A Singular Collapse: The Soviet Union and Inter-State Competition

Abstract

Chapter 8 provided a discussion of the Cold War itself and its underlying dynamic. The collapse of the Soviet system within the USSR and internationally in the late 1980s, in addition to its manifold implications for global politics and policy, raised a range of further issues within social and international theory of a stimulating and as yet unresolved kind which will be examined here. The first question confronting any analysis of this phenomenon is that of explanation, of providing an account that provides reasons, weighted and interrelated, of why a specific political and socio-economic system, one that was in broad terms equal to its rival in military terms, should have collapsed as it did, rapidly and unequivocally, and in the absence of significant international military conflict.¹