globalization and resistance - this area is password ... shower her with new clothes, including blue...

,,. Listen to Chapter 37 U on MyHistoryLab

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

3 7 .4 What were the main changes and continuities in religion in the contemporary period of world history? J>· 932

918

Globalization and Resistance

A recent movie about a family in Kerala (a state in southern India) makes the point inescapably. A baby girl is turned over to her "good" brother for care: He lives in the village and provides for her a simple, idyllic life. But when she enters college, she goes to the city to live with a childless aunt and uncle. They shower her with new clothes, including blue jeans, Western-style skirts, and cosmetics. She enters and wins a college beauty pageant. She gets in with a heavy-drinking, rowdy group of men and is disgraced-finally returning to the village where, in shame, she assumes the traditional costume.

By the early 21st century, Kera la had become a scene of quiet cultural struggle. Many residents worked abroad, mainly in the Persian Gulf. Television Channel V, the Indian version of MTV, piped in Japanese, Filipino, and Arab as well as Indian music, with disk jockeys-all women

FIGURE 37.1 Indian university students in New Delhi protest India's hosting of the Indian Miss World contest

by burning contestants in effigy. Like these students, some Indian conservatives see beauty pageants as

decadent imports from the West that are destructive of their culture's traditional values.

� Watch the Video Series on MyHistorylab Learn about some key topics related to this chapter with the MyHistoryLab Video Series: Key Topics in World History

of Indian origin from Britain or North America-speaking English. All of this provided new levels

of contact with the outside world. Growing interest in novel consumer standards formed part of

this change. A word derived from lower-caste slang, chetu, came to mean "cool"-denoting jeans,

cars, a new motorbike. But debate and opposition surfaced as well. A local Coca-Cola bottling

plant, for example, was accused of contaminating the water.

Concern about beauty pageants formed part of the cultural mix. Beauty pageants had spread

widely on the subcontinent after an Indian woman won the Miss Universe contest in the 1990s.

Hindu nationalists, however, condemned the contests, arguing that"ln India, the woman is not

meant to be sold" (Figure 37.1 ). In Kera la, local officials attempted a compromise effort to hold a

pageant in which women would be assessed for their beauty, but in traditional costume and with

accompanying tests of knowledge of Kera Ian culture. In this case, the compromise failed because

the women who wanted to be in beauty parades did not have the cultural knowledge, while

those who had the knowledge shunned the beauty contest part. It was a confusing situation, with

change and continuity warring for dominance and dividing the people of Kerala. •

The later 20th century saw renewed intensification of globalization. By the 1950s jet travel became increasingly routine. Several postwar agreements, such as the establishment of the International Monetary Fund, facilitated global economic contacts. Despite the cold war-and after all, both sides in this conflict had a global outlook-globalization gained ground after 1950, following the decades of partial retreat between the world wars.

But the end of the cold war unquestionably freed up new energy for global contacts. China, in 1978, and then Russia under Gorbachev opened to wider interactions. Another development both facilitated and reflected the latest surge of globalization: the expansion of industrial economies from their previous base in the West and the Pacific Rim to a host of additional countries. Although huge regional inequalities remained, essential industrialization itself globalized, and this encouraged still further contacts.

GLOBAL INDUSTRIALIZATION

What were the differences in the industrial map of the world in 2014, compared to 1950?

By the 1980s and 1990s, several key countries were able to go beyond earlier first steps, for example in import substitution, to expand industrial output and compete successfully in global export markets. In the case of China, previous experience with Mao Zedong's efforts at industrial growth, the "Great Leap Forward" after 1958, even though they had failed in the short run, provided similar impetus.

The countries involved were still in the "developing" category-Chinese leaders in the early 21st century like to call their country the world's largest developing economy, in contrast with the United States as the largest developed entry. They continued to take advantage of relatively low wages to help spur further growth. Many continued to host large number of foreign firms, seeking to take advantage of favorable pay scales and regulations. It was always possible that some future setbacks might reverse the patterns of the 1990s and early 2000s-skeptics warned, for example, of the burdens of unquestionably growing environmental pollution and the possibility of social unrest from the labor force amid potential resentments of a visibly growing, affluent middle class. But most observers anticipated further growth in most if not all of the newcomers. And there was no question that

The decades on either side of

2000 saw a major reversal of

the pattern of the first wave

of industrialization in the 19th

century. The share of industrial

manufacturing in the economies

of early industrializing nations in

the West and Japan shrank while

it spread and expanded rapidly in

developing societies from China

and India to Mexico, Brazil, and

Turkey.

CHAPTER 37 Globalization and Resistance 919

�Jl l 7.

the rates of annual expansion, often at 10 percent or more a year, were propelling key economies toward the levels of the most established industrial nations, even though they had yet to reach that mark. Trajectories recalled the previous advance of the Pacific Rim, but over much larger stretches of territory and population ranges.

Mexico, Turkey, and Brazil, for example, began to enter the ranks of significant industrial exporters by the 1980s. Factory textiles in Turkey, for example, became competitive in world trade, with significant exports to nations such as Germany, the nation became the second most industrial country in the Middle East, after Israel. Brazil's steel industry exported successfully to the United States, and Brazilian and Korean steel combined to dent American production by the late 1970s. Governments in Mexico, Turkey, and Brazil eagerly backed industrial development, beginning their support in the 1920s (in Turkey's case) and the 1930s (in Brazil and Mexico). Government sponsorship of industry included carefully negotiated trade arrangements with other regions, active solicitation of foreign aid and investment, and support for technical training and infrastructure.

Brazil's computer industry was a striking success story: A nation well behind the world's industrial leaders deliberately fostered an industry capable of serving the nation's computer needs and so avoided yet another dependence on expensive imports. Governmental regulations protected this new Brazilian industry, and heavily supported computer engineers at the technical university in Sao Paulo constructed independent computer prototypes. Although the industry itself developed only in the 1970s, it clearly built on Brazil's earlier commitment to industrial growth and technological progress. The engineering group at Sao Paulo thus stemmed from earlier advances in university science and technology, including nuclear physics; Brazil by the 1970s was producing 3 percent of the scientific articles in international physics journals. Beginning in 1959 the government had supported computer research directly, in connection with the Brazilian navy. Training in advanced electronics expanded steadily. Imports of advanced Western military equipment spurred a growing interest in computers, and collaborative programs were developed with U.S. universities. By 1971 Brazil was ready to develop its own computer model, in partial imitation of European prototypes. A variety of small companies linked to the university center in Sao Paulo then developed to produce computers. Brazilian computer production depended on imports of microchips from other areas, including Japan; this was not an isolated national industry. But the Brazilian computer industry did demonstrate that prior technical progress, careful government sponsorship, and a growing awareness of production and export opportunities could cause a genuine industrial breakthrough even in an economy that was, in terms of overall standards, still struggling to industrialize.

Not surprisingly, this industrial surge provided Brazil with the highest annual economic growth rates in Latin America-over 6 percent per year by the 1960s and 1970s. Standards of living improved accordingly. By 1990, 22 percent of all Brazilians owned cars, 56 percent had television sets, and 63 percent had refrigerators. These levels were well below those in the advanced industrial nations, to be sure, but were actually higher than rates in eastern Europe.

Overall, industrialization in Mexico, Brazil, and Turkey showed a steady buildup during the later 20th century, followed by even more solid success after 2000. By this point, industrial expansion seemed to be self-sustaining, much as the Pacific Rim had achieved a few decades earlier. Slowing rates of population growth facilitated improvements in living standards as well. The result formed part of a picture of substantial global industrialization during this most recent phase of industrial history.

China and India

In broad outline, developments in the two giant nations of Asia were similar, with clear industrial breakthroughs by the 1990s. The result was an even more massive rebalancing of the world economy. At the same time, each nation carved out its own particular path.

China became one of the world's great industrial producers, replacing Japan as the number two in overall earnings behind the United States by 2010-but after several decades of experimentation and recovery. The nation's strategy shifted after Mao's death, in what amounted to a policy revolution as it embraced globalization for the first time. In 1978 China began to adopt a more flexible and conventional industrialization strategy. Exports were promoted, and foreign technical advice was eagerly sought. Despite China's commitment to communism, including considerable state planning and a fiercely authoritarian government, private business sectors were encouraged in agriculture and industry. Some rural industry persisted, but urban production was emphasized as China worked to recover familiarity with advanced technology. Economic growth rates boomed in the 1980s, and

920 PART VI The Newest Stage of World History: 1900-Present

l .2 l 3/.3 j 31 l China, thanks to its size, became a considerable industrial force. Not only factories but also roads and railroads expanded rapidly. By the 1990s the nation's economic output was growing by 10 percent per year. In 2003, China used a full half of the world's production of concrete, for factories, housing, and infrastructure expansion.

