H-Diplo Roundtable XX-41 on Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970-1990

H-Diplo H-Diplo Roundtable XX-41 on Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970-1990

Discussion published by George Fujii on Monday, June 3, 2019

H-Diplo Roundtable Review Volume XX, No. 41 3 June 2019

Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse Roundtable and Web Production Editor: George Fujii

Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds, eds. Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970-1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. ISBN: 978-0-19-872750-7 (hardback, £38.99).

URL: http://www.tiny.cc/Roundtable-XX-41

Contents

Introduction by Thomas Schwartz, Vanderbilt University. 2 Review by Susan Colbourn, Yale University. 5 Review by Mario Del Pero, Institut d’études politiques/SciencesPo of Paris. 8 Review by Michael De Groot, University of Pennsylvania. 11 Author’s Response by Kristina Spohr, John Hopkins University, and David Reynolds, University of Cambridge 15

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

Introduction by Thomas Schwartz, Vanderbilt University

Reading a book today about the relatively successful summits of the 1970s and 1980s that helped unify the West and end the Cold War seems like an exercise in nostalgia. The ‘liberal world order’ so extolled during these years seems on the verge of cracking up. The United States is now in the process of withdrawing from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement of 1987, and the divisions between America and its European allies over issues like trade and tariffs, the Iranian nuclear deal, and the Paris climate agreement remain deep and unreconciled. An article about the recent 2019 Munich Security conference begins, “Europe and the Trump Administration have stopped pretending to respect each other.”[1]

Nostalgic as this might be, Transcending the Cold War elicits strong praise from all three reviewers. This is an edited volume with “a cohesive and compelling set of essays” as Susan Colburn writes, each of which is “valuable in its own right.” Drawing on what Mario Del Pero refers to as “a team of first rate historians,” all of whom use recently opened primary sources, Spohr and Reynolds have carefully structured the volume around distinct and chronologically related themes. The first set of articles, “Thawing the Cold War,” features discussions of the Erfurt and Kassel conferences in 1970 between German leaders, President Richard Nixon’s trip to China, and the Moscow summit of 1972. The second section, “Living with the Cold War,” delves into the famous Helsinki conference of 1975 and the meetings of Western leaders at Bonn and Guadeloupe in 1978, as well as the 1979 summit with President Jimmy Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Vienna. The third section of the volume, “Transcending the Cold War,” deals with the summit meetings of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Chancellor Helmut Kohl with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, with the meeting between Bush and his Chinese counterpart in 1989 providing an argument for the shift in American focus from Beijing to Moscow, a shift which the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989 cemented.

The reviewers are not without their criticisms, although they stress that these are minor and should not detract from their appreciation of the volume. Michael de Groot argues that the treatment of China is not fully integrated into a volume that is primarily concerned with Europe. He also raises the question of whether the volume elides the serious divisions and conflicts within the West during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Frequent summits could not conceal the fact that Carter and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt loathed each other, or that the Europeans were wary of Ronald Reagan’s harsh anti- Communism. De Groot also challenges the relative significance of summitry and the role of individual leaders as opposed to other factors in the “causal hierarchy of the Cold War’s end.” He poses the broad question of whether the results of some of the summits toward the end of the Cold War were “overdetermined” by events on the ground in Europe, such as the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe, the German elections, Soviet financial weakness, and the Helsinki agreements. Colburn also makes the important point that summitry is often linked to efforts to improve relations, and that the volume associates the increase in summits with policies like rapprochement, détente and Ostpolitik. She then points out that one omission in the volume is coverage of the summits between the Western allies that occurred between 1979 and 1985. These meetings, particularly Ottawa (1981), Versailles (1982), and Williamsburg (1983) were very contentious meetings, with serious disagreements about the Cold War and international economic questions, with the Reagan administration facing serious pushback from the Europeans and Canadians. This suggests that summits may also play a role in simply keeping leaders talking to one another when they disagree or when their publics are demanding that they disagree.

Finally, it is important, as Del Pero points out, to recognize that “the symbolic and even theatrical dimension of summits was crucial.”[2] Whether it was Reagan and Gorbachev strolling in Red Square or Kohl and the Soviet leader sitting awkwardly on tree trunks in the Caucasus, the choreography and symbolism of the summit were designed with a global audience in mind, although the particular domestic constituencies were probably the most important. Del Pero notes that this symbolism and drama at the highest level of government could only be sustained if the “Sherpas of the Summits,” the respective bureaucracies and lower level officials beyond the television cameras, also engaged their counterparts, and that these “Sherpas” do not appear very much in this volume. This may well

These minor criticisms aside, the reviewers are enthusiastic about this scholarly volume, with Colburn recommending it as “a teaching tool, given its breath and clarity.” It is rare that this is said about an edited volume, and this underlines the achievement of Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds in providing fresh scholarly insights into the last two decades of the Cold War.

