International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War

International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War, by Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, editors

8. Ideas Do Not Float Freely: Transnational Coalitions, Domestic Structures, and the End of the Cold War _*

Thomas Risse-Kappen

Efforts to explain the end of the Cold War--that is, the systemic transformation of world politics that started with the turnaround in Soviet foreign policy in the late 1980s--have to find answers to at least two sets of questions. First, why did Soviet foreign policy change as it did rather than in other conceivable ways ?, Why did this great power dramatically shift its course toward accommodationist policies, withdraw from its (informal) empire, and then collapse in a comparatively peaceful way ? Why did the Soviet Union in retreat never try to reverse its course forcefully ? Second, why did the Western powers--the alleged winners of the Cold War--never attempt to exploit the situation in order to accelerate their opponent's collapse ? What accounts for the specific Western response to the changes in the Soviet Union ? Why did both the United States and its Western European allies help end the Cold War in a comparatively smooth way ?

I argue in this essay that structural or functional explanations for the end of the Cold War--whether realist or liberal--are underdetermining and cannot account for either the specific content of the change in Soviet foreign policy or the Western response to it. Existing theories need to be complemented by approaches that emphasize the interaction of international and domestic influences on state behavior and take seriously the role of ideas--knowledge, values, and strategic concepts. Ideas intervene between material, power-related factors, on the one hand, and state interests and preferences, on the other. ₁

Some of the ideas informing the reconceptualization of Soviet security interests that centered around the notions of common security and reasonable sufficiency originated in the Western liberal internationalist community. ₂ This community, comprising arms control supporters in the United States and peace researchers and left-of-center political parties in Western Europe, formed transnational networks with new thinkers in the foreign policy institutes and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev, as a domestic reformer and uncommitted thinker in foreign policy, was open to these ideas because they satisfied his needs for coherent and consistent policy concepts. As a result, the new ideas became causally consequential for the turnaround in Soviet foreign policy. At the same time, they influenced the Western reactions to the new Soviet policies, albeit to different degrees (consider, for example, the cautious American and the enthusiastic [ West ] German responses to the revolution in Soviet foreign policy).

Ideas, however, do not float freely. Decision makers are always exposed to several, often contradictory policy concepts. Research on transnational relations and, most recently, on epistemic communities of knowledge-based transnational networks has failed so far to specify the conditions under which specific ideas are selected while others fall by the wayside. ₃ Transnational promoters of foreign policy change must align with domestic coalitions supporting their cause to make an impact. I argue that the domestic structure of the target state--that is, the nature of its political institutions, state-society relations, and the values and norms embedded in its political culture--determines both access to the political system and the ability to build winning coalitions.

In the former Soviet Union, with its state-controlled structure, the transnational actors needed to gain access to the very top of the decision-making hierarchy to have an impact. Their specific ideas and concepts also had to be compatible with the beliefs and goals of the top decision makers. On the other hand, access to the U.S. political system, with its society-dominated structure, is comparatively easy, but the requirements for building winning coalitions are profound. Moreover, concepts such as common security were rather alien to a political culture emphasizing pluralist individualism at home and sharp zero-sum conflicts with ideological opponents abroad. As a result, the liberal arms controllers and their societal supporters, together with their European allies, succeeded in moving the Reagan and Bush administrations toward cautious support for Gorbachev's policies, but not much further. In the German democratic corporatist structure, however, access to political institutions is more difficult than it is in the United States, but strong policy networks such as the party system ensure profound influence once access is achieved. The notion of common security resonated well with this political culture emphasizing consensus building and compromise among competing interests at home and abroad. Indeed, it was embedded in the German foreign policy consensus long before Gorbachev embraced it, which explains the enthusiastic German response to the new Soviet foreign policy years before the Berlin Wall came down.

Deficiencies of Prevailing Theories

Arguments about domestic-international linkages and the transnational diffusion of ideas would be unnecessary if more parsimonious theories could account for the dramatic turnaround in Soviet foreign policy and the accommodating Western response. But the prevailing structural approaches in international relations theory are mostly indeterminate and thus cannot adequately answer the two sets of questions raised above. They are not wrong, but more complex approaches are also required to explain the dramatic changes in world politics. ₄

Sophisticated realism goes a long way toward showing how the interaction between international systemic and domestic economic factors created a set of conditions that permitted the accommodationist foreign policies pursued by the Gorbachev coalition. Kenneth Oye, for example, argues that the long-term decline of the Soviet economy and the decreasing growth rates of the Eastern European states led to a growing burden on the Soviet Union during the early 1980s that required a fundamental policy change. ₅ At the same time, nuclear deterrence as a systemic condition in East-West relations precluded the adventurous foreign policies that might otherwise have been the response of a declining great power. ₆ The nuclear deterrence system might also explain the cautious U.S. response to the change in Soviet foreign policy. Bullying Gorbachev into speeding up the retrenchment from Third World conflicts and Eastern Europe was too risky, given that even a Soviet Union in retreat possessed enough nuclear missiles to annihilate the United States.

One can agree with this analysis and still remain puzzled by the Gorbachev revolution and by at least part of the Western response. The Soviet economic crisis and the nuclear deterrence system permitted a variety of responses of which the new Soviet foreign policy was only one. Why did the reformers in the Politburo embark on perestroika and glasnost instead of technocratic economic reforms that would have kept the repressive state apparatus intact ? After all, the Chinese leadership pursued just such a path under roughly similar domestic conditions. With regard to foreign policy, Gorbachev could have continued or rather returned to the détente and arms control of the 1970s, which would have allowed him a similar international breathing space during which to promote internal reforms. Instead, he radically changed the Soviet foreign policy outlook by embracing common security and reasonable sufficiency for military means. Moreover, he matched words with deeds by embarking on unilateral initiatives in the nuclear and conventional arms fields that seemed to come right out of the textbooks for "strategies of reassurance." ₇ He accepted the zero option for intermediate-range nuclear forces (inf), together with intrusive on-site inspections, unilateral troop withdrawals, and asymmetrical cuts in Soviet conventional forces. These moves took place even before the Soviet leadership decided to let Eastern Europe go. In other words, Gorbachev went far beyond what one can reasonably expect from a prudent realist perspective. Even sophisticated realism could not tell us which of the Soviet Union's possible choices was to be expected.

Realist bargaining theory, however, can be used to make an additional point. Some argue that Ronald Reagan's coercive strategy with regard to the Soviet Union and his massive arms buildup during the early 1980s finally drove Moscow's leadership over the edge. ₈ Cornered by the West and faced with an economic crisis at home, Gorbachev had virtually no choice but to cut losses in military and foreign policy, since striking back at the United States was precluded by the nuclear deterrence system. In short, according to this view, it was the combination of structural international and domestic conditions with Western "peace through strength" that led to the turnaround in Soviet foreign policy.

Evidence suggests that the new thinkers perceived the Western reaction to Brezhnev's foreign policy as a further incentive to change Soviet foreign policy. But to argue that "peace through strength" and structural conditions left no choice to the Soviet Union seems to miss the mark. ₉ First, the initial Soviet response to the Western buildup was to continue arms racing as usual. Under Andropov and Chernenko, who faced economic conditions as gloomy as those confronting Gorbachev, Moscow not only left the negotiating table in 1983 but also accelerated the production and deployment of new nuclear weapons. Second, some new thinkers argue that Reagan's buildup actually made it harder for them to push for changes in the Soviet security outlook. ₁₀ The transformation of Moscow's foreign policy was contested all along; the reaction of conservatives in the military and other institutions to the Reagan buildup was the opposite of the Gorbachev coalition's. That the latter prevailed must be explained by the dynamics of Soviet domestic politics rather than assumed away theoretically.

As to the Western response to the Gorbachev revolution, the American caution may be roughly accounted for by a sophisticated realist argument. It is the German "Gorbimania" that should pose a puzzle to realists. ₁₁ On the one hand, as a divided frontline state on the East-West border, the Germans had a lot to gain from the success of Gorbachev's reforms; indeed, the rapidly decreasing Soviet threat alone could have induced the enthusiasm with which Bonn supported the new Soviet foreign policy. On the other hand, the risks involved in a premature and overly accommodative reaction to Gorbachev could just as easily have led the Germans to adopt a cautious policy similar to that of the United States. Realism could not predict which of the two lines of reasoning the West Germans would follow. Ultimately, then, although sophisticated realism can explain how structural conditions and Western policies created a window of opportunity and thus a demand for new ideas in foreign policy, the theory fails to show why particular ideas were selected over equally possible alternatives that would have led to different foreign policies. ₁₂ Thus the end of the Cold War serves to confirm the indeterminate nature of the realist approach. ₁₃

Liberal theory, a major competitor of realism in international relations theory, does not score much better in explaining the momentous changes in world politics. ₁₄ Liberal accounts take the role of ideas in foreign policy seriously and emphasize that perceptions, knowledge, and values shape the state actors' responses to changing material conditions in the domestic and international environments. Several liberal "second image reversed" arguments have been made to explain the end of the Cold War. Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry suggested, for example, that the Soviet Union was faced with an international environment in which liberal ideas about democracy, human rights, and market economy not only dominated but also proved successful in serving human needs. ₁₅ As a result, Moscow found itself more and more isolated and, finally, was unable to escape the influence of these long-term liberal trends. In short, Soviet-type communism lost the competition over the organization of political, social, and economic life. ₁₆

