...longer present, several global problems noted in the issue are still very much with us, foremost among these being, in a different form perhaps, North-South relations. Thus, I noted at the time:



The global crisis reflects a crisis in the hegemony of the formal and substantive aspects of the post war "pax americana" [America's] paramount remedy to social ills seems to be a myopic but massive military response, in Central America as in the Middle East as in Southeast Asia. (Tiryakian 1984: 125-27)

On the whole, there is much in that issue that remains relevant for a macroscopic view of our situation in this still formative period of the new century. However, two decades later, there are new observations to be made, new themes that have been raised that should be analyzed on a comparative basis, and new multidisciplinary approaches to be proposed.

Our world of advanced modernity is prone to serious risks; risks that often are unforeseen consequences of purposive action in one sector which trigger negative reaction in another sector. The risks are environmental (Beck 1999), economic (such as the rogue trader in distant Singapore whose speculative trading brought the collapse in 1995 of an old British banking institution, Baring Bank), and political. Regarding the political risks, for example, twenty years ago American foreign policy found it expedient to arm Hussein's Iraq in its war against Iran and to provide training to the Taliban in Afghanistan in their struggle against Soviet dominance. Both turned out to be very bad investments for the United States.

Twenty years ago the concept of "globalization" was not current, but despite the then too facile polarization of the world into two superpowers--the "Free world" and the "Soviet world"--there was growing recognition of increasing interdependence and, consequently, of the growing vulnerability (risk) of the world to events in one region having significant ramifications elsewhere. The initial hardline of the Reagan administration toward the "evil empire" and the deployment of missiles in Germany increased the threat of a global conflict across national and even regional borders. And them almost miraculously for a secular age, new leadership in the Soviet world seeking to reform outdated economic structures instead led unwittingly to the astonishing implosion of a total societal system that had been seen at the beginning of the decade as a monolith of hierarchical power. The "global crisis" had passed, at least in part.

But crisis reemerged in the decade of the 1990s, in several forms. AIDS, unknown at the start of the 1980s, has become one of the great scourges of human medical history and is still raging in sub-Sahara Africa. It has attracted, of course, enormous attention and vast resources have been spent in seeking remedies, vaccines, and informed scientific knowledge to neutralize the virus.

Another sort of virus, which may have been dormant in premodern times, seems to have come out of the night soil in many parts of the world with a vengeance in the last century. Although it has many strains, the virus in question is manifest in severe protracted conflicts and violence between racial and ethnic groups that traditionally live or have lived within a given territory, even in situations where the two groups were not strictly exogamous. The most virulent form of the virus took the form of genocide, with the most notorious examples being the genocide of Armenians in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire and the genocide of Jews in the dying days of the Third Reich. Although the world's democracies could join the chorus of those demanding "'never again!", the second half of the twentieth century was marked by both the sharp decline of interstate violent conflict and the wide spread of severe intrastate strife, tensions and alienation from existing institutional arrangements, ethnic mobilization and contestation spilling into violence and civil wars. Echoing earlier forms of genocide, the 1990s witnessed in Rwanda (Central Africa) the near genocide of 800,000 Tutsis at the hands (and machetes) of Hutus. That slaughter failed to generate mediation and intervention, unlike the "ethnic cleansing" and civil wars in the disintegration of Yugoslavia--perhaps because of the latter's closer ties with Europe and the United States. (1) Other countries in West Africa--Liberia, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, among others--were also scenes of prolonged violence and deadly ethnic conflicts (Horowitz 2001), much like the situations in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka.

At the same time, there have been "good surprises" in settings marked by ethnic divisions with previous potential, or actual, conflicts. There are areas where experts anticipated "more of the same" in the way of violence and where violence did not occur and/or where a peace process began. Much of East Europe comprised of large ethnic minorities--the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia with a large Russian-speaking population, Slovakia and Rumania with a large Hungarian minority--has been spared the ethnic violence that many had anticipated after the breakup of Soviet hegemony. More spectacular, perhaps, there was in the last decade in at least three places unexpected peace accords between bitter foes: in Northern Ireland the "Good Friday" accord in 1998; in South Africa the deKlerk-Mandela negotiations in 1993-94 leading to the...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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