Conclusion: The Shape of Things to Come?

Abstract

The millennium approaches: the rusty Iron Curtain has fallen and there is much talk of the ‘New World Order’. Political geography has grown up in a world composed of sovereign states. It matured on a planet contested between two superpowers — a world in which the rules were stark and simple. But that world has gone, leaving far more scope for hypothesis and uncertainty. In the old world of the 1950s and 1960s there did not seem to be a great deal that was wrong that could not have been fixed at a summit conference between the leaders of the two superpowers. Any modern summit would have to accommodate a coachload of leaders, and looming over them would be challenges of a global nature, many of which they might not fix even if they wanted to. In the last years of this century, old certainties are undermined and new rules are needed to make sense of what is happening.