This analysis suffers from three problems. First, even large-scale failure does not necessarily result in the adoption of the competitor's solution. Here again the Chinese attempt to embark on economic reforms while maintaining the repressive political system is a case in point. Second, the analysis cannot explain the timing of the Soviet foreign policy change. Why did the Soviet leadership acknowledge the victory of liberalism in the mid-1980s and not, say, ten or twenty years earlier ? Third, the argument that the Soviet leadership essentially adopted Western ideas about domestic and foreign policies ignores the fact that Moscow was confronted with more than one Western concept. In the foreign policy area, for example, one approach that dominated U.S. foreign policy during Reagan's first term (peace through strength) was alien to a liberal conceptualization of world politics. It was rooted in a Hobbesian understanding of international relations and in realist bargaining theory. A second approach--deterrence plus détente--was adopted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Harmel report in 1967 and dominated the foreign policies of most Western European countries during the 1970s and early 1980s. It combined liberal and realist ideas and claimed that limited cooperation under anarchy was possible across the East-West divide. ₁₇ Finally, a genuine liberal internationalist--or, by European standards, Social Democratic--vision of common security held that a "security partnership" (in the words of Helmut Schmidt) through multilateral institutions could transform the East-West conflict and the nuclear deterrence system and that far-reaching peace and cooperative arrangements were possible among opponents. ₁₈

A liberal account emphasizing the international sources of the Soviet change cannot explain why the new leadership under Gorbachev discarded the first two concepts and subscribed to the third. One might argue, though, that Gorbachev could safely embark on liberal internationalist foreign policies because he knew that the Western democracies would not exploit the Soviet pullback. Democracies not only rarely fight each other, it is claimed, but also tend toward moderation in their relations with nondemocracies. ₁₉ Once the Soviet Union embraced détente and arms control, it could count on an equally accommodative Western response. This argument not only asserts that the Soviet leadership believed in liberal theory but also offers an explanation for the Western reaction to the change in Soviet foreign policy.

Unfortunately, the claim is based on a misreading of the democratic peace argument. ₂₀ While it is conceptually and empirically well established that democracies rarely fight each other, there is not much evidence that liberal democracies pursue moderate foreign policies toward nondemocracies or even political systems in transition to democracy. ₂₁ Immanuel Kant never argued that democracies are peaceful in general. ₂₂ Rather, they engage in as many militarized disputes and wars with autocracies or partially authoritarian states (such as the former Soviet Union under Gorbachev) as these pursue among themselves. This is not to suggest that the West could have waged war against a Soviet Union in retreat. But liberal theory is indeterminate with regard to a democratic state's reaction to a retreating authoritarian state; Reagan's earlier "peace through strength," Bush's caution, and Genscher's enthusiasm are all compatible with the approach.

To understand the revolution in Soviet foreign policy and the various Western responses to it that together brought the Cold War to an end, one cannot ignore domestic politics and leadership beliefs. Thus Matthew Evangelista and Sarah Mendelson emphasize that Gorbachev had first to consolidate his domestic power base in the Politburo and the Central Committee before the turnaround in foreign policy was possible. Richard N. Lebow argues that leaders committed to broad economic and political reforms tend to be motivationally biased toward accommodative foreign policies under certain conditions. Janice Stein maintains that Gorbachev was predisposed toward new thinking in foreign policy and embarked on "learning by doing." ₂₃

Domestic politics accounts and learning theories offer significant insights into why particular ideas carry the day in specific policy choices; however, they do not tell much about the origins of those ideas. Three possibilities come to mind regarding the case under discussion here. First, Gorbachev himself might have developed the new foreign policy beliefs earlier and then put them into practice after he had assumed power. The facts do not indicate, however, that Gorbachev held firm foreign policy convictions before entering office, particularly in comparison to the clarity of his domestic reform ideas. His few foreign policy speeches during the early 1980s do not reveal much more than a general open-mindedness about East-West cooperation. Even the first major attempt to outline the new foreign policy concept, Gorbachev's report to the Twenty-seventh Communist Party Congress in early 1986, represents a strange mix of old and new thinking. ₂₄ Eduard Shevardnadze has suggested that Gorbachev knew all along that he was opposed to Brezhnev's foreign policies but had no consistent framework and a coherent concept of international politics before he entered office. ₂₅ It is clear, though, that he learned extremely quickly.

Second, the ideas and foreign policy concepts might have originated in domestic intellectual communities that then gained access to the leadership. ₂₆ Jeff Checkel has convincingly shown that institutchiks at the Institute of the World Economy and International Relations (imemo) were able to convince Gorbachev, through advisers such as Aleksandr Yakovlev and Yevgeniy Primakov, that world politics had to be analyzed in terms of nonclass categories such as "interdependence" and that his enemy image of American capitalism had to change. Of course, these analysts might have read Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye's Power and Interdependence, but little evidence suggests that transnational contacts were important to them (with the possible exception of Yakovlev's time as the Soviet ambassador to Canada). Sarah Mendelson has similarly demonstrated that the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was influenced by a domestic epistemic community. ₂₇

Analyzing world politics in other than Marxist-Leninist categories--a change in worldviews, according to Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane--was certainly a precondition for the foreign policy revolution. ₂₈ But it is unlikely that worldviews determine the transformation of specific policies. Rather, changes in basic assumptions about the world open up an intellectual space for changes in principled or causal beliefs that--in the words of Goldstein and Keohane--"provide road maps that increase actors' clarity about goals or ends-means relationships" and thus affect policies. ₂₉ Strategic prescriptions such as common security, reasonable sufficiency, or nonoffensive defense combine principled and causal beliefs--values and knowledge--and are then operationalized into specific policies. ₃₀

But strategic prescriptions centering around common security were new to the Soviet security debate, so their intellectual origins must be found outside the country and its foreign policy institutes. ₃₁ Indeed, Checkel argues that the epistemic community at imemo was less influential regarding the new approach to military security than were, for example, natural scientists at the Academy of Sciences technical divisions (such as Yevgeny Velikhov and Roald Sagdeev) and institutchiks at the usa and Canada Institute (iskan) who regularly participated in exchanges and meetings with Western security analysts and scholars. ₃₂ Complementing Checkel's analysis, I argue below that transnational networks between those in the West who supported common security and nonoffensive defense, on the one hand, and natural scientists and institutchiks at iskan, on the other, were crucial in promoting the new Soviet approach to security. The foreign policy ideas of these transnational exchanges translated a somewhat diffuse new thinking about foreign policy into a coherent security policy. When Gorbachev adopted these concepts and then went on to act on them, he could count on the support of the very groups in the West that had provided the ideas in the first place. It is no coincidence that Gorbachev's new foreign policy drew the most immediate and positive response from Germany, where common security had gradually become ingrained in the foreign policy consensus of the society. It is also not surprising that a positive response to Gorbachev's overtures took longest in the United States, where liberal internationalist and Social Democratic ideas about foreign policy were not part of mainstream thinking. Thus an emphasis on transnational networks not only sheds additional light on the origins of the new thinking in Soviet foreign policy, but, in conjunction with the dynamics of domestic politics, also helps to explain the variation in Western responses to the Gorbachev revolution.

Transnational Relations and the End of the Cold War

In the following section, I first identify the actors who developed the new strategic prescriptions about security and the transnational networks through which these concepts were promoted. I then look at the different impact of these ideas on the Gorbachev revolution in foreign policy and the American and German responses to it.

Transnational Actors and Their Ideas: The Liberal Internationalist Community

Four intellectual communities together form a liberal internationalist community sharing political values and policy concepts. First, the liberal arms control community in the United States traces its origins to the late 1950s, when it was among the first to promote the idea of arms control to stabilize the deterrence system. ₃₃ This community is an alliance of natural scientists organized in such groups as the Union of Concerned Scientists (ucs) and the Federation of American Scientists (fas), policy analysts at various think tanks such as the Brookings Institution, scholars at academic institutions, public interest groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (nrdc), and policy makers in the U.S. Congress, mostly liberal Democrats.

This group's contribution to the broader liberal internationalist agenda during the late 1970s and early 1980s consisted primarily of specific proposals in the nuclear arms control area. The main focus during that time was to oppose the Reagan administration's efforts to do away with nuclear arms control. In particular, the community concentrated on promoting a comprehensive nuclear test ban and on preserving the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (abm) treaty threatened by Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (sdi). ₃₄

The second subgroup of the liberal internationalist community consists of mostly Western European peace researchers based at various institutes such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the Peace Research Institute Oslo, the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy Hamburg, the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, and various universities.

The third group includes European policy makers in Social Democratic and Labour parties and their transnational organization, the Socialist International. Security specialists in the German Social Democratic Party (spd) as well as the British and Dutch Labour parties were particularly influential in the liberal internationalist debate during the period under consideration. ₃₅

The two European components of the liberal internationalist community shared their U.S. counterparts' concerns about the future of arms control. But their main contribution to the transnational liberal agenda consisted of developing the concepts of common security and nonoffensive defense (or, to use the German misnomer, strukturelle Angriffsunf� higkeit, that is, "structural inability for offensive operations").

Common security transformed the original arms control idea of stabilizing strategic deterrence through cooperative measures into a concept transcending the notion of national security. Its proponents claimed that the security dilemma in international relations could be overcome through stable cooperative arrangements and peace orders that excluded the risk of war among states. Security in the nuclear age could no longer be achieved through unilateral measures; no one in the East-West relationship could feel secure unless everyone did. As Egon Bahr, the leading spd promoter of the idea, put it: "[ Security partnership ] starts with the insight that war can no longer be won and that destruction cannot be restricted to one side. . . . The consequence of this insight is that there is no reliable security against an opponent, but only with an opponent. There is only common security, and everybody is partner in it, not despite potential enmity, but because of it." ₃₆

Common security was widely discussed among peace researchers as well as mainstream and center-left parties in the Benelux countries, Great Britain, Scandinavia, and West Germany during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In West Germany, for example, then-chancellor Helmut Schmidt introduced the idea of a security partnership between East and West in 1978, although he conceptualized it mainly as complementing nuclear deterrence. In 1979 the spd adopted the concept and eventually transformed it into the notion of common security meant gradually to overcome deterrence. ₃₇ By the time Gorbachev came into power, common security was one of the mainstream foreign policy concepts in Europe.

