Introduction

Only 20 years after the ‘victory’ of capitalism over state socialism, marked by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989’91, an even bigger convulsion shook the affluent states of Europe, North America and Australasia. The twin crises of banking and government threatened the prosperity and stability which seemed to have settled on these societies, some of them were faced with upheavals that paralleled events in the USSR and its satellites in the early 1990s. Above all, the complacent view of the institutions of liberal democratic welfare states (suitably ‘modernised’ in recent decades) as the blueprint for future global development was dealt a mortal blow.