Power and Politics Since 1989: From Cold War to New Global Challenges

hello everybody and welcome how is everybody today good well I'm delighted to have the opportunity to be giving the

devayne lectures and the devayne lectures as you can tell from looking around you double as being a regular

Yale course for credit that students can take for credit and lectures that are open to the general public these

lectures are going to deal with power and politics in today's world and by today's world I'm going to mean the 30

years since 1989 and the 30 years since 1989 are and have been an incredibly tumultuous and period of very great

change and that's for unusual for instance if you compare it to the previous 40 years in most of the

advanced capitalist democracies they were a period of relative stability after World War two in most countries so

it was an era of great prosperity even countries recovering from World War two like the countries of Europe were being

rebuilt with marshal plan aid and it was a period party for demographic reasons our very great political stability for

people who grew up in that period internationally as well it was a period of very great stability because partly

because of the Cold War it's true we had episodes like the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War but as the Vietnam

War indicates most of the conflicts within the Cold War were played out as you like as proxy wars in other parts of

the world and so from the point of view of the citizens of the Western democracies except for those who are

actually fighting in Vietnam it was a far-off war that didn't have a great impact on the stability of

people's lives and that is very different from what has been experienced since 1989 time if you like I speed it

up a great deal we've seen incredible change in three decades and those are the three decades that I am going to be

exploring one pedagogical challenge that presents is that for some of us in this room the last three decades are etched

into our minds as like it was yesterday we experienced them through in real time but there are many people in this room

who were never born until long after that and so for them you know whether it's the last 40 years

or the last 60 years after the the 40 years or the 60 years after World War two it's all history and so one of the

first things I need to do and I'm going to try and make this a regular practice during the course is I need to take

everybody back and to make people understand who weren't there what it was like and then to remind people who've

lived through it of things that that they might have forgotten so let's just go back to 1989 in Berlin the Berlin

Wall once it divided East from West now on its way to becoming an artifact of history

[Music] is the CBS evening years dan Rather reporting tonight from in front of the

Brandenburg Gate in Berlin Germany good evening these are the sights and sounds of the

continuing celebration of Germans about the symbolic not the literal at least not yet but the symbolic tearing down of

the Berlin Wall it's impossible to completely describe how deeply Germans feel about what's

happened here East German border guards tonight were literally tearing down portions of the wall itself not the

whole wall that portions of the wall to make it easier for East Germans to come into West Berlin and as the joyous

hordes of Berliners were still streaming through the wall the East German communist government said they can come

and go permanently they can come into West Berlin have a look and then come back home again with no special

documents required today don't steal your mind at heart well of course I look back to all those years of hardship for

the families even more than for the country as a whole and it's moving to see families getting together again my

feeling is that we are very close to an end of the artificial division of Berlin and I also believe we are close to the

point where the parts of Germany will become much closer together this of course only within the reasonable

European framework anyone know who that was Billy Braun the former Chancellor of Germany who actually would would die a

couple of years three years after that so he was one of the celebratory crowd at that time so that might give you a

little sense of the shock and the enthusiasm that people experienced in in the latter days of 1989 this had been a

period in which the Soviet Union was clearly losing its grip on Eastern Europe it wasn't just Germany right

across Eastern Europe all through 1989 there had been these massive resist since movements developing and the

Soviet Union was losing it was clearly not in a position to intervene in these countries and they were shedding

totalitarian control for the first time in decades the of course the great exception which we will be talking about

next week was in China where demonstrations in Tiananmen Square that June had come out meant a very different

result but in most of the world often 1989 it seemed like democracy was was on the March

we saw the democratization of all of the former Soviet Union bloc countries in Eastern Europe even places like South