Participants:

Kristina Spohr is Helmut Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC., and normally she is on the faculty of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She studied at the University of East Anglia, Sciences Po Paris, and Cambridge University. Spohr has authored several books, most recentlyThe Global Chancellor: Helmut Schmidt and the Reshaping of the International Order (Oxford University Press, 2016)—also in a German edition, Helmut Schmidt: Der Weltkanzler (WGB/Theiss, 2016). She has also edited, with David Reynolds,Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970-1990 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2016). She has just completed her new book on the global exit from the Cold War. Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989 will appear with HarperCollins (UK) and Yale University Press (US) as well as in a German edition with DVA entitled Wendezeit: Die Neuordnung der Welt nach 1989 in fall 2019.

David Reynolds is Professor of International History at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He was educated at Cambridge and Harvard, and has held visiting appointments at Harvard, Sciences Po in Paris, and Nihon University, Tokyo. Apart from Transcending the Cold War, his most recent books are The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century (Simon & Schuster, 2013) and The Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt, with Vladimir Pechatnov (Yale University Press, 2018).Island Stories: Britain and its History in the Age of Brexit will be published by HarperCollins (UK) in the fall of 2019. He has also written and presented thirteen historical documentaries about 20th century international history for BBC TV, many of which are now available on Netflix.

Thomas Alan Schwartz is a Professor of History and Political Science at Vanderbilt University. Most recently he was the co-editor with Matthias Schulz, The Strained Alliance: US-European Relations in the 1970s (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He is currently finishing a study of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger entitled Henry Kissinger and American Power.

Susan Colbourn is Henry Chauncey Jr. ’57 postdoctoral fellow at International Security Studies at Yale University, having completed her Ph.D. in History at the University of Toronto in spring 2018. She is currently finishing a book on NATO and the Euromissiles Crisis.

Mario Del Pero is Professor of International History and U.S. Foreign Relations at theInstitut d’études politiques/SciencesPo of Paris. His research focuses on the history of U.S. Foreign Relations, particularly during the Cold War. Among his most recent publications areEra Obama [The Obama

Era] (Feltrinelli, 2017); Libertà e Impero. Gli Stati Uniti e il Mondo, 1776-2011 [Empire and Liberty. The United States and the World, 1776-2017] (Laterza, 2017, 3rd ed); The Eccentric Realist. Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy (Cornell University Press, 2009). Prof. Del Pero is currently writing a book on U.S. evangelical missions in early Cold War Italy.

Michael de Groot is a Ph.D. candidate in international history at the University of Virginia and a Henry A. Kissinger Predoctoral Fellow with International Security Studies at Yale University. He is currently completing his dissertation, titled “Disruption: Economic Globalization and the New World Order of the 1970s.”

Review by Susan Colbourn, Yale University

Summits often produce memorable moments, like the kiss between U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev at Vienna or Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, strolling with his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev in Red Square. These meetings—and the photographs that resulted—often seemed to encapsulate the Cold War of that particular time. Kristina Spohr’s and David Reynolds’s edited volume Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970-1990 brings together essays on many of the late Cold War’s major summits, exploring the relationship between two decades of summitry and the end of ‘bipolarity in Europe.’ The collection’s primary objectives, as Spohr and Reynolds define them in the introduction, are to draw out the “interplay of political action and situational context” to appreciate how and why the Cold War came to an end when it did (3).[3] Bringing together chapters on fifteen summits from Erfurt to Beijing, Transcending the Cold War encourages us to consider where summitry fits in the diplomatic landscape and what makes a meeting a summit.

Divided into three sections, Transcending the Cold War advances a clear periodization of the late Cold War. The first section, “Thawing the Cold War,” deals with a troika of summits: the German- German summits at Erfurt and Kassel in 1970, President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, and the Nixon-Brezhnev summit in Moscow that same year.[4] A second section, under the heading “Living with the Cold War,” includes chapters on 1975’s Helsinki Summit and a series of summits in 1978-1979 at Bonn, Guadeloupe, and Vienna.[5] “Transcending the Cold War,” the collection’s final section, covers the Reagan-Gorbachev summits (Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington, and Moscow), George H.W. Bush’s 1989 summits in Beijing and Malta, and finally, the Caucusus in 1990.[6]

It is refreshing to see an edited volume with so much collaborative scholarship. Six of the nine chapters are co-authored, and the benefits are obvious. Some leverage multilingual archival research to offer a more balanced view of a summit from both participants’ perspectives, like Yafeng Xia and Chris Tudda’s chapter on Beijing, 1972. Others take the opportunity to compare summits. Jeffrey Engel and Sergey Radchenko, for example, highlight fascinating differences between Beijing and Malta and the Bush administration’s broader debates over what foreign policy issues to prioritize during their first year in office.

Summit meetings, as so many of the chapters make clear, were high-profile public events. Photo ops and media scrums were a major part of the agenda, and the list of illustrations here seems to prove it with fireside chats, gymnastics shows, and a pair of tree trunk stools. Summitry was also an ongoing process. Jonathan Hunt and David Reynolds trace the role of summitry in U.S.-Soviet relations from the willingness to meet in 1985 to the signing of historic agreements on nuclear arms, emphasizing the rapid transformations of the late 1980s. Benedikt Schoenborn and Gottfried Niedhart’s chapter on Erfurt and Kassel offers an important reminder that meeting itself can be significant, no matter the immediate progress.

