A New World Order. End of History?
31 January 1990 – The first McDonalds’ restaurant is opened in Moscow
11 March 1990 – Lithuania declares its independence, but not a single state recognises it.
3 October 1990 – The day of the re-unification of Germany.
If 1989 was a year of amazing changes, 1990 seemed to mark the settling in of a new world order, the restoration of stability. The highlight of the year was the re-unification of Germany, which was announced officially on 3 October 1990. Because Gorbachev had not tried to hold on to the Eastern Bloc by force and had given his blessing to the united Germany, his popularity was at its zenith.
From now on the leitmotif of the Western powers was that one should not rock the boat of President Gorbachev, or otherwise he might be replaced by a heavy-handed conservative. The policy of sticking to the newly found stability also meant that Western politicians supported the preservation of the USSR. The revolution of 1989 was thus not supposed to spread over the borders of the Soviet empire. The Great Powers did not support Estonia's freedom.
Indeed, the West was overwhelmed by a general euphoria about the end of the Cold War. In September 1990, US President George W. Bush announced the establishment of a new world order based on Western democracy – though the precondition for its fulfilment, according to him, was the success of the West on the battlefield of Iraq (Iraq had occupied Kuwait in August 1990).
Some social scientists were even more optimistic. In summer 1989 American analyst Francis Fukuyama published a much-debated article “End of History?” He wrote: “ What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”. He did not say that from now on there would not be any important events in world affairs.
Indeed, he noted that as yet the victory of liberal democracy was only complete in the “realm of ideas or consciousness” and not “in the real or material world”. But clearly, he estimated, world events would be devoid of such drama as had been witnessed in the past. Because, he observed, liberal democracy was about to govern the material world in the long run.
If true, this was good news indeed for those who had witnessed the human misery that the 20th century had offered in plenty: two world wars, two totalitarian dictatorships, mass murder, deportations, "real socialism", etc.; Lennart Meri of Estonia had experienced much of that.
- Estonian SSR
- Latvian SSR
- Lithuanian SSR
- Russian SSR
- Byelorussian SSR
- Ukrainian SSR
- People´s Republic of Poland
- German Democratic Republic
- Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
- People's Republic of Hungary
- Socialist Republic of Romania
- Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
- The Moldavian SSR
- The People´s Republic of Bulgaria