The end of Cold War divisions, the rise of multinational corporations, and the advent of new information technologies have all served to knit the world together in a process known as “globalization.” With the market reforms pursued by the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping beginning in the early 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade later, the decades-long division of the globe between capitalist liberal democracies and state Socialist regimes seemed to disappear. As China and the former Soviet Socialist republics transitioned to economic regimes with privately held industry and foreign investment, capitalism appeared to be ascendant in the post–Cold War era. This “new world order” was thus marked by a new system of global capitalism. On one hand, free markets became the normative system of economic organization for most states around the globe.