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International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War, by Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, editors
9. Political Learning by Doing: Gorbachev as Uncommitted Thinker and Motivated Learner
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Janice Gross Stein
At a moment when history has turned, experience is not necessarily the first qualification. There are differences between being locked into foreign policies that reflect the thinking of the last decade and promoting foreign policies designed for the next decade.
--Anthony Lake
The dramatic changes in Soviet foreign policy initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Some analysts look largely to changes in the international distribution of power to explain the transformation of Soviet foreign policy, while others give primacy to domestic politics. I argue that both these explanations are underdetermined and that a satisfactory explanation of the change in Soviet foreign policy must include individual as well as international and domestic variables. 1 Although most Soviet leaders recognized the need for change by the mid-1980s, the direction and scope of the change that took place cannot be explained without reference to the impact of Gorbachev and his representation of the Soviet security problem.
There is no obvious explanation of how and why Gorbachev developed his representation of the issues that were central to the Cold War. Several different hypotheses are plausible. Gorbachev's cognitive constructs, different from those of his predecessors, may have been embedded in his cognitive structure for a considerable time. Those cognitive constructs did not change, but the man came to power. Under these conditions, a political explanation of generational change and new elites would capture most of what is important.
Two other related but distinct explanations are also possible. First, Gorbachev may have changed his cognitive constructs as he approached the senior leadership position in the Soviet Union. Cognitive concepts of schemata change are then an obvious candidate to explain the change. Theories of cognitive change, however, are insufficiently specified to predict the conditions and processes that would provoke the change in Gorbachev's representation of the security dilemma. In this sense, they share the limitations of structural explanations of political change.
A second possibility is that Gorbachev did not have well-developed cognitive constructs about security and international relations until fairly late in his career. As he approached the leadership, he developed new constructs. Theories of learning may provide a more satisfactory explanation of the development of Gorbachev's cognitive constructs. Here too the analyst encounters difficulties. No unified theory of learning exists, and concepts are open to multiple interpretations and measures. Any attempt to explain the development of Gorbachev's cognitive constructs confronts underspecified theories and very limited empirical evidence. For the moment, we can at best choose the explanation that most plausibly interprets the available data. I argue that through inductive trial-and-error learning stimulated by failure, Gorbachev developed a new representation of the ill-structured Soviet security problem. Learning by doing must be embedded within the broader social and political context to provide a convincing explanation of how and why Gorbachev was able to learn.
This explanation of the development of Gorbachev's cognitive constructs is only one piece, albeit an important one, of the larger puzzle of the changes in Soviet foreign policy. I conclude this essay with some observations about the importance of political learning as a component of a broader explanation of the changes in Soviet foreign policy that ended the Cold War and sketch the outlines of the rich research agenda that grows out of the analysis of learning and policy change.
International and Domestic Explanations of Change
Shortly after Gorbachev became general secretary of the Commu nist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985, he began to emphasize the importance of new thinking that challenged long-standing Soviet concepts of security. 2 Over the next few years, Gorbachev, some of his colleagues, and their advisers reformulated the basic axioms and strategic principles of Soviet security and defense. 3 Change was disorderly and ad hoc but encompassed the fundamentals of Soviet concepts of security.
By the end of 1988 Gorbachev's thinking had led him to a far-reaching and fundamental assault on established Soviet concepts of security. He repudiated the class basis of international relations that had dominated Soviet thinking since its inception, asserting that "all human values" had to take precedence over the narrower interests of the class struggle in the nuclear age. 4 This rejection of class-based competition within coexistence was heresy to any Marxist-Leninist and a sharp departure from thinking about security under Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Gorbachev emphasized the interdependence of capitalism and socialism in a common human civilization. National and international security, he insisted, were inextricably linked. Security was mutual, and political solutions, rather than military technology, should be at the forefront of policy. 5 One obvious explanation of these changes in Gorbachev's cognitive constructs is the unfavorable shift in the international distribution of capabilities. Yet Soviet military capability, the focus of realist theories, did not decline. On the contrary, many Western analysts worried about a relative improvement in Soviet nuclear capability and power to project conventional forces abroad at the beginning of the 1980s. 6 The Soviet economy, however, which had grown at rates of 5 percent or more until the early 1970s, was growing at a rate of only 2.5 percent in 1984. When the world economy began to shift away from the traditional heavy industries toward high value-added and knowledge-based manufacturing, the Soviet economy seemed increasingly less able to compete. 7
If the changes in Gorbachev's concepts that spilled over into Soviet doctrine and behavior were a straightforward response to relative economic decline, then new thinking is an epiphenomenal and unnecessary component of an explanation of the change in Soviet foreign policy. The data, however, do not sustain this interpretation in the way realist theories expect. The decline in growth rates during the 1970s and 1980s was not unique to the Soviet Union. Growth in the United States, the obvious point of reference, also slowed. The U.S. economy grew at an average rate of 4 percent throughout the 1960s, but the rate of growth declined to about 2.7 percent in the 1970s and 1980s. 8
The data do not show the relative decline in Soviet economic capabilities that is the focus of realist explanations. Evidence suggests, however, that Gorbachev was concerned about the absolute economic decline and stagnation of the Soviet Union. Even before his election as general secretary, Gorbachev warned, "Only an intensive, fast-developing economy can ensure the strengthening of the country's position in the international arena, enabling it to enter the new millennium appropriately, as a great and prosperous power." 9 When asked directly whether he knew before he became general secretary that the economic status quo was untenable and that radical change would be required, Gorbachev replied: "Like many others, I had known that our society needed radical change. That really was not some kind of revelation for me because after the death of Stalin, there were many attempts to do it. Khrushchev tried it. Kosygin tried it. Some agricultural reformers tried it, and some other reformers. . . . If I had not understood that, I would not have accepted the position of general secretary." 10
Although the leadership shared widespread concern about Soviet economic performance and a general recognition that change was required, possible responses to economic decline varied widely. Robert Gilpin argues that in periods of uneven shifts in relative power, either rising challengers or status quo great powers go to war to establish a new equilibrium. 11 A second possible response to economic stagnation was a neo-Stalinist retrenchment, with economic change directed from above. A third option was an accommodation with the West to free resources for investment in the Soviet economy. Since the variation across these responses is fairly wide, the structural explanation of the shift in Soviet foreign policy toward accommodation is underdetermined. 12
The limits of a structural explanation become clear when one looks at the response of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev's immediate predecessors, to fundamentally the same set of international conditions. Their initial response to the increased hostility of the United States in the early 1980s, under similar conditions of economic stringency, was to reiterate traditional Soviet concepts of security and to adopt a more confrontational policy. 13 Andropov withdrew from the intermediate-range nuclear forces (inf) talks after nato began its deployment of Pershing II missiles, and Chernenko agreed to return to the table only in January 1985, two months before Gorbachev succeeded to the leadership. Little had changed in the distribution of economic and military capabilities in those three years. Under Gorbachev, both concepts and policy were very different.
The serious division within the Soviet leadership as new thinking began to develop is further evidence of the indeterminacy of structural explanations. This intense debate could have reflected decision making in an environment of imperfect or incomplete information. Politicians can disagree over the likely consequences of policy options and debate alternatives to clarify uncertainty. Undoubtedly, the kinds of ill-structured problems Soviet leaders confronted involved high levels of uncertainty that led to different representations of the dilemmas of security in a changing environment. The debate was about problem representation, not simply about the uncertain consequences of options.
Analysts of Soviet politics, writing in late 1989, argued that new thinking was limited to a few central Soviet leaders and advisers. 14 Almost all its fundamental components were politically contested; prevention of war and protection against accidental war were the least controversial. Long before Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985, the Soviet military had instituted procedures to reduce the risk of accidents. 15 Brezhnev had insisted that it would be suicidal to start a nuclear war. Even so, the Soviet military, in its doctrine and in its journals, continued to emphasize the importance of preparing to fight and win a war. This discontinuity had perpetuated Western suspicion of Soviet intentions.
Gorbachev rejected out of hand any military planning based on the assumption that either the United States or the Soviet Union would deliberately attack the other. He did not believe that intentional nuclear war was possible. He told his senior military officials to stop bringing him any plans that presumed a war with the United States. "Don't put any such programs on my desk," he ordered. 16 Influential figures in the defense establishment such as Minister of Defense Dmitri Yazov and Dmitri Volkogonov, director of the Military Historical Institute in the Ministry of Defense, nevertheless continued to insist that the threat of an intentional attack against the Soviet Union was real, citing as evidence ongoing Western development and deployment of strategic weapons. They and others also challenged the heavy emphasis on political solutions to security problems, arguing that the United States remained committed to achieving military superiority. 17 Evidence of U.S. intentions was the failure of the United States to join the unilateral Soviet moratorium on nuclear testing and past duplicity on arms control.
Critics also challenged the fundamental political logic that underpinned new thinking on security. In August 1988, for example, three years after Gorbachev had come to power, Yegor Ligachev reiterated the importance of the international class struggle and argued that there was not and could not be any contradiction between peace and socialism. "Active involvement in the solution of general human problems," he insisted, "by no means signifies any artificial 'braking' of the social and national liberation struggle." 18
Given that senior Soviet leaders, officials, and policy analysts in the Gorbachev era disagreed fundamentally about the appropriate direction of Soviet foreign and defense policy, changes in international structures could not be determining of the change in concepts of security. It is thus unsatisfying to explain the changes in Soviet thinking about security as a rational adaptation to unambiguous feedback from the environment. 19
Cognitive variables are epiphenomenal in realist models that assume that changes in international capabilities are obviously and easily read by rational leaders, who then adapt to changing structures. The evidence suggests that in the Soviet case feedback was not obvious, that it was open to radically different interpretations, and that its meaning was construed very differently by Soviet leaders within a short period of time. Insofar as this is the case, the construction of meaning becomes a critical rather than epiphenomenal factor in any explanation of the end of the Cold War.
