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By Bruce W. Nelan Europeans on both sides of the Iron Curtain began the decade of the '80s feeling sorry for themselves. Suffering from oil-price shock, stagflation and political inertia, East and West alike were hoping for signs of an upturn. Worried about the demise of detente that followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, they desperately sought assurances that the nations of NATO and the Warsaw Pact could find ways to coexist without blundering into war. A small dose of bolstering would have sufficed to cheer up Europe. What it got instead was a rebirth, a historic, epoch-ending transformation that almost exhausted the supply of superlatives in every language of the Continent. The end of the cold war came as a surprise. One reason was that the West was accustomed to viewing the U.S.S.R. almost exclusively through a military prism. Weaponry was overwhelmingly the subject of East-West discussions, and officials on both sides tended to believe the relationship was healthy if they were making progress on arms control. By that criterion, which in the end contributed only a footnote to history, things were not going well in 1980. Even though Presidents Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev had sealed the SALT II agreement with a kiss in Vienna, it was dead a few months later, the victim of the invasion of Afghanistan and a suspicious U.S. Senate. Just as worrisome, 1 of 5  |
