The Post-Imperial Age; & Law and War Since 1945

• The Post-Imperial Age: The Great Powers and the Wider World
  J.P.D. Dunbabin – Longman, 1994 - xxii + 549 pp. - £44
• Law and War Since 1945
  Geoffrey Best - Clarendon Press, 1994 - xiv + 434pp. - £25

The period from 1945 to 1990 is destined to be remembered as the age of the Cold War, yet the East-West confrontation was only one of its defining features. The other was the process of decolonisation. Arguably, the last act of the Cold War – the break-up of the Soviet empire – constituted the last act of the imperial age. As Yugoslavia has shown, states may still fragment into even smaller units, yet there is now a sense that the expansion of the international society of states is all but complete.