Power, globalization, and the end of the Cold War

Abstract

The end of the Cold War has become a case study of major importance for scholars of international relations for numerous reasons. Not least among these is that it helped spark a renaissance in the study of ideas in the aeld and contributed to the rise of constructivism as a major theoretical school in the 1990s.1 It has also proven to be a rich case for developing new arguments inspired by constructivist thinking, as well as for extending standard models drawn from cognitive or social psychology and organization theory concerning how ideas shape strategic behavior. The result of this scholarly effort is a rich and diverse literature that advances numerous models of how norms, culture, identity, trust, persuasion, learning, demonstration effects, transnational conceptual oows, intellectual entrepreneurship, socialization, and many other ideational processes inouenced the dramatic ending of the superpower rivalry. Indeed, it is difacult to identify another case that has generated as large and varied a literature devoted to exploring how ideas inouence international relations.2 Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War