INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, STUDY OF

20th-century discipline concerned with the relations among countries. Additional reading Adda B. Bozeman, Politics and Culture in International History (1960), is the best guide to histories and concepts of past international systems. Other useful references that survey premodern international relations are Coleman Phillipson, The International Law and Custom of Ancient Greece and Rome, 2 vol. (1911); Richard L. Walker, The Multi-State System of Ancient China (1953); Geoffrey F. Hudson, Europe and China: A Survey of Their Relations from the Earliest Times to 1800 (1931); Frank M. Russell, Theories of International Relations (1936); and Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Political Systems of Empires (1963). Accounts of the earlier development of the academic study of international relations may be found in Sir Alfred Zimmern, The Study of International Relations (1931); and Grayson L. Kirk, The Study of International Relations in American Colleges and Universities (1947). Representative of the work of the 1930s that widened the scope of the field are Harold D. Lasswell, World Politics and Personal Insecurity (1935; paperback ed., 1965); Frederick L. Schuman, International Politics: An Introduction to the Western State System and the World Community, 6th ed. (1958); C.K. Leith, World Minerals and World Politics (1931, reprinted 1970); W.S. Thompson, Danger Spots in World Population (1929); Paul Radin, The Racial Myth (1934); Nicholas Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics (1942, reprinted 1970); Carl J. Friedrich, Foreign Policy in the Making (1938); Brooks Emeny, The Strategy of Raw Materials (1935); Abram Kardiner, The Psychological Frontiers of Society (1945); Quincy Wright, A Study of War, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1965); and E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 19191939, 2nd ed. (1946, reprinted 1964). The theory of political realism is expressed by Hans J. Morganthau in Politics Among Nations (1948). The idealist attempt to answer the challenge of political realism may be traced in Thomas I. Cook and Malcolm Moos, Power Through Purpose: The Realism of Idealism as a Basis for Foreign Policy (1954); and John H. Herz, Political Realism and Political Idealism (1951). Four books on the psychological and cultural aspects of the behavioral study of international relations providing an excellent introduction are J. Davis Singer, Human Behavior and International Politics (1965); Otto Klineberg, The Human Dimension in International Relations (1964); Joseph H. De Rivera, The Psychological Dimension of Foreign Policy (1968); and Herbert C. Kelman, International Behavior (1965). The most famous book of its time on a psychocultural interpretation of national behaviour was Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946, reprinted 1967). Richard C. Snyder, H.W. Bruck, and Burton Sapin, Decision-Making as an Approach to the Study of International Politics (1954), is still basic reading on the decision-making approach, but see also the data in Glenn D. Paige, The Korean Decision (1968). The most convenient compilation of varied examples of the theory and research of the behavioral decade is James N. Rosenau, International Politics and Foreign Policy, rev. ed. (1969). For conflict theory and international applications of game theory, see Kenneth E. Boulding, Conflict and Defense: A General Theory (1962); Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (1960); and Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games and Debates (1960). Edward McWhinney, Conflict and Compromise: International Law and World Order in a Revolutionary Age (1981), studies the effectiveness of law in resolving disputes among nations. An introduction to general system theory in the social sciences is Walter Buckley, Sociology and Modern Systems Theory (1967). Morton A. Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (1957); and Charles A. McClelland, Theory and the International System (1966), take different approaches to the applications of general systems ideas in the study of international relations. The coming of the Cold War, 194557 The symbolic first meeting of American and Soviet soldiers occurred at Torgau, Ger., on April 25, 1945. Their handshakes and toasts in beer and vodka celebrated their common victory over Nazi Germany and marked the collapse of old Europe altogether; but their inarticulate grunts and exaggerated smiles presaged the lack of communication in their relationship to come. Grand wartime coalitions invariably break up once the common fight gives way to bickering over division of the spoils, but feuding victors after the wars of Louis XIV and Napoleon or World War I at least negotiated treaties of peace, while the rancour among them was moderated by time or the danger that the common enemy might rise again. After 1945, however, no grand peace conference convened, no common fear of Germany or Japan survived, and the quarrels among the victors only grew year by year into what the U.S. presidential adviser Bernard Baruch