The 1990s was a decade of grand optimism. This hope appeared grounded in the Soviet Union’s fall, the subordination of Chinese communism to raising living standards and the domestic absence of radical politics. Many assumed that the future would be peaceful, ever more prosperous and less susceptible to class politics and rebellion from discontented voters. This mindset so distorted political thinking in Europe and North America that it encouraged reckless risk-taking.
The Clinton administration treated Russia’s ongoing energy-producing capacity as irrelevant to its possible geopolitical power. It assumed China could be led into the international economic order on American terms and then that America’s body politic could absorb China becoming a significant manufacturing economy. In the United Kingdom, Tony Blair’s governments began with a cavalier attitude towards the Union. Only on the improbable premise that Labour would remain permanently in power in all of Westminster, Edinburgh and Cardiff could devolution for Scotland and Wales ever have countered, rather than accentuated, the centrifugal forces already at work within the Union.
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