"These were the years of the Clinton boom and the gradual recovery of economic dynamism in Europe. They were the heyday of economic globalization and the weightless consumerism it afforded the Western middle classes in particular. The implications of this proved significant in the forging of at least three basic elements of the post-Cold War order: first, regarding the manner in which the world economy was “constructed” (primarily around international finance), the variant of financialized globalization it led to, and the leverage that afforded markets over states; secondly, regarding the timing and significance of the Cold War’s end, the lessons of which pushed the decade’s critical actors, social democrats, into a generational turn towards these newly liberalized markets as a less costly tool of distributional fairness; and thirdly, in terms of very real social tensions that reappeared across the Western democracies during the immediate post-Cold War years. With the world seeming to pick up speed all around, much of this went unnoticed—or at least it was not acted upon—at the time. For this was when the two Germanies were learning how to live as one nation again, and when the European Union was born at Maastricht. It was when the twentieth century seemed to deliver on so many of its technological promises—home computing and the Internet, GM food and cable television—and when it was possible to look at the world at large and, for the first time in people’s memory, not need to interpret events in terms of the struggle between communism and capitalism. It was the self-proclaimed era of being “post-” everything. And yet there was much that persisted too. Yugoslavia broke apart amid the violence in Bosnia; Eastern Europe struggled under the burden of its rapid conversion to a capitalist economy. International law took great strides forward but was written mostly by—and for—the powerful. Meanwhile, an oversized and underregulated financial market thrived beyond the oversight of national states, as did the black market and the oligarchs who profited from this."