On November 9, 1989 the government of East Berlin announced that it would begin dismantling the Berlin wall, which for 28 years had stood as a concrete symbol of the global divide between eastern and western blocs. Two years later, the Soviet Union officially disbanded and the United States, at least for the moment, appeared to be the lone superpower on the world stage.

Indeed, the position of preeminence held by the United States following this shift in power dynamic was so unprecedented that respected Princeton political scientist Francis Fukuyama was led to proclaim the end of history—western liberal democracy had won, and history, inasmuch as it represented the struggle of ideologies against one another, was over. But a year after Fukuyama’s controversial book, Samuel P. Huntington published an even more contentious essay, “The Clash of Civilizations,” which argued that history was far from over: following the collapse of the Soviet Union, nations would soon return to a multipolar, pre-Cold war order whose blocs would form along cultural lines. As he argued, “the fault lines of civilizations are the battle lines of the future.” Others in Washington foresaw a period of permanent US hegemony and formulated a new brand of neo-conservative foreign policy with the ultimate goal of preserving and extending US preeminence.

In other words, the 1990s were marked by a profusion of contending theories and predictions about what the future world order would look like and who the dominant players would be. But in the last five years, this debate has fallen a bit by the wayside—it was not resolved, but in a sense, talked out—and barring more evidence there was little to be added to the discussions of the past decade.

In this symposium we seek to revisit this debate in light of recent developments, including the consolidation of the European Union, the resurrection of the nonaligned movement, the rise of China, and recent US military activities abroad. What do these developments portend for predictions of the future world order? It is time to reexamine this question, and our five diversely-opinioned authors attack the issue with gusto.

Our symposium begins with a pair of contending articles discussing the United States’ role in the world. The first, by William Wolfforth, posits that the United States is and will remain a unipolar power, and that today’s ruminations about multipolarity are merely a fad similar to those surrounding Sputnik, stagflation, and Japan, Inc. the second article, by Immanuel Wallerstein, argues the opposite: that US hegemony has been in decline since the 1970s and that the recent war in Iraq has accelerated what was previously a process of slow decline. Wang Yiwei posits that the 21st century will be characterized by a “bifocal” order centered on the United States and China and that prognostications about China rising to threaten the United States are mistaken—Chinese development supports, rather than challenges, US power. Our final two articles offer an iconoclastic endingto the symposium, examining whether the balance of power framework is even relevant in the 21st century. Charles Maier argues that the question of the 21st century is not one of polarity and preeminence but whether states can be effective international actors at all in the face of globalization and diffused concentrations of power. Louise Richardson addresses the problem by looking at terrorism, questioning whether a state-centric framework is appropriate for understanding the actions of individuals who do not take an interest in “bandwagoning” against US power.

This diverse set of opinions takes a fresh look at the fundamental question of how power is and will be distributed across the globe. The world has changed significantly in the last seven years, necessitating a reconsideration of the predictions that were made in the 1990s as to how power would manifest itself during the next century. We hope that the articles included here will provide insight that will add to and carry forward this debate.