Author Archive

Jonathan Wright

Jonathan Wright recently retired as Professor in International Relations at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow in Politics at Christ Church. He is author of Gustav Stresemann: Weimar's Greatest Statesman, Germany and the Origins of the Second World War, and co-editor of Liberalism, Anti-Semitism and Democracy, Britain and Germany in Europe, 1945-90, Mental Maps in the Era of Two World Wars and Mental Maps in the Era of the Early Cold War 1945-68.

This review of Mental Maps in the Era of Détente and the End of the Cold War 1968-1991 is as much sweeping as it is detailed. Jonathan Wright highlights the main arguments each contributor has made to this edited volume dedicated to the thinking that prevailed during the closing decades of the Cold War. How did world leaders think? How did their thinking change and how did this impact the course of the Cold War? On behalf of his co-editor Steven Casey, as well as of each contributing author, Jonathan Wright makes the case that, “The great crises of the twentieth century sometimes allowed leaders even with very different ideologies to find something in common, a shared orientation in their mental maps.”