and the pundit Walter Lippmann termed a Cold War. The U.S.Soviet conflict began in 1945 over treatment of occupied Germany and the composition of the Polish government. It grew during 1946 as the Soviets communized the lands under their occupation and the victors failed to agree on a plan for the control of atomic energy. From 1947 to 1950 the reactions of Washington and Moscow to the perceived threats of the other solidified the division of Europe and much of the world into two blocs, and the Cold War became universalized, institutionalized, and militarized. The settlement after World War II, therefore, was a peace without treaties, and the Cold War magnified, distorted, or otherwise played upon the other historical trends given impetus by the world wars of the 20th century: Asian nationalism, decolonization, the seeming culmination of the 37-year-old Chinese Revolution, the evolution of independent Communist parties in Yugoslavia and Asia, and western Europe's drive to end four centuries of conflict through economic integration. The early Cold War was not a decade of fear and failure alone but also a creative time that gave birth to the closest thing to a world order that had existed since 1914. With the sole major exception of the later Sino-Soviet split, the boundaries, institutions, and relationships fashioned in the late 1940s were very nearly the same ones that shaped world politics through the 1980s. The Cold War guilt question As early as 1948 American left-liberals blamed the Truman administration for the icy tone of its relations with Moscow, while rightists blamed the Communists but accused Roosevelt and Truman of appeasement. Moderates of both parties shared a consensus that Truman's containment policy was, as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, the brave and essential response of free men to communist aggression. After all, Stalin's tyranny was undeniable, and his seizure of countries in eastern Europe one by one was reminiscent of Hitler's salami tactics. To be sure, Roosevelt may have helped to foster mistrust by refusing to discuss war aims earlier and then relying on vague principles, and Truman may have blundered or initiated steps that solidified the Cold War. Those steps, however, were taken only after substantial Soviet violation of wartime agreements and in fearful confusion over the motivations for Soviet policy. Was the U.S.S.R. implacably expansionist, or were its aims limited? Was it executing a plan based on Communist faith in world revolution, or reflecting the need of the regime for foreign enemies to justify domestic terror, or merely pursuing the traditional aims of Russian imperialism? Or was it only Stalin's own paranoia or ambition that was responsible for Soviet aggression? The fact that Western societies tended to parade their disagreements and failures in public, in contrast to the Soviet fetish for secrecy, guaranteed that historical attention would fix on American motivations and mistakes. In the late 1950s and the 1960s, traditional left-liberal scholars smarting from the excesses of McCarthyism and new leftists of the Vietnam era began publishing revisionist interpretations of the origins of the Cold War. The hard revisionism of William Appleman Williams in 1959 depicted the Cold War in Marxist fashion as an episode in American economic expansion in which the U.S. government resorted to military threats to prevent Communists from closing off eastern European markets and raw materials to American corporations. Less rigidly ideological soft revisionists blamed the Cold War on the irascible Truman administration, which, they charged, had jettisoned the cooperative framework built up by Roosevelt at Tehran and Yalta and had dropped the atomic bombs on Japan as a means of frightening the Russians and forcing an American peace. These revisionist interpretations were based not so much on new evidence as on new assumptions about U.S. and Soviet motives, influenced in turn by the protest movements against the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, and the alleged domination of American society by the military-industrial complex. Looking back to the years after 1945, the revisionists argued that Stalin was not a fanatical aggressor but a traditional Soviet statesman. After all, the Soviet Union had been brutally invaded and had lost 20,000,000 lives in the war. Stalin could thus be excused for insisting on friendly governments on his borders. He was betrayed, said revisionists, by American militancy and Red-baiting after the death of Roosevelt. Traditional historians countered that little evidence existed for most of the revisionist positions. To be sure, American hostility to Communism dated from 1917, but the record proved Roosevelt's commitment to good relations with Stalin, while no proof at all was forthcoming that American policy makers were anxious to penetrate eastern European markets, which were, in any case, of minor importance to the U.S. economy. Williams rebutted that policy makers so internalized their economic imperialism that they did not bother to put their thoughts on paper, but this argument from no evidence made a mockery of scholarship. The preponderance of evidence also indicated that the atomic decision was made for military considerations, although isolated advisers did hope that it would ease negotiations with Moscow. These and other examples led most historians to conclude that, while the revisionists brought to light new issues and exposed American aimlessness, inconsistency, and possible overreaction at the end of World War II, they failed to establish their primary theories of American guilt. Historians with a longer perspective on the Cold War transcended the passions of Vietnam-era polarization and observed that deeper forces must have been at work for the Cold War to have persisted for so long after 1945. