Making sense of the 1990s: choices, pathways, and missed opportunities

This introductory chapter lays out the volume’s analytic framework and core themes. It starts by looking at the “mixed outcomes” that emerged out of the 1990s. These are the choices, successes, and missed opportunities that the volume’s authors explore and seek to explain. The chapter then introduces the volume’s themes and summarizes the essays that probe them across a variety of geographic and functional settings. The chapter summaries are organized to highlight key features of liberal order-building in the 1990s, as well as areas of agreement and disagreement over what was achieved, and at what cost. The chapter concludes by considering the volume’s implications for understanding the challenges that China, Russia, and the antiglobalist backlash within the West pose to the liberal order today.