Returning to military service, Volodya’s father had barely survived the initial months of fighting. Badly wounded, he made it back to a hospital in Leningrad. There he was reunited with his wife.

The Germans besieged Leningrad for nearly three years. Volodya’s father and mother both almost died. They endured some of the most extreme experiences humans can suffer—of shelling, bombing, and near-starvation. Two of Volodya’s uncles, on his father’s side, died in the war. Another of his uncles, on his mother’s side, lost his life in the war too—but not at the hands of the Germans. Like many thousands of others, he disappeared after being tried by a Soviet military tribunal for alleged dereliction of duty.

Volodya’s eldest brother died before he was born, succumbing to illness before the war. His other brother also died before Volodya was born, a victim of malnutrition and illness during the German siege. Volodya was born after the war. The father, still limping from his wound, became a factory worker and loyal Communist Party member. The mother did all kinds of menial labor. The parents doted on their only surviving child.

Volodya’s childhood was poor, rough-and-tumble. But as he entered his teenage years, everything started turning for the better for him, as he found a focus pursuing two passions.

One of these life-changing passions was sports, specifically judo. He joined a sports club and became a skilled competitor, staying with it through his college years. It could be rough, he remembered, as “people would break their arms or legs. Matches were a form of torture. And training was hard, too.” If Volodya could avoid serious injury, he might go on to compete regularly at the national and Olympic level.

His other passion took precedence, however. That was his determination to find some way to get into the security services. His dream was to get into the KGB itself.

Having disciplined himself through his sports training, Volodya studied hard to get into the prestigious local school, Leningrad State University. Most of the places at the university were reserved for army veterans. There were few chances for kids straight out of high school. But Volodya made it. His favorite subjects in high school had been German and history.

At university, he studied law. He had heard that this was a favored subject for KGB aspirants. As he was completing college, his dream came true. A KGB recruiter asked him, “How would you feel if you were invited to work in the agencies?”

Volodya’s answer was ready. The KGB’s background, and the memory of the massacres and purges of the Stalin era, meant nothing to him. “My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.” He joined in 1975.

Volodya quickly found that the work “wasn’t what I had imagined.” His first assignments were in counterintelligence in Leningrad. That meant his job was to watch fellow Soviets and foreign visitors. He remembered once asking whether an operational plan followed the law.

His supervisor “was taken aback. ‘What law?’”

Volodya cited the law.

“‘But we have instructions,’ his supervisor said.… The men in the room didn’t seem to understand what Volodya was talking about.

“Without a trace of irony, the old fellow said, ‘For us, instructions are the main law.’ And that was that.”

Volodya remembered that he “was never a dissident. My career was shaping up well.” He was able to get training in foreign intelligence work at an elite KGB school near Moscow. His fluency in German was a clear plus.

At the KGB special school, he was rated as a good officer, but not a star. So back he went to Leningrad.

Finally, Volodya did get a posting outside of the Soviet Union, and it was to Germany! But it was inside the Soviet bloc, to the GDR. There, he was assigned to a relatively minor post out in the provinces, to join the half dozen KGB men in Dresden. They were well away from the main action in the capital, East Berlin.

Arriving in 1985, Volodya went about his work in partnership with the hundreds of East German Stasi officials covering that region of the country. As 1989 began, he had been in Dresden for nearly four years. He had been in the KGB for almost fourteen. He was thirty-six years old.

Though his office was always on the lookout for traveling foreigners or others who might offer information about the NATO adversaries, an important part of the work was to follow up possible security issues in his part of East Germany. He and his colleagues could look for possible foreign spies (they found none). Or they could try to recruit interesting foreigners at one of the universities in their region, or track misbehaving Soviets who were stationed or traveling in their area. Or, working with the Stasi, they could follow activities among the East Germans themselves.

“Everyone thinks that intelligence is interesting,” Volodya recalled. “Do you know that ninety percent of all the intelligence information is obtained from an agent’s network made up of ordinary Soviet citizens? These agents decide to work for the interests of the state.” In East Germany, the only big difference was that “a large part of our work was done through citizens of the GDR.”

Volodya’s work record was satisfactory. He was promoted. By 1989 he was the deputy head of the KGB’s small rezidentura in Dresden. He had a medal for “outstanding services” to the East German army, not an unusual award for someone in his position.

