The shock waves of whathappened in 1989 and after helped make the 1990s a peculiarly interesting decade,and while all periods in history are by definition special, there was somethingvery special indeed about the years following the collapse of the socialistproject in the former USSR and Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, this has not beenreflected in the theoretical literature. Thus although there have been many bookson the end of the Cold War, even more onthe ‘new’ history of the Cold War itself, and several on the current state of internationalrelations after the ‘fall’, there has been relatively little work done so far on thelandscape of the new international system in formation. Moreover, while therehave been several post-Cold War controversies and debates—we think here ofFukuyama's attempt to theorize the end of history,Mearsheimer's realist reflections on the coming disorder in Europe, the various attempts to define the Americanmission without a Soviet enemy, and Huntington's prediction about a coming clash ofcivilizations—not much serious effort has been made to bringthese various discussions together in one single volume.

Much of the discussion of the end of the Cold War starts from the premise that Gorbachev's domestic reforms and foreign policy initiatives set in motion a process that radically transformed the nature of East-West relations. The emphasis on the Gorbachev period is natural enough given the consensus among Western and Russian scholars that Gorbachev's domestic and foreign policies were the proximate cause of the end of the Cold War. The near exclusive focus on the causes and consequences of Gorbachev's policies nevertheless frames the analytical puzzle too narrowly. The Cold War was not a static conflict that continued unchanged from its origins in the late 1940s to the advent of Gorbachev some forty years later. Gorbachev's initiatives ushered in the terminal stage of a process of accommodation that had been underway, albeit with fits and starts, for several decades. The Gorbachev foreign policy revolution needs to be put into broader historical context.

The end of the ColdWar was an event of great significance in human history, the consequences ofwhich demand to be glossed in broad terms rather than reduced to a meaninglessseries of events. Neorealist writers on international relations would disagree;most such see the end of the Cold War in terms of the collapse of a bipolarbalance of power system and its (temporary) replacement by the hegemony of thewinning state, which in turn will be replaced by a new balance. There isobviously a story to be told here, they would argue, but not a new kind of story,nor a particularly momentous one. Such shifts in the distribution of power are amatter of business as usual for the international system. The end of the Cold War wasa blip on the chart of modern history and analysts of international politics(educated in the latest techniques of quantitative and qualitative analysis inthe social sciences) ought, from this perspective, to be unwilling to drawgeneral conclusions on the basis of a few, albeit quite unusual, events. Suchmodesty is, as a rule, wise, but on this occasion it is misplaced. The Cold Warwas not simply a convenient shorthand for conflict between two superpowers, asthe neorealists would have it. Rather it encompassed deep-seated divisions aboutthe organization and content of political, economic and social life at alllevels.

‘Regardless of how you define or measure it, globalization is real and its impact on state power is significant’, says the globalist. ‘But how do you know?’ replies the sceptic. In this opening interchange one sees the origin of a controversy that after almost a decade shows few signs of abating. Globalists continue to maintain that there are big, fin-de-siècle transformations under way in the world at large, which can be laid at the door of something called globalization. This new era—popularized as a ‘world without borders’ and symbolized by the dismantling of the Berlin Wall—ostensibly came into its own where the Cold War left off. Globalists of all shades see a new world order in the making, marked by the de-territorialization of economic and political affairs, the ascendance of highly mobile, transnational forms of capital, and the growth of global forms of governance. By the same token, globalization sceptics, scrutinizing very similar empirical terrain, continue to pose the same insistent question. The dispute between globalists and sceptics is not about the reality of change; it is about the nature and significance of the changes under way as well as the driving forces behind them. ‘There is something out there’, agree the sceptics, but it is not necessarily, or even primarily, responsible for what is going on ‘in here’. The changes that fundamentally interest globalists are usually less economic than political. That is to say that their efforts to analyse or demonstrate economic change—the extent to which national economies have become more interconnected through trade, production, finance, and the growing web of international rules and institutions—are often a prelude to the political project.

When the BerlinWall was breached in 1989 and the Cold War ended, specialists in the field ofinternational relations (IR) readily acknowledged that it was necessary to takestock and assess the historical significance of these events. Unsurprisingly, noagreement has been reached. For most realists, the events reflect no more than animportant shift in the power structure of the international system. But forliberals, the forty years of Cold War are now depicted not as a struggle forpower, but as an ideological battle between capitalism and communism from whichcapitalism has emerged triumphant. The significance of this development for thefuture of international relations is difficult to gauge. As a key concept,‘capitalism’ has largely been the preserve of the Marxian fringe inIR. It did not resonate amongst most mainstream theorists in the field, whetherrealist or liberal. The concept was most familiar as a term of communist propaganda.It was avoided by many specialists during the Cold War era who failed to see howcapitalism could promote an understanding of superpower relations. But with theend of the Cold War now linked to the triumph of capitalism, it is impossible forliberals, in particular, to discuss the future of the international systemwithout some evaluation of the unfolding international role being played bycapitalism.

