One of the most striking features of our time has been the ascendancy of neo-liberalism as the ruling doctrine of international and national politics, an ascendancy which has been accompanied by the apparent disappearance of serious alternatives. Capitalism may be teetering once again on the edge of a terminal crisis, but there are no gravediggers in sight. This time around not only are there no gravediggers there are no longer any rival economic systems either.

The moment that announced the present era was the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of communist regimes across Eastern and Central Europe and in the Soviet Union itself. These events erupted with a most dramatic suddenness, and very few anticipated them. Leonard Schapiro, acute analyst of Soviet politics though he was, did not foresee it. In his obituary notice on Schapiro for the British Academy written in 1984, Peter Reddaway quoted from one of Schapiro's last analyses written in 1982 just before Brezhnev's death, where he departed from his habitual caution to offer a longer-term prediction about the direction of Soviet politics:

Reddaway, writing in the Chernenko era two years after this prediction was made, commented that it seemed amply justified.

The fall of communism led to an outburst of celebration and triumphalism in the West. It vindicated the long struggle and the risks of the cold war, and the victory when it came appeared complete and unequivocal. The surrender of the Soviet Union was an ideological surrender rather than one forced by military defeat, but it was a surrender nonetheless, and marked the eclipse of the most potent challenger to the liberal world order following the defeats earlier in the century of Germany and Japan.