ABSTRACT
The changes that took place in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union between October 1989 and August 1991 have significance well beyond the shallow and narrow understandings of conventional Sovietology. The collapse of the East European communist regimes in late 1989 marked not only the bankruptcy of socialist central planning, but also the end of the post-war settlement, negotiated at Yalta, that had divided Germany and Europe in the interests of geopolitical stability. The events of late 1989 signified the unravelling in Europe of the global post-war settlement that had ceded hegemony to two superpowers – the Soviet Union and the United States – and divided Germany for over a generation. It is overwhelmingly likely that in the 1990s we shall see the further undoing of the post-war settlement, with the next major development being the emergence of Japan as a military power in its own right.