He was more uneasy about developments back home in the Soviet Union. Sometimes a fellow KGB officer would visit and tell disturbing stories, like the ones he heard from a veteran of KGB operations during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The disillusioned veteran confided to Volodya, “‘You know, I judge the results of my work by the number of documents that I did not sign.’ That really stunned me,” Volodya remembered.

Volodya’s boss had been outraged at the end of 1986 when the new Soviet leader, Gorbachev, had released the famous dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov. Volodya was not so bothered. To an office mate, he confided that it might take the “military superiority of the West” to “bring the unconstrained masters in the Kremlin to their senses.” To another friend, he even voiced support for the idea that the next Soviet president should be elected.

Volodya and his wife liked life in the GDR. Their second daughter had been born there. His wife, Lyudmila, remembered, “The streets were clean. They would wash the windows once a week. There was an abundance of goods—not like what they had in West Germany, of course, but still better than in Russia.”

It did seem to Volodya that the GDR was “a harshly totalitarian country,” like the Soviet Union had been a generation earlier. He wondered, “If some changes in the USSR begin, how would it affect the lives of these people?” On the other hand, at the time he thought “it was hard to imagine” any abrupt changes coming to the GDR.

It was indeed hard to imagine. The Cold War had created the GDR. As the Second World War came to an end in 1945, in first Europe, then much of Asia, and then around the world there were warring camps of rival ideological systems. For generations, divided Europe was also an armed camp, partitioned by barbed wire and minefields, with millions of soldiers readied for war, massing tens of thousands of armored fighting vehicles and thousands of nuclear weapons, regularly conducting large exercises to prepare for apocalyptic confrontation. It was hard to imagine great change, hard to envision just how the Cold War might end. If it did end, then one would have to dream up some notion of what might happen after that, including in the “harshly totalitarian” GDR.

No one could see how the Cold War might end in a way that extinguished East Germany, the entire socialist system of which it was a part, and then even the Soviet Union itself. It was hard to imagine how a divided world would disintegrate and a different one would take its place.

As their world fell apart, Kasi and Volodya would have to build new lives in this different world, along with millions of others. A handful of leaders might change the surrounding structures. Then it would be up to people like Kasi and Volodya to remake and rechart their lives.

They did. In fact, these two onetime East German success stories would eventually meet and get to know each other. By that time, they were among the handful of leaders making the big choices.

Kasi is now better known by her full married name: Angela Merkel. She made choices that would eventually bring her to the summit of political power—in a new, united Germany.

Volodya is now better known by his formal name: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. He too made choices, choices that would eventually also bring him to the summit of political power—in a new, diminished Russia.²

One is a chancellor in reunited Berlin. The other is a president in the Kremlin in Moscow.

Ups and Downs

History can seem like it has its ups and downs. People try to solve problems. Sometimes they do. All the solutions eventually have problems too, some old, some new.

Perhaps, when we succeed, the new problems are not as terrifying as the ones that went before. Perhaps, when we succeed, the new problems offer more scope for people to realize more of their human potential, more scope for freedom and the pursuit of happiness.

The Cold War certainly had its ups and downs. As it recedes into history it looks like it was a frozen standoff. But lived at the time, it was more like a frightening roller-coaster ride. The West had its scares in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In the mid-1950s, after the 1953 death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, the communist world was riven by doubt and fierce debate. There were huge protests and even violent revolts in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. The revolts were crushed.

Communism evolved. By the late 1950s it again seemed to be on the upswing, reaching new frontiers in science and new adherents in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

By the end of the 1950s it was the freer, capitalist part of the world, referred to in shorthand as “the West” (though it very much included countries like Japan) that was full of doubt. Western leaders were alarmed. The communists—first into outer space—seemed to have both know-how and might on their side.

In the early 1960s, some of this gloom dissipated. Capitalism and the West seemed to revive. The peak of Cold War confrontation seemed to have passed.

Yet by the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, the West felt it had descended into an even more profound, pervasive crisis. There was the awful war in Vietnam. A pro-democracy movement in Czechoslovakia was crushed by Soviet tanks. Once-flourishing capitalist economies sputtered with inflation and unemployment. Riots burned city centers in America. Terrorism plagued countries across Western Europe.

Yet by the late 1980s, the Atlantic world and East Asia had once again regained much of their confidence. That is the story we begin with in chapter 1. Some of these choices were made by leaders in Europe, China, and the United States. Others were made by judges and civil rights lawyers or activists on both sides of the Atlantic; still more were made by American innovators who pioneered a liberating idea of personal computing.

