09.1 Hist 20 podcast: 1980-89

events in the 9th decade of the 20th C

Transcript

University of California UCOP | Hist20 podcast 9.1

Hi. The 1980s are a pretty weird decade. I mean, the music's amazing. The fashion largely involved enormous

shoulder pads. And I don't think we've ever been closer to nuclear war than in the 1980s, and yet the 1980s are

also the end of the Cold War. It's a decade of enormous transitions, cataclysmic shifts, and shifts that we still feel

to this day in the 21st century.

At the beginning of the decade-- of the 1980s-- the Cold War was still the name of the game. And under President

Reagan, his administration had adopted a sort of two-pronged approach to how he was going to deal with it on a

global scale. On the one hand, it had to deal with authoritarian governments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in

this context. And so there, the CIA was the one that was tasked with providing military assistance for-- and I'm

going to use air quote here--

"freedom fighters" to help combat left-wing regimes.

And on the other hand, the United States Department of State provided diplomatic incentives for right-wing

regimes to allow free elections. Now, it's an important distinction to have because often when we speak of a

country's policies, especially in foreign affairs, we have a tendency to think that there's sort of a unified policy. And

we forget that different agencies and different departments are not necessarily going to act in concert. And what

sometimes seems like chaos could actually be strategy.

Now, when it comes to the strategy, this two-pronged strategy in the US, on the one hand, they needed to

continue fighting communists, right? Which is how the US ended up supporting paramilitary murderers who fought

against communist insurgencies in Nicaragua. So you're supporting what they thought was the lesser of two evils.

And at the same time, they were trying to coax really the worst right-wing authoritarian regimes towards

democratic elections. So there was no violence against the authoritarian and right-wing military commandos in

Argentina and Chile.

And then we have to remember-- there's kind of that tension, right? This has global consequences. These are US

decisions with wide-ranging consequences.

And then when it came to the USSR, the United States' strategy was that it was going to out-crazy the Soviets. It

was going to essentially position itself as being willing to spend what it took to build a nuclear program in space.

Yeah, that's the original-- well, not the original Star Wars, but that was the Star Wars. When we talk about Star

Wars in US policy, that's what we're talking about.

Now, Reagan entered office in January 1981, and he was determined to rollback Soviet expansionism. In fact, he

was determined to end the Soviet system. Let's just saying he had some support in that respect, perhaps not in

terms of policies.Now, there was a controversial issue around NATO. And that started in the late '70s-- 1979. So essentially the

beginning of the '80s. It was all around ballistic missiles. So you remember that during the Cuban Missile Crisis,

the Cuban Missile Crisis essentially was around the positioning of ballistic missiles in Cuba in response to the

United States putting similar missiles in Turkey.

Now, this dual track decision that NATO ministers made in 1979 hinged on this, that if the Soviets refused to

remove their medium-range ballistic missiles within four years, the Allies-- and that includes the United States--

would deploy an equal if not greater force of cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe. So essentially tit for

tat. Early 1980s.

And when the negotiations around who's going to move which missiles stalled, that was in 1983, it became the

year of the protests. In the US and in Europe, thousands of people just literally united in sort of anti-nuclear

demonstrations. This was across the US and Europe. I mean, there was enormous protests, and yet the Allies

began deployment of these missiles as scheduled in 1983.

So remember that the US unwritten policy was, we're going to out-crazy-- we are going to outspend you on this

front. As the missiles were installed, there was increasing sort of desire on the state department side of the United

States to sort of let's resume dialogue with the Soviets. We really, really shouldn't. This is a really risky proposition.

But the presidents Reagan in March '83 announced that there was not going to be any negotiation, that in fact

with the United States was going to do was start the Strategic Defense Initiative-- essentially Star Wars-- because

the Soviet Union was an evil empire. I tell you, Star Wars the movie and Star Wars the nuclear program, they're

quite similar.

