The Post-Imperial Age; & Law and War Since 1945
Lawrence Freedman reviews two new works on the post-war balance of global power
- The Post-Imperial Age: The Great Powers and the Wider World
J.P.D. Dunbabin – Longman, 1994 - xxii + 549 pp. - £44 - Law and War Since 1945
Geoffrey Best - Clarendon Press, 1994 - xiv + 434pp. - £25
The period from 1945 to 1990 is destined to be remembered as the age of the Cold War, yet the East-West confrontation was only one of its defining features. The other was the process of decolonisation. Arguably, the last act of the Cold War – the break-up of the Soviet empire – constituted the last act of the imperial age. As Yugoslavia has shown, states may still fragment into even smaller units, yet there is now a sense that the expansion of the international society of states is all but complete.
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