The world became smaller and more complex in 1998, as political leaders wrestled with the effects of economic crisis in Asia and Russia, growing demands for more effective means of regulating international affairs and a greater recognition that human rights take precedence over national sovereignties. It is hazardous to predict, of course, especially about the future. But taken together, these trends herald a genuine shift from political patterns of the last decade and point towards a different set of priorities in world politics during the century to come. So much store was put in Asian growth as a path to development that the full scale of its disintegration has taken the world by surprise over the course of the year.
The picture is uneven. Indonesia is the most dramatic case, with Suharto relinquishing power after a quasi-revolutionary upsurge and the reversion into poverty of millions who assumed they had escaped such a fate. Thailand and Malaysia also suffered severely, but Taiwan and the Philippines have not been as badly affected. South Korea has gone furthest towards recuperation. Japan, the largest economy in the region by far, is still struggling with indebted banks and an inflexible governing system. China, by far the biggest country, earned kudos for economic management but has the greatest difficulty with political and human rights. India has been relatively untouched but confronts Pakistan in an alarming politico-military escalation of regional tension.
Taking Russia along with the Asian cases makes limited geographical but much economic sense, confirming that we live in a smaller and more interdependent world. We go into 1999 amid the greatest uncertainty as to the outcome of Russia's economic and political crisis but sure in the knowledge that a drastic disintegration of its political or economic structures would have global consequences - especially for their fellow-Europeans.
An important theme of the outgoing year concerned the lessons to be learned from the failure of the market reform project in Russia and the shortcomings of the policy prescriptions from western advisers. As a result, a substantial debate is under way about the proper relationship between politics, states and markets. The crude idea that states must stand aside to let markets do their work, needs drastic revision in the light of the Asian and Russian experiences. So does the idea that democratic accountability and access must stop at the boundaries of the nation-state, in the face of such globalisation.
Politics is the means by which the adjustment will be made, whether at the level of the Bretton Woods institutions regulating the international economy, the United Nations, or international institutions thrown up by regional integration, of which the European Union is by far the most developed example in the contemporary world. The introduction of the single currency tomorrow dramatically confirms this fact. Political leadership to address these tasks in the major centres of power is in relatively short supply after the turbulence and change of the last year. President Clinton has determinedly carried on US foreign policy - in Kosovo, the Middle East, Asia and Northern Ireland, for example - despite the potentially crippling diversion of the Lewinsky affair. President Yeltsin has all but departed the scene in Russia. In Europe, a new set of mostly social democratic leaders is taking over the reins of power. Asian leaders are struggling with regional deflation. Political transitions in South Africa and Nigeria underline the uncertainty facing that continent. In Latin America, there are hopeful signs of political recovery. All these leaders will find they are fated to co-operate by these world trends in the year to come.