The communist world seemed to have been riding high during the 1970s. More states—in Africa, Latin America, and Asia—came under communist rule, welcoming troops or advisers from the Soviet Union or its allies.

Yet their roller coaster dipped down again. By the 1980s it was the communist world’s turn to go through another of its phases of disappointment and doubt. The crisis of communism became general.

What then changed, more profoundly, was the whole system itself. Instead of a seesaw tipping back and forth between the rival sides, a truly global system replaced the divided world that had gone before. Most of the crucial design choices for this new system were set between 1988 and 1992.

This book is about how Kasi and Volodya’s world collapsed. It is about the design of the new world in which they would become leaders. Unlike some other “end of the Cold War” books, even one that we wrote nearly twenty-five years ago, this book is less about endings and more about acts of creation.

What to call this new system? To call it a “post–Cold War system” says, literally, almost nothing. Dry references to a “liberal international order” are not much better.

Instead of a system designed for rival blocs to compete in a divided world and prepare for a third world war, the new system designed at the beginning of the 1990s was meant to be truly global. Its designers hoped they were laying the foundation for a global commonwealth of free nations. They sought an open and civilized world, where people everywhere might find a sense of identity, security, and material well-being.

All the principal leaders who dominate much of this book, men and women like Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand, George H. W. Bush, Jacques Delors, and Margaret Thatcher, were part of a “postwar” generation. They never forgot that. To them, the shadow of war was always there.

Imagine the hopes and fears of this generation. To most of these men and women, words like “tyranny,” “freedom,” “war,” and “security” were not empty abstractions. They brought back very real traumas.

Wounded at the start of the Second World War, Mitterrand had escaped from a prison camp, and then later had to literally run for his life, dashing breathlessly through alleys to escape Gestapo agents hunting him in wartime Paris. As a young political leader in the late 1950s, he was forced by France’s internal war over Algeria to again be on the lookout, this time watching for French assassins.

When he was a teenager, Delors’s best friend was arrested running messages for the Resistance. That friend was sent to Auschwitz. He died there, as did his father.

When she was a teenager, Thatcher had walked by the blasted shells of bombed-out streets and grown up with the end of empire. Even when she was a young member of Parliament in the early 1960s, her country was still struggling to recover from the deprivation and damage of past wars, full of obsolete housing, “derelict” dockyards, and antiquated factories, its railways in “ghastly shape.” France’s leader had just brusquely refused to let Britain join the new European Economic Community. As Thatcher attended her party’s annual conference in 1964, the leading Conservative newspaper headlined a speech in which a minister pledged “to keep Britain a first-class nation.”³

Thatcher’s West German counterpart, Kohl, had grown up in a country far more devastated than England. In Kohl’s childhood, ruins were part of the landscape. His friends scavenged for food. He was named Helmut after his father’s brother, dead in an earlier war. He came of age mourning another brother, his own, who never came home from the last war.

Gorbachev’s foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, also mourned a brother who had not come home from war, one among millions. Other memories were kept quieter. Gorbachev’s family remembered when their region was briefly overrun by German troops during 1942. The Germans were not there long enough to do much harm. But afterward, both of Gorbachev’s grandfathers had been arrested by Stalin’s secret police. Although they were fortunate and eventually released, the family remembered.

Bush had piloted a plane off aircraft carriers. Shot out of the sky during a Pacific island raid, he had to bail out into the ocean. He counted himself lucky, saved miraculously by a nearby American submarine. His crewmen did not survive.

One could go on and on with such examples among many of the top officials in these governments, men and women who spent much of their lives living in the shadow of wars past and the next war to come. They had become successful and prominent. They were politicians, worldly wise, often cynical. Yet, across the years, they still bore the marks of their memories.

None of these leaders were nostalgic about the postwar, Cold War world. They did not yearn to recover the broken world of their youth. They wanted to build something new and different, dramatically and profoundly different, so that future generations would inherit a better world than the one in which they had grown up.

In 1988 and 1989 they saw their supreme chance. The Cold War was ending. Another era was beginning. At such times, leaders with a vision for the future can make a difference.

An overall vision was essential, but abstract hopes were not enough. Leaders had to make concrete choices and design solutions.