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how leaders of the two countries could have sat down agreeably and settled the affairs of the world. The new superpowers were wrenched out of isolationism and thrust into roles of world leadership, they nurtured contrary universalist ideologies, and they mounted asymmetrical military threats (one based on conventional weapons, sheer numbers, and land power; the other on nuclear might, technological superiority, and air and sea power). To these liabilities could be added the fact that both countries had been forced into World War II by sneak attacks and had resolved never again to be seduced into appeasement or to be taken by surprise. Even such a balanced long-range view should not be taken uncritically. It remains the case that the Cold War grew out of specific diplomatic disputes, among them Germany, eastern Europe, and atomic weapons. Could those disputes have been avoided or amicably resolved? Certainly some prior agreement on war aims might have softened the discord after 1945, but Roosevelt's policy of avoiding divisive issues during the war, while wise in the short run, enhanced the potential for conflict. It might, without undue exaggeration, be said that the United States entered the postwar period with only a vision of a postwar economic world and few political war aims at all, and thus had little excuse for indignation once Stalin set out methodically to realize his own aims. But this does not justify a Soviet policy bent on denying self-rule to neighbouring peoples and imposing police states as cruel as those of Hitler. Although the Soviets had lost 20,000,000 in the war, Stalin had killed at least an equal number of his own citizens through deliberate famine and purge. American hegemony, if it can be called that, was by contrast liberal, pluralistic, and generous. The question has been posed: Is it not an expression of American exclusivism, self-righteousness, or cultural imperialism to insist that the rest of the world conform to Anglo-Saxon standards of political legitimacy? Even if so, critics must take care not to indulge in a double standard: excusing the U.S.S.R. for being realistic and damning the United States for being insufficiently idealistic. The end of the Cold War In retrospect, the course of the Cold War appears to have been cyclical, with both the United States and the U.S.S.R. alternating between periods of assertion and relaxation. In the first years after 1945 the United States hastily demobilized its wartime military forces while pursuing universal, liberal internationalist solutions to problems of security and recovery. Stalin, however, rejected American blueprints for peace, exploited the temporarily favourable correlation of forces to impose Communist regimes on east-central Europe, and maintained the military-industrial emphasis in Soviet central planning despite the ruination done his own country by the German invasion. Soviet policy prompted the first American outpouring of energy, between 1947 and 1953, when the strategy of containment and policies to implement it emerged: the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Korean War, and the buildup in conventional and nuclear arms. Then the Americans tired; Eisenhower accepted a stalemate in Korea, cut defense spending, and opened a dialogue with Moscow in hopes of putting a lid on the arms race. Khrushchev then launched a new Soviet offensive in 1957, hoping to transform Soviet triumphs in space and missile technology into gains in Berlin and the Third World. The United States again responded, from 1961 to 1968 under Kennedy and Johnson, with another energetic campaign that ranged from the Apollo Moon program and nuclear buildup to the Peace Corps and counterinsurgency operations culminating in the Vietnam War. The war bogged down, however, and brought on economic distress and social disorder at home. After 1969 Presidents Nixon and Ford scaled back American commitments, withdrew from Vietnam, pursued arms control treaties, and fostered dtente with the U.S.S.R., while President Carter, in the wake of Watergate, went even further in renouncing Cold War attitudes and expenditures. It was thus that the correlation of forces again shifted in favour of the Soviet bloc, tempting Brezhnev in the 1970s to extend Soviet influence and power to its greatest extent and allowing the