A second candidate explanation for the change in Soviet foreign policy is domestic politics. The strong version holds that leaders are put in place by powerful constituencies because of their commitment to change. Gorbachev would have had to have been chosen by the Politburo primarily because of his commitment to a new approach to Soviet defense and security. His new thinking could then be understood as a calculated response to the demands of his constituency and could be nicely explained as a rational response to interest politics.
Historically, periods of succession in the Soviet Union have promoted logrolling and political trade-offs in policy until the new leader consolidates his authority. 20 Andropov succeeded Brezhnev in November 1982 but became ill in the summer of 1983 and died in February 1984. Chernenko, also in failing health, was chosen as the new general secretary, but with the tacit understanding that Gorbachev would be considered the heir apparent. 21 In this long period of succession after Brezhnev, a coalition in favor of radical change in Soviet foreign policy could have formed behind Gorbachev as the successor.
The evidence does not suggest that Gorbachev was chosen because of his commitment to change Soviet foreign policy. Rather, he was acknowledged as one of the leading proponents of domestic reform. The limited evidence that is available suggests that he was chosen to end the period of stagnation at home and begin the revitalization of Soviet society. Domestic politics and political succession do explain why Gorbachev came to power. They are also important in explaining why his thinking on security mattered once he had become general secretary. 22 In a state-centered society, the influence of even a new general secretary was considerable. Domestic politics cannot adequately explain, however, why Gorbachev changed or developed new representations of the Soviet Union's security problem.
A weaker variant of a domestic politics explanation does provide important pieces of the puzzle. The configuration of domestic politics can help to explain the direction and scope of change once Gorbachev began to think differently about and to reorient Soviet foreign policy. Some of Gorbachev's actions were specifically designed to fracture alliances among those opposed to the new direction in policy. For example, he was reluctant to extend support to repressive leaders in Eastern Europe in part because they were allies of those in the Soviet Union who opposed reform both at home and abroad. 23 In this sense, domestic politics helped to accelerate rather than to initiate change.
Domestic politics is also helpful in explaining how Gorbachev deepened his commitment to policy change. The strands of domestic politics were woven in complex ways. I argue that Gorbachev drew on institutional expertise within the political system to develop and refine ideas and policy. He also crafted a political coalition in an effort to build political support for new policies that threatened established interests. In both these ways, domestic politics was an important component of foreign policy change. Domestic politics, however, cannot address the important questions of why Gorbachev began to think differently about security, why he rejected the conventional wisdom of the time, and how and why he developed new concepts to organize his thinking about foreign and defense policy.
Neither international nor domestic variables provide satisfactory answers to these questions. The Soviet leadership's recognition of the need for change permitted a wide variation in response, and domestic politics did not determine the vector of policy that emerged. To explain the shift in Soviet foreign policy, one must look to the role of individuals within the parameters set by an environment that pressed the Soviet leadership.
Generational Succession and Foreign Policy Change
Generational change provides a more convincing explanation of the change in Soviet foreign policy. It incorporates political and cognitive variables to suggest that cohorts learn collectively from shared formative experiences. Leaders do not change their concepts; rather, as one generation of leaders succeeds another, it brings with it different experiences and therefore different conceptions of policy. At first glance, this explanation provides a plausible interpretation of new thinking.
Gorbachev was a generation younger than Brezhnev and his colleagues. He was nineteen years younger than Chernenko and thirteen years younger than the average age of the ten surviving full voting members of the Politburo. Most members of Brezhnev's Politburo were born around 1910 and so lived through the early revolutionary years. They were young adults during the forced collectivization under Stalin and fully responsible adults during World War II. Their formative experiences were the creation of the Soviet Union, the surprise attack by Hitler's Germany, and the trauma of the "Great Patriotic War."
Many members of the Politburo under Gorbachev were born around 1930, and their formative political experience was Khrush-chev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956. Those who came of political age during this period were heavily influenced by Khrushchev's attempt to liberalize the political process, to free Soviet society of the Stalinist legacy, and to reform Soviet politics. They described themselves as children of the Twentieth Party Congress, and many emerged as colleagues or advisers to Gorbachev in the first few years of his administration. 24 Some of Gorbachev's advisers lived through the years of stagnation in frustrated isolation and were receptive to reform and change.
Yet generational change is not an entirely satisfactory explanation. Many in Gorbachev's cohort did not change their fundamental constructs. New thinking was contested not only by those of Brezhnev's generation entrenched within the institutional network but also by members of Gorbachev's cohort, who challenged both its validity and its consequences. The predisposition to reform of Soviet society was a powerful incentive to change among Gorbachev's generation, but not all the leaders of this generation drew the same conclusions from Soviet history; nor did they agree on the representation of the problem of Soviet security or the direction of change. Insofar as Soviet history could be and was read differently by members of Gorbachev's generation, generational change is an insufficient explanation of new thinking. In the end, the individual interpretation by the senior leader in a highly centralized political system becomes the starting point in any explanation of the change in the Soviet concept of security. In the Soviet political system from 1985 to 1989, Gorbachev's political thinking mattered.
Cognitive Change
Cognitive psychologists suggest that stability is the default position and change the exception. People use schemata--cognitive structures that represent knowledge about a concept, person, role, group, or event--to organize their interpretations of their environments and develop scripts for action. Theories of schemata explore the impact of these cognitive constructions on problem representation, memory, and information processing. They postulate that schemata are generally resistant to change once they are established. 25 The well-established tendency to discount information that is discrepant with existing schemata contributes significantly to cognitive stability. 26 The cognitive economy of schemata precludes their reevaluation in the face of small amounts of discrepant information.
Conservatism does not hold unconditionally. Generally, schemata change gradually over time rather than undergoing quick and far-reaching conversion. Change is also most likely to occur at the periphery and incrementally. Thus people tend to make the smallest possible changes, allow a large number of exceptions and special cases, and make superficial alterations rather than rejecting existing schemata.
Schema theory has not yet developed an integrated set of propositions about why schemata change. 27 The centrality of schemata, their refutability, the diagnosticity of discrepant information, the pattern of attribution, and cognitive complexity all have been identified as predictors of the likelihood of change.
Change is in part a function of the rate at which discrepant information occurs and its diagnosticity. Contradictory evidence dispersed across many instances should have a greater impact on schemata than would a few isolated examples. 28 As people consider information inconsistent with previous knowledge, they incorporate into their schema the conditions under which the schema does not hold; this kind of process permits gradual change and adjust ment. 29 Important schemata are challenged only when they cannot account for contradictory data that people consider diagnostic. Even the strongest schema cannot withstand the challenge of strongly incongruent information or a competing schema that fits the data better. 30 Cognitive psychologists have not, however, established thresholds for strongly incongruent and diagnostic information.
Significant change in a person's schema about another also occurs when a subject is exposed to incongruent information and persuaded that the behavior is not arbitrary but reflects the nature of the target. Change occurs when inconsistent information is attributed to dispositional rather than situational factors. 31 The general tendency to prefer situational rather than dispositional attributions for incongruent behavior explains why change occurs so infrequently. 32 It is not clear, however, when and why people make uncharacteristic attributions of inconsistent information to dispositional factors.
Change is also a function of cognitive complexity--the complexity of the cognitive rules used to process information about objects and situations. Cognitive complexity refers to the structure or the organization of cognition rather than to the content of thought. Complexity has a somewhat contradictory impact on schema change. The more complex the cognitive system, the more capable the decision maker of making new or subtle distinctions when confronted with new information. 33 Experts with highly complex cognitive schemata are more sensitive to new information than are novices with low cognitive complexity whose schemata are likely to be fixed. 34 On the other hand, because experts have more relevant information, they can more easily incorporate inconsistent information as exceptions and special cases. Incongruent data therefore have less impact on their schemata than they would have on those of novices. 35 A person's level of cognitive complexity is not unchanging but responds to situational, socializing, and role factors. Crisis-induced stress decreases cognitive complexity, while pluralistic values and political responsibility socialize people to the need to balance competing goals. 36
Cognitive Explanations of New Thinking
How helpful are these sets of propositions drawn from cognitive psychology in explaining Gorbachev's new thinking ? A fair test would require that Gorbachev's schemata before he became general secretary in 1985 be compared with his schemata some time after he took office. Only then could the extent of change be assessed and the likely impact of the different conditions that stimulated change be estimated. No such reconstruction of Gorbachev's schemata exists, and it could not be done validly after the fact. Indeed, whether and when Gorbachev's schemata changed are still empirical questions. Reliable and valid evidence to test these propositions with regard to the schema change of a leader in a closed political system is at present not available; a fair evaluation must await the opening of the records of party and leadership deliberations. 37 Nevertheless, the logic of elimination, and some currently available evidence allow some preliminary assessment of their utility.
