The Strategic Implications of Change in the Soviet Union

Recent years have seen major improvements in East-West relations and in prospects for security, stability and co-operation. Some observers have gone so far as to declare that the Cold War has ended. In large measure these developments have grown out of the process of domestic change and new thinking in the Soviet Union and its allies, reflecting recognition of the manifest failures of the rigidities of old-style state Socialism and of ideological confrontation. But the extent and durability of these changes and their implications for world order remain uncertain. The origins and sustainability of change in the Soviet Union, and the implications for the super-power dialogue, for East-West strategic and economic relations, for Europe, for the Asia-Pacific, and for regional conflict were analysed in papers by Eastern and Western experts, presented to the September 1989 Conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, held in Oslo. This book is a compilation of these papers, together with a summing-up of the discussion they provoked.