Taken together, the collection suggests two assumptions about what can be termed a summit: the power and status of the meeting’s participants, and the prospect of drastic change. The summits gathered together in this volume largely center around four powers: the United States, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and the Federal Republic of Germany. An anecdote from James Cameron’s chapter best sums up this dichotomy. Before Nixon traveled to Moscow in 1972, his staff ransacked the final communiqués and itineraries of other Western leaders for language and ideas (74-5). Few of those visits to Moscow, however, are considered summits in their own right, certainly not on same scale as Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev’s. So, what made Nixon’s visit different? Was it the sense of responsibility, shared by the two Cold War superpowers? Was it the symbolism that the Cold War was finally changing?

The idea of summitry is intimately linked with the process of improving relations, as terms like rapprochement, détente, and Ostpolitik appear and reappear throughout this volume. Many of the summits chosen reflect the opportunity for breakthrough or a historic departure from what came before. The summits of 1970-2, for instance, were historic and high-profile “icebreakers” (7). But summits were not merely a diplomatic tool to improve relations between adversaries. Michael Morgan and Daniel Sargent refer to the Helsinki Summit as “a pivot of world politics,” noting that the majority of summits in the late 1970s were summits between the Western allies, like Bonn and Guadeloupe, which are treated in this volume in a chapter by Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds (113). A chapter or two on the summits between 1979 and 1985 would have gone a long way in underscoring this point. G-7 gatherings like Ottawa (1981), Versailles (1982), and Williamsburg (1983) were the site of major disagreements about how to prosecute the Cold War, as the Western allies argued about economic sanctions and worried about public opposition to the Euromissiles. If one runs a bit further with the central organizing principle of the volume, President Jimmy Carter’s failed proposal to hold a NATO Summit in 1980 would be another prime candidate for inclusion.

Transcending the Cold War reflects a conventional outlook of the 1970s and 1980s. The fifteen summits included (and the three sections into which they are divided) reinforce the notion that the years between 1979 and 1985—so often dubbed the “Second Cold War”—were somehow different. Spohr and Reynolds explicitly engage this idea in their concluding chapter, pointing to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the introduction of martial law in Poland, and NATO’s now-infamous command and control exercise, Able Archer 83.[7] The editors conclude, quoting Time magazine’s correspondent on US-Soviet relations (and future Deputy Secretary of State during Bill Clinton’s presidency) Strobe Talbott, that the United States and the Soviet Union “were no longer negotiating in any forum.” The Europeans, by comparison, carried on East-West dialogue and “reflected attempts to live with Cold War” (240). Here, one wonders about the institutional channels of dialogue that remained. The United States and the Soviet Union did maintain numerous fora for negotiation, both

Transcending the Cold War’s greatest strengths are the result of it being an edited volume. Spohr and Reynolds have brought together a cohesive and compelling set of essays. Each one of the chapters is valuable in its own right. All are engaging and well-written, speaking to the context and controversies surrounding their respective periods. Placing them in dialogue with one another takes the analysis one step further, raising broader questions about summitry as a diplomatic tool and its relative importance in transforming and overcoming the Cold War’s divisions, particularly vis-à-vis structural developments. This volume is particularly valuable as a teaching tool, given its breadth and clarity.

Review by Mario Del Pero, Institut d’études politiques/SciencesPo of Paris

The 1970s and 1980s were, among other things, decades of summitry. From the 1970 summits between the two German leaders, Willy Brandt and Willi Stoph, to the July 1990 Caucasus meeting between the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the two final decades of the Cold War were punctuated by summits. Many of them are examined and discussed in this rich, and remarkably homogeneous, collection edited by international (and Cold War) historians David Reynolds and Kristina Spohr. The objective of the volume, we are told in the introduction[8], is not to resurrect “outdated notions of Great Man history” (3), although in a few occasions—particularly when German chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Kohl are discussed—great men seem indeed to dominate the stage. Reynolds and Spohr instead seek to examine the features of summitry as a practice in order to reflect on and explain the last phase of the Cold War. First and foremost is the notion that human agency was, and must be considered, a key driver of the historical process. Summits, the editors rightly note, help us to tease out the “interplay of political action and situational context” (3); looking at the interaction between the evolution of the Cold War and the practice of international summitry, it is possible to comprehend how “systemic developments influenced the behavior of leaders and how leaders in turn tried to shape the process of change” (233).

The summits this volume discusses fall broadly within three categories: Superpower relations (i.e. Soviet-American), with nuclear weapons invariably playing a key role; the German question, which—despite the progressive globalization of the Cold War competition—remained at the heart of post-1945 international relations; and the new triangularity produced by the rise of China, the Sino- Soviet competition, and the U.S. decision to finally open to Beijing.