U.S.S.R. to equal or surpass the preoccupied United States in nuclear weapons. After 1980, under Reagan, the United States completed the cycle with a final, self-confident assertion of willand this time, the Soviets appeared to break. In May 1981, at Notre Dame University, the recently inaugurated Reagan predicted that the years ahead would be great ones for the cause of freedom and that Communism was a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written. At the time few took his words for more than a morale-boosting exhortation, but in fact the Soviet economy and polity were under terrific stress in the last Brezhnev years, though the Soviets did their best to hide the fact. They were running hidden budget deficits of 7 or 8 percent of GNP, suffering from extreme inflation that took the form (because of price controls) of chronic shortages of consumer goods, and falling farther behind the West in computers and other technologies vital to civilian and military performance. The Reagan administration recognized and sought to exploit this Soviet economic vulnerability. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and his aide Richard Perle tightened controls on the export of strategic technologies to the Soviet bloc. CIA Director William Casey persuaded Saudi Arabia to drive down the price of oil, thereby denying the U.S.S.R. billions of dollars it expected to glean from its own petroleum exports. The United States also pressured its European allies to cancel or delay the massive pipeline project for the importation of natural gas from Siberia, thereby denying the Soviets another large source of hard currency. Such economic warfare, waged at a time when the Soviet budget was already strained by the Afghan war and a renewed strategic arms race, pushed the Soviet economy to the brink of collapse. Demoralization took the form of a growing black market, widespread alcoholism, the highest abortion rate in the world, and a declining life span. In an open society such symptoms might have provoked protests and reforms, leadership changes, possibly even revolution. The totalitarian state, however, thoroughly suppressed civil society, while even the Communist party, stifled by its jealous and fearful nomenklatura (official hierarchy), was incapable of adjusting. In sum, the Stalinist methods of terror, propaganda, and mass exploitation of labour and resources had served well enough to force an industrial revolution in Russia, but they were inadequate to the needs of the postindustrial world. Gorbachev and the Soviet new thinking Young, educated, and urban members of the Communist elite came gradually to recognize the need for radical change if the Soviet Union was to survive, much less hold its own with the capitalist world. They waited in frustration as Brezhnev was followed by Andropov, then by Chernenko. The reformers finally rose to the pinnacle of party leadership, however, when Mikhail Gorbachev was named general secretary in 1985. A lawyer by training and a loyal Communist, Gorbachev did not begin his tenure by urging a relaxation of the Cold War. He stressed economics instead: a crackdown on vodka consumption, laziness, and hooliganism said to be responsible for stagnation; and, when that failed, a far-reaching perestroika, or restructuring, of the economy. It was in connection with this economic campaign that surprising developments in foreign policy began to occur. Not only were the costs of empirethe military, KGB and other security agencies, subsidies to foreign client statesout of all proportion to the Soviet GNP, but the U.S.S.R., no less than in earlier times, desperately needed Western technology and credits in order to make up for its own backwardness. Both to trim the costs of empire and to gain Western help, Gorbachev had to resolve outstanding disputes abroad and tolerate more human rights at home. As early as 1985 the new thinking of the younger Communist apparatchiks began to surface. Gorbachev declared that no nation's security could be achieved at the expense of another'san apparent repudiation of the goal of nuclear and conventional superiority for which the Soviets had worked for so long. Soviet historians began to criticize Brezhnev's policies toward Afghanistan, China, and the West and to blame him, rather than capitalist imperialism, for the U.S.S.R.'s encirclement. In 1986 Gorbachev said that economic power had supplanted military power as the most important aspect of security in the present agean amazing admission for a state whose superpower status rested exclusively on its military might. He called on the Soviets to settle for reasonable sufficiency in strategic arms and urged NATO to join him in deep cuts in nuclear and conventional weapons. He reiterated Khrushchev's remark that nuclear war could have no winners and de Gaulle's vision of a common European house from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains. Finally, Gorbachev hinted at a repudiation of the Brezhnev Doctrinei.e., the assertion of the Soviets' right to intervene to protect Socialist governments wherever they might be threatened. Western observers were