ABSTRACT
After more than four decades of continuity, recent years have seen far-reaching changes in international politics. The changes have appeared at both the unit level and the international system level. In the former instance, they occurred within the political and socioeconomic systems of states, taking the form of democratization and transition to market economies, notably in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and, most recently, the former Soviet Union. Changes at the international system level include the decline of bipolarity due to the weakening of Soviet power and its disengagement from Eastern Europe and other parts of the globe and the potential for an integrated Europe or a united Germany and for Japan to become a major world power. In many ways these changes have been the most dramatic since the end of World War II and the onset of the cold war in the late 1940s.
