Yemeni unification took place on May 22, 1990, when the area of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (also known as South Yemen) was united with the Yemen Arab Republic (also known as North Yemen), forming the Republic of Yemen (known as simply Yemen).
Unlike East and West Germany, North and South Korea, or North and South Vietnam, the two bordered Yemens were not formed by a civil war or occupation. North Yemen became a state after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in November 1918. Aden, in South Yemen, was administered as part of British India, and in 1937 became a British colony in its own right. The larger part of South Yemen was a British protectorate, effectively under colonial control. In one of the many proxy conflicts of the Cold War, a South Yemeni insurgency (with the support and backing of the Soviet Union) led by two nationalist parties revolted, causing the United Kingdom to first unify the area and in 1967 to withdraw from its former colony.
Following the North Yemen Civil War, the north established a republican government that included tribal representatives. It enjoyed modest oil revenues and remittances from its citizens working in the oil-rich Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Its population in the 1980s was estimated at 12 million as opposed to 3 million in South Yemen.