Issues for class, 13 September 2004

0.  A note taker is needed.  I have contact info: see me after class.  (Pay is only $90/semester, but if you're going to take notes anyway...)

1. Reading assignments are very light next three weeks.  This material is the MOST IMPORTANT all semester.  So read and re-read.

2. Web notes are intended to demonstrate that historical interpretations -- even of the biggest events! -- differ radically depending upon whether

you choose a Liberal, a Marxist or a Realist perspective.  We'll return to interpreting some of the events listed on the web page later.  In class,

let's concentrate on three issues:

A.  What was (and still is?) the "German problem"?  For which people was it a "problem"?  For which theories was it a problem?

How was the "German problem" solved after WW2?  (First, division of the country and 4-power military occupation.  Then efforts such as ECSC to integrate economies of West Germany with its western neighbors.  Then admission of West Germany into NATO -- U.S.-led alliance.   And East Germany into the Warsaw Pact -- Soviet-led alliance.  Then, gradually, fitfully by further integration of Western Europe (and, until the collapse of communism of Eastern Europe), culminating in today's European Union. 

So, when West and East Germany reunified in 1990, Germany was again the most populous state in Europe (if we exclude Russia from Europe) and among the wealthiest.  But few observers feared reemergence of a 'German problem'.

B. Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?  Crockatt enumerates (a) internal and (b) external factors.  Many on the political Right in the U.S. credit Ronald Reagan of destroying the Soviet Union by engaging it in economically ruinous arms races.  But the political Right was very slow to see that the Soviet Union actually was disintegrating.  Or to welcome this process! 

What we think about the disintegration of the Soviet Union is strongly influenced by what we think the Soviet Union actually was.  Was it a great multinational empire, held together principally by coercion?  Or was it a great state, on the European (Westphalian) model?  If the latter, its disintegration is more of a problem for Realist theory.  If the former, "disintegration" should be viewed simply as "decolonization," much as experienced by the British and French empires in the 1950s and 1960s.  [However, the disintegration of the Soviet Union was remarkably nonviolent.]

C. Attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in the U.S. on 9/11/2001.  Of what was this an instance?

Many have called this "the greatest security failure in U.S. history" because so much damage was caused so quickly by so few, and because the intent and capabilities of that few were well known.

How the American electorate answers the question C. above will strongly influence the November presidential election.  So naturally proponents of different parties (who are sometimes but not always proponents of different theories) try to advance their preferred answer.