Chapter 8: The World Since the End of the Cold War 1989- 2019

Introduction

This chapter introduces the major events that have shaped world politics since the end of the Cold War. Four sections frame this chapter: the rst focuses on the end of the Cold War and on debates about the nature of the post-Cold War order. e second examines the main developments that shaped the US-led international system in the 1990s. e third discusses globalization and its limits. e fourth and nal section analyzes the major events since the September 11th attacks.

The End of the Cold War and “A New World Order”

This section analyzes the events that brought the Cold War to an end and assesses the debates regarding the nature of the post-Cold War international order.

The Dissolution of the Soviet Union

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 is usually considered the event marking the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the post-Cold War period. It also meant the end of the bipolar international system established after World War II, leaving the United States as the sole superpower of the international system.

Thee element of leadership—the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev to power in the Soviet Union in March 1985—would be the most important factor that would eventually trigger the series of events leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Perestroika (restructuring), this reform package intended some small scale changes in the country’s economy and politics with the aim of primarily fixing the problems of the Soviet economy. In the political and social realm, these reforms were known as glasnost (openness) and involved the creation of a more representative system, acknowledging social problems and historical wrongdoings, and intending to give a larger “voice” to people so that they could air their grievances in economically turbulent times. First, it would give the chance to both conservatives and liberals of the Soviet establishment to criticize Gorbachev’s economic reforms. Second, Gorbachev’s authority would be further undermined with the aring of ethnic con icts in Azerbaijan and Georgia and the secessionist demands of the Baltic Republics. Despite his e orts, on December 8, 1991, the leaders of the Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics announced the establishment the Common Wealth of Independent States (CIS) as a looser union that would replace the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR). Gorbachev’s resignation and the end of the Soviet Union would follow shortly thereafter.

Gorbachev’s reforms at the domestic level had also been accompanied by changes in Soviet foreign policy. In November 1985, Gorbachev and his American counterpart Ronald Reagan at the Summit Meeting in Geneva concluded, “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”. e most important of these e orts would be the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in December 1987 and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty I (START I) in July 1991, negotiations for which had begun in 1982. With the INF treaty, the US and USSR would not only eliminate 2962 nuclear missiles by June 1991, but would agree to discard an entire category of nuclear missiles with a range between 500 kilometers to 5500 kilometers and agree on on-site checks for the rst time in history (Arms Control Association, 2019). Gorbachev’s primary aim in this monumental change in foreign policy was to reduce the military expenditure and, thus, burden on the Soviet economy. As a result, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was concluded in February 1989 and in Eastern Europe by the end of 1994. However, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and cessation of aid to the communist regime in Kabul would result in a power vacuum that would lead to war among the warlords of Afghanistan—most of them being former mujahideen —which eventually paved the way to the Taliban seizure of power in September 1996. Al Qaeda, which organized the September 11 attacks, would nd a safe haven in a Taliban- led Afghanistan (see below). Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ in foreign policy would also allow another wave of regime change in Europe, as his speech at the UN signaled a green light to Eastern European countries of the Soviet Bloc that they were free to pursue their own path to reform.

The Collapse of the Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

By the end of 1989, the year also known as the annus mirabilis (the year of miracles), 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 organized polity.

By early 1989, Poland’s leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski realized that he could not rule the country without the Solidarity Movement, and thus legalized the movement and started a series of round-table talks that led to an elite-led democratic transition in the country.

In Czechoslovakia, the annus mirabilis manifested itself in the form of small-scale protests starting in January 1989.

The fall of the communist regime in Romania would be the bloodiest of the transitions in Eastern Europe. Romanian leader Nikolai Ceausescu had ruled the country with an iron st with his infamous secret service, while Romanians lived in utter deprivation and constant fear of persecution. After a brief show trial, the couple fell to a ring squad in late December 1989, ending communist rule in that country.

In Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov’s 35-year rule as the Secretary General of the Communist Party of Bulgaria ended in a courtroom with charges of nepotism and corruption brought against him. e Bulgarian Communist Party then agreed to competitive and free elections in January 1990.