The volume, rate, and diagnosticity of discrepant information that Gorbachev received are not very helpful in explaining the emergence of new thinking. Information about the economic performance of the Soviet Union, the difficulties in Afghanistan, the impasse in arms control, and the heightened tension with the United States was available to Andropov and Chernenko as well as to members of Gorbachev's Politburo, yet it led to no significant change in their cognitive constructs. 38 Neither qualitative nor quantitative changes in discrepant information can help to explain why Gorbachev but not Andropov, Chernenko, or Ligachev developed new representations of the Soviet security problem. Even though individual receptivity to discrepant information differs significantly, schema theory suggests that change occurs in the face of unambiguously incongruent information. In foreign policy making, information is frequently ambiguous, and problems are ill structured. Even were adequate longitudinal evidence available about Gorbachev's schemata, the volume, rate, and diagnosticity of discrepant information do not provide a satisfactory explanation.
The complexity of Gorbachev's thinking is somewhat more helpful in explaining the development of new thinking. Complexity can be assessed along two dimensions--differentiation, or the number of logically distinct arguments considered, and integration among the idea elements within a schema, or the development of principles for coping with trade-offs. 39 One way to assess the relationship between complexity and schema change is to compare Gorbachev's thinking about peaceful coexistence, a central concept in Soviet thinking about security, to that of a predecessor who exhibited little propensity for cognitive change. Brezhnev's peace platform speech to the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress in March 1971 and Gorbachev's Political Report of the Central Committee to the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February 1986 were content-analyzed. These two speeches were selected because they signaled new initiatives by each of the leaders, and the initiatives were announced before the concepts and programs that followed were fully developed. Both, however, as with almost all major speeches, went through many drafts and therefore are not completely valid indicators of the thinking of the two general secretaries. Coders were instructed to map the logical arguments connected with peaceful coexistence and to search for any discussion of trade-offs connected with the issue.
Differences in the number of logical arguments connected to peaceful coexistence are apparent. Brezhnev made only two arguments about the destructiveness of nuclear weapons and the impossibility of nuclear war as imperatives for peaceful coexistence. Gorbachev's thinking about peaceful coexistence demonstrated significantly greater complexity in the number of logically distinct arguments he considered.
Gorbachev repeatedly referred to the "hegemonic-seeking aspirations" of the United States. He did not reject the earlier Soviet concept of the "imperialist ambitions" of the United States. Rather, he located the concept of the United States as an imperial enemy within a more complex cognitive structure that included an analysis of the situation and integrated the concept within his schema of peaceful coexistence. Gorbachev considered many more elaborate dimensions than did Brezhnev, who focused almost exclusively on the nuclear threat to survival. Gorbachev spoke of global threats to survival that emanated not only from nuclear weapons and the arms race but also from the fragility of the ecosystem, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the tight linkages across those dimensions. The urgency of the situation, Gorbachev concluded, overwhelmed the narrowly defined interests of nation-states and required a different kind of peaceful coexistence appropriate for an "interdependent" and "integral" world. 40
The two scripts for action differed even more dramatically in their recognition of trade-offs. Brezhnev argued that peaceful coexistence would require no compromise in Soviet support of revolutionary movements and progressive forces in the Third World. His schema did not include any recognition of trade-offs. Gorbachev, on the other hand, acknowledged trade-offs and the necessity for compromise. The fundamental question, Gorbachev argued, was "To be or not to be?" The answer was not the competitive coexistence of the Brezhnev years but cooperative coexistence in which states accommodated each other's needs and interests. 41
Cognitive psychologists who work with the affective concept of attitude rather than the concept of schema have noted that turning-point decisions, or decisions that deviate significantly from the pattern of prior decisions, depend on resolving the contradiction between the attitude toward an object and the attitude toward a situation in favor of the situation. 42 Gorbachev integrated his attitude toward the United States within a structurally more complex schema of an interdependent global system.
Gorbachev's higher level of cognitive complexity certainly is consistent with the changes subsequently embodied in new thinking. It is difficult, however, to disentangle the causal dynamics of cognitive change inherent in the levels of development of causal schemata, or their cognitive complexity. 43 Tautological inference is a serious risk: evidence of Gorbachev's higher level of cognitive complexity comes from analysis of his new thinking and therefore cannot be used to explain his new representation of the Soviet security problem. 44 The content of schemata can change without structural change, cognitive structure and content can change simultaneously, or changes in cognitive structure can lead to changes in cognitive content. At best, the evidence suggests that increased cognitive complexity is associated with change in the content of schema; it does not explain the change in that content. 45
Not only "cold" cognition but also "hot" emotions affect the likelihood of schema change. Not all schemata are equivalent; people vary in their commitment to different schemata. 46 The greater the emotional commitment to a schema, the more resistant it is to change by disconfirming evidence. 47 Intensity of commitment, however, does not offer much help with the puzzle of the change in Gorbachev's constructs.
Gorbachev was a committed socialist who reaffirmed his commitment to the validity of the socialist experiment and its goals even as he began to articulate a new concept of peaceful coexistence. "We are looking within socialism," Gorbachev argued, "rather than outside it, for the answers to all the questions that arise." 48 In his commitment to socialism, Gorbachev did not differ significantly from his predecessors. Yet, while his commitment to the most fundamental concepts at the core of his cognitive constructs did not change, this was not the case in more peripheral areas. It is surprising that his intense commitment to core concepts did not preclude change in closely related schemata. Gorbachev was able to reconstruct his cognitive system so that his core concepts were not inconsistent with his new concept of peaceful coexistence. 49
Theories of social cognition also do not specify the external conditions or mediating causes of change, and critics rightly contend that the neglect of context is disturbing. The social dimension of social cognition research is largely absent. 50 Theories do not model explicitly the processes that link environmental stimuli to cognitive constructs and explain how these constructs change. Until they do, social cognition will remain incomplete as a theoretical tool in the analysis of change in political schemata. To extend the analysis, I build on propositions from social cognition and organizational psychology to develop a concept of trial-and-error learning from failure that examines why and how Gorbachev changed his concepts.
Learning in Context
The concept of learning may be more helpful than others in explaining the emergence of Gorbachev's new thinking. Learning is a subset of cognitive change: not all change is learning, but all learning is change. Theories of learning, unlike schema theory, are inherently dynamic. Learning is also an explicitly normative concept. It measures cognitive change against some set of explicit criteria.
There is as yet no unified theory of learning, and psychology has not identified the conditions or thresholds that predict when different forms of learning are likely to occur. Most psychological theories of learning are not very useful in specifying the dynamics of learning, in large part because they analyze learning within highly structured environments. Learning theorists in educational and experimental psychology are associationist. They treat learning as a change in the probability of a specified response in the face of changing reward contingencies. 51 This concept of learning is not helpful in an environment where appropriate responses are unknown or disputed.
Political psychologists distinguish between simple and complex learning. Learning is simple when means are better adjusted to ends. Complex learning occurs when a person develops a more differentiated schema that is integrated into a higher order structure highlighting difficult trade-offs. 52 Learning can be causal, an analysis of causal paths, and / or diagnostic--an examination of the conditions under which causal generalizations apply. 53 Complex learning, at its highest level, may lead to a reordering or redefinition of goals. From this perspective, learning must include the development of more complex structures as well as changes in content. 54
These concepts of learning are a useful first cut at explaining changes in a leader's schema that then shape new directions in policy, but they fail to distinguish change from learning. Without some evaluative criteria, any cognitive change can be considered learning, and the concept of learning becomes redundant. Change in cognitive content or structure does not always constitute learning. Saddam Hussein, for example, in the year preceding his decision to invade Kuwait, extended his schema and developed a differentiated analysis of a changing international system. He then concluded that the United States, the sole remaining superpower, was engaged in a conspiracy to undermine his regime, when the United States not only had no such intention but was attempting to reinforce its relationship with Iraq. These changes in Saddam's schema provide a powerful explanation of his foreign policy behavior. 55 They must, however, be characterized as pathological thinking, not learning. 56 Inescapably built into the concept of political learning is an evaluation of the structure and content of cognitive change. 57 These kinds of evaluative judgments inevitably are and will be essentially contested. 58
More helpful are several strands of theory and research about solving ill-structured problems and learning from failure. A problem is well structured when it has a well-established goal, known constraints, and identified possible solutions. Sometimes even the solution to the problem is established. Generally, problems in foreign policy are ill structured. Goals are often multiple and vaguely defined, one or more constraints are open, information is ambiguous and incomplete, and little may be known about the solution to the problem. Learning is the construction of new representations of the problem, the development of causal relations among the factors, the identification of constraints, and the organization of relevant knowledge. 59 Initially ill-structured problems become well structured during this representation process, which largely determines the solution. Learning is considered successful when the solution can be explained so that it is largely acceptable to the relevant community of problem solvers. 60
A second strand of research examines the liabilities of success and the benefits of failure in promoting organizational learning. 61 When failure challenges the status quo, it can draw attention to problems and stimulate the search for solutions. Only certain kinds of failures promote learning: highly predictable failures provide no new information, whereas unanticipated failures that challenge old ways of representing problems are more likely to stimulate new formulations. Responding to failure, leaders can learn through experimentation rather than through more traditional patterns of avoidance. 62
Learning through failure can provoke a series of sequential experiments that generate quick feedback and allow for a new round of trial-and-error experimentation. 63 This kind of trial-and-error model of learning captures the dynamics of social cognition far more effectively than do the statics of schema theory, in which the perceiver is a "passive onlooker, who . . . doesn't do anything--doesn't mix it up with the folks he's watching, never tests his judgments in action or interaction." 64 It does not represent learning as a neat linear process with clear causal antecedents but as a messy, dynamic, interactive process.
