Monopolar World Order [antikvár]

Foreword The bipolar world that came to an end in 1989 followed an orchestration which we had more or less learned to understand. We were sufficiently able to explain both important political events and inconspicuous everyday occurrences. It was possible to predict fairly accurately what consequences decisions taken in Moscow would have in Washington D.C. and vice versa. After the disappearance of the Soviet Union this is no longer the case. Since 1989, I have therefore tried to find out what was essential in the new situation. The result of this effort were a number of articles and lectures produced over the past ten years. A selection of them is presented in this volume. Their publication appears justified if, reading these contributions, it becomes possible to discern some pattern in what Norbert Elias metaphorically called the maelstrom of events. The texts in this volume are out to discover (new) realities. Both old and new realities can also be conceived as socially influenced mental constructs. However, as such they still ought not to be purely fictitious. Rather, we are concerned with reflections on observable events which we neither invented nor chose at random. To stress this is important at a time when information, also of the scientific kind, is increasingly turning into a commodity traded in monopolistic markets. Information monopolies are, to be sure, very well suited to the construction of realities which are not real in actual fact. The present volume is intended to oppose this trend. Erfurt, 11 Aprü 2000 Egon Mat^ner Max Weber Centre for Cultural and Social Studies University of Erfurt