Conclusion

The collapse of communism in the Soviet satellites surprised the world, for U.S.-bloc analysts had reported throughout the 1980s that the Soviet empire was in dangerously robust health. Yet no one should have been unaware of dissent or economic discontent. Since the 1960s, rebellious youth, ethnic and racial minorities, and women had all been condemning conditions across the West, along with criticizing the threat posed by the cold war. By the early 1980s, wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, protests against scarcity in the Soviet bloc, the power of oil-producing states, and the growing political force of Islam had cost the superpowers their resources and reputations. Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States tried to put their postindustrial and cold war houses in order. Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union—aimed at political and economic improvements—brought on collapse.

Glasnost and perestroika were supposed to bring about the high levels of prosperity enjoyed outside the Soviet bloc. Across the West, including the USSR, an unprecedented set of technological developments had transformed businesses, space exploration, and the functioning of government. Technological advances also had an enormous impact on everyday life. Work changed as society reached a stage called postindustrial, in which the service sector predominated. New patterns of family life, new relationships among the generations, and revised standards for sexual behavior also characterized these years. It was only in the United States and western Europe, however, that the full consumer benefits of postindustrialization reached ordinary people. The attainment of a thoroughgoing consumer, service, and high-tech society demanded levels of efficiency, coordination, and cooperation unknown in the Soviet bloc.

Many complained, nonetheless, about the dramatic changes resulting from postindustrial development. The protesters of the late 1960s addressed postindustrial society’s concentrations of bureaucratic and industrial power (often enabled by technology), social inequality, and environmental degradation. In the Soviet sphere, protests were continuous but were little heeded until the collapse of Soviet domination of eastern Europe in 1989. Soon communism would be overturned in the USSR itself. However, the triumph of democracy in the former Soviet Empire opened an era of painful adjustment for hundreds of millions of people. Amid this rapid change was the growing awareness—via technology’s instantaneous coverage of events across the globe—that the world’s peoples were more tightly connected than ever before.