ABSTRACT
The year 1989 has already become a convenient historical marker, invoked by commentators to indicate the end of the postwar era. An era is characterized by the passage not merely of time but also of the distinguishing attributes of a time, attributes that structure expectations and imbue daily events with meaning for the members of any given social collectivity. In that sense, what the journalist Theodore H.White observed
in 1945 is true once again: the world, he wrote, is “fluid and about to be remade” (White 1978:224). Arguments will continue for many years about the determinants of the collapse of the old postwar order and the contours of the new post-postwar order. But even among diverse theoretical traditions there exists a shared vocabulary describing “the world” that has become fluid and is being remade: in its simplest, irreducible terms, the world of strategic bipolarity.