By studying summits we can escape the most common methodological trap of international relations and instead balance structure and agency: systemic constraints on the one side and human choices

Possibilities and necessities, opportunities and fears, were behind the many summit meetings this volume examines. To engage with the Other, one had first to “de-other” (238) it, as Reynolds and Spohr correctly point out.[9] Détente was both a condition and consequence of this. The relaxation of tensions between the superpowers, and the ideological fatigue that accompanied it, made possible forms of diplomatic engagement that would have been unthinkable two decades earlier. Mutual recognition, and the resultant legitimization of the counterpart (the abovementioned ‘de-otherization’ of the adversary) were requested in order to sit at the same table, negotiate and achieve meaningful political results. The diffusion of power, and the loosening of the rigid post-1945 bipolarity, also played a role: greater geopolitical flexibility was a key determinant behind the process that rendered possible many of the meetings discussed here. But these summits were also a response to a visible, and potentially very threatening, deficit of governance. This deficiency had many drivers. Old instruments had vanished as with the implosion of the Bretton Woods system (which could have been discussed more thoroughly, particularly in the chapter on Bonn and Guadeloupe). Governance was clearly wanting in the key nuclear realm, whereas the U.S.-Soviet mortal embrace imposed new and deeper forms of cooperation between Moscow and Washington. And the loosening of the Cold War straightjacket, welcomed by many as it was, could paradoxically undermine a system that in Europe had somehow guaranteed stability and order.

Combined with technological progress, the many, and often novel, faces of global interdependence could frighten or induce hope and optimism. But they certainly encouraged engagement and dialogue among the main powers of the international system.

Summits stemmed from this interdependence and helped deepen it. Even when they achieved little in concrete terms—and that was the case of many 1970s summits—they could be fundamental “icebreakers” (27), as in the case of the Erfurt and Kassel meetings between Brandt and Stoph which is discussed in the excellent contribution from Benedikt Schoenborn and Gottfried Niedhardt.[10] They were meant, in other words, to trigger a process often promoted as sub silentio after the spotlights on the big event had finally been turned off. Those spotlights were nevertheless fundamental, since they constituted an integral element of the summitry. As all the essays of this volume make clear, the symbolic and even theatrical dimension of summits was crucial. Participants addressed an audience that could be global in scope. Theatrics invariably ensued—just think of the Reagan-Gorbachev meetings—and summits were carefully choreographed to convey specific messages, in particular the idea of a strong intimacy between participants via, for example, an accurately positioned fireplace (Reagan and Gorbachev in Geneva 1985) or some bizarre, and presumably very uncomfortable, tree trunks (on which poor Helmut Kohl had to sit when meeting with Gorbachev in 1990). Symbolism and drama helped improve (or build) a personal relationship between leaders, generating the very momentum that summits were meant to spur. Such momentum, however, could be sustained only if and when theatre and leaders’ interactions were accompanied by low level engagement on highly specific issues, carried out by the respective bureaucracies. The Sherpas of the Summits don’t appear much in the various cases this volume examines, but they were key supporting actors in the 1970s and 1980s summitry.

This limited attention to the mid/low level participants of the summits and the process they kick-

Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Roundtable XX-41 on Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970-1990. H-Diplo. 06-03-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/4167558/h-diplo-roundtable-xx-41-transcending-cold-war-summits-statecraft Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 7 H-Diplo started is one of the few flaws of this otherwise very rich collection. Along with it, some additional reflections could have been offered on the peculiarities, and inner contradictions, of the strategic (i.e. nuclear) interdependence that was so instrumental to the mutual recognition between the superpowers. This “interdependence for survival,” as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger famously defined it,[11] was invariably the core on which U.S.-Soviet summit discussions pivoted. It created a paradoxical situation in which the two Cold War archenemies came to accept that they depend on each other for their security if not for their very survival. Politically unacceptable for a part of the American public, as the rise of Ronald Reagan and the ensuing Strategic Defense Initiative saga clearly revealed, this structural dimension informed, if not shaped, the ‘situational context’ in which ‘political action’ could take place, as many essays of this volume show.

These minor quibbles notwithstanding, Transcending the Cold War is an important and rich volume that enhances a better and more complete understanding of the last two decades of the Cold War. David Reynolds and Kristina Spohr can be commended not only for their contributions in the volume (in addition to the introduction and conclusion, they authored or co-authored chapters 5, 6 and 8), but also for having assembled a team of first-rate historians to produce what is a remarkably coherent and comprehensive volume.

Review by Michael De Groot, University of Pennsylvania

The end of the Cold War has inspired a voluminous literature, and the field will continue to grow as scholars uncover more sources and apply new approaches. The literature to date generally falls into two factions. Some scholars highlight the role that individual leaders such as Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and U.S. President Ronald Reagan played in facilitating the peaceful and unexpected end of the conflict. Others stress instead the importance of impersonal structural forces such as the economic inefficiencies of the socialist system, domestic politics, and the rise of human rights as an international norm, among others.

In their volume Transcending the Cold War, editors Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds seek to establish a middle ground that leans toward human agency by drawing attention to the role of summitry in overcoming the division of Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. They contend that long-term developments “only take us so far: they do not explain when and how the Cold War confrontation ended–why its denouement occurred in 1989-1990 and why this happened so peacefully” (3). Structural factors created the necessary environment, they acknowledge, but policymakers retained the capacity to make choices within these constraints. Leaders’ actions were not purely reactive: “they also brought to bear their own ‘mental maps’ and emotional experiences” to the challenges that they confronted (6).[12] Successful summits required personal trust at the very top and a willingness on both sides to compromise, as well as a “combination of pragmatic politics and grand vision” (250). It ‘takes two to tango,’ after all.

