December 8 marks the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Belavezha Accords, which declared the Soviet Union effectively dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States in its place. It was signed at the state dacha near Viskuli in Belovezhskaya Pushcha on December 8, 1991, by the leaders of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. Executive Director of the Russkiy Mir Foundation and Dean of the School of Public Administration of Moscow State University Vyacheslav Nikonov here discusses six key consequences of this event.
If we look at the main geopolitical consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union, then the first thing we should note is that from this moment forward globalization became possible. Previously, the world was divided. And often these borders were impassable. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, the world became a single informational, economic and political system. Bipolar confrontation became a thing of the past and globalization emerged.
The second important consequence was the serious restructuring of Eurasia – the appearance of 15 states in place of the former Soviet Union. And this was followed by the dismantling of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. This entailed the appearance of an enormous number not only of new states but also unrecognized republics, which at times engaged in bloody wars against each other.
The third consequence was the emergence of a unipolar period to the global political scene. For a certain time the United States remained the sole superpower in the world which could in principle could resolve any problems as it saw fit. That period witnessed a sharp rise in America’s presence in the world and not only in the regions where the Soviet Union ceased to exist. I mean Eastern Europe and the former republics of the Soviet Union as well as other regions across the global.
The fourth consequence is the serious expansion of the West. If previously Eastern European states were not considered part of the West, they now have not only begun to be considered so but they have also practically institutionalized themselves as parts of Western alliances. I mean, they have become members of the European Union and NATO.
The next important consequence was the emergence of China as a second large center of global development. China, following the Soviet Union’s exit from history’s stage, to the contrary began to accumulate power, adopting a starkly different development scheme from that which Mikhail Gorbachev proposed. If Gorbachev proposed democracy without a market economy, then China proposed a market economy while preserving the old political regime and achieve amazing success in doing so. If the economy of the Soviet Union at the time of its collapse was three times the size of China’s economy, then the Chinese economy is now four times larger than the economy of the Russian Federation.
And, finally, the last major consequence was that developing countries, primarily African countries, were left to the whims of fate. During the time of bipolar confrontation, each of the poles tried in one way or another to offer assistance to their allies beyond the boundaries of their immediate spheres of influence and own countries, but this all ceased with the end of the Cold War. Thus the flow of aide directed toward various regions of the globe from both the Soviet Union and the West quickly dried up. And this led to serious economic problems in practically all countries of the developing world in the 1990s.
Source: Voice of Russia
