(apologies in advance about shitty hotmail formatting)
MP:
>Shane is right about Deng. I think he's far more significant. Another is Eisenhower. Without him, no NATO, no EU. He certainly had as much or more single responsibility for building the cold>war structures as Gorbachev had in ending them.
>The thing about Gorbachev is that he came at the end of line of reform leaders that the central committee was throwing up. It's very easy to believe that if it wasn't him, it would have been the>next or the next, and that the committee had primed themselves to follow him before he led. And insofar as he did lend a personal touch, there's a lot of case to be made that he fucked up his>mission badly. It's not accident that he was washed away in history's flood. He helped.
JG:
Last time I checked Deng and Eisenhower were dead. The initial premise was "living" political figure of utmost world-historical significance.
But I agree with you about Gorbachev. Structure was more important than agency in this case. And Andropov, Ligachev helped pave the way.
Dunno who I would nominate as a better candidate though. Yep, that's a cop-out -- a cop-out, right here. Step right u, come see the cop-out!