ASSOCIATING interdependence with democracy, peace and prosperity is nothing new. Before World War I, the close interdependence of states was thought of as heralding an era of peace among nations, and democracy and prosperity within them. In his widely read book, The Great Illusion, Norman Angell summed up the texts of generations of classical and neoclassical economists and drew from them the dramatic conclusion that wars would no longer be fought because they would not pay. World War I instead produced the great disillusion, which reduced political optimism to a level that remained low almost until the end of the Cold War--"almost", because beginning in the 1970s a new optimism, strikingly similar to the old, began to resurface. Interdependence was again associated with peace, and increasingly with democracy, which began to spread wonderfully to Latin America, to Asia and, with the Soviet Union's collapse, to Eastern Europe. In 1989 Francis Fukuyama foresaw in these pages a time when all states would be lib eral democracies, and more recently Michael Doyle projected that this would happen sometime between 2050 and 2100.1
