Just over a decade ago, following the almost total collapse of communism, it seemed to many observers to be the dawn of a new age, an age in which Western ideas of freedom, democracy, individual rights, and capitalism finally would come to dominate, spreading their beneficent effects to the many blighted parts of the globe that had previously rejected them in the name of Marxism, or traditional values, or anti-Westernism, or some other self-defeating ideal.