Part IV

To the Millennium

In this part . . .

Medieval people thought the year 1000 meant the end of the world. Twentieth-century people looked forward to the year 2000 with a mixture of excitement and nervousness. No one was expecting the world to end, though they were expecting all the computers to crash, which was almost as bad. The Cold War was over; the new world order would mean peace and international harmony. Wouldn’t it?

Technology certainly suggested it would. These were the years of the Internet, of instant messaging all around the globe. Communications brought the world closer together than it had ever been. Moreover, it was the Asian countries, so long at the mercy of the rest of the world, who were now making the running.

But it was painfully clear that some of the century’s problems simply wouldn’t go away. The end of the Cold War brought no peace in the Middle East, where militant Islam would soon emerge as the biggest challenge to world peace in the new century. The last decades of the twentieth century saw scenes of famine and even genocide.

These were the confident years, when the twentieth century turned its back on its own past and looked to the future. These were also the years when the twentieth century needed to know a bit more about its own history.