№ 1 - 2000
Utkin A.I.
Vectors of the Global Changes: Analysis and Appraisals of the Main Factors of the World Political Development

D.Sc. (History), Director, International Studies Centre, defines and describes, in the first part of the article, the six factors whose combined impact must bring the world community to a new condition in the 21st century. They are: 1) the geopolitical strength of the USA and her allies, extrapolated onto the world as a whole (“military strength”); 2) economy growth in North America, West Europe, and East Asia (“wealth”); 3) the weakening of nation states, as unregulated processes go on (“cha-otic development”); 4) political communities’ aspiration to obtaining new identity (“search for identity”); 5) the planet’s poor majority’s rising against the rich minority (“fight for justice”); 6) the population explosion (“the growth of the planet’s popula-tion numbers”). All these factors — provided the planet’s organization is unipolar (“unipolarity”), with the USA as its leader, as predicted by the author, — may nega-tively influence the global stability. In the 2nd part of the article , the author analyzes circumstances impeding these six factors, and concentrates mainly on internal and ex-ternal contradictions in the development of the potential global hegemon, that is to say, the USA. The study has been carried out in the context of discussing national in-terests of the USA and of other members of the world community.