In the first three weeks of August 1989 alone, 10,000 East Germans fled their country, one of the most repressive regimes in Eastern Europe, via the Austria-Hungary border, something which then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl would describe in October 1990 as “the removal of the first stone from the Berlin Wall” (Mayr, 2009). is e ectively meant the symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall —one of the symbols of the Cold War, which was quickly followed by the reuni cation of Germany in October 1990. With that, the Cold War in Europe had symbolically ended over a year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

Debating the Nature of the Post-Cold War Order

For John Lewis Gaddis, who wrote one of the most authoritative works on the history of the Cold War, the end of the Cold War spelled the “triumph of hope” (Gaddis, 2005).

Francis Fukuyama in his famous article, “The End of History” argued that history was made as a result of the clash between individualism and collectivism.

Tough made in 2005 and 1989, respectively, each scholar’s evaluation of the end of the Cold War was re ective of the optimistic mood that predicted the emergence of a liberal international order in its aftermath. One of the reasons for this expectation was that as the Cold War was coming to an end, the world was witnessing another major force shaping the new world order: globalization. In the 1990s, the forces of globalization shaping world politics were most evident in the establishment of new free-trade blocs, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Asia-Paci c Economic Cooperation (APEC), and the further deepening of the most important free trade bloc in the world, the European Union (EU).

In his 1991 book, The third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Samuel P. Huntington proudly explained the reasons for the third wave of democratization around the world that had begun in the 1970s. Two years later, in the summer of 1993, he penned an article for Foreign Affairs entitled “ e Clash of Civilizations. ”

Another of these pessimistic projections came from Benjamin Barber . In his March 1992 article, “Jihad vs. McWorld,” he argued that the globalization that was shaping the current world order was accompanied by the forces of nationalism and fundamentalism, neither of which boded well for the future of democratic governance, locally or internationally, as both forces limited people’s freedom in di erent ways (Barber, 1992).

The role that the remaining superpower of this newly emerging order, the United States, was willing to play and its engagement with the institutions of this order, i.e. the UN, NATO and the EU, and the future of the fallen superpower, the USSR, now replaced by Russia Federation , also became part of these debates. e invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in August 1990, even before the o cial end of the Cold War, was the rst such occasion to test the new parameters of the emerging post-Cold War world order.

The Era of Liberal Internationalism: The US-Led International Order of The 1990s

Tis section focuses on the major developments that shaped the US-led international order in the 1990s.

The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait and the First Gulf War (1990-1991)

When the UN’s embargo on Iraqi oil did not persuade Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait, US President George Bush announced Operation Desert Shield on August 7, 1990, arguing that the US imported half of the oil it consumed from the region and that the invasion of Kuwait was a “major threat to its economic independence,” (Bush, 1990).

The Breakup of Yugoslavia and NATO Interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo

The collective ability of major powers to shape the new world order would be subject to a severe test with the ethnic con ict that emerged in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia, established by Josip Broz Tito after World War II, had been able to maintain a semblance of unity among its di erent republics and ethnicities until the 1990s.

when Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence in March 1992, a move recognized by the EU, Bosnian Serbs led by Radovan Karadzic and supported by Serbia declared the establishment of the Republika Srpska (“Serb Republic”), which left the Muslim Bosniaks, demographically the majority, with a small piece of territory. As this was not enough, to enforce the new Serb Republic, Bosnian Serbs besieged several cities, including the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, and tried to expel the Muslim Bosniak population from their recently created state, a move that eventually led to the creation of concentration camps and much worse— the mass ethnic cleansing of the Bosniaks . Nationalism not only tore apart Yugoslavia, but led to the worst ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II.

The reluctant American intervention was late for several reasons. First, US leaders were convinced that con ict in Bosnia was the case of an “ancient hatred,”—an ethnoreligious rivalry that had been going on for thousands of years, so old that it did not have a clear beginning nor possibly a clear end. Second, a US humanitarian intervention in Somalia had gone horribly awry in 1993, and the Clinton administration was very reluctant to get into another mission, which, they thought, geographically, was the responsibility of European powers, not of the United States.