Industrial growth in China, as in other evolving economies, brought new wealth to many people. A new group of rich entrepreneurs surfaced in China, complete with symbols of high consumer standards, including television sets and tape recorders. Even many villagers enjoyed bicycles and other new products. Other industrial fruits were less palatable. Pollution levels in many countries surpassed those of the West and Japan. Chinese cities were choked with industrial gases, called the Yellow Dragon, and the chemical pollution of water sources was considerable. Industrial evolution had more than local pollution effects. By 2000 China's industrial advance, combined with its huge population, placed China in second position as a world contributor to the chemical emissions causing global warming. The growing use of coal for fuel (as China became the world's largest coal-mining nation) promised a further Chinese advance on this dubious achievement scale, as Chinese policy frankly placed economic growth ahead of environmental concerns.

China's expansion remained mixed. It depended heavily on cheap labor, plus continued pressure on the large peasant class. Hundreds of thousands of workers from the countryside took up industrial jobs without fully abandoning village ties. Multinational companies set up low-cost factory operations in China as in Mexico. Chinese exports were impressive, but they involved primarily inexpensive factory products like toys (China was filling almost half the U.S. toy market by the 1990s), as well as growing inroads in high technology. At the same time, however, China's rapid surge, combined with the growth of the Pacific Rim, caused some observers to wonder whether a vast new east Asian industrial complex was emerging, following Japan's initial lead. They noted that the area continued to emphasize modified Confucian values, which include hard work, discipline, loyalty, and education, along with forceful governments.

India's industrial growth was steadier than China's after World War II, but took a new turn slightly later, in the 1990s. Again, a government decision to loosen economic regulation in favor of more open competition was involved, although India had always had considerable private business. As in the other major cases of later 20th-century industrialization, finally, India's economy continued to display mixed signals.

With a liberalization of the economy after 1992, India increasingly added high-technology products, particularly software, exporting to both the industrial countries and southeast Asia. Using English-language as well as high-technology skills, India also entered the global service sector, with both Indian and multinational firms organizing operations that provided sales and telephone services to the entire English-speaking world. By the early 21st century, the country boasted a large middle class (80 million or more), complete with extensive consumer interests. Economic growth reached 9 percent per year.

Thus by 2000 it was increasingly clear that real industrial revolutions were underway in a number of new-old regimes. In China and India, the result began to return some of the world's traditional manufacturing powers to a lead position in the global economy, although on a far different basis from the strengths they had developed before the industrial era. Places like Brazil and Mexico gained a manufacturing position that was even more novel, from a historical standpoint.

Older Industrial Centers

The rise of industrial newcomers inevitably challenged older centers, most obviously the West and Japan. China and other regions took over many manufacturing staples, as their exports and export earnings expanded steadily. New competition also arose for resources. China and India increasingly turned to places like Africa in search of oil and other raw materials. This tended to drive prices up for all industrial countries and also created significant rivalries for the attention of African and Middle Eastern business and political leaders.

The older industrial centers retained great advantages. They still led in the export of some of the most high-technology products and also in services such as banking and finance. They also continued to profit from industrial designs, even though the actual fabrication might occur elsewhere. In 2011 the Chinese premier noted that he would be happiest when product labels, instead of saying "made in China' ' shifted to "created in China:'

Inevitably, however, the relative growth rates of the older centers lagged, as the relative balance shifted. German growth-in a country that retained a significant high-tech manufacturing sector-was


l n., J

Globalization is a result of political, demographic, and cultural as well as technological changes. Economic globalization itself involves unprecedented interconnection among the world's peoples.

globalization The increasing interconnectedness of all parts of the world, particularly in communication and commerce but also in culture and politics.

I 17.3

\___ Jl 17.��

only a third of the Chinese rate, even in good times. Some countries also seemed to falter a bit, even aside from the changes in relative balance. The Japanese economy generated only sluggish growth from the 1990s onward. A global financial recession that began in 2008 also highlighted slow growth rates in much of Western Europe, while forecasts even for the United States were not robust. Many of the older centers faced painful choices about cutting back levels of welfare support, because their economies did not keep pace amid growing competition.

GLOBALIZATION: CAUSES AND PROCESSES

What caused the acceleration of globalization in the later 20th century?

The spread of industrial economies not only contributed to the renewal of globalization; it also made the process less Western-centered than it had been previously, although regional imbalances persisted to some extent. Rapid globalization also spurred various types of resistance, both old and new. Different kinds of complexities resulted in global relationships.

What Globalization Means

Globalization as a concept developed in the 1990s. At heart, it means the intensification of contacts among all major parts of the world, such that larger influences play a growing role in human life, from trade to culture to physical well-being. Even older kinds of interchange, like migration or disease, are partially redefined. Globalization means, also, the expansion of international influences, beyond familiar aspects like commerce or formal diplomacy to include political institutions, the environment, even elements of crime.

Globalization emerged, of course, from previous patterns of interregional contact. We have seen how connections among Africa, Asia, and Europe increased with the intercontinental network of the postclassical period. This was a move toward later globalization, but it was not globalization in itself. The whole world was not yet involved; levels of exchange increased but still had limited impact even on economic activity. Imitation of other societies increased, but not yet around standards that could be regarded as global. The expansion of the world religions came closest here, but none achieved full global standing. The early modern period intensified connections and did bring the whole world together for the first time. Cultural impacts were limited, however. International trading companies arose, but except in a few colonial settings they did not have the deep local effects that later, multinational companies would generate.

An initial version of globalization emerged in the later 19th century. It depended on dramatic new technologies, and also policy decisions, spearheaded by Western imperialist powers, to increase economic interdependence around the world. But this first surge did not bring uniform benefits, and the middle decades of the 20th century saw many societies attempt to limit their contacts with globalization. The United States remained an active economic participant, but tried to limit political involvement through the policy of isolation in the 1920s and 1930s. Japan and Germany strove to form their own economic systems, apart from fully global exchange. Under Stalin and later Mao Zedong, Russia and China pulled away culturally and economically.

By the later 20th century, however, forces of globalization again seized center stage. Technologies were crucial: From airplanes and radio on to satellite transmission and the Internet, the speed and volume of global communication and transportation moved ahead rapidly. Policy decisions entered in as well, for by the 21st century only a few small nations attempted isolation. Tentatively, growing numbers of people around the world became accustomed to global connections. The spread of English as a world language, although incomplete and often resented, was part of this connection. English served airline travel, many sports, and the early Internet as a common language. This encouraged and reflected other facets of global change.

Although globalization suggests growing uniformities around the world, it was still not, however, a uniform process. Different regions encountered globalization differently-by 2008 only about a third of the world's population had direct access to the Internet, and globalization was a remote force for many rural regions in south Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. Different regions also saw different


l 371 j l 371 J 37.4 j l I. jpatterns of benefit or harm. In some regions, globalization increased unemployment and economic dislocation; in many places, the process seemed to promote new levels of economic inequality (a pattern visible in the two past decades in the United States, Europe, India, and China). By the early 21st century several Latin American countries were questioning whether global trading patterns were bringing economic benefits to their regions or whether separate national economic policies might make more sense. Everywhere, furthermore, globalization challenges an established sense of identity, and many people resent this challenge deeply.

The New Technology

A globalization guru tells the following story. In 1988 a U.S. government official traveling to Chicagowas assigned a limousine with a cellular phone. He was so delighted to have this novelty that he called his wife just to brag. Nine years later, in 1997, the same official was visiting a remote village in Cote d'Ivoire, in west Africa, that was accessible only by dugout canoe. As he prepared to leave, a Cote d'Ivoire official told him he had a call from Washington and handed him a cellular phone. Cellular phones, increasingly common, were among the key new communication devices that, by the 1990s, had made almost constant contact with other parts of the world feasible, and for some people unavoidable. Western Europe and east Asia led in the cellular phone revolution, but people in all parts of the world participated.

