Globalization at the Turn of the Millennium · 33 Globalization at the Turn of the Millennium ......

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33 Globalizationat the Turn ofthe Millennium

CHAPTER OUTLINEGlobal Political Economies

Trends and Visions

Global Culture

ENVIRONMENT AND TECHNOLOGY: Global Warming

DIVERSITY AND DOMINANCE: World Literature in English

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The workday began normally at the World TradeCenter in lower Manhattan on the morning of

September 11, 2001. The 50,000 people who workthere were making their way to the two 110-story tow-ers, as were some 140,000 others who visit on a typicalday. Suddenly, at 8:46 A.M., an American Airlines Boe-ing 767 with 92 people on board, traveling at a speedof 470 miles per hour (756 kilometers per hour),crashed into floors 94 to 98 of the north tower, ignitingthe 10,000 gallons (38,000 liters) of fuel in its tanks.Just before 9:03 A.M. a United Airlines flight with 65people on board and a similar fuel load hit floors 78 to84 of the south tower.

As the burning jet fuel engulfed the collision areas,the buildings’ surviving occupants struggled throughsmoke-filled corridors and down dozens of flights ofstairs. Many of those trapped above the crash sitesused cell phones to say good-bye to loved ones. Ratherthan endure the flames and fumes, a few jumped totheir deaths.

Just before 10 o’clock, temperatures that had risento 2,300˚ Fahrenheit (1,260˚ Celsius) caused the steelgirders in the impacted area of the south tower to giveway. The collapsing upper floors crushed the floorsunderneath one by one, engulfing lower Manhattanin a dense cloud of dust. Twenty-eight minutes laterthe north tower pancaked in a similar manner. Mirac-ulously, most of the buildings’ occupants had escapedbefore the towers collapsed. Besides the people on theplanes, nearly 2,600 lost their lives, including some200 police officers and firefighters helping in theevacuation.

That same morning another American Airlines jetcrashed into the Pentagon, killing all 64 people onboard and 125 others inside the military complexnear Washington, D.C. Passengers on a fourth planemanaged to overpower their hijackers, and the planecrashed in rural Pennsylvania, killing all 45 on board.

The four planes had been hijacked by teams ofMiddle Eastern men who slit the throats of serviceand flight personnel and seized control. Of the nine-teen hijackers, fifteen were from Saudi Arabia. All had

links to an extremist Islamic organization, al Qaeda˚(the base or foundation), supported by a rich Saudinamed Usama bin Laden˚, who was incensed withAmerican political, military, and cultural influence inthe Middle East. The men were educated and well-traveled, had lived in the United States, and spokeEnglish. Some had trained as pilots so that they couldfly the hijacked aircraft.

The hijackers left few records of their personalmotives, but the acts spoke for themselves. The Pen-tagon was the headquarters of the American military,the most technologically sophisticated and powerfulfighting force the world had even seen. The fourthplane was probably meant to hit the Capitol or theWhite House, the legislative and executive centers ofthe world’s only superpower. The Twin Towers mayhave been targeted because they were the tallestbuildings in New York, but they were not just Amer-ican targets. The World Trade Center housed 430companies involved in international commerce andfinance. Among the dead were people from more thanhalf the countries in the world. New York was the siteof the attack, but the World Trade Center was a power-ful symbol of the international economy.

The events of September 11 (9/11) can be under-stood on many levels. The hijackers and their sup-porters saw themselves as engaged in a holy struggleagainst economic, political, and military institutionsthey believed to be evil. They believed so deeply intheir mission that they were willing to give their livesfor it and to take as many other lives as they could.People directly affected and political leaders aroundthe world tended to describe the attacks as evil actsagainst innocent victims.

To understand why the nineteen attackers wereheroes to some and terrorists to others, one needs toexplore the historical context of global changes at theturn of the millennium and the ideological tensionsthey have generated. While the advancing economic,

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political, and cultural integration of the world is wel-comed by some, it is hated or feared by others. Theunique prominence of the United States in every ma-jor aspect of global integration also elicits sharply di-vergent views.

As you read this chapter, ask yourself the follow-ing questions:

● What are the main benefits and dangers of growingpolitical, economic, and cultural integration?

● What roles do religious beliefs and secular ideolo-gies play in the contemporary world?

● How has technology contributed to the process ofglobal interaction?

GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMIES

The turn of the millennium saw the intensification ofa globalization trend that had been building for

some time. Growing trade and travel and new technolo-gies were bringing all parts of the world into closer eco-nomic, political, and cultural integration and interaction.The collapse of the Soviet Union had completed the dis-solution of empires that had been under way through-out the twentieth century. Autonomous national states(numbering about two hundred) became an almost uni-versal norm, and a growing number of them have em-braced democratic institutions. The rapid integration ofworld trade and markets have convinced world leadersof the need to balance national autonomy with interna-tional agreements and associations.

The last decades of the twenti-eth century saw rapid increasesin democratic institutions andpersonal freedom. In 2003, 140

countries regularly held elections; people in 125 had ac-cess to free (or partly free) presses; and most people livedin fully democratic states.1

The great appeal of democracy has been that elec-tions are a peaceful way to settle the inevitable differ-ences among a country’s social classes, cultural groups,and regions. Although majority votes might swing fromone part of the political spectrum to another, democra-cies tend to encourage political moderation. For exam-ple, two of the world’s oldest democracies saw two

The Spread of Democracy

candidates win national elections in the 1990s by mov-ing their political parties closer to the political center(and by exuding great personal charm). In 1992 Bill Clin-ton was the first Democrat to win the American presi-dency in twelve years. In 1997 Tony Blair became GreatBritain’s first Labour Party prime minister in eighteenyears.

Very significant democratic gains have been madein the new nations of eastern Europe, where electionshave also been more open to electoral mood swings. TheCzech Republic, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and mostother formerly communist-ruled states have adopteddemocratic institutions. Likewise, after a shaky start, po-litical institutions in the Russian Federation have begunto function more smoothly under President VladimirPutin, elected in 2000.