The conflict in Kosovo came to an end in June 1999. NATO established a peacekeeping mission and gave Kosovo some autonomy, which eventually led to the declaration of independence of Kosovo in February 2008.

Rwandan Genocide

Just as in the case of Bosnia, the Rwandan Genocide, which took the lives of an estimated 500.000 to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in less than 100 days in the spring and summer of 1994, went down in history as a mass murder that took place under the gaze of Western powers. e role of Western powers in the Rwandan Genocide was not only limited to their reluctance to get involved to stop the genocide; additionally, rst German, and later Belgian, colonial rule had set the stage for it by favoring the minority Tutsi against the majority Hutu.

What triggered the genocide, however, was the downing of the plane that carried the Presidents of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana , and Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira , both of whom were ethnic Hutus, in April 1994.

The perpetrators of the genocide were brought to trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda , which was established in 1994 by the UN Security Council “to prosecute persons responsible for genocide and other serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of Rwanda and neighboring states between 1 January 1994 and 31 December 1994. e ad hoc court that ran from 1994 until 2015 brought indictments against 92 individuals, 62 of whom received sentences of varying lengths,” ( The ICTR in Brief).

The Oslo Accord-a Momentary Lull in the PalestinianIsraeli Conflict

By the beginning of the post-Cold War era, PalestinianIsraeli relations were already at a deadlock. Signed in September 1993 and September 1995, the Oslo Accords provided a temporary pause and a potential way out of the deadlock until the start of the Second Intifada in 2000. ey were also one of the reasons for high hopes in the postCold War order. Just like the end of the Cold War, leadership was a crucial element in the signing of the accords.

The final blow to the accords came in September 2000 with the start of the Second Intifada. It was triggered by the ‘visit’ of Ariel Sharon, then leader of the Likud Party, to Haram al-Sharif (the Temple Mount), where he declared the holy site a part of the Jewish state. With that Israeli-Palestinian relations tumbled yet again into a spiral of violence.

US-Russia Relations in the 1990s

During the Soviet era, Russia was not the only Soviet Republic in which nuclear weapons were kept. Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, all former Soviet republics, also held nuclear warheads. eir subsequent independence made these countries possessors of nuclear weapons. In May 1992, these each became parties to START

I, turning over control of their nuclear weapons to Russia, which then dismantled them—a cost that was born by an international consortium led by the US.

The cooperative mood that began with the signing of START I was followed by the signing of START II in January 1993. is introduced further cuts to nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles in both Russia and the US. However, despite a quick rati cation in the US Senate in January 1996, the Russian rati cation for START II would only come after Vladimir Putin’s arrival to power in March 2000. is foot dragging was a result of opposition in the Russian Duma to START II in which both the nationalists and communists believed this was a ploy designed by the US to weaken and humiliate Russia.

In addition to START II, other points of disagreement slowly emerged between the United States and Russia, as the latter started to perceive speci c US actions in international politics as an encroachment upon its national interest and traditional spheres of infuence.

Despite all of Russia’s objections, NATO expanded three times in the decade and a half proceeding the Cold War. In March 1999, Czechia, Hungary, and Poland joined; in 2004 Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined; in 2009 Albania and Croatia joined; and in 2017 Montenegro did.

Further Globalization and its Limits: Nafta, the EU, and the Rise of Asia

Europe: From the European Community to European Union

In 1985, e orts to further “deepen” the European Community had led to the signing of the Single European Act. While envisioning institutional changes that facilitated political integration, this act also agreed to the creation of an economic and monetary union (EMU) as well as to the creation of a ‘single market’ among members by January 1993 in which goods, services, capital and, more importantly, people could move freely. Removing these barriers would be the crowning achievement of the neoliberal economic paradigm that had begun to have its heyday in the 1980s, thus shaping the European Community alongside with the forces of globalization.