Africa which had been mired in a bitter conflict for decades transitioned in 1919 90s to a multi-racial democracy the

problems in Northern Ireland for finally settled with the Good Friday accords in 1997 even Israel Palestine which had

been one of the most intractable conflicts for decades and decades seemed to be moving towards a relevant

resolution in the early 1990s there were the Oslo Accords the PLO and the Israeli government were negotiating a settlement

anyone who was in Israel or the West Bank at that time anticipated that there was going to be a settlement until the

assassination of one of the key protagonists it's a Rabine in November of 1995 but that would and that would

lead to an unraveling of that potential settlement but in the early 1990s it's it's really I think difficult to

overstate the soozee Azzam for change this is the period when you know Francis Fukuyama

was talking about the end of history by which he meant that liberal democracy was sweeping the world in fact in at the

turn of the 21st century we finally went from a world in which most countries in the world were not democracies by most

standard measures to a world in which most countries were democracies by most standard measures so it's not surprising

that one would have had the kind of enthusiasm that Fukuyama had at that time and that was almost what's the

what's the word it just snowballing across so much of the developed world enormous confidence in democratic

capitalism and enormous confidence in the idea that many people were going to be lifted out of poverty and that the

world was heading for a kind of benign equilibrium as an economist would say Fukuyama's and of history idea now let's

fast forward three decades and let's stay in germany and here's a very different thing to look at

[Applause] like a triangle shaped via hibiscus shaft we are sent in touch from

Bundestag point via via theses landfill and on on Davi annual oppositely which directs the partisan Kansas teaser bonus

weegee antigua build at were three amazi our seat seconds each van and scene via valency argan via Viren foul marker or a

vein of emma yaghan point via via tones on salon also fought so a cone so he's a leader of the alternative for

Deutschland far-right anti-immigrant anti-system political party and what he is celebrating is that they have crossed

the five percent threshold this is the AFP here on this graph Germany has a five percent threshold to get seated in

the in the parliament so if you don't get five percent you get no seats they hadn't gotten five percent before and

now they had won five percent and so they saw themselves as getting a foothold in German electoral politics

for the first time and so Germany in in in der in 2017 was coming out of a situation in which there had been a

grand coalition between the SPD which is the left of said to Social Democratic Party and the right of center CDU

Christian Democratic Party led by Angela Merkel and the SPD were very unhappy they had been in this grand coalition

for a long time and they found that they were paying a huge price with their supporters they were getting less and

less of the vote for reasons we'll talk about later in the course and they announced that they were not going to

participate in a grand coalition again and they were going to go into opposition and rebuild themselves and so

on till a miracle they spent the next six months the alternative for Deutschland was were and

still are seen as beyond the pale nobody will form a government with them so she spent the next six months trying

to put together a coalition with the green environmentalist party and the so-called free Democrats the Free

Democrats would be what we would think of as kind of in this country as Rand Paul libertarians they are for small

government low regulation across the board and so it's not surprising that she couldn't do it because the greens

one green regulation they want environmental regulation that's their raison d'etre and the Free Democrats

want no regulation or any less regulation so they stumbled along in and out of negotiations but they weren't

able to form a coalition however over the course of that six months all the opinion polls showed that the AFD the

alternative for Deutschland was actually rising in popularity and so that the German president was very against having

another election in in the face of the stalemate with the Social Democrats refusing to join in a grand coalition on

the one hand and miracles inability to construct a different coalition on the other they all knew that if they went

for another election the AFD would do even better so finally after much hand wringing the the the SPD was persuaded

after extracting a very big set of concessions including six ministries and the Finance Ministry they were persuaded

to go back into a grand coalition even though a lot of their membership didn't want it so terrified worthy of the

prospect of another election in which the far-right would do even better so we thought German politics was

kind of settling down at this point but the following year this is what you see happening German Chancellor Angela

