Abstract
The dawn of a new year, let alone a new millennium, is conventionally accompanied by a sense of drawing a line under the past: the hope is that the tensions and failures that marked the previous time will not recur. In the case of 2000 this is, if anything, all the stronger because of the most marked change associated with the end of the twentieth century, the termination of major inter-state conflict with the end of the cold war. If to this is added a sense of the end of an era of ideological contestation, and an infectious, if not entirely convincing, optimism associated with technological change, then the reasons for moving on, for denying the relevance of the past, may be all the greater.
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Notes
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994).
This summary draws heavily on those who have analysed the conflicts, and resolutions, of the twentieth century: Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957);
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes; Gabriel Kolko, Century of War (New York: The New Press, 1994).
Quoted in Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (London: Heinemann, 1973, p. 121).
Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (London: Verso, 1997);
Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conflict with Tribal Peoples (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998);
Lisa Potts, The World Labour Market. A History of Migration (London: Zed, 1990).
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992).
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© 2001 Fred Halliday
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Halliday, F. (2001). The Shadow of the Twentieth Century. In: The World at 2000. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-333-99427-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-333-99427-6_2
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