The Arab Spring began in Tunisia in mid-December 2010 when a street vendor named Mohammed Bouzazi burned himself to death in protest over his maltreatment by the Tunisian police. 

The spreading tide of Industrial Revolution also transformed the dynamics of the traditional state and the society it governed. Growing numbers of tradable merchandise created a class of investors and merchants, which weakened the older landed aristocracy’s hold on power. Yet apart from this new moneyed aristocracy, a new working class was also emerging. Though the traditional absolutist rule of kings still prevailed, society was dynamically changing. Initially, higher revenues from both domestic and international trade and taxes from increasing production increased kings’ capacity to arm themselves, better govern their realm, and fight wars of territorial acquisition. In the short run, therefore, the Industrial Revolution rocketed the economies of traditional states and transformed them into highly centralized ones. As monarchs made use of their recently acquired means of power for more centralized models of government, the first image of the nation-state in history began to emerge (Hobsbawm, 1962:27-53).

The Soviet Union, who remained just beyond the capitalist world, were mostly immune to the effects of the Great Depression.

1989 is also known as the annus mirabilis, the year of miracles, as one by one, the communist parties of the Eastern Europe caved to the demands of the reformers in their respective countries, ending the monopoly on power of the Communist Party and paving the way to a more democratically organised polity by the end of 1989.

In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence. The federal army of Yugoslavia initially tried to bring Slovenia and Croatia back into Yugoslavia by force. However, the recognition given to them by European countries and later the US—not to mention the UN peacekeeping forces deployed to monitor the ceasefire established after the withdrawal of the Yugoslav federal army—gave Belgrade no choice but to let Slovenia and Croatia go.

Hitler had decided to attack the Soviet Union, since this would indirectly force Britain out of the war. Hitler’s aim was to deprive Britain of any hope of allies. Besides the geopolitical and ideological reasons for attacking the Soviet Union, an immediate factor was the impracticability of a cross-Channel invasion. Hitler discarded Sea Lion and turned to Operation Barbarossa against Soviet Russia.

After the failure of the London Foreign Ministers’ Conference in late 1947, the US, France, Britain, and the Benelux states (Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg) met again from February to June 1948 in what would be called the London Six Power Conference to hammer out an agreement on the formulation of a unified West German state. 

The age of absolutism is generally between 1660 and 1789, starting with the restoration of the English monarchy after the English Civil War and the personal rule of Louis XIV of France until the French Revolution.

During the establishment of the United Nations, USA, China, Russia and Britain agreed on the creation of five principal organs, one of them being a Secretariat with administrative staff headed by a Secretary-General appointed by the General Assembly on the recommendation of the Security Council (UNa).

The Cuban Revolution of 1959, for example, had led to the emergence of a communist Cuba that soon became an ally of the Soviet Union.

The issuance of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 by the British government pledged the British support for the Zionist movement and proved a milestone in the creation of the State of Israel (Best et al., 2008: 108-111).

Scholars have focused on three factors to explain the decolonization process in the 20th century: • The first is internal pressure, which can be evaluated at the local or regional level. Colonized peoples’ demands for reform and independence as well as the rise of anti-colonial political and nationalist movements can be considered as internal pressures against British, Dutch, and French colonial rule (Langenhove, 1961: 405, Betts, 2004: 37). The national politics of colonized powers were shaped upon these internal pressures. • The second is the inability and weakness of colonial powers to rule their colonies. World War II demonstrated that European colonial powers were no longer able to rule their African and Asian colonies. Fonseca and Marcos (2013: 209) argue that “if World War I helped to create local resistance movements against colonialism, it was World War II that destroyed the colonial system itself.” • The third factor is the external pressure which can also be expressed as effects made at the international level, including anti-colonial support from other states and international actors, including the United Nations (UN) (Kay, 1967: 787). 

Before the outbreak of the war in the Pacific, the Japanese economy had become increasingly dependent on America’s iron, metals, and oil to supply its army between 1931 and 1941. Since the US government recognized this dependency, it imposed certain economic sanctions and restrictions on Japan in response to its belligerence against China.

On March 17, 1948, in response to the Czech coup, Belgium, Britain, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands signed a mutual defense pact called the Treaty of Brussels, also known as Brussel Pact.