The EU explained the rationale for its 2004 enlargement as the desire “to extend the area of stability and peace to the whole European continent, and so avoid the recurrence of con icts such as that in the former Yugoslavia; to stimulate economic growth and trade by expanding the single market from 378 million to 453 million consumers in 2004... and to acquire a greater role for Europe on the international stage, particularly in trade negotiations,” (Publications O ce, 2007). Finally, Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007 while Croatia became a full member in 2013, bringing the total of member states to 28.

The Americas: NAFTA and Beyond

The relative success of the European experiment to stimulate economic growth through the creation of a free trade area soon motivated North American leaders to create a free trade zone with minimal barriers to the ow of goods and capital (though not labor) themselves. In that sense, NAFTA can be considered the Canadian, American, and Mexican’s collective answer to the European Community.

NAFTA defnitely increased the volume of trade among members and led to an increase in foreign direct investment into Mexico. But it also led to manufacturing job losses in the US—the exact numbers are disputed—as manufacturing jobs migrated to Mexico, where labor costs and environmental standards were much lower.

Asia After the End of the Cold War

After launching his economic reforms in 1978, with that dictum in the background and with its cheap labor force, China became the factory of the world, as Western companies quickly moved their manufacturing to China and other Asian countries.

Teories of modernization, for their part, predicted that economic development had to be followed by some level of political reform and democratization. What is more, the creation of a bourgeoisie, or “red capitalists,” and the migration from rural areas into cities made China watchers hopeful for political change.

In July 1997, Britain’s century-long lease over Hong Kong expired; along with the Portuguese departure from Macau in December 1999, these territories were returned to China. e negotiations regarding the orderly transfer of Hong Kong, a city that had become the beating nancial heart of Asia, had started in the early 1970s. By the 1980s, Deng had already devised the idea of “one country, two systems” to tempt back historically Chinese territories such as Hong Kong and Macau into a union with Mainland China.

India, for its part, despite being mired in internal political, ethnic, and religious con icts and having border disputes with Pakistan and China, also made huge economic strides in the 1990s. One of the reasons it became an economic powerhouse of Asia by the end of that decade was its adoption of neoliberal economic reforms in the early 1990s.

Dangerously, however, the longstanding rivalry between India and Pakistan that had existed since their partition in 1947 culminated in a nuclear arms race.

The Japanese economic boom, or “miracle” of the 1980s, went bust by the 1990s. Extending into the 2000s, Japan saw lower growth and higher unemployment rates. Internationally, however, Japan made substantial changes in its foreign and security policy in the 1990s. e most important of these was the modi cation of the Japanese Constitution, which had prevented Japan from sending troops abroad.

East Asian Crisis of 1997-1998

Economic modernization and high economic growth rates were not peculiar to the above- mentioned countries. In addition to China, Japan, Hong Kong, India, and Taiwan, countries like South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia also became the poster children of economic development and high growth rates.

For example, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan were nicknamed the Asian Tigers, while a World Bank Report published in 1993 labeled Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and ailand as fostering a broader East Asian Miracle. is miracle came to a pause, if not a halt, however, in May 1997 when the ai real estate bubble burst.

The US-Led International Order Under Challenge: The End of America’s Unipolar Moment

The September 11th Attacks and the War on Terror

On September 11, 2001, a group of nineteen terrorists from a jihadist network headed by Osama bin Laden called Al-Qaeda hijacked four US civilian airliners. Two of them crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. e third plane struck the Pentagon, the headquarters of the US Department of Defense, in Washington D.C, while the fourth crashed into a eld in Pennsylvania.

Aimed directly at the economic, political, and military symbols of global capitalism and US hegemony, the attacks revealed the jihadist organization’s rancid dislike of globalization and US hegemony.

