Tóm tắt

The end of the Cold War proved traumatic for practitioners and theorists of International Relations (IR) alike. For over forty-five years after the end ofWorld War II, the East-West conflict was regarded as the central factor in international affairs. Few areas of the world escaped its baleful influence in temas of either their domestic dispositions or their diplomatic orientations. Certainly in the dominant Anglo-American tradition of thinking and acting in foreign affairs, everything else seemed subordinate to it. That the Cold War lens afforded an extremely myopic and distorted view of international relations is now being gradually (though sometimes grudgingly) acknowledged. both by academic specialists in IR for whom the discipline has in an important sense been liberated and by foreign policy elites for whom this confrontational behavioural paradigm had achieved the status of an unquestioned grundnorm from which virtually all policies and perspectives logically flowed.