Globalisation, the EU & the post-Cold-War order
The post-1991 order: globalisation, the WTO, European integration from Maastricht to the euro and Brexit, and the drift from unipolarity to multipolarity.
From Bipolarity to the 'Unipolar Moment'
The Cold War ended in a cascade: the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, the reunification of Germany on 3 October 1990, and the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991, when the USSR's red flag was lowered over the Kremlin and fifteen successor states emerged. The United States stood as the sole superpower, a condition the columnist Charles Krauthammer named the 'unipolar moment' in 1990. President George H. W. Bush, addressing Congress on 11 September 1990 during the Gulf crisis, invoked a 'new world order' grounded in collective security and the rule of law.
That order was tested immediately. UN Security Council Resolution 678 (29 November 1990) authorised force to expel Iraq from Kuwait; Operation Desert Storm (January–February 1991) restored Kuwaiti sovereignty under a broad coalition. The 1990s, however, also exposed the limits of liberal optimism: genocide in Rwanda (April–July 1994, roughly 800,000 dead) and the massacre at Srebrenica (July 1995) revealed the international community's paralysis, prompting the doctrine of the 'Responsibility to Protect' (R2P), endorsed at the 2005 UN World Summit.
The Architecture of Globalisation
Economic globalisation acquired durable institutions. The Uruguay Round of the GATT concluded with the Marrakesh Agreement (15 April 1994), establishing the World Trade Organization on 1 January 1995, with a binding Dispute Settlement Understanding that GATT had lacked. China's accession on 11 December 2001 integrated 1.3 billion people into the trading system and accelerated the 'second unbundling' of global supply chains.
The period's defining theorists framed the debate. Francis Fukuyama's The End of History? (1989) argued liberal democracy was the terminal form of human government; Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations? (1993) countered that future conflict would be cultural and religious. The 1997–98 Asian Financial Crisis, the anti-globalisation protests at the Seattle WTO ministerial (November 1999), and above all the 11 September 2001 attacks punctured triumphalism and inaugurated the 'War on Terror'.
Toward Multipolarity
The 2008 global financial crisis, originating in the collapse of Lehman Brothers (15 September 2008), shifted the centre of gravity. The G20 supplanted the G7 as the premier crisis-management forum at its Washington summit (November 2008). The rise of the BRICS (the term coined by Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs in 2001; first leaders' summit 2009), China's Belt and Road Initiative (launched 2013), and Russia's annexation of Crimea (March 2014) signalled the erosion of the unipolar order. By the 2020s, analysts described a contested multipolarity defined by US–China strategic competition, the weaponisation of interdependence (sanctions, semiconductors, energy), and renewed great-power war in Europe following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
