EBOOK
1989
The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe
Mary Elise SarotteSeries: Princeton Studies in International History and Politics(0)
About
"A Financial Times Book of the Year" "Winner of the 2010 Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize Award, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations" "Co-Winner of the 2010 Marshall Shulman Book Prize, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies" "Winner of the 2009 DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies, awarded by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2010" Mary Elise Sarotte is Visiting Professor of Government and History at Harvard University and Dean's Professor of History at the University of Southern California. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall.
How the political events of 1989 shaped Europe after the Cold War
1989 explores the momentous events following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the effects they have had on our world ever since. Based on documents, interviews, and television broadcasts from Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, and a dozen other locations, 1989 describes how Germany unified, NATO expansion began, and Russia got left on the periphery of the new Europe.
This updated edition contains a new afterword with the most recent evidence on the 1990 origins of NATO's post-Cold War expansion. "Sarotte's focus is on Germany. . . . [She] describes a host of competing conceptions of post-cold-war Europe that flourished, mutated and perished in the maelstrom of events that led up to German unity. . . . Two decades later . . . [t]here are still nuclear missiles aimed across the continent. It's hard to imagine that it could have been otherwise--but, Sarotte shows us, it could have been."---Paul Hockenos, New York Times Book Review "A great virtue of Mary Elise Sarotte's 1989 is that she makes the problem of hindsight bias explicit, and systematically explores the roads not taken."---Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books "Much the most exciting of these books is Mary Elise Sarotte's 1989. In contrast to the other authors, Sarotte treats the uprisings and collapses of that year as a prelude to the biggest change of all: 'the struggle to create post-Cold War Europe', as her subtitle puts it. . . . Sarottte [is] a lucid and compelling writer."---Neal Ascherson, London Review of Books "The author embeds her interpretation in a sharp-eyed, fluent narrative of 1989-1990 that sees the realpolitik behind the stirring upheavals. . . . [S]he offers a smart and canny analysis of the birth of our not-so-new world order." "Mary Elise Sarotte's 1989 . . . shows why this post-Cold War world, and not a different one, came out of the dramatic events of 1989, and why the result was bound to pit the U.S. against Russia again in the twenty-first century."---George Packer, NewYorker.com "A hugely impressive study that looks beyond 1989 to the many-faceted battle to shape the new Europe." "Sarotte's book is compact and highly interpretive. Yet Sarotte has thoroughly mastered the original source material in all the key countries. She distills it with great skill, constantly enlivening her account with a sensibility for what these changes meant in life and culture. Hers is now the best one-volume work on Germany's unification available. It contains the clearest understanding to date of the extraordinary juggling performance of Kohl."---Philip D. Zelikow, Foreign Affairs "[A] scrupulous account of the high politics and diplomacy of 1989. With remarkable diligence, [Sarotte] has interviewed almost all the surviving participants, and quarried government archives and other libraries for documents that illustrate the decision-making (and lack of it) that year. The result is a tale of hypocrisy and indecision in high places." "The tragic hero of 1989, for Sarotte, is Gorbachev. He was, and is still seen by many Russians as a King Lear figure: a man prepared to give away what he should have retained to a west be
How the political events of 1989 shaped Europe after the Cold War
1989 explores the momentous events following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the effects they have had on our world ever since. Based on documents, interviews, and television broadcasts from Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, and a dozen other locations, 1989 describes how Germany unified, NATO expansion began, and Russia got left on the periphery of the new Europe.
This updated edition contains a new afterword with the most recent evidence on the 1990 origins of NATO's post-Cold War expansion. "Sarotte's focus is on Germany. . . . [She] describes a host of competing conceptions of post-cold-war Europe that flourished, mutated and perished in the maelstrom of events that led up to German unity. . . . Two decades later . . . [t]here are still nuclear missiles aimed across the continent. It's hard to imagine that it could have been otherwise--but, Sarotte shows us, it could have been."---Paul Hockenos, New York Times Book Review "A great virtue of Mary Elise Sarotte's 1989 is that she makes the problem of hindsight bias explicit, and systematically explores the roads not taken."---Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books "Much the most exciting of these books is Mary Elise Sarotte's 1989. In contrast to the other authors, Sarotte treats the uprisings and collapses of that year as a prelude to the biggest change of all: 'the struggle to create post-Cold War Europe', as her subtitle puts it. . . . Sarottte [is] a lucid and compelling writer."---Neal Ascherson, London Review of Books "The author embeds her interpretation in a sharp-eyed, fluent narrative of 1989-1990 that sees the realpolitik behind the stirring upheavals. . . . [S]he offers a smart and canny analysis of the birth of our not-so-new world order." "Mary Elise Sarotte's 1989 . . . shows why this post-Cold War world, and not a different one, came out of the dramatic events of 1989, and why the result was bound to pit the U.S. against Russia again in the twenty-first century."---George Packer, NewYorker.com "A hugely impressive study that looks beyond 1989 to the many-faceted battle to shape the new Europe." "Sarotte's book is compact and highly interpretive. Yet Sarotte has thoroughly mastered the original source material in all the key countries. She distills it with great skill, constantly enlivening her account with a sensibility for what these changes meant in life and culture. Hers is now the best one-volume work on Germany's unification available. It contains the clearest understanding to date of the extraordinary juggling performance of Kohl."---Philip D. Zelikow, Foreign Affairs "[A] scrupulous account of the high politics and diplomacy of 1989. With remarkable diligence, [Sarotte] has interviewed almost all the surviving participants, and quarried government archives and other libraries for documents that illustrate the decision-making (and lack of it) that year. The result is a tale of hypocrisy and indecision in high places." "The tragic hero of 1989, for Sarotte, is Gorbachev. He was, and is still seen by many Russians as a King Lear figure: a man prepared to give away what he should have retained to a west be