The European peace research community also developed proposals to restructure the Western conventional force posture in such a way that offensive operations would become virtually impossible--nonoffensive defense--thereby overcoming the security dilemma by reconciling peaceful intentions with purely defensive capabilities. ₃₈ By the mid-1980s, various European Social Democratic and Labour parties had incorporated nonoffensive defense into their policy platforms.

The fourth component of the transnational community provides the link with the former Soviet Union. It consists of natural scientists and policy analysts in various institutes, primarily at the Academy of Science (for example, the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy headed by Velikhov, the Space Research Institute headed by Sagdeev, and the foreign policy institutes imemo and iskan). The Soviet new thinkers were mainly on the receiving end of ideas promoted by their European and American counterparts.

These four groups not only shared values and policy concepts but also frequently exchanged their views. Since the connections between the United States and the European arms control communities are well documented, I concentrate on the East-West exchanges.

First, specific nuclear arms control proposals were the subject of increasingly institutionalized contacts between the U.S. arms control community, particularly natural scientists working for the ucs, the fas, and the nrdc, and Soviet experts such as Velikhov and Sagdeev. Evangelista has documented these exchanges and shown in detail how these interactions influenced Soviet arms control decisions. His analysis provides further empirical evidence for the argument developed in this essay. ₃₉

Second, the concept of common security was introduced to Soviet institutchiks and foreign policy experts by the Independent Commission for Disarmament and Security, (known as the Palme commission, in honor of former Swedish Prime Minister and Social Democrat Olof Palme). ₄₀ Founded in September 1980, the commission brought together mostly elder statesmen and -women from around the world to study East-West security issues. Academician Georgi Arbatov, the head of iskan, served as the Soviet member, while retired general Mikhail Milshtein of the same institute was one of the principal advisers. ₄₁ Common security was introduced into the commission's deliberations by the German Social Democrat Bahr, who had been one of the architects of German Ostpolitik. In 1982 the Palme commission issued a report entitled Common Security that defined the principles of a cooperative East-West security regime and spelled them out with regard to arms control, confidence-building measures, and economic cooperation.

Third, regular exchanges took place between various Western European Social Democratic and Labour parties--particularly the German spd--and Communist parties in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. These relations had begun during the détente period of the 1970s and continued throughout the 1980s. The spd, for example, conducted regular meetings on security policy issues with the East German, Polish, Soviet, and other Communist parties. Agreements were worked out on principles of common security, on nuclear and chemical weapon free zones in Central Europe, and on nonoffensive defense. ₄₂ The Social Democrats tried to gain Eastern European and Soviet support for the recommendations achieved in the Palme commission. Given the reality of East-West relations in the pre-Gorbachev era, Western participants in these contacts had to walk a thin line. As a result, on the one hand, the contacts legit imized official Eastern European and Soviet policy proposals by promoting nuclear weapon free zones and the like, while, on the other hand, they served to make acceptable in the East the concept of common security and notions that later became known as military glasnost (on-site inspections, for example).

Fourth, the Soviet institutchiks and even Soviet military academies frequently consulted Western experts of the nonoffensive defense community. ₄₃ This is all the more significant because nonoffensive defense was alien to traditional Soviet military thinking. In fact, the initial reaction of even civilian experts in the Soviet Union to the alternative defense debate in Western Europe had been quite hostile and turned more sympathetic in their publications only after Gorbachev had come into power. ₄₄

Some of the transnational contacts were initiated through well-known frameworks such as the Pugwash conferences. In 1984, for example, Pugwash established a working group on conventional forces that became a major East-West forum on these issues; it included most of the European peace researchers, such as Anders Boserup, Horst Afheldt, and Albrecht von M�ller, specializing in alternative defense models. Andrei Kokoshin, deputy director of iskan and one of the most prominent new thinkers in Soviet foreign policy, also participated and eventually became a leading proponent of a defensive restructuring of the Soviet armed forces. The annual Pugwash conferences regularly dealt with issues of defensive restructuring, particularly the 1988 meeting in the Soviet Union. ₄₅

Transnational Exchanges and the Turnaround in Soviet Security Policy

In February 1986 Gorbachev made the following remarks about his vision of security:

Security cannot be built endlessly on fear of retaliation, in other words, on the doctrines of "containment" or "deterrence." . . . In the context of the relations between the ussr and the usa, security can only be mutual, and if we take international relations as a whole it can only be universal. The highest wisdom is not in caring exclusively for oneself, especially to the detriment of the other side. It is vital that all should feel equally secure. . . . In the military sphere we intend to act in such a way as to give nobody grounds for fear, even imagined ones, about their security. ₄₆

These remarks from Gorbachev's report to the Twenty-seventh Party Congress closely resemble comments in the Palme commission's report on common security, as well as the statement by Bahr quoted above. ₄₇ They represent the first instance of the Soviet leader identifying himself with this new concept of security so alien to traditional Soviet thinking. Yet, although liberal internationalist ideas about common security and nonoffensive defense unquestionably reached new thinkers in several Soviet institutes through a variety of transnational exchanges with like-minded groups in the West, can Gorbachev's change of heart be attributed to these transnational exchanges ? ₄₈ Was there a causal link beyond a mere correlation ?

Various facts suggest that ideas about common security developed by European peace researchers and Social Democrats indeed influenced Gorbachev's thinking. First, the Soviet leader himself acknowledged that his views about international security and disarmament were "close or identical" to those of European Social Democrats such as Willy Brandt, Bahr, and the Palme commission. ₄₉ In a meeting with Brandt, he argued that the new thinking combined traditions going back to Lenin with insights from socialist friends and "proposals reflected in such documents as reports by the commissions of Palme, Brandt, and Brundtland." ₅₀ Gorbachev made a deliberate effort to develop closer contacts with the Socialist International and its chairman, Brandt. At the same time, European Social Democrats were eager to promote their security policy ideas directly to the Soviet leader.

One could argue, of course, that Gorbachev's references to Western thinking were self-serving, meant to legitimize his own views. Even if this is true, the similarities between his arguments and those of European analysts and policy makers are still striking, and the Soviet leader recognized these affinities. Moreover, as mentioned above, Gorbachev did not hold firm convictions on foreign policy before he entered office. Finally, he was not paying mere lip service to these notions; his policy proposals and actions on nuclear and conventional weapons in Europe directly followed from the newly developed strategic prescriptions on enhancing international security.

Second, the transnational links between European institutes and policy makers, on the one hand, and institutchiks at iskan and other Soviet institutes, on the other, became increasingly important in the reconceptualization of the Soviet approach to security. iskan's head, Georgi Arbatov--a member of the Palme commission--while certainly not among the most radical new thinkers, belonged to the inner circle of Gorbachev's foreign policy advisers during the early years of perestroika. Arbatov was extremely impressed by Bahr--"one of the outstanding political minds of our time"--and consid ered him a friend. ₅₁ The Palme report, with its international clout, became a major tool with which liberal institutchiks influenced both Foreign Minister Shevardnadze and Gorbachev. According to Arbatov, it had a significant effect on political thinking in the Soviet Union and introduced the concept of common security to officials. Its publication in Moscow also confronted the Soviets with Western estimates of the conventional forces (im)balance in Europe. ₅₂ Proposals to restructure the Soviet conventional forces from an offensive posture toward nonoffensive defense seem similarly to have influenced the leadership. The report to the Twenty-seventh Party Congress had mentioned the defensive orientation of the Soviet military doctrine and the concept of reasonable sufficiency without being specific. One year later, Gorbachev referred to doctrines of defense "connected with such new or comparatively new notions as the reasonable sufficiency of armaments, non-aggressive defense, elimination of disbalance and asymmetries in various types of armed forces, separation of the offensive forces of the two blocs, and so on and so forth." ₅₃

His statement led to an intensive debate among civilian and military analysts in the Soviet Union about its implications for the conventional force posture. The military in particular claimed that nonoffensive defense related to the overall goals of Soviet military doctrine rather than to its implementation. The institutchiks argued that reasonable sufficiency should lead to a restructuring of Soviet military forces that precluded the ability to conduct (counter)offensive operations. ₅₄ Analysts at iskan such as Vitaly Zhurkin, Sergei Karaganov, and Andrei Kortunov as well as its deputy head Kokoshin became leading advocates of the concept, embraced Western ideas of nonoffensive defense, and translated them into the Soviet context. Kokoshin, with Major General Valentin Larionov of the General Staff Academy, published various articles on the subject. ₅₅ As mentioned above, Kokoshin was involved in transnational exchanges at Pugwash and had frequent contacts with European peace researchers such as Boserup and Lutz Unterseher, who were also in touch with Alexei Arbatov--who headed the new Department of Disarmament and International Security at imemo and was far more radical than his father--Karganov, and the bureaucracy of the Soviet Foreign Ministry. ₅₆

In December 1988 Gorbachev showed that he sided with the institutchiks and the new thinkers in Shevardnadze's Foreign Ministry when he announced large-scale unilateral troop reductions. Shortly afterward, the Soviet Union accepted the core of Western proposals at the Conventional Forces in Europe negotiations to establish conventional parity in Central Europe. Two years later, the Soviet Defense Ministry published a draft statement on military doctrine that explicitly defined sufficiency as the inability "for conducting large-scale offensive operations." ₅₇ New thinking had reached the defense bureaucracy.