Like a stream that narrows and rushes faster and faster as it approaches a channel and a waterfall, crucial choices began accumulating during the late 1970s and the 1980s. In 1989 the cataract began and leaders all had to shoot through the hole and navigate the rapids. There, no guide wielding an oar has full control. The guide tries a few key moves; the team paddles hard. Gasping, pushing, they try to miss the big rocks and find smoother water.

Most of this book looks back at recent history, but it is not a conventional narrative of all the major events. It is written as an analytical history of the major choices.

Our approach focuses on leaders and their teams, but the views of ordinary citizens remain an essential part of the situation. For example, in chapter 4 we describe a series of choices and running arguments about when and how to unify Germany. What evolved were two basic sets of positions, with both sides consciously, constantly reacting to popular sentiment. The leaders, interacting with publics, were trying to steer and channel what citizens wanted, expected, or thought might be possible.

The leaders could not settle the matter on their own. Instead they set up two large alternatives being put to the vote in the East German election of March 1990. That election was being powerfully affected by West German opinion, which was also split, as was opinion across Europe. Each side used diplomacy to influence public opinion. Until the votes were counted, it was not at all obvious which side would win.

History is path dependent. Once people have made certain choices, other possibilities fade away, lost among the speculative might-have-beens. We have tried to zero in on the moments of important choice. At those moments, we call out the other possibilities plausibly available at the time. We invite readers to notice and reflect on whether they would have made those choices. We try to recover some sense of the situations and concerns that people could perceive at the time.

One value of this approach is to help demystify some of what policymaking is all about. We do think several leaders performed skillfully. Rather than just say so, we help show what that means. Readers can judge for themselves.

Another value of this approach is that it does a little more to unpack the relevant mix of judgments that interact in choices. These are a mix of beliefs about values (what do we care about?), reality (what’s going on?), and action (what can we do?).⁴ Here is what went into the deconstruction of one system and the creation of another. Thus readers who wonder about what to do now can better relate the judgment calls of the past to those to be made today.

Operating Principles for a Different World

Leaders inherit their circumstances. Facing those circumstances between 1988 and 1992, some leaders chose, quite deliberately, to transform the basic operating principles of whole societies. They chose to abolish countries and create new ones. They chose to roll back and substantially disarm the largest and most dangerous military confrontation in the world.

But, like all human creations, their new system made trade-offs, had flaws, and set up new issues. A series of crises that we review in chapter 7 bring us forward to the present. We wrote this book because, as we approach another time of rethinking the global system, it is worth studying how and why we got the one we have.

Phrases like “international system” can seem very academic. In this book, what we mean by a “system” boils down to a set of a half dozen or so basic operating principles for how states and communities interact.

The basic operating principles for the old Cold War system were about:

• How the leading opponents (the United States, the Soviet Union, and sometimes China) viewed each other and their struggle;

• How each side organized its military alliances and armed forces for a possible war;

• How they carried on their struggle for the ideologically uncommitted regions of the world;

• How they ran their home economies;

• And how they viewed norms for international finance and trade.

Applying those basic Cold War operating principles in Europe, that meant there had to be operating principles about:

• How to think of the future of Germany (“the German question”);

• How to conceive the future of Western Europe;

• And how to envision the future of communist-controlled Eastern Europe (then usually defined as the area between Western Europe and the Soviet Union, although much of the Soviet Union was also in the eastern part of Europe).

For example, the German question noted above actually stayed open, debated, for a while after 1945. By the early 1950s it had been provisionally settled. Germany would be much reduced in size. It would be divided into two separate states, one communist and one not. This division was not abstract. Watchtowers, machine guns, minefields, and barbed wire defined the contours; diverging ways of life defined the interiors.

Much of the politics of the early Cold War was about whether to make that provisional settlement permanent. A series of treaties in the early 1970s, capped by a 1975 “Final Act” signed in Helsinki by thirty-five states, seemed to make it permanent, its borders “inviolable,” to be changed only “by peaceful means and by agreement.” By the late 1980s the great powers regarded the German question as having been scratched from the list of open questions in the Cold War system, off the table. A divided Germany with two German states was not only a historical fact, it was a historical necessity. The basic future of Eastern Europe was also thought to have been scratched off the list of open issues.

These principles may seem abstract. But they filter into dominating, everyday realities for ordinary people: Putin going to work at his KGB office, watching the West and possible internal dissidents; Merkel a state employee contributing to government science, wary about who was listening to what she was saying, wondering about new research in the West or how to arrange a rare foreign trip.

