The question is how to discuss productively the role ideas played in this complex outcome. To exploit the large existing literature and to try to simplify a vast topic, we suggest focusing on change in Soviet foreign policy and the role of new thinking. Instead, the goal is to try to sharpen our understanding of the relationships between ideas and material, political, individual, and institutional factors in accounting for the Cold War's end. Ideas may spread but may not simply be accepted or replicated. They may be transformed or appropriated in ways that were unintended.
Analyses here point to how ideas become embedded in institutions, organizations, or discourse.
Many scholars contend that there is something about how the Cold War ended that should cause scholars to rethink the ways they have traditionally studied the role of ideas in international politics. A central purpose of this workshop is to make these arguments more explicit and to establish their connection to our empirical knowledge about the end of the Cold War. In this vein, analysts attempt to trace the causal link between ideas and specific political outcomes, for example by assessing the proportion of variance explained by ideas as opposed to other independent variables. Ideas are thus a residual category which help to explain what interests and power alone cannot explain. A second approach holds that interests are only conceived in the context of a framework of ideas.