The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War by Michael Cotey Morgan
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Author | Cindy Ewing |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702020912468 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
determination and human rights, for instance, circulated through imperial net-
works, they nonetheless presaged global decolonization. As Britain and France
grappled with colonial independence, the US insular empire similarly dissolved: the
Philippines gained independence on 4 July 1946; Puerto Rico became an overseas
Commonwealth in 1952; Hawaii was incorporated as the 50th state in 1959; and
the Cuban Revolution swept away US influence the same year. The US Civil
Rights movement, too, can be understood in relation to the “global trends that
brought the Western empires to a close” (665).
The demise of the Western empires, Hopkins concludes, opened our own period
of “postcolonial globalization,” in which “the international order changed in ways
that altered established patterns of commerce and regional integration, questioned
the sovereignty of the nation-state, and turned world opinion against imperial dom-
ination (696).” Though the United States attained a position of immense power and
influence, facilitating the incredible growth of global trade and interconnectedness,
Hopkins nonetheless argues that the US’ position “differs markedly from that of its
European imperial predecessors (692).” Indeed, he prefers the term “hegemony” to
distinguish the US’s contemporary geopolitical status from old-fashioned imperial-
ism—an interpretation sure to provoke debate among international relations schol-
ars and the various schools of American historians. Imperial historians, moreover,
may wonder about the absence of settler expansionism from Hopkins’s account,
with its emphasis on international dynamics over the extension of US sovereignty
across the continent. But, weighing in at over 900 pages, endnotes included, with
erudition and ambition throughout, American Empire is hard to fault for either its
provocations or omissions. Casual readers and specialists alike will find it excep-
tionally innovative and readable, and it is difficult to see how future studies of global
history or “America in the world” can be written without it.
Michael Cotey Morgan
The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2018. 424 pp. $35.00 (hardcover) ISBN: 978-0-6911-7606-2
Reviewed by: Cindy Ewing (cindy.ewing@utoronto.ca), University of Toronto
For Leonid Brezhnev, the signing of the Helsinki Final Act on 1 August 1975 was a
tearful victory “unprecedented in history,” affirming the Soviet Union’s legitimacy,
territorial status quo, and Leninist approach to international relations (211).
Michael Morgan’s masterful account of the Conference on Security and
Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and its founding document, however, shows oth-
erwise. The CSCE was hardly the resounding success that the Soviets claimed, or
the “quid pro quo” often described by other scholars in which the United States,
Canada, and its Western European allies merely exchanged the recognition of
Eastern Europe’s postwar borders for a vague commitment to human rights.
Instead, the negotiations, which extended over three years beginning with prepa-
ratory talks in 1972 and ending with the Helsinki summit in the summer of 1975,
106 International Journal 75(1)
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