The end of the Cold War was a heady moment for me. It was not just the excitement of being able to witness history, the joy on people's faces as they breached the Berlin Wall or swarmed into Wenceslas Square, although that was euphoric enough. I felt something more that this was a personal triumph, a vindication of everything I had being doing politically and intellectually during the 1980s. I was active in that part of the peace movement that advocated 'detente from below' building links between movements in Eastern and Central Europe. This strategy was drawn from a specific analysis of the Cold War and of the nature of political processes. We argued that the Cold War was not a conflict between two different systems but an ideological device for sustaining two different systems. Both systems, the Atlanticist variant of capitalism and the Stalinist variant of socialism, needed a permanent external confrontation to legitimize power structures and maintain social cohesion. What is more, political parties, including the parties of the Left, were incorporated into the structures of the Cold War hence the need for new social movements, outside the orthodox power structures, 'antipolitics' to use the term coined by opposition groups in Eastern Europe, working in both East and West. The revolutions of 1989 seemed to be a kind of proof of this way of thinking. It was movements, not Western military might, that toppled the regimes in Central Europe. And the Western peace movement had played an important role, both in establishing a disarmament agenda which led to the INF Treaty and the talks about conventional-force reductions without which the Soviet Union could not have renounced the Brezhnev doctrine, and in supporting and assisting the fledgling