During the 1980s steady improvements in miniaturization made computers increasingly efficient. By the 1990s the amount of information that could be stored on microchips increased by more than 60 percent each year. Linkages among computers improved as well, starting with halting efforts in the 1960s mainly for defense purposes. Email was introduced in 1972. In 1990 a British software engineer working in Switzerland, Tim Berners, developed the World Wide Web, and the true age of the Internet was born. Almost instantaneous contact by computer became possible around the world, and with it came the capacity to send vast amounts of information, from text, to videos and other imagery, to music. While the Internet was not available to everyone-by 2012 only 35 percent of the world's population had access-it did provide global contacts for some otherwise fairly remote regions. In eastern Russia, for example, international mail service was agonizingly slow, telephone access often interrupted-but a student could sit at an Internet cafe in Vladivostok and communicate easily with friends in the United States or Brazil. By 2009, further development in computer-based networking included systems like Facebook and Twitter, which again could facilitate personal connections around the world.

Satellite linkages for television formed a final communications revolution, making simultaneous broadcasts possible around the world. A full quarter of the world's population now could, and sometimes did, watch the same sporting event-usually World Cup soccer or the Olympics-a phenomenon never before possible or even approachable in world history. Global technology gained new meaning.

Economic Globalization: Business Organization and Investment

Thanks in part to new technology, in part to more open political boundaries, international investment accelerated rapidly at the end of the 20th century. Stock exchanges featured holdings in Chinese utilities or Brazilian steel companies as well as the great corporations of the West and Japan. U.S. investments abroad multiplied rapidly, almost doubling in the first half of the 1970s. By the 1980s foreign operations were generating between 25 and 40 percent of all corporate profits in the United States. Japan's foreign investment rose 15-fold during the 1970s. During the 1980s Japanese car manufacturers set up factories in the United States, Europe, and other areas. German cars, French tires, German chemicals and pharmaceuticals, and Dutch petroleum all had substantial U.S. operations. Atthe end of the 1990s the German Volkswagen firm introduced an updated version of the automobile affectionately known as the "bug;' whose initial design went back to Hitler's Germany. Its production facilities were entirely based in Mexico, but it was marketed in the United States and around the world.

Globalization in business involved rapid increases in exports and imports, the extension of business organization across political boundaries-resulting in multinational corporations-and

division of labor on a worldwide basis (Map 37.1). Cars that were made in the United States were assembled from parts made in Japan, Korea, Mexico, and elsewhere. Japanese cars often had more

multinational corporations

Powerful companies, mainly from the

West or Pacific Rim, with production

as well as distribution operations

in many different countries.

Multinationals surged in the decades

after World War II.


37.2

PACIFIC

OCEAN

c::=i No parent companies c::=i l-100 c::=i 100-500 c::=i 500-1,000 c::=i 1,000-2,000 c::=i 2,000-5,000 c::=i 5,000-9,500

ATLANTIC

OCEAN

PACIFIC

OCEAN

MAP 37.1 Multinational Corporations in 2000 By the end of the 20th century, multinational companies had become a major force for economic

change and political controversy over much of the world. As this map illustrates, these engines of globalization were especially prominent in

mature industrial and more affluent societies, and much less in evidence in formerly colonized or communist countries.

FIGURE 37.2 Change and continuity in rural India. New irrigation

and electrification combine with traditional methods of tilling the

soil as agricultural production rises.


American-made parts in them than Detroit products had. Firms set up operations not simply to produce closer to markets to save transportation costs; they also sought to reduce costs by looking for cheap labor and minimal environmental regulations. Computer boards were made by West Indian and African women. India developed a huge software industry, subcontracting for firms in the United States and western Europe. The linkages were dazzling.

International firms continued to seek cheap raw materials. For example, companies in Japan and the West competed for access to oil and minerals in the newly independent nations of central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. China's rapid economic growth prompted active arrangements for oil supplies from Central Asia, Latin America and Africa, as well as the Middle East. International investments also followed interest rates. During the 1990s relatively attractive U.S. interest rates drew extensive investment from Europe, Japan, and the oil-rich regions in the Middle East.

While multinational corporations sometimes faced government regulation, many of them had more power, and far more resources, than the governments of most of the countries within which they operated. Thus, they could determine most aspects of labor and environmental policy. They could and did pull up stakes in one region if more attractive opportunities opened elsewhere, regardless of the impact on the workers and facilities they left behind. Early in the 21st century, for example, many multinationals pulled jobs from Mexico in favor of expansion to China or Vietnam, where wages were lower. Even clerical jobs were outsourced: Telephone services for many American companies, for example, were set up in India, where wages were lower and English was widely spoken. The spread of multinationals promoted industrial skills in many previously agricultural regions and depended on improvements in communications and transportation that could bring wider changes for the people of the lands in which they hired workers (Figure 37.2).

L 37.� J L37.3 j l 37.4 j L 37.S J

American factories located in northern Mexico, designed to produce goods for sale back in the United States, showed the complexity of the new international economy. The owners of these factories unquestionably sought cheap labor and lax regulations. Their factories often leaked chemical waste. Wages were barely 10 percent of what U.S. workers would earn. Nonetheless, these factories often paid better than their Mexican counterparts. Many workers, including large numbers of women, found the labor policies more enlightened and the foremen better behaved in the foreign firms. A key question, not yet answerable, is whether the poverty-level wages for workers in such factories will improve and whether the industrial skills they learn will make possible a widening range of opportunities.

Efforts to tally the overall economic effects of globalization are complex and contested. Some parts of Africa lost traditional manufacturing jobs to new global competition, and in these regions, unemployment rates of 30 percent or more were common. Prostitution, including new international sex trafficking in women and children, and even the sale of body organs, showed the increasingly desperate poverty in some societies. Not only global competition but reductions in government services, in the name of free-market principles, contributed to new problems. In south and southeast Asia, rates of child labor rose, although the larger global patterns were different. On the other hand, new global opportunities permitted an increase in per capita income in places like China and India. Growth rates in several parts of Africa after 2000 were also encouraging.

It was clear that there were winners and losers in economic globalization, both among different parts of the world and within individual societies-even within industrial societies like the United States. Gaps widened between the poor and those with higher incomes. A growing middle class developed in Latin America, India, and China, but urban slums and exploited labor expanded as well.

Migration

Broad international patterns of migration had developed by the 19 50s and 1960s, with the use of"guest workers" from Turkey and north Africa in Europe, for example. Here, patterns in the 1990s built clearly on previous trends. But easier travel, along with the continued gap between slowly growing populations in the industrial countries and rapidly growing populations in Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia, maintained high levels of exchange. A few areas, including Italy, Greece, and Japan, had almost ceased internal population growth by the 1990s, which meant that new labor needs, particularly at the lower skill levels, had to be supplied by immigration.

Japan hoped to avoid too much influx by relying on high-technology solutions, but even here worker groups were brought in from the Philippines and southeast Asia. Migration into Europe and the United States was far more extensive, producing truly multinational populations in key urban and commercial centers. By 2000 at least 25 percent of all Americans, mostly people of color, came from households where English was not the first language. Ten percent of the French population in 2003 was Muslim (Figure 37.3). Here was an important source of tension, with local populations often fearing foreigners and worried about job competition. Here also was a new opportunity, not just for new laborers but for new cultural inspiration.

Migration was hardly new in world history. But new levels of migration from distant regions had novel qualities. So did the resulting mixture of migrants and locals in the cities of North America, western Europe, or the Persian Gulf states of the Middle East. So, finally, did the new facility of traveling back and forth: Many migrants, returning home to Turkey or India on vacation or permanently, brought back new styles and ideas, maintaining their own commitment to at least two different cultures.

Cultural Globalization

Thanks in part to global technologies and business organization, plus reduced political barriers, the pace of cultural exchange and contact around the world accelerated at the end of the 1990s. Much of this involved mass consumer goods, spread from the United States, western Europe, and Japan. But art shows, symphony exchanges, scientific conferences, and Internet contact increased as well. Music conductors and artists held posts literally around the world, sometimes juggling commitments among cities like Tokyo, Berlin, and Chicago within a single season. Science laboratories filled with researchers from around the world, collaborating (usually in English) with little regard for national origin.

