Challenging as may be the task of accounting for the failure of students of International Relations to anticipate the end of the Cold War (Gaddis 1992/3; Rosenau, 1995b), that of comprehending the basic contours of global politics that have evolved since the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed is both more difficult and important. If it is the case, as has been cogently argued, that the Cold War ‘left so light an impact on the living memory of states and societies, that it is already enroute to oblivion’ (Gambles, 1995: 35), then the need to pause and explicitly conceptualise the basic outlines of the global structures now emergent is all the more urgent. Not to do so is to run the serious risk of assuming that ‘the business of international politics is being conducted as if there were continuity between the years before and the years after [the Cold War], as if history was being resumed’ (1995: 27) – an assumption that is clearly too simple and ignores the social, economic, political and technological transformations that have unfolded in the last fifty years (and that, indeed, significantly contributed to the end of the Cold War).