Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, there had been tantalizing signs of a thaw in the Cold War. China and the United States had decided in 1979 to establish mutual diplomatic relations, a consequence of Beijing’s decision to focus on domestic reform and stop supporting wars of national liberation in Asia. Six years later, the ascent of Mikhail Gorbachev to leadership, culminating in the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, brought a final end to almost half a century of bitter rivalry between the world’s two superpowers.
The accession of Mikhail Gorbachev to power in the Soviet Union in 1985 eventually brought a dramatic end to the Cold War. Gorbachev was willing to rethink many of the fundamental assumptions underlying Soviet foreign policy, and his “New Thinking,” as it was called, opened the door to a series of stunning changes. For one, Gorbachev initiated a plan for arms limitation that led in 1987 to an agreement with the United States to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear weapons (the INF Treaty). Both sides had incentives to dampen the expensive arms race. Gorbachev hoped to make extensive economic and internal reforms, and the United States had serious deficit problems. During the Reagan years, the United States had moved from being a creditor nation to being the world’s biggest debtor nation. By 1990, both countries were becoming aware that their large military budgets made it difficult for them to solve their serious social problems.
The years 1989 and 1990 were a crucial period in the ending of the Cold War. As described earlier, the postwar settlements came unstuck as a mostly peaceful revolutionary upheaval swept through Eastern Europe. Gorbachev’s policy of allowing greater autonomy for the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe meant that the Soviet Union would no longer militarily support Communist governments that faced internal revolt. The unwillingness of the Soviet regime to use force to maintain the status quo, as it had in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, opened the door to the overthrow of the Communist regimes. The reunification of Germany on October 3, 1990, marked the end of one of the most prominent legacies of the Cold War.
The Persian Gulf War provided the first major opportunity for testing the new relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union in the post-Cold War era. In early August 1990, Iraqi military forces suddenly occupied the small neighboring country of Kuwait, in the northeastern comer of the Arabian peninsula at the head of the Persian Gulf. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait sparked an international outcry, and an international force led by the United States liberated Kuwait and destroyed a substantial part of Iraq’s armed forces in the early months of 1991. The Gulf War was the first important military conflict in the post-Cold War period. Although Gorbachev tried to persuade Iraq to withdraw its forces from Kuwait before the war began, overall the Soviets played a minor role in the crisis and supported the American action. By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union had disintegrated, making any renewal of global rivalry between the superpowers impossible and leaving the United States as the world’s leading military power. With the end of superpower rivalry and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, attention focused on the new post-Cold War era. Many observers were optimistic. U.S. president George H. W. Bush looked forward to a new era of peace and international cooperation that he called the “new world order.” Others predicted the beginning of a new “American century,” characterized by the victory of liberal democratic values and free market capitalism.
But the voices of optimism began to fade as it became clear that forces were now being released that had long been held in check by the ideological rigidities of the Cold War. The age of conflict that had long characterized the twentieth century had not ended but was simply taking a different form.
This was soon apparent around the world. In Southeast Asia, even before the end of the Cold War, former allies in China, Vietnam, and Cambodia turned on each other in a conflict that joined territorial ambitions with deep-seated historical suspicions based on the memory of past conflicts. The pattern was repeated elsewhere: in Africa, where several nations erupted into civil war during the late 1980s and 1990s; in the Balkans, where Yugoslavia broke apart in a bitter conflict not yet completely resolved; and in the Middle East, where disputes in Palestine and the Persian Gulf have grown in strength and erupted into open war.
Acts of terror by individuals and groups opposed to governments have become a frightening aspect of modem Western society and indeed of all the world. In 1996, President Clinton called terrorism “the enemy of our generation,” and since the end of Cold War, it has of ten seemed as though terrorism has replaced communism as the West’s number one enemy. Already during the late 1970s and 1980s, concern about terrorism was of ten at the top of foreign policy agendas in the United States and many European countries. Small bands of terrorists used assassination, the taking of hostages, the hijacking of airplanes, and indiscriminate killing of civilians, especially by bombing, to draw attention to their demands or to destabilize governments in the hope of achieving their political goals. Terrorist acts garnered considerable media attention. When Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and killed eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, hundreds of millions of people watched the drama unfold on television.