This came to a head in 1985 when the Soviet Union installed a new leader. Mikhail Gorbachev became the new

leader of the Soviet Union in March 1985. And what the US didn't know at that time was who Gorbachev would be.

It turns out that Gorbachev had been chosen largely to modernize the Soviet Union. His policy was modernization

and economic restructuring because the Soviet economy was pretty much in a shambles.

The Communist regime had been built in opposition to the free market concept, and it was in trouble. There had

been almost 80 years of state control of the productive machine, and that had created really significant shortfalls

in basic goods. I mean, it was perfectly normal for people in the Soviet Union to stand in line for hours to get a loaf

of bread.

Imagine, that's like-- you can't function that way. And a loaf of bread is just one of these things. Forget toilet

paper, fruit, sugar, gas.So there was a kind of a dislocation between the skills of the Soviet people and the needs-- their needs. The

needs of the people, the needs of the economy, the needs of the country. And there was an enormous cost that

the government was really finding difficult to fulfill because in the Soviet Union, education was free, health care

was free, everybody was guaranteed a job.

And so the Soviet empire, as it were, was sort of built on an aging military and manufacturing machine. And during

the '80s, the entire world was seeing a shift from manufacturing to services. And the Soviet system was just ill

prepared for the change.

And so in order to restructure the Soviet economy and essentially reform its domestic society, Gorbachev had to

reduce military spending. He had to reduce it at home, and he had to reduce political tensions abroad. He couldn't

continue to put the Soviet Union on this kind of threatened war path. And how do you do that? Well, he needed to

change the relationship between the Soviet Union the US.

And remember these popular demonstrations against the ballistic missile positioning in Europe and the US? Well,

what Gorbachev did is he issued a call to the United States to have discussions over arms control. So in 1983,

Reagan had called the Soviet Union the evil empire, and he vowed to protect the world from the aggression. And

two years later in 1985, the Soviet Union was asking for negotiations to table these aggressions for good.

We could be tempted to see Reagan's crazier-than-thou posturing as having been strategically brilliant. I am not

saying it was. I'm just saying that many people do think that, and you can sort of understand why they might see it

that way. That posturing, in many ways, forced the Soviets to negotiate because they realized that they were not

going to be able to outspend the US.

And while ultimately it was the diplomatic tactic that won, right? We didn't go to war. Gorbachev asked for

negotiations. The debate forever is going to be whether the diplomatic policy, the diplomatic strategy, was going to

be enough, or whether that diplomatic option really only became an option because the more crazy one was

becoming increasingly real.

Turns out that Gorbachev and Reagan had a really positive personal relationship, and it produced a really

practical result in 1987. Went really quickly. The two leaders signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces

Treaty, and the treaty eliminated an entire class of missiles in Europe. It was a milestone in the history of the Cold

War. That had never happened.

Whereas the entire Cold War was about increasing armaments, here the two had an unbelievably civilized,

friendly treaty and agreed to get rid of an entire range of missiles. Gorbachev took the initiative, but Reagan was,

in fact, prepared to adopt that policy of negotiations. So he wasn't as crazy as we might have thought. Or maybehe was, I don't know. I'm going to let you read up on that and figure it out.

Now, part of the Soviet transformation under Gorbachev started from within, and it was defined by a term called

"glasnost,

" which means-- from what I understand, it means transparency or public knowledge. It was used sort of

as a means to convey that what the government was going to do was going to be publicly known and understood.

And Gorbachev combined this with another Russian term,

"perestroika,

" that meant restructuring. The Soviet

Union was good to restructure in order to make its ways public. And this was an attempt to democratize a political

system that had never been democratic. I mean, Russia wasn't democratic before the Soviet Revolution, so it had

no practice of democracy.

And it was a slow process. And it started with the gradual pulling out by Russia out of agreements, and especially

financial ones, with its many foreign allies, with the countries in the Eastern Bloc that it had subsidized and

supported. So starting in 1985, Gorbachev allowed nationalist movements to express their wishes.

