Because the Participants in the Geneva Summit Were Concerned

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Because the participants in the Geneva summit were concerned most of all with domestic and bloc consolidation, they came away from the meeting reasonably satisªed, even though the sessions yielded few concrete results and the post-Geneva agendas of the powers were largely incompatible.Soviet leaders were pleased that they had held their own with the stronger and more sophisticated Western powers.Despite the careful show of Western unity and the invocation of four-power rights and respon- sibilities going back to Potsdam, the shrewd Khrushchev could discern in Geneva the bipolar, arms control–centered U.S.-Soviet détente that would emerge in the 1960s and eventually push German unity off the political agenda until 1989.Dulles was re - lieved that the West had survived Geneva without falling prey to Soviet propaganda, and he was hopeful that the summit had initiated a diplomatic process that would gradually enable the West, proceeding from its “position of strength,” to secure Ger- man unity and the liberation of Eastern Europe.Britain and France were reasonably satisªed that they had bolstered their countries’ great-power status. Needless to say, these conºicting expectations about the post-Geneva world could not all come true.As John W.Young shows in his chapter on the conference of foreign ministers in the fall of 1955, the Soviet Union, having beneªted from the im- proved political climate in the wake of the summit, was not interested in revisiting the question of German uniªcation that the leaders had mandated to their foreign ministers.With “socialism” under construction in East Germany, the German question was closed—a position that the Soviet authorities held until the upheavals of 1989. Cold War Respite adds signiªcantly to our understanding of this key episode of the high Cold War, demonstrating how and why Geneva ultimately failed what Eisen- hower called the “acid test” of détente.If failure was already apparent at the foreign ministers’ conference, it was to become even more obvious a year later during the Suez and Hungarian crises, which highlighted the emergence of strategic bipolarity, shat- tered illusions about the great-power status of France and Britain, and ended any lin- gering hopes that Eastern Europe might be liberated or Germany united through the diplomacy initiated at Geneva.Ultimately the 1955 summit was indeed just a respite. Final resolution of the issues on the Geneva agenda—above all German unity and Eu- ropean security—had to wait another thirty-ªve years for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse from within of the entire Soviet system.

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Robert G.Darst, Smokestack Diplomacy: Cooperation and Conºict in East-West Envi- ronmental Politics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. 300 pp. $22.95.

Reviewed by Brent S. Steel, Oregon State University

Well before the demise of Communism environmental problems in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had reached grave levels.Environmental disasters such as the nu - clear power plant accident in Chernobyl and the nuclear weapons production facility

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accident in Chelyabinsk; the poisoning of lakes, waterways, and seas (notably the Aral and Caspian Seas and Lake Baikal); the widespread air pollution; and the contamina- tion of agricultural land all contributed over time to the undermining of Commu- nism.These conditions prompted Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr.to re - mark, in their book Ecocide in the USSR (New York: Basic Books, 1992), that “no other great industrial civilization so systematically and so long poisoned its land, air, water and people.” After Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, most of the new governments initiated at least a modicum of democratic reform and market-oriented economic policies.Although the results varied from country to coun - try, the one thing that did not change—at least immediately—was the grave nature of environmental problems in the region.The health and long-term livelihood of the people and ecosystems in the former Communist world remain under threat.Because the new governments have had to cope with acute social, economic, and political issues, most of them have done little or nothing to redress damage to the environment. Robert Darst’s Smokestack Diplomacy examines international efforts to promote environmentally responsible policies in the former Soviet Union and ªve post-Soviet republics—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine.Starting in the 1960s and continuing to the present, the book focuses on three environmental issues facing the post-Soviet states and their Western neighbors: Baltic Sea pollution, transboundary air pollution, and nuclear energy.According to Darst, East-West cooperation on environmental issues was greatest in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, when the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, undertook several unprece- dented initiatives with the West to mitigate transboundary environmental pollution. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, however, East-West relations concerning the environment reverted to a more confrontational approach, described by Darst as “smokestack diplomacy.” The former Soviet states have been much less willing to work together to address transboundary environmental problems and at times have threatened their Western neighbors with “greater transboundary dangers in order to exact payments from them—a form of environmental blackmail never employed by the USSR, even during the darkest days of the Cold War” (p. 3). Darst attributes the changing nature of East-West environmental relations in the Cold War and post–Cold War periods to the “instrumental manipulation of external environmental concerns” (p.3).During the ªnal years of the Cold War the Soviet Union sought to moderate East-West hostility by displaying a willingness to cooperate on certain international environmental issues of great interest to the West.Gorbachev shared formerly secret environmental information with the West and undertook several costly and ambitious efforts to cut transboundary emissions.After 1991, however, Russia and the other former Soviet republics began to manipulate the more afºuent and environmentally concerned Western states to secure resources for economic development and the resolution of their own internally generated environmental problems. In response, Western governments disbursed billions of dollars through direct grants and low-interest loans to ªnance economic development and environmental protec-

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tion measures.Two of the most prominent examples of manipulation include Russia’s threat to resume dumping of radioactive waste at sea unless its more afºuent Western neighbors ªnanced alternative methods of disposal and Ukraine’s threat to continue the operation of the Chernobyl nuclear plant unless the West paid for cleanup and re- placement of the plant. Darst concludes with a list of factors that help to explain the degree of conten- tiousness and cooperation in East-West environmental negotiations.These include, among other things, the overlap of East-West environmental interests and the economic, political, and administrative capacity of the former Soviet states to implement agreements and policies.The conclusion also contains a detailed list of lessons for Western governments to consider when pursuing environmental protection efforts in the former Soviet Union.Although the lessons are not pathbreaking by any means (e.g., “never pay for reductions that have already occurred and cannot easily be re- versed,” p.211), they do bear serious consideration by Western states and donor agen - cies when crafting and negotiating environmental aid projects. Smokestack Diplomacy provides a fascinating and signiªcant contribution to our understanding of the domestic constraints on, and possibilities for, cooperation in international environmental policy.With its exhaustive use of ªeld research and inter- views of relevant actors, including scientists, diplomats, government ofªcials, and ac- tivists, the book provides an innovative theoretical framework for the analysis of international environmental policy and a much needed contribution to our understanding of Cold War and post–Cold War perspectives on transboundary pollution policy.Darst has produced a thoughtfully written and well-documented study that will be of great interest and utility to scholars and donor agencies alike.

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Andrew Bennett, Condemned to Repetition? The Rise, Fall, and Reprise of Soviet-Russian Military Interventionism, 1973–1996. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.370 pp. $21.95.

Reviewed by Robert D. English, University of Southern California

Many political scientists will admire this book, and most historians will not.Testing an intricate theory (a multilevel learning model) across a series of diverse cases (Soviet- Russian “interventionism” in mid–, late–, and post–Cold War circumstances), the book is an ambitious effort that reºects both the promise and the pitfalls of a highly systematized approach to complex political phenomena.Ultimately Bennett succeeds in establishing the centrality of political learning to policy change, but this success sometimes comes despite, rather than because of, his search for analytical rigor. Bennett’s thesis is straightforward: that “the lessons Soviet and Russian leaders learned from their direct experiences with [previous] military interventions explain much of the variance” in subsequent policy (p.3).He begins by detailing the analyti -

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