The first half of the 1990s saw significant developments in the former Soviet and East European region: the attempted coup of August 1991 against Mikhail Gorbachev, the dissolution of the union, and the subsequent struggle in the 15 newly independent former republics to bring about significant social and economic change. There has been armed conflict in a series of these republics. In Russia there has been an armed attack on the parliament and its dissolution at the behest of the president, two national elections, simmering tension with a number of its neighbours, and continuing concern over the effects of economic reform, culminating in the December 1995 electoral success of the communist party. In Eastern Europe countries have been struggling with the legacy left by the communist regimes that collapsed in 1989. In a number of these countries communists returned to power via the ballot box. And, of course, the region was overshadowed by the breakup of Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars of Yugoslav succession. Despite this record of dramatic and important developments, this region has been of less concern to Australian foreign-policy makers than was the case during the Cold War.

The socialist economic system in Eastern Europe—the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance—was established in 1949. Most of the countries there did not join the CMEA because they genuinely believed in its purpose of rivaling the capitalist half of Europe. Stalin forced in order to protect Soviet influence there. Yet even he seemed not to be convinced about the viability of the CMEA. Several socialist states opted out of the idea of an integrated socialist economic system within two decades—Yugoslavia, China, Albania, and Romania. Because the USSR was the dominant member, it initiated several rounds of reforms from the mid 1950s to the 1970s to provide the CMEA with greater purpose and direction in the competition with the capitalist West. But the structural and ideological foundations, which Stalin had put in place before 1953, remained remarkably resistant to change. Thus, within two decades of the end of Worl War II, Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe turned from a source of reparations into an economic liability for the USSR. By the late 1970s, virtually all CMEA members understood that the organization had failed to deliver it had set out to do.

The Vatican was one of the seminal Cold Warriors, rejecting communism as early as the 1840s. It had hoped for the “containment” of Soviet-style expansionism into Europe during World War II, i.e. even before the United States adopted that term into its official Cold War vocabulary in 1946-47. However, the Vatican realized by the late 1950s that ideological rigidity damaged its own interest—ensuring the continued existence of functional churches behind the Iron Curtain. Mainly for this reason, it decided to engage with the communist world in the 1960s, although its policies were fraught with political danger and disappointments. Its major success in the European Cold War—the restoration of the Polish Church to independence—only occurred in the context of détente in German-German and European affairs in the early 1970s.

The Socialist Camp was a Soviet creation. In the wake of the Soviet military advance across the eastern half of Europe in World War II, Stalin’s USSR imposed communist regimes. As the Cold War heated up, the Soviet Union tightened controls in 1947-48, alienating Yugoslavia in process but also attracting the communist parties from China and Albania. The Socialist Camp appeared sturdy but was internally brittle. After Stalin’s death in 1953, his successors tried to regain legitimacy by reforming the USSR. De-Stalinization opened up rifts with China, Romania, and Albania, and created political crises in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. The rise of a conservative Soviet leadership in the mid 1960s did not smother conflict within the Socialist Camp but ultimately convinced the USSR to shore up a rump-camp through military means. The intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 ended the erosion of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe, but undermined the capacity of the Soviet system to reform itself. It further alienated other socialist states like China, Romania, and Yugoslavia while convincing Western European communist parties to reform themselves into democratic organizations.