![]() ![]() The Cold War ended in the early 1990s with the successful Reunification of Germany and the USSR's demise after the August Coup of 1991. Destruction of the 155-km Berlin Wall, at the end of the decade, signaled a seismic geopolitical shift. After tension for most of the decade, by 1988 relations between the communist and capitalist blocs had improved significantly and the Soviet Union was increasingly unwilling to defend its governments in satellite states.ġ989 brought the overthrow and attempted overthrow of a number of governments led by communist parties, such as in Hungary, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 in China, the Czechoslovak "Velvet Revolution", Erich Honecker's East German regime, Poland's Soviet-backed government, and the violent overthrow of the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime in Romania. Islamism became a powerful political force in the 1980s and many jihadist organizations, including Al Qaeda, were set up.īy 1986, nationalism was making a comeback in the Eastern Bloc, and the desire for democracy in socialist states, combined with economic recession, resulted in Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, which reduced Communist Party power, legalized dissent and sanctioned limited forms of capitalism such as joint ventures with companies from capitalist countries. Major civil discontent and violence occurred, including the Angolan Civil War, the Ethiopian Civil War, the Moro conflict, the Ugandan Bush War, the insurgency in Laos, the Iran–Iraq War, the Soviet–Afghan War, the 1982 Lebanon War, the Second Sudanese Civil War, the Lord's Resistance Army insurgency, and the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. Ethiopia witnessed widespread famine in the mid-1980s during the corrupt rule of Mengistu Haile Mariam, resulting in the country having to depend on foreign aid to provide food to its population and worldwide efforts to address and raise money to help Ethiopians, such as the Live Aid concert in 1985. The world came perilously close to nuclear war for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, but the second half of the decade saw a dramatic easing of superpower tensions and ultimately the total collapse of Soviet communism.ĭeveloping countries across the world faced economic and social difficulties as they suffered from multiple debt crises in the 1980s, requiring many of these countries to apply for financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Superpower tensions escalated rapidly as President Reagan scrapped the policy of détente and adopted a new, much more aggressive stance on the Soviet Union. ![]() The final decade of the Cold War opened with the US-Soviet confrontation continuing largely without any interruption. The United Kingdom and the United States moved closer to supply-side economic policies, beginning a trend towards global instability of international trade that would pick up more steam in the following decade as the fall of the USSR made right-wing economic policy more powerful. Global warming became well known to the scientific and political community in the 1980s. ![]() The AIDS epidemic became recognized in the 1980s and has since killed an estimated 39 million people (as of 2013 ). Japan and West Germany saw large economic growth during this decade. As economic deconstruction increased in the developed world, multiple multinational corporations associated with the manufacturing industry relocated into Thailand, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. The decade saw a dominance of conservatism and free market economics, and a socioeconomic change due to advances in technology and a worldwide move away from planned economies and towards laissez-faire capitalism compared to the 1970s. The 1980s (pronounced "nineteen-eighties", shortened to " the '80s" or " the Eighties") was a decade that began January 1, 1980, and ended December 31, 1989. ![]() From left, clockwise: The first Space Shuttle, Columbia, lifts off in 1981 US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ease tensions between the two superpowers, leading to the end of the Cold War The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is considered to be one of the most momentous events of the 1980s In 1981, the IBM Personal Computer is released In 1985, the Live Aid concert is held in order to fund relief efforts for the famine in Ethiopia during the time Mengistu Haile Mariam ruled the country Pollution and ecological problems persisted when the Soviet Union and much of the world is filled with radioactive debris from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, and in 1984, when thousands of people perished in Bhopal during a gas leak from a pesticide plant The Iran–Iraq War leads to over one million dead and $1 trillion spent, while another war between the Soviets and Afghans leaves over 2 million dead. For other uses of "Eighties", see Eighties (disambiguation). " '80s", "The 80s", and "Eighties" redirect here. ![]()
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