PRINCIPLES FOR AN AUTOPSY

Principles for an Autopsy

Principles for an Autopsy

Introduction

Yet a third consequence of our failure to anticipate the major changes in the USSR, and recognize and respond to them more promptly is the tumult and instability of that region now.  Had the Western powers and their analysts appreciated the power shift in the Kremlin, and reacted to its foreign policy implications in a timely and positive fashion, the transition might have been more gradual.  Having failed to do so, we probably deprived the Gorbachev-technocrat reformers of the reinforcement they needed to move at a pragmatic pace at home and abroad. (Kegley, 1994:11-4)

1. What assumptions is the author making about how we are to acquire knowledge as opposed to opinions of social or political life?

A serious discussion of the winding down of the cold war might well begin with the distinction between the demise of the Soviet state on the one hand and the end of the Soviet-American armed rivalry on the other, linked together largely by the dramatic shifts in Soviet foreign and military policy; in other words, three related but different sets of predictors are up for discussion.  Further, the sorts of predictions that were made in the months, years, and even decades before the early indications soon after Gorbachev's election by the party leadership, will rest on three different sets of understandings.  One is the most obvious: the structure, culture and dynamics of the Soviet domestic system.  Second -- and this should be equally obvious -- is our understanding of world politics in general.  Third and least obvious is the way in which we come to the central issue in our discipline:  how we model and explain the intimate interface between domestic systems and the global system.

Before looking at some of those scholars, analysts, and practitioners who might have been expected to anticipate and alert us to the demise of the Soviet regime, their retreat from the enduring rivalry, or the end of the cold war system, we might pause for a moment to consider the "so what?" question.  If a fair fraction of our colleagues yawn when these questions come up, perhaps they are "merely academic".  In my view, the inability of most Western analysts to predict these events -- or to take more seriously the predictions and auguries coming out of the East -- was indeed costly in the extreme.  First and foremost, it could have been catastrophic because it perpetuated the costly arms race for at least another half-decade, and worse yet, provided an appreciable number of additional occasions for the initiation of nuclear war. 

The purpose is therefore unabashedly didactic. The advice stems from the conviction that students of the Cold War are all acting like coroners. But trained at different institutions and prisoners of particular paradigms, each has been driven to emphasize different pieces of the victim's anatomy. This invites unwarranted simplification and inhibits investigation of the broad array of plausible explanations that deserve ...