Author(s): Ricardo M. Martín de la Guardia

Publisher: Ediciones AKAL

Publication Date: 2012-10-23

Binding: Paperback

Pages: 320

Language: es

There are dates in History when events accelerate, moments that encapsulate the trajectory of past decades to become their epitome while also providing the main guidelines for the immediate future. The year 1989 is undoubtedly one of these dates: in Paraguay, the eternal dictatorship of Stroessner came to an end, while a few kilometers to the west, in Chile, the democratic opposition won free elections against a dictatorship no less emblematic, that of Augusto Pinochet. In Asia, the regime of the ayatollahs buried its leader, Khomeini, that year; meanwhile, the still economically and politically underestimated Chinese giant showed its darkest side in the Tiananmen student massacre, while on the African continent the embers of the long and painful decolonization process still burned in Namibia: the former territory of Southwest Africa was abandoned by the military forces of the racist Pretoria regime, which the following year, pressured by international forces, would release Nelson Mandela from prison, one of the great icons of the closing century. But it was above all the fall of the Berlin Wall in November that symbolically began the end of the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe and opened the doors to the disintegration of the Soviet Union two years later. The end of the international order established at Yalta fifty years earlier gave way to a new reality, more open—also more confusing—where the indisputable North American primacy would have to be combined with a series of emerging powers. Barely two decades after that year that changed the world, this magnificent monograph analyzes how what happened then gave rise to the birth of a new international order.