Latin America has a long history of democracy, butan almost equally long history of authoritarian rule bymilitary and personalist leaders (see Chapter 23). Since1991, however, democracy has become almost universalin South and Central America. The region has also seensignificant shifts in the balance of power within coun-tries. In 2000 Mexican voters elected a reformist presi-dent with a centrist agenda, Vincente Fox, ending thehalf-century rule of the corrupt Institutional Revolution-ary Party (PRI). In 2002 leftist Workers’ Party candidateLuiz Inácio Lula da Silva˚ won the presidency of Brazil byappealing to nationalism and popular discontent withthe economy. Other populist leaders won elections inVenezuela (1999), Chile (2000), and Argentina (2003).

Democratic governments continued to flourish inAsia. Beginning in 1999 the populous state of Indonesiamoved from years of authoritarian and corrupt ruletoward much more open political institutions. Since thedeath of long-time Communist leader Deng Xiaoping in1997, China, the world’s most populous country, has al-lowed a greater measure of free expression, but democ-racy is a long way off. India saw a major political shift in1998 when a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) electoral vic-tory ended four decades of Congress Party rule. The BJPsuccess came through blatant appeals to Hindu nation-alism, the condoning of violence against India’s Muslims,and opposition to the social and economic progress ofthe Untouchables (those traditionally confined to thedirtiest jobs). The BJP also adopted a belligerent policyagainst neighboring Pakistan, centering on the two coun-tries’ long-standing claims to the state of Kashmir.

In sub-Saharan Africa, democracy has had mixedresults. Many elected leaders have used their offices to

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enrich themselves and limit their opponents. Militarycoups and conflicts over resources such as diamondshave also been distressingly common. Southern Africa,however, has seen democratic progress and a decline inarmed conflicts since 1991. A key change came in SouthAfrica in 1994, when long-time political prisoner NelsonMandela and his African National Congress (ANC) wonthe first national elections in which the African majoritycould participate equally. Since then, the lively politics ofthis ethnically diverse country have been a model of howdemocracy can resolve conflicts. Also hopeful has beenthe return to democracy of Nigeria, Africa’s most popu-lous state, after decades of military rulers. In 1999, after asuccession of military governments, Nigerians electedPresident Olusegun Obasanjo˚ (a former coup leader)and a 2003 vote renewed his term, despite serious votingirregularities. In 2002 Kenyans voted out the party thathad held power for thirty-nine years.

Democracy is as exceptional in the Middle East as itis in much of Africa. Some once-democratic states suchas Algeria have manipulated elections because thosein power fear the rising power of Islamic militants. Onthe other hand, in Turkey, the most democratic Muslim-majority state in the region, a once-strident Islamist

party won a parliamentary majority in 2002 by moderat-ing its tone and politics. Women have made gains in re-cent elections in Morocco, Turkey, and Bahrain. Recentregime changes in Afghanistan and Iraq may mark amove toward more democratic rule in these countries.

As examples later in the chapter will indicate, thegrowth (or decline) of democracy has only partly beendue to internal changes in individual countries. Two in-ternational factors have also played important roles: thechanged politics of the post–Cold War era and the de-mands of global economic forces.

Modern nation-states have con-siderable autonomy under in-ternational law. Other nations

may intervene in a state’s affairs only when seriouslythreatened or when the state is engaging in extremehuman rights abuses. Although necessary to protectsmaller, weaker countries from the imperial bullyingthat was once common, this autonomy greatly compli-cates international policing and peacekeeping efforts.

After the end of the Cold War, the United Nationsstruggled to reclaim its roles as defender of human rightsand peacekeeper. This was especially noticeable un-der the leadership of Kofi Annan, who became United

Global Politics

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Global Political Economies 881

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C H R O N O L O G YPolitics Economics and Society

1992 Yugoslavia disintegrates—Croatia and Sloveniabecome independent states

1992–1995 Bosnia crisis1994 Nelson Mandela elected president of South

Africa; Tutsi massacred in Rwanda1995 Nerve gas released in Tokyo subway

1997 Hong Kong reunited with China1998 Terrorists bomb U.S. embassies in Kenya and

Tanzania; India and Pakistan test atomic bombs1999 East Timor secedes from Indonesia (officially

independent 2002)2001 Terrorists destroy the World Trade Center and

damage the Pentagon on September 112002 United Nations weapons inspectors return

to Iraq2003 United States and Britain invade and occupy

Iraq

1991 Mercosur free trade association formed

1993 Nobel Peace Prize to Nelson Mandela

1994 North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement adopted

1995 World Trade Organization founded; UnitedNations women’s conference in China

1997 Asian financial crisis begins

1999 Nobel Peace Prize to Doctors Without Borders

2001 Start of global recession

2002 Euro the only currency in twelve Europeancountries

1991

1995

2000

Olusegun Obasanjo (oh-LOO-say-goon oh-bah-SAHN-joh)

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Nations secretary general in 1997. The members of theUnited Nations Security Council often had difficultyagreeing on a course of action. Individual countries of-ten acted alone or with their neighbors to resolve con-flicts in nearby countries, whether through peacefulnegotiation or military intervention. Some interventionsrestored order and punished wrongdoers, but in othercases people suffered and died by the hundreds of thou-sands as world leaders hesitated or debated the wisdomand legitimacy of intervening. As the lone superpower,the United States was in a unique position to use itsmoral leadership, economic power, and military mightto defend its national interests and promote the generalgood. However, interventions also brought charges ofAmerican imperialism.

There were some notable peacemaking successes.The United Nations, South Africa, and other countrieshelped end the long civil war in Mozambique in 1992and struggled to do the same in Angola, where peace fi-nally returned in 2002. In the 1990s Nigeria, the majormilitary power in West Africa, helped end fighting inSierra Leone in 1998, and again in 2003 in Liberia, whichwarlords and embezzlement has made the world’s poor-est country. The Clinton and George W. Bush administra-tions had some success in getting aggrieved parties in

Israel, Ireland, and South Asia to negotiate their differ-ences, even though lasting solutions were elusive.

However, in a number of cases the internationalcommunity had great difficulty in agreeing on when andhow to stop civil conflicts and abuses in individual coun-tries. For example, in 1991 the Balkan state of Yugoslavia,which had existed since 1920 and was united by a com-mon language (Serbo-Croatian), dissolved into a morassof separatism and warring ethnic and religious groups.Slovenia and Croatia, the most westerly provinces ofYugoslavia, both heavily Roman Catholic, became inde-pendent states in 1992 after brief struggles with federalYugoslav forces. Reflecting centuries of Muslim, Catholic,and Orthodox competition in the Balkans, the people ofthe province of Bosnia and Herzegovina were moremixed—40 percent were Muslims, 30 percent SerbianOrthodox, and 18 percent Catholics. The murderousthree-sided fighting that broke out with the declarationof Bosnian national independence in 1992 gave rise toethnic cleansing, an effort by one racial, ethnic, or reli-gious group to eliminate the people and culture of a dif-ferent group. In this case, the Orthodox Serbs attemptedto rid the state of Muslims.