Motivations for terrorist acts varied considerably. Left-and right-wing terrorist groups flourished in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Left-wing groups, such as the Baader-Meinhof (BAH-durr-MYN-huff) gang (also known as the Red Army Faction) in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy, consisted chiefly of affluent middle-class young people who denounced the injustices of capitalism and supported acts of revolutionary terrorism in an attempt to bring down the system. Rightwing terrorist groups, such as the New Order in Italy and the Charles Martel Club in France, used bombings to foment disorder and bring about authoritarian regimes. These groups received little or no public support, and authorities succeeded in crushing them fairly quickly.
But terrorist acts also stemmed from militant nationalists who wished to create separatist states. Because they received considerable support from local populations sympathetic to their cause, these terrorist groups could maintain their activities over a long period of time. Most prominent was the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which resorted to vicious attacks against the ruling government and innocent civilians in Northern Ireland. Over a period of twenty years, IRA terrorists were responsible for the deaths of two thousand people in Northern Ireland; three-fourths of the victims were civilians.
Although left-and right-wing terrorist activities declined in Europe in the 1980s, international terrorism remained commonplace. Angered by the loss of their territory to Israel in 1967, some militant Palestinians responded with terrorist attacks against Israel’s supporters. Palestinian terrorists operated throughout European countries, attacking both Europeans and American tourists; Palestinian terrorists massacred vacationers at airports in Rome and Vienna in 1985. State-sponsored terrorism was of ten an integral part of international terrorism. Militant governments, especially in Iran, Libya, and Syria, assisted terrorist organizations that made attacks on Europeans and Americans. On December 21, 1988, Pan American flight 103 from Frankfurt to New York exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 258 passengers and crew members. A massive investigation finally revealed that two Libyan terrorists who were connected to terrorist groups based in Iran and Syria planted the bomb responsible for the explosion.
One of the most destructive acts of terrorism occurred on September 11, 2001, in the United States. Four groups of terrorists hijacked four commercial jet airplanes after takeoff from Boston, Newark, and Washington, D.C. The hijackers flew two of the airplanes directly into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, causing these buildings, as well as a number of surrounding buildings, to collapse. A third hijacked plane slammed into the Pentagon near Washington, D.C. The fourth plane, believed to be headed for Washington, crashed instead in an isolated area of Pennsylvania, apparently as the result of an attempt by a group of heroic passengers to overcome the hijackers. In total, nearly three thousand people were killed, including everyone aboard the four airliners.
These coordinated acts of terror were carried out by hijackers connected to an international terrorist organization known as al-Qaeda (“the Base”), run by Osama bin Laden (1957-2011). A native of Saudi Arabia, bin Laden used an inherited fortune to set up terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, under the protection of the nation’s militant fundamentalist Islamic rulers known as the Taliban. On May 2, 2011, U.S. Navy SEALS killed Bin Laden in the compound where he was living in Abbotabad, Pakistan.
WAR IN AFGHANISTAN U.S. president George W. Bush vowed to wage a lengthy war on terrorism and worked to create a coalition of nations to assist in ridding the world of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. In October 2001, United States and NATO air forces began bombing Taliban-controlled command centers, airfields, and al-Qaeda hiding places in Afghanistan. On the ground, Afghan forces opposed to the Taliban, assisted by U.S. special forces, pushed the Taliban out of the capital city of Kabul and seized control of nearly all of the country by the end of November. A multi ethnic government was installed but faced problems as a result of renewed Taliban activity after the United States began to focus much of its military attention on the war in Iraq. In 2009, President Obama sent an additional 30,000 troops to deal with the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. After the death of bin Laden, Obama announced that he would withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan beginning in the summer of 2011. By the autumn of 2012, the additional 30,000 troops sent earlier had returned home.
