In Edward Said’s account, the Soviet Union matters less as a self-contained place than as a pivot in the changing politics of East–West relations. Its invasion of Afghanistan and eventual dissolution form part of a wider argument: the Cold War’s end altered the political landscape without dissolving the entrenched oppositions, conflicts, and power imbalances through which the Orient continued to be represented and governed.

Cold War Conflict and Afghanistan

Said describes the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as one of the contests that sharpened the perceived division between East and West. In the years that followed, Islamic groups in countries including Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Occupied Territories challenged the status quo, while American and European responses helped shape the conflict’s wider context. These included the creation of Islamic brigades to fight the Russians from bases in Pakistan and, later, the Gulf War. In this account, Afghanistan is not an isolated episode: it belongs to an interconnected sequence of conflicts and interventions that intensified political anxiety and encouraged people to see themselves as either Westerners or Easterners.

Dissolution and Political Change

The Soviet Union’s dismemberment and the political independence attained by Eastern European countries mark a major change in the post-Cold War order. Yet Said stresses that this change did not bring an end to patterns of power and dominance. The disappearance of the Soviet Union was followed by a search, in some American scholarship and journalism, for a new imperial adversary, with Islam increasingly presented as a threatening and unified force. The old geopolitical opposition therefore persisted in altered form: the political framework changed, but the habit of organizing the world into opposing blocs endured.

Power After the Cold War

Said sets the Soviet Union’s dissolution against the continuing reach of the United States. The global South, once described as the Third World, remained caught in debt and fragmented among political entities facing poverty, disease, and underdevelopment. Decolonization’s non-aligned movement and its charismatic leaders had receded, while ethnic conflict and local wars returned in multiple regions. In Central America, the Middle East, and Asia, the United States remained dominant, with a still-unified Europe trailing behind. The Soviet Union’s end thus appears as a reordering of power, not its disappearance.

Significance in Said’s Argument

Said rejects the idea that the end of Cold War bipolarity simply gave way to a natural clash among sealed civilizations. He criticizes the claim that Western, Confucian, and Islamic civilizations are watertight compartments chiefly concerned with resisting one another. The Soviet Union’s collapse and the conflicts surrounding it instead illustrate how political events are interpreted through reductive frameworks that harden collective identities. For Said, understanding the period requires tracing those historical connections and the continuing structures of dominance rather than treating East and West as fixed, self-contained realities.