Merkel was led Germany for 13 years has offered to step down as her party's leader and said she won't run for office

again after her term ends in 2021 her announcement came a day after her party the Christian Democratic Union saw a

disappointing performance in a key regional election in the state of Hesse the far-right alternative for Germany

party claimed more than a dozen seats in houses Parliament for the first time the entire migrant party now controls seats

in all 16 of Germany's state Parliament's plus the National Bundestag and European Parliament so there it is

and they had also done very poorly in the Bavarian regional elections they damaged about 10 percent of their vote

to the AFD in these regional elections and by the way the SPD wasn't very happy either because they were hemorrhaging

support to the Greens so the the this is and this is something we'll see playing out in many European countries the

establishment parties are shrinking and becoming weaker and the parties on the fringes are growing and becoming

stronger and it was impossible not to start thinking about the past and thinking particularly about the 1920s

and 30s no fee as a result of the elections of July 1932 the Nazis became the biggest

party in Germany with 37% of the vote so you know if you want to go back to the 1930s you can see though that video was

about the July 1932 election and you can see what happened in the in the subsequent elections that it was a very

unstable system they were having multiple elections and of course 18 months later Hitler came to power and if

you go to Germany you hear very anxious people talking about you know is this back to the future it was is 2017 and

2018 some kind of replay of the empowerment of extremist parties and of course it's no it wasn't just Germany in

in 2016 we had massive shocks delivered to establishment parties with the brexit result result in the UK and Donald

Trump's populist Stampede to the presidency in the US both widely unanticipated outcomes by most of the

establishment parties pundits and politicians and you could go around the world in the Austrian elections of 2016

people were very relieved that in the runoff the Green candidate actually defeated the far-right quite handsomely

by 54 to 46 percent but if you look at the legislature again you see the far-right gaining ground the the

establishment parties coming in fourth and fifth in the 2017 legislative elections these are the parties that

would normally have come in first and second while the far-right party increased its vote putting them a close

third with 51 seats while the Greens fell below the threshold and won nothing or if you look at Belgium

the again you see a center-right party rate retains its majority but if you drill down a little bit you can see that

there was an increase of support for the far-right Flemish vlog belong which received almost 12% of the vote gaining

seats if you look at Italy you can see the the center-left party seedings power to the center-right but many of

the votes for the center-right party are coming from the league so-called again a far right-wing populist party which ends

up with a hundred and twenty five seats and 17% of the population popular vote a gain of a hundred and nine seats and I

could put up another seven or eight or nine slides of different countries that basically tell the same stories in

country after country across Europe both Eastern Europe and Western Europe including countries that we thought of

as bastions of civil social democratic stability like Sweden you see these far-right parties doing well too Turkey

Latin America elsewhere where anti-establishment parties that sometimes also verge on being anti

system parties are gaining ground in in many legislatures so if you think about the contrast between those the videos of

1989 and where the world has been since 2016 it couldn't be more dramatic and in some ways it's a big downer and but my

first thing I want to say is don't get too depressed it's not all all of course for depression the central questions of

this course are three how did we get from there to here what are the challenges and prospects going forward

and most importantly in the last part of the course how could we get to a better place in

many of the countries that we're talking about and we'll spend a lot of time on the US but not exclusively in the US I

should say a little bit about the the distinctive approach that I'm going to be taking in these lectures not to say

it's the best approach there are many ways to look at this kind of material but it is the approach that I'm going to

be using and the first thing I would say about this approach is that I'm going to be studying history with the tools of

political science and political theory on the one hand but also using history to keep political science and political

theory honest so what do I mean by that well one thing that is is remarkable about the events of 1989 is that they

supply us with a kind of terrific natural experiment from the point of view of social scientists if you look at

the literature for example of people who studied European democracies before 1989 they were essentially cycling endless

numbers of theories through the same old data set that everybody had had for four decades and they didn't have any a big

exhaustion as change in 1989 is a big shock to the system and suddenly we have for instance in Western Europe the in

