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CHAPTER 34
New Challenges in a New Millennium
INSTRUCTIONAL OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter students should be able to:
1.
Discuss the main benefits and dangers of growing political, economic, and cultural integration.
2.
Discuss the role of religious beliefs and secular ideologies in the contemporary world.
3.
Discuss the way in which technology has contributed to the process of global interaction.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I.
Globalization and Economic Crisis
A. An Interconnected Economy
1. Economic growth in China and India, along with their large populations, made them
future world economic powers. These nations and the United States increased their
demand for oil to the point that the price per barrel rose from $20 in 1999 to $70 in
2006, then fell abruptly during the economic crisis of 2008.
2. To promote economic growth and reduce vulnerabilities, many countries formed freetrade zones and regional trade associations. The strengthening of the European Union
(EU) and the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were
notable examples of this trend.
3. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was formed in 2001 with China,
Russia, and four former U.S.S.R. regions initially for the purposes of collective
security. Oil-rich Iran applied for membership in 2008.
4. The World Trade Organization (WTO) was founded in 1995 to encourage reduced
trading barriers and enforce international trade agreements. The organization has
numerous vocal critics. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank
provide assistance to countries in economic trouble, but few expected the drastic
downturn in the global economy.
B. Global Financial Crisis
1. The 2008 financial crisis had roots in the Asian crisis of 1997 when the investment
boom in Asian countries burst. Money then flowed the other way, much to the U.S.,
allowing the U.S. to fight two wars while lowering taxes.
2. In 2008 the U.S. housing boom collapsed causing devaluation in housing and
generating a large number of home foreclosures. U.S. financial firms and banks
teetered on the brink of collapse. Unemployment increased. U.S. presidential candidate
Barack Obama won the election in part from faith in his ability to stem the economic
crisis.
C. Globalization and Democracy
1. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the number of democratic institutions
increased throughout the world.
2. The great appeal of democracy is that it allows for the peaceful resolution of
differences among a country’s social, cultural, and regional groups, and reduces the
threat of war between democratic nations.
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Chapter 34: Globalization in the New Millennium
3.
4.
II.
The economic crisis of 2008 caused some new democratic governments to fall.
Democracy in Pakistan seemed uncertain; President Pervez Musharraf stepped down
rather than face impeachment because of his support of the U.S. The government also
faced growing strength of the Pakistani Taliban.
5. Asian countries have moved toward more open political processes. The election of the
BJP in India increased tensions between India’s Hindus and Muslims. In 2004, the BJP
lost a national election to the Congress Party and peacefully handed over power.
6. With the notable exception of South Africa, elections in sub-Saharan Africa have often
been used by would-be dictators as the first step in establishing their political and
military dominance. In Sudan, violence in Darfur led to Omar al-Bashir becoming the
first sitting head of state to be charged with genocide by the International Criminal
Court in 2009.
D. Regime Change in Iraq and Afghanistan
1. Experiments in democracy took place in Afghanistan and Iraq after the United States
overthrew both regimes.
2. Ruled by the Taliban at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and harboring Usama bin Laden,
Afghanistan became the target of the United States in December 2001. With the fall of
the Taliban, Hamid Karzai was elected interim president in 2002 and was
Afghanistan’s first democratically elected president in 2004.
3. Afghanistan’s government has not proven strong enough to control warlords in some
outlying regions, and it has had to fight attempts by the Taliban to regain power.
Despite efforts to the stem production, the majority of Afghanistan’s agricultural
income comes from opium production.
4. The United States began a preemptive strike against Iraq on March 20, 2003, under the
belief that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), although United Nations
weapons inspectors had not found any evidence of WMDs in Iraq. When no WMDs
were found, President George W. Bush then stated that the reason for the invasion was
to liberate the Iraqi people from oppression and install a democracy.
5. After “major fighting” ended in Iraq, the United States led Iraqis through the steps to a
constitutionally elected government in January 2005. As democracy took shape in Iraq,
they also endured a guerilla insurgency and, after the election of a Shi-ite majority,
conflict between Shi-ite and Sunni factions, verging on civil war. By the time Barak
Obama took office, however, signs of stabilization led him to announce withdrawal of
U.S. combat forces by August 2010.
6. The hardships of democratization in Iraq and Afghanistan led other Middle Eastern
countries to question U.S. urgings to liberalize their political systems. The capture of
23 seats in the Lebanese parliament by Hezbollah in 2005 and the majority of seats
won by Hamas in the Palestine Governing Council seemed to confirm for oilproducing countries their hesitancy to hold free elections. In 2007, Hamas attacks
against Israel led to aerial bombardment by Israel on the Gaza Strip.
The Question of Values
A. Faith and Politics
1. Evangelical Protestants became a powerful, conservative political force in the United
States, particularly during the presidency of George W. Bush. Catholic conservatives
led opposition to abortion, homosexuality, marriage of priests, and admission of
women to the priesthood. Israel’s hyperorthodox Jews, known as haredim, vehemently
resisted both Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and plans for
withdrawal from parts of the West Bank. In India, Hindu zealots made the BJP party a
powerful political force.
2. The birth of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 made the current of Muslim political
assertiveness visible to all, but by the year 2000, acts of terrorism by non-Iranian
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Chapter 34: Globalization in the New Millennium
245
Muslim groups claiming to be acting for religious reasons were capturing the
headlines. Media technology increased terrorism’s effectiveness as a political tactic
from the 1980s onward, especially with spectacular attacks against the United States
and Europe.