9/11 fundamentally transformed US foreign policy and its relations with the wider world. For one thing, it reinforced the shift from multilateralism to unilateralism in US foreign policy. Indeed, the administration of President George W. Bush, who assumed o ce in January 2001, had already embarked on a unilateral course in its foreign relations well before 9/11, revealing its refusal to sign or ratify a number of multilateral agreements, including the UN’s Kyoto Protocol on global warming and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. e attacks, however, made unilateralism more pronounced in foreign policy. In December 2001, the US announced its intention of withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, for example.

The most controversial aspect of the Bush Doctrine was its pre-emptive element, which reserved the right for the US to take pre-emptive action against potential security threats and enemies before they could strike (Best et al., 2014: 607). e ideological component of the Bush Doctrine was its willingness to promote democratization across the Middle East which was based on the belief that democracies would not harbor terrorists (Dodge, 2012: 217). e rst campaign of the war on terror was launched in October 2001 with the war on Afghanistan, which was followed by the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Obama’s War

The main aim of Obama’s foreign policy was to end the wars and bring US soldiers home. Still, in order to x the situation, he increased the number of troops in Afghanistan. His greatest achievement in ghting against Al-Qaeda was the killing of its leader, Osama bin Laden, by the US special forces in May 2011. Beginning a slow withdrawal process in 2011, the combat mission of the US and NATO in Afghanistan o cially ended in December 2014.

2008 Global Financial Crisis

It is argued that what eventually took the world economy to the brink of collapse in 2008 was the loosening of regulatory conditions over banking system due to the nancial panic after the attacks.

The financial crisis also had far-reaching consequences for world politics. First, it presented a major challenge to the US-led international political and economic order, placing great strain on the basic premises of neoliberal capitalism. Coupled with its foreign policy failures, the nancial crisis raised serious doubts about US hegemony and the dominance of the West within the international system. Due to the Eurozone crisis, the future of the European Union also came into question putting the idea of monetary union into a severe test.

Challengers to the US Hegemony

The rise of China is seen as the most signi cant challenge to US hegemony, although some scholars, mostly Chinese, advocate that Beijing is pursuing a “peaceful rise”, which is a policy of integration into the existing international system that can avoid confrontation with the US (Cox, 2014:72). is is supported by China’s acceptance of international economic and political norms and by its willingness to participate in international institutions created by the West. As such, it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 and created a close cooperation with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) (Young and Kent, 2013: 613). Nevertheless, the Chinese economic rise has led to structural transformations in international economic institutions that re ect the shifting economic balance of power.

The “Arab Spring”

In early 2011, a wave of uprisings rocked Arab-speaking countries across the Middle East and North Africa, which quickly became known as the Arab Spring . Rapidly organized on social media such as Facebook and Twitter, anti-government protests eventually brought down a number of dictatorial regimes.

Brexit, Trump, and the Rise of Populism: Globalization in Crisis?

The British vote to withdraw from the EU, better known as Brexit, the election of Donald Trump as the US president, and the rise of right-wing populism across European countries have further called into question the future of globalization at the heart of global capitalism. One of the major signs of the current populist backlash against globalization, Brexit has helped encourage other anti-EU movements across the continent.

In January 2017, US President Donald Trump is a staunch supporter of unilateral and protectionist policies undermining the global liberal order that has been led by the US itself since World War II. Apart from launching aggressive economic policies, Trump withdrew the US from the Trans-Paci c Partnership, which included 12 countries in the Paci c region and was meant to prevent the Chinese takeover of the Paci c economic order; took steps to renegotiate NAFTA with Mexico and Canada; began criticizing the free trade agreement with South Korea; and questioned the value of the WTO itself.

On the trade side, the Trump administration drastically increased tari s on Chinese imports, thus beginning a trade war with Beijing reminiscent of the 1980s. With his “America First” approach to foreign policy, the American president also decided to end the US participation in both the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change and the UN Global Compact for Migration. e US also quit the UN Educational, Scienti c, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Having vowed to build a wall along the USMexico border, Trump also put in place much harsher immigration and border policies. Along with the recent increase of right-wing, ultra-nationalist, and populist political parties in European politics, all these events have posed a great challenge to globalization, undermining liberal and democratic values around the world.