Full list  |  Top Global population: 5.3 billion Olympics: Barcelona, 1992 (9,356 athletes from 169 nations); Atlanta, 1996 (10,318 athletes from 197 nations)

By some margin the most important communication advance of the twentieth century appeared with the launch of World Wide Web in late 1990 (Decisive Day #92, 12/11/1990). Spiritually linked to simplification of photography in 1900 and the spread of tabloid newspapers stirred after 1964 it also improved communications for millions. Though unlike the Kodak Brownie camera and The Sun newspaper it did not make its architect wealthy. Where George Eastman of Kodak or Lord Beaverbrook or Rupert Murdoch or other press barons made oodles of cash from their creativity the lack of a patent for ‘W3’ ensured only oodles of credentials for Tim Berners-Lee. His modestly stated development of an old idea to connect computers first trickled and later gushed through world consciousness.

One of the first global news events which internet news sites excitedly covered was the largest army to appear since the Second World War. Weapons proliferation had long since claimed a seat at the High Table of international politics but now diabolical weapons of mass destruction proliferation threatened to turn that seat into a throne. Assembled in Saudi Arabia, and principally formed around the United States military, over half-a-million troops from overa dozen countries gathered to evict chemical and biologically armed Iraq from Kuwait. Tellingly, the alliance included important Arab countries not only bordering of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait but also Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates

The military drubbing of Desert Storm (Decisive Day #93, 17/01/1991) proved pivotal on many fronts, both military and economic. Prominent among the economic messages was translucent confirmation that monetary concerns for oil supply were now as beefy as political and ideological concerns from the 1910s and 1940s. One contemporary incongruity confirmed the point rather pitilessly. In 1990 and concentrated in the poor fiascos of Africa and Asia there were about 300,000 inveigled child soldiers or nearly 1% of the American population. Yet there was little political appetite in Washington DC or other capital cities of industrialized countries to end to this twentieth century variation of slavery. Little or none, in fact. Such disengagement stood firm even though child soldiering harmed far more people than lived in Kuwait. Instead was contentment, if only privately whispered, that dilemmas focused only on actionable hot spots like Kuwait. Of several other world evils only the Balkans, still lucklessly jammed into the ticklish margins of Christian Europe and Islamic Asia, caught serious political attention. Yet even this emerged not from wishes to right wrongs but from distant memories of the 1910s when the Balkans entangled European allies in massive war. Bitterly earned hindsight did ensure global recognition that as Yugoslavia slowly and then swiftly unravelled in the summer of 1991 it should count as significant (Decisive Day #94, 25/06/1991). But only a modest NATO force involved itself. Even then the participation took several years to appear and was only to protect a religious minority, Muslims from Christians, rather than guard the sovereignty of one country against another.

Meanwhile many newspapers and bloggers – individuals shortcutting the previous hold of press barons to share their own views on-line – sharpened their keyboards with markedly acidic obituaries on centrally planned economics. Once in the middle of the century the often wacky notion had inspired and imprisoned nearly half the globe. Its expiry at century end left an intense combination of scars and relief the Nobel Prize for Peace tried to soothe – awarded to Premiere Michael Gorbachev in 1990 for lessening Cold War tensions and opening the USSR. Perhaps the kindest eulogy was that at least Russia ditched planned economics fully (Decisive Day #95, 25/12/1991). Not only the thinking but also ruling cadres left the Soviet landscape – even though both resurfaced in diluted forms later. Cauterizing defunct economics was far less decisive for Russia’s mammoth neighbour. China’s Communists, blemished descendants from the guilty butchers of tens of millions in the 1950s and 1960s, discretely morphed into a shiny new pro-capitalist deity. Critical in this deft glide was the far-sighted thinking of Deng Xiao-ping. Nearing the end of his life the old political combatant was still prescient enough to spot what the Soviet collapse meant. So a couple of weeks after Comrade Gorbachev’s farewell speech Comrade Deng told a haughty socialist audience that, after all, individual wealth creation and property ownership had some merits (Decisive Day #96, 19/01/1992). Getting rich is no sin, he smiled, cajoling the bemused audience to calculate just how of this wordplay meant poverty was sinful.