divided at first as to how to respond to this new thinking. Some analysts considered Gorbachev a revolutionary and his advent a historic chance to end the Cold War. Others, including the Reagan administration, were more cautious. Soviet leaders had launched peace offensives many times before, always with the motive of seducing the West into opening up trade and technology. Gorbachev was a phenomenon, charming Western reporters, crowds, and leaders (Thatcher was especially impressed) with his breezy style, sophistication, and peace advocacy. He published two best-sellers in the West to enhance his reputation, which for a time caused Europeans to rate Reagan and the United States the greatest threats to peace in the world. What convinced most Western observers that genuine change had occurred, however, was not what Gorbachev said but what he allowed others to say under his policy of glasnost, or openness. As Western experts had predicted, perestroika, an attempt to streamline a fatally flawed Communist system, was doomed to failure. What the Soviets needed, they said, was a profit motive, private property, hard currency, real prices, and access to world markets. But Gorbachev, still thinking in Communist categories, blamed bureaucratic resistance for the failure of his reforms and thus declared glasnost to encourage internal criticism. What he got was the birth of a genuine Soviet public opinion, a reemergence of autonomous organizations in society, and more than 300 independent journals (by the end of 1989) publicizing and denouncing Communist military and economic failures, murder and oppression, foreign policy crimes such as the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact and the invasion of Afghanistan, and even Communist rule itself. By 1987 most Western observers still called for deeds to match the words pouring forth in the Soviet Union, but they were persuaded that an end to the Cold War was a real possibility. The Reagan administration made its first show of trust in Gorbachev by engaging in negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons from Europe. In 1987 Gorbachev surprised the United States by accepting the earlier American zero-option proposal for intermediate-range missiles. After careful negotiation a treaty was concluded in Geneva and signed at a Washington summit in December. This controversial Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons and allowed, for the first time, extensive on-site inspection inside the Soviet bloc. Critics still feared that stripping Europe of nuclear missiles might only enhance the value of the Soviets' conventional superiority and called for parallel agreements through the mutual and balanced force reduction talks on NATO and Warsaw Pact armies. In Moscow in mid-1988, Reagan and Gorbachev discussed an even bolder proposal: reduction of both strategic nuclear arsenals by 50 percent. A mellower Reagan, interpreting the Soviets' new flexibility as a vindication of his earlier tough stance and having thereupon repudiated his evil empire rhetoric, now seemed eager to bargain as much as possible with Gorbachev. Finally, Gorbachev and his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, reached out in all directionsChina, Japan, India, Iran, even South Korea and Israelin hopes of reducing military tensions, gaining access to trade and technology, or just creating new possibilities for Soviet statecraft. Gorbachev's most celebrated moment came in December 1988 at the United Nations, when he announced a unilateral reduction in Soviet army forces of half a million men and the withdrawal from eastern Europe of 10,000 tanks. Henceforth, he said, the U.S.S.R. would adopt a defensive posture, and he invited the NATO countries to do the same. Throughout his first four years in power Gorbachev inspired and presided over an extraordinary outpouring of new ideas and new options. Western skeptics wondered whether he meant to dismantle Communism and the Soviet empire and, if he did, whether he could possibly avoid being overthrown by party hard-liners, the KGB, or the army. He had maneuvered brilliantly in internal politics, always claiming the middle ground and positioning himself as the last best hope for peaceful reform. His prestige and popularity in the West were also assets of no small value. In June 1988 he persuaded the Communist party conference to restructure the entire Soviet government along the lines of a partially representative legislature with a powerful presidenthimself. Was the Gorbachev phenomenon merely an updated version of earlier, limited Russian and Soviet reforms designed to bolster the old order? Or would Gorbachev use his expanding power to liquidate the empire and Communism? In truth, Gorbachev faced a severe dilemma born of three simultaneous crises: diplomatic encirclement abroad, economic and technological stagnation at home, and growing pressure for liberal reform in Poland and Hungary and for autonomy in the non-Russian republics of the U.S.S.R. Thoroughgoing dtente, perhaps even an end to the Cold War, could solve the first crisis and go far toward ameliorating the