Drawing on models of the solution of ill-structured problems and learning through failure, I argue that Gorbachev, stimulated by failure, learned through trial-and-error experimentation and constructed a new representation of the ill-structured Soviet security problem. From 1986 to 1988 Gorbachev and some of his colleagues acknowledged the mutuality of security in the nuclear age, the interdependence of states in an integrated system, the danger of inadvertent war, the risks inherent in the security dilemma, the importance of "defensive defense" in ameliorating the security dilemma, and some of the difficult trade-offs inherent in this representation of the problem of security. These changes reflected to a far greater degree the consensus of experts, within the Soviet Union and abroad, on the representation of the problem of security in the nuclear age than did earlier Soviet concepts. Once the changes in Gorbachev's representation of the Soviet security problem are designated as learning, the important analytic questions are why and how he learned.
Why Gorbachev Learned
Political psychology offers some suggestive hypotheses about why Gorbachev learned. Evidence suggests that Gorbachev may have been a relatively uncommitted thinker on security issues. Born in 1931, his early years were spent in Stavropol. He received his degree in law from Moscow State University and traveled in the West during the 1970s. In 1978 he was elected secretary of the Central Committee, and in 1980 he became the youngest voting member of the Politburo. Until he joined the Politburo, his exposure to issues of security was limited. Only in 1982, after Brezhnev died, did he become a member of the inner circle. He then chaired the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Politburo, and by mid-1984 he frequently chaired meetings of the Politburo itself.
Gorbachev's primary interest and responsibility before he became general secretary were in the domestic economy. He was in contact with many of the scholars and directors of the principal economic institutes for several years, and his commitment to economic reform grew out of his study of local, not international, policy. 65 Unlike Andropov, who dealt largely with security issues long before he became general secretary, Gorbachev quite probably joined the Politburo less deeply interested in issues of security than some of his predecessors were.
Eduard Shevardnadze asserts that during the early 1980s Gorbachev knew the kind of foreign policy that he did not want but had few clear ideas about what he did want. In 1979, Shevardnadze noted, Gorbachev's ideas on foreign policy had not crystallized. 66 Aleksandr Yakovlev recalled that he first talked openly with Gorbachev about security in 1983, when he was ambassador to Ottawa, and Gorbachev was on a visit to Canada. In the few hours they had alone together, Yakovlev recounted, "We began to talk openly. We were surprised by how much we agreed. We agreed that it was necessary to do something. Mikhail Sergeievich [ Gorbachev ] did not know what he wanted to do, but our idea was to stop the Cold War before it led to catastrophe. We had to do something." 67 Valentin Falin, who subsequently became chief of the International Department of the Central Committee, described Gorbachev as "not an expert in foreign policy at all" but unusually willing to listen to what others had to say. 68 If Gorbachev was dissatisfied with existing policy and struggling to redefine the problem, he would be a prime candidate for learning. The absence of well-developed schemata and deep commitments would make learning easier.
The proposition that Gorbachev was a largely uncommitted thinker on security gets some support from his heavy emphasis on domestic restructuring in the early months of his administration. In a speech to the French parliament in October 1985, Gorbachev explained that the highest Soviet priority was economic reform and renewal. Soviet foreign policy, he observed, "like the foreign policy of any government, is determined first of all by internal demands." 69
Some analysts of Soviet politics under Gorbachev have speculated that his initial interest in security was largely instrumental, that he was attempting above all to seize control of the Soviet defense agenda in order to rebuild the Soviet economic-industrial base. Gorbachev quickly learned at the tactical level that the commitment of resources implicit in the threat assessments of traditional thinkers would seriously constrain economic restructuring. His interest in new thinking about security grew out of his strong commitment to perestroika at home. 70
The argument that new thinking was more a product of "instrumental necessity than of military-strategic enlightenment" is a false dichotomy. 71 Learning is the product of cognitive processes and emotional factors. Learning theorists in educational and behavioral psychology model enlightenment as a response to incentives. Gorbachev's commitment to fundamental change at home, along with an absence of deeply embedded constructs about security, both motivated and permitted him to learn about security.
Motivated and relatively free to learn, Gorbachev was far more receptive to new representations of the security problem in the face of common evidence of blockage and failure than were many of his cohort. Evidence of his unusual interest in acquiring relevant knowledge is very strong. Anatoliy Dobrynin, then the Soviet ambassador to Washington, recalled a visit to Moscow shortly after President Reagan was elected: "I walked around to meet the leaders of the Politburo, and almost no one asked me any questions. They said, 'How is life ?' I said, 'Well, it's okay,' and that was it. There was one man, just one man, who asked me twenty, thirty questions. His name was Gorbachev. He was so interested. And what's surprising, he had read so many books about the United States. Gorbachev took all the books he could find about the United States and read them all." 72
Gorbachev began by asking new questions and was open to a broader range of answers than were his predecessors and many of his cohort. He was also motivated to search actively for new ideas and new representations of an ill-structured problem. Andrei Aleksandrov-Agentov, adviser to Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Gorbachev on security issues, observed that Gorbachev felt that Soviet foreign policy had become rigid and difficult to change. 73 The failure in Afghanistan was an especially powerful incentive to learn. With no personal responsibility for the war, Gorbachev concluded as soon as he heard about the invasion that it was a costly error. 74 Even before he became general secretary, he invited specialists for private discussions about Afghanistan. Convinced of the need for change and motivated to learn, Gorbachev began to search for new representations of the problem of Soviet security.
Learning by Doing
If the proposition that Gorbachev was highly motivated to learn but a largely uncommitted thinker about security is correct, the obvious question is, how did he learn ? How did he acquire the schema that were at the core of new thinking about security ? The evidence suggests that beginning in the early 1980s, several years before he became general secretary, Gorbachev began to look for ideas from civilian and academic specialists inside and outside the government. 75 After he became a full member of the Politburo, he began to consult with members of the specialist community on issues of foreign as well as domestic policy. 76
Immediately after he became general secretary, Gorbachev ordered a series of critical examinations of security issues. His predecessor had commissioned hundreds of studies of economic and social problems but almost none of foreign policy and security issues other than Afghanistan. Gorbachev requested studies from the Foreign Ministry, the Defense Ministry, and the State Security Committee (kgb). He had arranged for Yakovlev to be brought back from Canada to head the Institute of World Economy and International Relations; Yakovlev drew on specialists there to provide a flow of expert advice directly to the general secretary. 77 Gorbachev also asked Georgi Arbatov, the director of the usa and Canada Institute, for papers and advice. 78 Oleg Grinevsky, the chief Soviet negotiator at the Conference on Confidence and Security Building Measures, was invited to Gorbachev's office for confidential discussions. 79
Many of those Gorbachev consulted worked in the policy institutes of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow and in journalism and had long been critical of established Soviet concepts of defense. 80 Partially sheltered in the institutes from broader political repercussions, these policy intellectuals, in a slow, cumulative process, had for years critically examined the failure of Soviet concepts of security to realize Soviet goals. Much of the analysis and commentary referred to the failures of policy under Brezhnev. 81 Long before Gorbachev became general secretary, analysts had written about the irrelevance of superiority and victory in nuclear war, the growing risk of inadvertent war, the dangers of the security dilemma, and the importance of transcending the class factor in the search for security. 82
Policy scientists working in the institutes had access to Western journals and scholarly articles that critically analyzed both Soviet and American concepts of security. From the late 1960s, academic specialists and journalists had come to know specialists in the Western European and U.S. arms control community, both through their work and personally. They met at Pugwash meetings, at seminars organized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences with the Soviet Academy of Sciences, at international scientific conferences, and through exchange programs. 83 These international contacts facilitated the exchange of ideas between transnational communities and the development of mutually understandable vocabularies and concepts. In the Gorbachev years, some senior Soviet military officers acknowledged that their supposedly new idea of unacceptable damage in nuclear war could be traced to the thinking of U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. 84
Expert learning was a long, slow process but particularly important were the acknowledgment of the growing costs of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the recognition that Afghanistan was the Soviet Vietnam. 85 Yakovlev and Arbatov agreed in early 1985 that the Soviet Union had to withdraw from Afghanistan. 86 They also, along with other analysts, argued that nato's deployment of Pershing II missiles was provoked by Moscow's deployment of highly accurate intermediate-range nuclear systems. 87 Yakovlev termed the deployment a "stupid and strange" policy. 88 These were the kinds of unexpected policy failures that stimulated learning.
