The global economy is currently undergoing a quiet transformation. While most of the world’s attention remains justifiably focused on the European Union’s minute-by-minute struggle to formulate a permanent solution to its unending debt crisis, other far-reaching economic forces are shifting beneath the surface. Increasingly, it seems as if the golden era of globalization that defined the last quarter of the 20th century is in danger, with the years prior to the 2008 economic crisis perhaps marking its high-water mark. Ours has become the era of perpetual global financial crisis, of sagging economic growth, of stubborn unemployment. As the world economy [...]
On Sept. 11, 1990, U.S. President George H. W. Bush, in an address before a joint session of Congress, outlined his vision of a “new world order,” arguing that the end of the Cold War and the imminent launching of a multilateral military operation to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi forces offered the nations of the world “a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation.” Events over the next several years seemed to validate his prediction: The ensuing First Gulf War offered a model for rules-based multilateral military interventions; the Madrid Peace conference raised the tantalizing hope that [...]
In August 1944, representatives from China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States gathered at the Dumbarton Oaks mansion in Washington to lay the foundations of the postwar global governance architecture. Coinciding with the liberation of Paris by Allied forces, the meeting set the stage for many of the international and regional political, security and economic structures on which the global order has been based since 1945: the United Nations and subsequent multilateral organizations, as well as international agreements on trade, tariffs and currencies. Under the auspices of these arrangements, states were willing to cede some sovereignty [...]
