ABSTRACT
The last decade of the twentieth century was the first in two millennia without a significant empire. Japan alone among major states bears the title, but nothing more. The last of those vast political enterprises held in place by military force, not popular agreement, was that dominated by the Soviet Union whose disintegration was dramatically marked with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Since then, empire is only used as a meaningful qualifier for the telecommunications industry, the domain of which is not geographically fixed in a traditional sense: air waves and cyberspace have no ports of entry or discernible frontiers.