These two examples suggest that important parts of the reorientation of Soviet security policy were indeed influenced by strategic prescriptions transmitted to the leadership through transnational interactions. ₅₈ Once the foreign policy experts and their transnational contacts had aligned with the domestic reform coalition in the Soviet Union, the transnational exchanges influenced the very content of the new Soviet security policy and thus the scope of the change. The new leadership needed independent expertise outside the military, which opened a window of opportunity for the institutchiks. ₅₉ The new ideas about common security and reasonable sufficiency transformed a general uneasiness with the state of Soviet international affairs into a coherent foreign policy concept. The institutchiks and their transnational networks persuaded the Gorbachev coalition of necessary and bold steps to change Soviet foreign policy toward the West. At the same time, their ideas rationalized and legitimized the need for a turnaround in foreign policy. It is impossible to separate these two aspects of how ideas influence policy decisions.

The contribution of the institutchiks and their transnational contacts to the change in Soviet foreign policy was not trivial. By helping Gorbachev match words and deeds, they were crucial in targeting his message to a receptive Western audience, particularly in Europe. Transforming Western attitudes toward the Soviet Union, however, was itself critical, not just to end the Cold War but to create the benign international environment that Gorbachev needed to pursue perestroika and glasnost domestically.

Liberal Internationalists and the Western Responses to Gorbachev: The U.S. and German Cases

Most peace researchers and liberal arms controllers in Western Europe and the United States were primarily concerned about Western policies and did not expect the Soviet Union to be receptive to their proposals. Nevertheless, their impact varied from country to country. I illustrate this in the following sections through the examples of the United States and West Germany.
THE UNITED STATES: PRESERVATION OF ARMS CONTROL AND CAUTIOUS RESPONSE TO GORBACHEV. In the U.S. case, the liberal arms control community pursued three main objectives during the 1980s: (1) restoring the Reagan administration to the arms control track and preserving the nuclear arms control agreements of the 1970s, such as the abm treaty; (2) convincing the administration of the necessity to launch rigorous arms control efforts in the areas of test ban negotiations and nuclear reductions; and (3) ensuring a positive American response to the Gorbachev revolution in foreign policy. The first goal was achieved, the second was not, and the third met with mixed results, and it is by no means clear that the successes were due primarily to the efforts of the members of the arms control community. ₆₀

When the Reagan administration brought hard-liners into power, the U.S. arms control community was removed from policy influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the freeze campaign, together with pressure from the European allies, that revived the arms control process. ₆₁ Then, empowered by social movement and allied pressure, the expert community reentered the policy-making process, particularly in Congress. At the same time, there developed a transnational coalition between the arms control community and the European allies that succeeded in moving the Reagan administration away from its early militaristic rhetoric toward the resumption of arms control talks. The main impact was to shift the bureaucratic balance of power from conservative hard-liners such as Caspar Weinberger and Richard Perle to moderate conservatives such as George Shultz and Paul Nitze. The policy impact of this shift first became visible in early 1984 when Reagan gave several moderate foreign policy speeches that later led to the Shultz-Gromyko agreement to resume arms control talks in January 1985--before Gorbachev came into office.

The single most important success of the liberal arms control community in the United States was probably the preservation of the ABM treaty despite Reagan's sdi. ₆₂ In this case, a powerful coalition emerged, including liberal internationalists, Congress (particularly Senator Nunn, who became chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1986), and the European allies. The arms control community was less successful, however, in the absence of a winning domestic coalition. In 1986-87, for example, a transnational coalition between the nrdc and the Soviet Academy of Science tried to influence U.S. testing policy. In an attempt at private diplomacy, they established seismic verification stations close to the two principal nuclear testing sites in the United States and the Soviet Union. The stations demonstrated publicly that a comprehensive test ban was verifiable and thus discredited a major U.S. objection to a test stop. ₆₃ The transnational alliance quickly gained access to Congress. In the autumn of 1986 the House of Representatives passed an amendment to the defense budget bill calling for a one-year moratorium on nuclear tests, but a countercoalition including the Reagan administration, Republicans in Congress, and leading Democrats such as Senator Nunn defeated the House resolution.

The efforts of the liberal internationalist community did not have a long-term impact on attitudes toward the Soviet Union and the Cold War in general. Liberal arms controllers failed to build a stable policy consensus around their strategic prescriptions. Common security, for example, remained a minority position in the United States. As a result, the Reagan administration reacted rather cautiously to the changes in Moscow, even though Reagan developed a friendly personal relationship with Gorbachev. As late as early 1989, half a year before the Berlin Wall came down, the new Bush administration advocated status quo plus as its response to the Gorbachev revolution. ₆₄
GERMANY: "SECURITY PARTNERSHIP" AND "GORBIMANIA." The reluctant U.S. response to the revolution in Soviet foreign policy contrasts strongly with the West German answer. ₆₅ As I mentioned earlier, ideas about common security and nonoffensive defense originated in the European peace research community as well as in Social Democratic and Labour parties during the late 1970s. The spd was crucial in promoting these ideas domestically and in Europe. By the mid-1980s, before Gorbachev assumed power, a stable German public and elite consensus on common security emerged, ranging from the center-left to the center-right and comprising both the spd and the two governing parties, the Christian Democrats and the Free Democrats. However, ideas about a defensive restructuring of the German armed forces were still contested. The attitude of the Bonn government under Chancellor Kohl toward nonoffensive defense began to change only after the Soviet Union had embraced the concept.

The liberal internationalist community of peace researchers and Social Democrats did not somehow manipulate the German public into believing these ideas, as some have suggested. ₆₆ Just as the freeze campaign cleared the way for the arms control community in the United States, the German peace movements opened a window of opportunity for common security to gain widespread acceptance. The movements emerged in reaction to the confrontational U.S.-Soviet relationship of the early 1980s and the planned deployment of new medium-range missiles on German soil; their majority advocated unilateral disarmament--a more radical idea than common security. German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the spd. By about 1982 / 83 the notion of common security had strong support, well documented in public opinion polls. ₆₇

Shortly afterward, Christian Democrat leaders such as Chancellor Kohl and Richard von Weizs�cker, the federal president, increasingly used common security language in their speeches, possibly in order to preserve their constituency. Eschewing the Social Democratic slogan of "security partnership," they referred instead to a "community of responsibility" (Verantwortungsgemeinschaft). Common security became the center of a new German security policy consensus after the mid-1980s, after the peace movements had vanished but before Gorbachev initiated his foreign policy change.

German enthusiasm for Gorbachev and the revolution in Soviet foreign policy is easy to explain, given these domestic developments. Tapping into the German domestic consensus on security policy, Gorbachev's overtures met an almost immediate welcome in Bonn. His acceptance of the inf zero option in 1986 became the defining moment for the Germans to embrace his policies. (One has to bear in mind in this context the divisiveness of the German inf debate in the early 1980s, as well as the fact that in 1979 the spd and then-chancellor Schmidt had promoted the zero option that became Reagan's inf negotiating position in 1981.) ₆₈ Popular support for the Soviet leader skyrocketed, and the center-right Kohl government, in particular Free Democrat Foreign Minister Genscher, became the first in the West to appreciate the changes in Soviet foreign policies. From about mid-1986 on, while most of its allies were still skeptical, the German government promoted a positive Western response to the new Soviet foreign policy ("Genscherism" quickly became the word for this attitude). Germany became the first and only Western state to commit substantial amounts of financial assistance to the Soviet economic reform process. In effect, the Cold War ended for the Germans about two years before the Berlin Wall came down.

The Limits of Transnationalism: Domestic Structures as Intervening Variables

I have tried to document above that a liberal internationalist and transnational community of scholars, policy analysts, and center-left political parties promoted new strategic prescriptions such as common security, nonoffensive defense, and far-reaching arms control agreements during the late 1970s and early 1980s. New thinkers in the Soviet Union picked up these ideas and influenced the views of the Soviet leadership. The particular content of Gorbachev's foreign policy revolution cannot be understood unless one acknowledges the input of this community. The transnational community also influenced Western responses to Gorbachev, albeit to different degrees. It was less successful in the United States but very effective in West Germany, where it contributed to the creation of a new foreign policy consensus around common security.

I suggest that the end of the Cold War--both in the East and the West--cannot be adequately understood without taking the role of these transnationally transmitted ideas into account. The impact of these ideas, however, varied considerably. Only the Soviet Union under Gorbachev reconceptualized its security policy toward both common security and nonoffensive defense. The German polity achieved a domestic consensus on the former but remained reluctant on the latter, while the American public and elite opinion failed to agree on either of the two concepts. Moreover, the interval between the initial promotion of these ideas in the target countries and their acceptance by the political leaderships varies considerably. If the Palme Commission report represented the first exposure of Soviet institutchiks to common security, it took less than four years for the ideas to have a policy impact. It took about ten years to accomplish the same result in Germany--from the mid-1970s, when peace researchers and Social Democrats started promoting the strategic prescriptions, to the mid-1980s. In Washington, common security never became as politically relevant as it did in Moscow and Bonn.

How is this considerable variation in policy impact to be explained ? To influence policies, transnational actors need, first, channels into the political system of the target state and, second, domestic partners with the ability to form winning coalitions. Ideas promoted by transnational alliances or epistemic communities do not matter much unless those two conditions are met. Answering the question, then, requires looking at intervening variables between transnational alliances and policy change. I suggest that differences in the three countries' domestic structures largely account for the variation in the policy impact of transnationally circulated ideas.

