The Geopolitical Roots of Today’s Nineties and Noughties Nostalgia

Bucket hats, low-rise jeans, Oasis on tour, and Tony Blair’s face over our screens. Was it 2025? Or is it 1999? Trick question, of course, for it is both. It has not escaped the notice of many today that a tidal wave of 1990s and 2000s revival has hit us in the West in recent years. On an aesthetic level alone, a new generation of adolescents have thrown themselves with abandon into the shibboleths of ‘90s/’00s fashion. From Vogue to Elle and far beyond, those who experienced the trends first time round are trying to mediate between their own urge to cringe at an all-too-recognisable victimhood to fashion, and a certain twinkly-eyed nostalgia for a period where chunky white platform trainers and highlighters in hair set the sartorial standards of the day.  

Beyond these mere personal aesthetic concerns, politics in the UK back in 2024 saw a rise in discourse concerning Blairite landslides and political regeneration – spurred on by a romping Starmer-led Labor election victory which had that familiar tune of D:Reem floating across the airwaves once more. There even seemed to be just as little recognition by those using it as in 1997, of the irony of championing an election campaign with the line ‘things can only get better’. And Tony himself is back; where he once stood showing off purported progress on Palestinian-Israeli relations, he is now a dubious champion of a new iteration of an international ‘Mandate’ style situation for Gaza.  

While not all of these echoes of history are actually looked upon fondly in their own rights today, the zeitgeist is undeniably drawn in by nostalgia of one form or another for a period which, ultimately, makes for such good source material because it was a time when the west had it good – really good. When US president George Bush proclaimed in 1991 that there was a ‘New World Order’ he was not being merely rhetorical. The defining structural feature of geopolitics since the Second World War had been the huge gravitational pull of two great powers, the USA and the Soviet Union. This ‘bipolar’ distribution of power within the international political system was held by scholars like Kenneth Waltz as the fundamental ordering principle of international politics. 

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union on the horizon, the successful US-led, UN-backed (i.e. non Kremlin-vetoed) military campaign in the Persian Gulf in 1990-1991 showed that there was zero potency in resistance to a US-dominated global political and economic system. America was to have, in the words of American political commentator Charles Krauthammer, its ‘unipolar moment’. On top of this, the world’s trading relationships were being homogenised through the gargantuan influence attached to the neoliberal free trade policies of the ‘Washington consensus’ and the nascent World Trade Organisation. Approaching the turn of the millennium, then, the USA was a sole great power in the global order and – in the name of its mostly deeply-entrenched economic interests – it ensured it kept its hand on the tiller of the free trade regime which broadly served the dollar. Politically aligned countries like the UK largely stepped into line behind the USA. 

How does this translate into today’s nostalgia? Firstly, the flailing of liberal democratic politics around the world today both makes the stability of 90s/’00s centrist neoliberal democracies an attractive contrast, and provides collective living memory of times when it felt like the fundamental pillars of life in the West were not challenged quite so much as they are today. Looking to the past for political narratives or performances that provide psychological succour to a mind besieged by the vexing political questions of today is made much easier if those past performances and narratives were the genuine article; the real actions and policies of people who felt a genuine self-confidence about their society that is absent today.  

Secondly, the liberated individual consumer – who had so ably demonstrated the USA’s ‘soft’ power during the cold war by flaunting to their Eastern Bloc counterparts the latest in denim fashion – is even further enabled today. Goods have become cheaper and more accessible thanks to competition in supply chains and intermediaries criss-crossing the globe as well as the harnessing of new technologies to reinvent the shopping process for the individual consumer. This all complements an ideology of extreme individualism of self-expression; in general the consumer in the west has the choice and freedom to present themselves however they wish.

But mass consumer culture in the west today has little to say for itself as it enters a period where its preconceived self-assurances are being shown up as hollow. Since the US began being nudged and barged atop its global pedestal – from the first election of Donald Trump onwards in particular – and with the current structures of neoliberal individualism and consumerism thus tottering, the expendable resources of western populations have increasingly been spent reinforcing not just an image of the past, but the images and articles of a past germinating from a context we associate with collective social self-confidence. In the conscious moment, we appreciate the form of an object; in the subconscious we seek satisfaction or comfort from its context. 

The west and the USA are not spent forces in geopolitical terms, but in an uncertain world it could be some time until mass consumer culture stops identifying the trends of the ‘90s/’00s as its preferred collective self-representation.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Sharon Farmer

Licence: public domain.

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