At first, no European power acted to stop the grow-ing tragedy in the Balkans. Finally, after much indeci-


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sion—and extensive television coverage of atrocities andwanton destruction—the United States made a cautiousintervention and eventually brokered a tentative settle-ment in 1995. In 1999 vicious new fighting and ethniccleansing broke out in the southernmost Yugoslavianprovince of Kosovo, the ancient homeland of the Serbs,which had become predominantly Muslim and Alban-ian. When NATO’s warnings went unheeded in Kosovo,the United States, with aid from Britain and France,launched an aerial war against Serbia. Suffering few ca-sualties themselves, the NATO allies damaged militaryand infrastructure targets in Serbia and forced the with-drawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo. A trial of formerSerbian president Slobodan Milosevic˚ at a special tribu-nal in the Hague on charges of crimes against humanitybegan in 2002 but was often delayed by his ill health.

Another tragedy unfolded in 1994, when politicalleaders in the Central African nation of Rwanda incitedHutu people to massacre their Tutsi neighbors. Themajor powers avoided characterizing the slaughter asgenocide because an international agreement man-dated intervention to stop genocide. Only after some750,000 people were dead and millions of refugees hadfled into neighboring states did the United States andother powers intervene. Belatedly, the United Nationsset up a tribunal to try those responsible for the geno-cide. In 1998 violence spread from Rwanda to neighbor-ing Congo, where growing opposition and ill-health hadforced President Joseph Mobutu from office after overthree decades of dictatorial misrule. Various peacemak-ing attempts failed to restore order. By mid-2003 morethan 3 million Congolese had died from disease, malnu-trition, and injuries related to the fighting.

Fear that intervention could result in long andcostly commitments was one reason the major powerswere reluctant to intervene. Nor was it easy to distin-guish conflicts that would benefit from forceful inter-vention from those that might better be resolved bydiplomatic pressure. Many conflicts reflected deep-seated differences that were difficult to resolve. Tamil-speaking Hindus in Sri Lanka have waged a mercilessguerrilla struggle against the dominant Sinhalese-speaking Buddhists for decades. Militant Hindus andMuslims in South Asia continue a violent struggle overthe territories of the state of Kashmir, which was dividedbetween India and Pakistan at their independence in1947. Sometimes it took decades of international pres-sure to bring a conflict to an end, as was the case in EastTimor (a mostly Catholic former Portuguese colony that

Indonesia had annexed in 1975), whose people voted toseparate from Muslim Indonesia in 1999 and gained fullindependence in 2002.

In addition to agreements oncollective action against geno-cide and other crimes againsthumanity (see below), interna-

tional treaties govern weapons of mass destruction. Nu-clear, biological, and chemical devices pose especiallyserious dangers to global security because they can killlarge numbers of people quickly.

For a time after international agreements weresigned in the 1960s and 1970s (see Chapter 31), consid-erable progress was made in restricting the testing andspread of nuclear weapons and reducing their numbers.Fear increased when the breakup of the Soviet Unionthreatened to expand the number of states with nuclearweapons, but in the end only Russia retained nucleararsenals. Meanwhile, China resumed nuclear weaponstests in 1992.

Anxiety over nuclear proliferation increased in 1998when India and Pakistan openly tested nuclear bombsand missile delivery systems, acts that raised the stakesin any future conflict between them. Although North Ko-rea was a signatory of the nuclear nonproliferationtreaty, it secretly continued nuclear weapons programsand, beginning in 2002, belligerently challenged the restof the world to try to stop them. Iran and Israel are alsobelieved to have secret nuclear weapons programs. In vi-olation of another agreement, the Bush administrationis pushing for new nuclear weapons development in theUnited States.

Chemical and biological weapons are difficult to de-tect and can easily be produced in seemingly ordinarychemical and pharmaceutical plants. As part of the set-tlement of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, United Nations in-spectors in Iraq uncovered and destroyed extensivestocks of chemical munitions and plants for producingnerve gas and lethal germs. However, in 1997 the govern-ment of Saddam Husain reneged on its agreement to al-low United Nations weapons inspectors free access to allsites in Iraq.

What made the proliferation of weapons of massdestruction more worrisome was the fear that suchweapons could be used for terrorism. Terrorists believethat horrendous acts of violence can provoke harshreprisals that would win them sympathy or cause theregimes they oppose to lose legitimacy. Terrorism has along history, but much recent concern focused on thenetwork of terrorist organizations created by Usama

Arms Control and Terrorism

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bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi. Because his methods wereso repugnant, his own family disowned him and SaudiArabia stripped him of his citizenship, but his anti-American stance and patronage attracted followersthroughout the Islamic world. In 1992 bin Laden estab-lished himself in Sudan, where he invested in manyprojects. Suspecting that a pharmaceutical plant nearthe Sudanese capital Khartoum was being used formaking chemical weapons, President Clinton had it de-stroyed by rockets in 1998, but no evidence of weaponsproduction was found.

After being expelled from Sudan in 1996, bin Ladenwent to Afghanistan, where he had close ties with theTaliban, a fundamentalist Islamic organization that hadtaken control of most of that country in 1995. Bin Laden’sagents bombed the American embassies in Kenya andTanzania in 1998 as well as the destroyer USS Cole, whichwas making a port call in Yemen in 2000, before turningto targets in the United States itself. In response to theterrorist attacks of September 2001 and the subsequentpanic caused by an unknown terrorist mailing spores ofanthrax, a lethal disease, the U.S. government adopted amore aggressive policy against terrorism and weaponsof mass destruction. In December 2001, American andother NATO forces joined with Afghan opposition groupsto overthrow the Taliban-supported regime in Afghan-

istan, an act that President Bush declared to be the firststep in a much larger “war on terrorism.”