The spread of fast-food restaurants from the United States, headed by McDonald's, formed one of the most striking international cultural influences from the 1970s onward. The company began


l 37.1 J

� Read the Document

l:ii:I on MyHistorylab: The McDonaldization of Society (Ritzer)

l Jl � Read the Document on MyHistorylab: Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility l:ii:I Act of 1996

FIGURE 37.3 The mixtures of peoples and cultures that had become a prominent feature of

world history by the end of the 20th century are wonderfully illustrated by this group of Muslim

schoolchildren in a French school. By 2007, more than 1 O percent of the French population was

Islamic. In 2006, riots broke out in Islamic areas of French cities revealing tensions over the gap

between opportunities available to immigrants and those available to the majority population.

in Illinois in 1955 and started its international career in 1967 with outlets in Canada and Puerto Rico. From then on, the company entered an average of two new nations per year and accelerated the pace in the 1990s. By 1998 it was operating in 109 countries overall. The company won quick success in Japan, where it gained its largest foreign audience; "makadonaldo" first opened in Tokyo's world famous Ginza, already known for cosmopolitan department stores, in 1971. McDonald's entry into the Soviet Union in 1990 was a major sign of the ending of cold war rivalries and the growing Russian passion for international consumer goods. The restaurants won massive patronage despite (by Russian standards) very high prices. Even in gourmet-conscious France, McDonald's and other fast-food outlets were winning 26 percent of all restaurant dining by the 1990s. Not everyone who patronized McDonald's really liked the food. Many patrons in Hong Kong, for example, said they went mainly to see and be seen and to feel part of the global world.

Cultural globalization obviously involved increasing exposure to American movies and television shows. Series like Baywatch won massive foreign audiences. Movie and amusement park icons like Mickey Mouse, and products and dolls derived from them, had international currency. Western beauty standards, based on the models and film stars, won wide exposure, expressed among other things in widely sought international beauty pageants. MTV spread Western images and sounds to youth audiences almost everywhere.

Holidays took on an international air. American-style Christmas trappings, including gift giving, lights, and Santa Claus, spread not only to countries of Christian background, like France, but also places like Muslim Istanbul. Northern Mexico picked up American Halloween trick-or-treating, as it displaced the more traditional Catholic observance of All Saints' Day. Muslim observance of Ramadan, the month of self-denial, began to include greeting cards and presents for children, a clear echo of new consumerism. The American jingle "happy birthday;' with its implications about individualism and entertainment for children, was translated into virtually every language.

Consumer internationalization was not just American. Japanese rock groups gained wide audience. The Pokemon toy series, derived from Japanese cultural traditions, won a frenzied audience among American children in the 1990s, who for several years could not get enough. A Japanese soap


l 7 l 37.3 j \.. 37.4 3/ j opera heroine became the most admired woman in Muslim Iran. South Korea, historically hostile to Japan, proved open to popular Japanese music groups and cartoon animation, and anime also gained popularity in the United States. European popular culture, including fashion and music groups, gained large followings around the world as well. By the early 21st century, Korean popular culture, including music, gained ground rapidly throughout eastern Asia and began to penetrate the United States.

Dress was internationalized to an unprecedented extent. American-style blue jeans showed up almost everywhere. A major export item for Chinese manufacturing involved Western clothing pirated from famous brand names. A "Chinese market" in the cities of eastern Russia contained entirely Western-style items, mainly clothing and shoes.

The international expansion of middle-class consumerism also generated a global epidemic of obesity, particularly for children. Available foods increased along with more sedentary lives and entertainments, producing echoes in Shanghai and Bangalore of problems more obvious in Houston or Birmingham.

� Read the Document on l:i:I MyHistorylab: LetThem Eat

Fat: The Heavy Truths about American Obesity (Critser)

Cultural globalization roused extensive resistance. McDonald's became a symbol to attack by people eager to preserve local standards of food and culture; anti-McDonald's protest� surged from France to South Korea. Efforts to adapt other forms of global consumer culture, like the beauty pageants, showed the interest in slowing or modifying this aspect of globalization. Some movements, at an extreme like the Taliban in Afghanistan, moved forcefully against any participation whatsoever. Contests over global culture became a standard part of life in many regions.

The penetration of cultural globalization varied-in part by wealth and urbanization, in part according to degrees of cultural tolerance. There were obvious resource limits, as in access to the Internet. Blending

DOCUMENT

Protests Against Globalization

IN DECEMBER 1999, A SERIES OF protests rocked Seattle on the occasion of a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting designed to discuss further international tariff cuts in the interests of promoting global trade. The following passage was written by Jeffrey St. Clair, a radical journalist who is co-editor of the political newsletter Counter Punch. St. Clair describes the atmosphere of the Seattle protests and some of the groups involved. The Seattle protests foreshadowed a regular sequence of popular demonstrations at the meetings of such groups as the World Bank, which continue into the 21st century, involving many of the same groups and issues.

MONDAY

And the revolution will be started by: sea turtles. At noon about 2000 people massed at the United Methodist Church, the HQ of the grassroots [ organizations J, for a march to the convention center. It was Environment Day and the Earth Island Institute had prepared more than 500 sea turtle costumes for marchers to wear. The sea turtle became the prime symbol of the WTO's threats to environmental laws when a WTO tribunal ruled that the U.S. Endangered Species Act, which requires shrimp to be caught with turtle excluder devices, was an unfair trade barrier.

But the environmentalists weren't the only ones on the street Monday morning. In the first showing of a new solidarity, labor union members from the Steelworkers and the Longshoremen showed up to join the march. In fact, Steelworker Don Kegley led the march, alongside environmentalist Ben White. (White was later clubbed in the back of the head by a young man who was

apparently angry that he couldn't do his Christmas shopping. The police pulled the youth away from White, but the man wasn't arrested. White played down the incident.) The throng of sea turtles and blue-jacketed union folk took off to the rhythm of a familiar chant that would echo down the streets of Seattle for days: "The people will never be divided!"

I walked next to Brad Spann, a Longshoreman from Tacoma, who hoisted up one of my favorite signs of the entire week: "Teamsters and Turtles Together at Last!" Brad winked at me and said, "What the hell do you think old Hoffa [ former Teamster leader] thinks of that?"

The march, which was too fast and courteous for my taste, was escorted by motorcycle police and ended essentially in a cage, a protest pen next to a construction site near the convention center. A large stage had been erected there hours earlier and Carl Pope, the director of the Sierra Club, was called forth to give the opening speech. The Club is the nation's most venerable environmental group ....

Standing near the stage I saw Brent Blackwelder, the head of Friends of the Earth. Behind his glasses and somewhat shambling manner, Blackwelder looks ever so professional. And he is by far the smartest of the environmental CEOs. But he is also the most radical politically, the most willing to challenge the tired complacency of his fellow green executives ....

Blackwelder 's speech was a good one, strong and defiant. He excoriated the WTO as a kind of global security force for transnational corporations whose mission is "to stuff unwanted products, like genetically engineered foods, down our throats:' ...

(continued on next page)


�7 1 l 3/.3 j L''·· (continued from previous page)

After the speechifying most of the marchers headed back to the church. But a contingent of about 200 ended up in front of McDonald's where a group of French farmers had mustered to denounce U.S. policy on biotech foods. Their leader was Jose Bove, a sheep farmer from Millau in southwest France and a leader of Confederation Paysanne, a French environmental group. In August, Bove had been jailed in France for leading a raid on a McDonald's restaurant under construction in Larzac. At the time, he was already awaiting charges that he destroyed a cache of Novartis' genetically engineered corn. Bove said his raid on the Larzac McDonald's was promoted by the U.S. decision to impose a heavy tariff on Roquefort cheese in retaliation for the European Union's refusal to import American hormone-treated beef. Bove's act of defiance earned him the praise of Jacques Chirac and Friends of the Earth. Bove said he was prepared to start a militant worldwide campaign against "Frankenstein" foods. "These actions will only stop when this mad logic comes to a halt:' Bove said. "I don't demand clemency but justice:'

Bove showed up at the Seattle McDonald's with rounds of Roquefort cheese, which he handed out to the crowd. After listening to a rousing speech against the evils of Monsanto, and its bovine growth hormone and Roundup Ready soybeans, the crowd stormed the McDonald's breaking its windows and urging customers and workers to join the marchers on the streets. This was the first shot in the battle for Seattle.

Who were these direct action warriors on the front lines? Earth First, the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment (the new enviro-steelworker alliance), the Ruckus Society (a direct action training center), Jobs with Justice, Rainforest Action Network, Food Not Bombs, Global Exchange, and a small contingent of Anarchists, the dreaded Black Bloc.

There was also a robust international contingent on the streets Tuesday morning: French farmers, Korean greens [environmentalists], Canadian wheat growers, Mexican environmentalists, Chinese dissidents, Ecuadorian anti-dam organizers, U'wa tribespeople from the Columbian rainforest, and British campaigners against genetically modified foods. Indeed earlier, a group of Brits had cornered two Monsanto lobbyists behind an abandoned truck carrying an ad for the Financial Times. They detained the corporate flacks long enough to deliver a stern warning about the threat of frankencrops to wildlife, such as the Monarch butterfly. Then a wave of tear gas wafted over them and the Monsanto men fled, covering their eyes with their neckties ....

