[BLANK_AUDIO] Hi, welcome back. Make yourself comfortable. So, this week we're going to look at the contemporary world. The world of the last 20 plus years. Let's start with the way the Cold War ended, in the world of the early 1990s when the term Washington Consensus passed into common usage because the United States of America, for a time, seemed so central in providing some of the guiding principals for this new order. Let's start with the postwar settlement. I put postwar in partial quotation marks because the settlement was so radical, it did so much to change the map of the world, it was the kind of settlement that ordinarily only happens after a global cataclysmic conflict. But in this case, the postwar settlement came after and culminated a period of peace, cold war to be sure, but it was arrived at peacefully, not as the aftermath of a major war. That itself is worthy of note because the terms were so significant. In a way, the postwar settlement is a kind of long delayed fruition of the postwar vision of Franklin Roosevelt in the closing years of World War II. What were some of the elements in Franklin Roosevelt's vision? High on the list for him would have been international cooperation among the great powers. To keep the peace, he imagined that the great powers would work together as a kind of policemen against rogue states. In fact, one expression used for it back in the mid-1940s was to talk of hopes for the four policemen. Back then, President Roosevelt thought that the permanent members of the UN Security Council, the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, China, would become the four policemen, the new great powers. He also had in mind a vision in which there would be an open trading order. So, new institutions for international cooperation like the United Nations, with real peacekeeping done by the great powers willing to use force against rogue states, which FDR envisioned as the four policemen back at the end of World War II. In a world characterized by open economies. The extent to which this vision was realized was very much a product of American statecraft. The Americans had important allies on different issues in Europe, in Asia, in Latin America. But it is worth just lingering for a moment over some of the American architects of these new structures at the beginning of the 1990s. Historians are coming more and more to appreciate the quality of the statesmanship displayed between 1989 and 1992 by President George H W Bush, who was himself very much a product of the World War II generation, really believed a lot of the ideals about the postwar order from someone who had grown to manhood while Franklin Roosevelt had been president. His Secretary of State, the wily negotiator, James Baker. His National Security Advisor, seasoned veteran, a retired Air Force general, Brent Scowcroft. And perhaps the most important figure in Baker's brain trust was this man, then in his 30s, Robert Zoellick, Z-O-E-L-L-I-C-K, who most recently retired from a very good tenure as the President of the World Bank. Some of the capstones of this new structure were actually formal treaties. One, signed in Moscow, which was the final settlement of the German question, the final settlement for Germany signed in Moscow in September 1990. You see, there had never been a peace treaty with Germany signed after World War II. The powers were going to negotiate a peace treaty, but their occupation regimes then just developed into a divided Europe, with that peace treaty with Germany never signed, with the final settlement of the future borders of a German state never definitively settled. What the Moscow treaty of September of 1990 did is it finally tied off those issues of World War II in Europe and the future of the German state. And then in November 1990, two agreements signed in Paris, one of them a treaty on conventional armed forces in Europe, called the CFE Treaty, that was the most ambitious arms control treaty ever negotiated. It regulated the armies and air forces of all the states in Europe, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains, and how large they could be in that region. Nothing on this scale had ever been attempted before. This treaty was actually negotiated and concluded in November 1990 and did a lot to simply stabilize and put in motion a military balance in which people didn't pay as much attention to the military balance in Europe anymore. The other treaty signed in Paris was the Charter of Paris. This is really an agreement on the political and economic principles that all the European states felt should guide them in their relations with each other and inside their countries. Provisions about market economies, democracy, and so forth. Basically, an agreement on the principles on which the post-Cold War Europe should be organized. With the signing of these treaties in the fall of 1990, I believe the Cold War really had come to an end, because the basic division of Europe, the basic division of ideas between the two halves of Europe, had come to an end, even though the Soviet Union would totter along for another year before it disintegrated. Another thing that comes to an end with the end of the Cold War, is that anti-communist confederation that I talked about first in Week Twelve of the course, just a couple of weeks ago. Remember I said instead of thinking of this as an American Empire, instead think of this as a league of states organized around a common principle, of opposing communism, with a particular central member of this league, this confederation, being the United States of America. The anti-communist confederation was embodied in