Introduction

Abstract

We are currently in a period of global change. But, more than this, it is a period of change which is of especial importance: ‘As the twentieth century draws to its close, we are becoming aware of historic transformations of human society.’¹ Not only are the transformations ‘historic’ but they have been happening with great rapidity: ‘over a period of less than three years — from major shifts in Soviet foreign policy by 1988 to the collapse of a conservative coup in Moscow in 1991 — the world underwent a cataclysm that was something like the functional equivalent of World War III.’² The extent and the speed of the change has, indeed, been astonishing: the ‘cataclysm impressively demonstrates that radical change can sometimes happen with astonishing speed’ and the ‘transformation is as astounding in retrospect as it was at the time.’³ Fred Halliday sums it up in these words:

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the world underwent a strategic and intellectual earthquake, comparable in [its] effects — though not, at least initially, in the human suffering — [to those] caused by the First and Second World Wars. A hegemonic system, and its attendant distribution of power, collapsed. The map of states was redrawn, and around twenty new sovereign states were created. A degree of uncertainty unparalleled since the 1930s prevailed in the international arena.⁴