WAR IN IRAQ In 2002, President George W. Bush, charging that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (1937-2006) had not only provided support to bin Laden’s terrorist organization but also sought to develop weapons of mass destruction, threatened to invade Iraq and remove him from power. Both claims were widely doubted by other member states at the United Nations. As a result, the United States was forced to attack Iraq with little world support. Moreover, the plan to attack upset many Arab leaders and fanned anti-American sentiment throughout the Muslim world.
In March 2003, a largely American-led army invaded Iraq. The Iraqi army was quickly defeated, and in the months that followed, occupation forces sought to restore stability to the country while setting forth plans to lay the foundations of a future democratic society. But although Saddam Hussein was later captured by U.S. troops, Saddam’s supporters, foreign terrorists, and Islamic militants continued to battle the American-led forces.
American efforts focused on training an Iraqi military force capable of defeating the insurgents and establishing an Iraqi government that could hold free elections and create a democracy. Establishing a new government was difficult, however, because of the differences among the three major groups in Iraqi society: Shi’ite Muslims, Sunni Muslims, and ethnic Kurds. Although a new Iraqi government came into being, it has had great difficulty establishing a unified state. By 2006, violence had increased dramatically, and Iraq seemed to be descending into a widespread civil war, especially between the Shi’ites, who control southern Iraq, and the Sunnis, who control central Iraq. An increase in American troops in 2007 helped stabilize conditions within a year. The U.S. and Iraqi governments then agreed to a complete withdrawal of American troops by 2011, a goal that was achieved by the Obama administration in December 2011.
One of the major sources of terrorist activity against the West, especially the United States, has come from some parts of the Muslim world. No doubt, the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the United States has steadfastly supported Israel, helped give rise to anti-Western and especially anti-U.S. feeling among many Muslims. In 1979, a revolution in Iran that led to the overthrow of the shah and the creation of a new Islamic government led by Ayatollah Khomeini, also fed anti-Western sentiment. In the eyes of the ayatollah and his followers, the United States was the “great Satan,” the powerful protector of Israel, and the enemy of Muslim peoples everywhere. Furthermore, the United States was blamed for the corruption of Iranian society under the shah.
The involvement of the United States in the liberation of Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War in 1991 also had unexpected consequences in the relationship of Islam and the West. During that war, U.S. forces were stationed in Saudi Arabia, the location of many sacred Islamic sites. The presence of American forces was considered an affront to Islam by anti-Western Islamic groups, especially that of Osama bin Laden and his followers. These anti-Western attitudes came to be shared by a number of radical Islamic groups, as is evident in the 2003 bombing in Madrid and the 2005 bombing on subway trains in London.
The U.S. attack on Iraq in 2003 further inflamed some Islamic groups against the West. Although there was no evidence of a relationship between al-Qaeda terrorists and the regime of Saddam Hussein, the United States used this claim as one of the excuses to launch a preemptive war against Iraq. Although many Iraqis welcomed the overthrow of Saddam, the deaths of innocent civilians and the torturing of prisoners by American soldiers in prisons in Iraq served to deepen anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world.
Dramatic social developments have accompanied political and economic changes since 1985. New opportunities for women have emerged, and a reinvigorated women’s movement has sought to bring new meaning to the principle of equality with men. New problems for Western society have also arisen with a growing reaction against foreign workers and immigrants.
It is estimated that parents need to average 2.1 children to ensure a natural replacement of a country’s population. In many European countries, the population stopped growing in the 1960s, and the trend has continued since then. By the 1990s, birthrates were down drastically; among the nations of the European Union, the average number of children per mother was 1.4. Although the EU rate had risen somewhat to 1.59 by 2009, it remained well below the replacement rate. In 2011, Germany and Spain both had a rate of only 1.36.
At the same time, the number of women in the workforce continued to rise. In Britain, for example, women made up 44 percent of the labor force in 1990, up from 32 percent in 1970. By the twenty-first century, women constituted 48 percent of the labor force in the Scandinavian countries and 51 percent in the Eastern European countries. Moreover, women were entering new employment areas. Greater access to universities and professional schools enabled women to take jobs in law, medicine, government, business, and education. In the Soviet Union, about 70 percent of doctors and teachers had been women. Nevertheless, economic inequality still of ten prevailed; women received lower wages than men for comparable work and found fewer opportunities for advancement to management positions.
THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT Feminists in the women’s liberation movement came to believe that women themselves must transform the fundamental conditions of their lives. They did so in a variety of ways. First, they formed numerous “consciousness-raising” groups to heighten awareness of women’s issues. Women got together to share their personal experiences and become aware of the many ways that male dominance affected their lives. This consciousness-raising helped many women become activists.
Women also sought and gained a measure of control over their own bodies by insisting that they had a right to both contraception and abortion. In the 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of thousands of European women worked, of ten successfully, to repeal the laws that outlawed contraception and abortion. In 1968, a French law permitted the sale of contraceptive devices, and in the 1970s, French feminists began to call for the legalization of abortion. One group of 343 prominent French women even signed a manifesto declaring that they had had abortions. In 1979, abortion became legal in France. Even in Catholic countries, where the church remained adamantly opposed to abortion, legislation allowing contraception and abortion was passed in the 1970s and 1980s.
As more women became activists, they also became involved in new issues. In the 1980s and 1990s, women faculty in universities concentrated on developing new cultural attitudes through the new academic field of women’s studies. Courses in women’s studies, which stressed the role and contributions of women in history, mushroomed in both American and European colleges and universities.
Other women began to try to affect the political environment by allying with the antinuclear movement. In 1982, a group of women protested American nuclear missiles in Britain by chaining themselves to the fence of an American military base. Thousands more joined in creating a peace camp around the military compound. Enthusiasm ran high; one participant said: ‘‘I’ll never forget that feeling; it’ll live with me forever.... We walked round, and we clasped hands.... It was for women; it was for peace; it was for the world.”
Some women joined the ecological movement. As one German writer who was concerned with environmental issues said, it is women “who must give birth to children, willingly or unwillingly, in this polluted world of ours.” Especially prominent were the female members of the Green Party in Germany (see “The Environment and the Green Movements” in Chapter 29), which supported environmental issues and elected forty-two delegates to the West German parliament in 1987. Among the delegates was Petra Kelly (19472002), one of the founders of the German Green Party and a tireless campaigner for the preservation of the environment as well as human rights and equality.
Women in the West have also reached out through international conferences to work with women from the rest of the world in changing the conditions of their lives. Between 1975 and 1995, the United Nations held conferences in Mexico City, Copenhagen, Nairobi, and Beijing. These meetings made clear that women from Western and non-Western countries had different priorities. Whereas women from Western countries spoke about political, economic, cultural, and sexual rights, women from developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia focused on bringing an end to the violence, hunger, and disease that haunt their lives. Despite these differences, the meetings were an indication of how women in both developed and developing nations were organizing to make people aware of women’s issues.
Despite an aging European population and declining birthrates, the total population of Europe has increased over the last decades due to mass migrations. As the economies of the Western European countries revived in the 1950s and 1960s and birthrates declined, a severe labor shortage encouraged them to rely on foreign workers. Government and businesses actively recruited so-called guest workers to staff essential jobs. Scores of Turks and eastern and southern Europeans came to Germany, North Africans to France, and people from the Caribbean, India, and Pakistan to Great Britain. With the collapse of the colonial system by the 1960s (see Chapter 28), millions of people from the former British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese colonies moved to Europe. Overall, there were probably 15 million guest workers in Europe in the 1980s, representing 5 to 6 percent of the population. They constituted 17 percent of the labor force in Switzerland and 10 percent in Germany.
Although these workers had been recruited for economic reasons, they of ten found themselves unwelcome socially and politically. Many foreign workers complained that they received lower wages and inferior social benefits. Moreover, their concentration in certain cities or certain sections of cities of ten created tensions with the local native populations. Foreign workers, many of them nonwhites, constituted almost one-fifth of the population in the German cities of Frankfurt, Munich, and Stuttgart. Having become settled in their new countries, many wanted to stay, even after the end of the postwar boom in the early 1970s led to mass unemployment. Moreover, as guest workers settled permanently in their host countries, additional family members migrated to join them. Although they had little success in getting guest workers already there to leave, some European countries passed legislation or took other measures to restrict new immigration.
