Unit 9: Globalization (1900-Present)

🧪 Globalization and Technology

• Globalization - The increasing economic, political, and social interconnectedness of the world

• Trade routes, imperialism, and world wars represent increasing interconnectedness

• Globalization since 1900s will increase in pace due to new technologies that diminish the geographical distance between nations

Communication Technologies

• Radio

  • Very prevalent in the US, provided entertainment and news broadcast to 12 millions homes

• Television (1960s)

  • Allowed people to see and feel connected with what goes on in other parts of the world. Ex: Vietnam war, Cuban Missile Crisis

• Cellular

  • Enabled connectivity through the air

  • Allowed rapid development of cell phones

  • Allowed people to communicate across the world

• Internet

  • Rise of personal computers as they became affordable to normal people

  • World Wide Web (1990s)

  • Connected the world’s population along with connected businesses with customers, accelerating global commerce

Transportation Technology

• Air Travel

  • Massive economic growth after WW2 in Western nations allowed many people to afford air travel

  • Shrinking geographical distance

• Shipping containers - standardized metal boxes that can be stacked uniformly for shipping non-bulk cargo like food, clothing, or raw materials

  • Significantly contributed to a global economy

  • Almost all consumer goods are transported via these

  • Allowed mega corporations to move factories to other countries such as China

Energy Technology

• increased productivity of manufacturing on a massive scale

• Petroleum (Fossil Fuels)

  • Fuel for vehicles

  • Electricity accessible to more people in the developed world, not so much in the undeveloped world

  • Replaced coal as the main power source for industrial manufacturing, allowing manufacturing to increase to meet global consumer demands

• Nuclear Power

  • Used energy produced by nuclear reactions for civilian use

  • Cleaner than petroleum

  • Disasters in nuclear power plants in the US and USSR caused public opinion to turn against this

Medical Technology

• Medical Birth Control

  • Birth Control Pill allowed women to have more control over their fertility

  • Again, only in developed nations

  • Caused women in developed nations to have fewer children

  • Led to demographic crises in many places

  • Populations are growing rapidly in the developing world such as Sub-Saharan Africa where healthcare is not as accessible

• Vaccines and Antibiotics

  • Combat diseases

  • Increased lifespan dramatically

  • Increased population growth

Agriculture Technology

• Increased population for less developed areas too

• Commercial Agriculture

  • contrasts with Subsistence Farming - farmers growing a small amount to feed their family

  • Commercial Agriculture aimed to increase farming production to export

  • Led to significant increase in global food supply

• Green Revolution

  • Genetic modification of food led to strains of high yielding grain crops

  • Introduced in the developing world (Mexico, Indonesia, etc)

🦠 Spread of Disease

• Travel and global connections being more abundant caused disease to spread faster

• Global Pandemics

  • Influenza Pandemic of 1918

    • Claimed ~50 million lives over the course of 2 years

    • Had a massive impact on demographics across the world

    • Disproportionately affected working age people

    • Actually killed more people than WW1

• Diseases associated with poverty

  • Populations of wealthy nations had greater access to well developed healthcare to address disease

  • Ex: Malaria

    • Spread by mosquitoes, typically occurs in warmer, tropical regions

    • Most of the deaths are in impoverished Sub-Saharan Africa

• Diseases associated with aging populations

  • So many people are living longer that diseases such as Alzhiemer’s and Heart Disease are more prevalent

  • Mainly affected people in developed nations with access to healthcare and longer life spans

  • New medical advances have been developed to treat them though

🌱 Globalization and the Environment

• Globalization further fueled industrialization and urbanization (growth of cities around the world)

• Led to environmental consequences:

• Deforestation

  • Urbanization caused more people to live in cities, making cities expand further, cutting down trees to make space for suburbs

  • More Farmland needed to be created to sustain a greater world population, clearing forests

  • Increased animals going extinct and pollution in water from erosion

• Decline in Air Quality

  • Fossil fuels used for energy caused air pollution in cities

• Desertification

  • Occurs when farmland becomes infertile due to over-cultivization through commercial agricultural practices

  • Becomes useless for farming

• Increased consumption of the world’s fresh water supply

  • ~3% of water on earth is drinkable

  • Commercial agriculture uses lots of water too

• Climate Change

  • Warming of the planet due to increasing greenhouse gasses being released since the industrial revolution

  • Debate about climate change

    • Is it human caused?

    • Who is responsible for fixing the problem?

      • Some say wealthy nations who are industrialized bear all the responsibility as they caused it

      • Others say developing nations also have responsibility in it as they must industrialize to catch up economically

        • But if developing nations don’t use fossil fuels, it is harder for them to develop their state

🪙 Globalized Economics

• Promotion of free market economics and economic liberalization

• During World Wars and the Great Depression, a common trend in many places was for governments to take a greater role in economic decisions

• By the 1980s, many states rejected this trend in favor of free market policies of economic liberalization

Free market policies

• Lowering trade barriers like tariffs

• Deregulation of industry

• Transfer of public sector industries to the private sector

• Ex: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher

  • Reduced taxes on the wealthy

  • Deregulated businesses

  • Decreased spending on social welfare programs

  • Helped keep the nation economically healthy during crises

  • However, it worked to undermine the power of labor unions

  • Gave more power to business leaders, increasing the gap between the rich and poor

Restructuring Geographical Distribution of Global Economic Activity

• In the last period, industrialization is what made some nations extremely powerful

  • the factories and laborers were mainly inside the country

• Knowledge Workers - for some workers in wealthy nations, the main capital for work was not their bodies but rather their minds

  • Ex: Finland

  • Agrarian (agriculture) economy before WW2

  • Towards end of 20th century, government invested in technology causing Finland’s massive economic growth in cell phone tech and software development

