‘A gripping and compelling account…. The peaceful ending of the Cold War between West and East remains one of the greatest achievements of modern statecraft’ CHRISTOPHER ANDREW, Literary ReviewThis landmark global study makes us rethink what happened when the Cold War ended and our present era was born.The world changed dramatically as the Berlin Wall fell and protest turned to massacre in Tiananmen Square. Now, with deft analysis and a wealth of newly declassified archival sources, historian Kristina Spohr offers a bold and novel interpretation of the revolutionary upheaval of 1989 and, how in its aftermath, a new world order was forged without major conflict.The Post-Wall world, Spohr argues, was brought about in significant measure through the determined diplomacy of a small cohort of international leaders. They engaged in tough but cooperative negotiation and worked together to reinvent the institutions of the Cold War. Exploring this extraordinary historical moment, Spohr offers a major reappraisal of US President George H. W. Bush and innovative assessments of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and President François Mitterrand of France.But the transformation of Europe must be understood in global context. Spohr elegantly weaves together the Western and Asian timelines to revelatory effect, by contrasting events in Berlin and Moscow with the story in Beijing, where the pro-democracy movement was brutally suppressed by Deng Xiaoping. Post Square, he pushed through China’s very different Communist reinvention.Meticulously researched and brilliantly original, Post Wall, Post Square provides an authoritative contemporary history of those crucial hinge years of 1989-1992 and their implications for our times. The world of Putin, Trump and Xi, with a fractious European Union, rogue states and the crisis of mass migration has its roots in the global exit from the Cold War.
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Kristina Spohr. Post Wall, Post Square
POST WALL. POST SQUARE. Rebuilding the World after 1989. Kristina Spohr
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Maps
Introduction
Chapter 1. Reinventing Communism: Russia and China
Chapter 2. Toppling Communism: Poland and Hungary
Chapter 3. Reuniting Germany, Dissolving Eastern Europe
Chapter 4. Securing Germany in the Post-Wall World
Chapter 5. Building a Europe ‘Whole and Free’
Chapter 6 ‘A New World Order’
Chapter 7. Russian Revolution
Chapter 8 ‘Dawn of a New Era’
Chapter 9. Glimpsing a ‘Pacific Century’
Epilogue. Post Wall, Post Square: A World Remade?
Abbreviations
Footnotes. Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Notes
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Epilogue
Index
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Kristina Spohr
About the Publisher
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‘Kristina Spohr beautifully reconstructs the events of the 1989–92 era, reminding us of the importance of intelligent, responsible political leadership at critical moments of history … Uses recently declassified material in the British, French, German, Russian and US archives … [and] pays deserved tribute also to the “people power” of central and eastern Europe. She mentions not only those who filled the streets of East Berlin and Prague in peaceful demonstrations, but also brave individuals such as Lech Walesa, the earthy, politically astute electrician from Gdansk, who symbolised Poland’s non-violent move to democracy’
Financial Times
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Two years before, Bush’s predecessor Ronald Reagan had stood before the Brandenburg Gate and called on the Soviet leader, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’[117] Now in June 1989 a new US president was throwing down the gauntlet once again, mounting a new propaganda offensive against the charismatic Soviet leader. ‘Let Berlin be next’ was in one way headline-grabbing rhetoric, but it revealed that the administration was already beginning to grapple with the issue of German unification. As Bush said in his Mainz speech, ‘the frontier of barbed wire and minefields between Hungary and Austria is being removed, foot by foot, mile by mile. Just as the barriers are coming down in Hungary, so must they fall throughout all of Eastern Europe.’ Nowhere was the East–West divide starker than in Berlin. ‘There this brutal wall cuts neighbour from neighbour, brother from brother. And that wall stands as a monument to the failure of communism. It must come down.’
Despite his emphasis on Germany, Bush’s vision remained much broader. The will for freedom and democracy, he insisted yet again, was a truly global phenomenon. ‘This one idea is sweeping across Eurasia. This one idea is why the communist world, from Budapest to Beijing, is in ferment.’[118] By June 1989, Hungary was undoubtedly on the move but here change was occurring peacefully. On the other side of the world, however, the forces of democratic protest and communist oppression collided violently and with dramatic global consequences in China’s Forbidden City.
