ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a great drama involving two distinct conceptions or paradigms of international order. The first is a global conception, expounded by the United States and expounded once again as the New World Order. The second is a regional conception or, more exactly, two variations on a regional theme. The great and sudden transformation in the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe in 1989 had its origins in the great, long trajectory of Soviet-style industrialization from the 1950s to the 1980s. Of all the regions that have generated international conflict in this century, Central Europe has generated the most momentous, having been at the center of the two world wars and the Cold War. The revolution in Eastern Europe, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and the end of the Soviet Union meant the end of a fifth concept of security—the Soviet concept of coercive security.