The collection conceives of summitry broadly, including both substantive and symbolic exchanges, as well as formal and casual meetings between senior officials, within its implicit definition. Spohr and

Reynolds underscore three unifying themes that run across the volume. First, superpower summits in the 1970s and 1980s attempted to advance nuclear arms control. Second, summitry sought to legitimize or transcend the division of Germany. Third, summitry with China gave international affairs a new triangular geometry.

The volume is divided into three sections that are organized both chronologically and thematically. The first three chapters focus on the ‘icebreaker’ summits of the early 1970s, which Spohr and Reynolds contend “helped to change the mood of international relations” by encouraging leaders to “discove[r] and begi[n] to humanize the Other” (7). In the opening chapter on the Erfurt and Kassel Summits of 1970, Benedikt Schoenborn and Gottfried Niedhart explore how summitry paved the way for the de facto recognition of two German states in 1972.[13] They contend that Erfurt and Kassel triggered a series of West German meetings with Eastern leaders over the next two decades, decreasing Eastern European fears of an irredentist West Germany and enabling dialogue between the blocs. Turning to Asia, Yafeng Xia and Chris Tudda examine the U.S.-Sino Beijing Summit in 1972, illustrating how personal politics ushered the world into a “new arena of triangularity that shifted the dynamics of international diplomacy” (61).[14] Although Xia and Tudda make great use of both English- and Chinese-language sources, greater engagement with how the summit impacted events in Europe would have helped integrate the chapter into the volume’s focus on Europe.[15] Finally, James Cameron considers the impact of the U.S.-Soviet Summit of May 1972 in Moscow, which resulted in U.S. President Richard Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signing the SALT and ABM Treaties, among others.[16] Although these agreements did not transform U.S.-Soviet relations, the summit demonstrated for the first time that Washington and Moscow “could do business together” (86).

After the ‘icebreaker’ summits of the early 1970s, policymakers began to “think about how to live with, and in, a world divided” (8). The second section of the volume explores summits that aimed to “make the Cold War more livable” (238). Michael Cotey Morgan and Daniel Sargent investigate the origins of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Helsinki and evaluate its complicated legacy.[17] The Helsinki Summit served Soviet and Eastern European interests by delivering de facto recognition by the West of post-1945 international boundaries, much to the chagrin of President Gerald Ford’s domestic opponents, but the Final Act also served to undermine Moscow’s “grip on Eastern Europe” over the next fifteen years (115). Next, Spohr and Reynolds contend that the Bonn, Guadeloupe, and Vienna Summits of 1978-1979 represented transitional phase in Cold War summitry, the point when the West tried to “cope with the challenge of an increasingly tense and unpredictable world” by having regular West-West summits (Vienna does not fit this narrative quite so neatly) (123).[18] The authors conclude that the summits served as a device to hold the West together as détente crumbled. Yet the late 1970s should not be seen as years of transatlantic unity. West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s exasperation with U.S. President Jimmy Carter defined a cold relationship between the two leaders that played out both behind closed doors and in the media. Schmidt chastised Carter for the latter’s promotion of human rights as counterproductive and protested against U.S. opposition to the sale of West German nuclear technology to Brazil. Washington’s unwillingness to defend the dollar in 1977 and 1978 raised the specter of exported inflation, encouraging the Chancellor to turn away from the United States in international monetary policy and push forward on the European Monetary System. Summitry only took Western unity so far.

The final section explores the role of summitry during the Cold War’s endgame. First, Jonathan Hunt and David Reynolds demonstrate how Mikhail Gorbachev’s primary concerns about the domestic economy drove him to seek a relaxation of Cold War tensions in order to ease the financial burden of the arms race.[19] In Washington, President Ronald Reagan felt emboldened after his reelection in 1984, and he believed that the U.S. bargaining position with the Soviets had improved sufficiently after his military buildup, the achievement of Atlantic Alliance solidarity, and Soviet fears about the Strategic Defense Initiative (157). Although the two leaders approached their summit at Geneva in 1985 with different objectives, their meeting sparked mutual trust that would continue over the next three years, ushering in improvements in bilateral relations, facilitating a stark reduction in the nuclear threat, and “set[ting] the stage for a veritable transformation in the geopolitics of the Cold War” (173). Continuing the chronology, Jeffrey A. Engel and Sergey Radchenko focus on the Beijing and Malta Summits of 1989, arguing that they represented a “remarkable turn in American policy from Beijing to Moscow [that] would prove of real diplomatic importance.”[20] The 1972 Beijing Summit had opened a door to China, and George H.W. Bush initially looked there when he assumed the presidency. But events at Tiananmen Square intervened. By the year’s end, “the door marked Beijing slammed firmly in his face” and Bush turned instead to Moscow (181). The President’s first summit with Gorbachev in Malta convinced him that he could talk to the Soviet leader, which Engel and Radchenko note, proved important during negotiations on German unification. In the eighth and final chapter, Spohr picks up that subject and explores the role of the West German-Soviet summits in the summer of 1990.[21] Over a series of meetings in the Caucuses, Helmut Kohl and Gorbachev engaged in a ‘protracted duel’ over Germany’s future relationship with NATO. Ultimately, among other things, the leaders agreed that a unified Germany would come under NATO’s umbrella and the Soviet Union would receive a withdrawal period of three to four years. In exchange, Bonn would compensate Moscow for housing and retraining Red Army soldiers at a price that would ultimately amount to DM 17 billion (221). This resolved the German question and ensured that Western institutions, particularly NATO and the European Community, would form the security architecture of a post-Cold War Europe.

