1985; First cracks in the Berlin Wall?

In November 1985 Reagan and Gorbachev started a process of rapprochement at the Geneva Summit. Through a series of five summits in the period of 1985-1988 Reagan and Gorbachev tried to improve relations and to reduce the nuclear threat. This thesis analyzes the meaning of these summits in the process of ending the Cold War. More specific, the efforts of Reagan and Gorbachev in ending the Cold War are described and analyzed. Therefore the central research question is: how and when did Reagan and Gorbachev end the Cold War? In order to answer the central research question this thesis combines a description of existing theories on the end of the Cold War with an analysis of a set of primary sources concerning the summits between Reagan and Gorbachev. The described theories are related to three types of international relations theories: i.e. realism, idealism, and institutionalism. The primary sources cover the entire period of preparing for a summit, the actual meetings, and the aftermath of the meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev in the period of 1985-1988. This is the same for all five summits. The primary sources are divers and vary between advice reports to both leaders, transcripts of the meetings between them, letters which Reagan and Gorbachev exchanged, and diaries of the historical actors involved in these summits. The memoirs of these historical actors proved to be a useful addition to the analysis of the primary sources. This thesis will show that it is impossible to pinpoint one moment in time as being the end of the Cold War, not even such a strong symbolic event as the fall of the Berlin Wall. The end of the Cold War was a process which started with Reagan and Gorbachev meeting each other for the first time in Geneva in 1985, and it gradually ended over time. It depends on what definition of the Cold War one adheres to that determines how and when the Cold War ended. Reagan and his advisers thought the psychological and ideological end of the Cold War happened before Reagan left office in January 1989, while Gorbachev thought the Cold War ended after the Malta Summit in December 1989. Although the key characteristic of the Cold War, i.e. the nuclear threat, started to diminish as late as July 1991 with the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, thus placing the end of the Cold War even further in time.