Such preemptive strikes are clearly speedier thancollective action, but the issue of when military inter-vention is justified became the focus of a huge interna-tional debate after President Bush pushed for extensionof the war on terrorism against the brutal regime ofSaddam Husain in Iraq. Strong opposition to unilateralaction came from America’s NATO allies France andGermany, as well as from Russia and China. GermanChancellor Gerhard Schröder won a close election inSeptember 2002 by campaigning against American im-perialism. Faced with this opposition, the Bush adminis-tration changed tactics. In November 2002 it persuadedthe United Nations Security Council to unanimouslypass a resolution ordering the return of United Nationsweapons inspectors to Iraq and requiring the Iraqigovernment to specify what weapons of mass destruc-tion it still possessed. It was a rare moment in whichsuperpower America bowed to the authority of the inter-national body and in which the Security Council ac-knowledged the need to take firm and forceful action toenforce its resolutions.

When the new United Nations inspectors in Iraqfailed to find any evidence of banned weapons, the splitwidened between those nations wanting to continue


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inspections and those, led by the United States andBritain, wanting to intervene militarily. Abandoning ef-forts to gain Security Council authorization, an Ameri-can-led “coalition of the willing” invaded Iraq in March2003. On the eve of the invasion, General Brent Scow-croft, a former national security adviser to the elder Pres-ident George Bush, predicted that the United Stateswould pay a high price for the image of American arro-gance and unilateralism that such actions fostered.

By the time the new Persian Gulf war began, the over-whelming international sympathy the United States hadreceived after September 11 had evaporated. Public dis-approval ran well over 80 percent in Russia and in NATOallies France, Germany, and Turkey (whose parliamentvoted not to allow American troops to attack Iraq fromTurkish soil). Public opinion in most of the Muslim worldwas almost unanimously against the intervention. Evenin Britain and Poland, which sent troops to Iraq, mostpeople disapproved of the war. Not surprisingly, the warset off large antiwar demonstrations around the world anddrew strong criticism from prominent religious leaders.

The war took only six weeks to drive Saddam’s regimefrom power and showcased the technological precisionof America’s latest bombs and missiles. Iraqi looters didmore damage to utility plants, oil well equipment, andgovernment offices than had the bombing. However, thehidden weapons of mass destruction, on whose removalthe Bush administration had justified the war, were notfound.

In May the Security Council authorized the Ameri-can and British occupation of Iraq and lifted the sanc-tions on petroleum exports that had been imposed onthe old regime. But American efforts to secure a largerUnited Nations role in rebuilding Iraq faced resistancefrom other world powers, who insisted on curbing Amer-ican control. Meanwhile, sniper attacks and car bomb-ings took a steady toll.

Most Iraqis welcomed the end of Saddam’s rule andapplauded his capture, but were eager for American oc-cupiers to leave. They criticized the slow pace of restoringelectricity and water to the cities and the lack of law andorder. They had little faith in the American-nominatedIraqi Governing Council. As in Afghanistan, reestablish-ing political and civil order in Iraq would be a long andcostly process. In September 2003 President Bush an-nounced the price tag for the next year: $87 billion.

The 1990s opened a new chap-ter in the history of global cap-italism. After the collapse ofthe long experiment with state-

managed socialist economies in eastern Europe and the

The GlobalEconomy

Soviet Union, free-market capitalism seemed to be theonly road to economic growth. Free trade could generatenew wealth, but it also brought many problems.

From 1991 to 2000 the world experienced rapid ex-pansion in manufacturing and trade. The burgeoning in-ternational trade of the 1990s tied the world more tightlytogether. Manufactured products were increasingly likelyto be the product of materials and labor from manycountries. Overall, the already developed economies in-creased their wealth the most, but the fastest rates ofgrowth were in developing countries and in economiesmaking a transition from communism. Net private cap-ital flows to developing nations rose almost sevenfoldbetween 1990 and 2000. This was not foreign aid. In-vestors put their funds in countries whose political sta-bility, legal systems, level of education, and labor costspromised the most profitable returns.

The greatest single beneficiary was China. While of-ficially espousing communism, the Chinese governmenttook major steps to open its economy to freer trade andinvestment. Newly opened markets in eastern Europeand the former Soviet Union also received significantprivate investment. Stimulated by foreign investment,the Latin American nations of Brazil, Argentina, andMexico experienced great economic growth. Investorsput much less money into the shaky economies and po-litical systems of sub-Saharan Africa, except for coun-tries with significant petroleum resources.

Electronic transfers via the Internet made it possibleto invest capital quickly; but when conditions becameunfavorable, funds could be withdrawn just as fast.When investors lost faith in Thailand in 1997 and shiftedtheir funds out, the country’s currency and stock valuesplummeted. Political corruption and unrest in Indonesiabrought on a similar capital flight the next year, and thewidening Asian collapse eventually triggered a seriousrecession in Japan, business failures in South Korea, anda slowing of economic growth in China.

Government intervention sometimes helped. WhenMexico’s economy stumbled badly in 1995, U.S. loanguarantees helped it recover rapidly, and by 2001 Mexicohad the largest economy in Latin America. However,when Argentina had to abandon its attempt to link itscurrency to the U.S. dollar in 2001, the value of the Ar-gentine peso plummeted.

Although the largest economies were better able toweather tough times, they were not immune to economicdownturns. The extraordinary economic and stock mar-ket economic boom of the 1990s cooled in 2000 andplunged deeper into recession in the wake of the Sep-tember 11 attacks. The rate of growth in world trade fellfrom 13 percent in 2000 to only 1 percent in 2001.

As Map 33.1 shows, the economic boom of the 1990s

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did little to change historic disparities in regional eco-nomic size and in per capita income in 2002. The giganticU.S. economy continued to be larger than the economiesof the next five countries combined—Japan, Germany,Great Britain, China (including Hong Kong), and France.One person in six lived in a country whose per capita in-come was over $20,000, while four of every six lived incountries with per capita incomes of under $2,000. Somesixty countries grew poorer in the 1990s, but there weresome remarkable overall improvements in the lengthand quality of life. The average lifespan grew by ten yearsin three decades. Infant mortality fell by 40 percent andadult illiteracy by 50 percent. However, every day manythousands still died of preventable diseases such asmalaria, cholera, and tuberculosis.

