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 | 1989: |
There are unique periods in history when a single year witnesses the total transformation of international relations. The year 1989 was one such crucial watershed. This book uses previously unavailable sources to explore the momentous events following the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago and the effects they have had on our world ever since. Based on documents, interviews, and television broadcasts from many different locations, including Moscow, Berlin, Bonn, Paris, London, and Washington, 1989 describes how Germany unified, NATO expansion began, and Russia got left on the periphery of the new Europe. Mary Sarotte explains that while it was clear past a certain point that the Soviet Bloc would crumble, there was nothing inevitable about what would follow. A wide array of political players--from leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl, George H. W. Bush, and James Baker, to organizations like NATO and the European Community, to courageous individual dissidents--all proposed courses of action and models for the future. In front of global television cameras, a competition ensued, ultimately won by those who wanted to ensure that the "new" order looked very much like the old. Sarotte explores how the aftermath of this fateful victory, and Russian resentment of it, continue to shape world politics today. Presenting diverse perspectives from the political elite as well as ordinary citizens, 1989 is compelling reading for anyone who cares about international relations past, present, or future. Mary Elise Sarotte is professor of international relations at the University of Southern California. Her previous work includes the books Dealing with the Devil and German Military Reform and European Security. She has served as a White House Fellow and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. "A great virtue of Mary Elise Sarotte's 1989 is that she makes the problem of hindsight bias explicit, and systematically explores the roads not taken."--Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books "The author embeds her interpretation in a sharp-eyed, fluent narrative of 1989-1990 that sees the realpolitik behind the stirring upheavals. . . . [S]he offers a smart and canny analysis of the birth of our not-so-new world order."--Publishers Weekly "Sarotte's book is compact and highly interpretive. Yet Sarotte has thoroughly mastered the original source material in all the key countries. She distills it with great skill, constantly enlivening her account with a sensibility for what these changes meant in life and culture. Hers is now the best one-volume work on Germany's unification available. It contains the clearest understanding to date of the extraordinary juggling performance of Kohl."--Philip D. Zelikow, Foreign Affairs "A hugely impressive study that looks beyond 1989 to the many-faceted battle to shape the new Europe."--The Washington Post "Sarotte's book is a "scrupulous account of the high politics and diplomacy of 1989. With remarkable diligence, she has interviewed almost all the surviving participants, and quarried government archives. . . . The result is a tale of hypocrisy and indecision in high places . . . Sarotte debunks myths."--The Economist "Sarotte's readable and reliable diplomatic history will no doubt take its place as the classic overview of this period. It is sensible, balanced, and well documented, drawing on what is now an extensive international body of primary and secondary sources."--Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs Endorsements: Series:
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