Publisher's Synopsis
This book is a comparative study of the role that domestic factors play in shaping the form and content of Western policy toward the Soviet Union. It demonstrates that these factors are at the heart of many of the Allied conflicts in security policy over the past few years and are likely to remian so as the West seeks to coordinate its approach to Gorbachev's Soviet Union.;The opening chapter explores the general relationship between domestic politics and the evolution of postwar Western attitudes towards the Soviet Union. It demonstrates how the ideological character of the Soviet adversary helped to create an absolute image of the Soviet threat, and how this gave rise to a very special consensus during the Cold War - one that helped determine which political forces would govern in the West and what kinds of issues could be legitimately debated. As the Soviet threat became more relative with time and changing strategic conditions, political controversy over policy has once again emerged. This has made the coordination of policy more difficult at both the national and alliance levels. Indeed, it has made harmony in the Western approach to the Soviet Union very much a function of how compatible the domestic political necessities of different allies are, above all those of the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany.;Six country studies follow on Great Britain, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States. The decision to have a Japanese study was based on that country's importance and the conviction that more needs to be understood about the factors influencing Japanese policy, despite the fact that there are few parallels between the evolutions that have taken place in Japan and the other countries.;Each of the country studies examines the evolution of policy toward the Soviet Union in light of changing domestic contexts. Although the emphasis varies according to national peculiarities, the chapters concentrate in analyzing the same two clusters of factors: images, that is the origins of assumptions that inform policy; and process, how domestic political structures influence the formulation of policy. The analysis of images concentrates on how countries perceive the various elements of the security policy equation: the evolution of self-image; images of their allies and their positions in the Western Alliance; images of the Soviet Union, the threat it poses, and how both have changed over the years; and the image of the means to security in light of changes in all these variables. The analysis of process focuses on the domestic factors which have been important to formulating policy toward the Soviet Union and how their influence has been brought to bear.
