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In a recent state-of-the-discipline article, John Lewis Gaddis highlighted the failure of scholars of International Relations to foresee the end of the Cold War.1 A similar, no less painful, observation has been made of the inability of those engaged in Soviet Studies to anticipate the collapse of the USSR.2 Any attempt to understand the origins of these transformations has, however, been swiftly overshadowed by the urgent need to outline and evaluate their consequences. This paper seeks to make a modest contribution to this task by providing an analysis of Russian foreign policy; a policy whose orientation, and indeed very existence, is predicated on the demise of the Cold War and the end of Soviet power.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, the People's Republic of Angola (PRA) was often regarded as a close ally of the Soviet Union, Cuba and certain East European regimes. Consequently, reforms initiated by that regime might conceivably be linked to the profound political and economic upheavals experienced by the former communist countries. While the relationship with the Soviet Union and Cuba did have an important influence on the development of the PRA, this is, however, only an incomplete interpretation. A detailed examination of the political and economic development of the regime and an understanding of its pragmatic external orientation suggest that recent reforms in Angola have a number of other roots and, in some respects, reflect a long process of adaptation.

The transformation of Soviet foreign policy during the Gorbachev era was truly seismic in nature. Re-evaluations were effected in all areas of policy, resulting, most visibly, in the fundamental reordering of relations with the United States and fellow N.A.T.O. countries, and the demise of the Warsaw Pact and communist régimes in Eastern Europe. Equally sweeping were alterations in approach to the Third World and, more specifically, sub-saharan Africa, where changes in policy Soviet retreat.

Introduction: The Evolution of European Security Governance Security governance can be defined as the coordinated management of issues by multiple and separate authorities. As applied to Europe, its most obvious formal characteristic is the development of dense patterns of multilateralism and institutionalization. This feature does not negate the continuing relevance of the state-as-actor but it clearly suggests that this actor is, to an important degree, subordinated to institutional imperatives and processes of cooperation, as well as subject to a normative discourse on the appropriate principles of order. Governance of this type was not absent in Europe during the Cold War, however, since the late 1980s it has both ‘widened’ and ‘ deepened’. Security governance has come to acquire a pan-continental (rather than a bipolar) quality that involves overlapping interactions among a range of state, institutional and private actors in multiple security-relevant issue areas. At both analytical and policy levels the conceptualization and operationalization of security governance can be disputed; however, what seems eminently clear is that European order is now as much about institutions and norms as it is statecentric concerts, balances of power, and the conduct and settlement of war. The development of Europe's security governance has occurred against a backdrop of policy-driven controversies concerning the appropriate roles and hierarchy of security institutions. For two to three crucial years after 1989 this came in the guise of the so-called ‘ architecture’ debate concerning the relative merits of NATO, the then Conference (now Organization) on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE/OSCE) and the post-Maastricht European Union (EU).

The enlargement of NATO and the development of a European-based military and defense capability have been hailed as among the most significant developments in European security affairs since the early 1990s. Not surprisingly, a great deal has been said and written about these twin processes. The relationship between them, however, has not given rise to anything close to the same degree of interest. This situation notwithstanding, NATO enlargement does have certain consequences for the two organizational forms in which European military and defense autonomy has developed. A link with the ESDI—the “European Pillar” of NATO—has been implicit since at least the mid-1990s. Somewhat more obvious is the link between NATO enlargement and the ESDP developed within the EU. Insofar as the ESDP requires the development of an effective institutional and operational interface between the EU and NATO, the entry of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland into the Alliance in March 1999 complicated this already difficult task. The issuing of invitations to other NATO candidates at the Alliance’s summit in Prague in November 2002 could complicate it still further.

The Third World was, in many respects, a creation of the Cold War — a third world, literally, that was distinct from the first world of capitalist industrial states and the second world of the Soviet-led socialist bloc.1 The Cold War’s various antagonisms pitted the first two worlds one against the other yet much of its competitive energies were ventilated in the Third World. This was a consequence of the strategic and political stalemate in Europe (the territorial core of the Cold War) and the global implications of the nuclear balance of power. It also reflected the fact that the Cold War was a statement of ideology as much as of strategy. Its juxtaposition of two alternative systems of socio-economic and political organisation inevitably meant that the myriad of states which sat in between would be affected. This was all the more likely given that the Cold War followed upon and, in some cases, coincided with the end of colonialism and thus the coming to independence of dozens of new states throughout Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

The celebratory, even euphoric language that was once used to describe Russia’s relations with Europe (and indeed the West more generally) has been out of currency for several years. The vocabulary of analysis, since at least 1994, has tended toward either neutral terms that hint at a balanced, but nonetheless competitive relationship (‘pragmatism’ and ‘realism’), or labels suggestive of some fundamental schism (Russian foreign policy as ‘rigidly anti-western’).1 The use of such vocabulary is not without merit. Russia and the states of Europe (most obviously those centred on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU)) have experienced differences over a large number of issues. Several of these disputes have been covered in this volume and there are others beside (the west European states, for instance, have objected to Russian sales of nuclear technology to Iran and anti-aircraft missiles to Cyprus).

If we are to believe the ‘democratic peace’ hypothesis, stability in Europe relies, in large part, on the extension of democratic, pluralistic political systems to the east of the continent, Russia included. The spread of democratic institutions, it is argued, provides domestic obstacles to belligerent acts by governments, while the diffusion of democratic norms promotes compromise and cooperative practices among states. The process of democratic transition, however, is far from trouble free. As noted in Chapter 1, the interactions of consolidated democracies may be peaceful, but the foreign policies of those in the early stages of democratization are more likely to be unpredictable and bellicose. Thus, stability relies not just on democratic development, but on the parallel assimilation of democratizing states into international institutions that may act to blunt the external consequences of domestic political transformations.

For some four and a half decades after 1945 the Cold War dominated the landscape of European affairs. However, in the space of a few short years after 1985, Europe’s economic, political and military division was overturned. The suddenness and scale of this process owe almost everything to developments initiated in the then Soviet Union. The opening to the West under Mikhail Gorbachev and Moscow’s consent to the removal of communism in east-central Europe (ECE) were defining events of the Cold War’s end. The unintended collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991 meanwhile served to demonstrate still further that, at that point in time, Moscow constituted a pivot around which much of Europe’s history was unfolding.

The post-war period has witnessed a remarkable growth in the number of states, from around fifty in 1945 to more than 180 in 1996. These range from the tiny city states of Monaco and the Holy See all the way up to the Russian Federation and China, respectively the world’s largest and most populous states. During the twentieth century, there have been several great waves of ‘state creation’: in the period after the First World War, again after the Second World War, and then in the 1960s. Most recently, the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s led to claims of statehood on the part of a large number of formerly subject peoples such as those of Central Asia, whilst other states such as those in the Baltic which had been suppressed by their absorption into the USSR re-emerged on to the international scene. Statehood, to put it simply, is more popular and sought-after than it has ever been, but this raises important questions about the changing nature both of states and of statehood more generally.