The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism

Why did the Cold War come to a peaceful end? And why did neoliberal economics sweep across the world in the late twentieth century? In The Triumph of Broken Promises, Fritz Bartel argues that the answer to these questions is one and the same. The Cold War began as a competition between capitalist and communist governments to expand their social contracts as they raced to deliver their people a better life. But the economic shocks of the 1970s made promises of better living untenable on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Energy and financial markets placed immense pressure on governments to discipline their social contracts. Rather than make promises, political leaders were forced to break them.  This pressure to impose discipline, Bartel argues, produced the momentous events that comprise the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberal global capitalism.

Fritz Bartel is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, where he is also a member of the Albritton Center for Grand Strategy.  As a dissertation, his book, The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2022), won the Oxford University Press USA Dissertation Prize in International History from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).  Along with Nuno P. Monteiro, he co-edited Before and After the Fall: World Politics and the End of the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2021).  His research has been published in Enterprise & Society and Diplomatic History.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.