Others have studied extensively the size and strength of the policy community that promoted new thinking on security. 89 What is important for purposes of this argument is that a community of policy intellectuals deeply critical of past failures of policy under Brezhnev and aware of analyses by Western colleagues was prepared and accessible to Gorbachev when he began to look for new ideas about security. This community proposed new ways of representing the problem of security, identified new causal relationships, and made some of the difficult trade-offs explicit. These policy entrepreneurs were ready to teach when Gorbachev, anxious to learn, gave them a policy window. 90
The evidence suggests that Gorbachev did not learn in an orderly linear fashion or through deductive reasoning. Rather, the development and articulation of Gorbachev's new thinking imply a complex interactive relationship between political learning and action that provided quick feedback. Through a process of trial and error, Gorbachev learned through experimentation. 91
Experimentation began long before new thinking was wholly in place. On April 7, 1985, barely a month after Gorbachev became general secretary, he announced the suspension of Soviet countermeasures in response to inf deployments by nato and a moratorium on further deployments of ss-20s. In August of the same year, he proclaimed a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing. The Soviet Union also paid its back dues to the United Nations for peacekeep ing, began to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and reworked its position in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (start) in October 1985. In January 1986 Gorbachev urged a program of complete nuclear disarmament to be achieved in three stages by the year 2000. Committed to change yet frustrated by the initially slow U.S. response, Gorbachev gradually expanded his schema and his scripts for action.
At the same time, he was learning from his meetings with U.S. officials, particularly Secretary of State George Shultz. He considered Shultz an important "interlocutor" in discussions of "big philosophical questions" about the world and its future in the next century. "He helped me a great deal," Gorbachev said, "in developing my policies." 92 Ideas and action were synergistically related, as new thinking began first tentatively to encourage unilateral action and the response to Soviet behavior then fed and expanded Gorbachev's new thinking.
One final factor is worth noting. When Gorbachev first recognized the need for new thinking about security, his motives were largely instrumental; his interest was focused on the restructuring of the domestic economy. As he learned, however, the importance and autonomy of new thinking about security grew. By 1987 Gorbachev insisted that the unforgiving realities of the nuclear age demanded new concepts and new policies, independent of perestroika at home:
| Some people say that the ambitious goals set forth by the policy of perestroika in our country have prompted the peace proposals we have lately made in the international arena. This is an oversimplification. . . . True, we need normal international conditions for our internal progress. But we want a world free of war, without arms races, nuclear weapons, and violence; not only because this is an optimal condition for our internal development. It is an objective global requirement that stems from the realities of the present day. 93 |
Gorbachev's commitment to his representation of the problem of security intensified as he learned.
The answer to the question of how Gorbachev learned is that he learned in part from those in the Soviet Union who had been thinking about security for a long time, in part from the meetings he held with senior officials abroad, and in part through the trial-and-error experimentation that he and his colleagues initiated. As he began to learn, he replaced older colleagues with new people committed to the ideas and problem representations he wanted to promote and began to build the political coalition that would make change politically possible. Shevardnadze replaced Andrei Gromyko as foreign minister, and Gorbachev ensured the election of a substantial number of new members to the Central Committee. 94 Learning promoted both personnel shifts and political support that, in turn, pushed new thinking even further. 95 Over time, learning from others and from behavior became self-reinforcing and self-amplifying.
Individual Learning and Foreign Policy Change
No explanation of individual learning, even by a senior leader in a hierarchical system, can explain foreign policy change. Institutional and political processes must intervene to build the political support necessary to transform individual learning into changes in foreign policy behavior. To speak of state learning is to anthropomorphize these processes in ways that leave out the critical political and organizational variables. I have examined whether Gorbachev learned, but I have not explored how his learning shaped the changes in Soviet foreign policy--a far more complex problem that requires systematic analysis of political and institutional variables. The analysis of how Gorbachev learned is suggestive, however, of some preliminary observations about the importance of individual learning in policy change.
Analysts of learning have identified several conditions that are necessary if individual learning is to be translated into policy change. At a minimum, learning must be institutionalized in the central political agencies, a dominant political coalition must be committed to the new representations of problems, and new policies must be created. Institutions with a stake in the old order must be restaffed, reorganized, given new missions, or marginalized. Institutionalized changes are most effective when policy experts first agree on the need for change. 96
Only some of these conditions were present in the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1989. Gorbachev changed the top leadership in the Foreign Ministry and the International Department of the Central Committee, put civilians with defense expertise on the staff of the Central Committee, and named policy intellectuals to his personal staff. Large-scale restaffing of the foreign and defense policy-making apparatus took place. 97 Despite these changes, however, no broad-based consensus in favor of new thinking existed. As I have shown, almost all the fundamental concepts of new thinking about security were politically contested.
Yet even though traditional thinkers powerfully placed within the Soviet general staff challenged the new concepts of security with increasing vigor from mid-1987, policy change proceeded and indeed gathered momentum. The evidence suggests that a broad-based expert consensus and institutionalized change in the Soviet general staff were not necessary conditions of policy change. Some institutionalization to translate individual learning into policy change was clearly necessary, as was a new political coalition, but both were smaller in scope than many analysts expected.
This observation is open to challenge. A counterfactual argument can be made that the forces opposed to new thinking about security that gathered momentum and organized politically in 1990-91 could have compelled a retreat. In his last year in office, Gorbachev was forced to give greater political weight to traditional thinkers and to slow somewhat the pace of policy change. The proposition that limited institutionalization would have impeded further change or even partially reversed policy cannot be put to the test because Gorbachev resigned in December 1991, as the Soviet Union disintegrated in the wake of the failed coup attempt the previous August.
The evidence from this case suggests that the relationship among individual learning, political institutionalization, and foreign policy change was not linear but highly interactive. Individual learning provoked initial tentative changes in policy that in turn led to more learning, co-optation of intellectual and political entrepreneurs, coalition building and some institutionalization, and further policy change. The social cognition of learning by doing captures these dynamics. It suggests an incremental process whereby new representations were reinforced by experimentation abroad and politics at home as the process escalated. Gorbachev was an inductive, or data-driven, learner--not the kind of deductive thinker assumed by rational models.
Although individual learning by doing was a necessary condition of foreign policy change, it is not a sufficient explanation. It does not adequately capture the politics of doing as Gorbachev developed a new representation of the problem of Soviet security. Gorbachev's new thinking activated the engine of policy change, but politics determined whether, when, how far, and in what ways change occurred.
Political learning is not a necessary condition of policy change. Policy can change as the result of shifting domestic coalitions or new patterns of institutionalization in the face of changing international conditions, and it does so routinely in large numbers of cases. That individual learning is neither necessary nor sufficient across all cases of policy change should not be disturbing. It is unlikely that there is a single path to policy change. Multiple paths to single outcomes are part of the larger problem of equifinality, in which similar outcomes are explained by the interaction of different factors under different conditions. Only the outlines of the rich research agenda that arises from the conditionality of political learning in foreign policy change can be drawn.
Analysis of the individual leader is the critical starting point. Social learning is created only by individuals; organizations learn only by institutionalizing individual learning. Openness to new ideas and the capacity to create new representations of ill-defined problems are in part functions of personality. Research on the personalities of political leaders suggests, for example, that low cognitive complexity and intolerance of ambiguity are associated with an aggressive political style. Creativity, however, is inversely related to openness to the ideas of others. 98 We need much better developed theories of personality that explore openness and creativity as traits influencing individual capacity for political learning.
Political learning by individuals occurs in context. Evidence suggests that some leaders have learned from unexpected policy failures and from crisis, while others have abstracted from past policy successes. We know little about the political conditions, at home and abroad, that motivate learning. Theories of social cognition have to identify the linkages between different kinds of political contexts and political learning.
Finally, the interaction between learning and politics must be systematically examined to explain policy change. Gorbachev learned through trial-and-error experimentation and initiated an incremental process of policy change. Other analyses have found that policy learning is a spasmodic process catalyzed by the creation of new intellectual constructs, the establishment of new organizations, or a major failure of past policy. In evolutionary models, political learning is occasional and erratic. 99 These different representations of the interaction between policy learning and change may be a function partly of differences in policy arenas but, more importantly, of different units--individuals or collectives--that learn and of the kind of learning they do.
Just beneath the surface of the controversies about the kinds of interaction between learning and politics that produce policy change lies an important debate about the attributes of knowledge. Broadly speaking, for those who consider that knowledge is socially constructed, politics determines knowledge and learning. 100 For those who conceive of knowledge as reasoned truth, learning shapes politics. The analysis of the interaction among learning, politics, and foreign policy change is inextricably joined to a deep debate about the construction of knowledge in political life. It is a debate worth having.
I would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of Richard Ned Lebow, Jack Levy, Thomas Risse-Kappen, Jack Snyder, Yaacov Y. I. Vertzberger, and David Welch. I am grateful to the United States Institute of Peace, the Connaught Committee of the University of Toronto, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their generous support of this research. The Lake statement used in the epigraph is quoted from Adam Clymer, "Bush and Clinton Open Fire on the Foreign Policy Front," New York Times, August 2, 1992, p. E3. Back.
Note 1: Explanations of foreign policy change are less extensive than explanations of stability and obstacles to change. Most analyses of change are focused at the system level. See, for example, R. J. Barry Jones, "Concepts and Models of Change in International Relations," in Change and the Study of International Relations: The Evaded Dimension, ed. Barry Buzan and Barry Jones (New York: St. Martin's, 1981), pp. 11-29; Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); John Lewis Gaddis, "Tectonics, History, and the End of the Cold War," in The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations, ed. John Lewis Gaddis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 155-67; and John Gerard Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis," in Neorealism and Its Critics, ed. Robert O. Keohane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 131-57. Hermann focuses most explicitly on directed foreign policy change and argues for a multilevel, multivariate explanation. See Charles F. Hermann, "Changing Course: When Governments Choose to Redirect Foreign Policy," International Studies Quarterly 34 (March 1990): 3-21. Back.
