There are unique periods in history when a single year witnesses the total transformation of international relations. The year 1989 was one such crucial watershed. This book uses previously unavailable sources to explore the momentous events following the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago and the effects they have had on our world ever since.

Based on documents, interviews, and television broadcasts from many different locations, including Moscow, Berlin, Bonn, Paris, London, and Washington, 1989 describes how Germany unified, NATO expansion began, and Russia got left on the periphery of the new Europe. Mary Sarotte explains that while it was clear past a certain point that the Soviet Bloc would crumble, there was nothing inevitable about what would follow. A wide array of political players--from leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl, George H. W. Bush, and James Baker, to organizations like NATO and the European Community, to courageous individual dissidents--all proposed courses of action and models for the future. In front of global television cameras, a competition ensued, ultimately won by those who wanted to ensure that the "new" order looked very much like the old. Sarotte explores how the aftermath of this fateful victory, and Russian resentment of it, continue to shape world politics today.

Presenting diverse perspectives from the political elite as well as ordinary citizens, 1989 is compelling reading for anyone who cares about international relations past, present, or future.

A szerzőről:
Mary Elise Sarotte is professor of history and of international relations at the University of Southern California. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Dealing with the Devil and German Military Reform and European Security. She has served as a White House Fellow and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

"A great virtue of Mary Elise Sarotte`s 1989 is that she makes the problem of hindsight bias explicit, and systematically explores the roads not taken." (Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books)

"Much the most exciting of these books is Mary Elise Sarotte`s 1989. In contrast to the other authors, Sarotte treats the uprisings and collapses of that year as a prelude to the biggest change of all: `the struggle to create post-Cold War Europe`, as her subtitle puts it. . . . Sarottte [is] a lucid and compelling writer." (Neal Ascherson, London Review of Books)

- Winner of the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize 2010 Award of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
- Co-winner of the 2010 Marshall Shulman Book Prize, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
- Winner of the 2009 DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies, awarded by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies
- Featured on the Financial Times (FT.com)`s "Books of the Year" list
- One of CHOICE Magazine`s 2010 Outstanding Academic Titles