More people on earth today are endangered by their own governments, through malevolence or incompetence, than they are by the armed forces of an aggressive neighbour. War is only part of global insecurities. Poverty, hunger, disease and oppression destroy people s lives. From the past to the future . Coping with the coming global crises with any degree of success demands that those involved in influencing and making policy will need the intellectual depth and strength necessary to reinvent a new world - a challenge requiring imagination as well as confidence.
Humans are a meaning-creating species, and accounts of the past are central.
The first global age therefore needs a history to match its scale, because we need all the help we can get to construct the meanings that will help us face the radical circumstances of the 21st century. Such mental resources will not be much stimulated by immersion in the ideas and practices of the Cold War, with their ethnocentrism and temporal parochialism. Our imaginations are more likely to be stimulated by explorations of previous seismic shifts in human consciousness and large-scale history than by continuing the parochialism of time. From Cold War International Relations to Global Moral Science . The dismal Cold War social science of International Relations was narrow in focus and spirit.