2019 Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse H-Diplo Roundtable and Web Production Editor: George Fujii @HDiplo Roundtable Review Volume XX, No. 41 3 June 2019 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 © 2019 The Authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License. 1 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XX-41 Introduction by Thomas Schwartz, Vanderbilt University eading 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. e ‘liberal world order’ so R extolled during these years seems on the verge of cracking up. e 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. is 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. e first set of articles, “awing 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. e 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. e 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. e 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. ese 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 1 omas Wright, “e Moment the Transatlantic Charade Ended,” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/mutual-distrust-2019-munich-security-conference/583015/. 2 | Page Roundtable XX-41 Europeans and Canadians. is 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. is may well be worth further study, in that the absence of such engagement by the “Sherpas’ may signal a summit held chiefly for the spectacle and the effect on voters, rather than one which makes any meaningful progress on disputed issues. (And, yes, this is an indirect reference to President Donald Trump’s two meetings with the leader he once called Rocket Man, North Korea’s Kim- Jong-um. ese 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 recently e 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/eiss, 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 e Long Shadow: e Great War and the Twentieth Century (Simon & Schuster, 2013) and e Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt, with Vladimir Pechatnov (Yale 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 ousand Words, but the White House is Betting It’s Worth Ten ousand Votes’: Richard Nixon and Diplomacy as Spectacle” in Andrew L. Johns and Mitchell B. Lerner, eds., e Cold War at Home and Abroad: Domestic Politics and US Foreign Policy Since 1945 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018), 146-172. 3 | Page Roundtable XX-41 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. omas Alan Schwartz is a Professor of History and Political Science at