The Cold War system assumed a world divided between two fundamentally opposed sets of ideas for how to organize modern societies. In each, believers sincerely thought their way of organizing society was imperfect but essentially good. They thought that the alternative model was essentially bad, even profoundly evil.

These beliefs were not lightly arrived at or lightly held. They had been developed and refined as systematic ideologies since the late nineteenth century. The consequences of such beliefs molded lives, just as communism had molded the lives of Merkel and Putin, their families, and many millions more.

As the Cold War system began to disintegrate in 1988 and 1989, the old questions resurfaced and then began turning into a whole new set of questions. We show how leaders started framing and making choices that accumulated into a new operating system for the world.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the crucial choices set vectors, general directions, about:

• How to provide security? What should be the roles of the superpowers?

• How should a global economy work?

• How should Europe evolve? More European integration? For which parts of Europe?

• How should “the German question” be resolved?

• What about the future of Eastern Europe?

• What about the future of the reforming Soviet Union?

The basic approaches for all these questions were largely set by the end of 1992.

We invite readers to look over the shoulders of those who were making these choices. Consider what might have happened had another plausible path been chosen. To help, at each stage we offer a running map of the big issues and the key choices in play.

The Blindness of Hindsight

Macro-changes often arise from micro-choices. The crucial choices are not always obvious. The historian’s microscope can help.

For instance, in chapter 4 we retell the story of the opening of the Berlin Wall during the night of November 9–10, 1989. The East German government did not choose to do this. Nor had protesters organized to assault and force it open. Then why did this momentous result happen? It was set off by a bureaucratic screwup, which we detail. But the Berlin Wall story, taken alone, can mislead. It creates an illusion of accident, of chance.

In the story of the collapse of the East German dictatorship, a real choice, the choice that drove all the others, was not on that confused night in November. It came a month earlier. In early October the East German leaders had to decide: Should we try and accommodate the rising outpouring of East German dissenters? Or should we arrest them, beat them, wall them in, and crush them?

The “crush them” option was certainly plausible. Some East German leaders wanted to use what they called the “Chinese solution.” Repression was what the East German government had been doing, quite effectively, for generations. That alternative path of violent repression was vivid to all in East Germany.

That October 1989 choice was no longer just a matter for East Germans alone. They had to deal with an exodus of their citizens through other, formerly allied, countries. The East Germans were also carefully gauging the attitude of the Soviet government. They were also attentive to the West Germans, and the West Germans had been noticing signals from the American government.

There were many such choices between 1988 and 1992. To understand them, we try to guard against hindsight. Hindsight is not 20/20. It is blinding. The path of what happened is so brightly lit that the alternatives are cast more deeply into shadow.⁵

Writing about the coming of the American Civil War, a great historian named David Potter agreed that, with hindsight, the causes of the Civil War seem obvious. Yet Potter pointed out that at the time, in 1861, few people had seen the war coming. They did not anticipate its character or its consequences.

The “supreme task of the historian,” Potter said, the only way to combat the “fallacy of reading history backward,” was “to see the past through the imperfect eyes of those who lived it.” Another great historian of the coming of the Civil War, Ed Ayers, makes a similar point. The war “did not approach… like a slowly building storm.” Instead “it came like an earthquake, with uneven and unpredictable periods of quiet between abrupt seismic shifts that shook the entire landscape. It came by sudden realignments, its tremors giving no indication of the scale of violence that would soon follow. People changed their minds overnight, reversing what they had said and done for years.”⁶

In this book, we too are recalling an earthquake, with sudden realignments and changes of course. It is hard to reimagine roads not taken. Such roads disappear. They dissolve along with the fading memories of what might have been.

After a catalytic episode, people naturally try to make sense of what happened. They quickly throw together stories that help them make sense of it. So the end of the Cold War quickly got its few big stories. Democracy and capitalism had prevailed. Communism had failed and was discredited. For some this is an easy and satisfying story. Others prefer tales of incompetence or treachery.

There are more simplifications. There is a triumphalist American story. It goes about like this: Americans stood strong, led the free world to confront the communists. The communists, realizing how decrepit they were, quailed and buckled.

The triumphalist narrative provokes a counterattack. Those who prefer their stories of America and the world to be cautionary tales have a story that goes about like this: It is the communist leader, Gorbachev, who is the singular visionary, joined by ordinary people. The power-obsessed Americans never quite get it. Suspicious, timid, and unimaginative, the Americans just react. Unsupported, Gorbachev becomes a tragic figure.

