2 - An Overview

Summary

Australia’s international environment in the first half of the 1990s was heavily conditioned by global trends that had gathered force over the preceding decade. Among these trends were the internationalisation of production and of financial and commodity markets; the emergence of a technologically borderless world, characterised by new media, information and communication networks and symbolised above all by the World Wide Web; and within this context of globalisation, the rise of new centres of economic and technological power, very notably in East Asia. The increasingly widespread influence of free (or at least liberal) market ideology could be seen as concomitant with these changes, in part reflecting them, in part driving them. And interlinked with these phenomena at the geostrategic level there was the waning of the Cold War. While the Soviet implosion of the later 1980s might not have ushered in any new world order, it did signify the demise of certain verities – including superpower ideological rivalry, strategic bipolarity, and nuclear arms racing – which had done much to structure the pattern of international relationships for four decades.