Niklas Luhmann died in 1998. For illustrative purposes, it is an interesting exercise to remember what the world’s concerns were at that time. These were the days of the raw conflict in Kosovo, of the discussions on banning human cloning particularly in Europe. It was also the era of the Clinton–Lewinsky affair, the planning of attacks on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for violations of peace agreements, and the long and winding trip of weapons inspectors through Iraq. India and Pakistan, countries that tested nuclear weapons and threatened each other, while US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed, presumably by Osama bin Laden. The 1997 Asian economic crisis hit Latin America strongly in 1998; with massive capital outflows and sharp currency depreciations, plunging the region into a crisis that lasted until 2003. In 1998, the Rome Statute was adopted by 120 States (and later ratified by 60 countries giving birth to the International Criminal Court in 2002), and 1998 was also the year in which the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was indicted and arrested by a Spanish magistrate in London for human rights violations committed during the military dictatorship that ruled Chile between 1973 and 1989. In 1998, Hugo Chávez was elected president in Venezuela, introducing the ‘socialism of the twenty first century’ to the world, a populist political system with ramifications relevant for Latin America even today. And if all that were not enough, Google was officially launched in 1998.

Turbulent and critical times far from equilibrium, as we may say in the language of complex systems. The chronological end of the twentieth century is closer to the entangled and contradictory dynamics of the twenty-first century than to the Cold War deflationary bloc politics that prevailed since 1945. Historically, it can be said that the twentieth century came to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the rise of the internet in the early 1990s. With this, politics and economy were released as world social systems in a twofold sense. First, they were freed from the structural and semantic forces that had contained their expansion, namely, the compulsion to understand every political operation as either supporting communism or capitalism and every economic operation as a question of capital or work.