After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet-style communism, the old bipolar world system suddenly disappeared and the West basked in triumph. To some observers this was by no means a foregone conclusion. For example, Samuel Huntington argued as late as the mid-1980s that “the likelihood of democratic development in Eastern Europe is virtually nil” (Huntington 1984: 217). To others, most notably Francis Fukuyama, the momentous events signaled the “triumph of the West, of the Western idea” What we may be witnessing, he wrote, “is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.“

These sentiments proved to be rather short-lived, however. Western triumphalism quickly came to an end as a bloody civil war erupted in Yugoslavia and a prolonged economic recession put millions of people out of work in the industrial world. Unemployment trends put the number of jobless Europeans alone at 20 million by 1995, about a quarter of them young people between 18 and 25.2 An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report released in 1995 projected unacceptably high unemployment levels to continue in Europe beyond the year 2000.3 Social unrest, ethnic strife, and rampant nationalism have spread while political leaders, often beset by scandals and corruption, seem helpless and devoid of ideas about how to confront - and much less solve - today's pressing problems.