In producing a single volume unifying the diverse international summits of the 1970s and 1980s, Spohr and Reynolds have contributed to scholars’ understanding of the complex negotiations that shaped the trajectory of the end of the Cold War. Whereas most of the available literature concentrates on the events of the mid-and late-1980s, this volume seeks to extend the timeframe, implicitly linking the establishment of détente to the conflict’s peaceful resolution almost two decades later. Yet it may have been fruitful to spend a bit more time articulating the relationship between the summits of the 1970s and the 1980s. After the ‘breakthrough’ superpower summits of 1972-1974, U.S. and Soviet meetings did not pick up again until Reagan and Gorbachev occupied the White House and Kremlin a decade later. Aside from procedural similarities, what were the enduring elements of summitry that survived the collapse of détente? The case that the 1970s and 1980s summits were linked is more persuasive in the context of West Germany’s contacts with the East, where Ostpolitik largely survived the onset of the so-called Second Cold War. Bonn wanted to continue dialogue with the East to ensure that the German question remained open. The West German government rescued the East Germans by extending the Milliardenkredite in 1983 and 1984, for example, throwing East Berlin a financial lifeline and ending a Western credit boycott that had existed since the imposition of martial law in Poland.

Nevertheless, few scholars will disagree with Spohr and Reynolds that summits played an important role in international relations during this period. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that somebody could write about détente without the Moscow Summit or discuss German unification without Kohl’s meetings with Gorbachev in July 1990. Scholars will still debate, however, the question of summitry’s position in the causal hierarchy of the Cold War’s end. Did those negotiations play a more decisive role than changes in the international system, economics, or domestic politics? Were infrequent summits more important than regular contacts between bureaucracies? Could U.S.-German-Soviet talks really have produced a different outcome, or was German unification on Western terms overdetermined by the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe, the Soviet need for financial assistance, the East German election in March 1990 in favor of the Allianz für Deutschland, and the force of the statement from the Helsinki Final Act that a country had the right to belong to the alliance of its choice? Ranking the importance of the various factors is one of the primary challenges facing scholars who write the literature on the end of the Cold War.

In analyzing summitry, the volume might also have cast a wider net than the dissolution of bipolarity in Europe. Perhaps the best example of summitry’s significance across both decades was the birth of the Group of 7. Spohr and Reynolds do note that “new West-West summitry” emerged in the late 1970s as a means of managing common problems in an age of accelerating economic interdependence, but it is not included as one of the major interpretive threads in the book and disappears in the chapters on the 1980s (122). Other scholars may wish to expand Transcending the Cold War’s concept to inquire about summitry’s role in global affairs both within and beyond the Cold War context. A global perspective would allow China to fit a bit more comfortably into the framework, particularly as the relationship between summitry with China and the Cold War in Europe is not always made clear in the current volume. Another possibility for inclusion would be the North-South dialogue, a series of large conferences like the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) that also had a global reach.

In sum, scholars of international affairs in the late Cold War will find a lot of value in each of these well-written chapters as well as in Spohr’s and Reynolds’s thoughtful introduction and conclusion. They mobilize recently declassified primary sources on both sides of the Iron Curtain and grapple with enormously consequential topics. Transcending the Cold War should stimulate constructive debates about the interaction between human agency and structure at the end of the Cold War and will help push the conversation forward.

Author’s Response by Kristina Spohr, John Hopkins University, and David Reynolds, University of Cambridge

We appreciate the stimulating and detailed responses to our edited book from the three commentators. Their thoughtful reactions are, in general, agreeably positive. But since the reviewers highlight some conceptual issues and raise several specific questions, let us pick up a few points.

The first concerns the way in which we approached our overall task. Susan Colbourn welcomes a volume “with so much collaborative scholarship,” observing that “six of the chapters are co-authored and the benefits are obvious.” We did indeed consciously seek to engineer such collaboration as a way to “leverage multilingual archival research” and to offer broader comparisons between summits. We also wanted to encourage cross-cultural exchange and debate between the two authors themselves. One regret we had was that we could not secure the services of Russian historians so as to make two of the chapters on the Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev years into joint endeavours.