Note 2: The phrase new thinking was first used by foreign policy specialists Anatoliy Gromyko and Vladimir Lomeiko. See R. Craig Nation, Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy, 1917-1991 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 288. Back.
Note 3: Bruce Parrott, "Soviet National Security Under Gorbachev," Problems of Communism 6 (November-December 1988): 1-36. Back.
Note 4: See Pravda, October 21, 1986; and Gorbachev's speech to the United Nations General Assembly, December 7, 1988, as quoted in Pravda, December 8, 1988. Back.
Note 5: Vitaly Zhurkin, Sergei Karaganov, and Andrei Kortunov argued that relying exclusively on military-technical instruments was to set Soviet security against the security of others ("Reasonable Sufficiency--Or, How to Break the Vicious Circle," New Times 40 [ October 12, 1987 ]: 13-15). Back.
Note 6: A recently declassified cia National Intelligence Estimate of Soviet military capability in 1983 highlighted the extensive modernization and deployment of Soviet strategic forces. It emphasized the growing capability of a force of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (icbms), intermediate-range ss-20s, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (slbms), long-range cruise missiles, and strategic bombers. The CIA estimated that there was significant potential for an increase in the size and capability of the forces and that political and economic factors would not play much of a role in restraining the expansion of Soviet forces. Back.
Note 7: Paul Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 231. Back.
Note 9: Quoted in Robert G. Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumph and His Failure (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), p. 76. Back.
Note 10: Interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, Toronto, April 1, 1993. Back.
Note 11: Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics, pp. 15, 33, 42-43, 187, and 197-201. Back.
Note 12: For an examination of the limits of structural explanations for the end of the Cold War, see Richard Ned Lebow, "The Long Peace, The End of the Cold War, and the Failure of Realism," the second essay in this book. Back.
Note 13: Parrott, "Soviet National Security Under Gorbachev," p. 35. Back.
Note 14: See, e.g., 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), p. 53. Back.
Note 15: These included mechanical and electronic control systems, personnel reliability programs, and changes in methods of deployment. See Stephen M. Meyer, "The Sources and Prospects of Gorbachev's New Political Thinking on Security," International Security 13 (fall 1988): 124-63, and note 33, p. 137 in particular. Back.
Note 16: Interview with Gorbachev. Back.
Note 17: Meyer, "Sources and Prospects of Gorbachev's New Political Thinking on Security," pp. 135-38. Back.
Note 18: Pravda, August 6, 1988. Back.
Note 19: Steven Weber argues this point cogently in "Interactive Learning in U.S.-Soviet Arms Control," in Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy, ed. George W. Breslauer and Philip E. Tetlock (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991), pp. 784-824. Back.
Note 20: See George W. Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982); and Richard D. Anderson, Jr., "Why Competitive Politics Inhibits Learning in Soviet Foreign Policy," in Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy, ed. George W. Breslauer and Philip E. Tetlock (Boulder, Colo.: Westview), pp. 100-31. Back.
Note 21: Nation, Black Earth, Red Star, p. 286. Back.
Note 22: Shifts in social structure and political power determine whose learning matters. See Joseph S. Nye, Jr., "Nuclear Learning and U.S.-Soviet Security Regimes," International Organization 41 (summer 1987): 371-402, esp. p. 381. Back.
Note 23: Interview with Gorbachev. Back.
Note 24: Jerry F. Hough, Russia and the West: Gorbachev and the Politics of Reform (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), pp. 18-32. Back.
Note 25: For a definition of schemata, see Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor, Social Cognition (New York: Random House, 1984), p. 140. For arguments about cognitive stability, see Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Yaacov Y. I. Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds: Information Processing, Cognition, and Perception in Foreign Policy Decisionmaking (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Richard R. Lau and David O. Sears, "Social Cognition and Political Cognition: The Past, the Present, and the Future," in Political Cognition, ed. Richard R. Lau and David O. Sears (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986), pp. 347-66. For a discussion of cognitive psychology and foreign policy change, see Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, "Afghanistan, Carter, and Foreign Policy Change: The Limits of Cognitive Models," in Diplomacy, Force, and Leadership: Essays in Honor of Alexander L. George, ed. Dan Caldwell and Timothy J. McKeown (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993), pp. 95-128. Back.
Note 26: Lee Ross, Mark R. Lepper, and Michael Hubbard, "Perseverance in Self Perception and Social Perception: Biased Attributional Processes in the Debriefing Paradigm," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32 (November 1975): 880-92. The postulate that schemata are resistant to change can be interpreted as consistent with statistical logic if people assign a low variance estimate to their expectations. Psychological research contradicts this interpretation through repeated observations that exposure to discrepant information strengthens rather than undermines existing schemata. See Craig A. Anderson, Mark R. Lepper, and Lee Ross, "Perseverance of Social Theories: The Role of Explanation in the Persistence of Discredited Information," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39 (December 1980): 1037-49; Craig A. Anderson, "Abstract and Concrete Data in the Perseverance of Social Theories: When Weak Data Lead to Unshakable Beliefs," Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology 19 (March 1983): 93-108; and Edward R. Hirt and Steven J. Sherman, "The Role of Prior Knowledge in Explaining Hypothetical Events," Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology 21 (November 1985): 519-43. The strengthening of schemata after exposure to contradictory information results from the processes of reasoning people use to explain apparent inconsistencies. Reasoning may transform inconsistent information to make it consistent with the schema. See Jennifer Crocker, "Judgment of Covariation by Social Perceivers," Psychological Bulletin 90 (March 1981): 272-92; James A. Kulik, "Confirmatory Attribution and the Perpetuation of Social Beliefs," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44 (June 1983): 1171-81; Thomas K. Srull, "Person Memory: Some Tests of Associative Storage and Retrieval Models," Journal of Experimental Psychology 7 (November 1981): 440-63; Robert S. Wyer, Jr., and Sallie E. Gordon, "The Recall of Information about Persons and Groups," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 18 (March 1982): 128-64; and Chris S. O'Sullivan and Francis T. Durso, "Effect of Schema-Incongruent Information on Memory for Stereotypical Attributes," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 47 (July 1984): 55-70. Back.
Note 27: In large part because schema theories focus on whole schemata, they are relatively static. For a critical review of the static quality of schema theory, see James H. Kuklinski, Robert C. Luskin, and John Bolland, "Where Is the Schema: Going Beyond the 'S' Word in Political Psychology," American Political Science Review 85 (December 1991): 1341-56. Back.
Note 28: Jennifer Crocker, Darlene B. Hannah, and Renee Weber, "Person Memory and Causal Attributions," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44 (January 1983): 55-66. Back.
Note 29: E. Tory Higgins and John A. Bargh, "Social Cognition and Social Perception," in Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 38, ed. Mark R. Rosenzweig and Larry W. Porter (Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Reviews, 1987), pp. 369-425, esp. p. 386. Back.
Note 30: Hazel Markus and Robert B. Zajonc, "The Cognitive Perspective in Social Psychology," in Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson, 3d ed. (New York: Random House, 1985). Cognitive psychologists who study processes of attribution are less explicit in modeling processes of change. They note only that individuals may vary in their propensity to acquire schemata and in their tendency to use them to process information when they do have them. See Susan Fiske, "Schema-Based Versus Piecemeal Politics: A Patchwork Quilt, but Not a Blanket," in Fiske and Taylor, Social Cognition, pp. 154-81. Back.
Note 31: Crocker, Hannah, and Weber, "Person Memory and Causal Attributions," p. 65. Back.
Note 32: See Edward E. Jones and Richard E. Nisbett, "The Actor and Observer: Divergent Perceptions of the Causes of Behavior," in Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior, ed. Edward E. Jones, David E. Kanouse, Harold H. Kelley, Richard E. Nisbett, Stuart Valins, and Bernard Weiner (Morristown, N.J.: General Learning Press, 1971), pp. 79-94; H. H. Kelley, "Attribution Theory in Social Psychology," in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, ed. D. Levine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), pp. 192-240; Lee Ross, "The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process," in Advances in Experimental and Social Psychology, ed. Leonard Berkowitz (New York: Academic, 1977), 10:174-77; and Lee Ross and Craig A. Anderson, "Shortcomings in the Attribution Process: On the Origins and Maintenance of Erroneous Social Assessments," in Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, ed. Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 129-52. Back.
Note 33: See Peter Suedfeld and A. Dennis Rank, "Revolutionary Leaders: Long-Term Success as a Function of Changes in Conceptual Complexity," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34 (August 1976): 169-78; Peter Suedfeld and Philip Tetlock, "Integrative Complexity of Communication in International Crisis," Journal of Conflict Resolution 21 (March 1977): 168-84; and Philip Tetlock, "Integrative Complexity of American and Soviet Foreign Policy Rhetorics: A Time-Series Analysis," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49 (December 1985): 1565-85. Back.
Note 34: Pamela J. Conover and Stanley Feldman, "How People Organize the Political World: A Schematic Model," American Journal of Political Science 28 (February 1984): 95-126. Those who possess multiple judgment dimensions also tend to possess rules of abstraction that facilitate the integration and comparison of information. They tend to produce alternative interpretations of new information but, by using their capacity for abstraction and integration, are able to resolve these ambiguities. People with low cognitive complexity tend to produce absolute, fixed judgments. See William L. Bennett, The Political Mind and the Political Environment (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington, 1975), pp. 33-35; and Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds, pp. 134-37. Back.