To promote economic growthand reduce their vulnerabili-ties, many countries joinedwith their neighbors in free-

trade zones and regional trade associations (see Map33.2). The granddaddy of these is the European Union(EU), most of whose members replaced their coins andbills with a new common currency (the Euro) in 2002. Tennew members from eastern Europe and the Mediter-ranean were admitted in May 2004. Turkey, Bulgaria,and Romania were hoping to join. Despite the EU’s ex-pansion, the North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA), which eliminated tariffs among the UnitedStates, Canada, and Mexico in 1994, governed the world’slargest free-trade zone. A South American free tradezone, Mercosur, created by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay,and Uruguay in 1991 is the world’s third largest tradinggroup. In 2002 Mercosur decided to allow the free move-ment of people within its area and gave equal employ-ment rights to the citizens of all member states. PresidentBush promoted a Free Trade Area of the Americas, whichwould include all the democracies of the Western Hemi-sphere. Chile was the first to sign on. Other free tradeassociations operate in West Africa, southern Africa,Southeast Asia, Central America, the Pacific basin, andthe Caribbean.

Because of the inequalities and downturns that areintrinsic to capitalism, the global economic bodies thattry to manage world trade and finance find it hard to con-vince poorer nations that they are not only concernedwith the welfare of richer countries. In 1995 the world’smajor trading powers established the World Trade Or-ganization (WTO) to replace GATT (see Chapter 31). TheWTO encourages reduced trading barriers and enforcesinternational trade agreements. Despite the member-

Managing theGlobal Economy

ship of some 150 nations, the WTO has many critics, asbecame evident in Seattle in 1999, when street demon-strations, partly organized by American labor unionsfearful of foreign competition, forced the organization tosuspend a meeting. Moreover, the seven richest nationsplus Russia form the Group of Eight (G-8), whose annualmeetings have an enormous impact on internationaltrade and politics and also attract a variety of protestors.

Countries in economic trouble have little choice butto turn to the international financial agencies for fundsto keep things from getting worse. The InternationalMonetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank make their assis-tance conditional on internal economic reforms that areoften politically unpopular, such as terminating govern-ment subsidies for basic foodstuffs, cutting social pro-grams, and liberalizing investment. While the bitter pillof economic reform may be good in the long run, it alsofuels criticism of the international economic system.

The emphasis on free trade led to changes in theterm of government-to-government aid programs. Dur-ing the Cold War countries had often gained funds foreconomic development by allying themselves with oneof the superpowers. In the decade after the Cold Warended, however, foreign economic aid to poor nationsfell by a third. On an African tour in 2000 President Clin-ton told African countries that the days of large hand-outs were over and that they would have to rely on theirown efforts to expand their economies.

In the face of rising criticism at home and protests atinternational meetings, world leaders in the 2000s havepledged to increase attention to the problem of eco-nomic backwardness, especially in Africa. At a Millen-nium Summit in September 2000 the states of the UnitedNations agreed to make sustainable development andthe elimination of world poverty their highest priorities.A 2002 United Nations meeting in Monterrey, Mexico,called for special commitments to Africa. Recent G-8summits endorsed new joint efforts to promote Africandevelopment. Late in 2002 President Bush proposed asubstantial increase in American foreign aid. If funded,his Millennium Challenge Account would increase theamount of nonmilitary foreign aid by 50 percent. Firstpriority would be given to poor countries that crackeddown on corruption, promoted civil liberties, increasedspending on education and health, and followed free-market economic principles.

Freer trade has also put pressure on developed coun-tries to change domestic aid programs. Though agricul-ture occupies a small part of the work force in Europeand the United States, agricultural interests are politi-cally powerful. Government subsidies have led to vastoverproduction of some products. Some of this surplus

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food is distributed as famine relief, but critics point outthat subsidies to farmers in developed countries actuallyhurt farmers in poor countries who cannot competewith the artificially low prices that subsidies produce. AWTO meeting collapsed in 2003 when richer countriesrefused to meet the demands of delegates from poorerstates to reduce agricultural subsidies.

TRENDS AND VISIONS

As people around the world faced the opportunitiesand problems of globalization, they tried to make

sense of these changes in terms of their own cultures andbeliefs. With 6 billion people, the world is big enough toinclude a variety of different approaches, from intenselyreligious or local visions to broad secular views thatchampion a new universal value system. In some cases,however, conflicting visions fed violence.

In 1999 Thomas L. Friedman, aveteran Middle East and inter-national reporter and colum-

nist for the New York Times, published a penetratinganalysis of the state of the planet. “The world is ten years

A New Age?

old,” proclaimed the opening essay of The Lexus and theOlive Tree. Friedman argued that the political and eco-nomic changes associated with the collapse of the SovietEmpire and the technological advances (computers,satellite and fiber optic communications, and the Inter-net) that had made possible a huge drop in telecommu-nications costs had ushered in a new age of political andeconomic globalization. In his view, global capitalismand American power and values characterized this newera of history, which held the promise (but not the cer-tainty) of increased prosperity, peace, democracy, envi-ronmental protection, and human rights.

In Friedman’s analysis, the Lexus, a splendidly engi-neered Japanese luxury car, produced for a global marketon a computer-run assembly line of mechanical robots,symbolizes global progress and prosperity, and the inter-national cooperation needed to achieve them. A MiddleEastern symbol, the olive tree, stands for the communalvalues of family, ethnicity, and religion that give people’slives stability, depth, and meaning.

To Friedman both the Lexus and the olive tree repre-sent important human values, and his book suggests thatthey are mutually compatible. But his optimism aboutthe new age is guarded. He believes that the benefits ofglobal integration will offset its threats to established or-der. Still, his years of observation of Middle Eastern con-flicts make him wary of the dangers that excessive

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devotion to parochial ethnic and religious values maypose to global progress. His book is less inclined to criti-cize the excesses of global capitalism.

The September 11 terrorist attacks that were beingplanned as Friedman wrote were a clear illustration ofthe extreme olive-tree mentalities he warned about, asare many other simmering conflicts around the world.The steeper declines in the value of the stock marketsgenerally and especially of telecommunication compa-nies that came in the wake of 9/11 and growing revela-tions of excessive greed and dishonesty by top executivesin key companies shook many people’s faith in free-market capitalism. Friedman and others would arguethat such events were normal (and self-correcting) as-pects of free markets, but they also suggest that the rapidpace of economic growth in the 1990s cannot be countedon. Moreover, the war on terrorism declared by PresidentBush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks promised to be along and costly global struggle with an uncertain out-come.