Originally developed in the field of comparative foreign economic policy, domestic structure approaches have generated empirical research across issue areas to explain variation in state responses to international pressures, constraints, and opportunities. ₆₉ The concept refers to the structure of the political system, of society, and of the policy networks linking the two. Domestic structures encompass the organizational apparatus of political and societal institutions, their routines, the decision-making rules and procedures as incorporated in law and custom, as well as the values and norms prescribing appropriate behavior embedded in the political culture.

This last point marks a departure from earlier conceptualizations of domestic structures, which emphasized organizational characteristics of state and society but neglected political culture and thus insights from the new institutionalism, particularly the focus on communicative action, duties, social obligations, and norms. ₇₀ Political culture refers to those worldviews and principled ideas--values and norms--that are stable over long periods of time and taken for granted by the vast majority of the population. Thus the political culture as part of the domestic structure contains only those ideas that do not change often and about which there is a societal consensus. ₇₁

Until about 1988-89, the former Soviet Union represented an extremely state-controlled domestic structure with a highly centralized decision-making apparatus. ₇₂ Such structures lead to top-down policy-making processes, leaving little room for policy innovations unless they are promoted by the top leadership. It follows that leadership beliefs are expected to matter more than attitudes of the wider population. ₇₃

Centralized and state-dominated domestic structures provide transnational coalitions with comparatively few access points into the political system, in that they must reach the top echelon of the decision-making structure directly rather than build winning coalitions in civil society. Prior to Gorbachev's gaining power, the transnational exchanges between Western liberal internationalists and Soviet institutchiks had almost no impact on Soviet foreign policy. A reform-oriented leadership had to gain power first. It needed to be open-minded, and its worldviews needed to be predisposed toward the strategic prescriptions promoted by the transnational actors.

Beyond his general inclination to change foreign policy, Gorbachev seems to have been attracted to common security for a more specific reason. ₇₄ His domestic reform ideas closely resembled policy concepts promoted by democratic socialism and the Socialist International, which emphasized political democracy and a market economy with a heavy dose of state interventionism. Gorbachev, who made a strong, successful effort to gain the support of the European Social Democrats, might have been attracted to their foreign policy ideas because they were promoted by groups that to an extent shared his beliefs about domestic politics.

The combination of a centralized decision-making structure with a reform-oriented leadership explains why the strategic prescriptions promoted by the transnational coalition had such a strong impact on Gorbachev's foreign policy revolution in a comparatively short period of time. Once a channel to the top decision-making circle was open, the transnational coalition profoundly influenced policies. Given the absence of a strong civil society backing the ideas, the impact depended almost entirely on the leadership's willingness to listen.

In contrast to the Soviet Union, the United States represents, of course, a more society-dominated domestic structure, with a strong organization of interest groups, in which societal demands can be mobilized rather easily. At the same time, it lacks effective intermediate organizations such as a strong party system, and its political system is comparatively fragmented and decentralized, without a powerful center (Congress versus Executive, Pentagon versus State Department, etc.). ₇₅ Moreover, and throughout the Cold War, the American national security culture incorporated rather strong and consensual enemy images of the Soviet Union and defined national security mainly in military terms. ₇₆

Society-dominated structures are expected to mediate the impact of transnational coalitions in almost the opposite way as state-controlled structures do. Transnational actors should have few problems in finding access into a decentralized political system. Yet, while this initial hurdle is comparatively low, the task of building a winning coalition is expected to be more complex than in state-dominated systems. Since society-dominated structures are characterized by frequently shifting coalitions, transnational alliances may successfully influence policies in the short run, but their long-term impact is probably rather limited. Thus the liberal arms control community had virtually no problems finding channels into the political system but failed to form stable winning coalitions with a lasting policy impact. The group was successful only to the extent that its demands were compatible with either a public opinion consensus--as in the case of Reagan's return to the arms control table-- or the views of powerful players in Congress--as in the case of the preservation of the abm treaty. The more far-reaching goals of the community required a change in basic attitudes toward the Soviet Union and a mellowing of the U.S. Cold War consensus as a precondition to forming a domestic winning coalition.

Germany represents a third type of domestic structure, the democratic corporatist model. ₇₇ It is characterized by comparatively centralized societal organizations, strong and effective political parties, and a federal government that normally depends on a coalition of at least two parties. As a result, and supported by cultural norms emphasizing social partnership between ideological and class opponents, the system is geared toward compromise-oriented consensus building in its policy networks.

Democratic corporatist structures tend to provide societal and transnational forces with fewer access points to political institutions than do society-dominated systems. The policy impact of these forces should also be more incremental because of the slow and compromise-oriented nature of the decision-making processes. Any impact they do make, however, is expected to last longer because corporatist structures are geared toward institutionalizing consensus on policies.

As argued above, ideas about common security were gradually picked up, first by the spd as one of the two leading mass integration parties and second by societal organizations, thereby reaching the constituency of the conservative Christian Democrats. In the end, the polarized debate about détente during the 1970s and about nuclear weapons during the early 1980s evolved into a new consensus centered around common security that explains the German enthusiasm for the Gorbachev revolution. The structure of German political institutions and policy networks explains why it took much longer for the new ideas to influence policies than in the Soviet case. The German political culture was geared toward class and ideological compromise, and past experiences with Ostpolitik explain why common security or security partnership became a consensual belief as the foreign policy equivalent of the domestic social partnership.

In sum, a domestic structure approach that incorporates political culture can account for the different foreign policy impacts of ideas promoted by transnational communities. The channels by which these ideas enter the policy-making process and become incorporated into national foreign policies seem to be determined by the nature of the political institutions. At the same time, strategic prescriptions need to be compatible with the worldviews embedded in the political culture or held by those powerful enough to build winning coalitions. In the case of the former Soviet Union and its centralized decision-making structure, the transnational coalition's policy ideas required both incorporation into Gorbachev's basic beliefs and his determination to implement reforms in order to have an impact. In the German case, a political culture geared toward compromise and consensus enabled elite and public opinion to accept the strategic prescription of common security. In the United States, however, a decentralized and fragmented policy-making structure together with a deeply rooted Cold War consensus made it much harder for the ideas to have a policy impact.

The prevailing realist and liberal theories of international relations account for underlying structural changes opening a window of opportunity for the end of the Cold War. Understanding its immediate causes, however, requires an explanation of the specific content of Gorbachev's foreign policy revolution as well as the Western responses to it. Structural explanations are insufficient for this task, which instead demands an account that integrates international and domestic politics.

The content of the Soviet foreign policy change and the Western reactions that together brought the Cold War to an end were informed by specific principled and causal beliefs--values and strategic prescriptions. Some of these ideas originated independently in various domestic intellectual communities. Others, particularly those informing the reconceptualization of Soviet security interests, emanated from a transnational liberal internationalist community comprising the U.S. arms control community, Western European scholars and center-left policy makers, and Soviet institutchiks. These ideas were causally consequential for the end of the Cold War; however, they had different impacts in the former Soviet Union, the United States, and Germany. The difference can be explained by a revised domestic structure approach that incorporates political culture. The differences between the Soviet, U.S., and German domestic structures explain to a large degree the variation in policy impact of the transnational networks and their strategic prescriptions.

I conclude, therefore, that structural theories of international relations need to be complemented by approaches that integrate domestic politics, transnational relations, and the role of ideas if we are to understand the recent sea change in world politics. The approach presented here does not pretend to offer a general theory of international relations. It is more limited and focuses instead on comparative foreign policy--a neglected and undertheorized field. As a result, the main competitors are not realism or liberalism but behavioral decision-making analysis as well as rational choice and assumptions about the state as unitary actor. Bureaucratic politics and cognitive psychological accounts offer complementary rather than alternative explanations.

The approach presented here promises insights with regard to two questions in the study of comparative foreign policy. First, the argument I have developed could prove helpful in analyzing the policy impact of transnational actors and coalitions. Reviving this subject is long overdue, to move it beyond the earlier sterile debate between society-dominated and state-centered approaches to world politics. Focusing on domestic structures as intervening variables between transnational coalitions and the foreign policy of states appears to offer a way of theorizing systematically about the interactions between states and transnational relations. ₇₈

Second, this essay attempts to contribute to the study of how ideas matter in foreign policy. Many scholars recently have drawn attention to the institutional conditions under which new values and policy strategies become politically relevant. ₇₉ A modified domestic structure approach incorporating long-held worldviews embedded in the political culture appears to account for varied impact of transnationally diffused principled and causal beliefs across different countries.

But the argument developed in this article differs in one important aspect from the approach adopted by Goldstein and Keohane, who argue that "the materialistically egocentric maximizer of modern economic theory" allows us to "formulate the null hypothesis" against which the role and impact of ideas can be measured. ₈₀ The problem is that both the reconceptualization of Soviet security interests and the German enthusiasm for Gorbachev are perfectly consistent with such a null hypothesis--after the event. I have tried to argue that the issue is not whether the end of the Cold War can be explained in terms of power relationships. Rather, a power-based analysis using the model of egoistic utility maximizers is underdetermining in the sense that it leaves various options as to how actors may define their interests in response to underlying structural conditions. The role and impact of ideas must be conceptualized as intervening variables between structural conditions and the definition of actors' interests and preferences. In other words, ideas determine which material international and domestic conditions matter and how they lead to outcomes.

