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.

Unlike the Western Gastarbeiter, the GDR labor migrants were recruited later (the 1980s), fewer (no more than 200,000), from other countries (Vietnam, Mozambique, Poland), objects of secret service surveillance (by the Stasi), and portrayed not as labor migrants, but recipients of “brotherly” socialist solidarity. Yet the motivation for recruiting them (labor shortages) and their experience of living among Germans were similar: segregated from the general population; objects of paternalism, exoticization, hypersexualization, dehumanization, racist violence; and enticed to leave with – modest – financial bonuses when no longer needed (1983 in Western, 1990 in Eastern Germany). What was fundamentally different was that the GDR portrayed itself as an anti-racist internationalist society; that the countries of origin of the labor migrants deducted a large portion of their earnings and never returned it when the “contract workers” (Vertragsarbeiter) were forced out after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall; and that, consequently, the deported labor migrants often ended up living in poverty at the margins of their societies rather than reaping the benefits of their hard work in the GDR.