Was Friedman too optimistic in seeing the dawningof an age of great promise? Many who thought so citedThe Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the WorldOrder, in which Harvard political scientist Samuel P.Huntington argues that the end of the Cold War left theworld divided into distinct regional civilizations. ForHuntington, religious and cultural differences are morelikely to shape the future than are globalizing economic,political, and communication forces. It is impossible topredict whether global clashes or global convergence aremore likely to dominate the future. Recent trends seemto point in both directions.

The turn of the millenniumwas an occasion for some verybig parties. It also raised moreserious issues. Fearing all sorts

of mix-ups, businesses and governments spent vastsums to ensure that computers would recognize datesbeginning with 2000. Some religious groups believedthat a new era had arrived in which cosmic battles wouldbe waged for the heart and soul of humanity.

Since the calendar now used around the world wasdevised to count the years since the birth of Jesus Christ,Christians had special reason to celebrate the millen-nium. The Catholic Church proclaimed the year 2000 aholy year and marked it with all sorts of special celebra-tions, including a vast gathering at its headquarters inRome. With some 2 billion adherents, Christianity is theworld’s largest religious tradition and the most wide-spread globally (see Map 33.3). Well established in theAmericas, Europe, and Africa, Christianity has been

ChristianMillenarianism

spreading rapidly in East Asia; for example, Christians arenow more numerous than Buddhists in South Korea. Af-ter the fall of the official atheistic communist regime,many Russians returned to the Russian Orthodox Churchor joined new evangelical Christian congregations.

As had sometimes happened in the past, someChristians looked for deeper meaning in the calendarchange. Many turned to the prophetic account of theend of the world in the final book of the New Testament,the Apocalypse or Book of Revelation. This book foretoldthat three sets of seven violent struggles would lead tothe final triumph of good over evil. With victory achieved,Christ would return to Earth, the good would be taken toHeaven, and the material world would come to an end.Guided by a tradition that held that since God had cre-ated the world in six days, the end of the world wouldcome after the passage of six millennia, some Christiansheld that the year 2000 marked the beginning of the end,and they saw the events around them in terms of theseprophecies.

The extent of this Christian millenarianism wassuggested by the huge sales of the Left Behind series ofnovels, which described the events foretold in Revela-tion in vivid present-day settings. By the end of 2001 theten novels by Tim LaHaye, a Baptist minister, and Jerry B.Jenkins, a syndicated cartoonist, had sold an unprece-dented 50 million copies. Whatever the precise strengthof Christian millenarianism, its supporters are well or-ganized and skillfully use the Internet and other forms ofmass communication to circulate their ideas.

While social scientists are inclined to interpret mil-lenarian and other prophetic beliefs as efforts to findcertainty in an uncertain world, believers accept theprophesies in Revelation as the guiding reality of theirreligious lives. To believers, the proliferation of secularvalues and permissive attitudes toward moral issues,disturbances in the weather, and the events of 9/11 areall signs of the impending confrontation between goodand evil.

Because of their belief that only Christians can besaved, millenarian Christians have stepped up efforts toconvert Muslims and Jews. These efforts have causedmuch resentment in Middle Eastern lands, where someMuslims have assaulted Christian missions. An Ameri-can missionary in Lebanon was assassinated in 2002 fortrying to convert Muslims.

A small part of millenarianism was associated withcult movements that came to violent ends. An armedconfrontation with the FBI in Waco, Texas, in 1993 de-stroyed a small group called the Branch Davidians led byDavid Koresh. This was followed by ritual murders andcollective suicides of members of the Heaven’s Gatemovement in California in 1997 and of members of the


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Order of the Solar Temple in France and Quebec in 1999.Such movements are easily dismissed as lunatic fringegroups, but they were not alone or uniquely Christian. In1995 members of Aum Shinrikyo, a Buddhist sect whosefounder had predicted that the world would end in 1999,released nerve gas in the Tokyo subway system.

People in other faiths werealso interpreting contemporaryevents from deeply religious

perspectives. In the Jewish calendar a millennial change(the year 6000) will not arrive until 2240 C.E., but manyon the religious right in Israel interpret the struggle ofmodern Israel to survive and prosper in terms of the Bib-lical accounts of the Israelites’ conquests more than fourthousand years ago. Some Christian believers have goneto Israel to support Jewish settlers’ efforts to reclaim thelands of the ancient Jewish kingdoms. In mid-2003, asPresident Bush was securing agreement to a new peace

Militant Islam

plan between Israel and the Palestinian Muslims whohave occupied these lands for centuries, a conservativeJewish Israeli cabinet minister insisted that Palestiniansmust understand that God had given all of these landsto the Jews. The day the new peace plan was signed, tenthousand Israelis demonstrated against recognizingPalestinian rights to any territory that had been part ofthe ancient kingdom of Israel. Like others before it, thepeace plan soon collapsed. For greater security againstsuicide bombers, Israel began walling off West BankPalestinian lands.

Muslims have also drawn varying conclusions aboutthe age of globalization. Moderate views predominate,but extreme and intolerant groups have been on the rise.Even though adherents to Islam number well over a bil-lion globally and the numbers are increasing rapidly,many Muslims feel frustrated. The last of the Islamicempires disappeared after the defeat of the OttomanEmpire in the First World War, and three decades of Eu-ropean occupation of former Ottoman lands followed.


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Since becoming independent in the 1950s, some MiddleEastern states have earned great wealth from petroleumexports, but per capita income in Muslim-majority coun-tries in 2002 averaged half as much as in the world as awhole. No Muslim state is a major industrial or geopolit-ical power. The spread of mass media has also fed dis-content by making ordinary Muslims more aware of lifein the outside world and of the wide gaps in income andprivilege within Muslim societies.

This failure of economic, social, and political mod-ernization to advance along the lines envisioned by na-tionalist leaders of the twentieth century has led manyMuslims to seek consolation in their sacred past. Forsome, it has also encouraged hostility to the seductionsof the modern world and a rekindling of the Islamicstruggle against non-Muslim infidels. In Indonesia, Nige-ria, and other places, Muslim militants have assaultednon-Muslim minorities, often provoking retaliations.

Others have focused their hostility on external ene-mies. Much resentment centers on Israel, a Jewish stateestablished in a part of the world that had been Muslimfor many centuries. Israel’s military victories over its Is-lamic neighbors have been particularly painful, as hasbeen the failure to create the Palestinian state envisagedby the United Nations resolution in 1947. Israel’s greatereconomic prosperity and technological sophisticationare also frustrating to its Muslim neighbors.

