Ideas and international political change : Soviet/Russian behavior and the end of the Cold War

The remarkable, peaceful end of the Cold War dramatically-and unexpectedly-transformed international politics toward the end of the twentieth century. At the heart of this amazing change was the struggle over new and old ideas. Drawing on rich data from interviews with key Soviet architects of "new thinking" and of Gorbachev-era policy reforms, Jeffrey Checkel offers an absorbing historical narrative of political change in the late Soviet period, along with theoretical insights into the effect of ideas on state behavior. International structure and domestic institutions account for variations from country to country in how ideas influence state policy, Checkel argues. While a changing international political environment creates opportunities for the carriers of new ideas, these entrepreneurs must operate within domestic institutional settings that sharply affect their ability to influence policy. In the late Soviet period, entrenched assumptions about international politics were close to breaking down, creating a rare opportunity for new thinking. Checkel draws on this analysis of policy change in Soviet Moscow at the end of the Cold War, as well as in post-Soviet Russia, to illuminate the role of ideas in international political change.-- Provided by Publisher

The rise of atheism in the modern world is a religious phenomenon unprecedented in history, both in the number of its adherents and in the security of its cultural establishment. How did so revolutionary a conviction as this arise? What can theological reflection learn from this massive shift in religious consciousness?

In this book, Michael J. Buckley investigates the origins and development of modern atheism and argues convincingly that its impetus lies paradoxically in the very attempts to counter it. Although modern atheism finds its initial exponents in Denis Diderot and Paul d’Holbach in the eighteenth century, their works bring to completion a dialectical process that reaches back to the theologians and philosophers of an earlier period.  During the seventeenth century, theologians such as Leonard Lessius and Marin Mersenne determined that in order to defend the existence of god, religious apologetics must become philosophy, surrendering as its primary warrant any intrinsically religious experience or evidence. The most influential philosophers of the period, René Descartes and Isaac Newton, and the theologians who followed them accepted this settlement, and the new sciences were enlisted to provide the foundation for religion.

Almost no one suspected the profound contradictions that this process entailed and that would eventually resolve themselves through the negation of god.  In transferring to other areas of human experience and inquiry its fundamental responsibility to deal with the existence of god, religion dialectically generated its own denial.  The origins and extraordinary power of modern atheism lie with this progressive self-alienation of religion itself.

Contents 7 Preface: Capturing Complexity, Explaining Change 9 Abbreviations and Acronyms 15 Part I Ideas and Foreign Policy 19 1 Ideas and Policy Change 19 2 Policymaking in an Authoritarian State 34 PART II Front Detente to New Thinking and Beyond 47 3 Entrepreneurs Looking for a Window 47 4 Windows Opening? 79 5 Open Windows, New Ideas, and the End of the Cold War 93 6 A Post-Cold War Cold Peace? Ideas and Institutions in the New Russia 122 PART III Ideas, Institutions, and International Change 139 7 Ideas and Foreign Policy 139 Appendix: Schedule of Interviews 149 Notes 151 Index 201