The Shadow of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The dawn of a new year, let alone a new millennium, is conventionally accompanied by a sense of drawing a line under the past: the hope is that the tensions and failures that marked the previous time will not recur. In the case of 2000 this is, if anything, all the stronger because of the most marked change associated with the end of the twentieth century, the termination of major inter-state conflict with the end of the cold war. If to this is added a sense of the end of an era of ideological contestation, and an infectious, if not entirely convincing, optimism associated with technological change, then the reasons for moving on, for denying the relevance of the past, may be all the greater.