Eastern Europe the addition of a whole lot of new parliamentary democracies and so that creates possibilities of

thinking about long-established conventional wisdom testing theories that against new data which is the gold

standard for social science rather than testing theories on data out of which the theories had been developed which

tend to result in what statisticians call just so stories sort of fitting the curve to the data

suddenly we have all this new data coming along in real time and so if you think about and we're going to talk some

about some of the standard theories in political science like modernization theory which is a theory about how as

economies modify certain kinds of political changes become more likely that was long held that modernization

produces democracy they were many variants of modernization theory and we will talk about some of the differences

among them but now we have new data and where they're modernizing economies will produce democracy it is long been

conventional wisdom that democratic systems are incompatible with state-run economies if we look at what's happened

since 1989 we've got we've gone to market economies in some of the post-communist systems but others like

China and Vietnam have become state capitalist systems of a certain kind while retaining non democratic politics

so we'll have cause to think about theories of that general sort there's but a lot of conventional wisdom about

the conditions for stable democracy that suddenly can be put to the test on a whole slew of new democracies is it all

the economy stupid or does due beliefs of citizens matter and what kinds of beliefs matter and what about the

beliefs of elites all of these things we can look at again in new contexts so we have lots of new data to think about

them provided by this this dramatic break of 1989 there's a lot of conventional wisdom about the relations

between business government and labor that has built up among political economists and political scientists over

the last several decades before 1889 again we now have big power shifts partly because communism as an economic

system has been taken off the table well if communism as an economic system is taken off the table how does that

restructure relations between business government and labor it turns out it really has a big impact on those

relationships so that's another of this the topics we will be looking at how do electoral systems affect things like

inequality provision of environmental legislation and public goods a lot of conventional wisdom there about which

types of democracies are more likely to do that and which are less likely to do that start to look before and after 1989

and we're going to discover that some of the conventional wisdom needs rethinking so on the one hand we're bringing the

the tools of political science and the theories of political science to bear on the data that's thrown up by this last

30 years of history on the other hand we're using that data to keep the political scientists honest precisely

because we have this this whole smorgasbord of of new results as a social scientist would put it but then I

also said I'm going to use the tools of political theory so political theory I should confess truth in advertising by

my my my first my first profession if extended is a profession is I'm a political theorist my I cut my

teeth in in the world of political philosophy I'm in normative things about what should happen how the world should

be organized rather than empirical work on how it is organized

and so we are definitely going to be thinking about normative questions here as well as we go along what should

happen what might have happened but the the confession I need to make about my home discipline is that it reminds me of

the story about the fella who goes up to a farmer in Donegal and says how do I get to Dublin and the answer that comes

back is well I wouldn't start from here sunny that is to say much of political

philosophy develops theories that take no account of where we actually are and how the theories that people argue about

in the journals and in the literature actually could be implemented in the world if at all and this spills over

into normative arguments made by other scholars Thomas Piketty in his book capital in the 21st century

argues for a 4% global wealth tax well good luck with that who's going to implement a 4% global

wealth tax so I when I think about normative questions it's going to be from the perspective of how might the

goals that we think are desirable actually be achieved and so I am going to spend as we go along through this the

different topics that we're going to be discussing I am going to be focusing on paths not taken things that might have

been done differently and here the the sorts of things I'm going to be talking about are things like NATO expansion of

the collapse of the Soviet Union the NATO alliance we'll talk about this next week which was expanded over the next

several decades to include most eventually all of former Soviet bloc countries and there

were overtures also to including former Soviet states like Georgia and several others I'll talk about this Ukraine

Georgia and Ukraine were both talking about joining NATO that part of the reason the Soviet Union invaded it you

Ukraine so we will talk about whether there was a path not taken at that time French president Francois Mitterrand

thought that NATO should be shut down at the end of the Cold War it was a defensive alliance that had lost its

purpose how realistic was that was a well how bite the world have been different had

that happened we're going to be talking about the Global War on Terror I should in after 9/11 when we invaded first

