100:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,118[BLANK_AUDIO]Hi, welcome back.Make yourself comfortable.So, this week we're going to look at thecontemporary world.The world of the last 20 plus years.Let's start with the way the Cold Warended,in the world of the early 1990s when theterm Washington Consensus passedinto common usage because the UnitedStates of America, for a time, seemed socentral in providing some of the guidingprincipals for this new order.Let's start with the postwar settlement.I put postwar in partial quotation marksbecause thesettlement was so radical, it did so muchto changethe map of the world, it was the kind ofsettlement that ordinarily only happensafter a global cataclysmic conflict.But in this case, the postwar settlementcame after and culminated a period ofpeace,cold war to be sure, but it was arrivedat peacefully, not as the aftermath of amajor war.That itself is worthy of note because theterms were so significant.In a way, the postwar settlement isa kind of long delayed fruition of thepostwarvision of Franklin Roosevelt in theclosing years of World War II.What were some of the elements in FranklinRoosevelt's vision?High on the list for him would have beeninternational cooperation among the greatpowers.To keep the peace, he imagined that thegreat powerswould work together as a kind of policemenagainst rogue states.In fact, one expression used for it backin themid-1940s was to talk of hopes for thefour policemen.Back then, President Roosevelt thoughtthat the permanent members of the UNSecurity Council, the United States, theSoviet Union, Britain,China, would become the four policemen,the new great powers.He also had in mind a vision in whichthere would be an open trading order.So, new institutions for international

cooperation like the United Nations, withreal peacekeepingdone by the great powers willing to useforceagainst rogue states, which FDR envisionedas the fourpolicemen back at the end of World War II.In a world characterized by openeconomies.The extent to which this vision wasrealizedwas very much a product of Americanstatecraft.The Americans had importantallies on different issues in Europe, inAsia, in Latin America.But it is worth just lingering for amoment over some ofthe American architects of these newstructures at the beginning of the 1990s.Historians are coming more and more toappreciate the quality of thestatesmanship displayed between 1989 and1992 by President George H W Bush,who was himself very much a product of theWorldWar II generation, really believed a lotof the idealsabout the postwar order fromsomeonewho had grown to manhood while FranklinRoosevelt had been president.His Secretary of State, the wilynegotiator, James Baker.His National Security Advisor, seasonedveteran,a retired Air Force general, Brent Scowcroft.And perhaps the most important figure inBaker's brain trustwas this man, then in his 30s, RobertZoellick, Z-O-E-L-L-I-C-K,who most recently retired from a very goodtenure as the President of the World Bank.Some of the capstones of this newstructure were actually formal treaties.One, signed in Moscow, which was the finalsettlement of the German question,the final settlement for Germany signedin Moscow in September 1990.You see, there had never been a peacetreaty with Germany signed after World WarII.The powers were going to negotiatea peace treaty, but their occupationregimesthen just developed into a divided Europe,with that peace treaty with Germany neversigned, with the finalsettlement of the future borders of aGerman state never definitively settled.

What the Moscow treaty of September of1990 did is it finally tied offthose issues of World War II in Europeand the future of the German state.And then in November 1990, two agreementssigned in Paris, one of thema treaty on conventional armed forces inEurope, called the CFETreaty, that was the most ambitious armscontrol treaty ever negotiated.It regulated the armies and air forces of allthe states in Europe, from theAtlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains, andhow large they could be in that region.Nothing on this scale had everbeen attempted before.This treatywas actually negotiated and concluded inNovember 1990and did a lot to simply stabilize and putin motion a military balance inwhich people didn't pay as much attentionto the military balance in Europe anymore.The other treaty signed in Paris was theCharter of Paris.This is really an agreement on thepolitical and economic principles thatall the European states felt should guidethem intheir relations with each other andinside their countries.Provisions about market economies,democracy, and so forth.Basically, an agreement on the principlesonwhich the post-Cold War Europe should beorganized.With the signing of these treaties in thefall of 1990,I believe the Cold War really had come toan end,because the basic division of Europe, thebasic division of ideasbetween the two halves of Europe, had cometo an end,even though the Soviet Union would totteralong for another year before itdisintegrated.Another thing that comes to an end withthe end of the Cold War, is thatanti-communistconfederation that I talked about first inWeek Twelveof the course, just a couple of weeks ago.RememberI said instead of thinking of this as anAmerican Empire,instead think of this as a league ofstates organized arounda common principle, of opposing communism,

