Chapter 12. Canada at the End of History
12.2 The End of the Cold War
The legacy of the Cold War continues to influence world affairs. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the post-Cold War world became unipolar instead of bipolar, with the United States the sole remaining superpower. Being caught geographically between two superpowers from 1945 to 1991 gave shape to Canada’s international role and its aspirations for middle power status. Defining a new international role in the post-Cold War era would take Canada into new conflicts.
In November 1989, the world — including foreign policy experts and espionage agencies from both sides of the Iron Curtain — watched in surprise as peaceful protesters in East Germany marched through guard stations at the Berlin Wall. Within hours, people from both East and West Berlin flooded the checkpoints and began tearing down large chunks of the wall. For months, demonstrations in East Germany had called on the government to allow citizens to leave the country. These protests were one manifestation of a larger movement with origins in Poland’s Solidarity (Solidarność) movement, which would sweep across East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, leading swiftly to revolutions — most of them peaceful — and resulting in the collapse of Communist governments in Central and Eastern Europe.
In Budapest in 1956, and Prague in 1968, the Soviet Union had restored order through a large show of force. In the case of Hungary, over a thousand Soviet tanks were involved, with 30,000 troops, and as many as 3,000 Hungarians died; in 1968 the USSR mustered half a million troops from the Warsaw Pact nations and more than 6,000 tanks to put down (with far less bloodshed) the Prague Spring. That these events were not reprised in 1989 was an indication to all that the Soviet Union was itself collapsing. In July 1991, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931) and United States President George H. W. Bush (b. 1924) signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, which committed their countries to reducing their nuclear arsenals by 25%. A month later, in an attempt to stop the changes begun by Gorbachev’s reforms, Communist Party hardliners tried to remove him from power. Protests arose throughout the Soviet Union, and by December 1991, the nation had collapsed. In January 1992, 12 former Soviet republics formed the Commonwealth of Independent States to coordinate trade and security measures. The Cold War was over.[1]
A More Dangerous World?
The dust had barely settled on the crumbling Berlin Wall when the global order began to shift. The United States was, effectively, unleashed from whatever restraint the fear of provoking Moscow previously exerted. Cold war subterfuge gave way to direct attacks on enemy and rogue states. In December 1989, the Bush administration launched a military intervention in Panama and, claiming to be acting on behalf of human rights, deposed the military dictatorship of Manue