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With the twin collapses of the end of the Soviet control of eastern Europe in 1989, and the end of the USSR in 1991, the Cold War ended. These events marked a profound change in the global security system. It left one superpower, the United States, thus terminating the bi-polar system which had dominated world politics for four decades. It altered the ideological space of global struggle; the Soviet model, already in trouble, has disintegrated. Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, other forces had already been changing international politics; the end of American economic hegemony and the growth of other cultural models. The collapse of the Soviet Union knocked out one remaining, and important, prop of an international system which had been undergoing massive change for some time.

Economically, the end of American hegemony over the world's market economies had been evolving for a number of years. The war torn economies of Europe and Japan revived and grew to challenge the US Hitherto underdeveloped regions of the world joined the" great game," not for empire, but for industrial wealth. Culturally, the grip of the American" model" had also been eroding for a number of years. While" the market" defeated" central planning," the notion of the market became complex. It proved the case that there was not only an American way of organizing markets, and politics, but rather a wide range of ways of doing