The danger, of course, in such essay collections is that the chapters do not hang tightly together, that the approaches of different authors are diverse, and their prose styles not easily harmonized. That is why we started by trying to find complementary author pairings and set clear editorial guidelines, including a list of research questions that each essay-team had to tackle. Then we held a two-day workshop that brought the essayists together, during which all drafts were debated. The contributors graciously tolerated our dirigiste approach—during both the drafting and workshop stages, and also our tight editing process afterwards. We are glad that Mario del Pero found the result “remarkably coherent.” It was indeed our hope to produce not merely a collection of thought-provoking papers but an integrated book that took the reader on a journey via specific summits from the era of détente to the defusing and overcoming of the Cold War. We offer our experiences as a possible model for other edited projects.

Unsurprisingly, given our agenda, the commentators note some omissions in the volume. Both Colbourn and Michael de Groot would have liked more treatment of one-off or serial “West-West” summitry—within the Atlantic alliance and the European Community, and also leading into the development of G7 summits. De Groot also comments that “the 1970s should not be seen as years of transatlantic unity.” And Colbourn adds that the G7 talks between 1979 and 1985 “were the site of major disagreements about how to prosecute the Cold War, as the Western allies argued about economic sanctions and worried about public opposition to the Euromissiles.”

Both make fair points. There were acute tensions within Europe and among Western allies at large in the 1970s, over the ‘right’ (neo-liberal or Keynesian) economic and energy policies—on both the global and domestic planes—over the creation of the EMS, over the best approach to Western defence and deterrence, over the Polish crisis, over the dangers of (Euro)Communism, over how to handle the environmental, pacifist, and often anti-American popular protest movements—to name but a few contentious areas. But whatever the personal animosities or disagreements in outlook between leaders, new international fora were created, new multilateral agreements were reached, and NATO as well as the EC and G7 stuck together. As a result, by the 1980s there was intensified West-West dialogue and ultimately more interdependence and cooperation than before—not less. “Summits,” as Del Pero sums up, “stemmed from this interdependence and helped deepen it.”

Del Pero would have wanted more sustained and detailed engagement with “the mid/low level participants of the summits” in other words the “Sherpas” who helped ensure success at the top-level meetings, by kickstarting processes, laying the groundwork for the leaders as well as by working on the post-summit implementation of agreements or seeking to continue dialogue on frictional issues. To be sure, diplomats and officials often kept channels intact and open across the Cold War divide even when talks froze at the top.

In response to these requests for more, we plead the tight pressures of space imposed by the publishers on us and our authors and also note that we have addressed some of these issues elsewhere. Spohr’s The Global Chancellor offers a detailed account of the friction between German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and President Jimmy Carter over the neutron bomb and then the Soviet SS-20 missile, arguing that summitry helped tocreate a tenuous but significant transatlantic consensus around the dual-track decision of 1979. Reynolds has gone into more detail on “institutional summitry” in Summits, which also underlines the vital behind-the-scenes role of Sherpas and professional diplomats—singling out the remarkable collaboration between Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in the summitry of the Reagan-Gorbachev era.[22] As regards West-West summits, there exists a specialist volume, edited by Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol and Federico Romero, on the Rise of the European Council and the G7, 1974-1991, to which Reynolds contributed a chapter on the origins of the G7.[23]

In other volumes, there could indeed be space for discussion of the North-South summit of 1981 in Cancun (officially called the International Meetings on Cooperation and Development)—as de Groot has urged – and for more sustained attention to China’s opening to the West and into world trade: a point raised by Colbourn.[24] Both the dynamics of North-South relations and the rise of China as a global power are indeed major themes of international relations over the last half-century.

But the overall aim of our particular volume was to offer succinct international syntheses of the latest research on the denouement of bipolarity and to encourage further thought on why and how the Cold War ended. As Colbourn appreciated, our intention throughout was to raise “broader questions on summitry as a diplomatic tool and its relative importance in transforming and overcoming the Cold War’s divisions, particularly vis-à-vis structural developments.” Our mission, to borrow De Groot’s concluding remarks, was that “Transcending the Cold War should stimulate constructive debate about the interaction between human agency and structure at the end of the Cold War and will help push the conversation forward.” If that indeed proves to be the case, we shall be well satisfied.

Notes

[1] Thomas Wright, “The Moment the Transatlantic Charade Ended,” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/mutual-distrust-2019-munich-security-conference/ 583015/.

[2] For an insightful analysis of one of the best examples of this use of summitry, see Tizoc Chavez, “‘One Picture May Not Be Worth Ten Thousand Words, but the White House is Betting It’s Worth Ten Thousand Votes’: Richard Nixon and Diplomacy as Spectacle” in Andrew L. Johns and Mitchell B. Lerner, eds., The Cold War at Home and Abroad: Domestic Politics and US Foreign Policy Since 1945 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018), 146-172.

[3] Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds, “Introduction,” inTranscending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970-1990, ed. Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1-12.

[4] Benedikt Schoenborn and Gottfried Niedhart, “Erfurt and Kassel, 1970,” in Transcending the Cold War, 15-42; Yafeng Xia and Chris Tudda, “Beijing, 1972,” in Transcending the Cold War, 43-66; James Cameron, “Moscow, 1972,” in Transcending the Cold War, 67-92.

