The Gulf crisis of 1990–1991 was, by any standards, one of the more significant international crises of the post-1945 epoch. It involved the mobilization of around one million armed men, the diplomatic involvement of much of the international community, and a war that, for all its limited character, was a significant case of inter-state conflict. In what follows I do not want to dwell on the actual course of this war or to examine in detail specific aspects of the history, not least because the broad outline of what happened is already well known. I do, however, want to look at this conflict in broader perspective, and from two vantage points in particular, each pertinent to the study of international relations (IR).

The capacity to transfer wealth abroad had long served wealth-holders as a potent restraint on state encroachment. The creation of movable wealth, Montesqueau wrote in the eighteenth century, meant that ‘rulers have been compelled to govern with greater wisdom than they themselves might have intended’. In the years since then, new technology and increasing interdependence have greatly magnified this capability; one recent book argues that the increased mobility of capital and growing integration of economies means that all governments ‘have lost the vestiges of unchecked economic sovereignty’ and that they ‘must concede to the implied threats of quicksilver capital’ When enormous quantities of wealth travel across the world with a single tap of a computer key, a country risks paying heavy costs if it adopts the wrong policies. So if the nation-state is not yet dead, it appears to be severely weakened in its ability to pursue measures at odds with the wishes of mobile-asset holders

Like every other part of the world, the Caribbean is having to come to terms with the deep-seated changes in the nature of the world order manifest at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. These changes have set in train a process which is beginning to constitute a reconfiguration of what is meant by and included within the concept of the Caribbean. Conventionally, the Caribbean has been defined by a blend of its geography and history. From a simple geographical viewpoint, it consists of all the islands in the Caribbean Sea, making up a huge archipelago which runs some 2,500 miles from the southern tip of Florida in the north to the coast of Venezuela in the south, facing Central America to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. From a more complex historical viewpoint which emphasizes the common, searing impact of slave-based European imperialism, it also includes Belize on the Central American isthmus and the three ‘Guianas’ on the South American coast: Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. Conceived in this way, the region has widely been said to possess an intellectual coherence that makes it possible to analyse its modern politics and economics within a single framework.

The majority of political theories have arisen in opposition to existing theories and the interests they represent. Dependency theory was no different in this regard. It arose as a reaction to ‘modernization’ theory, which linked industrialization to political development and to those theories of political development which themselves represented American interests during the period of the Cold War.1 It arose also in reaction to the economic theory of ‘trickle down’ which characterized the post-war social democratic concern with economic growth and Keynesian economics in industrialized countries and which linked the poor in the industrialized West with the poor in the non-industrialized South. In both, Keynesian based, state led policies of capital investment were expected to provide the locomotive for indigenous development.

Like nuclear weapons, the literature on the end of the Cold War continues to proliferate. Much of this work it has to be said has been limited in its depth (if not range) by the simple fact that the structure of the new international order has yet to assume a finished form. Writing meaningfully about a constantly evolving subject is no easy undertaking. There is also the added problem of perspective. In many ways we are still living too close to recent events to say much that is particularly profound about them. Finally, understanding the new world has been made all the more difficult by the sheer scale of the changes that have occurred since 1989. Because of the triple collapse of communism as an ideology, the Soviet Union as a European power, and the USSR as a united country our known political universe has fallen apart. Making sense of the global results is no easy job; indeed it is turning out to be an extraordinarily difficult task—one for which we may not yet have the proper conceptual tools.