Original citation

Introduction
As our discussion of the causes of the First World War makes evident, the 
theories that we use to organise our knowledge about the world play a 
determining role in how we perceive and understand history. Thus, while a 
structural Realist might point to Germany’s rising power as a destabilising 
factor in the anarchic international system of the early twentieth century, 
a liberal might look to the absence of formal international organisations 
capable of managing interdependence between states to avoid armed 
conflict. Marxists focus on the role of the class system and control of 
the means of production as defining characteristics, while the English 
School (ES) points out that war was still a completely acceptable means 
of conflict resolution in early twentieth-century Europe, making it a key 
institution in European international society in the years before the First 
World War. Theory frames the way that we see the world around us, 
highlighting and masking different aspects to produce contrasting sets 
of explanations. This use of theory separates IR from associated subjects 
like international history (IH). While IH generally tries to accumulate 
empirically-verified ‘facts’ about the past, IR is more interested in weaving 
those facts together to produce analyses and explanations of past and 
present. Given the vast – some might say infinite – complexity of human 
history, this weaving requires that we select some facts to include and 
some to exclude, trimming our empirical evidence to manageable 
proportions. This is the function of theory: to simplify the world around us 
to such an extent that we can make general comments about IR based on a 
limited number of cases.
In this chapter, we turn our attention to the ways in which IR understands 
one of the most crucial moments of the late twentieth century: the end 
of the Cold War. Just as Europe’s imperial expansion from the fifteenth 
century laid the groundwork for the emergence of contemporary 
international society, the end of the Cold War played a vital role in shaping 
its practices and principles in the twenty-first century. The end of the Cold 
War was a tipping-point, transforming both the international system and 
IR as an academic subject. The way we think about the two decades that 
have elapsed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of 
the Soviet Union in 1991 owes much to what happened before and during 
those key events. Indeed, many in IR continue to think about the post-
Cold War world in terms of the bipolar global conflict that preceded it, 
using a variety of theoretical models to understand different aspects of this 
important period in international history.
This chapter will look at a number of issues related to the end of the 
Cold War. First, we will consider the difficult problem of prediction, ably 
illustrated by the fact that not a single expert in IR anticipated the events 
of 1989 and 1991. We will then ask who, if anyone, actually ‘won’ the Cold 
War; and why IR has produced so many different explanations of its end. 
Finally, we will examine the consequences of the end of the Cold War for 
the international system and IR.

---

Chapter 3: The end of the Cold War
41