The greatest worksof political and social theory are often the shortest, and none more so than thetext of Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History, written just overtwo hundred years ago in 1784: it is all of thirteen pages long, and advances athesis that should concern us all. In essence, it argues that history can, and tosome degree does, move in a progressive direction—one in which the domesticorganisation of states on an increasingly legal, constitutional, basis will leadto greater cooperation between states and ultimately to some form of worldgovernment. Kant's hope was ‘that after many reformative revolutions,a universal cosmopolitan condition, which Nature has as her ultimate purpose,will come into being as the womb wherein all the original capacities of the humanrace can develop’. There are many readings of Professor Kant, not least when this textis combined with others. Yet to put it in modern terms, not entirely traducing hismeaning, his work can be read as envisaging a world of constitutional regimes andliberal democracies, one that will be without war. This is a bold thesis withmany unproven assumptions: but it is not entirely implausible, on eithertheoretical or historical grounds. Abused as it may have been by the twin menacesof a modish post-1989 triumphalism, and a postmodernist pessimism, it nonethelesssets us a goal that can, and should, command attention. Two centuries later, thegoals of Enlightenment, and a measured concept of progress, retain an, albeitchastened, validity in international as in domestic affairs.

Marx always predicted that the development of capitalism as a socialsystem would be punctuated by major crises, which would become progressivelydeeper and broader until the system itself was swept away. What he could not haveforeseen was that the development of Marxism as a theory would also be marked bycrises, both of belief and of method, which have periodically threatened itssurvival. In this respect at least Marxism has achieved a unity of theory andpractice. No crisis has been so profound for Marxism, however, as the crisisbrought about by the collapse of Communism in Europe after 1989. With the disappearance after seventy years of the Soviet Union,the first workers' state and the first state to proclaim Marxism as itsofficial ideology, Marxism as a critical theory of society suddenly seemedrudderless, no longer relevant to understanding the present or providing a guideas to how society might be changed for the better. Marx at last was to bereturned to the nineteenth century where many suspected he had alwaysbelonged.

Many expected that after the Cold War, there would be peace, order, increasing prosperity in expanding markets and the extension and eventual consolidation of civil and political rights. There would be a new world order, and it would in these ways be liberal. In international politics, the United States would be supreme. It would through security treaties command the peace in western Europe and east Asia; through its economic power command it in eastern Europe and Russia; through clients and its own domination command it in the Middle East; through tacit understanding command it in Latin America; and, in so far as any state could, command it in Africa also. It could choose whether to cooperate in the United Nations, and if it did not wish to do so, be confident that it would not be disablingly opposed by illiberal states. In the international markets, it would be able to maintain holdings of its bonds. In the international financial institutions, it would continue to be decisive in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; it would be an important influence in the regional development banks; and it would be powerful in what it was to insist in 1994 should be called the World (rather than Multinational) Trade Organisation. Other transactions in the markets, it is true, would be beyond the control of any state. But they would not be likely to conflict with the interests of the United States (and western Europe) in finance, investment and trade, and would discipline other governments.

The confessions of a neoclassical realist

In 1972, Hedley Bullwrote that ‘the sources of facile optimism and narrow moralism never dryup, and the lessons of the “realists” have to be learnt afresh byevery new generation.‘ He proceeded to claim, withundue emphasis, that ‘in terms of the academic study of internationalrelations, the stream of thinking and writing that began with Niebuhr and Carrhas long run its course.’ The scholarly problems with classical realisttheory are indeed severe. However, it would be a most grievous error toconsign such theory to the bin marked ‘yesterday's solutions foryesterday's problems.’ If the academic study of internationalrelations can find little save period-piece interest in the ideas of theclassical realists, that is more a comment upon the competence of scholarshiptoday than upon any change in world conditions.

