International relations from the early 1980s to the late 1990s examining tensions, rivalries and linkages not merely between the Western and Communist blocs, but also within them, as well as studying the events reflecting the shift from the era of bipolarity to the post-Cold War world. The aim is to address from a historical perspective the diplomacy of the end of the East-West conflict, China’s exit from the Cold War, German reunification, Soviet disintegration, Yugoslavia’s bloody implosion, European integration, and NATO enlargement. The domestic bases of as well as the political relations between the leading figures (Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Reagan, Bush, Deng, Thatcher, Major, Mitterrand, Delors and Kohl) and respective government machineries will be covered. Major topics include Thatcherism; Reaganomics; Gorbachev's new thinking; the reunification of Germany; the collapse of the Soviet Union and its wider empire; the Kuwait crisis and Yugoslavian Wars; the Single European Act, the Maastricht Treaty and the Euro; the security arrangements of Russia and NATO after 1991; America’s unipolar moment.