Note 35: Higgins and Bargh, "Social Cognition and Social Perception." Back.
Note 36: See Ariel Levi and Philip Tetlock, "A Cognitive Analysis of Japan's 1941 Decision for War," Journal of Conflict Resolution 24 (June 1980): 195-211; Philip Tetlock, "Cognitive Style and Political Ideology," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45 (July 1983): 118-26; Philip Tetlock, "Content and Structure in Political Belief Systems," in Foreign Policy Decision Making: Perception, Cognition, and Artificial Intelligence, ed. Donald Sylvan and Steve Chan (New York: Praeger, 1984), pp. 107-28; and Philip Tetlock and Richard Boettger, "Cognitive and Rhetorical Styles of Traditionalist and Reformist Soviet Politicians: A Content Analysis Study," Political Psychology 10 (June 1989): 209-32. Back.
Note 37: Richard Herrmann, "The Empirical Challenge of the Cognitive Revolution," International Studies Quarterly 32 (June 1988): 175-204. Back.
Note 38: It is difficult to draw definitive conclusions about Andropov, given his short tenure as general secretary. In his fifteen months in office, Andropov withdrew from the inf talks after nato began its deployment of Pershing IIs. He was also the patron of many of the young reformers during the Brezhnev years and was well placed to tap new ideas. A policy review of the war in Afghanistan was conducted while he was general secretary, and Arbatov, the director of the usa and Canada Institute, suggests that Andropov concluded that no military solution was possible in Afghanistan. However, Arbatov maintains that the review did not touch more fundamental aspects of Soviet security. (This information is from an interview with Georgi Arbatov, Moscow, May 19, 1989). Back.
Note 39: Tetlock identifies four structural dimensions of complexity: cognitive complexity; evaluative complexity, or the degree of inconsistency, tension, or dissonance existing among the various cognitions; cognitive interaction; and metacognition. Tetlock argues that increasing cognitive complexity increases the likelihood both of pursuing policies that lead to important goals and of setting realistic goals, especially when the environment is highly complex and rapidly changing. See Philip Tetlock, "Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy: In Search of an Elusive Concept," in Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy, ed. George W. Breslauer and Philip E. Tetlock (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991), pp. 20-61, esp. pp. 32-35 and 40; and Tetlock and Boettger, "Cognitive and Rhetorical Styles." Back.
Note 40: Izbrannye rechi i stat'i. Gorbachev developed these arguments in more detail later in his career: "This can only be achieved by learning to live together, to cohabit side by side on this small planet threatened by ecological and environmental degradation, mastering the difficult art of taking into account each other's mutual interests. This is what we mean by peaceful coexistence" (Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Izbrannye rechi i stat'i (Selected speeches and articles) (Moscow: 1987-90), 2:461. Back.
Note 41: In related research, Tetlock and Boettger find significant differences in complexity between Soviet traditionalists and reformers. See "Cognitive and Rhetorical Styles." Other scholars have compared Gorbachev with previous Soviet leaders and find that he scored higher on conceptual complexity. He was able to differentiate among alternative principles and policies and then integrate disparate elements into complex higher-order generalizations. See David G. Winter, Margaret G. Hermann, Walter Weintraub, and Stephen G. Walker, "Theory and Predictions in Political Psychology: The Personalities of Bush and Gorbachev Measured at a Distance: Procedures, Portraits, and Policy," Political Psychology 12 (June 1991): 215-46. Back.
Note 42: Yudit Auerbach, "Turning-Point Decisions: A Cognitive-Dissonance Analysis of Conflict Resolution in Israel-West German Relations," Political Psychology 7 (September 1986): 533-50. Back.
Note 43: See Kuklinski, Luskin, and Bolland, "Where Is the Schema," p. 1345, for the essential equivalence between levels of development of cognitive schema and cognitive complexity. Back.
Note 44: An analysis of Gorbachev's speeches before and after he became general secretary classifies Gorbachev as a traditionalist until March 1985 and an ardent reformer thereafter. See Tetlock and Boettger, "Cognitive and Rhetorical Styles." The speeches Gorbachev delivered before he became general secretary do not provide valid data to assess his cognitive complexity because of the constraints on Soviet leaders. Back.
Note 45: Tetlock argues that whereas beliefs (or content) can shift without entailing structural change, a change in structure necessarily leads to a change in beliefs. See Tetlock, "Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy." Tetlock and Boettger argue that integrative complexity is in part a function of role and ideology; see their "Cognitive and Rhetorical Styles." Liberals are far more likely than conservatives to become integratively complex when they assume office. Back.
Note 46: Cognitive psychologists identify a variety of different types of expectancies or schemas. See Edward E. Jones and Daniel McGillis, "Correspondent Inferences and the Attribution Cube: A Comparative Reappraisal," in New Directions in Attribution Research, ed. John H. Harvey, William J. Ickes, and Robert F. Kidd (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1976), 1:389-420; John M. Darley and Russell H. Fazio, "Expectancy Confirmation Processes Arising in the Social Interaction Sequence," American Psychologist 35 (October 1980): 867-81; E. Tory Higgins and Gillian King, "Accessibility of Social Constructs: Information-Processing Consequences of Individual and Contextual Variability," in Personality, Cognition, and Social Interaction, ed. Nancy Cantor and John F. Kihlstrom (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1981), pp. 69-121; Jeffrey S. Berman, Stephen J. Read, and David A. Kenny, "Processing Inconsistent Social Information," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45 (December 1983): 1211-24; and John A. Bargh and Roman D. Thein, "Individual Construct Accessibility, Person Memory, and the Recall-Judgment Link: The Case of Information Overload," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49 (November 1985): 1129-43. Back.
Note 47: Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds, p. 136. Back.
Note 48: Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), p. 10. Back.
Note 49: See Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds, pp. 123-25, for a discussion of relative value stability in the face of belief change. Back.
Note 50: For the absence of the social dimension in social cognition research, see Kuklinski, Luskin, and Bolland, "Where Is the Schema ?" p. 1346. Exceptions are Tetlock and Boettger, "Cognitive and Rhetorical Styles"; and Ralph Erber and Susan T. Fiske, "Outcome Dependency and Attention to Inconsistent Information," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 47 (October 1984): 709-26. Erber and Fiske find that outcome dependency increases people's attention to inconsistent information. They hypothesize that when the perceiver's outcomes depend on another person, the perceiver may be more motivated to have a sense of prediction and control, rather than simply to maintain an expectation. Back.
Note 51: Thomas L. Good and Jere E. Brophy, Educational Psychology: A Realistic Approach (New York: Longman, 1990). Developmental psychology is more helpful, but it too works largely with known responses. Back.
Note 52: Haas describes this dimension of political learning as "nested prob lem sets." See Ernst Haas, When Knowledge Is Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 84. Back.
Note 53: Jack Levy, "Learning and Foreign Policy: Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield," International Organization 48 (spring 1994): 279-312. Back.
Note 54: See Tetlock, "Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy," p. 40. E. Haas, When Knowledge Is Power; and George W. Breslauer and Philip E. Tetlock, eds., Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991). An early study of Soviet and American learning on security issues is Alexander L. George, Philip J. Farley, and Alexander Dallin, U.S.-Soviet Security Cooperation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Back.
Note 55: See Janice Gross Stein, "Deterrence and Compellence in the Gulf: A Failed or Impossible Task ?" International Security 17 (autumn 1992): 147-79. Back.
Note 56: In an effort to deal with the problem of evaluation, analysts refer to pathological learning, or changes that impede future cognitive growth. See James Clay Moltz, "Divergent Learning and the Failed Politics of Soviet Economic Reform," World Politics 45 (January 1993): 301-25, esp. p. 303. Back.
Note 57: For a similar argument, see George W. Breslauer, "What Have We Learned About Learning ?" in Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy, ed. Breslauer and Tetlock, pp. 825-56. Back.
Note 58: Levy argues that an efficiency concept of learning--one that emphasizes the matching of means to ends--can be assessed only against empirically confirmed laws of social behavior. In their absence, he concludes, it is preferable to exclude efficiency from concepts of learning and include only changes in beliefs. See Levy, "Learning and Foreign Policy." Back.
Note 59: See Walter R. Reitman, Cognition and Thought (New York: Wiley, 1965); Allan Newell and Herbert A. Simon, Human Problem Solving (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972); Herbert A. Simon, "The Structure of Ill-Structured Problems," Artificial Intelligence 4 (October 1973): 181-201; James F. Voss, Terry R. Greene, Timothy A. Post, and Barbara C. Penner, "Problem-Solving Skill in the Social Sciences," in The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory, ed. Gordon H. Bower (New York: Academic, 1983), pp. 165-215; James F. Voss and Timothy A. Post, "On the Solving of Ill-Structured Problems," in The Nature of Expertise, ed. Michelene H. Chi, Robert Glaser, and Marshall J. Farr (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988), pp. 261-85; and James F. Voss, Christopher R. Wolfe, Jeanette A. Lawrence, and Randi A. Engle, "From Representation to Decision: An Analysis of Problem Solving in International Relations," in Complex Problem Solving: Principles and Mechanisms, ed. Robert J. Sternberg and Peter A. Frensch (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991), pp. 119-58. Back.
Note 60: Voss and Post, "On the Solving of Ill-Structured Problems," pp. 281-82. Back.