with a particular central memberof this league, this confederation, beingthe United States of America.The anti-communist confederation wasembodied in several different kindsof security treaties, bilateral andmultilateral, and some institutions,like NATO, the North Atlantic TreatyOrganization.With the end of the Cold War in 1990,really the anti-communist confederationalso comes to an end.The institutions, however, did not come toan end,instead they morph into new purposes.NATO remains in existence because thestates want to continue cooperating witheachother in this Atlantic community, but NATOenlarges to pick up differentmembers.And becomes a place for politicaldiscussion and even some militarycoordination for common purposesnot related to the old communist threat atall, but not as intense as it used to be.The European community, meanwhile, morphedinto a European Union, an ambitiousexperiment in organizing a new kind ofmultinational state,inspired perhaps a tiny bit by theprecedentof the American Union that was created inthelate 1700s and that turned itself into amoretightly organized federation during themiddle of the 1800s.So rather than a European Empire, aEuropean Union,keeping a lot of the national identitiesof thestates but also having some significantsharing of sovereignty.This map just gives you a little bit of asense of how the European Union hadexpanded and was expanding.These areas here, in solid green,are the core of the old EuropeanCommunity, the old Common Market.This had expanded to include Denmark, theUnited Kingdom.At the end of the Cold War, it alsoincluded places like Ireland.But then has expanded since then to pickup places like Sweden,Finland, the rest of Germany, all thesestates in east Central Europe, the BalticRepublics, Poland and so on.In fact Croatia, listed here as a

candidate member of the EuropeanUnion, will be joining the European Unionin just a couple of months.Romania and Bulgaria.And so on.As the European Union expands, what's alsoexpanding with it is a requiredcommon notion of how to organizetheir governments on political democraticprinciples andhow to organize their economies on marketprincipals, with open marketsand open movement of goods between them.In 1991, a finalaftermath of the end of the Cold War tookplace.That was the end of the Soviet Union.In a way think about the Soviet Union as areplacement for the Russian Empire.Here isa map of the Russian Empire as it expandedup to the early 1900s.You see the enormity of the empire as itwas in 1914 over herein Europe, in the Caucasus, in CentralAsia, in the Far East.But the Russian Empire was organized as amultinational empire.It was replacedby an empire organized on ideologicalprinciples.A Soviet Union was a Union of SovietSocialist Republics.An old fashioned empire was replaced of aunion of like minded republics all sharingcommunist principles.As communism disappears as the glueholdingthis union together, what will take itsplace?The answer, increasingly by 1991, isnational principles willtake its place, and the Soviet Union wouldbreak up.Here's a map that shows you a little bitof what happened with that break up.The dominant remaining state was a newRussian Federation.Russia itself trying to compose amultinational union.You see here the limits of the new RussianFederation.These areas here, like Komi, areconstituentrepublics inside this Russian union, thisRussian Federation.But you can also see, Central Asia, allthese states become independent countries.The Caucasus, more independent nationstates.

East Central Europe, more independentnation states.If you were to compare this map of theRussian Federationwith old maps of the Russian Empire, you'dseethat the extent of the Russian domainsshrink backto an extent that had not been seen innearly 300 years, since the middle of the1700s.Ordinarily you would think that there musthave been a titanic warto cause such a shrinkage, but no, thiswas handled largely peacefully.There were some wars and skirmishes on theoutskirtsof the shrinking empire, but mainly thechangeswere political upheaval, economicupheaval, and social upheaval.These arrows showing you the movement ofethnic Russiansmoving back from Central Asia into theRussian Federation.Volga Germans being offered a chance tomigrate actually back to German-speaking lands.Other kinds of migrationsback and forth.Some Central Asians moving back into theirhomerepublics, from homes inside Russia and soon.Not only did the Soviet Union come toan end, but a series of new internationalinstitutionsalso were added to the list in theearly 1990s, helping to regulatethis new order.Let's look at some of the economicinstitutions that become so importantin the 1990s and the first decade of the21st century.A World Trade Organization.Instead of just multilateral tradeagreements, there wouldactually be an international institutionto regulate the rulesof free trade and to take appeals fromcountries that were complaining aboutviolations of trade agreements.That was the WTO, the WorldTrade Organization, which has beenremarkably successful.Inside North America, a North AmericanFree Trade Agreement, unitingthe United States, Canada and Mexico in afree trade area.In the Asia Pacific, an Asia-PacificEconomic Cooperation Forum

which, along with the Association ofSoutheast Asian Nation States,provided international institutions totalk about political and economic issuesamong a number of the states in theAsia-Pacific region.Again,institutions international forinternationalcooperation, assuming that the worldwas not divided into rival great powerblocks anymore.