The analyses of our century, our times, are many. Just before the break-up of communism Francis Fukuyama, a former analyst with the Rand Corporation, wrote the following in a talk he entitled "the End of History." "There is some larger process at work," he wrote, "a process that gives coherence and order to the daily headlines. The twentieth century saw the developed world descend into a paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war. But the century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an "end of ideology" or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism." Fifteen years later the waters are muddier. The summary Fukuyama gives here of the twentieth century is useful here to place in context this tenth stage of history.