China’s tardy capitalist cuddle arose not just from Russia’s failures but from galling distributions of wealth. GDP from the world's poorest fifty nations barely matched the wealth of three billionaires – Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in America and the Indian Lakshmi Mittal, based in Britain. The imbalance stayed chronic, in fact critical and vexing, for Asia throughout the decade. Of global GDP in 2000, roughly US$28 trillion, Asia including the reforming China and swelling India produced only US$2 trillion. This was despite controlling 52% of the world’s population. Europe by contrast, home to only 5% of the worlds population, turned out four times much more wealth and a staggering US$8 trillion of global GDP. With two-way trade between India and China worth a trifling US$1.5 billion the two Asian mammoths were more failing behemoths of population than twin leviathans of commerce. (On improved relations and growth in respective economies it had already risen tenfold to US$20 billion in 2006.)

As failed economic ideas evaporated others withered too. Passion about permanent division from Ireland to Sri Lanka and other divided islands eased among hopes for power-sharing or even unity. A more pivotal slackening appeared in Africa in late 1992 when apartheid finally ebbed from weary South Africa (Decisive Day #97, 26/09/1992). Apartheid, the Afrikaans word and idea where few whites denied power to the majority blacks, left only unqualified and desolate regret in South Africa. Behind it came a signal that simply having capitalist governments ensuring a likeness of wealth was not enough. Societies expected justice too. And across all continents too. At the beginning of 1993 another previously ticklish dilemma with its own odd apartheid resolved in the central European country of Czechoslovakia, which divided peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. (Wags wondered what happened to the ‘o’ in the middle.)

Decolonisation underlined this new sense of justice and self-determination. Behind China, whose population had now jumped to 1.2 billion, and India with 1 billion the next most populous countries were America with 300 millions and Indonesia with 200 millions. Most of the world lived in countries with populations significantly under 100 millions and nearly all self-governing sovereign states. While opinions varied on the manner of decolonisation by the 1990s it was at least complete. A century earlier, in the optimistic 1880s, English writer John Seeley fretted that Britain had ‘conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’. By the 1990s the absence of mind had recovered its sanity. Only eight colonizing countries controlled sixty minor possessions. France preserved sixteen colonies and the United Kingdom fifteen. Norway had three, Denmark and the Netherlands two each. Other colonizers existed only in Australasia – Canberra had inherited six ex-British colonies and Wellington three – and the United States had fourteen colonies. Perhaps to some tastes even sixty colonies was too much. But in fact the colonizing stew had boiled down to fewer than eight million people living in deep-rooted and often content colonies, equal to a minuscule 0.1% of global population. In other words 99.9% of the world had removed themselves from colonialism.

Britain, the biggest colonizer, had successfully squeezed down administrative responsibilities to only 120,000 square kilometres of foreign land. After tiny Hong Kong separated in 1997, the last consequential colony in economic terms and home to six million people jammed inside 1,000 square kilometres, the remaining and more adhesive British territories contained only 450,000 individuals. This amounted to around 0.8% of the British domestic population. It also included long-established territories within British coastal waters such as the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, Guernsey and Jersey in the North Sea, none of which wanted independence from Westminster. Plucky little Gibraltar at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea may have rebuffed diplomatic invitations to reunite with Spain but their determination to stay British annoyed London as much as Madrid.

France had also compressed colonial responsibilities to an area similar to Britain – 125,000 square kilometres – although Gallic attraction to larger colonies persisted. In the Caribbean, France held Guadeloupe and Martinique (450,000 people in each) and Reunion (800,000) east of Africa. But although 2.6 millions lived outside France this was only 4% of the domestic French population. In an oddly fitting codicil to the Age of European Empires, the largest remaining colonial power measured by land space was not the two big grabbers but modest little Denmark. Copenhagen still ruled one of the first colonial grabs from the 1720s, the 350,000 square kilometres of Greenland.

