Introduction

Abstract

It is now a commonplace for people to suggest that the world as we know it was transformed at the end of the 1980s-early 1990s. The cold war, which had been the principal factor structuring world politics in the post-war period, ended, and with it a discernibly new era dawned. One writer saw the fall of communism, first in Eastern Europe and then in its heartland the USSR, as defining the end of what he called the ‘Short Twentieth Century’. Hobsbawm’s terminology is useful. It highlights the way in which the collapse of communism effectively brought to an end the pattern of international politics (at least in Europe) generated by the outcome of the First World War. The great contest between the capitalist West and the communist East, a contest focused on Europe but the effects of which were to be found in all corners of the globe, had ended, with some Western triumphalists interpreting this as the complete victory of their way of life. As events soon showed, particularly in the Persian Gulf and the former Yugoslavia, such views not only were optimistic, but may also have significantly under-estimated the cost of the Western ‘victory’. But even if these sorts of judgements are problematic, what is not in question is that the dynamics of international politics have been altered.