This essay also appeared in International Organization 48 (spring 1994): 185-214. It draws on insights from another collaborative project--Thomas Risse-Kappen, ed., Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures and International Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)--whose contributors I thank for helping to clarify my thoughts on the subject. I am also very grateful to Ned Lebow, John Odell, Steve Ropp, Jack Snyder, and several anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on this article. Since I cannot claim to be an expert on the former Soviet Union, I owe a lot to the work of Matthew Evangelista, in particular, Taming the Bear: Transnational Relations and the Demise of the Soviet Threat, forthcoming, and of Robert Herman, especially his "Ideas, Institutions and the Reconceptualization of Interests: The Political and Intellectual Origins of New Thinking in Soviet Foreign Policy" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1994). Finally, I thank Janice Stein for this article's title. I would also like to acknowledge the support of Cornell University's Peace Studies Program, Yale University's International Security Program, and the International Studies Program at the University of Wyoming. Back.

Note 1: This essay is part of a growing body of literature on the role of ideas in foreign policy. With regard to the former Soviet Union, see in particular George W. Breslauer and Philip E. Tetlock, eds., Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991); Jeffrey Checkel, "Ideas, Institutions, and the Gorbachev Foreign Policy Revolution," World Politics 45 (January 1993), pp. 271-300; Matthew Evangelista, "Sources of Moderation in Soviet Security Policy," in Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War, ed. Philip Tetlock, Jo L. Husbands, Robert Jervis, Paul C. Stern, and Charles Tilly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), vol. 2; Matthew Evangelista, Taming the Bear: Transnational Relations and the Demise of the Soviet Threat, forthcoming; Robert Herman, "Ideas, Institutions and the Reconceptualization of Interests: The Political and Intellectual Origins of New Thinking in Soviet Foreign Policy" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1994); Sarah E. Mendelson, "Internal Battles and External Wars: Politics, Learning, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan," World Politics 45 (April 1993), pp. 327-60; Rey Koslowski and Friedrich Kratochwil, "Understanding Change in International Politics: The Soviet Empire's Demise and the International System," the sixth essay in this book; Richard Ned Lebow, "The Search for Accommodation: Gorbachev in Comparative Perspective," the seventh essay in this book; and Janice Gross Stein, "Political Learning by Doing: Gorbachev as Uncommitted Thinker and Motivated Learner," the ninth essay in this book. On ideas and foreign policy in general, see Emanuel Adler, The Power of Ideology: The Quest for Technological Autonomy in Argentina and Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Judith Goldstein, "Ideas, Institutions, and American Trade Policy," International Organization 42 (winter 1988): 179-217; Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Ernst Haas, When Knowledge Is Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Peter Haas, ed., Knowledge, Power, and International Policy Coordination, International Organization (special issue) 46 (winter 1992); John Odell, U.S. International Monetary Policy: Markets, Power, and Ideas as Sources of Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); and Kathryn Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Back.

Note 2: I use the term common security (in Russian, vseobshaia bezopasnost') throughout the article, even though Soviet / Russian and American authors frequently speak of mutual security (vzaimnaia bezopasnost') or equal security (bezopasnost' dlia vsekh). I do this because, though all the terms refer to the same concept, common security is the generic term that was originally used in the German security debate (gemeinsame Sicherheit) and later in the Palme commission's report. See Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, Common Security: A Blueprint for Survival (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). On the various Russian terms, see Georgi Arbatov, Zatianuvsheesia vysdorovlenie (1953-1988 gg.), Svidetel'stvo sovremennika (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1991), pp. 240-41; published in English as The System: An Insider's Life in Soviet Politics (New York: Random House, 1992). I thank Matthew Evangelista for clarifying the Russian terms for me and for alerting me to Arbatov's book. Back.

Note 3: On epistemic communities, see P. Haas, Knowledge, Power, and International Policy Coordination; and E. Haas, When Knowledge Is Power. On transnational relations, see Robert O. Keohane and Joseph Nye, Jr., eds., Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). Back.

Note 4: The following discussion is based on Isabelle Grunberg and Thomas Risse-Kappen, "A Time of Reckoning ? Theories of International Relations and the End of the Cold War," in The End of the Cold War: Evaluating Theories of International Relations, ed. Pierre Allan and Kjell Goldmann (Dordrecht, Holland: Martinus Nijhoff, 1992), pp. 104-46. Back.

Note 5: See Kenneth Oye, "Explaining the End of the Cold War: Morphological and Behavioral Adaptations to the Nuclear Peace ?" the third essay in this book. For a critical discussion of this argument, see Matthew Evangelista, "Internal and External Constraints on Grand Strategy: The Soviet Case," in The Domestic Book of Grand Strategy, ed. Richard Rosecrance and Arthur Stein (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 154-78. Back.

Note 6: Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Back.

Note 7: For excellent surveys of strategies of reassurance see Alexander George, "Strategies for Facilitating Cooperation," in U.S.-Soviet Security Cooperation, ed. Alexander L. George, Philip J. Farley, and Alexander Dallin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 692-711; Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, "Beyond Deterrence," Journal of Social Issues 43 (winter 1987): 5-72; and Janice Gross Stein, "Reassurance in International Conflict Management," Political Science Quarterly 106 (fall 1991): 431-51. Back.

Note 8: See, for example, John Lewis Gaddis, "Hanging Tough Paid Off," Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 45 (January 1989): 11-14; and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Henry Kissinger, and Yasuhiro Nakasone, "East-West Relations," Foreign Affairs 68 (summer 1989): 1-21, esp. pp. 8-9. See also Robert Einhorn, Negotiating from Strength: Leverage in U.S.-Soviet Arms Control (New York: Praeger, 1985). Back.

Note 9: For empirical evidence, see Fred Chernoff, "Ending the Cold War: The Soviet Retreat and the U.S. Military Buildup," International Affairs 67 (January 1991): 111-26; Ted Hopf, "Peripheral Visions: Brezhnev and Gorbachev Meet the 'Reagan Doctrine,' " in Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy, ed. Breslauer and Tetlock, pp. 586-629; Sarah Mendelson, "Internal Battles and External Wars: Politics, Learning, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan," World Politics 45 (April 1993): 327-60; and Thomas Risse-Kappen, "Did 'Peace Through Strength' End the Cold War," International Security 16 (summer 1991): 162-88. For a general discussion of the effects of Western leverage on the Soviet Union, see Jack Snyder, "International Leverage on Soviet Domestic Change," World Politics 42 (October 1989): 1-30. Back.

Note 10: For evidence, see Mendelson, "Internal Battles and External Wars," p. 334. Back.

Note 11: I am referring to West German enthusiasm for Gorbachev in 1987 and 1988--two years before the Soviet leadership consented to German reunification. Back.

Note 12: For a similar point, see Checkel, "Ideas, Institutions, and the Gorbachev Foreign Policy Revolution," pp. 274 and 279-80. Back.

Note 13: See Kenneth N. Waltz, "Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My Critics," in Neorealism and Its Critics, ed. Robert O. Keohane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 322-45. Waltz seems to acknowledge this point when he writes that "any theory of international politics requires also a theory of domestic politics" (331). On the indeterminate nature of realism, see Robert O. Keohane, "Realism, Neorealism, and the Study of World Politics," in Neorealism and Its Critics, ed. Robert O. Keohane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 1-26; Stephen Haggard, "Structuralism and Its Critics: Recent Progress in International Relations Theory," in Progress in Postwar International Relations, ed. Emanuel Adler and Beverly Crawford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); and Richard N. Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, "Introduction: International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War," the first essay in this book. Back.

Note 14: For examples of efforts at systematizing liberal thinking in international relations, see Ernst-Otto Czempiel, Friedensstrategien (Strategies for peace) (Paderborn, Germany: Sch�ningh, 1986); Robert O. Keohane, "International Liberalism Reconsidered," in The Economic Limits to Modern Politics, ed. John Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 165-94; Andrew Moravcsik, "Liberalism and International Relations Theory," working paper no. 92-6, Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., 1992; and Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Back.

Note 15: See Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, "The International Sources of Soviet Change," International Security 16 (winter 1991 / 92): 74-118; and Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, "Soviet Reform and the End of the Cold War: Explaining Large-Scale Historical Change," Review of International Studies 17 (summer 1991): 225-50. For a critique of the argument, see Mendelson, "Internal Wars and External Battles," pp. 330-31. Back.

Note 16: For an extreme version of this argument, see Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Back.

Note 17: Grieco calls this perspective neoliberal institutionalism, while Jack Snyder uses the term defensive realism. See Joseph M. Grieco, "Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation: A Realist Critique of the Newest Liberal Institutionalism," International Organization 42 (summer 1988): 485-507; and Jack Snyder, "Myths, Modernization, and the Post-Gorbachev World," the fifth essay in this book. See also Kenneth A. Oye, ed., Cooperation Under Anarchy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). This approach also influenced the original arms control literature. See, for example, Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control 2 (New York: Pergamon and Brassey, 1961); and Hedley Bull, The Control of the Arms Race (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961). Back.

Note 18: The bible of that approach is Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, Common Security. See also Egon Bahr, Was wird aus den Deutschen ? (What will happen to the Germans ?) (Reinbek, Germany: Rowohlt, 1982); Dieter S. Lutz, ed., Gemeinsame Sicherheit (Common security), 2 vols. (Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos, 1986). Back.

Note 19: For this argument, see Snyder, "Myths, Modernization, and the Post-Gorbachev World." Back.

Note 20: See Michael Doyle, "Liberalism and the End of the Cold War," the fourth essay in this book; Michael Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics," American Political Science Review 80 (December 1986): 1151-69; and Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace. Back.

Note 21: For the most recent data on the democratic peace, see Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace. See also Journal of Conflict Resolution 35 (June 1991) and International Interactions 18 (February 1993), both special issues; and Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, "Alliances, Contiguity, Wealth, and Political Stability: Is the Lack of Conflict Among Democracies a Statistical Artifact ?" International Interactions 17 (February 1992): 245-267. Back.

