Explain the challenges created by the break-up of the Soviet Union, post-Cold War regional and ethnic conflicts, and struggles for self-governance

Learning goal: Explain how the break-up of the Soviet Union ended the Cold War and created challenges for its former allies, the former Soviet republics, Europe, the United States and the non-aligned world; explain how regional and ethnic conflicts in the post-Cold War era have resulted in acts of terrorism, genocide and ethnic cleansing; and explain how political and cultural groups have struggled to achieve self-governance and self-determination.

How the Soviet Union broke up. By the 1980s the Soviet economy was stagnating, the war in Afghanistan (1979–1989) was costly, and the arms race strained resources. Mikhail Gorbachev, leader from 1985, introduced glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), hoping to reform communism, and he signaled that the Soviet Union would not use force to keep Eastern European governments in power. In 1989 communist regimes fell across Eastern Europe, mostly peacefully; the Berlin Wall was opened on 9 November 1989, and Germany reunified on 3 October 1990. Inside the Soviet Union, republics such as Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia demanded independence. After a failed coup by hard-liners in August 1991, the republics broke away; Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist, leaving fifteen independent states. The Cold War was over.

Challenges for former allies and former Soviet republics. Former Warsaw Pact allies such as Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia (which split peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993) had to build democratic institutions and convert planned economies into market economies, a transition that brought unemployment and inflation along with new freedoms. The former Soviet republics faced the same transition plus the task of building states from scratch; Russia experienced economic collapse in the 1990s. Some republics had large Russian-speaking minorities and disputed borders, and several faced armed conflicts, such as the wars in Chechnya within Russia (1994–1996 and from 1999). Nuclear weapons left in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan were transferred to Russia in the 1990s. The United States and Russia moved from containment to cooperation in some fields: the START I treaty (signed 1991) cut nuclear arsenals, American funds helped secure and dismantle former Soviet weapons, and from 1993 the two countries became partners in the International Space Station.

Challenges for Europe, the United States and the non-aligned world. Europe had to decide how far to extend its institutions eastward. NATO admitted Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999 and seven more states, including the three Baltic republics, in 2004; the European Union admitted ten new members in 2004, eight of them former communist states. Russia's leaders came to view NATO enlargement as a threat, and relations worsened; Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and backed armed separatists in eastern Ukraine, beginning a war that it widened into a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a war that is ongoing and whose outcome is not settled. The United States became the sole superpower and had to define its role, from the 1991 Gulf War to peacekeeping and counterterrorism. For the non-aligned world, the end of superpower rivalry ended the ability to play one side against the other for aid: Cuba, for example, lost Soviet subsidies and entered a severe economic crisis in the 1990s, and several African and Asian governments lost Cold War patrons.

Regional and ethnic conflicts. Without Cold War structures, suppressed disputes sometimes turned violent. Key terms: terrorism is violence against civilians by non-state groups (or sometimes states) to create fear for political ends; genocide is acts intended to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part; ethnic cleansing is the forced removal of an ethnic group from a territory by violence and terror. Yugoslavia: as the federation broke up from 1991, wars in Croatia (1991–1995) and Bosnia (1992–1995) saw ethnic cleansing by several sides, especially Bosnian Serb forces; at Srebrenica in July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces killed about 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys, which the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice ruled was genocide. Rwanda: from April to July 1994 Hutu extremists organized the genocide of Tutsi and the killing of moderate Hutu; scholars' estimates of the dead, most of them Tutsi, commonly range from about 500,000 to 800,000, and the Rwandan government's own count is higher, over one million. The killing took roughly 100 days, and an international tribunal later prosecuted leaders. Terrorism: on 11 September 2001 al-Qaeda hijackers attacked the United States, killing nearly 3,000 people; the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan followed. The group calling itself the Islamic State carried out terrorism and, in 2014, attacks on the Yazidi people that a UN inquiry found to be genocide. Both grew out of regional conflicts. Al-Qaeda formed in 1988 among Arab volunteers who had fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and its leaders cited the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia after the 1991 Gulf War and U.S. support for Israel. The Islamic State grew from al-Qaeda in Iraq during the insurgency that followed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and expanded amid the sectarian civil war in Syria. Separatist and nationalist conflicts produced terrorism as well: the Irish Republican Army's bombing campaign in Northern Ireland and Britain, part of a conflict that began during the Cold War in the late 1960s, continued after it into the 1990s until the ceasefire that led to the Good Friday Agreement of 10 April 1998; Chechen militants seized a Moscow theater in 2002 and a school at Beslan in 2004; Hamas carried out suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israelis; and Boko Haram has attacked civilians in Nigeria since 2009, including the kidnapping of schoolgirls at Chibok in 2014. Explaining why a group turned to terrorism is not the same as justifying it. Mass atrocities also continued: in Darfur, in western Sudan, government-backed militias killed and expelled civilians from 2003, which the United States government called genocide in 2004; and in 2017 Myanmar's army drove more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims into Bangladesh, a campaign that UN investigators said showed genocidal intent.

