Review: The Global 1989

Abstract

THE GLOBAL 1989 Continuity and Change in World Politics George Lawson, Chris Armbruster, and Michael Cox, eds. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 317PP, US$33.00 paper. ISBN 9780521147910Whether it was the year of miracles or of negotiated transfers of power, 1989 made the idea of the real. Even the broadest world- significant events - the decolonization of Africa, the Vietnam War, the ou crisis of 1973 - developed along two largely separate channels. As if in parallel universes, they had different meanings, different faces on the two sides of the Cold War. Yes, the Soviet Union had oil, but oil's role in command economy was fundamentally different from its place in capitalist economy. Yes, reporters and military attaches from west and east encountered each other in the cafes of Brazzaville, Accra, and Vientiane, but their constraints and their goals, and the ways they thought about the world were fundamentally different. The enterprising transnational historian can trace ghost outlines across the barriers and find comparable effects here and there. Still, as scholars busily work to bridge the Cold War divide, we need to remember that the divide itself is what makes such work interesting.But now we come to 1989, year in which every day's headlines brought surprises from eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, China, South Africa, and Latin America. It is not the broad scattering of contemporaneous events that made the global, but that together they removed or at least weakened that divide, ending the era of parallel universes. In this sense, the world began in 1989, when it seemed as if everyone was experiencing the same reorientation.Of course, there was no everyone and never has been. The end of the Cold War meant one thing in Moscow and another in Paris, Washington, or Cairo. This should hardly surprise us; we are talking about the whole world, after all. The tension between the sense of the and the knowledge of different experiences drives the editors and authors of the articles in this collection. The Global 1989 is the product of one of the many 20thanniversary conferences that collectively blanketed the academic landscape three years ago. Most of those, fortunately, have not resulted in books. It is good thing that this one did. The typical 1989 conference featured couple of reminiscing veterans of the anti-communist struggle, few authors of books about the revolutions who offered potted summaries of ideas already in print, plus some local scholars asked to provide or comparative perspectives. The resultant hodgepodge was pleasant to experience, and there was always at least one new perspective on offer. But commemorative conferences are like wedding videos: if you weren't there, you won't find them particularly interesting.The Global 198g features none of the usual topics. Here global does not mean quick tour around the world, but instead consideration of how problems and processes have or have not been transformed by the end of the Cold War and the fall of European communist regimes. Do we really - as I always ask my students at the outset of courses on 1989 - live not in post-9/11, but post-1989 world? A consensus on this question does not emerge here. Co-editor George Lawson points out in the introductory essay that a fundamental rupture in world order does not appear to have taken place. Rather, much akin to the bionic man, the post-1989 era is quicker, stronger, faster (19) - different, and clearly post, but not utterly transformed. …