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 snapshot is a tapestry of voices from the major groups who came after the second great caesura, 1989, the end of Cold War and the opening toward the East: the ethnic Germans (2.3 million after 1987 and Gorbachev’s Perestroika) and 230,000 Jewish “quota refugees” (from 1990 onwards), both from the former Soviet Union and subjects of subsequent chapters; and many others, such as the ethnic Germans from Poland or Polish labor migrants who work in Germany but continue to live in Poland. It also touches on the 400,000 Soviet soldiers who left the former GDR until 1994 and the Eastern German “interior” migrants who began commuting to jobs in Western Germany.

The scholarly debate on the causes of the end of the Cold War has placed significant emphasis on the role of communist economic stagnation in bringing about the collapse of communism. This chapter brings a new material factor – communist sovereign debt – to the forefront, and in so doing, it offers a redefinition of the materialist explanation for the end of the Cold War. The global financial history of the end of the Cold War has four important implications. First, it makes the timing of the end of the Cold War far less contingent upon Gorbachev’s rise than previously thought. Second, it allows us to refine the causal connection between Soviet relative decline and the peaceful nature of the end of the Cold War. Third, global financial history transforms our understanding of Western leverage over the events that comprise the end of the Cold War. And fourth, the history of sovereign debt in the Eastern Bloc de-exceptionalizes the revolutions of 1989 in world history and places them within the context of broader global currents that continue to this day.

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.