Note 22: Immanuel Kant, "Zum Ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf" (Perpetual peace: A philosophical sketch, 1795), in Immanuel Kant: Werke in sechs B� nden (Immanuel Kant: Works in six volumes), ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt: Insel, 1964), 6:193-251. Back.

Note 23: See Evangelista, "Sources of Moderation"; Mendelson, "Internal Battles and External Wars"; Lebow, "The Search for Accommodation"; and Stein, "Political Learning by Doing." See also Robert Legvold, "Soviet Learning in the 1980s," in Breslauer and Tetlock, Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy, pp. 684-732; and Jack Snyder, "The Gorbachev Revolution: A Waning of Soviet Expansionism ?" International Security 12 (winter 1987 / 88): 93-131. Back.

Note 24: See M. S. Gorbachev's speech before the British Parliament, December 18, 1984, reprinted in M. S. Gorbachev, Speeches and Writings (Oxford: Pergamon, 1986), pp. 123-30; and M. S. Gorbachev, "Report to the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union," February 25, 1986, also reprinted in Gorbachev, Speeches and Writings, pp. 1-109, 5-21. In particular, see pp. 5-21 of the latter for an example of old thinking, which emphasized the world class struggle, and pp. 70-85 for a mix of old and new thinking. Back.

Note 25: Shevardnadze is quoted in Checkel, "Ideas, Institutions, and the Gorbachev Foreign Policy Revolution," p. 294, esp. n. 78. Back.

Note 26: I hesitate to use the term epistemic communities because Peter Haas's definition emphasizes policy-relevant knowledge and shared causal beliefs as their primary source of authority. While the intellectual community in the former Soviet Union shared certain knowledge claims about international politics, their internal consensus derived mostly from shared principled beliefs or values. To put it differently, their knowledge claims made sense only if one shared their values. Moreover, their expertise and competence in a particular domain was only recognized (another part of Haas's definition) when Gorbachev came into power and increasingly relied on their ideas. Finally, their competence remained contested in the Soviet domestic debate. For the definition of epistemic communities, see Peter Haas, "Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination," in Knowledge, Power, and International Policy Coordination, pp. 1-35, esp. p. 3. For a discussion, see Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, "International Issue Networks in the Environment and Human Rights," paper prepared for the International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, September 24-27, 1992, Los Angeles. Back.

Note 27: Checkel, "Ideas, Institutions, and the Gorbachev Foreign Policy Revolution"; Robert O. Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977); Mendelson, "Internal Battles and External Wars." Back.

Note 28: See Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, "Ideas and Foreign Policy: An Analytical Framework," in Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 3-30. Back.

Note 29: Ibid., p. 3. Back.

Note 30: On the term strategic prescription, see Checkel, "Ideas, Institutions, and the Gorbachev Foreign Policy Revolution," p. 281. Strategic prescriptions contain both values (such as peace and security) and assumptions about causal relationships between ends and means. Thus they do not fall neatly into either of the two categories of principled and causal beliefs identified by Goldstein and Keohane. Back.

Note 31: For the evolution of Soviet security thinking, see Stephen Kull, Burying Lenin: The Revolution in Soviet Ideology and Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992); and Allen Lynch, Gorbachev's International Outlook: Intellectual Origins and Political Consequences, Institute for East-West Security Studies Occasional Paper No. 9 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1989). Back.

Note 32: Checkel, "Ideas, Institutions, and the Gorbachev Foreign Policy Revolution," pp. 291-94. Back.

Note 33: For overviews, see Emanuel Adler, "The Emergence of Cooperation: National Epistemic Communities and the International Evolution of the Idea of Nuclear Arms Control," International Organization (special issue) 46 (winter 1992): 101-45; Gert Krell, "The Problems and Achievements of Arms Control," Arms Control 2 (December 1981): 247-86. Back.

Note 34: On the domestic arms control debate during the Reagan administration, see Dan Caldwell, The Dynamics of Domestic Politics and Arms Control: The salt ii Treaty Debate (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991); Michael Krepon, Arms Control in the Reagan Administration (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1989); Bernd W. Kubbig, Amerikanische R�stungskontrollpolitik: Die innergesellschaftlichen Auseinandersetzungen in der ersten Amtszeit Ronald Reagan (U.S. arms control policy: The domestic debates during Reagan's first term) (Frankfurt: Campus, 1988); David Meyer, A Winter of Discontent: The Freeze and American Politics (New York: Praeger, 1990); and Philip G. Schrag, Listening for the Bomb: A Study in Nuclear Arms Control Verification (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1989). Back.

Note 35: On the German debate, see Jeffrey Boutwell, The German Nuclear Dilemma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Thomas Risse-Kappen, Die Krise der Sicherheitspolitik: Neuorientierungen und Entscheidungsprozesse im politischen System der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1977-1984 (The crisis of security policy: New orientations and decision-making processes in the political system of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1977-1984) (Mainz-Munich: Gr�newald-Kaiser, 1988). Back.

Note 36: Egon Bahr, "Sozialdemokratische Sicherheitspolitik" [ Social Democratic security policy ], Die Neue Gesellschaft, no. 2 (1983): 108 (my translation and emphasis). See also Bahr, Was wird aus den Deutschen ?; Egon Bahr, "Gemeinsame Sicherheit: Gedanken zur Entsch�rfung der nuklearen Konfrontation in Europa," (Common security: Thoughts on the deescalation of the nuclear confrontation in Europe), Europa-Archiv 37, no. 14 (1982): 421-30; and Lutz, Gemeinsame Sicherheit. See also Richard Smoke and Andrei Kortunov, eds., Mutual Security: A New Approach to Soviet-American Relations (New York: St. Martin's, 1991). Back.

Note 37: For details, see Risse-Kappen, Die Krise der Sicherheitspolitik, pp. 110-18, 152-71. Back.

Note 38: See, for example, Horst Afheldt, Defensive Verteidigung (Defensive defense) (Reinbek, Germany: Rowohlt, 1983); Anders Boserup and Andrew Mack, Krieg ohne Waffen (War without weapons) (Reinbek, Germany: Rowohlt, 1974); Anders Boserup, Foundations of Defensive Defense (New York: Macmillan, 1990); Bjorn Moller, Non-Offensive Defense: A Bibliography (Copenhagen: Center for Peace and Conflict Research, 1987); Bjorn Moller, Common Security and Non-Offensive Defense: A Neorealist Perspective (Boulder, Colo.: Rienner, 1992); Studiengruppe Alternative Sicherheitspolitik, Strukturwandel der Verteidigung (Structural change of defense) (Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher, 1984); and Albrecht A. C. von M�ller, "Integrated Forward Defense," unpublished manuscript, Starnberg, Germany, 1985. On the security dilemma, see Robert Jervis, "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma," World Politics 30 (January 1978): 186-214. Back.

Note 39: Evangelista, Taming the Bear; and Matthew Evangelista, "Transnational Relations, Domestic Structures, and Security Policy in the U.S.S.R. and Russia," in Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures and International Institutions, ed. Thomas Risse-Kappen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Back.

Note 40: See Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, Common Security. In the late 1980s, there was also a transnational U.S.-Soviet effort to discuss common security. See Smoke and Kortunov, Mutual SecurityM. Back.

Note 41: Back.See Georgi Arbatov, The System, pp. 341-43. Milshtein frequently published in Western journals. See, for example, Mikhail Milshtein, "Problems of the Inadmissibility of Nuclear Conflict," International Studies Quarterly 20 (March 1976): 87-103.

Note 42: The most far-reaching agreement was the spd-Polish Communist Party declaration entitled "Criteria and Measures for Establishing Confidence-Building Security Structures in Europe," released in Warsaw on February 2, 1988. For details, see Stephan Kux, "Western Peace Research and Soviet Military Thought," unpublished manuscript, Columbia University, New York, April 20, 1989. Back.

Note 43: For details, see Kux, "Western Peace Research and Soviet Military Thought"; and Matthew Evangelista, "Transnational Alliances and Soviet Demilitarization," paper prepared for the Council on Economic Priorities, October 1990, pp. 33-41. See also Anders Boserup, "A Way to Undermine Hostility," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 44 (September 1988): 16-19. Back.

Note 44: For the initial Soviet reactions, see Stephan Tiedtke, Abschreckung und ihre Alternativen: Die sowjetische Sicht einer westlichen Debatte [ Deterrence and its alternatives: The Soviet view of a Western debate ] (Heidelberg, Germany: Forschungsst�tte der Evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft, 1986). Back.

Note 45: On the history of Pugwash, see Joseph Rotblat, Scientists in the Quest for Peace: A History of the Pugwash Conference (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1972). On the various Pugwash meetings, see Joseph Rotblat and Laszlo Valki, eds., Coexistence, Cooperation, and Common Security: Annals of Pugwash 1986 (New York: St. Martin's, 1988); and Joseph Rotblat and V. I. Goldanskii, eds., Global Problems and Common Security: Annals of Pugwash 1988 (Berlin: Springer, 1989). Back.

Note 46: Gorbachev, "Report to the Twenty-Seventh Congress," pp. 71, 74. For a more coherent and less ambiguous argument about common security, see Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), pp. 140-44. For comprehensive analyses of the new Soviet thinking about security, see Kull, Burying Lenin; Raymond Garthoff, Deterrence and the Revolution in Soviet Military Doctrine (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1990); and Klaus Segbers, Der sowjetische Systemwandel (The Soviet system change) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), pp. 299-330. Back.

Note 47: See, for example, Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, Common Security, pp. 6-11. Back.