Because American aid and support have helped Is-rael acquire the most powerful military force in the Mid-dle East, much Islamic hatred and opposition has beendirected against the United States. Many militants alsodenounce American support for unpopular and undem-ocratic governments in Muslim-majority countries, es-pecially Saudi Arabia. Although most Muslims admireAmerican technological and cultural achievements, a2002 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People andthe Press found that the majority of Egyptians, Jordani-ans, and Pakistanis held a “very unfavorable” opinion ofthe United States. America’s extensive aid to Egypt andPakistan seems to have won it few friends in those coun-tries. The American-led liberation of the Muslim state ofKuwait in the Persian Gulf War of 1990–1991 after a vio-lent takeover by Iraq actually became a rallying issue formany Islamic extremists, in part because of the Ameri-can use of bases in Saudi Arabia, which they consider sa-cred territory.

This view of the world order has many roots, but itreflects an ideological vision of Muslims under attackthat is widely published in the media in Muslim statesand promoted by some Islamic leaders who use religiousideas to justify violent actions. From this perspective thePalestinian suicide bombers in Israel that others call ter-

rorists are martyrs and heroes. Such a vision explainswhy some Muslims celebrated when the Twin Towerscollapsed in New York.

While the actions of militant Muslims are based ontheir perception of complex realities, it is important tokeep in mind that they are also the product of ideolo-gies. A rational explanation of the 9/11 events makes nosense, according to Professor Richard Landes, directorof the Center for Millennial Studies, because Usamabin Laden believes he is fighting “in a cosmic battlethat pits the warriors for truth against the agents ofSatan and evil in this world.” Similarly, Bernard Lewis,a respected senior scholar of Islam, argues that for binLaden “2001 marks the resumption of the war for thereligious dominance of the world that began in the sev-enth century” when Islam was founded.2 Such beliefshelp explain why many Muslims also saw nothing posi-tive in America’s overthrow of the oppressive and un-popular Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001 and whya high proportion of Muslims regarded the Americancampaign to oust Saddam Husain from Iraq in 2003 asfurther American aggression against the Muslim world,rather than as the liberation of Muslims from an oppres-sive dictator.

At the same time as thesereligious visions have gainedstrength, efforts to promote ad-herence to universal standards

of human rights have also gained wider acceptance. Re-ligious leaders had first voiced the notion that all peopleare equal, but the modern human rights movement grewout of the secular statements of the French Declarationof the Rights of Man (1789) and the U.S. Constitution(1788) and Bill of Rights (1791). Over the next century,the logic of universal rights moved Westerners to under-take international campaigns to end slave trading andslavery throughout the world and to secure equal legalrights (and eventually voting rights) for women.

International organizations in the twentieth centurysecured agreement on labor standards, the rules of war,and the rights of refugees. The pinnacle of these effortswas the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passedby the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, whichproclaimed itself “a common standard of achievementfor all peoples and nations.” Its thirty articles condemnedslavery, torture, cruel and inhuman punishment, andarbitrary arrest, detention, and exile. The Declarationcalled for freedom of movement, assembly, and thought.It asserted rights to life, liberty, and security of person; toimpartial public trials; and to education, employment,

Universal Rightsand Values

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and leisure. The principle of equality was most fully ar-ticulated in Article 2:

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms setforth in this Declaration, without distinction of anykind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, orpolitical or other opinion, national or social origin,property, birth or other status.3

This passage reflected an international consensusagainst racism and imperialism and a growing accept-ance of the importance of social and economic equality.Most newly independent countries joining the UnitedNations willingly signed the Declaration because it im-plicitly condemned European colonial regimes.

The idea of universal human rights has not gone un-challenged. Some have asked whether a set of principleswhose origins were so clearly Western could be calleduniversal. Others have been uneasy with the idea of sub-ordinating the traditional values of their culture or reli-gion to a broader philosophical standard. Despite theseobjections, important gains have been made in imple-menting these standards.

Besides the official actions of the United Nationsand individual states, individual human rights activists,often working through international philanthropic bod-ies known as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),have been important forces for promoting human rights.Amnesty International, founded in 1961 and numberinga million members in 162 countries by the 1990s, con-centrates on gaining the freedom of people who havebeen tortured or imprisoned without trial and cam-paigns against summary execution by government deathsquads or other gross violations of rights. Arguing thatno right is more fundamental than the right to life, otherNGOs have devoted themselves to famine relief, refugeeassistance, and health care around the world. MédecinsSans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), founded in1971, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for1999 for themedical assistance it offered in scores of crisis situations.

The rising tendency to see health care as a humanright has made a new disease, acquired immune defi-ciency syndrome (AIDS), the focus of particular attentionbecause its incidence and high mortality rate are closelyassociated with poverty, and treatments are very expen-sive. Over 40 million people worldwide are infected withthe HIV retrovirus that causes AIDS. Of them, 70 percentlive in sub-Saharan Africa (see Figure 33.1). The numberof sick and dying is already large enough in some parts ofAfrica to pose a significant risk to the production of food,the care of the young and elderly, and the staffing ofschools. Because sexual promiscuity among young menserving in the armed forces has made them especiallylikely to be infected, death and incapacitation from AIDS

has significantly imperiled military preparedness inparts of Africa. Great international efforts are beingmade to provide drugs at a lower cost, so that moreAfricans can be treated. Because the disease is not con-tagious except by very intimate contact, education is amore cost-effective way of stemming the spread of AIDS.In Uganda, South Africa, and Ethiopia, for example, edu-cation campaigns have reduced the incidence of newHIV infections in targeted groups. An inexpensive drughas also been successful in cutting the transmission ofthe infection from mother to infant during childbirth.

Other international agreements have made geno-cide a crime and have promoted environmental protec-tion of the seas, of Antarctica, and of the atmosphere.The United States and a few other nations were greatlyconcerned that such treaties would unduly limit theirsovereignty or threaten their national interests. For thisreason the U.S. Congress delayed ratifying the 1949 con-vention on genocide until 1986. More recently the UnitedStates drew widespread international criticism for de-manding exemption for Americans from the jurisdictionof the International Criminal Court, created in 2002 totry international criminals, and for withdrawing in 2001from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol requiring industrial na-tions to sharply reduce emissions of pollutants thatdamage the atmosphere (see Environment and Technol-ogy: Global Warming). To many nations it seemed as if


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Global Warming

Until the 1980s environmental alarms focused mainly onlocalized episodes of air and water pollution, exposure to

toxic substances, waste management, and the disappearanceof wilderness. The development of increasingly powerfulcomputers and complex models of ecological interactions inthe 1990s, however, made people aware of the global scopeof certain environmental problems.