Afghanistan and then Iraq was there another path that would have been politically viable that would have led

the world to in a different direction we will talk about the response to the financial crisis of 2008 in 2009 again

what were their possibilities that when were ignored or overlooked that might have been both politically feasible and

more polished effective in the sense of policy and so that brings me to underscore the third feature of the

approach that I am going to take in this course which is when you look at people who talk about public policy it tends

either to be policy wonks who just go on about what would be the best policy or political scientists who talk about why

some policies get adopted in some systems and not in other systems but there's very little discussion of what

is the effective political way of achieving a good policy or the effect of political way of blocking a bad policy

and so when I talk about innovations in the last part of the course it's very much going to be in a way that marries

considerations of politics two considerations of good public policy so that that is the flavor of what we're

going to be doing here and as I said it's it's not the only way one might study these materials but it's the way

that we're going to be doing it in this course let me talk a little bit about the shape of the course it falls into

five sections the first one is going to starting on Monday deal with the collapse of communism and it's aftermath

they are we going to look at collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in Russia in in China and in Vietnam although I will

talk about some other countries along the way we're going to talk about the rise of a unipolar world until 1989 we

had a bipolar world in which there was as I said a lot of actual stability that came about as a byproduct of the Cold

War at least among the the major powers even if they maintained this stability partly by acting out their conflicts in

proxy wars in in Asia Africa and at America but it by and large from the the great powers were the nucleus standoff

worked and we didn't have a major conflict between them now we have gone to a unipolar world dominated by a

single power after 1989 how does that restructure politics and the possibilities for politics that will be

also part of our concern and then I'm going to talk about the politics of the economics

the what I'm going to call the rise of neoliberalism at home and the Washington Consensus abroad and this is put on this

is basically it comes to it comes to exist because of the collapse of an alternative to capitalism the

disappearance of communism as a viable political system as a viable economic system and so you have this this idea

that's often called neoliberalism that basically has three elements its trade deregulation key trade deals getting rid

of restraints on trade getting rid of internal regulation within countries and massive privatization of formerly state

assets that was called the neoliberal approach to political public public political economy and when it's

translated into a set of recommendations or requirements for countries in the developing world it was called the

Washington Consensus was essentially adopted by the World Bank by the IMF as a condition for giving loans to

developing countries and it was essentially taking neoliberalism global and so the post communist era is marked

by this massive confidence in the the capacity of unregulated or mildly regulated mark free-market capitalism to

deliver the best results for every country in the world then we're going to talk about the new global order that is

ushered in by this we're going to we're going to look at whether democracy really was on the march the people

thought about a potential we had talked again the conventional wisdom in political science was that the

democratization had preceded in three waves the first wave being the gradual

expansion of the franchise in the what we think of today is the older democracies the second wave being

decolonization in in Africa and Asia and Latin America after World War two the third wave coming in 1989 to 1991 and

people started to wonder whether there's a fourth wave now with democratization of South Africa with settlements in

places like northern island in initially with the Arab Spring people wondered whether we were going to start to see

more democracy as part of this new global order then we're going to look at the international institutions that

developed in this global order we'll talk about things like the International Criminal Court which for the first time

would hold dictators to account for their activities of repression there was the creation and of something called a

doctrine of the United Nations called the responsibility to protect responsibility to protect says that this

was in the wake of things like the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and what happened in Kosovo in 1999 eventually we

got responsibility to protect where the UN was said all governments are going to be held accountable for human rights by

a severe human rights violations within their own territories and if they don't respect them the UN is going to

intervene militarily this is you know a big change we're saying we're not going to respect the capsid sovereignty of

Nations so new the new international order seems to be affecting not only relations among countries but relations

within them the third part of the core I'm calling the end of the end of history and this is really has its

ultimate roots with 9/11 and the emergence of the global war on terror the invasion of Afghanistan Iraq Libya

and eventually the the collapse in Syria we're going to see that the idea that history was heading in some benign

direction was getting harder and harder for people to hold on to we're going to look at the resurgence of state

capitalism we're going to we're going to look at what China was his has been and is doing in Africa we are going to be

looking at Russia's resurgence as a global power they had been back on their heels for much of the 1990s and early