Note 48: Tracing the policy impact of transnational coalitions requires extensive data on decision-making processes in order to allow for causal inferences. The evidence I present is not sufficient to meet these requirements. For more detailed studies, see Evangelista, Taming the Bear; Evangelista, "Transnational Relations"; and Herman, "Ideas, Institutions and the Reconceptualization of Interests." Back.

Note 49: Gorbachev, Perestroika, pp. 206-7. See also ibid., p. 196, regarding the Brandt commission on North-South issues. Back.

Note 50: Pravda, April 6, 1988, as quoted in Kux, "Western Peace Research and Soviet Military Thought," p. 13. See also Evangelista, "Transnational Alliances and Soviet Demilitarization," pp. 29-31. As Georgi Arbatov put it: "We do not claim to have invented all the ideas of the new thinking. Some of them originated outside the Soviet Union with people such as Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and Olof Palme. We are developing them, along with our own ideas, into a full program for international conduct" (quoted in Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina Vanden Heuvel, eds., Voices of Glasnost [ New York: Norton, 1989 ], p. 315). Back.

Note 51: Arbatov, The System, p. 171. Back.

Note 52: See ibid., pp. 311-12; Checkel, "Ideas, Institutions, and the Gorbachev Foreign Policy Revolution," pp. 291-94; Mendelson, "Internal Battles and External Wars," p. 340; Lynch, Gorbachev's International Outlook, pp. 56-58; and Pat Litherland, "Gorbachev and Arms Control: Civilian Experts and Soviet Policy," Peace Research Report No. 12, University of Bradford, November 1986. Back.

Note 53: Gorbachev, Perestroika, pp. 142-43. See also his "Report to the Twenty-Seventh Congress," p. 74. Back.

Note 54: For details of these arguments, see Garthoff, Deterrence and the Revolution in Soviet Military Doctrine, pp. 149-85; Stephen M. Meyer, "The Sources and Prospects of Gorbachev's New Political Thinking on Security," International Security 13 (fall 1988): 124-63; R. Hyland Phillips and Jeffrey I. Sands, "Reasonable Sufficiency and Soviet Conventional Defense," International Security 13 (fall 1988): 164-78; and Willard C. Frank and Philip S. Gillette, eds., Soviet Military Doctrine from Lenin to Gorbachev, 1915-1991 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992). Back.

Note 55: See, for example, Andrei Kokoshin and Valentin Larionov, "Con frontation of Conventional Forces in the Context of Ensuring Strategic Stability," in Alternative Conventional Defense Postures in the European Theater, ed. Hans G�nter Brauch and Robert Kennedy (New York: Crane Russak, 1992), 2:71-82. The Russian original of this article first appeared in 1988. See also Andrei Kokoshin, "Restructure Forces, Enhance Security," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 44 (September 1988): 35-38, and Valentin Larionov, Prevention of War: Doctrines, Concepts, Prospects (Moscow: Progress, 1991); and Valentin Larionov, "Soviet Military Doctrine: Past and Present," in Frank and Gillette, Soviet Military Doctrine, pp. 301-19. Back.

Note 56: For details of these exchanges, see Evangelista, "Transnational Alliances and Soviet Demilitarization," pp. 31-37. For Alexei Arbatov, see his book Lethal Frontiers: A Soviet View of Nuclear Strategy, Weapons, and Negotiations (New York: Praeger, 1988), which first appeared in Russian in 1984 and shows a superb knowledge of the American strategic debate. Back.

Note 57: Frank and Gillette, Soviet Military Doctrine, p. 397. Back.

Note 58: Other examples include arms control proposals on test ban negotiations and the abm treaty (see Evangelista, "Transnational Relations") and ideas about the "common European home" and the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe. See Gorbachev, Perestroika, pp. 194-98. Back.

Note 59: See Litherland, "Gorbachev and Arms Control"; Lynch, Gorbachev's International Outlook; and Kimberley Martin Zisk, "Soviet Academic Theories on International Conflict and Negotiation: A Research Note," Journal of Conflict Resolution 34 (December 1990): 678-93. Back.

Note 60: The details in the remainder of this section are rather sketchy. However, enough empirical analyses are available to support the argument. See, for example, the literature cited in note 35 above. See also Bernd W. Kubbig, Die milit� rische Eroberung des Weltraums (The military conquering of space), vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Campus, 1990). The best narratives of arms control under the Reagan and Bush administrations are Strobe Talbott, Deadly Gambits (New York: Knopf, 1984); Strobe Talbott, The Master of the Game (New York: Knopf, 1988); and Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993). See also George Shultz's memoirs, Turmoil and Triumph (New York: Scribner's, 1993). Back.

Note 61: The best analysis of the freeze campaign is Meyer, A Winter of Discontent. Back.

Note 62: See Kubbig, Die milit� rische Eroberung des Weltraums; and Raymond Garthoff, Policy Versus the Law: The Reinterpretation of the abm Treaty (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1987). Back.

Note 63: For details on this case, see Mich�le Flournoy, "The nrdc / sas Test Ban Verification Project: A Controversial Excursion in Private Diplomacy," unpublished manuscript, Washington, D.C., 1989; and Schrag, Listening for the Bomb. For a discussion of the Soviet involvement in these activities, see Evangelista, "Transnational Relations." Back.

Note 64: The cautious and reactive U.S. approach to the revolutionary changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is well documented in Beschloss and Talbott, At the Highest Levels. Back.

Note 65: This discussion builds on my earlier work, in particular Die Krise der Sicherheitspolitik. See also Boutwell, The German Nuclear Dilemma; and Barry Blechman and Cathleen Fisher, The Silent Partner: West Germany and Arms Control (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1988). On the evolution of European public opinion on security policy, see Richard Eichenberg, Public Opinion and National Security in Western Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). Back.

Note 66: See, for example, Jeffrey Herf, "War, Peace, and the Intellectuals: The Long March to the West German Peace Movement," International Security 10 (spring 1986): 172-200. Back.

Note 67: Details in Risse-Kappen, Die Krise der Sicherheitspolitik, pp. 43-89. Back.

Note 68: See Thomas Risse-Kappen, The Zero Option: inf, West Germany, and Arms Control (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1988); and Talbott, Deadly Gambits. Back.

Note 69: See, for example, Peter Katzenstein, ed., Between Power and Plenty (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Peter Katzenstein, Small States in World Markets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); G. John Ikenberry, Reasons of State: Oil Politics and the Capacities of the American Government (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); and G. John Ikenberry, David Lake, and Michael Mastanduno, eds., The State and American Foreign Economic Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). For examples of attempts to apply the approach to other issue areas, see Michael Barnett, "High Politics Is Low Politics: The Domestic and Systemic Sources of Israeli Security Policy, 1967-1977," World Politics 42 (July 1990): 529-62; Matthew Evangelista, Innovation and the Arms Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); idem, "Domestic Structures and International Change," in New Thinking in International Relations Theory, ed. Michael Doyle and G. John Ikenberry (forthcoming); and Thomas Risse-Kappen, "Public Opinion, Domestic Structure, and Foreign Policy in Liberal Democracies," World Politics 43 (July 1991): 479-512. See also my introduction in Bringing Transnational Relations Back In. Back.

Note 70: See, for example, James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989); G. John Ikenberry, "Conclusion: An Institutional Approach to American Foreign Economic Policy," in Ikenberry, Lake, and Mastanduno, The State and American Foreign Economic Policy, pp. 219-43; and Friedrich Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1989). For various applications, see Peter Katzenstein and Nobuo Okawara, "Japan's National Security: Structures, Norms, and Politics," International Security 17 (spring 1993): 84-118; Peter Katzenstein and Nobuo Okawara, Japan's National Security: Structures, Norms, and Policy Responses in a Changing World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Thomas Berger, "From Sword to Chrysanthemum: Japan's Culture of Anti-militarism," International Security 17 (spring 1993): 119-50. Back.

Note 71: Clearly, it is important to distinguish between consensual ideas that are stable over time and those that are altered frequently and promoted by specific groups. The strategic prescriptions discussed in this article are examples of the latter type of ideas. I thank John Odell and an anonymous reviewer for alerting me to this point. Back.

Note 72: See Evangelista, Innovation and the Arms Race; and idem, "Transnational Relations." Back.

Note 73: A domestic structure approach explains why cognitive and learning theories are so widely used to explain the Gorbachev revolution. See Breslauer and Tetlock, Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy; and Stein, "Political Learning by Doing." For a similar point, see Sue Peterson, "Strategy and State Structure: The Domestic Politics of Crisis Bargaining" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, New York, 1993). Back.

Note 74: I owe the following argument to Steve Ropp. Back.

Note 75: Of course, U.S. autonomy is greater in national security affairs than in other issue areas. But compared with the former Soviet state, the difference is still striking. Back.

Note 76: On the Cold War consensus in the United States and its limits, see Bruce Russett, Controlling the Sword (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), chap. 3; and Eugene Wittkopf, Faces of Internationalism: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990). Back.

Note 77: See Peter Katzenstein, Corporatism and Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); idem, Policy and Politics in West Germany (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). Back.

Note 78: For a further evaluation of this approach, see Risse-Kappen, Bringing Transnational Relations Back In. See also Kathryn Sikkink, "Human Rights, Principled Issue-Networks, and Sovereignty in Latin America," International Organization 47 (summer 1993): 411-41. Back.

Note 79: See, for example, Checkel, "Ideas, Institutions, and the Gorbachev Foreign Policy Revolution"; Goldstein, "Ideas, Institutions, and American Trade Policy"; Goldstein and Keohane, Ideas and Foreign Policy; Odell, U.S. International Monetary Policy; and Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions. Back.

Note 80: Goldstein and Keohane, "Ideas and Foreign Policy," p. 26. Back.

International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War