It is an intriguing fact of late twentieth-century life that just at the time when philosophers have proclaimed the death of 'meta-narratives', the collapse of grand modernist dreams for re-moulding man and society and consciously shaping the human future - indeed, even the end of 'history' itself - international political leaders have come to identify themselves with an amibitious new project intended to act as the famous of human endeavor in the twenty-first century.