3. Most notorious of the terrorists was the Saudi-born charismatic leader Usama bin
Laden. Through his group of fighters called al-Qaeda, he attacked American
embassies, the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole, and the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon in 2001. Further terrorist attacks by Indonesians in 2002, North Africans in
2004, and English-born Muslims in 2005 suggested that the violence begun by alQaeda had become decentralized and that recruits might no longer be taking orders
from bin Laden. Debate has not settled on the reasons for the increasing violence but
fear of terrorism became pervasive throughout the world, and many peaceful Muslims
found themselves suspect because of their beliefs.
B. Universal Rights and Values
1. The United Nations sought to protect the rights of individuals through the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, passed by the General Assembly in December 1948.
The declaration’s emphasis on individual rights was derived mostly from European
and American history; many of the countries that later signed this declaration had
reservations about the universal nature of concepts that had been formulated
exclusively on the basis of the western cultural tradition.
2. Rather than addressing fundamental philosophical issues regarding the concept of
human rights, human rights activists worked through nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) and focused their efforts on agreed-upon violations of human rights: torture,
imprisonment without trial, and summary execution by death squads, and on famine
relief and refugee assistance.
3. U.S. demands that its citizens be exempted from the jurisdiction of the International
Criminal Court and that “enemy combatants” taken prisoner during the “war on
terrorism” did not have to be treated in accordance with the Third Geneva Convention,
and its withdrawal from the Kyoto agreement has prompted charges of hypocrisy from
critics of the U.S. government. The election of Barak Obama, the first AfricanAmerican president of the U.S., seemed to signal a change in American attitudes on
international rights issues.
C. Women’s Rights
1. Positions on the question of women’s rights clearly demonstrate the dichotomy of
views between the western industrialized nations and the nations of Africa, Asia, and
Latin America.
2. The feminist movement in the west was concerned with voting rights, equal access to
education and jobs, and an end to gender discrimination and sexual exploitation.
Feminists in the west also decried the oppression of women in other parts of the world.
3. Some nonwestern women complained about the deterioration of morality and family
life in the west and questioned the priorities of the western feminist movement. Efforts
to coordinate the struggle for women’s rights internationally gained momentum in the
1970s, but these efforts were not able to overcome deep-seated cultural disagreement
on the definition of women’s rights.
4. International conferences have focused attention on women’s issues more than they
have generated solutions. On the other hand, increasing women’s education, better
employment opportunities, political participation, and control of fertility are goals that
promise to lead to better gender equality.
III. Global Culture
A. The Media and the Message
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Chapter 34: Globalization in the New Millennium
After World War II, the United States became the world’s main exporter of movies,
challenged only by India, Egypt, and Hong Kong.
2. In the 1960s, television began to spread to most of the nonwestern world, where
government monopolies ensured that the new medium would be used to disseminate a
unified national viewpoint rather than function as a medium for the transmission of
western culture and opinions. American organizations like CNN (Cable News
Network) used satellite transmission technology to enter the international market,
proffering a fundamentally American view of the news. In response to CNN, other
countries have developed their own twenty-four-hour news coverage, such as AlJazeera, based in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, which interprets the news of the
Iraq War, for instance, from a different perspective than U.S. news media.
3. The development of digital technology offered the possibility of combining the
separate technologies of movies, television, and computers, while the development of
the Internet transformed business and education. These technological innovations
could be seen as portents of western—especially American—cultural domination, but
as technology became more widespread, people around the world had more
opportunities to adapt that technology to their own purposes.
The Spread of Pop Culture
1. The new technologies helped change perceptions of culture by allowing popular
culture to become more and more visible. At the beginning of the twentieth century,
European composers, choreographers, writers, and artists drew on popular cultures to
inspire and enliven their work.
2. Initially, the content was heavily American but consumer products of American,
European, and Japanese transnational companies found their way into international
markets and filmmakers began to be inspired by global themes for international
audiences.
Emerging Global Culture
1. Cultural links across national and ethnic boundaries at the elite level generated much
less controversy than did the globalization of popular culture. Russian-American
collaboration on space missions and in the business world, the flow of graduate
students and researchers from around the world to American scientific laboratories,
and the use of English as a global language were all aspects of globalization at the elite
level.
2. The importance of English as a global language became evident in the emergence of an
international literature in English, though world literature remained highly diverse..
3. Western universities have become the model for higher education around the world.
Enduring Cultural Diversity
1. Diverse cultural traditions persisted at the end of the twentieth century despite the
globalization of industrial society and the integration of economic markets. Japan, for
example, has been a success in the modern industrial world in spite of—or perhaps
because of—its group-oriented, hierarchical approach to social relations.
2. The economic success of Japan and other Asian countries calls into question the longstanding western assumption that all of world history culminated in the exceptional
convergence of political freedom, secularism, and industrialization that emerged in the
west. Also coming into question was whether industrialization offered the only viable
route to prosperity.
1.
B.
C.
D.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1.
To what extent has the global economy changed since the 9/11 attacks on the United States in
2001, and what efforts have been made by regions throughout the world to gain economic power?
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Chapter 34: Globalization in the New Millennium
247
2.
How did technology affect the development of the global economy in the late twentieth century?
3.
How did technological innovation and dissemination change the ways in which nations and people
were able to threaten each other with violence in the late twentieth century?
4.
Is there sufficient justification for western organizations and governments to concern themselves
with human rights and women’s rights issues in nonwestern countries?
5.
In what ways is the current U.S. doctrine of preemptive strikes on potential threats a departure
from the strategy of containment used against the Soviet Union in the twentieth century? What
consequences do you predict will flow from this doctrine?
6.
How will the new emphasis on terrorism shape global politics in the first decades of the twentyfirst century?
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