Evaluating IR's Crystal Balls: How Predictions of the Future Have Withstood Fourteen Years of Unipolarity.

The fall of the Berlin Wall inspired speculation about why the Cold War came to such an abrupt and shocking end, why no school of thought anticipated its demise, and what the event meant for international relations theory ( ). A set of articles simultaneously emerged purporting to identify the most salient aspects of the new system—structural and otherwise—and to anticipate the direction in which it was heading. This essay begins a reexamination of some of those predictions, using the evidence that has accumulated over the decade and a half since the collapse of bipolarity to evaluate how early visions of the post-Cold War international system have matched the events that followed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]