ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that structural or functional explanations for the end of the cold war – whether realist or liberal – are underdetermining and cannot account for both the specific content of the change in Soviet foreign policy and the particular Western response to it. Efforts to explain the “end of the cold war,” that is, the systemic transformation of world politics that started with the turnaround in Soviet foreign policy in the late 1980s, have to find answers to at least two sets of questions. Ideas, however, do not float freely. Decision makers are always exposed to several and often contradictory policy concepts. Research on transnational relations and, most recently, on “epistemic communities” of knowledge-based transnational networks has failed so far to specify the conditions under which specific ideas are selected and influence policies while others fall by the wayside.