Such an intense and determined climate of decolonisation explains in large measures why Britain and France, plus others in the industrialized continent like former colonizers Holland and Belgium, now gravitated towards European political union. There stood twin comforts of a thwart to conflict And increasing economic opportunities. Several events had marked this ever-closer union since the 1950s. By far the most pivotal moment in this distinctly twentieth-century European journey was the Maastricht Treaty (Decisive Day #98, 01/11/1993). Newly joined, the European rump looked not unlike a single superstate – or at least like an entity in which some cold see such hopes.

Washington also ditched most overseas possessions. In America’s case all that remained were military outposts like Wake and Midway Islands and otherwise worthless bombing ranges like the Johnson Athol where the USAF practiced explosions of nuclear ordnance. Total American territory amounted to only 10,000 square kilometres, being mostly Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, home to four million people inside 9,000 square kilometres. Under colonial rule only 4.4 million people or around 1.5% of their domestic population.

With colonization all but gone China and Russia and many other industriliasing powers looked discretely at America for signs of what might develop in their own countries. Sadly the view was not too rousing. The Cold War might have handed America a handsome win, all the more charmed for happening without nuclear explosions, but injustice and iniquities still held a tenacious grip on American life in the 1990s. To those with a sense of historical irony this was foreseeable. Thomas Jefferson had warned in 1787 that American governance would stay virtuous only ‘as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they [the people] get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another.’

In 1992 Jefferson’s words resonated loudly not in the farming communities of New England but the urban sprawl of California. Despite compelling video-evidence a mostly white jury acquitted four white police officers of beating black Rodney King. In the following riotous hoo-hah little remained sacrosanct. Restoring order came only after five days through an elegant plea from Mr King – ‘Can’t we all get along?’ – and ungainly US Marines paid for by the federal government. Fifty people lost their lives, hundreds suffered injuries, and over US$1 billion of property damages transpired. It was not the costliest critical incident in America in the 1990s. Damages from the 1994 earthquake in San Francisco exceeded US$20 billion and was the priciest natural disaster in American history. But the Los Angeles troubles went beyond mortar and muggings. Unearthed was a touchy reminder of how fragile ethnic integration was as a universal idea. If even America’s international cities suffered like this – Los Angeles proclaimed America’s most diverse ethnic mix and nearly two dozen sister cities including St. Petersburg (Russia), Tehran (Iran), and Guangzhou (China) – what hope for others? China was not alone at looking nervously at its own mass incidents – a new Beijing term for large riots and aggressive protests – already running steadily into tens of thousands each year.

American political life in the 1990s was not much more soothing. Criticism on the internet increasingly targeted selected and unselected leaders of all shades and sleaze. A crescendo appeared in December of 1998, a week before Christmas, arising from President Clinton’s shift from repetitive denial about an affair. ‘I want you to listen to me. I am going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms Lewinsky,’ he promised on live television. Under pressure this transformed quickly into a reluctant shard of decency, also carried on live television: ‘Indeed I did have a relationship with Ms Lewinsky that was not appropriate, in fact it was wrong.’ It was the sharpest and swiftest presidential twirl of the twentieth century. Partisan US House of Representatives quickly impeached America’s forty-second president and five-times governor of Arkansas. Not just America but the world poured over, under, and within the pointless excess of the 117,000-word Starr report. Easily exceeding romantic novels in length and raciness the report arguably placed a long-winded but obvious crown on political accountability in the twentieth century.