As the march turned up toward the Sheraton and was beaten back by cops on horses, I teamed up with Etienne Vernet and Ronnie Cumming. Cumming is the head of one of the feistiest groups in the U.S., the PureFood Campaign, Monsanto's chief pain in the ass. Cumming hails from the oil town of Port Arthur, Texas. He went to Cambridge with another great foe of industrial agriculture, Prince Charles. Cumming was a civil rights organizer in Houston during the mid-sixties. "The energy here is incredible;' Cumming said. "Black and white, labor and green, Americans, Europeans, Africans, and Asians arm in arm. It's the most hopeful I've felt since the height of the civil rights movement:'

Vernet lives in Paris, where he is the leader of the radical green group EcoRopa. At that very moment the European delegates inside the convention were capitulating on a key issue: The EU, which had banned import of genetically engineered


Jl 37.5 J crops and hormone-treated beef, had agreed to a U.S. proposal to establish a scientific committee to evaluate the health and environmental risks of biotech foods, a sure first step toward undermining the moratorium. Still Vernet was in a jolly mood, lively and invigorated, if a little bemused by the decorous nature of the crowd. ''Americans seem to have been out of practice in these things;· he told me. "Everyone's so polite. The only things on fire are dumpsters filled with refuse:' He pointed to a shiny black Lexus parked on Pine Street, which throngs of protesters had scrupulously avoided. In the windshield was a placard identifying it as belonging to a WTO delegate. "In Paris that car would be burning:•

[David] Brower [ environmental leader] was joined by David Foster, Director for District 11 of the United Steelworkers of America, one of the most articulate and unflinching labor leaders in America. Earlier this year, Brower and Foster formed an unlikely union, a coalition of radical environmentalists and Steelworkers called the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment, which had just run an amusing ad in the New York Times asking, "Have You Heard the One about the Environmentalist and the Steelworker?" The groups had found they had a common enemy: Charles Hurwitz, the corporate raider. Hurwitz owned the Pacific Lumber company, the northern California timber firm that is slaughtering some of the last stands of ancient redwoods on the planet. At the same time, Hurwitz, who also controlled Kaiser Aluminum, had locked out 3000 Steelworkers at Kaiser's factories in Washington, Ohio, and Louisiana. "The companies that attack the environment most mercilessly are often also the ones that are the most anti-union;' Foster told me. "More unites us than divides us:'

I came away thinking that for all its promise this tenuous marriage might end badly. Brower, the master of ceremonies, isn't going to be around forever to heal the wounds and cover up the divisions. There are deep, inescapable issues that will, inevitably, pit Steelworkers, fighting for their jobs in an ever-tightening economy, against greens, defending dwindling species like sockeye salmon that are being killed off by hydrodams that power the aluminum plants that offer employment to steel workers. When asked about this potential both Brower and Foster danced around it skillfully. But it was a dance of denial. The tensions won't go away simply because the parties agree not to mention them in public. Indeed, they might even build, like a pressure cooker left unwatched. I shook the thought from my head. For this moment, the new, powerful solidarity was too seductive to let such broodings intrude for long.

From Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair, and Allan Sekula, 5 Days That

Shook the World (London: Verso, 2000), 16-21, 28, 29, 36-37.

QUESTIONS

• What were the principal groups involved in the globalization

protests?

• Why did they feel such passion?

• Was this a global protest, or did different parts of the world have

different issues?

• What were the key arguments of defenders of globalization who

disapproved of this kind of protest and of its goals?

) 37.4 J L,.

of global and local signals was another key development. Foreign models were often adapted to local customs. Thus foods in McDonald's in India (where the chain was not very popular in any event) included vegetarian items not found elsewhere. Comic books in Mexico, originally derived from U.S. models, took on Mexican cultural images, including frequent triumphs over "gringd' supermen. A host of combinations emerged. Cultural internationalization was a real development, but it was complex and incomplete.

Institutions of Globalization

On the whole, political institutions globalized less rapidly than technology or business, or even consumer culture. Many people worried about the gap between political supervision and control and the larger globalization process. UN activity accelerated a bit in the 1990s. With the end of the cold war, more diplomatic hotspots invited intervention by multinational military forces. UN forces tried to calm or prevent disputes in a number of parts of Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Growing refugee populations called for UN humanitarian intervention, often aided by other international groups. UN conferences broadened their scope, dealing, for example, with gender and population control issues. While the results of the conferences were not always clear, a number of countries did incorporate international standards into domestic law. Women in many African countries, for example, were able to appeal to UN proclamations on gender equality as a basis for seeking new property rights in the courts. By 2001 the United Nations became increasingly active as well in encouraging assistance to stem the AIDS epidemic.

The World Health Organization also expanded its range directly. A threatened global outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), after occurrences in east Asia and Canada in 2003, met with prompt controls under international guidance.

Another area of innovation involved international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs). Amnesty International, a London-based human rights agency, began in 1961. The 1970s saw a more rapid proliferation of humanitarian INGOs for human rights, labor, environmental, and other issues, often with networks of local affiliates. By the 1990s Internet-based petitions against torture, labor abuses, or the death penalty became standard fare, sometimes winning significant policy responses. The range of criteria for INGOs expanded steadily as well: Rape, for example, was internationally recognized as a war crime by the 1990s, a major innovation.

As more nations participated actively in international trade, the importance of organizations in this arena grew. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank had been founded after World War II to promote trade. Guided by the major industrial powers, these organizations offered loans and guidance to developing areas and also to regions that encountered temporary economic setbacks. Loans to Mexico and to southeast Asia during the 1990s, and again to several regions during the global recession after 2008, were intended to promote recovery from recessions that threatened to affect other areas. Loans were usually accompanied by requirements for economic reform, usually through reduced government spending, including social welfare spending, and the promotion of more open competition. These guidelines were not always welcomed by the regions involved. The IMF and the World Bank were widely viewed as primary promoters of the capitalist global economy.

Annual meetings of the heads of the seven leading industrial powers (four from Europe, two from North America, plus Japan) also promoted global trade and policies toward developing regions. After 2008, the global structure expanded to a Group of 20, including the rising economies of Asia and Latin America, an acknowledgment that leadership from the West plus Japan was no longer adequate. Finally, the regional economic arrangements that had blossomed from the 1950s onward gained growing importance as globalization accelerated. The European Union headed the list, but the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFT A) and other regional consortiums in Latin America and east Asia also pushed for lower tariffs and greater economic coordination.

THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT

How has globalization changed the human-environment relationship?

Human impact on the environment was not new, but the global level reached after the 1950s was unprecedented (Figure 37.4). Industrial competition, in the context of globalization and population explosion, increased the number of societies eager for economic growth regardless of environmental

� Read the Document on 1:.:,1 MyHistorylab: World Bank

Supported Day Care Programs in Uganda 1990s

Globalization generated

unfamiliar environmental

problems. These problems fed

resistance to globalization and

also efforts at corrective reform.


� Watch the Video on Ii.ii MyHistorylab: Modernity's

Pollution Problems (Andrew Jenks)

37.3

lit) View the Closer Look on MyHistorylab: The Earth at Night

FIGURE 37.4 This composite satellite image shows the regional impact of the human population

on the planet. Regions where light burns brightest include much of Europe, Japan, and the United

States-regions with a considerable amount of industry. Regions with excessive pollution because of

petroleum extraction are also visible, particularly in the Middle East and areas of Russia, as are regions

plagued by wild fires (Australia) and those that engage in slash-and-burn agriculture, particularly

areas of the African and South American continents.

consequences. New technologies expanded global impact directly. Huge tankers periodically leaked massive amounts of oil into the oceans, affecting many regions. Tall smokestacks, designed to reduce local pollution in the American Midwest or the German Ruhr, spread acidity to the forests of Canada or Scandinavia. Multinationals, seeking loose environmental controls, often spilled chemicals. Above all, the pressure to expand production, in agriculture as well as industry, steadily cut into tropical rain forests, in places like Brazil, causing regional economic damage and contributing to global warming.

