Abstract

One of the few positive features of the 20th century — the century of mass destruction — is that it came late 1914) and ended early (1989), spanning from the definitive decline the jus publicum Europaeum (and the sovereign state on which it was based) and the end of the Cold War. An era of false starts for Utopian social systems and new international orders, uneasy adjustments to a post-colonial world first and post-industrial realities later, it closed with the 19th century problems it originally inherited not only unsolved but even more intractable than before. The increasingly obsolete central state of the previous four centuries was not replaced by any viable alternative.