ABSTRACT
My starting point for this chapter is the early 1990s, when Fukuyama argued that alternatives to liberal capitalism seemed to have been defeated, not only in the postcolonial Third World, but more acutely in the former eastern bloc (Fukuyama 1992).1 A key illustration was how at US insistence the reconstruction of communism in Europe took the form of shock therapy. Indeed it became a commonplace of political discourse to argue that the global strategic situation of the post-Cold War world was unprecedented: for the first time since the Roman Empire a majority of the world’s military power was concentrated in the hands of a single state and its institutions of national security.
