How Many European Countries Have Gained Independence Since 1990?

On December 26 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was officially disbanded. This led to the foundation of fifteen new countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Many of these countries had already formalized declarations of independence before the legal dissolution of the USSR. The parliament of Ukraine, whose primary inhabitants formed the second-largest ethnic group in the Soviet Union in 1989 according to contemporary data, had already declared independence on August 24 with 321 of 360 votes. As our chart based on data collected by ThoughtCo shows, the vast majority of new countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia were founded over a span of just three years.

Before the USSR splintered into fifteen sovereign states, the Soviet-influenced German Democratic Republic and the Allied-occupied Federal Republic of Germany were unified into today's German state on October 3 1990, with full sovereignty returned to the country around five months later. In 1991 and 1992, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia broke off into the four distinct states of Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Amid the bloody Yugoslav Wars that followed, Serbia and Montenegro represented the remainder of Yugoslavia from 1992 until 2006, when Montenegrins voted in favor of independence with a narrow margin of 5.5 percent. In contrast to the conflict between the former members of the Yugoslav federation, the partition of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia was a non-violent event. The secession was carried out on December 31, 1992.

The latest declaration of independence in the area was filed by Kosovo in 2008. However, Kosovo is only partially recognized by the United Nations. Around half of its member states still see the country as a part of Serbia, chief among them Russia, China and, as could be expected, Serbia, according to an official list maintained by the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Diaspora.

Zooming out, only eight additional countries and territories gained independence in the rest of the world between 1990 and 2024. Starting with Yemen and Namibia in 1990 and ending with South Sudan in 2011, four of these countries are located on the African continent and three, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau, in Oceania. The final entry on the list, East Timor, is located in Southeast Asia and declared its independence from Indonesia in 2002.