second. His policy of glasnost, deemed vital to economic progress, had the fatal side effect, however, of encouraging repressed ethnic groups, at home and in eastern Europe, to organize and express their opposition to Russian or Communist rule. Of course, the Soviet government might simply crush the nationalities, as it had in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, but that in turn would undo the progress made in EastWest relations and put Gorbachev back where he had started. If, on the other hand, the Soviet government relinquished its satellites abroad, how could it stop the process of liberation from spreading to the subject nationalities inside the U.S.S.R.? If it repudiated its Marxist-Leninist global mission in the name of economic reform, how could the regime legitimize itself at all, even in Russia? The origins of World War II, 192939 The 1930s were a decade of unmitigated crisis culminating in the outbreak of a second total war. The treaties and settlements of the first postwar era collapsed with shocking suddenness under the impact of the Great Depression and the aggressive revisionism of Japan, Italy, and Germany. By 1933 hardly one stone stood on another of the economic structures raised in the 1920s. By 1935 Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime had torn up the Treaty of Versailles and by 1936 the Locarno treaties as well. Armed conflict began in Manchuria in 1931 and spread to Abyssinia in 1935, Spain in 1936, China in 1937, Europe in 1939, and the United States and U.S.S.R. in 1941. The context in which this collapse occurred was an economic blizzard that enervated the democracies and energized the dictatorial regimes. Western intellectuals and many common citizens lost faith in democracy and free-market economics, while widespread pacifism, isolationism, and the earnest desire to avoid the mistakes of 1914 left Western leaders without the will or the means to defend the 1919 order. This combination of demoralized publics, stricken institutions, and uninspired leadership led historian Pierre Renouvin to describe the 1930s simply as la dcadence. The militant authoritarian states on the other handItaly, Japan, and (after 1933) Germanyseemed only to wax stronger and more dynamic. The Depression did not cause the rise of the Third Reich or the bellicose ideologies of the German, Italian, and Japanese governments (all of which pre-dated the 1930s), but it did create the conditions for the Nazi seizure of power and provide the opportunity and excuse for Fascist empire-building. Hitler and Mussolini aspired to total control of their domestic societies, in part for the purpose of girding their nations for wars of conquest which they saw, in turn, as necessary for revolutionary transformation at home. This ideological meshing of foreign and domestic policy rendered the Fascist leaders wholly enigmatic to the democratic statesmen of Britain and France, whose attempts to accommodate rather than resist the Fascist states only made inevitable the war they longed to avoid. The economic blizzard Political consequences of the Depression The debate over the origins of the Great Depression and the reasons for its severity and length is highly political, given the implications for the validity of theories of free market, regulated, and planned economies, and of monetary and fiscal policy. It is usually dated from the New York stock-market crash of October 1929, which choked the domestic and international flow of credit and severely damaged global trade and production. Wall Street prices fell from an index of 216 to 145 in a month, stabilized in early 1930, then continued downward to a bottom of 34 in 1932. Industrial production fell nearly 20 percent in 1930. Unlike previous swings in the business cycle, this financial panic did not eventuate in the expected period of readjustment, but rather defied all governmental and private efforts to restore prosperity for years until it seemed to a great many that the system itself was breaking down. Mutual recriminations flew across the Atlantic. Americans blamed the Europeans for the reparations tangle, for pegging their currencies too high upon the return to gold, and for misuse of the American loans of the 1920s. Europeans blamed the United States for its insistence on repayment of war debts, high tariffs, and the unfettered speculation leading to the stock-market crash. Certainly all of these factors contributed. More tangibly, however, a sudden contraction of international credit in June 1928 made an international emergency likely. Since the Dawes Plan of 1924, Europe had depended for capital and liquidity on the availability of American loans, but increasingly American investors were flocking to the stock market with their savings, and new capital issues for foreign account in the United States dropped 78 percent, from $530,000,000 to $119,000,000. Loans to Germany collapsed from $200,000,000 in the first half of 1928 to $77,000,000 in the second half and to $29,500,000 for the entire year of 1929. A world crisis was also brewing in basic commodities, a market in which prices had been