ULUSLARARASI İLİŞKİLER TARİHİ

In a similar tone, and as early as 1989, even before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, 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, and that the weakening of communist regimes in the USSR and East Europe meant the defeat of the forces of collectivism and the victory of individualism, i.e., liberalism.

The war coincided with the development of cable news networks whose 24-hour coverage of the war led to the emergence of the CNN Effect. The CNN Effect is the ability of the news media to shape public opinion, including that of public officials, thus influencing major foreign policy decisions.

Though the signing of the accords garnered Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat, and Shimon Peres the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, it quickly became clear that they had been stillborn. First, there were groups among both the Palestinians and Israelis that saw the accords as an act of treason. On the Palestinian side, the signing of the accords helped pave the way towards the rise of Hamas, a radical Islamist alternative to PLO that considered the accords an act of treason. On the Israeli side, they lead to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 by an Israeli extremist, who similarly saw Oslo as caving to Palestinian demands. Second, the accords were unable to stop the violence that both sides were perpetrating against each other, and third, they did not really clarify important issues such as the current and future state of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, the status of Jerusalem, or the repatriation of Palestinian refugees. 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.

While the voters in Austria, Finland, and Sweden had said “yes” to their countries’ membership, Norwegians, as they had in 1972, voted “no,” largely to avoid sharing their oil and gas revenues from the North Sea and to not have to open their commercial fisheries to other EU fishers.

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 flow 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.

With its better-educated labor force (compared to China) and the high rate of English speakers, India quickly became an important outsourcing hub for Western service sector jobs. Indeed, the mass migration of these service sector jobs has led to some to call China the “factory” of the world and India its “office.”

The 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.

On October 7, 2001, the US, with British support, officially launched Operation Enduring Freedom against Taliban forces. Rather than a full-scale military occupation, the early phase of the war involved US airstrikes backed by a small number of Special Forces and Marines.

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. Enraged by rising prices, high unemployment, government corruption, and repression and motivated by a desire for political change and more freedom, especially among educated and unemployed urban youth, millions took to the streets in Tunis, Cairo, and other Arab capitals to demand the transformation of their societies.

e 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. e end of the Soviet Union was not simply the end of the Soviet Union—one of the world’s two superpowers at the time. 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 and prompting a group of policymakers and scholars alike to trying to (re) define and conceptualize this ‘new world order’— or ‘new world “disorder”’—as others have preferred to name the international system. When the Soviet Union collapsed, most Western Sovietologists and theorists of realism were accused of not being able to predict this event with colossal implications. The correct answer is Choice E.

Ambitious and considerably young compared to his predecessors, Gorbachev’s main aim was to reform the Soviet economy that had fallen behind its Western counterparts since the 1960s, without making any fundamental changes in the governing ideology of the Soviet Union. 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” (Joint Soviet-United States Statement on the Summit Meeting in Geneva, 1985). The correct answer is Choice C.

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” (Joint Soviet-United States Statement on the Summit Meeting in Geneva, 1985). The correct answer is Choice C.

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. The correct answer is Choice E.

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. In Poland, for example, this transition had already begun in 1980 when a group of Gdansk shipyard workers led by Lech Walesa came together as the Solidarity Movement to protest an increase in food prices. In the face of worsening economic conditions and protests, the authorities cracked down on the movement and jailed its leaders. 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. These talks would not only lead to the first competitive elections in the Polish parliament, in which Solidarity would capture the majority of the seats in both houses, but also to the election of the first non-communist prime minister in the Soviet Bloc—Tadeusz Mazowiecki. In Czechoslovakia, the annus mirabilis manifested itself in the form of small-scale protests starting in January 1989. The correct answer is Choice B.

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). Gaddis argued that communism had failed to deliver the better life it had promised and the global rise of democracies, coupled with the bravery of ordinary people in the least expected times, had brought about the downfall of authoritarian regimes in the Communist bloc and triggered the end of the Cold War. In a similar tone, and as early as 1989, even before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, 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, and that the weakening of communist regimes in the USSR and East Europe meant the defeat of the forces of collectivism and the victory of individualism, i.e., liberalism (Fukuyama, 1989). The correct answer is Choice B.

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). Operation Desert Shield, which necessitated a US troop build up in Saudi Arabia and the creation of an international coalition, was the first phase of the war that would eventually drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. e second phase of the war, Operation Desert Storm, started on January 16, 1991 when US-led international coalition, following a UN resolution, decided to enforce UN sanctions by military force, beginning with airstrikes against Iraq. These were coupled with a ground force in the final phase of operations. The correct answer is Choice C.

As the Cold War zzled out in the late 1980s, however, so did the money that had owed into Yugoslavia from the West. is, coupled with Tito’s death and his replacement with Serbian nationalist Slobodan Milosevic, who not only saw the Serbian nation as the real owner of Yugoslavia, but decided to pursue a politics along ethnic lines, ignited a powder keg. In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence, soon followed with Macedonia in September 1991 and Bosnia-Herzegovina in March 1992. e 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 cease re established after the withdrawal of the Yugoslav federal army—gave Belgrade no choice but to let Slovenia and Croatia go. However, 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 correct answer is Choice C.

By the beginning of the post-Cold War era, Palestinian-Israeli 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. They were also one of the reasons for high hopes in the post-Cold War order. Just like the end of the Cold War, leadership was a crucial element in the signing of the accords. The correct answer is Choice D.

In 1985, efforts 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. This tendency to “deepen” was further advanced with the signing of the Treaty of Maastricht in February 1992. First, effective November 1, 1993, not only had the European Community become the European Union, but members of the union had also agreed on creating a single currency, the euro, and a common central bank for what would now be known as the Eurozone. Membership in the Eurozone was not automatic. Only EU members that fulfilled the convergence criteria, i.e. those that had price stability and sound public finances with manageable government deficits and debts and achieved a certain level of stability in their exchange rates and long-term interest rates—were eligible for admittance in the monetary union. When the time came to put the ‘euro’ into circulation in January 2002, however, the convergence criteria was disregarded for certain countries. What is more, others such as Britain, Denmark, and Sweden exercised their right to ‘opt out’ and continue to use their own national currency, further undermining the creation of a full and solid monetary union. Second the Treaty of Maastricht also gave EU citizens the right to work and live in any member country, rendering borders between members obsolete. The correct answer is Choice E.

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. A is the correct choice.