In contemporary international relations, after the breakdown of “Berlin Wall”, the end of East-West conflicts, and expectation for the “New World Order”, we lose theoretical and practical perspectives for assessing the future. We face extreme nationalism, for example, in the ex-Soviet Union and ex-Yugoslavia, and a so-called “New World Disorder”, which might be caused by collapses of the existing national borders.
Of couse, Gorvachev's perestroika foreign policy replaced the “Cold War” with a new East-West relationship, which ended the bipolar world order divided by two social systems. The prevention of East-West conflicts and closer relationships between the the ex-Soviet Union and the United States under the “Post-Cold War” period was said to be a prologue to the “New Order” constituted beyond the “national interests”, under the “common human interest”. After the Gulf War, a new type of cooperation between the “great powers” has started by use of the United Nations. In 1992, a new General Secretary of the United Nations, Boutros Ghali, being to consider how it should be reorganized, issued his plan (“An Agenda for Peace”).
The uneasiness of conversion from a socialist state to capitalist, or the posibility of escalation of national conflicts, involving bloodshed, caused by the loss the existing social system and the collapse of state integrity, led us to a different perspective. Instability in-and-around the ex-Soviet Union, the civil war in the ex-Yugoslavia, especially Bosnia-Herzegovina's case, is serious. The U. N. and the U. S. do not have enough power to control such a situation.
In addition to that, Russo-West relations are worsening day by day, because of the plan to lift the arms embargo to Croatia and widen the membership of NATO to include the former East and Soviet Republics. The “happy song” has seemed to turn into a “sad melody”.
I want to name this rapid change the “Post Cold War Syndrome”, which is very dangerous for a researcher when she or he analyses the “Post Cold War world”. I think that pessimism over the present situation, which is sometimes called the “Cold Peace”, has countered the optimistic perspectives towards the end of “Cold War” and the “New World Order” initiated by perestroika.
I will choose as a clue to analize this “Syndrome” a case study of Russian foreign policy transformation in this paper. And I try to examine whether this foreign policy had really acted beyond the “national interest” or towards the “common human interest”, which brought the end of “Cold War” and the beginning of the “New World Order”.
My conclusion is that “the foreign policy elites”, theoretically or pragmatically, had never wanted to damage the “national interest”, and that these officials who conducted the perestroika foreign policy have always though of their own state's interest as a “great power”. We can not, therefore, distinguish the perestroika foreign policy from their so-called “cold peace” policy.
In the period of perestroika, we relied too much on their description over their foreign policy. And today we still do so. We sometimes exaggerate the changes in a state's conduct in international affairs. With such attitudes continuing, we may never find the appropriate perspectives towards the real changes of the “grobal system”.
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