We resist both of these simplifications. They are not true enough, not insightful enough. Real life is not so inevitable and predetermined. And in those stories about endings, all the new acts of creation tend to go unnoticed.

Another way we complicate the story is that we center it not in U.S.-Soviet global relations, but in Europe. In this period of history, Europe was the most important theater of global choice. Chinese leaders play a vital part, but in 1989 they took their country in a different direction. Later they would return to history’s central stage.

The crucial partnerships in our story always involve European leaders, not just American or Soviet ones. It is an ensemble drama. There were several leading players. Each took turns in the spotlight.

Americans do not need to be insecure or defensive about the role their government played in ending the Cold War. That role will become clear enough. But to the extent the Americans succeeded, they only succeeded as part of effective partnerships, first with key West European governments, and then beyond.

No one leader, no one country can fashion a global commonwealth. Anglo-American cooperation was an old and valuable pattern. But in this story the core of the creation was a partnership between an American team and a European one—a triumvirate centered in Germany, France, and the European Commission.

They all then interacted with a set of vital choices made inside the communist world, and then beyond it. Leaders in the East had agonizing decisions to make about the future of shattered societies. They had to decide whether or how to join in a new system, and if so, on what terms.

A number of leaders contributed to results that, at the outset, none of them had planned. All were improvising, coursing through the rapids, trying to keep certain aims in view. Some of the improvisations turned out brilliantly. Some did not. Meanwhile, the leaders tried to bring it all to calmer waters, crafting agreements, new or transformed institutions, and new or transformed countries.

Beyond the simplifications, we hope Americans—and others—will learn more about just how their government, or any government, actually influences large events. Little influence came from direct orders, telling others what to do. Nor was the outcome a victory of brute force, the triumph of a bloody war of conquest.

Governments often influence events by creating possibilities—or not. They can create a way to work on a problem. They can table inducements or suggest possible solutions.

If the analysis or suggestions are attractive, people join together and make common plans. They take common action. And common, concerted action can indeed change the world.

Consider, for instance, just one of the great changes: the creation of a new, unified Germany. “For decades a thick closed blanket of clouds obscured the star of German unity,” Germany’s former foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher recalled. “Then for a short time the blanket of clouds parted, allowed the star to become visible, and we grabbed for it.”

“Grabbed” is a good word for what happened. It captures the sense of a frantic lunge, what the British scholar Timothy Garton Ash has called a “hurtling and hurling together, sanctioned by great-power negotiations.” It was, he wrote, a time when “more happened in ten months than usually does in ten years.”⁷

A renowned German commentator called the outcome “the greatest triumph of diplomacy in the postwar era.” A former Soviet foreign minister called it “one of the most hated developments in the history of Soviet foreign policy.”⁸ Although now the outcome may seem almost preordained, those closest to the events—whether former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze or political figures from East and West Germany—marveled that this tumult did not lead to a “bloodbath,” a war, or another new phase of cold war.⁹

The period between 1988 and 1992 became a catalytic episode in world history. We call it so because a number of ingredients came together, like a new sort of chemical compound, to produce a different system.

Catalytic episodes on a worldwide scale are rare. During the last 250 years there have only been about five of them. This period was one. And among all such global upheavals of such scale in the history of the world, this was the most peaceful one.¹⁰

Together, the leaders in this episode did help build that different world they had dreamt of. For all its faults, they helped build a world almost inconceivably safer and more prosperous than the one in which they grew up.

Slouching Toward a Systemic Crisis

Amid a general impression of net global success, through the 1990s the global commonwealth was extended, and extended some more. Finally, it reached its limits. So, what happened? What went wrong?

The essential elements of the global commonwealth leaders created in the early 1990s are not well understood. One reason why their acts of creation get less notice is because much of what was new seemed so familiar.

True, there were some new institutions, like a new global trading system with a new World Trade Organization. But mostly there were names people knew, like NATO or the EU or the IMF or the UN. Yet the appearance of familiarity was deceptive.

Sometimes a builder wants to keep a handsome historic building in place, because it looks good in the neighborhood. But because the actual building is obsolete, everything behind the attractive edifice is gutted and renovated. A decrepit mansion keeps its genteel look on the outside, but becomes a modern hotel.