2000 in the Middle East and elsewhere we're going to look at the new role of business in many political conflicts

around the world sometimes with benign purposes in mind but often not and so we're going to start to see a much

Messier politics the fourth part of the course is about the new politics of insecurity this is really ushered in not

so much by the financial crisis itself but by the way in which governments responded to the financial crisis and

this will be one of the areas where we will be looking at paths not taken but we will see that there was growing

insecurity in the in the work forces of many of the advanced democracies that had been building up for decades and the

the financial crisis threw into sharp relief the fact most governments we're not doing much

about it if anything at all and in fact that they ended up bailing out the elites while doing nothing much for the

people who have been most harmed in the crisis and so we will look at the response to the financial crisis in men

in in a number of countries particularly in the US and then we will all in the last part of the course what is to be

done that great Leninists not slogan we will be looking at two things really first how the voter sentiment in

these countries was so poorly misdiagnosed by so many political elites and people in control of political

parties misdiagnosed to the point where not only did they fail to respond to the growing economic insecurity that were it

was experienced by many many millions of workers within their own countries they were actually implementing political

reforms that were likely to make things worse and so the last part of the course will be looking at those two interacting

issues what sorts of economic policies were pursued or failed to be pursued what kinds of policies might have been

pursued and how did the reform of political systems over the last pilot asked over the last 15 or 20 years make

the problem worse and that will lead me to make some arguments about how we should think about politics going

forward so that's that is what we're going to be doing it's a big menu we have you know we have 26 now soon to be

25 lectures in which to explore it I'm going to before breaking today I'm going to talk about of

a few logistical matters one is that I have been asked to announce but you can see for yourself that the Office of

Public Affairs is taking pictures and there's letters are going to be videotaped and we this will include we

will have microphones so we can have questions from the floor and interaction but you should know that this is all

being tape recorded and so anything you say can be taken down and used in evidence against you so a couple of

other logistical things one is I want to introduce Christina Seyfried Christina she's the head Teaching Fellow for the

course so for she will be overseeing the grading of students who are taking the course for credit and she will also be

working with me in running office hours for people from the community which we're both going to be doing I'll say a

little bit more about that in a minute but you will see more of Christina as we go along

office hours I'm going to happy having office hours in Rosencrantz room 201 from 10:00 to 12:00 on Wednesdays and

Fridays the presumption there is that from 10:00 to 12:00 yell students have priority

these are walk-in office hours not by appointment and on 10:00 to 12:00 on Fridays people from the community a

priority but who knows who will if anyone will show up but that's the way it'll work 201 rosenkranz Hall which is

right opposite the new colleges up the street Christina is going to have office hours for people from the community on

Thursdays from 5 to 7 at a place yet to be announced and one thing we're going to do

the office hours are not just going to vanish into the ether we're going to Christina and I are going to film five

sessions over the course of the semester where she and I will discuss what's come up in the office hours and we will post

that on the course website I do this with my Coursera course and it improves to be quite helpful so we will get

questions that have come up in the office hours both in our office hours and in office hours between the students

and the Teaching Fellows that they will be participating as well and we will we will publish those videos of the office

hours on the on the course website access to reading anyone who has a Yale ID can get almost all of the readings on

canvas there's a few I think three of the books or art we're using too much for copyright reasons to put them on

canvas but they're all in the library for anyone who doesn't want to buy any the people from the community we have

made available in the New Haven Public Library if you don't have access to canvas us it's a couple of sets of the

books that we're being using in the course or you can get them that way those who are taking the students who

are taking the course for credit the official exam is the last afternoon of the last day of exams which I'm sure

some of you have already bought plane tickets that are inconsistent with that so actually we're going to have to

alternate exams one on December 11th and this is primarily to accommodate Som students because of the timing of the

som elective exam period and that exam will if we can arrange it be held at som and then they'll be but others can take

