Date of Graduation

2003

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

This work examines the political and academic career of Zbigniew Brzezinski. Born in Warsaw in 1928 Brzezinski was a personification of the trials of interwar Poland that would culminate in the combined Nazi-Soviet invasion that would trigger World War II. The son of a Polish diplomat the young Brzezinski witnessed the war from a diplomatic outpost in Montreal where he developed an academic interest in the affairs of the Soviet Union. In 1950 Brzezinski moved on to Harvard where he gained an academic reputation examining the phenomenon of "totalitarianism" and the fragmenting nuances of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. Brzezinski later became instrumental in advocating a "peaceful engagement" toward Eastern Europe that he believed offered more hope than the largely rhetorical "liberation" policy being advocated by the Eisenhower Administration. Moving into the 1960s Brzezinski became the most prominent advocate of weaning the Soviet bloc nations toward a more "western" social-democratic order. Though temporarily derailed with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Brzezinski continued to advocate "peaceful engagement" toward Eastern Europe as an alternative to what he described as the "benign neglect" and "moral indifference" being formulated by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Brzezinski's key role as President Carter's national security adviser introduced the concept of "human rights" that greatly inspired the nascent opposition groups in the region that would culminate in the more dramatic revolutions that swept the region in 1989. In the 1990s Brzezinski became perhaps the most prominent advocate of expanding NATO in an effort to keep the recently liberated nations of East-Central Europe from falling back into the Russian orbit or becoming politically destabilized as a result of the massive political and structural deficiencies imposed by four decades of Soviet-style communism.

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