Although acquitted in the following spring President Bill Clinton secured global notoriety as the second impeached American president and the only one of the twentieth century (the first was President Andrew Johnson in 1868). Dramatis personae may have ebbed from the stage. The President’s former dalliance, Paula Jones, disappeared into life as a sometime soft-porn model and full-time suburban estate agent. The President’s young intern, Monica Lewinsky, drifted into branded handbag manufacturing and trying to avoid endorsing phallic cigars. But the challenge to world leadership was a plain marker in the further easing of the age of obedience. Britain saw the first ‘official questioning’ of a Prime Minister in 2006 – Blair on political fund-raising – as Starr-like criticism and challenges detonated across many countries. A curious underlining of just how life had changed arose in 1998 when DNA evidence surfaced that President Thomas Jefferson, in the days of slavery, probably fathered an illegitimate son through Sally Hemings, his mixed black-white slave. While Jefferson may once have felt the hard-working people and not the rich ‘are our dependence for continued freedom’ doubtless from the grave America’s third president appreciated the lack of an internet which the forty-second president endured.

Even the Asian financial tsunami that gripped the continent failed to top ratings for the Clinton dalliance. First started in 1997 currency crisis had engulfed first Thailand. That perhaps looked weak as it had a history of instability dating to 1992 when army were driven from power. But then the Indonesian currency fell, with the Suharto regime not far behind in 1998, plus Malaysia and the Philippines, looking eerily to their ditching of Marcos in 1986. South Korea followed. It even went global with particular weakness uncovered in Russia in the summer of 1998 and Brazil in early 1999. The IMF with help and direction from the US Treasury behind the scenes pushed for more freely floating currencies to prevent a repear.

Diminishment of deference affected religion too and notably European Christianity, which in the 1990s and for several earlier decades had haemorrhaged support. Beleaguered Rome responded with avacious glances at new converts in Africa. Plus, for good measure, the Pontiff offered formal acceptance that Catholicism may have erred in punishing Galileo 350 years earlier. After all, agreed Pope John Paul, the earth rotates around the sun and is not as unmovable as the Bible says. Surviving royalty also suffered. In the summer of 1997 Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris while fleeing pushy paparazzi with long-range camera lenses and powerful flashes. Despite her 1992 divorce from Prince Charles, heir to the British crown, and related easing from the Windsor upper crust, reactions to the royal death proved as astounding as the death of Kennedy in the 1960s. British and global reactions to the most photographed woman in earth demanded mourning from Queen Elizabeth who obliged – just in time – with public expressions of grief at the death of Shy Di, the People’s Princess. Obsession with the accident swirled around the internet and fastidious attention on possible guilty parties from drunken chauffeurs to amnesic bodyguard. By some estimates over two billion watched the funeral and few escaped tears as Earl Spencer eulogized his sister’s unsolicited role in the new global nature of celebrity: ‘Diana was the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty. All over the world she was a symbol of selfless humanity. A very British girl who transcended nationality.’

While the life expectancy of church and royal families looked increasingly precarious for everyone else advances in biological longevity were significant. In 1900 the average age at death was 47 in America and similar in the industrialized nations of Europe. This jumped notably and in 1960 an estimated 4,000 Americans were over 100 years old. By the 1990s this number had jumped to 55,000. Several scientific advances had helped this but the most significant, at least in what it held for the future, was cloning Dolly the Sheep (Decisive Day #99, 23/02/1997). In part pride from Dolly the Sheep, adopted as a Scottish triumph, pressure within the United Kingdom for devolution continued to bubble. In 1998 Scotland voted for a devolved form of government, though fell some way short of full devolution. Somewhere around 30% of the population favoured full ending of the 1707 Act of Union with England – bedrock of the United Kingdom.

Across not only Scotland but much of Britain and Europe and America, odd and often ominous terms entered vocabulary and thinking: from crack dens (places for selling and using drugs) to ASBO (antisocial behavior orders), cyber bullying (posting abusive images and libel on the internet); neets (drop-outs ‘not in education or employment or training’); and noise abatement orders (up from around 50,000 in 1980 to over 300,000 in 2000). Simultaneously fired up was growing resentment not just at neighbours but corporations harming the environment, or so some held despite evidence that mass consumerism caused as much damage. Humanity, it turned out, needed to control not only themselves but their endless bullying of the environment. And so the century closed with a striking political consensus at Kyoto in Japan that accepted, after all, continued global warming would melt ice caps and raise sea levels significantly (Decisive Day #100, 11/12/1997).