it then as well if they want and then there'll be an another alternate exam on Friday the 13th so there'll be different

times at which people can take the exam policy here will be no laptops no screens no iPhones I came to this policy

a couple of years ago it definitely works better it's just too tempting to be doing that Amazon shopping for your

grandmother's birthday present that you forgot about and it's it's it's it's it's very distracting not only for the

people around you but it's also distracting for me to teach we will we will post the slides on canvas and on

the course web page off the lectures so people will have access to the slides what you'll find is if you go and you

look at the slides on canvas they'll look like they'd been turned into a PDF and the video will not play if you want

to play the video you have to download the slides and then it will read it will regurgitate as playable videos so it is

possible to play the video yes so no laptops don't no screens no phones and everything everything I

put up here will will be available to you so you don't have to take copious notes of what appears on slides comments

questions yes sir you'd have to yell will we will have microphones yes starting next time

you can't so that's why we put a set of the reasonings in a New Haven library and the reason for it it's not just in

Yale being mean it turns out there are two sets of copyright rules so if you if you are just come if you're photocopying

chapters from a book you are allowed to take up to 10% of the book otherwise you have to buy the book if you're using it

but universities for their students have a more prison permissive rule so we can take more than 10% from a book I've

forgotten what the exact number is but it's much more than 10% we can take more than 10% from a book and put it up on

canvas if it's only if it's only available to Yale students but if we made them available to the general

public we were yell would be violating copyright laws so that's why we have bought two complete sets of the books

and put them in a New Haven Public Library from which we have been xeroxing most of this stuff so you should be able

to get the vast majority of the readings if you want to go down there and get them

other questions comments observations if there's a question in your mind it's probably in the mind of 30 other people

so they'll be grateful if you ask it yeah you just have to yell are we going to

look at the European Union as well as what we're certainly going to look at the the growth of the European Union and

the expansion of the European Union since the in fact we're going to talk about it next next class we're going to

look at the expansion of the European Union since the Cold War we all talked very briefly about the early you know

but this course is really post 1989 it is not you know we've just hired David Engleman and Arnie Weston who are both

cold war historians who are going to be teaching courses on the Cold War so that if that if you really want to deal with

the post-war Europe from you know night into war Europe to to the end of the Cold War that these are the guys who are

going to be teaching that stuff going forward in Yale College so I'm very consciously not doing that so you know I

will talk about the the way in which the European Union was formed which has had a lot to do with its current troubles

but mostly I'm going to focus on since 1989 yeah pardon there are no sections in this course this is why we have an

hour and a quarter lecture rather than a 50-minute lecture yeah the topics for the papers will be posted two weeks

before the papers are due and we will give acids a a couple of things about that this is not a research course so

you can write a first-rate paper based on reading the material on this you're not expected to go beyond the

syllabus and we will we will post two weeks before the papers are due a list of topics of and it will be there will

be very significant amount of choice on it so we'll probably give you four or five possible topics to write about yes

sir what is the expectation for graduate students the the the same the same

course requirements the two papers and a final exam yeah yes sir party no there's no limit anybody this

this is an uncapped course I'm hoping we can stay in this room it looks like it numbers tend to go down rather than up

during shopping period so yeah no it's not it's not a capped course yeah well there well people have taken courses

with me before know that I have a pretty interactive lecturing style so yes there will be microphones and there will be

questions I'm not planning to talk for an hour and a quarter every Tuesday and Thursday so there will be there will be

significant amount of interaction yeah yes sir yeah we we currently I believe have six in addition to Christina's

Teaching Fellows all of whom will be holding office hours and so they'll be they'll be available and you will be

able to go and talk to them about what's come up in the class about your papers and so on and the conversations you have

with those Teaching Fellows we will also address then in the videotaped office hours that we post okay

so any other questions comments reactions so on Tuesday we're going to talk about the collapse of the Soviet

Union from Soviet Communism to Russian gangster capitalism now I will see you then

[Music] you