Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989

Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989
Kristina Spohr

This 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.

POST WALL

POST SQUARE

Rebuilding the World after 1989

Kristina Spohr

Copyright (#ulink_1cc70d3e-50fd-5350-872e-0b74b1b9e48d)

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Kristina Spohr 2019

Cover design by Heike Schüssler

Kristina Spohr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Maps by Martin Brown

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008280086

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008280109

Version: 2019-09-11

Dedication (#u65bb4856-8dc8-5256-87d4-bfe1a22ce090)

For my godchildren

Anna Lisa (*1997)

Daniel (*2004)

James (*2007)

Clio (*2013)

born into the post-Wall world

Epigraph (#u65bb4856-8dc8-5256-87d4-bfe1a22ce090)

If 1989 was the year of sweeping away, 1990 must become the year of building anew.

James A. Baker, 1990

We don’t care what others say about us. The only thing we really care about is a good environment for developing ourselves. So long as history eventually proves the superiority of the Chinese socialist system, that’s enough.

Deng Xiaoping, 1989

France is our homeland, Europe is our future.

François Mitterrand, 1987

Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences.

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1991

Politics needs a sense of the possible, also of what is acceptable to others.

Helmut Kohl, 2009

Contents

Cover (#uafd6df80-e766-51e9-b4b9-1e1b5341c475)

Title Page (#u0b58c23c-7796-5687-ae3d-647cd828a1e8)

Copyright (#u6e906fd7-c44c-59d1-ba4f-3f531a7e5b56)

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Maps (#uad2b9579-ab88-5747-a5ed-dc3cbb6670cd)

Introduction (#u607fdcc1-c3de-534d-968a-6f1e90e23a9e)

1 Reinventing Communism: Russia and China (#uca424135-7397-5dd6-a457-d37f919edb1a)

2 Toppling Communism: Poland and Hungary (#u6645cfe9-59fd-51f3-8946-40c28d254492)