POLITICAL OPPORTUNITY AFTER THE COLD WAR

Abstract

The end of the cold war dramatically altered the prospects for challenging movements in both the East and the West. Because the international context in which social movements occur has so radically changed, their form and content is also likely to change radically. In this article, the author uses the concept of political opportunity structure to discuss the likely opportunities, issues, and constituencies of challenging movements after the cold war. The author begins by discussing political opportunity structure as an analytic tool, explaining how the end of the cold war alters opportunities for challengers within various countries and briefly outlines the events that marked the end of the cold war, arguing that activists played a role in precipitating and shaping the transformations now underway. Opportunities are discussed for political action on a large scale that activists have thus far pursued in a piecemeal fashion. The author then examines how these opportunities refract in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and in the United States. It is suggested that the prospects for transformation from below have dramatically improved in the West because negative models of alternative forms of political and economic organization are no longer externalized as a security threat. In the East, matters are much less clear. Opposition to party‐state governments in Eastern Europe spanned a broad political spectrum during the cold war, unified only by rejection of the status quo. Paradoxically, new openness may make organizing and articulating new claims, particularly for democratic movements, more difficult, and the author concludes by calling for transnational activist efforts.