This chapter recounts the final years of the USSR, from the collapse of the Soviet position in Eastern Europe in 1989 to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. It focuses particularly on Gorbachev's failed bid to create a common European space that would include the USSR. His effort to keep East Germany out of NATO was a significant part of that vision, but it was outrightly rejected by President George H.W. Bush, who feared that if Gorbachev had his way, Germany would leave NATO, undermining the alliance and, with it, the rationale for the American presence in Europe. The chapter explores the nature of the reassurances given to Gorbachev in February 1990, concluding that there was never a "deal" not to enlarge NATO, at least not as far as Gorbachev knew. Facing economic collapse and political chaos at home, the Soviet leader had to accept the terms he was given. This did not save the Soviet project. Gorbachev's vision for the future fell flat, leaving his dreams of global leadership largely unfulfilled.

Chapter 4 traces how South Africa’s position on the NPT evolved during the transition from P. W. Botha to F. W. de Klerk. My concentrated attention here lies on the role played by the South African DFA because the department’s officials were intimately involved in setting up these multilateral talks and, more crucially, were at the forefront of advocating the South African strategy on the NPT internationally. The ensuing discussion reconstructs events chronologically, bringing together the views of the South African, British, American and Soviet officials who dealt with the issue.

This essay reads world literature’s most recent (of many) emergences in relation to the tensions created by late capitalist globalization. The latter are connected to a series of points, from Goethe’s early nineteenth-century concept of Weltliteratur to midcentury postwar reanimations of the concept and the field formation of the present. Practices of reading, models of time and space, and the shadow of spectrality are points of particular focus in this survey of major contributions to the field. The essay proposes that world literature after 1989 constitutes not only an era of history but also a particular kind of hermeneutic in which periodization can be reconsidered beyond Eurochronology.

This chapter assesses the question whether dissident human rights activism had an impact on the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communism. Focusing on the situation in Poland, it argues that human rights activism had a threefold impact on the end of the Cold War: First, the Polish activists’ status as human rights icons provided them with the authority to be the government’s interlocutors at round table talks which, even if accidentally, triggered the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Second, human rights activism also made sure that the West, and especially the United States, provided material support for the Polish opposition movement thus helping sustain it through the 1980s. Third, because of dissident demands to uphold human rights in Eastern Europe, there were strong external pressures on Poland to implement reforms. Yet by contrasting the Western responses to the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981 to Western behavior in the late 1980s, the chapter shows that Western human rights policies were neither the automatic result of the 1970s human rights revolution nor of Cold War policies but of an activism that occurred largely during the 1980s.

This chapter discusses how the book's main themes relate to the historiography of human rights. It makes four points: First, it argues that the history of the Solidarity movement shows how precarious and contested human rights remained in international politics well into the 1980s, a finding that challenges the view of the 1970s as the final breakthrough of human rights. Second, this chapter argues that the history of Polish dissent and of its supporters in France and the USA reveals discourses in which human rights were not seen as an alternative to politics so much as a means of creating a new kind of politics. Even the overtly antipolitical imagery of groups like Amnesty International merely concealed a profound symbolic politics of human rights. Third, the findings of the book do not suggest that the origins of human rights really lie in the 1980s but that the entire quest for a point of origin is misguided. The history of human rights, rather, is one of their continuous competitions with other universalisms, their repeated reinvention, and adaptation to new causes. Fourth, this chapter argues that the book's findings show that human rights had a crucial impact on the end of the Cold War.

Chapter 2 provides a brief overview of the UN human rights regime and Chinese human rights views.The main substance of this chapter is an overview of China’s experiences with and participation in the human rights regime, including the treaty bodies and special procedures.Chapter 2 begins with China’s foray into the regime in the early 1980s beginning with the UN Commission on and Human Rights and traces the PRC’s growing engagement with the regime, including Chinese ratification of a range of human rights treaties and acceptance of visits by select UN special procedures.Crucially, it examines the post-Tiananmen period, when after 1989 the PRC faced international opprobrium and human rights scrutiny not only in the UNCHR where other states tried to pass resolutions on China’s record, but also from other parts of the regime.It details Beijing’s strategies to mitigate negative human rights attention.

In Chapter 2, I situate Johnnie To’s popular comedy, Justice, My Foot! (1992 審死官), which revolves around a lawyer defending a woman falsely accused of murdering her husband, in light of the drafting of the Basic Law and passage of the Bill of Rights in early-1990s Hong Kong. I argue that To’s film, which appeared at cinemas a mere three years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing, can be approached as a screening of a nightmare scenario on the minds of many viewers at the time: A Hong Kong-style lawyer trying to defend the innocent and maintain justice in a Chinese-style legal system that disregards basic human rights and that is plagued by corruption and nepotism. I will then explore the function of humor in the film to show how Justice, My Foot! repackages anxieties about the sinicization of law into a marketable cultural product for mass consumption.

In 1989, those demanding human rights to reform the system versus those who fought to leave it combined to create an explosive crisis for the SED. Human rights served not just to rally a heterogeneous coalition of dissidents, but also provided an ideological justification for SED officials to dismantle their own power structure and abolish the party’s monopoly on power in the face of mass demonstrations and mass emigration. In planning for a new East Germany, former SED officials worked with dissidents to draft a constitution that would secure liberal democratic rights and freedoms alongside rights that would preserve the ideals of the socialist project. In 1990, however, the joint hopes of dissident activists and reform communists were dashed as the realities of East German economic collapse turned the population away from new utopian ideas towards realising human rights through reunification with the Federal Republic. The idealistic anti-capitalism of the dissident elite alienated a population that wanted both democracy and prosperity through human rights. While the dissidents were successful in ending state-socialist dictatorship through their campaign for human rights, they ultimately failed to expand upon the narrow and unsatisfactory human rights system of the capitalist West.

Although East Germany and its state security agency, the Stasi, have become synonymous with human rights violations, the ruling SED considered itself a champion of human rights. The introduction outlines the implications of socialist human rights theory and politics and how it requires us to reconsider the history of GDR foreign policy, the rise of the dissent movement and the collapse of state socialism in 1989/1990.

The end of the GDR in 1990 also resulted in the erasure of human rights alternatives to capitalist West German norms developed before reunification. The idea of “socialist human rights” collapsed in tandem with SED rule, and many of its own proponents evolved into democrats who renounced their earlier work on the subject. East German dissidents and feminists – who advocated for conceptions of democratic rights and rights to bodily self-determination in conflict with those established in West Germany – were deemed to be deviant and marginalised. While some dissidents saw reunification as the ultimate triumph of the mass demonstrations of 1989, others saw it as a lost opportunity to create a better form of democracy and human rights.

Here we introduce the main themes of the book. First, we argue that 1989 was not the beginning of the region’s globalisation but rather the confirmation of a choice of a capitalist, Western democratic form. Second, we assert the need for a less Eurocentric approach: the story of the Westernisation of Eastern Europe is in fact a global story of exchange, circulations, and re-imaginings. Third, we critique the ‘West to the rest’ framing of the story of the 1989: rather, we contend that globally engaged local elites were key players in this regional reorientation in a long-term process that lasted from the 1970s to the 1990s. To this end, the book charts how the values which would eventually underpin the neoliberal, liberal democratic and European-facing settlement emerged within elite and oppositional cultures, as part of interactions between Eastern Europe and the world, during the late Cold War. Last, we explore the ‘other 1989s’ – radical, populist, or authoritarian: these stories were hidden in the liberal celebratory culture that once surrounded the transformation, but had legacies which returned to haunt post-Communist politics and culture.