Even a realist like former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger is at a loss to describe the world in a comprehensive way. He told a conference in Washington recently: “It's probably not possible to have some overarching concept.”

[The passing of the Keynesian welfare state] represents much more than a series of strategic responses to a changing international political economy. It signals a paradigm shift in governing practices – a historic alteration in state form which enacts simultaneous changes in cultural assumptions, political identities and the very terrain of political struggle. Restructuring represents a prolonged and conflict-ridden political process during which old assumptions and shared understandings are put under stress and eventually rejected while social forces struggle to achieve a new consensus – a new vision of the future to fill the vacuum created by the erosion of the old.