ABSTRACT
The period since the end of the Cold War in 1989 is in many ways similar to the situation roughly a century ago, from the 1880s to 1914. Both were and are periods of large-scale and turbulent change in economics, politics and military technology. The liberal international economy of the belle epoque, created from the 1850s, was in some ways more open and dynamic than that of today.! Military technology changed out of all recognition between 1850 and 1900. The world was threatened by terrorism and by colonial revolts and areas of instability outside European rule.2 The Great Powers cooperated in the face of such challenges and sought to reconcile differences in commercial and colonial questions wherever possible. The picture of the pre-1914 world as one of intense and inevitable antagonism between the Great Powers is far from accurate; conflict and cooperation were more evenly balanced. This rapid change produced a large body of reflection on the future of war and international politics.3 Some of it was fatuous and designed to foment conflict between the Powers; such as the English penchant for invasion scare stories. Some of it was serious and remarkably prescient; such as Ivan Bloch's recognition that the new weapons would lead to stalemate, to prolonged war and thus to the end of the existing liberal economic system.4 In the early 20th century a fashionable view among liberal intellectuals was that war between the Great Powers would be so futile and economically
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there is now an economic but no longer a military great power system. The G7 dominate the planet economically, but they are all close allies linked in a network of international agreements, norms and arbitration procedures that the participants at the Hague could only have dreamed about. In 1900 the current economic hegemon, the British Empire, faced several powers whose industrial and military power was growing rapidly relative to its own. The Pax Britannica related to the world maritime, commercial and financial system. Its functioning depended on peace, but Britain had no capacity to enforce peace on the major continental powers. Britain could contain Germany only by sacrificing the sources of its hegemony and then had no capacity to challenge the USA. In 1922 the UK conceded naval parity to the USA and thus forfeited hegemony. The British defeat at Washington was thus more significant in signalling the realities of British power than the victory over Germany in 1918.