Until the secondhalf of the 1990s, Western commentary about the former Soviet Union and the newRussia basically divided into two camps. On the one side stood those who not onlywelcomed the end of the USSR but looked forward to the ‘brave newworld’ they hoped would be built on the debris left behind by the oldorder. Having failed to anticipate the demise of Soviet communism,< theoptimists now predicted a bright new capitalist future for Russia. With excellent access to those in power, theywere clearly the most favoured group with Western governments in general and theAmerican government in particular. Certainly, within the US foreign policy eliteit was broadly assumed that successful reform in Russia and Russia'sintegration into the larger capitalist system, was both feasible and necessary.As Strobe Talbott, the architect of American strategy towards Russia, observed inthe early days of the Clinton administration, reform in Russia was not just aboutRussia but the shape of the new international order waiting to be born in thewake of the Cold War. Others were always moresceptical.

The changingstructure of European order poses, for any student of international relations,some fundamental questions about the evolution of world politics. Concepts of European order and of the Europeanstate system are, after all, central to accepted ideas of internationalrelations. Out of the series of conflicts and negotiations—religious wars,coalitions to resist first the Hapsburg and then the Bourbon attempt at Europeanhegemony—developed ideas and practices which still structure thecontemporary global state system: the equality of states; international law asregulating relations among sovereign and equal states; domestic sovereignty asexclusive, without external oversight of the rules of domestic order. The‘modern’ state system, modern scholars now agree, did not springfully-clothed from the Treaty of Westphalia at the close of the ThirtyYears' War; it evolved through a succession of treaties and conferences,from 1555 to 1714. It remains acceptable, nevertheless, to describe the Europeanstate order as built around the Westphalian system.

As we enterthe new millennium, the Third World, far from disappearing, is becoming global.The dynamic of economic driven globalization is resulting in the globalreproduction of Third World problems. Growing inequality, risk and vulnerabilitycharacterize not simply the state system, but an emerging global social order.This is part of an historical process underway for five centuries: the expansionof capitalism across the globe. Technological developments speed up the process.The demise of the communist bloc and the associated rejection of ‘realexisting socialism’ as a mode of economic organization have provided aspecific additional fillip to the reconfiguration of the ‘ThirdWorld’. The 1980s, and more particularly the 1990s, have witnessed themainstreaming of liberal economic ideology via the Washington consensus. This approach to development has been legitimated in severalglobal conferences such as United Nations Conference on Environment andDevelopment (UNCED) and the Copenhagen Social Summit. It has been appliedpractically through institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF),the World Bank and World Trade Organization (WTO). In its wake we have seen adeepening of existing inequalities between and within states, with a resultingtension—contradiction even—between the development targets agreed bythe United Nations (UN), and the policies pursued by international organizationsand governments to facilitate such results.

Typical of the opposing trends that have been a part of the decade 1989 to 1999, many of the states in the Asia-Pacific in these ten years have shifted from ‘miracle’ status to crisis. From being the political and economic model for other countries in both the developing and the developed world, they now signal how best to avoid the less savoury pitfalls of rapid development. The miracle status, deriving from two decades or more of impressive growth rates on the basis of a presumed distinctive politico-economic model, was supposed to herald a Pacific Century. The key characteristics of this new era were a newfound regional coherence and a related transfer of economic and above all political power from the Atlantic community towards Asia-Pacific. The crisis, in turn, is seen as marking the end of that shift in the economic and political centres of gravity.

At the inception ofthe twenty-first century—not to mention the next millennium—books on‘the American Century’ proliferate monthly, if not daily. We nowhave The American Century Dictionary, The American CenturyThesaurus, and even The American Century Cookbook; perhaps theAmerican Century baseball cap or cologne is not far behind. With one or twoexceptions, the authors celebrate the unipolar pre-eminence and comprehensiveeconomic advantage that the United States now enjoys. Surveys of public opinionshow that most people agree: the American wave appears to be surging just as theyear 2000 beckons. Unemployment and inflation are both at twenty-year lows,sending economists (who say you can't get lows for both at the same time)back to the drawing board. The stock market roars past the magic 10,000 mark, andthe monster federal budget deficit of a decade ago miraculously metamorphosesinto a surplus that may soon reach upwards of $1 trillion. Meanwhile PresidentWilliam Jefferson Clinton, not long after a humiliating impeachment, is rated in1999 as the best of all postwar presidents in conducting foreign policy (adizzying ascent from eighth place in 1994), according to a nationwide poll by theChicago Council on Foreign Relations. This surprising result might also, ofcourse, bespeak inattention: when asked to name the two or three most importantforeign policy issues facing the US, fully 21 per cent of the publiccouldn't think of one (they answered ‘don't know’), and amere seven per cent thought foreign policy issues were important to thenation. But who cares, when all is for the best in the best ofall possible worlds?