The map of Europe at the end of WWI had never intended to be permanent, but the new Cold War between the Soviet Union and America (and by extension the democratic and capitalistic West) had led to the divisions in Europe and Asia being an established part of the geopolitical landscape.
Detente was a doctrine in the 1970s which accepted those divisions and map as permanent. This gave the Soviet government legitimacy, as well as the territory and political hold they had on Europe legitimacy as well. Detente was more important to the Soviets than it was America, however, from the US point of view it followed a doctrine of realpolitik.
John Lewis Gaddis points to several world leaders who were not prepared to deal in Dentente which entrenched the cold war conflict as the status quo; they were Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa and Mikhail Gorbachev.
The main push against detente was Reagan's and could not have happened unless there was an increasing liberal and peaceful Soviet leader as there was in Mikhail Gorbachev. The irony of these two leaders and their militaristic nations is that they both believed in peace and that MAD [Mutually Assured Destruction] - a center piece of detente - was an out-dated and dangerous military policy. It was through this understanding that the liberalisation of the Soviet Union, and ultimately its collapse as a political, ideological, economic and 'historically infallible' entity occurred.
The leaders did not manage to do all this in isolation. The American population was constantly pressing for a more moral conduct of American foreign affairs which included the international establishment of human rights, the respect for democracy and free markets as well as a Wilsonian zero tolerance for authoritarian regimes.
Those living in communist countries were also constantly pressing for change and effectively delegitimized the communist governments in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and eventually the Russian Republic itself. The two most visible incidents of this was Solidarity who sought to establish a labor union that was separate to the state, and the fall of the Berlin Wall when East German guards opened the gate between East and West on their own initiative.
When authoritarians are faced with the loss of legitimacy to rule they usually respond with violence. Deng in China put down the Tiannamen Square challenge with violence, in the same way that Brezhnev rolled the Soviet tanks into Prague earlier. The difference with Gorbachev the peacenik is that he did not. He was prepared to let personal happiness be found in self-organization and political expression despite his belief in socialism.
Gaddis points to the tanks not rolling into Poland when there were strikes and protests over the lack of food as the turning point to when the Soviet Union collapsed even though the fall of the Berlin Wall came as a complete surprise to governments around the world. It meant the abolition of the Brezhnev Doctrine. Instead the Soviets opened up the Polish economy to trade with the West in order to ensure there was sufficient food for the Poles.
Lenin-Marxist ideology claimed that communism was the end result of history; it was inevitable since capitalism could only end in war and poverty, consequently socialism, central planning and a ruling elite were inherently legitimate. Reagan challenged this through the 'evil empire' speech. It also sounded an end to detente. Gaddis writes:
The 'evil empire' speech completed a rhetorical offensive designed to expose what Reagan saw as the central error of detente: the idea that the Soviet Union had earned geopolitical, economic, and moral, legitimacy as an equal to the United States and the other western democracies in the post-World War II international system.By this time communism had lost legitimacy in the Soviet Republics people were living double lives, and it was obvious that the Lenin-Marxist system of government, economy and organization was unable to provide prosperity or happiness. In comparison to the ability of capitalism and market economies to scale horizontally in complexity and wealth, the centrally planned economy was an inefficient beast steeped in stasis, corruption and failure. Humanity is a moral species. It follows that the amoral nature of realpolitik will have trouble being explained or legitimized in a democracy which relies so heavily on popular support for political legitimacy. Foreign policy requires an element of morality for it to be complete. Reagan and Gorbachev's willingness to challenge the status quo, or detente, led to a geopolitically better world.
