Introduction

In the twentieth century the history of international relations revealed four powerful trends. The first, and the one that received the greatest attention at the end of the century, was that the years between 1900 to 2000 witnessed a shrinking world in which the rapid growth of trade and finance created a truly global economy, while advances in communications and transport radically reduced the boundaries of time and space. Moreover, this trend towards globalization was reinforced by the fact that closer contacts and interdependence between political communities spurred on the formation of permanent inter-governmental institutions as well as a mushrooming of non-governmental organizations. Linked to this trend was a second major theme, which is that the twentieth century was a period defined by the quest for modernization and the perfection of modernity. Accordingly, more than any previous century, its course was shaped by ideological innovations and confrontation, ranging from the progressive utopianism of communism to the outwardly nostalgic visions of political Islam. Another major trend was that the century saw the steady diffusion of power away from Europe, which had dominated the world in 1900. At the level of Great Power politics, Europe was eclipsed by the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union, but this change to the international order also had another vital element, the proliferation of new nation-states in Asia and Africa, which acquired sovereignty as the European colonial empires broke up. These dramatic transformations in the world led to the fourth trend, the century’s all-too-frequent tendency to descend into conflict. Fed by ideology, nationalism and advances in technology and institutional administration, no previous century can claim the violent death toll of the last one, in which lives were not just lost in war, but also in barbarous acts of organized state violence.