The Interregnum

Martin Jacques

• Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood
  Verso, 182 pp, £15.00, July 2003, ISBN 1 85984 502 9
• Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan by Michael Ignatieff
  Vintage, 134 pp, £6.99, May 2003, ISBN 0 09 945543 9
• Global Civil Society? by John Keane
  Cambridge, 220 pp, £40.00, April 2003, ISBN 0 521 81543 6
• Global Civil Society: An Answer to War by Mary Kaldor
  Polity, 189 pp, £45.00, April 2003, ISBN 0 7456 2757 9

The central dynamic of global politics since 11 September 2001 has been the profound shift in the nature of American foreign policy. After the end of the Second World War, the United States emerged as the dominant world power, and yet, because of the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union, its hegemony was exercised in an organic alliance, most notably with Western Europe, giving rise to the notion, in its contemporary form, of ‘the West’. Despite its overwhelming dominance, the power, interest and identity of the US were partly subsumed in the idea and reality of the West, and ‘multilateralism’ was a way of describing the symbiotic nature of the alliance. As Mary Kaldor points out, the Cold War gave rise to the politics of the blocs, and the partial eclipse of the nation-state.