Note 61: Sim B. Sitkin, "Learning Through Failure: The Strategy of Small Losses," in Research in Organizational Behavior, ed. Larry L. Cummings and Barry H. Staw (New York: jai, 1992), 14:231-66. Back.
Note 62: See Donald T. Campbell, "Reform as Experiments," American Psychologist 24 (January 1969): 409-29; B. Hedberg, "How Organizations Learn and Unlearn," in Handbook of Organizational Design, ed. Paul C. Nystrom and William H. Starbuck (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 1:3-27. Back.
Note 63: See Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schon, Organizational Learning (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978) for a discussion of the importance of theory in action; and Thomas Peters and Robert H. Waterman, In Search of Excellence (New York: Harper and Row, 1982) for an analysis of action bias. Back.
Note 64: Ulric Neisser, "On 'Social Knowing,' " Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 6 (December 1980): 603-4, cited in Kuklinski, Luskin, and Bolland, "Where Is the Schema," p. 1346. Back.
Note 65: Sarah Mendelson, "Internal Battles and External Wars: Politics, Learning, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan," World Politics 45 (April 1993): 327-60, esp. p. 344. In Pravda, January 7, 1989, Gorbachev referred to a broad-based canvas of reports from specialists on the need for change in the Soviet Union that he conducted with the assistance of Nikolai Ryzhkov, then the head of the Economic Department of the Central Committee, before he became general secretary. Back.
Note 66: Eduard Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. 26. Back.
Note 67: Interview with Aleksandr Yakovlev, Toronto, September 27, 1993. Back.
Note 68: Falin is quoted in Don Oberdorfer, The Turn from the Cold War to a New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983-1990 (New York: Poseidon, 1991), p. 113. Back.
Note 69: Gorbachev, Izbrannye rechi i stat, 2:459-60. Back.
Note 70: Meyer, "Sources and Prospects of Gorbachev's New Political Thinking on Security," p. 125-29, which cites interviews with senior Gorbachev advisers. Shevardnadze observed that the most important purpose of foreign policy was "to create the maximum favorable external conditions needed in order to conduct internal reform" (The Future Belongs to Freedom, p. xi). Back.
Note 71: Meyer, "Sources and Prospects of Gorbachev's New Political Thinking on Security," p. 129, makes this argument. Back.
Note 72: Interview with Anatoliy Dobrynin, Moscow, December 17, 1992. Back.
Note 73: Back.Interview with Andrei Aleksandrov-Agentov, Moscow, August 12, 1993.
Note 74: Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, p. 26. Back.
Note 75: An analysis of Gorbachev's personality scored him low on creativity and predicted that he would be especially receptive to others' ideas and to solutions suggested by his advisers. See Winter et al., "Theory and Predictions in Political Psychology," p. 235. Back.
Note 76: Mendelson, "Internal Battles and External Wars," p. 344. Back.
Note 77: Interview with Yakovlev. Also see Jeff Checkel, "Ideas, Institutions, and the Gorbachev Foreign Policy Revolution," World Politics 45 (January 1993): 271-300. Back.
Note 78: Interview with Georgi Arbatov, Moscow, May 19, 1991. Back.
Note 79: See Oberdorfer, The Turn, p. 113; and interview with Oleg Grinevsky, Stockholm, October 16, 1992. Gorbachev also institutionalized an informal advisory system that provided a wider flow of ideas and critical advice on security issues. Although Andropov, and at times Brezhnev, had occasionally engaged in private discussions with institute officials, Gorbachev created bodies of experts from the institutes, the press, and the ministries and met frequently to ask their advice and opinions. He made almost no major decision without expert advice. Based on interview with Pavel Palazchenko, Gorbachev's long-standing interpreter, Toronto, April 1, 1993. Back.
Note 80: See Thomas Risse-Kappen, "Ideas Do Not Float Freely: Transnational Coalitions, Domestic Structures, and the End of the Cold War," the eighth essay in this book; and Mendelson, "Internal Battles and External Wars." Back.
Note 81: Yevgenii Primakov, "Novaia filosofiia vneshnei politiki" (New philosophies of foreign policy), Pravda, July 11, 1987. Back.
Note 82: See, for example, Olegovich Bogomolov, "Afghanistan as Seen in 1980," Moscow News 30 (July 30-August 6, 1988). For a detailed examination of the impact of policy scientists as an epistemic community, see Stephen Shenfield, The Nuclear Predicament: Explorations in Soviet Ideology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987); Allen Lynch, The Soviet Study of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Parrott, "Soviet National Security Under Gorbachev"; and 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, 1995). Back.
Note 83: 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, esp. pp. 137-40; Michael Mandelbaum, "Western Influence on the Soviet Union," in Gorbachev's Russia and American Foreign Policy, ed. Seweryn Bialer and Michael Mandelbaum (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1988); and Mendelson, "Internal Battles and External Wars." Back.
Note 84: Edward L. Warner III, "New Political Thinking and Old Realities in Soviet Defence Policy," Survival 31 (January-February 1989): 18-20. Back.
Note 85: Interview with Vadim Zagladin, formerly head of the Department of International Relations of the Central Committee and subsequently a policy adviser to Gorbachev, Moscow, May 18, 1989. Back.
Note 86: Interviews with Yakovlev and Arbatov, May 19, 1991. Back.
Note 87: Interviews with Ambassador Leonid Zamyatin, who subsequently headed tass, Moscow, December 16, 1991, and with Dobrynin. See also Herman, "Ideas, Institutions, and the Reconceptualization of Interests." Back.
Note 88: Interview with Yakovlev. Back.
Note 89: See Herman, "Ideas, Institutions, and the Reconceptualization of Interests"; Mendelson, "Internal Battles and External Wars"; and Checkel, "Ideas, Institutions, and the Gorbachev Foreign Policy Revolution." For a broader study of epistemic communities, or networks of knowledge-based experts, see the collection of essays in Peter M. Haas, ed., Knowledge, Power, and International Policy Coordination, International Organization (special issue) 46 (winter 1992). Back.
Note 90: On the concept of policy entrepreneur, see Matthew A. Evangelista, "Sources of Moderation in Soviet Security Policy," in Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War, ed. Philip E. Tetlock, Jo L. Husbands, Robert Jervis, Paul C. Stern, and Charles Tilly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 2:254-355, esp. pp. 275-77. On the concept of a policy window, see John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984). Back.
Note 91: In a complementary stream of evidence, research in cognitive psychology suggests that at times behavior leads to changes in schema as people make inferences from their behavior about their convictions. See Gerald R. Salanick and Mary Conway, "Attitude Inference from Salient and Relevant Cognitive Content About Behavior," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32 (November 1975): 829-40; and Mark P. Zanna, James M. Olson, and Ralph H. Fazio, "Attitude-Behavior Consistency: An Individual Difference Perspective," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38 (March 1980): 432-40. Once people are convinced that their behavior has been shaped by their prior beliefs, those beliefs become even more important in shaping future behavior. Inference from behavior is a dominant cognitive mechanism in the early stages of development of beliefs and attitudes. See J. Daryl Bem, "Self-Perception Theory," in Advances in Experimental and Social Psychology, ed. Leonard Berkowitz (New York: Academic, 1972), 6:1-61; Ralph H. Fazio, Mark P. Zanna, and Joel Cooper, "Dissonance and Self-Perception: An Integrative View of Each Theory's Proper Domain of Application," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 13 (September 1977): 464-79; Richard E. Nisbett and Stuart Valins, "Perceiving the Causes of One's Own Behavior," in Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior, ed. Edward E. Jones, David E. Knouse, Harold H. Kelley, Richard E. Nisbett, Stuart Valins, and Bernard Weiner (Morristown, N.J.: General Learning, 1971), pp. 63-78; and Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds, p. 169. Decision makers who have little prior experience develop their beliefs while on the job; their beliefs and attitudes can change as a result of the inferences they draw from their behavior. Back.
Note 92: Interview with Gorbachev. Back.
Note 93: Gorbachev, Perestroika, p. 11. Back.
Note 94: See Thane Gustafson and Dawn Mann, "Gorbachev's First Year: Building Power and Authority," Problems of Communism 35 (May-June 1986): 1-19, and Jerry F. Hough, "Gorbachev Consolidating Power," Problems of Communism 36 (July-August 1987): 169-70. Back.
Note 95: Andrew Owen Bennett, "Patterns of Soviet Military Interventionism 1975-1990: Alternative Explanations and Their Implications," in Beyond the Soviet Threat: American Security Policy in a New Era, ed. William Zimmerman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 105-27. Back.
Note 96: See E. Haas, When Knowledge Is Power: and Ernest Haas, "Collective Learning: Some Theoretical Speculations," in Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy, ed. Breslauer and Tetlock, pp. 62-99. See also Lloyd Etheredge, Can Governments Learn ? (New York: Pergamon, 1985); and James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, "The Uncertainty of the Past: Organizational Learning Under Ambiguity," in Decisions and Organizations, ed. James G. March (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 335-58. Back.
Note 97: Parrott, "Soviet National Security Under Gorbachev." Back.
Note 98: Winter et al., "Theory and Predictions in Political Psychology." Back.
Note 99: See John Odell, U.S. International Monetary Policy: Markets, Power, and Ideas as Sources of Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 367-76; and Peter Haas, "Towards an Evolutionary Model of Institutional Learning: Ideas and Structuration," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., September 1-4, 1993. Back.
Note 100: For an analysis of part of this debate, see 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. Back.
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