The End of a Millennium: Changing Structures of World Order and the Post-Cold War Division of Labour

Abstract

A valuable geopolitical pedagogy, George Bush’s 1991 State of the Union Message triggered a public discourse over world order. Urging cooperative action to end aggression, he called upon the global community to ‘fulfill the long-held promise of a new world order — where brutality will go unrewarded and aggression will meet collective resistance’ (quoted in Safire, 1991). Bush envisaged an era of peace and stability in which the United States, in conjunction with the United Nations, will see that order is maintained. The Gulf War was what he called a ‘defining moment’, a harbinger of the new order; the Gulf crisis provided the context for the redefinition of global alignments.

Some of the ideas in this paper, first presented at the Dalhousie University Workshop on ‘Political Economy and Foreign Policy in the Third World in the 1990s’, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 26–8 September 1991, are elaborated upon in my ‘Global Restructuring of Production and Migration’, in Yoshikazu Sakamoto (ed.), Global Structural Change (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1993).