depressed throughout the decade. Mechanization of agriculture stimulated overproduction, and Soviet dumping of wheat on the world market to earn foreign exchange for the First Five-Year Plan compounded the problem. The SmootHawley Tariff, the highest in U.S. history, became law on June 17, 1930. Conceived and passed by the House of Representatives in 1929, it may well have contributed to the loss of confidence on Wall Street and signaled American unwillingness to play the role of leader in the world economy. Other countries retaliated with similarly protective tariffs, with the result that the total volume of world trade spiraled downward from a monthly average of $2,900,000,000 in 1929 to less than $1,000,000,000 by 1933. The credit squeeze, bank failures, deflation, and loss of exports forced production down and unemployment up in all industrial nations. In January 1930 the United States had 3,000,000 idle workers, and by 1932 there were more than 13,000,000. In Britain 22 percent of the adult male work force lacked jobs, while in Germany unemployment peaked in 1932 at 6,000,000. All told, some 30,000,000 people were out of work in the industrial countries in 1932. The Depression naturally magnified European bitterness over the continuing international obligations, but the weakest link in the financial chain was Austria, whose central bank, the Creditanstalt, was on the verge of bankruptcy. In March 1931, Stresemann's successor as German foreign minister, Julius Curtius, signed an agreement with Vienna for a GermanAustrian customs union, but French objections to what they saw as a first step toward the dreaded Anschluss provoked a run on the Creditanstalt and forced Berlin and Vienna to renounce the union on September 3. The panic then spread to Germany, rendering the Reichsbank unable to meet its obligations under the Young Plan. President Hoover responded on June 20, 1931, with a proposal for a one-year moratorium on all intergovernmental debts. Short of a general recovery or global agreement on the restoration of trade, however, the moratorium could only be a stopgap. Instead, every country fled toward policies of protection, self-sufficiency, and the creation of regional economic blocs in hopes of isolating itself from the world collapse. On Sept. 21, 1931, the Bank of England left the gold standard, and the pound sterling promptly lost 28 percent of its value, undermining the solvency of countries in eastern Europe and South America. In October a national coalition government formed to take emergency measures. The Ottawa Imperial Economic Conference of 1932 gave birth to the British Commonwealth of Nations and a system of imperial preferences, signaling the end of Britain's 86-year-old policy of free trade. The Lausanne Conference of JuneJuly 1932 took up the question of what should be done after the Hoover Moratorium. Even the French granted the impossibility of further German payments and agreed to make an end of reparations in return for a final German transfer of 3,000,000,000 marks (which was never made). The United States, however, still insisted that the war debts be honoured, whereupon the French parliament willfully defaulted, damaging Franco-American relations. The quest for a new world order In the run-up to the Persian Gulf War, Bush had summoned the United Nations to the task of building a new world order. He was seeking to place the resistance to Iraqi aggression on a high moral plane but was also responding to critics who accused him of lacking vision. In fact, American opinion was sharply divided on how to take advantage of the sudden, surprising victory in the Cold War. Neo-isolationists urged the United States to pare back foreign commitments, neo-nationalists wanted the country to look more to its own interests abroad, liberals hoped for a peace dividend that could be applied to a domestic agenda ranging from education to health care and crime, and all hoped to address the yawning deficits in the U.S. budget and trade balance. Internationalists of both parties, however, insisted that Americans would miss a historic opportunity if they turned inward after the Cold War. Twice before in the 20th century the United States had led the world to victories over tyranny only to see its plans for a democratic world order frustrated. As the only nation with the unique combination of military, economic, and ideological strengths needed to lead, the United States now had a duty to win the peace. Was bold leadership in fact all that was needed to fashion a secure and free world order? Or must the post-Cold War international system, like all previous ones, evolve according to the play of power and interest among states? Would the end of the bipolar world eventuate in a unipolar one led by the UN? Or would it fragment into a multipolar system, with new sorts and sources of threats, such as ethnic and regional violence, terrorism, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to second-level states, some of them hostile to Western values? Prospects for peace The Middle East At least two abiding conflicts did seem ripe for resolution in the wake of the