In the 1980s, there was an influx of other refugees, especially to West Germany, which had liberal immigration laws that permitted people seeking asylum for political persecution to enter the country. During the 1970s and 1980s, West Germany absorbed more than a million refugees from Eastern Europe and East Germany. In 1986 alone, 200,000 political refugees from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka entered the country. By 2005, 13 percent of Germany’s residents were foreigners. Other parts of Europe saw a similar influx. Between 1992 and 2002, London and southeastern England received some 700,000 immigrants, primarily from Yugoslavia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Aftica. A survey in 1998 found that English was not the first language of one-third of inner-city children in London. Many other European countries experienced similar increases of immigrants during the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2000, Spain’s immigrant population was 4.6 percent, but by 2006 it had grown to 10.8 percent.
The arrival of so many foreigners strained not only the social services of European countries but also the patience of many native residents who opposed making their countries ethnically diverse. Anti-foreign sentiment, especially in a time of growing unemployment, increased and was encouraged by new right-wing political parties that catered to people’s complaints. Thus, the National Front in France, organized by Jean-Marie Le Pen (ZHAHN-mah-REE luh PEHN) (b. 1928) and now led by his daughter Marine Le Pen (mah-REEN luh PEHN) (b. 1968), and the Republican Party in Germany, led by Franz Schönhuber (1923-2005), a former SS officer, advocated restricting all new immigration and limiting the assimilation of settled immigrants. Although these parties had only limited success in elections, even that modest accomplishment encouraged traditional conservative and even moderately conservative parties to adopt more nationalistic policies. Occasionally, an anti-foreign party has been quite successful. Jorg Haider (YORG HY-dur) (1950-2008), whose Freedom Party received 27 percent of the vote in 1999, cushioned his rejection of foreigners by appealing to Austrian nationalism and attacking the European Union: “We Austrians should answer not to the European Union, not to Maastricht, not to some international idea or other, but to this our Homeland.” In 2012, Marine Le Pen won 17.9 percent of the vote in the French elections-the National Front’s strongest showing. Even more frightening than the growth of these right-wing political parties were the organized campaigns of violence in the early 1990s, especially against African and Asian immigrants, by radical, right-wing groups.
Even nations that have traditionally been tolerant in opening their borders to immigrants and seekers of asylum are changing their policies. In the Netherlands, 19 percent of the residents have a foreign background, representing almost 180 nationalities. Two high-profile assassinations in the early 2000s, however, including the shooting of filmmaker Theodoor van Gogh, who had directed Submission, a film on the oppression of Muslim women in immigrant families, prompted the Dutch to alter their immigration policies. In 2004, the Dutch government passed tough new immigration laws, including a requirement that newcomers pass a Dutch language and culture test before being admitted to the Netherlands.
Sometimes these policies have been aimed at religious practices. One of the effects of the influx of foreigners into Europe has been a dramatic increase in the Muslim population. Although Christians still constitute a majority (though many no longer practice their faith), the number of Muslims has mushroomed in France, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. It has been estimated that at least 15 million Muslims were living in European Union nations in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In some nations, concern that Muslim immigration will result in an erosion of national values has led to attempts to restrict the display of Islamic symbols.
In 2004, France enacted a law prohibiting female students from wearing a headscarf (hijab) to school. Article 1 stated: “In public elementary, middle and high schools, the wearing of signs or clothing which conspicuously manifest students’ religious affiliations is prohibited.” The law further clarified “conspicuous” to mean “a large cross, a veil, or a skullcap.” Small religious symbols, such as small crosses or medallions, were not included. Critics of this law argue that it will exacerbate ethnic and religious tensions in France, while supporters maintain that it upholds the traditions of secularism and equality for women in France (see the box on p. 948).