Consider the case of NATO. It retained its historic name. It kept the U.S. commitment to Europe. But in chapter 5 we describe how members of the alliance promised Soviet leaders that, as NATO remained, it would be transformed into a different kind of organization. The allied leaders kept this promise. They dismantled most of what the old NATO used to do, which was to organize a highly prepared military alliance ready for large-scale nuclear and conventional war.

Allied leaders turned NATO into something else. In the background of general American reassurance, the transformed NATO coordinated a program of Europe-wide disarmament, including the withdrawal of most of the American forces, aided by an extraordinarily ambitious and far-reaching Europe-wide arms control treaty. The organization worked on civil-military transitions in post-communist states. Its enlargement to some of those states was consequential politically, not militarily. It actually did relatively little to extend tangible U.S. political or economic influence.

NATO’s remaining kernel of military capability was reoriented mainly toward painful and modest security and peacekeeping missions in the Balkans. The United States approached these missions with great reluctance. It did persuade some Europeans to join in “out-of-area” global work, in faraway failed states like Afghanistan.

The extension of the NATO system began reaching its limits in the mid-2000s. This extension did not cause the estrangement of Russia, which had much deeper and more tragic sources. But as Russia did move into an adversarial relationship against “the West,” NATO absolutely became a part of that story. That alliance now finds itself ill-adapted for the problems of the twenty-first century.

As we will show, the NATO illustration is not alone. There are other versions of this story of extension, limits, and maladaptation. Leaders are still looking to the United Nations, the European Union, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, and other elements of the global system to handle problems they were not designed to solve.

Some parts still work. The much-derided UN, for example, has actually played a quite important role in dealing with challenges from countries like Iran and North Korea, and in helping to end some conflicts like the 2006 Israeli war in Lebanon.

But there are some large new global trends, like the implosion of much of the Arab and Muslim world or the digital revolution that is transforming economies and societies everywhere. The original system had assumed the persistence of a Soviet Union, but that union broke up into fifteen countries, and Russian leaders eventually came to regard the system as a foe.

Two giant countries, India and China, had not originally been fully integrated with the global commonwealth. In the 1990s, leaders tackled the China problem, with mixed results as China tries to straddle a position that is both part of an open world and yet hostile to it. Leaders, and the two of us in our later work, also turned to the problem of integrating India into the system. That has had somewhat better results, though still very tentative.

The global economic crisis of 2008–12 delivered a tremendous shock. The confrontations with Russian and Chinese aggression since 2014 have delivered more. Especially in 2015, the Syrian civil war, on top of other unresolved conflicts, created a massive eruption of refugees and migrants. Then came the Brexit vote and the Trump election of 2016. The U.S. president has questioned fundamental elements of a system that much of his own government still tries to lead. We discuss these developments in chapter 7.

The global commonwealth is beleaguered. But it is too soon to pronounce its doom. Leaders did respond to the economic and migration crises. Little noticed, the system managed huge transfers of funds from American reserves to Europe at desperate moments and saved Europe’s financial system. The European Union successfully administered giant transfusions of help to battered states in Eastern Europe. European states also have managed a substantial containment of the migration crisis, for the time being. Some of the bleeding has been stopped. But the patient is still very much in danger.

For more than ten years, a generation-long worldwide trend of growing political freedom and democratic government has been drifting the other way. The global economic recession joined and accelerated a “democratic recession.” In the mid-2010s—2014 to 2016—there were more shocks, as war returned to Europe, established liberal democracies began tearing at themselves, and China consolidated a return to one-man rule.¹¹

As one of us put it in a recent book, in 2016 the Brexit and American presidential votes were angry voters yelling, “Do you hear me now?” The votes, as Rice wrote, were “a revolt against political and economic elites, their institutions, and their globalizing and sometimes moralizing views [that] has upended the status quo.” It has “left all to wonder, What comes next?”¹²

What Comes Next?

To answer that question, one also must ask, “How did we get here?” That is why it is so useful to revisit and reflect on the choices that created the world we live in today. The great settlements are back on the table. The great issues about how best to organize modern society have been reopened.

We do not think the world can return to the past. But we can learn from it. No settlements in history are permanent. This generation is coming up on another great time for choosing.

At the beginning of chapter 1 we introduce the story of two prophets of the future of freedom, James Burnham and George Orwell. Burnham was darkly prescient about the appeal of technocratic, all-powerful managerial states. Galvanized by Burnham’s dark pessimism, Orwell saw the danger, saw it more clearly than most. Yet he hoped that free societies could pass the test of ultimately being better at tackling society’s problems.

