GLO: Lesson - The 1990s

The 1990s

Expanded Democracy, Globalization, and Cooperation

The Fall of the USSR in 1991 sent shockwaves around the world. The United States, and therefore democratic capitalism, had won the Cold War. Over 20 countries started or expanded their democracies.

Three notable examples of democracy and self-determination in the 1990s included Ireland, Israel, and South Africa. In Ireland and the UK, the Good Friday Agreement acknowledged that most people in Northern Ireland wanted to remain in the UK, and the territory would do so until a majority wanted to be part of Ireland. This ended The Troubles (the era of violence and terrorism). Israel agreed to give Palestine 2 areas of land: Gaza and the West Bank and declared the PLO to be a legitimate political entity for Palestinians. In South Africa, then-President F.W. de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu collaborated to dismantle apartheid. By 1994, Nelson Mandela was elected South Africa’s first black president.

Image note: Nelson Mandela casts his ballot in the 1994 South African election. It was the first time he ever was able to vote in his life, and it was also the election that won him the presidency!

In fact, by the end of the century, half the world’s population lived in “free” or “partially free” countries, and the number of democracies outnumbered dictatorships. Although not fueled by the Cold War, the United States still took its role as the promoter of democracy seriously. In the 1990s, US foreign aid for democratic development increased nearly 8 times the yearly expenditure of the 1980s.

A Focus on Human Rights

This decade also saw a larger worldwide commitment to human rights, peace, and environmentalism. This was in part economically based. Multinational corporations could expand into countries that no longer were financially risky and wanted to capitalize on cheap labor overseas. The World Trade Organization, created in 1994, lowered tariffs and encouraged specialization, although the cheap prices of large companies like Amazon made it hard for local businesses, especially in developing nations, to compete.

It was technologically based: worldwide communication became much faster with the growing popularity of cell phones and the invention of the internet. The cooperation also had diplomatic roots: with the end of the Cold War, nuclear war became less of a threat, and 177 countries signed and ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT, 1996). However, since China, Iran, Israel, the United States, India, North Korea, and Pakistan (all of these countries have nuclear weapons) haven’t ratified the treaty, it was not effective. Finally, globalization was also a response to scientific studies demonstrating that when humans negatively impact the earth, it would in turn limit human rights in those areas. The Montreal Protocol (1988), Kyoto Protocol (1998), and Convention on Biological Diversity (1993) currently experience near universal participation and individually work to limit harm to the Earth’s ozone layer and protect against species extinction.

Land Disputes, Genocides, and Terrorist Attacks

But the close of the century was not a completely peaceful time.

Genocides: There were genocides in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Rwanda in the 1990s. A genocide is a mass killing of a people, ethnic group, or nation.

In Eastern Europe, the fall of the USSR left competing religious and ethnic groups in Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia had 3 main groups: Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosnians. In 1992, Serbs killed 200,000 Croats and Muslims. NATO (including the US) stopped the fighting, and Yugoslavia broke up into 8 countries.

Image note: Martyrs' Memorial Cemetery Kovači in Sarajevo. It is the final resting place for Bosnian soldiers who were killed by the Serbian army.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, threatened Saudi Arabia, and murdered his Kurdish citizens. In 1991, The US sent in troops to stop Hussein from fighting, but he remained in power.

In central Africa, the ethnic Tutsis (toot-sees) had ruled over another ethnic group, the Hutus (hoo-toos), in Rwanda since colonial times. In 1994, angry Hutus killed Tutsis. Eventually, Tutsis started to kill Hutus, too. Between 500,000 -1,000,000 Rwandans died.

Image note: Images of the Rwanda Genocide victims at the Kigali Genocide Center in Kigali, Rwanda. The center is the final resting place of 250,000 Tutsi victims of the Rwanda genocide. One survivor is quoted saying “The Kigali Genocide Memorial is like my home. It is where I go to be with my relatives. You feel happy being close to your loved ones. But then it becomes a place of grief because they are gone.”

In South Asia, Pakistan, India, and China all claimed the region of Kashmir. All three of those countries have nuclear weapons, so it led to tense negotiations. The land is still disputed.

Terrorism: Terrorism increased worldwide, but especially in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. While this decade saw economic growth in the United States, terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in NYC (1993), a Federal Building in Oklahoma City (1995), and the Olympic Park in Atlanta (1996).

Practice Activity

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