They were no longer going to clamp down on internal desires, wishes. Independent labor unions could exist. The

Polish Solidarity Movement, led by Lech Walesa, stopped being criminalized, for example. And in financial terms,

this meant that countries like Cuba would no longer sell their sugar at above-market prices to Eastern Bloc

countries, which would be have dire consequences for Cuba. And Cuba will no longer receive subsidies for gas

and grains from Moscow.

This was bad for Cuba, because as of 1985, the island saw an astronomical surge in prostitution. Especially

prostitution that was geared towards Latin American tourists. And this was essentially a way by which Cubans tried

to make ends meet.

And the Cuban government, who generally frowned on any entrepreneurial enterprise-- which prostitution in some

ways could be seen an entrepreneurial independent enterprise, and they saw that as a capitalist vice-- had no

choice but to really look the other way because the island could not sustain itself, and the state could not help its

own people.

The Soviet Union's gradual exit from the global political sphere led to one of the most historic events of the

decade. Since 1961, Germany had been divided in two. It had a wall running between the two sides, and a wall

dividing two sides of the city of Berlin, which was in the center of Eastern Germany.

The politics of these countries were radically different and had been radically different since the late '50s. The

gradual end of the conflict between the two superpowers generated a really increasing popular German desire for

reunification. But there are many reasons why people in Europe might have been a little bit worried about this. I

mean, ultimately it was the German empire and the German Reich that had started both world wars. And the lastof these wars had ultimately led the world to be divided into two camps that were now kind of trying to get closer to

each other.

So the end of the animosity between the US and USSR, that's positive. But what did that mean for Germany and

the rest of the world? And could the world do anything about it?

Now, the world was taken by surprise when, during the night of November 9th, 1989, crowds of Germans on both

sides of the wall began dismantling the wall. A barrier that for almost 30 years had symbolized the Cold War

division of Europe was coming down at the hands of the Germans themselves.

By the way, I was there. I was living in Belgium at the time. And when I woke up in the morning of November 10th

and saw what was going on, I got on a train, went to Berlin, and spent the weekend there watching the wall come

down. And it was an amazing experience, and I've never forgotten it.

By October 1990, Germany was reunified. Now there was no two Germanies. There was one Germany. And that

triggered a really swift collapse of the entire Soviet Union, and all the East European regimes became

independent of the Soviet Union. Essentially, the Soviet Union was no longer a Soviet Union. These were

independent countries now, and Russia became Russia again.

And 13 months later, December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned. And that was it. No more USSR officially.

Now, these are not minor events, right? This is not a small thing, but it's not without consequences. First, even if

the Cold War led to many collateral casualties and the build up of nuclear arsenals and unnecessary rivalries, it

was the devil we knew. Without the USSR, the US stood as the only superpower. And that doesn't hold in the long

term.

And the other problem was that since the world stage had for so long been presented as a place where capitalism

and communism were fighting for dominion, the end of the Soviet Union, essentially the most powerful Communist

enemy of the US, could be seen as the victory of capitalism, right? Well, I guess, if you view the world as a fight

between these two sides.

But if you lived in a small village in Uganda in 1986, all you hoped for was for some sort of agreement between the

warring factions in your country. You hadn't seen a lot of peace even since the overthrow of Idi Amin in the late

'70s. What I mean is at the end of the Cold War was just that. It was the end of the Cold War. It was the end of a

really important rivalry that had many global consequences.

But to call it the victory of capitalism? Well, that is definitely a debatable point. And the '80s are also about much

more than just the end of the Cold War. It's also a decade that will forever be marred by the AIDS crisis. Let's goback to those freewheeling experimental '70s with all their, well, experimentation-- drugs, sex, rock and roll.

The AIDS virus erupted on the scene in Europe and in the US. And it was seen largely as a gay plague since, in

the beginning, this immune disease seemed to be transmitted largely among gay men. In fact, for a long time, or

at least in the early part of the '80s, there were only certain people that were considered to be at risk.

