El Mundo En Los Últimos Veinte Años. Bailes

CIDOB INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK 2009 KEYS TO FACILITATE THE MONITORING OF THE SPANISH FOREIGN POLICY AND THE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN 2008

The World in the last 20 years, tendencies and evolution. Alyson J.K. Bailes

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The World in the last 20 years, tendencies and evolution

anyabsolute priorities. The question of overall global power structures and ‘polarity’ imposes itself as a starting point. The parallel economic question about the apparent triumph and possible crisis of capitalism demands inclusion in any summary written during 2008. Changes in the content and balance of the security agenda are considered in general terms, and trends relating to armaments anddisarmament are then looked at more deeply. The last of the five themes is the European method of multilateral integration: is it the ‘best of the bad’ solutions for 21st-century governance? The text ends with brief words on preparing for the future. Who rules the world?

Alyson J.K. Bailes, Visiting professor at the University of Iceland

Given the dominance of the very young in fields like pop musicand sport, international society is being shaped today by cultural icons who were not even born in 1989. Given the tendency, even in large countries, to look for younger recruits to decision-making, there are many government ministers serving today who were still in lower or middle school when the Berlin Wall fell. In general this is healthy since a new age needs new solutions, and new eyes canusually see new needs more clearly. Yet some of the forward trends of the early 1990s now seem to be turning back on themselves, bringing cyclical interpretations back into fashion, while others have not moved in as straight a line as hoped. Genuinely new challenges can also echo old ones in part, so that at least some old do’s and don’ts may still be relevant. For all these reasons, the twentiethanniversary of a new world dispensation is a good time to look back as well as forward. But twenty is not an age at which a person or community is usually best placed to make the most subtle and final analysis of their experience. The impossible task of summarizing global trends since 1989, and their significance for today and tomorrow, can only be approached in a humble spirit and in provisionalmode. Here, the trends and changes since the end of the Cold War will be grouped under five headings that reflect the author’s limited competence rather than

Twenty years is long enough for events at the start of the period to be reinvented and, in the process, increasingly misunderstood. The number of people who in 2008 have asked if the Cold War is returning is one clear enough sign of how farthe real Cold War has been forgotten. A more subtle but also common mistake is for commentators to describe the period 1945-1990, with more or less ironic nostalgia, as a time when everything was simple. The world was bipolar and the two great armed camps balanced each other: everyone else in the world had to choose sides. or drop out of the strategic balance as ‘non-aligned’. It is of coursetrue that the world before the collapse of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact was more bipolar than now. The Western democratic alliance, concretized in NATO, faced an opponent that was its close mirror image as well as close to equal in strength. Both sides did seek to make countries in other regions their allies and proxies, and the resulting wars - as in Korea, South-east Asia or Central America -powerfully affected the fates of local nations. But all kinds of other things were going on as well. The same period saw major processes of decolonization by European powers, also involving many wars, in which Communist exploitation was not always significant and even less often decisive. The Middle East confrontation was not at bottom an East-West affair and the actors on either side could never...