[5] Michael Cotey Morgan and Daniel Sargent, “Helsinki, 1975,” inTranscending the Cold War, 95-121; Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds, “Bonn, Guadeloupe, and Vienna, 1978-9,” in in Transcending the Cold War, 122-148.

[6] Jonathan Hunt and David Reynolds, “Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington, and Moscow, 1985-8,” in Transcending the Cold War, 151-179; Jeffrey A. Engel and Sergey Radchenko, “Beijing and Malta, 1989,” in Transcending the Cold War, 180-203; Kristina Spohr, “The Caucasus, 1990,” in Transcending the Cold War, 204-230.

[7] Able Archer 83 remains the subject of considerable historiographical debate but ample scholarship, drawing on archival records from across the former Warsaw Pact, has rejected the idea that it was a near-brush with nuclear war. See, for example, Dmitry Adamsky, ““Not Crying Wolf”: Soviet Intelligence and the 1983 War Scare,” in The Euromissile Crisis and the End of the Cold War, ed. Leopoldo Nuti, Frédéric Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey, and Bernd Rother (Washington, D.C. and Stanford: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2015), 49-65; Beatrice Heuser, “The Soviet Response to the Euromissile Crisis,” in The Crisis of Détente in Europe: From Helsinki to Gorbachev, ed. Leopoldo Nuti (London: Routledge, 2009), 137-149; Beatrice Heuser, “Military Exercises and the Dangers of Misunderstandings: The East-West Crisis of the Early 1980s,” in Military Exercises: Political Messaging and Strategic Impact, ed. Beatrice Heuser, Tormod Heier, and Guillaume Lasconjarias (Rome: NATO Defense College, 2018), 113-137; Vojtech Mastny, “How Able Was “Able Archer”? Nuclear Trigger and Intelligence in Perspective,”Journal of Cold War Studies 11:1 (Winter 2009): 108-123; Simon Miles, “The War Scare That Wasn’t: Able Archer and the Myths of the Second Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies, forthcoming.

[8] Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds, “Introduction,” in Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds (eds), Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970-1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1-12.

[9] Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds, “Summits, Statecraft and the Dissolution of Bipolarity,” in Transcending the Cold War, 233-251.

[10] Benedikt Schoenborn and Gottfried Niedhardt, “Erfurt and Kassel, 1970,” inTranscending the Cold War, 15-42.

[11] “Briefing by the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” 15 June 1972, inForeign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1969-1976, Volume I : Foundations of Foreign Policy, 1969-1972, last accessed 8 May 2018.

[12] Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds, “Introduction,” in Spohr and Reynolds, eds.,Transcending the Cold War, 1-12.

[13] Benedikt Schoenborn and Gottfried Niedhart, “Erfurt and Kassel, 1970,” in Spohr and Reynolds, eds., Transcending the Cold War, 15-42.

[14] Yafeng Xia and Chris Tudda, “Beijing, 1972,” in Spohr and Reynolds, eds., Transcending the Cold War, 43-66.

[15] On the impact of U.S.-Sino rapprochement on European affairs, see, for example, Mary E. Sarotte, Dealing With the Devil: East Germany, Détente, and Ostpolitik, 1969-1973 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

[16] James Cameron, “Moscow, 1972,” in Spohr and Reynolds, eds.,Transcending the Cold War, 67-91.

[17] Michael Cotey Morgan and Daniel Sargent, “Helsinki, 1975,” in Spohr and Reynolds, eds., Transcending the Cold War, 95-121.

[18] Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds, “Bonn, Guadeloupe, and Vienna, 1978-9,” in Spohr and Reynolds, eds., Transcending the Cold War, 122-147.

[19] Jonathan Hunt and David Reynolds, “Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington, and Moscow, 1985-8,” in in Spohr and Reynolds, eds., Transcending the Cold War, 151-179.

[20] Jeffrey A. Engel and Sergey Radchenko, “Beijing and Malta, 1989,” in Spohr and Reynolds, eds., Transcending the Cold War, 180-203.

[21] Kristina Spohr, “The Caucasus, 1990,” in Spohr and Reynolds, eds., Transcending the Cold War, 204-229.

[22] Kristina Spohr, The Global Chancellor: Helmut Schmidt and the Reshaping of the International Order (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), chapters 3 and 4; David Reynolds, Summits: Six Meetings that Shaped the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2007), chapters 7 and 8.

[23] Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol and Federico Romero (eds),International Summitry and Global Governance: The Rise of the European Council and the G7, 1974-1991 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). See also Enrico Böhm,Die Sicherheit des Westens: Entstehung und Funktion der G7-Gipfel (1975-1981) (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2013).

[24] For other notable volumes on the story of summitry in the Cold War and its endgame, see Chris Tudda, Cold War Summits: From Potsdam to Malta (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) who explores the summits of Potsdam (1945) Bandung (1955), Glassboro (1967) Beijing (1972), Vienna (1979) and Malta (1990); and Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas S. Blanton, eds, The Last Superpower Summits: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Bush. Conversations that Ended the Cold War (Budapest: CEU Press 2016) who offer documentation and analysis concerning the US-Soviet summits from Geneva (1985) to Madrid (1991).