Fritz Bartel on The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism
Associated Event
Washington History Seminar Series
Monday, September 19th, 2022
4 pm EST
The National History Center and the Wilson Center are pleased to announce the Fall 2022 season of the Washington History Seminar.
The seminars will all be held virtually via zoom and recordings will be posted to the National History Center’s YouTube channel.
About Fritz Bartel
Fritz Bartel joined the Department of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University as an assistant professor in the fall semester, 2019. He comes to the School from Yale University, where he was Associate Director of International Security Studies and also held a postdoctoral fellowship.
Bartel received his Ph.D. in history from Cornell University, where his research was funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. His dissertation, “The Privatization of the Cold War: Oil, Finance and the Fall of Communism,” won the 2018 Oxford University Press USA Dissertation Prize in International History from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), and is under contract to be published by Harvard University Press.
Bartel completed a Bachelor of Arts in History and International Relations from the University of Toronto (Trinity College) in 2010.
About The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism
Why did the Cold War come to a peaceful end? And why did neoliberal economics sweep across the world in the late twentieth century? In this pathbreaking study, Fritz Bartel argues that the answer to these questions is one and the same. The Cold War began as a competition between capitalist and communist governments to expand their social contracts as they raced to deliver their people a better life. But the economic shocks of the 1970s made promises of better living untenable on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Energy and financial markets placed immense pressure on governments to discipline their social contracts. Rather than make promises, political leaders were forced to break them.
In a sweeping narrative, The Triumph of Broken Promises tells the story of how the pressure to break promises spurred the end of the Cold War. In the West, neoliberalism provided Western leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher with the political and ideological tools to shut down industries, impose austerity, and favor the interests of capital over labor. But in Eastern Europe, revolutionaries like Lech Walesa in Poland resisted any attempt at imposing market discipline. Mikhail Gorbachev tried in vain to reform the Soviet system, but the necessary changes ultimately presented too great a challenge.
Faced with imposing economic discipline antithetical to communist ideals, Soviet-style governments found their legitimacy irreparably damaged. But in the West, politicians could promote austerity as an antidote to the excesses of ideological opponents, setting the stage for the rise of the neoliberal global economy.