• In the second half of 20th century, manufacturing was increasingly moved to developing nations as international businesses could pay foreign workers less

  • Manufacturing sector is now mainly located in Asia

    • Ex: Vietnam, Bangladesh, China, Mexico, Honduras

Rise of global economic institutions

• Help facilitate economic interactions

• World Trade Organization

  • Created to regulate trade on a global scale

  • Assists in negotiating trade deals

  • Moderates trade disputes

  • Assists developing nations

Conditions for Multiplication of Regional Trade Agreements

• Ex: European Union

  • Basically merged into a single economic bloc by reducing trade barriers between member nations

Proliferation of Multinational corporations

• Multinational corporations - Business incorporated in one country but manufacture and sell goods to other countries globally

  • Ex: Nestle

    • Headquartered in Switzerland

    • Manufacture chocolate using low wage workers in West Africa

    • Sells chocolate on the world market

Globalized Culture

• Communication and transportation technologies allowed people all over the world to experience the culture of others, creating a globalized culture

  • Mostly dominated by western values

• Music

  • Ex: Reggae

    • Originated in Jamaica

    • Bob Marley helped spread this regional music across the world

  • Ex: KPop

• Entertainment

  • Hollywood (US)

  • Bollywood (India)

  • Films reflect culture and values while make lots of money on the international market

• Spectator Sports

  • Olympics

  • World Cup

  • Allow for the expression of nationalism

• Consumer Culture

  • People are defined by what they buy, not what they like

  • Ex: After 9/11, US President told people to go shopping so the economy doesn’t suffer

  • Because the US had a huge influence on the global culture and economy after WW2, consumer culture ended up becoming a global phenomenon

  • Many countries became consumers of global brands or the producers of their own global brands

• Global Brands

  • Ex: Coca Cola

    • Originated in US but expanded globally near the second half of the 20th century

  • Ex: Toyota

• Online Retailers

  • Ex: Alibaba

  • Ex: Amazon

  • Ex: Ebay

  • Use shipping containers

• Globalized Culture threatens the values of local cultures

  • Ex: China

    • Did not like Western social media sites like Facebook and Twitter

    • Thought those sites created unrest among Chinese people

    • Uighur population (Muslim minority in China) had riots and unrest which China blamed on Western social media for spreading these ideas

    • Created their own state approved social media site called Weibo, filtering out information the government deemed unfit

🇺🇳 Globalized Institutions

• Facilitated global cooperation on the world stage

• United Nations

  • Successor to the League of Nations (created after WW1 and was not effective)

    • Tried to facilitate diplomatic negotiation to problems rather than war but it had no authority to enforce policies so it did nothing

  • UN was created after WW2 to fix weaknesses of the League of Nations

  • Aimed to:

    • Prevent war

    • Facilitate cooperation among nations

  • General Assembly

    • 193 member nations

    • Discusses and makes policies for all member nations

  • UNICEF (UN International Children’s Emergency Fund) in 1946

    • Provided social welfare services to children around the world

    • Immunization, education, emergency relief for children and mothers

  • Security Council

    • Peacekeeping

    • 5 Permanent members (US, China, France, Russia, UK)

      • All 5 have veto power, protecting their own interests at the expense of the global community

    • 10 rotating representatives among member nations

    • Has authority to send military peacekeepers

      • Help stabilize violent situations

    • Imposes economic sanctions that violate human rights or cause war

• Economic Institutions

  • World Bank

    • Created to provide financial assistance for the reconstruction of Europe post-WW2

    • Shifted its focus to providing loans and technical assistance to developing countries

      • Projects reducing poverty

      • Promoting economic development

      • Sustainable Growth

  • International Monetary Fund

    • Created to facilitate monetary cooperation among member states

  • Both these wanted to protect free trade and keep the global economy running smoothly

📜 Globalization encouraged reform

• Rights based discourse

  • Challenged old assumptions about race, class, gender, and religion

  • After WW2 in 1948 the UN made the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

    • Document that included basic human rights of life, liberty, and security of persons

    • Condemned racism and imperialism

    • Championed social and economic equality of all citizens

    • Especially the rights of women, children, and refugees

• Feminist Movements

  • Worked to secure women’s right to vote across the world

  • Taken up by the UN

  • Many women in the late 20th century got more freedom to make more occupational and personal choices

  • Communist ideology also supported gender equality

• Negritude Movements (Black persons)

  • Worked against racial discrimination

• Access to education and politics for various groups

  • Relentless pressure from civil rights movement caused:

  • SCOTUS to abolish racial segregation in schools

  • Congress passed the civil rights act of 1964

    • End of legal discrimination and racial segregation

• Caste reservation system in India

  • reserved a certain percentage of seats in educational institutions, govt jobs, elected positions were reserved for members of historically marginalized caste groups

• Religious movements

  • Liberation theology (Latin America) - Emphasized Christ’s concern for the poor and marginalized and called for the transformation of oppressive power structures

  • Significant effects on the Catholic Church causing reform to work for social justice

✊ Resistance to Globalization

• Environmentalism

  • Became a global concern in the 20th century

  • Environmental protections such as Greenpeace were formed using nonviolent tactics to raise awareness and advocate for protection of the environment

• World Fair Trade Organization

  • Multinational corporations paying foreign workers very little to cut costs

  • WFTO seeks to reform these practices

• Battle for Seattle in 1999

  • Global economic policies of the WTO, World Bank, IMF make it easy for multinational organizations to exploit laborers in developing countries that lack regulation for their practices

  • Therefore, the WTO met in Seattle to establish new financial goals

  • During the meeting, ~40,000 people from diverse backgrounds protested

  • Protest was met with violence as police used tear gas and rubber bullets

  • Meeting marked the beginning of a larger anti-globalization movement that represents the interests of those that were marginalized by globalized economic policies