1990s

The 1990s (shortened to the 90s and referred to as the nineties) was a decade that began on January 1, 1990, and ended on December 31, 1999. The decade, known as the Golden Age of Multiculturalism, saw a rise in the awareness of multiculturalism compared to the 1980s, as well as the advance of alternative media. Music movements like grunge, the rave scene, and hip hop became popular with young people worldwide, aided by cable television and the Internet. The 1990s saw advances in technology, with the World Wide Web, the first gene therapy trial, and cloning all emerging and being improved upon throughout the decade.
A combination of factors, including the continued mass mobilization of capital markets through neoliberalism, the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the beginning of the widespread proliferation of new media such as the Internet, and increasing skepticism towards the government, led to a realignment and consolidation of economic and political power across the world. Many countries were economically prosperous during the 1990s. High-income countries experienced steady economic growth for much of the decade during the Great Moderation, while the GDP of the countries of the former Soviet Union decreased as their economies restructured. International trade increased with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 and forming of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, and the dot-com frenzy resulted in the dot-com bubble of 1997–2000 that brought great wealth to some entrepreneurs before its crash between 2000 and 2001.
New ethnic conflicts emerged in Africa, the Balkans, and the Caucasus, the former two witnessing the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides, respectively. Signs of any resolution of tensions between Israel and the Arab world remained elusive despite the progress of the Oslo Accords. The Troubles in Northern Ireland came to a standstill in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement following 30 years of violence.

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