A key issue was the expansion of intensive industrial development goals. The Soviet Union and its satellites, pressing production during the cold war, had already caused extensive environmental damage, particularly in regions like central Asia. By the 1990s, China's headlong industrial drive raised new concerns. China's population of over a billion people was building on a resource base that was already severely depleted and degraded-including widespread water shortages. It was industrial growth that caused much of the smoke that enveloped many cities. Beijing planned to shut down manufacturing operations during the 2008 Olympics to provide a brief, internationally pleasant respite. The nation became the second greatest air polluter, after the United States, by 2001.

Equally alarming were reports on the ecological fallout of rapid development in southeast Asia, where multinationals based in Japan and in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia are extracting resources with abandon and where the rain forest is disappearing even more rapidly than in Brazil. Similar trends have been documented in sub-Saharan Africa, where imminent economic collapse and environmental demise are now routinely predicted.

The general issues became abundantly clear in Mexico City, where oxygen is now widely sold by peddlers in the streets. A journalist, Marc Cooper, put it this way:

The city's poised on the abyss of a world-class bio/technic disaster ... its infrastructure is crumbling ... the drinking water mixes with sewer effluent, many of the scars of the 1985 killer quake won't be healed before the next tremblor strikes. [And even then] Mexico City still beats the eternally depressed, sun-baked countryside.

Environmental Issues as Global Concerns

At the turn of the 21st century, environmental issues have emerged as focal points of public debate and government policy in most human societies (Figure 37.5). After a century of unprecedented levels of mechanized warfare, scientific experimentation, and the spread of industrialization, a wide variety of


FIGURE 37.5 In April 1986, nuclear chain reactions in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine

(then part of the Soviet Union) leapt out of control, creating a fireball that blew the steel and concrete

lid off of the reactor. Radioactive material was spewed into the open air and drifted across Europe. The

area surrounding the plant, which is now closed, remains a contaminated wasteland. The Chernobyl

catastrophe was unique, but it added to the larger environmental damage in many parts of the former

Soviet Union.

complex and often interrelated environmental disruptions threaten not only humanity but all other life forms on the planet Earth.

Most scientists now agree that the greenhouse effect caused by the buildup in the atmosphere of excessive amounts of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases has led to a substantial warming of the planet in recent decades. Some of the chief sources of the pollutants responsible for the atmospheric buildup are industrial wastes-including those resulting from energy production through the burning of fossil fuels like coal-and exhaust from millions of cars, trucks, and other machines run by internal combustion engines that burn petroleum. But other major sources of the greenhouse effect are both surprising and at present essential to the survival of large portions of humanity. Methane, another greenhouse gas, is introduced into the atmosphere in massive quantities as a by-product of the stew of fertilized soil and water in irrigated rice paddies, which feed a majority of the peoples of Asia, the world's most populous continent. Methane is also released by flatulent cattle, which produce milk and meat for human populations over much of the globe. Other gases have had equally alarming effects. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), for example, which were once widely used in refrigeration, air conditioning, and spray cans, deplete the ozone layer, thereby removing atmospheric protection from the ultraviolet rays emanating from the sun.

If scientific predictions are correct, global warming will increasingly cause major shifts in temperatures and rainfall throughout much of the globe. Fertile and well-watered areas now highly productive in foods for humans and animals may well be overwhelmed by droughts and famine. If widely accepted computer simulations are correct, coastal areas at sea level-which from Bangladesh to the Netherlands to New Jersey are among the most densely populated in the world-are likely to be inundated. As climates are drastically altered, vegetation and wildlife in many areas will be radically altered. In Asia, the recent rapid melting of glaciers in the Himalayas threatens to deprive much of India and China of water for irrigation. Temperate forests may die off in many regions and be replaced by scrub, tropical vegetation, or desert flora. Some animal species may migrate or adapt and survive, but many, unable to adjust to such rapid climatic changes, will become extinct. In recent decades the extinction of species has clearly accelerated. In fact, in the 1990s and early 2000s, species have disappeared before they could even be put on the international endangered list.

f1::1 Read the Document onl:i.i:J MyHistorylab: Al Gore, Global

Warming (2006)


l'il View the Closer Look on

U MyHistoryLab: Competing

Visions: Global Warming, Good

Science or Media Hype?

Globalization generated direct

protest at the end of the 20th

century. Nationalism and religion,

overlapping globalization,

provided alternative sets of

loyalties.

37.4

International discussions of environmental regulation increased from 1997 onward. A major conference in Kyoto, Japan, set limits on greenhouse gas emissions, in order to curtail global warming. It was not clear, however, whether these limits would have any effect. Many individual nations, including the United States between 2001 and 2009, opposed the limits proposed because of potential damage to national economies. Here was another area where global politics did not seem to be keeping pace with globalization. Some interest in sustainability movements and green design did gain ground in many different countries, including the United States, China, and the United Arab Emirates as well as countries like Germany and Japan, where environmental activism had an even larger pedigree. And there were a few local success stories, as in Mexico City where, by 2012, pollution control measures, particularly over vehicles, had measurably improved local environmental quality.

Disease

Changes in global contacts have usually involved disease, and globalization is no exception. Rapid international travel helped spread the AIDS epidemic from 1980 onward. Southern and eastern Africa were hit most severely, but AIDS also spread to the United States and western Europe. The epidemic took on even larger proportions in places like Brazil. By the early 21st century, rates of increase in parts of Asia and in Russia began to accelerate. These were regions that had initially felt relatively safe but where global contact ultimately brought new levels of contagion. The advent of SARS in 2003 raised fears of another global contagion. This is where the response of international organizations proved particularly essential.

The problem of contagious disease remained less severe than some of the earlier epidemics associated with global contacts, although some experts warned of even greater disease problems in the future. Environmental issues, newer on the global scale, may have replaced disease as the clearest downside of international connections.

Global health problems increasingly included disease patterns long characteristic of established industrial societies. Here, degenerative diseases, like heart disease and cancer, replaced older contagions as the leading source of mortality. These diseases accompanied growing life expectancy, but they were also hard to control. Global developments like rising rates of childhood obesity highlighted these health concerns, with no clear solutions in sight.

RESISTANCE AND ALTERNATIVES

What were the main changes and continuities in religion in the contemporary period of world

history?

Accelerating globalization attracted a vigorous new protest movement, partly because of mounting environmental concerns. Meetings of the World Bank or of the industrial leaders were increasingly marked by huge demonstrations and some violence.

Protest and Economic Uncertainties

A new anti-globalization protest movement began with massive protests in Seattle in 1999, and the protests continued at key gatherings thereafter. Protesters came from various parts of the world and raised a number of issues. Many people believed that rapid global economic development was threatening the environment. Others blasted the use of cheap labor by international corporations, which was seen as damaging labor conditions even in industrial nations. Rampant consumerism was another target.

Many critics claimed that globalization was working to the benefit of rich nations and the wealthy generally, rather than the bulk of the world's population. They pointed to figures that suggested growing inequalities of wealth, with the top quarter of the world's population growing richer during the 1990s while the rest of the people increasingly suffered (Figure 37.6). This division operated between regions, widening the gap between affluent nations and the more populous developing areas. It also operated within regions, including the United States and parts of western Europe, where income gaps were on the rise. Bitter disagreements increasingly divided the supporters and opponents of globalization.


FIGURE 37.6 The increasing gap between rich and poor is a controversial problem in the age of globalization. Here, contemporary workers and shoppers pass a homeless person on a Hong Kong sidewalk.

THINKING HISTORICALLY

How Much Historical Change?

AS THE COLD WAR DREW TO A CLOSE, a number of analysts, primarily in the United States, looked forward to dramatic shifts in human affairs. There were two related lines of argument. The "end of history" concept emphasized the new dominance of the democratic .form of government. According to this view, the contest among political and economic systems, particularly between democracy and communism, was over; democracy would now sweep over the world. With this, the need for basic questioning about political institutions would also end: Democracy worked best, and it was here

prosperity by waging war. Shared interests, rather than traditional disputes over limited resources, it is alleged, would carry the day. However, history suggests that capitalism is not necessarily compatible with democracy: The drive for material wealth has often led to corruption within democratic societies, sapping the effectiveness of their institutions. Even the greatest proponent of the idea that history will end in the triumph of capitalism, Harvard economist Francis Fukayama, has voiced concern that growing disparities of wealth even within the most prosperous capitalist nations might

to stay. Further, the change in political structure also had implications for power rivalries. Some analysts contend that democracies never war on each other. Once the people control affairs of state through their votes, the selfishness and power trips that lead to war will end.

