Abstract

The last decade of the twentieth century was a momentous period in contemporary history. A revolutionary wave that started in Poland in 1989, and continued in Hungary, East Germany and elsewhere, led to the end of Soviet domination in Central and Eastern Europe, and ultimately the collapse, in 1991, of the Soviet Union itself. Today, the contrast between the current direction that the world is headed and the accelerated globalization of the 1990s is pronounced. While in the aftermath of the Soviet Bloc’s defeat, the discourse of capitalist triumphalism prevailed—with Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis as its most influential example (Fukuyama 1992)—three decades on, more cautious assessments are in order. Although global capitalism—especially of a particular, neoliberal kind—has maintained its tight grip over almost the entire globe, the obituaries written in the early 1990s, for social democracy, the state, the nation, sometimes modernity itself, now seem utterly premature. Far from homogenizing the world, the processes of globalization have clashed with tendencies toward fragmentation, globalism has been undermined by nationalism, and the hegemony of free-market economics is often described as zombie-like, exhausted by challenges both on the right and the left (Peck 2014). The articles gathered together in this special issue of the International Journal of Interdisciplinary Global Studies look back at the hopes that were invested in the new world of the 1990s as it was emerging out of the ashes of the great ideological battles of the twentieth century, consider what went wrong to produce its unforeseen dysfunctions, and postulate some tentative ways to get out of the multiple crises we find ourselves in at the outset of the 2020s. In this introductory article we map the insights provided in the following four contributions to this issue—by Darren J. O’Byrne, Paul Kennedy, Andrew Z. Katz, and Zdzisław Mach—while complementing them with our own observations. The first part takes a brief look at how the 1990s were interpreted by intellectuals and commentators at that time. The second part descends from the realm of dreams to the realities on the ground and sheds some light on recent developments, including the rise of national populism. Finally, the third part, which is more explicitly normative in nature, takes a glimpse into the future.