ABSTRACT
The end of the Cold War and the demise of the bloc system in the late 1980s initially fuelled speculation about the advent of a ‘New World Order’. The collapse of state-socialist regimes in Eastern-Central Europe, and then in the republics of the Soviet Union itself, raised expectations that liberal democracy and the market economy would establish themselves across Europe, and that economic and cultural globalisation would progressively promote this model worldwide.1 In the process, it was argued, new opportunities for international cooperation would be opened up to tackle global issues like the environment and Third World debt, and to compensate for the declining autonomy of the nationstate in the field of economic and foreign policy Indeed, what Hobsbawm has called ‘the supranational restructuring of the globe’ was seen by many to herald the slow demise of the nation-state, and by derivation the decline of national consciousness and of the viability of ‘nationalism’ as a political project.2 The moves towards integration of the European Community through the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty, the recent enlargement of the European Union to fifteen members, as well as the prospects of further enlargement, seemed to confirm the beginnings of this process.
