Introduction

The political changes of the late 1980s and 1990s were even more dramatic than the ideological and cultural shifts of the preceding decades (BFN: 491–2, 514). For a European, the fall of the Berlin Wall is the mid-point of this period. This extraordinary event was the fulcrum upon which turned the exposure of the economic and political bankruptcy of the old Soviet Union, the subsequent reunification of Germany and the reshaping of Central Europe (as, on the one hand, countries such as Poland, that were independent but effectively occupied reasserted their autonomy and, on the other hand, states such as Lithuania, the Ukraine and Uzbekistan emerged from their absorption in the USSR). This change was complemented by the less dramatic but no less significant expansion and strengthening of the European Union in the West (culminating in its incorporation of various countries from the old Soviet bloc in 2004). An important consequence of these events, repeatedly noted by Habermas, is an increase in economic and political migration from the impoverished margins of global and European society to its affluent centres (see BFN: Appendix II; IO: Ch. 8). From a global perspective, this was also the period that saw a series of challenges to the status and legitimacy of the United Nations. At the core of this was the crisis of Iraq, and the two Gulf Wars (of 1991 and 2003).