Why do people love the 90s

brainfreeze wrote: »

You thinking about Trump, Brexit, other bad stuff defining the 2010s in future peoples nostalgic mind, is like assuming when people today think of the 90s they only think of The Troubles, Iraq War, Rwandan and Bosnian Genocides etc. People usually only remember the good in these type of discussions. The 90s was no utopia.

In terms of overall global war and the threat of war it was a definite high point though.


The cold war ended, meaning:

Nuclear arsenals plummeted (I mean really plummeted, until the 90's tens of thousands were deployed on a hair trigger to launch on land, sea and air in circumstances that would never be accepted nowadays);
The threat of nuclear war went from constant risk and sometimes immediate (see Able Archer 83 or any other alert emergency from the period) to sweet FA so the media had to eventually use nonsense like dirty bombs to scare us into watching;
Arms budgets went through the floor leaving a considerable peace dividend;
Eastern European countries finally achieved self-determination and began the long, messy but overall positive path to their current prosperity;
The Northern Irish Troubles eventually ended after the US put pressure on the British to pursue the peace process. Until the end of the Cold War it regarded it as an internal British matter. Once the strategic need for a British partner was lessened the US mediated the peace process. We may have got there eventually but not nearly as fast.


Most of the immediate bad stuff was a result of the cold war, and triggered by its ending:
Yugoslavia collapsed, it had been held together by coercion and kept afloat by both East and West as it hedged one against the other;
Zaire collapsed as the west didn't need Mobutu anymore, this led to the long agony of central Africa's wars over the mineral spoils of the Congo;
Afghanistan had been turned into a morass of competing warlords by the USSR, USA, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran for reasons of Cold War realpolitik.



Eventually the rising tide of Islamist extremism, contributed to by the US in the 1980s, came up against the high point of American hubris, in bed with a military industrial complex that missed the good old days, and resulted in the war on terror. But that wasn't until the 2000s.


Popular theorists were writing utopian books about the end of history in the 1990s. Since then people have only been been writing dystopian visions of every imaginable apocalypse : economic, military, religious, climate, robots, zombies. Nobody will look back on our times like people do the 90s, unless things get much worse.