Cold War and the Persian Gulf War. In the Middle East mutually reinforcing changes on the international, regional, and domestic fronts breathed new life into the peace process. First, the American commitment to gulf security raised U.S. prestige and influence throughout the entire region. Second, Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Arab governments cut financial support for the PLO. Third, the foremost rejectionist Arab states like Syria and Iraq were marginalizedthe former because of the loss of its Soviet patron, the latter by military defeat. Fourth, weary Palestinians and Israelis began to look for an alternative to the ongoing strife of the intifada in the disputed territories. Sensing the opportunity born of these changes, Bush sent Secretary of State Baker to the Middle East twice in the spring of 1991 in order to revive the peace process, then joined Gorbachev on July 31 in calling for a Middle East peace conference. Other hopeful signs included Jordan's tentative moves away from Iraq and toward a more representative government at home and the renewal of diplomatic relations with Israel by the U.S.S.R., China, and India. In June 1992, Yitzhak Rabin's Labour Party defeated the Likud in elections, bringing to power a more flexible Israeli cabinet. Bush then extended $10,000,000,000 in American loan guarantees to Israel, and Jerusalem in turn announced a moratorium on new Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Thanks to Bush's leadership, the conference that opened in Madrid on Oct. 30, 1991, spawned three diplomatic tracks: IsraeliPalestinian discussions on an interim settlement; bilateral talks between Israel, on the one hand, and Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, on the other; and multilateral conferences designed to support the first two tracks. Syria's President Assad signalled a new flexibility when he first used the word peace in September 1992, and he later indicated that the total return of the Golan Heights was no longer a precondition for negotiations. A crucial breakthrough was made in May 1993 as Israel began secret negotiations with the PLO that bore fruit in August whenjust as the delegates were gathering for the 11th multilateral round of talksthe Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, made the surprise announcement that an accord had been reached with the PLO. Secret talks held in Norway had resulted in a plan to establish Palestinian self-rule in the Gaza Strip and in Jericho. As part of the agreement 'Arafat repudiated before the Israelis the long-standing Palestinian denunciation of Israel's right to exist. The signing of a Declaration of Principles based on UN Resolutions 242 and 338, presided over by U.S. President William J. Clinton, followed on September 13. Speculation ensued as to whether 'Arafat would survive to enforce the accord against the will of terrorist groups like Hamas. Despite continued violence, however, an implementation accord was reached on May 4, 1994, that in turn allowed the consummation of peace between Jordan and Israel on October 26. As the year ended, hopes were high that Syria would also agree to terms. Several sticky points remained between Jerusalem and Damascus, however, while the Israelis and Americans discussed whether or not U.S. peacekeeping forces should be deployed on the Golan Heights to monitor an agreement. Total Cold War and the diffusion of power, 195772 The concomitant arrival of the missile age and of an independent and restive Third World multiplied the senses in which politics had become global. Intercontinental rockets not only meant that the most destructive weapons known could now be propelled halfway around the world in minutes but also, because of the imminent nuclear standoff they heralded, that a Cold War competition would now extend into other realmsscience and technology, economic growth, social welfare, race relations, image makingin which the Soviets or Americans could try to prove that their system was the best. At the same time, the decolonization of dozens of underdeveloped states in Asia and Africa induced the superpowers to look beyond the original front lines of the Cold War in Europe and East Asia. These technological and political revolutions would seem to have raised the United States and the Soviet Union to unequaled heights of power. The Soviets and Americans advanced rapidly in the high technology required for spaceflight and ballistic missiles, while techniques for the mobilization and management of intellectual and material resources reached a new level of sophistication, especially in the United States, through the application of systems analysis, computers, bureaucratic partnership with corporations and universities, and Keynesian fine-tuning of the economy. By the mid-1960s the vigorous response of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to the Cold War challenge seemed to ensure American technological, economic, and military primacy for the forseeable future. A mere five to seven years later, however, it became clear that the 1960s, far from establishing an American hegemony, had in fact wrou