This “New Europe”: Historic Policy Opportunities for Canada

Abstract

Along with the rest of the world, Canadians today are living yet again through history-making

and often unpredictable times. In only the past 15 years, we have experienced such dramatic events as the

sudden end of the Cold War, with its division of the world into two binary ideological camps, the

fragmentation of the world’s second superpower – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – and the

convergence of United States as the world’s hyperpuissance; China’s embrace of elements of a market

economy and emergence as a formidable economic presence; the first major terrorist attack on the

continental US, and the consequential dramatic awakening to the uncertainty of terrorism and its sources

as the principal security threat to even the most highly developed liberal democratic systems.