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The Soviet Union's new identity was enacted in Gorbachev's foreign policy of new thinking. Having abandoned the identity of vanguard and centre of the world revolutionary movement, interests in NLMs in the developing world, and in Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and China were transformed.

East European allies lost institutional entree into the Kremlin and discovered that their own post-Stalinist identities had little in common with the new Soviet understanding of itself as a European Social Democracy in the making. Ponomarev was infuriated by the fact that Gorbachev preferred to meet with Eurocommunists than with East European allies. As Ponomarev put it: 'How can this be? Scores of good communist leaders, and he meets with the bad Italians.'[325] Gorbachev met with the 'bad Italians' because he identified the Soviet future with the revisionist deviant discourse of Eurocommunism. What institutionalised resistance there was in Moscow to Gorbachev's new conceptualisation of relations with Eastern Europe was undercut by the arrival of Dobrynin and Aleksandr Yakovlev to the CCID, and the restoration of the MFA as the centre of Soviet foreign policy.[326] At an October 1985 meeting of the Warsaw Pact Political Consultative Council, Gorbachev told the assembled leaders that it was time for them to act independently of Moscow.[327] In a renunciation of the vanguard discourse of the previous thirty years, Gorbachev said that 'it is time we stopped running fraternal parties like obkoms ...If we disagree with them, then we have to make our point, not just excommunicate them, scheming and meddling in their internal affairs.'[328]

Gorbachev's expectation that East European states would remain Soviet allies, that they would become Social Democracies, along with the Soviet

Union, reflected his confidence in common human values.[329] Deviance was impossible in Eastern Europe since the Soviet vanguard identity was no more. In a meeting with East European Communist leaders in late i986, Gorbachev told them they could no longer rely on Moscow for support; they would have to generate their own domestic legitimacy.[330] By 1989, Gorbachev had proscribed the use of force in Eastern Europe, and not because the Soviet military was incapable, but because this 'would be the end of perestroika', at home; such actions were incompatible with Soviet identity and its implied interests in a liberal, law-governed, international order.[331] At the December i989 CC plenum, Yakovlev tied the new democratic Soviet identity to Soviet interests in Eastern Europe: 'If we have proclaimed freedom and democracy for ourselves, then how can we deny it to others?'[332]

The abandonment of the vanguard identity had similar effects on Soviet interests in the 'countries of socialist orientation' inherited from the thirty years of support for NLMs in the decolonisingworld. The most notable change was the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, a decision made by Gorbachev in principle in March 1985. But its formula of 'national reconciliation', that is, negotiated settlements resulting in coalition governments and subsequent elections, was pursued as well in Angola, Nicaragua and El Salvador.[333] From being a constituent part of the world revolutionary alliance, Gorbachev redefined the developing world as part of a global alliance against nuclear war and for the peaceful resolution of all conflicts. As in other realms of foreign policy, the discourse shifted radically because of the marginalisation of the CCID, and the empowerment of a minority point of view that had been in research institutes all along.[334]

Soviet interests in China were redefined in accordance with the new identity. China was no longer understood along socialist lines within the predominant discourse, though, importantly, within the CCID, they continued to treat China as a revisionist deviation, given DengXiaoping's market reforms. Contrariwise,

Soviet reformers seized on Chinese reforms as demonstrating the possibilities of the market at home. Control over policy on China shifted from the CCID to the MFA and the General Secretary, and so relations were normalised during the i980s such that by i998 trade between the two countries had already reached the level of the 1950s.[335]

Finally, the end of the Cold War with the West was associated with the new identity's acknowledgement of fallibility at home and abroad. Violations of the ideals of Social Democracy by Stalin and his successors had made the Soviet Union into an untrustworthy and threatening state; and its foreign policy actions in Afghanistan, Poland and Czechoslovakia, and its nuclear and conventional military build-up had exacerbated the problem. As a Great Power vanguard, the Soviet Union had encircled itself. By becoming a normal Social Democratic Great Power, the Soviet Union would ally with humanity against common threats, most importantly the danger of nuclear war. The Soviet Union would be more secure because the new discourse recognised the independent sovereignty of each state, thereby dissipating the illusory threat from a monolithic imperialist bloc headed by Washington. Gorbachev told a May 1986 MFA assembly that the most important direction of Soviet foreign policy should be European, and that the ministry was too Americanised.[336]

Gorbachev linked this new Soviet identity with the security dilemma previous Soviet behaviour had created. Reporting to the Politburo after a meeting with the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, Gorbachev told his colleagues that what she most wanted to know was 'What is the USSR today? She emphasized trust, and said the USSR had undermined that trust', but that the USSR's domestic reforms were making a deep impression on her, changing her image of the USSR.[337] Gorbachev told his Politburo colleagues that the West European leaders with whom he had met after the summit in Reykjavik with Reagan in November 1986 had said: 'you have no democracy . . . Let's say we trust you personally, but if you are gone tomorrow, then what? . . . Without democracy we will never achieve real trust in Soviet foreign policy abroad.'[338] The new Soviet identity treated public opinion in the West as real, and as partly the product of the Soviet Union's own foreign policy errors.[339]

Among the concessions Gorbachev made to change Soviet identity in the eyes of the West were: a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing announced in August 1985, repeatedly renewed until February 1987, by which time the US had conducted over twenty tests; acceptance of zero SS-20s, codified in the December 1987 INF Treaty; April 1988 agreement to withdraw from Afghanistan; a unilateral 500,000 cut in conventional forces in Eastern Europe announced in December 1988; delinkage of strategic weapons talks from SDI in September 1989; non-interference in the peaceful liberation of Eastern Europe, culminating in the velvet revolutions of November-December 1989; reunification of Germany accepted in July 1990; and support for the US war against Iraq, autumn 1990. Soviet insecurity was a self-inflicted wound that could be healed through not just changes in Soviet foreign policy, but a transformation of what the USSR was.[340]