Mortal Friends, Best Enemies: German-Russian Cooperation after the Cold War (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs) - Hardcover

Wallander, Celeste A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801435811 ISBN 13: 9780801435812

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 1999

Synopsis

Several hundred thousand members of the Red Army were stationed in East Germany when that state was reunited with its western counterpart. The peaceful transfer of these soldiers to their homeland produced a welcome outcome to a potentially explosive situation. Through an investigation of the strategies of German and Russian decision-makers, Celeste A. Wallander explores what conditions facilitate or hinder international cooperation in security matters.

Wallander spent the months and years after the fall of the Berlin Wall interviewing officials and politicians from Germany and Russia. She reveals how these individuals assessed and responded to potential flashpoints: the withdrawal of Russian military forces from Germany, the implementation of arms control treaties, the management of ethnic and regional conflicts. She also examines the two states' views on the enlargement of NATO.

The first detailed account from both countries' perspectives of the extraordinary contraction of Russian power and the implications of German unification, Mortal Friends, Best Enemies clearly depicts the important role European and global institutions played making the military disengagement possible. Wallander draws on these findings to develop a new institutional theory of security relations. In it she defines the techniques that international institutions can use to help states solve obstacles to security.

About this title

About the Author

Celeste A. Wallander is Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University and the editor of The Sources of Russian Foreign Policy after the Cold War.

Reviews

Wallander, author of a half-dozen books on contemporary European foreign relations, now tackles European security matters in the context of the new post-Cold War environment. She asserts that a change from threat assessment to risk assessment has helped Germany and Russia shape a more benign view of each other. Both countries have tended to work primarily through multilateral organizations, and both consider global ideological issues to be less important than threats to regional stability. Much of Wallander's analysis of institutional theory rests heavily on a mutually viable framework of multilateral organizations. This book compares favorably with The Legacies of Communism in Eastern Europe (Johns Hopkins Univ., 1995) and David Cox's Retreating from the Cold War: Germany, Russia and the Withdrawal of the Western Group of Forces (New York Univ., 1996). Recommended for international and security relations collections in larger public and academic libraries.AStephen W. Green, Auraria Lib., Denver, CO
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801435811
• ISBN 13: 9780801435812
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256