Acceso usuarios
Luigi Bonanate
This essay contains a commentary of the revelations made by General Nogueira to NATO concerning the weakness of the Soviet Union before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nogueira relates the facts and how they were perceived in military circles. The serious aspect, however, is that the information that was circulating at the time in military quarters was largely unfounded, the product of propaganda. Based on this information it was totally impossible to understand the developments which, particularly from 1975 (when the German question was officially "concluded"), would lead to the dissolution of bipolarity, the end of the Cold War and even the wiping of the USSR from the world map. This essay aims to reconstruct the main passages in world political history of the last quarter century, and suggests that a great transformation has taken place in international life due to the suspension, or breakdown, of the paradigm, which linked statehood to war. Since war has become "impossible" (due to the enormity of its possible nuclear consequences), history ought to come to a standstill. But since it is evolving -as the end of bipolarity demonstrates-, it means that some extraneous element has intervened to impose a shift in international relations. Although with scepticism, this essay concludes with the hypothesis that it was the shift in the war paradigm that changed the State. However, we are left with strong doubts as to whether this really has transformed the state and made it structurally pacific. Finally, it highlights the extent to which "interpretations" like those of Nogueira were misleading, albeit involuntarily so, and the extent to which such misrepresentation serves to control world public opinion.