Self-governance and self-determination. Self-determination is the principle that a people may choose its own political status; self-governance is the practical power to run its own affairs, which can mean independence or autonomy within a state. Struggles since 1991 include the peaceful independence of the Baltic states; Eritrea's independence from Ethiopia in 1993 after a long war and a referendum; East Timor (Timor-Leste), which voted for independence from Indonesia in 1999 amid violence and became independent in 2002; South Sudan, independent in 2011 after a referendum; and the end of apartheid in South Africa, where the first elections open to all races in 1994 brought Nelson Mandela to the presidency. Other groups remain without states or with contested status, among them the Kurds across several countries, the Palestinians and the Tibetans. Referendums in Scotland (2014) and Quebec (1995) rejected independence by majority vote; and in Mexico the Zapatista rising in Chiapas (1994) demanded autonomy and rights for Indigenous communities. Self-determination often conflicts with the principle that existing borders should be respected.

Worked model. Why did Yugoslavia break up violently while Czechoslovakia split peacefully? Yugoslavia's republics had intermixed populations, rival nationalist leaders and armed forces, so new borders left large minorities; Czechoslovakia's two parts were more distinct and leaders negotiated. Conditions, not ethnicity alone, decided the outcome.

Worked challenge sort: Assign each challenge to a group: (a) converting a planned economy to a market economy; (b) deciding whether to admit former Warsaw Pact states to NATO; (c) losing Soviet subsidies; (d) nuclear weapons stationed on new national territory. Solution: (a) former allies and former Soviet republics; (b) Europe and the United States; (c) the non-aligned world and Soviet clients, such as Cuba; (d) former Soviet republics (Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan), resolved by transfer to Russia.

Worked term precision: Classify: (a) forcing Bosniaks from towns in eastern Bosnia by terror; (b) the killing at Srebrenica in July 1995; (c) the attacks of 11 September 2001. Solution: (a) ethnic cleansing—forced removal of a group from territory; (b) genocide, as ruled by the ICTY and ICJ, because the killings were intended to destroy part of a group; (c) terrorism—violence against civilians by a non-state group for political ends. Using the correct term matters because each has a distinct meaning in law and history.

Worked self-determination comparison: South Sudan (2011) and Scotland (2014) both held referendums. South Sudan voted overwhelmingly for independence after decades of civil war; Scotland voted to remain in the United Kingdom. Solution: both show self-determination exercised by vote; the outcomes differed because of different histories of conflict and different views among voters. Self-governance can be pursued by war, negotiation or ballot.

Post-Cold War case table: Record five cases—Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the September 11 attacks, East Timor and South Sudan. Columns: dates; groups involved; whether the case involves terrorism, genocide, ethnic cleansing or self-determination (more than one may apply); causes rooted in the end of the Cold War or earlier history; and the international response.

Independent performance: Write a 400-word essay answering "Did the end of the Cold War make the world more peaceful?" Success criteria: a qualified thesis; an explanation of how the Soviet Union broke up with at least three dates; challenges for at least three of the five groups named in the standard (former allies, former Soviet republics, Europe, the United States, the non-aligned world); at least two conflicts with correct terms (terrorism, genocide, ethnic cleansing); at least one successful and one unresolved struggle for self-governance; and recent events described as ongoing where they are.