And the media named it the Four H Club, which is just horrible. But essentially a couple of patterns had arisen. It

seemed that hemophiliacs who had received contaminated blood transfusion where at risk, homosexual men

reported high incidences of the disease, heroin users and people who used drugs via injections or intravenous

drugs use, and for some reason people of Haitian origin, because many cases of AIDS were being reported in

Haiti.

Now, the research around this epidemic coalesced very quickly. And by 1984, this interpretation of AIDS as a gay

disease had pretty much changed because it was very clear that women could get HIV, that essentially everybody

who had sex, or had unprotected sex, was at risk of getting AIDS. And so what by the middle of the '80s was also

apparent was that the disease was extremely widespread globally.

This was not remotely a disease that essentially chose a small group of people. It was very localized in a certain

group of people in Europe and in the US. But it was really widespread in Africa, where it probably originated in the

1930s.

In the middle of the 1980s, it was finally declared a global epidemic, one that fundamentally altered the sexual

practices of everyone and medical practices in terms of blood transfusion across the globe. And it shifted the

notion of safe sex. Up until then, for many people, many heterosexual people, safe sex was essentially having sex

without risking pregnancy. And the 1980s changed that. Now safe sex was sex that was not life threatening.

So the spread of HIV, the underlying virus to AIDS, has global consequences both socially and culturally. It shook

the gay community to its core, it galvanized the medical community to collaborate on a cure, and it pushed for

worldwide access to retroviral drugs at a price that everyone in Africa, Asia, or anywhere could afford.

Essentially, this was a global epidemic, and it needed a global solution. And this was not a solution that would--

there were a lot of discussions about this, and it wasn't always seamless. But essentially, this notion that

everybody deserves and is owed access to retroviral drugs. That was an important medical discussion of the '80s

that I think continues to this day.

Last but not least, let's talk about shoulder pads, shall we? During the early 1980s, there was a resurgence of

interest in ladies' evening wear styles from the 1940s. You know, peplums, and batwing sleeves, and enormousshoulder pad. And this may or may not have had a connection with the end of the Cold War-- in a sense, returning

to a time before the Cold War, before the two superpowers sort of went to war with each other.

In a sense, fashion is our way back machine. And in the 1980s, the shoulder pad really was the way back. And it

routinely used this time in cut foam versions, especially in well-cut suits that were reminiscent of World War II. And

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a huge fan of these.

And in many ways, these shoulder pads were like an armor for women who, in the 1980s, were starting to break

through the corporate glass ceiling. So second-wave feminism managed to push women into full-time corporate

workforce. And if you've ever watched a film called Working Girl with Melanie Griffith, you'll get a sense of the size

of shoulder pads in the '80s. And you'll also get a sense for a particular tension in 1980s feminism.

Being a woman in a position of corporate power meant that you very often ran the risk of losing what people

thought was your femininity. And I think these two things-- I don't know what people mean by "femininity" anyway,

but that was sort of an important part of the debate. And if you watch the Sigourney Weaver character in this film,

she really tries hard to make it work, and she fails. And she's epically punished for it in the film.

The Melanie Griffith character, on the other hand, makes it work. And she wins. And you can really watch that film

and turn it upside-down and see it as either a critique of feminism, or some kind of half-hearted attempt at trying

to make feminism work in a context in which men continue to have most of the power.

Ultimately, I'd like to say that nobody wins the shoulder pad wars. That's just not a good thing. I'll refer you to

some epic scenes in the TV show Dynasty and Dallas. I think you can watch clips of these on YouTube.

These TV shows had global audiences, by the way. So the shoulder pads? They were not just in the US. Shoulder

pads spread across world fashion. And the '80s are definitely the decade when bigger was better, and that

included sort of pretend wars with epic enemies, hair, and shoulder pads.

Yep, that's the '80s. I have to say, I'm pretty happy we're not doing that anymore. Both of it-- Cold War and

shoulder pads. Bye, guys.