Explaining the Long Peace: Systemic Stability and Change through Security Regimes

This paper explains 'the Long Peace' during the Cold War years and the peaceful transformation of the international system in the early 1990's. It does so through laying out the effects of institutions in general and the United States-Soviet security regimes in particular on superpower and interbloc relations. It argues that security regimes institutionalized the Cold War, stabilized the international system, and provided some specific principles and norms for managing interbloc relations through which the major powers were able to change the international system peacefully. The creation of security regimes in the first place and later their effect on the systemic change, however, became possible thanks to learning occurred in the United States and Soviet foreign policies in the 1960's and mid-1980's, respectively. The relative peace—the Long Peace—since 1945 and the peaceful transformation of the international system in the early 1990s demonstrate that institutional cooperation matters and, in fact, institutionalism better explains international relations in the era concerned than structural theories such as realism..