Following the end of the Cold War 10 years ago, the US academic Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history, with liberal capitalism emerging the victor.
The battle of Seattle earlier this month can be seen as offering a reply. As the Observer editorialised, the events in Seattle "introduce the first serious opposition to global capitalism since the Cold War".
At one level, what happened at Seattle should have come as no surprise. After all, the WTO summit was simply the culmination of a series of high-profile international summits held throughout the 1990s, such as the Rio summit on the environment in 1992, Vienna on human rights in 1993, and Beijing on women in 1995.
Large numbers of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) attended each of these, some in a semi-official capacity but many others at parallel forums held alongside the main meeting.
Furthermore, the power of these transnational civil society networks to undermine inter-governmental negotiations had been acknowledged in the collapse in April 1998 of talks among 29 OECD countries on a Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI).
These talks, on drafting a comprehensive treaty governing international investment, had been taking place far from public scrutiny since May 1995 until, in February 1997, an early draft was leaked and posted on the World Wide Web.
The resulting outcry, orchestrated by NGOs, about the possible undermining of social, labour, national and environmental rights, halted the talks. Delegates at Seattle failed to reach agreement on re-starting them.
What happened on the streets of Seattle, therefore, served to draw international public attention in a dramatic way to a phenomenon that has been emerging throughout the decade, namely that networks of civil society organisations have become significant actors on the world stage.
Up to now, these have been widely regarded as a disparate collection of groups largely concerned with single issues such as the environment, women, labour, indigenous peoples, developing countries, or human rights. What the WTO seems to have done is to give them a common enemy - global capitalism.
WE must, of course, be careful in assessing the significance of what happened. Seattle was simply a moment; the networks it drew together can quickly fragment, particularly as they almost certainly contain groups espousing widely divergent solutions to the problems identified from a return to national protectionism, through a reform of capitalism, to its complete overthrow.
But it is also important that these considerations do not result in underestimating the significance of what was manifested there, dismissing it as an obstructionist nuisance.
Two dimensions merit attention. The first concerns the meaning of globalisation, the second concerns democratisation. On the issue of globalisation, what was striking to the observer of Seattle was the clash of discourses.
We witnessed senior WTO and government officials proclaiming that economic liberalisation was being pursued to increase people's prosperity while the actions on the streets were clearly motivated by a widespread experience that the opposite is the case.
Dismissing the protesters as being against globalisation, as the Economist has done, entirely misses this point. I'm sure some are against globalisation but most, I suspect, are simply giving voice to what they see as the devastating social impact on many sectors of humanity of the present market-driven form of globalisation espoused by the WTO.
Indeed, far from being against globalisation, many NGOs are to the forefront in elaborating proposals as to how a globalised economy could be made to serve better the needs of the marginalised and vulnerable, including the vulnerable environment.
Examples include proposals to make social impact assessments a central part of WTO deliberations, and linking trade liberalisation to progress on protecting the world's forests.
Thus the battle of Seattle seems to be the most dramatic expression to date of the argument made by Prof Richard Falk of Princeton, that a market-driven globalisation needs to be counteracted by a people-driven globalisation.
He argues that governments throughout the world have become far too subservient to corporate interests and that pressure from an activist global civil society is needed to "resituate" them so that they attend more centrally to the needs of their own citizens, particularly the poor and marginalised.
THE second dimension that requires attention concerns democratisation. It is indeed striking that a decade which has seen a concerted move throughout the world to take economic policy-making out of the realm of political debate and to hand it over to "experts" (for example, the independence of central banks, the imposition of IMF economic "recipes" on governments, the broad consensus that reigns on economic liberalisation), ends with people taking to the streets in a direct challenge to this dominant economic orthodoxy. Where political systems have been evacuated of real power, citizens are seeking new ways of influencing events.
To interpret the significance of all this, I find useful the theoretical insights of the Hungarian social scientist, Karl Polanyi, who fled from Vienna to London in 1933 and whose most influential book, The Great Transformation, was published in 1944.
Polanyi analysed the source of the breakdown of world order in the first half of the 20th century (two World Wars, the rise of fascism) as lying in the emergence of the self-regulating market economy in the 19th century which made society subservient to its needs.
This, argued Polanyi, was an entirely new phenomenon in world history and society had to react to try to counteract the social destruction wrought by the free market.
Many international relations scholars are finding uncanny parallels between the process described by Polanyi and today's world. At lectures in DCU and the Royal Irish Academy earlier this week, Prof Fred Halliday of the London School of Economics reminded his listeners that the destructive breakdown of world order in the 20th century was preceded by a belle epoque of expanding world trade and globalisation at the end of the 19th century. These historical references remind us that failure to learn and act on the lessons of Seattle would be foolhardy in the extreme.
Peadar Kirby is a lecturer on the MA course in International Relations at Dublin City University