ABSTRACT
There were two superpowers in the twentieth century: the USA and the USSR. At the beginning of the next century, from most points of view, there appears to be only one, the USA. In the future, there may be others: China seems a prime candidate. And in the past, before the superpowers, there were the ‘great powers’, mainly the European empires but including both the USA and the USSR’s predecessor, Tsarist Russia. Already in 1835, in a famous prediction, Alexis de Tocqueville talked of them as ‘two great nations’ apparently tending towards the same end, if starting from different points, each of which seemed to be ‘called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world’. As we shall soon see, we have to go far further back than 1835 in order to understand the origins of the two twentieth century superpowers.
