ULUSLARARASI İLİŞKİLER TARİHİ - Deneme Sınavı - 8

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. The 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.

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.

Entente Powers, also known Allies or Allied Powers. The major Allied powers in World War I were Great Britain (and the British Empire), France, and the Russian Empire.

The second wave of decolonization began with India, far and away the world’s most populous and important colony, who obtained its independence from Britain in 1947.

Scholars have focused on three factors to explain the decolonization process in the 20th century: • The first is internal pressure, which can be evaluated at the local or regional level. Colonized peoples’ demands for reform and independence as well as the rise of anti-colonial political and nationalist movements can be considered as internal pressures against British, Dutch, and French colonial rule (Langenhove, 1961: 405, Betts, 2004: 37). The national politics of colonized powers were shaped upon these internal pressures. • The second is the inability and weakness of colonial powers to rule their colonies. World War II demonstrated that European colonial powers were no longer able to rule their African and Asian colonies. Fonseca and Marcos (2013: 209) argue that “if World War I helped to create local resistance movements against colonialism, it was World War II that destroyed the colonial system itself.” • The third factor is the external pressure which can also be expressed as effects made at the international level, including anti-colonial support from other states and international actors, including the United Nations (UN) (Kay, 1967: 787).

Rwanda was under the colonial rule of Belgium until the independence that took place in 1962.

Self-determination is the idea that a country can determine its own destiny and has the right to establish its own sovereign government. The UN Charter, signed on June 26, 1945, established the principle of self-determination and provided the basis for its own decolonization push.

Based on the Ten Principles of Bandung, the criteria for NAM membership were determined in the preparatory conference. In order to be considered as a member of the movement, a country should meet the following criteria: 1. The country should adopt an independent foreign policy based on the co-existence of states with different political and social systems and on non-alignment, or should be showing a trend in favor of such a policy. 2. The country concerned should be consistently supporting movements for national independence. 3. The country should not be a member of a multilateral military alliance concluded in the context of great power conflicts. 4. If a country has a bilateral military agreement with a great power or is a member of a regional defense pact, the agreement or pact should not be one deliberately concluded in the context of great power conflicts. 5. If it has conceded military bases to a foreign power, the concession should not have been made in the context of Great Power conflicts.

In the wake of World War II, Europe had two priorities: post-war economic recovery and the maintenance of long-term peace and stability. US financial assistance for recovery, which is known as the Marshall Plan of 1947, was important for the reconstruction of the European economy. The US demonstrated its support for the idea of European unity by insisting that those European countries should establish a permanent agency to manage US financial aid.

Six European countries, namely Belgium, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and Netherlands responded positively by pooling their coal and steel industries and signing the Treaty of Paris in 1951. The establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community was the first step towards the European integration and paved the way for the establishment of the European Economic Community in 1957.

The issuance of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 by the British government pledged the British support for the Zionist movement and proved a milestone in the creation of the State of Israel. The declaration allowed Jewish immigration to Palestine and stated that “[h]is Majesty’s Government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object […]”

Arab nationalism emerged as an opposition movement in the Ottoman Empire during the twentieth century and remained a minority movement until the end of the Ottoman Empire. As the latter declined in power, Europe’s Great Powers, Britain and France, extended their influence into the Middle East. Those regional developments led to the rise of local nationalisms, most notably Arab nationalism. As Best et al. (2008: 92) wrote: “the combination of Ottoman weakness and steady European penetration created the environment for the rise of Arab nationalism”.