greatly determine the course of future conflict resolution--the way we handle
the next cold wars, not to mention the hot ones.

While our main focus is directed at the question Why did the Cold War
end? some of the contributors address a range of other, but related, questions
such as Did the West win the Cold War? Has the Cold War even ended?
Could it have ended sooner? Why were the experts surprised? What does its
ending mean? How does our conception of its beginning affect our interpre-
tation of the events of 1989 and 1990? What was the Cold War's nature?
Was it a genuine conflict or was it contrived? In what way might its lessons
shape the future? and Did the Cold War have a fundamentally different
meaning to the Chinese than it did to the other antagonists? As Joseph A.
Camilleri argues in Chapter 15, "the full significance of these events [the
ending of the Cold War] cannot be grasped unless they are placed within a
wider historical context, which means taking full account of the continuities
as well as discontinuities between the Cold War and post-Cold War peri-
ods." ² In his analysis, he even goes one step further--as do some of the other
authors--and identifies political and economic trends that had their origins
in circumstances predating 1945 and extending as far back as the nineteenth
century. The contributors, therefore, approach the title question of the book
not only from the different perspectives categorized under the book's main
sectional headings, but from a variety of time-frames. Their different ap-
proaches are then given added meaning in the concluding chapter by means
of a macroanalytical framework constructed by Michael E. Salla. His integra-
tive analysis provides an overall focus enabling the reader to do more than
pick and choose from a menu of explanations the "right" or "preferred"
answer. Instead, each of the separate explanations can be seen to interweave
and illuminate one area of an expanding total picture about this highly
complex event.

Not that any of the book's authors would claim a monopoly of truth for
his or her specific contribution. As was evident from the lively but amicable
discussions at the symposium, each presentation was offered more in the
nature of a point of view--albeit a carefully researched and reasoned one.
Such an attitude stands in marked contrast to the factor that gave rise to the
symposium--and now the book--in the first place. What motivated the
project, of course, was a perception that a unitary, pervasive, and rigid
explanation was enveloping Western thinking about the Cold War's ending
and that, while every orthodoxy is potentially dangerous and should be
subject to constant examination, this one has particularly pernicious impli-
cations.

Without wanting to overstate their role, I believe social scientists have an
obligation to ensure that an absence of thought does not degenerate into an

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