Russia and the Idea of the West

by Robert D. English

Release Date: 15 July, 2000

Edition: Paperback

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The Thinking Person's Guide to the End of the Cold War

Robert English makes a compelling case for the utility of ideas in changing national policy, which one hopes might have relevence to the current international crisis. National identity, English maintains, is not immutable. He argues that intellectuals play a key role in creating new identities -- they are "storytellers" who can be agents of belief change even in countries "where the state controls discourse over history and politics, imposing an identity from above through its monopoly over education, the media, and scholarship." Taking on those on the right who embrace the idea that Reagan and SDI won the war as well as those on the left who don't believe containment had an effect, English offers a narrative that seems far more convincing. Ideas and intellectuals, he argues, matter.