The "end of history" concept emphasized the new dominance of the democratic

form of government.

spark violent unrest that could derail the drive toward a free-market utopia.

This is a challenging kind of forecasting because it cannot easily be disproved-until the future does not correspond to the dramatic projections. The consumerism

Ordinary people understand the horror of war. They appreciate the common humanity they share with other democratic peoples. Just as democracy resolves internal conflicts through votes, democracies would come to resolve external conflicts through bargaining and compromise. They argue that, in the main, people do not vote for wars of aggression, at most sanctioning defense against attack.

Another argument, which might be combined with the democracy approach, focused on the spread of consumer capitalism around the world. As put forward by a U.S. journalist in a popular book called The Lexus and the Olive Tree, the consumer capitalism approach emphasized the benefits of a global economy. In this, everyone would gain access to greater material abundance and the wonders of consumerism, and no one would wish to jeopardize

argument, particularly, has no precedent. At the same time, the predictions also could not be proved, for example, merely by pointing to some prior historical analogy. How, then, should they be assessed?

QUESTIONS

• Following the end of the cold war, did the world change as rapidlyand fundamentally as these predictions implied?

• Did new systems spread as uniformly and consistently as thedemocracy and global consumerism arguments implied?

• How significant was the cold war's end in shaping globalrelationships?


R (!!) Read the Document onU MyHistorylab: Osama bin

Laden World Islamic Front Statement, 1998

l 7.5 J Nationalism and New Religious Currents

Several trends ran counter to globalization as the 21st century began. Nationalism was one. While many nations were partially bypassed by globalization-many countries were much less powerful than the multinational corporations-nationalist resistance to globalization surfaced in many ways. Many countries opposed the erosion of traditions by global cultural patterns. The French government periodically resisted the incorporation of English words into the French language. Many Chinese families began to pay for private Confucian lessons for their children, to recall key cultural traditions lest global standards and materialism sweep everything else away. Many European countries tried to regulate the number of immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the West Indies, in the interest of preserving dominance for families and workers of European background. The United States rejected a wide variety of international treaties, including a provision for regulation against war crimes, because they might interfere with national sovereignty. China and other states periodically bristled against international criticism of internal policies concerning political prisoners.

Other individual nations tried to stand out against global trends, even aside from the few regimes, like North Korea, that were almost entirely isolated. The health ministry in Indonesia, for example, worked to prevent the World Health Organization from testing for outbreaks of new diseases. Several Latin American countries periodically opposed the efforts of international economic organizations to interfere with domestic economic policies in the interest of free trade.

It was religion, however, that posed the most interesting challenge to globalization in the final decades of the 20th century. Most religious movements were not necessarily opposed to globalization, but they tended to insist on their distinctiveness, against any uniform global culture. They also bred suspicions of the consumerism and sexuality highlighted in many manifestations of globalization, including films and tourism.

As communism collapsed in eastern Europe, many people returned to previous religious beliefs, including Orthodox Christianity. Protestant fundamentalists, often from the United States, were also busy in the region. Protestant fundamentalism also spread rapidly in parts of Latin America, such as Guatemala and Brazil. In India, Hindu fundamentalism surged by the 1990s, with Hindu nationalist politicians capturing the nation's presidency. In China, an intriguing spinoff from Buddhism, the Falun Gong, won wide support, despite brutal repression by the government.

Fundamentalism also gained ground in Islam, particularly in the Middle East and nearby parts of Africa and south central Asia. The Taliban, which followed a particular version of Islamic fundamentalism, gained control of the state in Afghanistan, initially in opposition to Soviet occupation, until the party was dislodged by the American invasion after the 2001 terrorist attack. Islamic fundamentalists argued for a return to religious law, opposing more secular governments in the region as well as the lures of global consumerism. Whether Christian, Hindu, or Islamic, fundamentalists tended to urge a return to the primacy of religion and religious laws and often opposed greater freedoms for women. Frequently, fundamentalists urged government support for religious values.

Religious fundamentalism ran counter to globalization in several ways, even though many religious leaders became adept at using new global technologies such as the Internet. It tended to appeal particularly to impoverished urban groups who seemed to be left behind in the global economy. Fundamentalism also tended to increase intolerance, even in religious traditions that had historically been reasonably open. Hindu fundamentalism, for example, was more fiercely exclusive than had been true in the past, while also more eager to seek support from the state. While some advocates of globalization assumed that religious traditionalism would decline, the balance was in fact unclear as the 21st century opened.

Religious differences contributed to many regional conflicts. Catholic, Serbian Orthodox, and Muslim clashes complicated the ethnic rivalries in the former Yugoslavia. Battles between Muslims and Christians occurred in Indonesia and the Sudan, and clashes between Hindus and Muslims intensified in India during the 1990s. Judaism and Islam, and Christianity as well, generated tensions not only in Israel but also in Lebanon. Antagonisms between Christian fundamentalists and other groups intensified political divisions within the United States. Clashes between Sunnis and Shiites, within Islam, contributed to Middle Eastern instability. In many areas, earlier patterns of tolerance were newly strained.


) Religious-based terrorism aimed explicitly against globalization. The choice of the World

Trade Center in New York as a target for the September 2001 attacks involved its symbolic role in international, and not just American, capitalism. A bloody bombing attack on a hotel in Bali, Indonesia, lashed out at Australian tourists and the consumerist lifestyle of an international resort. Reactions to terrorism, for example in generating new limitations on international travel, compounded the impact.

Most of the religious movements were not, of course, mainly terroristic, nor were they defined simply by opposition to globalization. Different strands of fundamentalism emerged: for example, many Iranian religious leaders, although eager to support religious law, regarded the Taliban in Afghanistan as crude and excessive. Many religious leaders were far more focused on local issues-like the secular regimes in the Middle East-than on global ones. Fundamentalists did, however, provide alternative identities and standards, compared to globalization. They generated debate within a large number of societies about what kind of future people should strive for.

VISUALIZING THE PAST

Two Faces of Globalization

� Read the Document on l:ii:,I MyHistorylab: "America Enters

a New Century with Terror," N. R. Kleinfield, The New York Times,

2001

EARLY IN THE 21ST CENTURY THE CITY OF DUBAI, in the United Arab Emirates, became a world commercial center, with banking, telecommunications, and other services. Many international corporations located regional offices there. The city was a beehive of construction, including work on the world's newest tallest skyscraper. Most of the buildings were in characteristic modern style, often designed by Western firms and often strikingly beautiful. This Arab center was becoming increasingly cosmopolitan, with little overt protest. But there was another face. Workers in Dubai, most of them immigrants from places like Pakistan, Palestine, and the Philippines, often had relatively low pay. Few were citizens, which limited their access to benefits such as higher education. While they

wanted the work, for conditions in their host country were better than at home, they were not reaping the benefits of globalization in a way comparable to the citizens of Dubai, and their work was extremely physically challenging in a demanding climate.

QUESTIONS

• What does this picture say about globalization?

• There is an obvious side: the march of gleaming city centers in

many parts of the world. A less obvious side is the people whose

work built the global economy. The picture provides evidence

about both sides.


Forecasts about the future use

history, but in different ways. Key

issues for the future emerge from

recent trends and tensions.

TOWARD THE FUTURE

What predictions about the future are particularly plausible, and why?

Human beings have always wanted to know what the future will hold. Various societies looked to the configurations of the stars for predictions, and astrology still has partisans in the contemporary world. Some societies generated beliefs in cycles, predicting that the future would repeat patterns already seen in the past; many Chinese scholars developed a cyclical approach. Still other societies assume that the future will differ from the past; from the Enlightenment onward, Western culture developed an additional belief in progress.

History suggests the futility of many efforts at forecasting. It has been estimated that well over half of the "expert" forecasts generated in the United States since World War II have been wrong. This includes predictions that by 2000 most Americans would be riding to and from work in some kind of airship, or that families would be replaced by promiscuous communes. Yet if history debunks forecasts, it also provides the basis for thinking about the future.

Projecting from Trends

The most obvious connection between history and the future involves the assessment of trends that are likely to continue at least for several decades. Thus we "know" that global population growth will slow up, because it is already slowing up. Many forecasts see stabilization by 2050, based on rapidly falling birth rates around the world. We also "know" that populations will become older; that is, the percentage of older citizens will increase. This is already happening in western Europe, the United States, and Japan and will occur elsewhere as birth rates drop. What we don't "know;' of course, is how societies will react to the demands of the increasing numbers of older people, or how much the environment will have deteriorated by the time global population stabilizes. Even trend-based forecasts can be thrown off by unexpected events, like wars. In the 1930s experts "knew" that the American birth rate would fall, because it was already falling, but then war and prosperity created a totally unexpected baby boom, and the experts were wrong for at least two decades. Forecasts about the rise of Chinese or Indian economic power in coming decades also build on existing trends.

