Introduction: A preliminary mapping of the terrain

As the long history of the twentieth century drew to a close, a series of political events took place which, although initially local to nation states, changed the landscape of global politics in a fundamental and seemingly irrevocable way. The revolutions which marked the demise of the Eastern communist blocs, which had so defined the political dialectic of the second half of the twentieth century, were said to herald the end of history (Fukuyama 1992) and the inevitable end point of political and economic tensions which had begun some fifty years earlier. The doctrinal dominance of the free market had finally been established, which signalled the end of ideological contestations and the creation of a new global capitalist order without national or international boundaries. These Eastern convulsions followed a steady retreat from Keynesian polity, located within the policies of Western governments, which had begun with the economic crisis of the 1970s. Where the post-war period in nations such as the United States and the United Kingdom had been defined by a general consensus around the provision of welfare and a form of managed capitalism of greatest benefit to ordinary workers and their families, this earlier crash brought finance to the fore in a previously unprecedented manner and prepared the ground for a new form of politics based upon the championing of free-market capitalism and an overt attack upon established forms of social organisation.