several different kinds of security treaties, bilateral and multilateral, and some institutions, like NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. With the end of the Cold War in 1990, really the anti-communist confederation also comes to an end. The institutions, however, did not come to an end, instead they morph into new purposes. NATO remains in existence because the states want to continue cooperating with each other in this Atlantic community, but NATO enlarges to pick up different members. And becomes a place for political discussion and even some military coordination for common purposes not related to the old communist threat at all, but not as intense as it used to be. The European community, meanwhile, morphed into a European Union, an ambitious experiment in organizing a new kind of multinational state, inspired perhaps a tiny bit by the precedent of the American Union that was created in the late 1700s and that turned itself into a more tightly organized federation during the middle of the 1800s. So rather than a European Empire, a European Union, keeping a lot of the national identities of the states but also having some significant sharing of sovereignty. This map just gives you a little bit of a sense of how the European Union had expanded and was expanding. These areas here, in solid green, are the core of the old European Community, the old Common Market. This had expanded to include Denmark, the United Kingdom. At the end of the Cold War, it also included places like Ireland. But then has expanded since then to pick up places like Sweden, Finland, the rest of Germany, all these states in east Central Europe, the Baltic Republics, Poland and so on. In fact Croatia, listed here as a candidate member of the European Union, will be joining the European Union in just a couple of months. Romania and Bulgaria. And so on. As the European Union expands, what's also expanding with it is a required common notion of how to organize their governments on political democratic principles and how to organize their economies on market principals, with open markets and open movement of goods between them. In 1991, a final aftermath of the end of the Cold War took place. That was the end of the Soviet Union. In a way think about the Soviet Union as a replacement for the Russian Empire. Here is a map of the Russian Empire as it expanded up to the early 1900s. You see the enormity of the empire as it was in 1914 over here in Europe, in the Caucasus, in Central Asia, in the Far East. But the Russian Empire was organized as a multinational empire. It was replaced by an empire organized on ideological principles. A Soviet Union was a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. An old fashioned empire was replaced of a union of like minded republics all sharing communist principles. As communism disappears as the glue holding this union together, what will take its place? The answer, increasingly by 1991, is national principles will take its place, and the Soviet Union would break up. Here's a map that shows you a little bit of what happened with that break up. The dominant remaining state was a new Russian Federation. Russia itself trying to compose a multinational union. You see here the limits of the new Russian Federation. These areas here, like Komi, are constituent republics inside this Russian union, this Russian Federation. But you can also see, Central Asia, all these states become independent countries. The Caucasus, more independent nation states. East Central Europe, more independent nation states. If you were to compare this map of the Russian Federation with old maps of the Russian Empire, you'd see that the extent of the Russian domains shrink back to an extent that had not been seen in nearly 300 years, since the middle of the 1700s. Ordinarily you would think that there must have been a titanic war to cause such a shrinkage, but no, this was handled largely peacefully. There were some wars and skirmishes on the outskirts of the shrinking empire, but mainly the changes were political upheaval, economic upheaval, and social upheaval. These arrows showing you the movement of ethnic Russians moving back from Central Asia into the Russian Federation. Volga Germans being offered a chance to migrate actually back to German-speaking lands. Other kinds of migrations back and forth. Some Central Asians moving back into their home republics, from homes inside Russia and so on. Not only did the Soviet Union come to an end, but a series of new international institutions also were added to the list in the early 1990s, helping to regulate this new order. Let's look at some of the economic institutions that become so important in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. A World Trade Organization. Instead of just multilateral trade agreements, there would actually be an international institution to regulate the rules of free trade and to take appeals from countries that were complaining about violations of trade agreements. That was the WTO, the World Trade Organization, which has been remarkably successful. Inside North America, a North American Free Trade Agreement, uniting the United States, Canada and Mexico in a free trade area. In the Asia Pacific, an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum which, along with the Association of Southeast Asian Nation States, provided international institutions to talk about political and economic issues among a number of the states in the Asia-Pacific region. Again, institutions international for international cooperation, assuming that the world was not divided into rival great power blocks anymore.