Trend-based forecasting is even chancier when the trends are already fragile. The late 20th century saw a genuine global spread of democracy, although admittedly not to every region. It was possible to venture predictions about the triumph of this form of government. But by 2002 it was hard to be confident that democracies were entirely secure in parts of Latin America or even in Russia. The hold of earlier, less democratic political traditions or the sheer pressure of economic stagnation might unseat the trend.

Forecasting is also complicated when two different trends are in play. The 20th century saw a fairly steady rise in consumerism, which spread to all parts of the world. The appeal of mass media, commercialized sports, and global fashions reaches across traditional boundaries. But the last 30 years have also seen a pronounced increase in religious interest, in many if not all parts of the world. Some people participate in both trends, but overall, the priorities are different. Is one of the two trends likely to predominate? Or should we think of the future in terms of division and tension among cultural interests?

Big Changes

Some analysts have looked at the world's future in terms of stark departures from its past. They argue that trend analysis is inadequate because we are on the verge of a major shift in framework. In the 1960s a "population bomb" analysis won considerable attention. The argument was that rapid population growth was about to overwhelm all other developments, leading to resource depletion, new wars over resources, and a world far different from what we had previously known. More recently, other forecasts, of dramatic climate change and of resource exhaustion, providl:! another dire picture of the world's future, in which other issues, like the fate of particular political systems, fade in importance.

Another scenario for a dramatically different future that has enjoyed recurrent popularity is the vision of a postindustrial world. Some pundits argue that computer technology, genetic engineering, and other technological advances are undermining the conditions of industrial society. Information, not production, becomes the key to economic growth and to social structures. The functions of


cities shift from production to entertainment. Work will become more individualized and less time consuming, creating a new premium for expressive leisure. Here too, however, critics express doubts. Many parts of the world are not yet industrial, much less postindustrial. Work does not seem to be heading toward less routine; for example, computers promote repetitious activities as much as new creativity. As is always true with intriguing predictions of massive change, the jury is still out.

The Problem of the Contemporary Period

One of the reasons prediction is particularly difficult-although also compelling-is that world history has undergone so many fundamental changes during the past century. We know, for example, that the dominance of western Europe, for centuries a staple of world history, is a thing of the past, despite the continued vitality of the region. But what will replace it? Continued United States ascendancy, with military outposts in many parts of the world? Or the rise of China or east Asia? Or perhaps no single dominant region at all? We know there's a question about the world balance that will replace Western control, but the answer is unclear.

The same applies to conditions for women. Improvements in women's education plus the decline of the birth rate add up to significant changes for women around the world. The pace of change varies with the region, to be sure. Many regions also have given new legal and political rights to women. But is there a new model for women's roles that might be applicable around the world? Continued disputes about women's work roles, significant male backlash against change, and even disputes by women themselves about the relevance of an individualistic Western model for women's lives make forecasting difficult. We can assume continued change, but it's hard to pinpoint the results.

Global Connections and Critical Themes

CIVILIZATIONS AND GLOBAL FORCES

A key question for the future involves the fate of individual civilizations. World history has been shaped substantially by the characteristics of key civilizations for over 5000 years, granting that not everyone has been part of a major civilization and that in some cases civilizations are not easy to define. Some observers argue that, by the 21st century, the separate characteristics of civilizations are beginning to yield to homogenizing forces. Many scientists, athletes, and businesspeople feel more commitment to their professional interests than to their region of origin-which means that global professional identities can override civilizational loyalties. The downtowns of most cities around the world look very much alike. The same products, stores, and restaurants can be found in most urban areas. Globalization may be outpacing regional labels.

Further Readings

For very different takes on the resurgence of globalization since 1989, see Thomas Friedman's cautious celebration in The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (2000), John Gray's more sober appraisal in False Dawn (2000), and Thomas Frank's lively critique in One Market Under God (2000). See also Joseph E. Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work (2006); Nathan M. Jensen,Nation-States and the Multinational Corporation: A Political Economy of Foreign Direct Investment (2006); Dimitris Stevis and TerryBoswell, Globalization and Labor: Democratizing Global Governance(2008); Peter Dicken, Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contoursof the World Economy (2007); Guillermo de la Dehesa, What Do We

Yet we have also seen that globalization can falter, as it did in the middle decades of the 20th century. Even when it accelerates, as in the 1990s, it brings efforts to reassert separate identities. Even as it participates in the global economy, China remains distinctive, reflecting, for example, some of the political characteristics that were launched 3000 years ago. The Japanese easily move in global economics and culture, but with an emphasis on group identity measurably different from the personal goals emphasized in the United States. Major religions like Hinduism and Islam continue to mark their regions, and in some ways their influence seems to be on the rise.

World history has long been defined by a tension between regional features and larger connections. The specifics change, for example with shifts in technology and organizational capacity. But it may be premature to assume that some kind of global homogeneity is going to change the equation altogether.

Know About Globalization?: Issues of Poverty and Income Distribution (2007); Daniel Cohen, Globalization and its Enemies (2006); Nelly P. Stromquist and Karen Monkrnan, eds., Globalization and Education: Integration and Contestation across Cultures (2000); Ernest Gundling and Anita Zanchettin, Global Diversity: Winning Customers and Engaging Employees within World Markets (2007); and Deen K. Chatterjee, ed., Democracy in a Global World: Human Rights and Political Participation in the 21st Century (2008).

Differing perspectives on the cultural ramifications of the new global economic order are provided by Peter Stearns, Consumerism in World History (2001); Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (2000); and the contributions to James Watson, ed., Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia (1998). See


also Lewis Solomon, Multinational Corporations and the Emerging World Order (1978); Stephen Rees, American Films Abroad (1997); Theodore von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization (1997); Peter N. Stearns, The Industrial Revolution in World History (1998); and Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens, eds., Conceptualizing Global History (1993).

J. Luccassen and L. Luccassen, eds., Migration, Migration,History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (1997), is a recent comparative social history-in addition to an extensive bibliography it includes chapters on conceptual issues (periodization, definitions, etc.) and several regional historical case studies. Alistair Ager, Refugees: Perspectives on the Experience of Forced Migration (1998), is a useful survey. See also Patrick Manning, Migration in World History (2002).

For genuinely global perspectives on environmental issues, see Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (1999 ed.); Mark Hertsgaard, Earth Odyssey (1998); Jennifer Clapp and Peter Dauvergen, Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment (2005); and Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (2000). The best accounts of environmental degradation in key regions of the world include Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest (1990), about Brazil; Judith Shapiro, Mao's War against Nature (2001); Vaclav Smil, The Bad

Earth (1984) and China's Environmental Crisis (1993); Murray Feshback and Alfred Friendly Jr., Ecocide in the USSR (1992); Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert (1993), about the United States; and Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, Ecology and Equity (1995), about India.

For a good source about the movement for sustainable development, Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World by David W. Orr (1992) and Andres R. Edwards, The Sustainability Revolution (2005). Several serious books (as well as many more simplistic, popularized efforts) attempt to sketch the future of the world or the West. On the concept of the postindustrial society, see Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1974). For other projections, consult R. L. Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (1974); and L. Stavrianos, The Promise of the Coming Dark Age (1976).

On environment and resource issues, see D. H. Meadows and D. L. Meadows, The Limits to Growth (1974); Al Gore, Earth in the Balance (1992); and L. Herbert, Our Synthetic Environment (1962). M. ul Haq's The Poverty Curtain: Choices for the Third World (1976) and L. Solomon's Multinational Corporations and the Emerging World Order (1978) cover economic issues, in part from a non-Western perspective. On a leading social issue, see P. Huston, Third World Women Speak Out (1979).

On MyHistorylab If, and on

Critical Thinking Questions

1. What are the main debates over the impact of globalization?Can some of the debates be resolved?

2. Compare interactions between religion and secularculture in the contemporary United States and theMiddle East.


3. When did globalization begin? What are the main optionsin world history over the past two centuries, and whatmeasurements work best?

4. Is nationalism declining or does it still serve importantpurposes? What kinds of evidence help answer this question?

globalization and resistance - this area is password ... shower her with new clothes, including blue...

Documents