Abstract

Despite forebodings about the various “New World Orders” prefigured after the end of the Cold War, what is most striking today is how little has actually changed. NATO is still a functioning military alliance, the UN is as powerless as ever (except when operating as the de facto enforcer for US foreign policy) and, with the exception of the former German Democratic Republic, whose reintegration into the Federal Republic of Germany was the inevitable result of several decades of ideological warfare, the rest of the East is still largely cordoned off by a Velvet Curtain — now maintained by the other side to prevent hordes of people and products from flooding Western Europe.