The basic message of this book is that the twenty-first century is being shaped by a raft of complex problems that will develop in an environment of perpetual instability. This book is a cautionary tale that the incipient threat of instability comes from the massiveness and substance of the problems themselves, which have gotten out of hand for a variety of reasons.

To make his case, Kennedy assumes that corporate interests are the principal agents of international development and change and to some degree lie outside nation-state influence or politics. Secondly, Kennedy assumes that older concerns than those presented by population explosions, the technological revolution, and the global economy tend to exacerbate the negative and limit the positive changes that are going on as the world moves to the twenty-first century. In o

But this assumption ironically loses its force even as chaotic events overtake or substantiate predictions of gloom and doom. For a case can be made that from time to time chaos results in positive change. Consider the massive relief efforts in the wake of floods in Bangladesh, Somalian famine, invasion of Kuwait, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. To be sure, relief efforts are hardly the equivalent of positive structural change, but the principal service that chaos and crisis perform is to bring the depth of problems to the surface and so encourage, in the long term, some impulse toward reform. To the degree the industrialized countries fail to respond in structural terms to the latest crisis--the fate of Muslim Bosnia is a good example-then chaos theory assumes authority. But to the degree a crisis can result in substantive rethinking of priorities on the part of participants, then a useful result may be obtained as new ways of thinking about international cooperation emerge. Consider the changes in the PLO-Israel relationship in 1993 and the international coalition in the Gulf War of 1991.

Repeatedly Kennedy brings readers back to the ancient tribalism and rivalries that are never far away from any impulse toward modernization or even moderate change in outlook, attitude, or ambition. But he does not treat tribalism--whether European or African or Asian or rich or poor in structure--as a separate issue in detail, even though he alludes to it repeatedly. This is the prin