We again face such a test. We argue that the goal of a global commonwealth is still the right one. It is still right and wise, including for Americans, to seek a more open, civilized, and democratic world.

One of the oldest and wisest traditions in American statecraft, from its earliest days, is the conviction that for Americans, and for a great many others, an open world is better than one that is closed. A civilized world is safer than one where, as Bob Kagan puts it, “the jungle grows back.” A system geared for business opportunity is more prosperous for more people, including more Americans, than a world system designed for crony capitalism and state-owned enterprise.

The system we helped create at the beginning of our careers is becoming obsolete, ill-fitted for today’s world. This generation’s dominant problems are also very different from the great challenges at the end of the postwar era. Now the problems are more transnational than they are international. They cut across societies and may challenge aspects of our existence, whether they stem from energy use and climate change or new kinds of disorder, or the hopes and fears that come with another great revolution in commerce and culture, the digital revolution. In our epilogue we offer some suggestions about how to envision a changed global system. We retell the story of an earlier generation’s acts of peaceful creation in order to inform and inspire new acts of peaceful creation, still to come.

Like Angela Merkel, that quiet young physicist going about her work in East Berlin, at the beginning of 1989 we too were young professionals. Like her, we were thirty-four years old.

Philip Zelikow was a relatively junior foreign service officer. He had been detailed from the State Department to work at the White House on the National Security Council (NSC) staff of the newly elected American president, George H. W. Bush.

Condoleezza Rice arrived in the same White House office, the NSC staff office for European and Soviet Affairs, on the same day. She came to Washington from Stanford University, where she was a promising professor of politics and a specialist on Soviet affairs.

As with Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin, the next two years changed our lives. In 1991, Rice returned to Stanford and was asked to become one of the university’s leaders, its provost. Zelikow left the Foreign Service to accept a professorship at Harvard.

As we reflected on what we had just experienced, it began turning into a book. It originated as an internal historical study. Zelikow began the work, which turned from an internal study into a full, international history of German unification. Rice joined the book project. We complemented research in the American archives with a careful study of all materials available in German and Russian, as well as in English. (At that time the available French material was limited.) We consulted some papers that had emerged from East German and Soviet records, including many of Gorbachev’s papers. We could do this because in 1992, working with Rice, Gorbachev arranged privately for a large number of his papers to be sent to the Hoover Institution at Stanford for safekeeping amid the turbulent and uncertain times in Moscow.¹³ We also talked to key decision makers in a number of countries, most of whom we knew. We cited all of our sources. Many were then still secret, but the citations themselves were not. Our original book was published in 1995 by Harvard University Press, entitled Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft. Nearly twenty-five years later, scholars still rely on that book and it has plenty of still-valuable detail that we frequently cite in our notes in this book.

Yet, while leaning occasionally on that foundation, we decided to write this new book with a much wider perspective. The scope of this book is much broader. The style is different too, focusing on the critical choices. We also now have far better access to the records of the other governments. Crucial documents have been released and published on the inner workings of the West German, East German, Soviet, British, and French governments, among others. This evidence has hugely enriched, enlivened, and sometimes amended what we thought we knew.

Our own perspectives are now enriched too, with much more experience. We have lived with the consequences of the events in which, as younger policymakers, we had played a small part. When our earlier book came out in 1995 we were still early in our careers. Since then one of us has been secretary of state and national security adviser. The other has been counselor of the Department of State and director of the 9/11 Commission, among other jobs. We have also done a lot of other writing and thinking as scholars.

We have taught generations of students who didn’t experience the events we describe. We have read a generation of commentary and scholarship about the end of the Cold War and the events in which we took part. Some of this work is splendid. Our debts are apparent in our notes.

Naturally, we sometimes thought that the scholars had not understood us or that past world. That has challenged us to try to be perhaps a little more understandable. Sometimes, of course, critiques of our past work are spot on the mark and we have had to revise our earlier views. Other times we disagree and welcome the chance to explain why. For instance, we discuss the controversy about NATO enlargement, whether a “deal” was broken to take advantage of a weakened Russia, or how these perceptions have been fostered or manipulated.

We also welcome the opportunity to take on the question: What comes next? What has happened to the European and global system put in place at the end of the Cold War? We suggest how history set the stage for the great changes—and what kind of choices we should get ready for now.