ABSTRACT
The remarkably peaceful demise of the Soviet Union immediately touched the entire world: in Eastern Europe the former satellite states gravitated toward the West, and Moscow’s previous clients Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, and the Palestinians—already living on reduced subsidies—were set adrift. The internationalization of world production and trade began in the West in the 1970s, spurred by the oil crisis and by major technological advances in transportation and communications. Once the Cold War ended, the United Nations again sought to lead the collective effort to stop or reverse the damage to the world’s fragile ecosystems that transcended national borders. The United Nations, born in World War II and largely ignored during the Cold War, sought to fill the structural and security gap after 1991. In the former communist world, the Czechs and Slovaks, freed from Moscow’s control, peacefully separated with their "velvet divorce" in 1992.