Many scientists and policymakers came to perceive globalwarming, the slow increase of the temperature of the Earth’slower atmosphere, as an environmental threat requiring pre-ventive action on an international scale. The warming iscaused by a layer of atmospheric gases (carbon dioxide,methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone) that allow solar radiationto reach Earth and warm it, but keep infrared energy (heat)from radiating from Earth’s surface into space. Called thegreenhouse effect, this process normally keeps the Earth’stemperature at a level suitable for life. However, increases ingreenhouse-gas emissions—particularly from the burning offossil fuels in industry and transportation—have added tothis insulating atmospheric layer.

Recent events have confirmed predictions of global tem-perature increases and melting glaciers and icecaps. Globally,the five warmest years on record were 1995, 1997, 1998,2001, and 2002. Record heat hit northern Europe in the sum-mer of 2003. Greenland glaciers and Arctic Ocean sea icemelted at record rates during 2002, and a huge section of theAntarctic ice shelf broke up and floated away. Andean gla-

ciers are shrinking so fast they could disappear in a decade,imperiling water supplies for drinking, irrigation, and hydro-electric production. Drought has affected much of the UnitedStates in recent years, and in 2002 Australia experienced the“Big Dry,” its worst drought in a century.

Despite this evidence, governments of the industrializedcountries that produce the most greenhouse gasses havebeen slow to adopt measures stringent enough to reduceemissions because of the negative effects they believe thiscould have on their economies. There is also fear that it maybe already too late to reverse global warming. The pledgesthat representatives from 178 countries made at the firstEarth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to limit their increasein greenhouse-gas production have so far been ineffective.Fearing limits on gas emissions could cripple their plans forindustrial and economic expansion, many nations hesitatedto sign the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the first internationalagreement to impose penalties on countries that failed tocut greenhouse-gas emissions. It was a major environmentalvictory when Japan added its signature in March 2001, but tothe consternation of many world leaders President GeorgeW. Bush has rejected the agreement. The war on terrorismalso appears to have made the environment a lower Ameri-can priority. Until the destructive effects of global warming,such as the inundation of coastal regions and large cities byrising sea levels, match the destruction of terrorists, the po-litical focus is unlikely to shift.

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Americans, with the world’s greatest industrial economy,were trying to exempt themselves from standards thatthey wanted to impose on other nations.

The women’s rights move-ment, which began on bothsides of the North Atlantic in

the nineteenth century, became an important humanrights issue in the twentieth century. Rights for womenbecame accepted in Western countries and were en-shrined in the constitutions of many nations newly freed

Women’s Rights

from colonial rule. . A series of international conferenceson the status of women sponsored by the Division for theAdvancement of Women of the United Nations haveshown the international importance of women’s rights atthe end of the twentieth century. The first meeting, heldin Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985, attracted seventeen thousandwomen from all over the world. The delegates focusedon equal access to education and jobs and on quality-of-life matters such as ending sexual exploitation and gain-ing control of reproduction. A second conference inBeijing in 1995 also examined a variety of women’s issuesand perspectives, in some cases to the discomfort of theChinese government. The Beijing conference recognizedthe advances that had been made in the status of womenand called for efforts to remove remaining obstacles toequality, including those caused by poverty.

Besides highlighting the similarity of the problemswomen faced around the world, the conferences alsorevealed great variety in the views and concerns ofwomen. Feminists from the West, who had been accus-tomed to dictating the agenda and who had pushed forthe liberation of women in other parts of the world,sometimes found themselves accused of having narrowconcerns and condescending attitudes. Some non-Western women complained about Western feminists’endorsement of sexual liberation and about the deterio-ration of family life in the West. They found Western fem-inists’ concern with matters such as comfortable clothingmisplaced and trivial compared to the issues of povertyand disease.

Other cultures came in for their share of criticism.Western women and many secular leaders in Muslimcountries protested Islam’s requirement that a womancover her head and wear loose-fitting garments to con-ceal the shape of her body, practices enforced by law incountries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless,many outspoken Muslim women voluntarily donnedconcealing garments as expressions of personal belief,statements of resistance to secular dictatorship, or de-fense against coarse male behavior. Much Western criti-cism focused on the African custom of circumcisinggirls, a form of genital mutilation that can cause chronicinfections or permanently impair sexual enjoyment.While not denying the problems this practice can leadto, many African women saw deteriorating economicconditions, rape, and AIDS as more important issues.

The conferences were more important for the at-tention they focused on women’s issues than for thesolutions they generated. The search for a universally ac-cepted women’s rights agenda proved elusive because oflocal concerns and strong disagreement on abortion andother issues. Nevertheless, increases in women’s educa-


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tion, access to employment, political participation, andcontrol of fertility augured well for the eventual achieve-ment of gender equality.

Such efforts raised the prominence of human rightsas a global concern and put pressure on governments toconsider human rights when making foreign policy deci-sions. Skeptics observed, however, that a Western coun-try could successfully prod a non-Western country toimprove its human rights performance—for example, bygranting women more equal access to education and ca-reers—but that reverse criticism of a Western country of-ten fell on deaf ears—for example, condemnation of thedeath penalty in the United States. For such critics thehuman rights movement was not as an effort to makethe world more humane but another form of Westerncultural imperialism, a club with which to beat formercolonial societies into submission. Still, support for uni-versal rights has grown, especially because increasingglobalization has made common standards of behaviormore important.

GLOBAL CULTURE

Along with the human rights movement, other kindsof cultural globalization were also proceeding rap-

idly at the turn of the millennium. A global language, aglobal educational system, and global forms of artisticexpression have all come into being. Trade, travel, andmigration have made a common culture necessary. Elec-tronic communications that were once confined tomembers of a jet-setting elite have enabled global cul-tural influences to move deeper into many societies, anda sort of global popular culture has also emerged. Thesechanges have angered some and delighted others.

Although cultural influencesfrom every continent travelaround the world, the fact thatthe most pervasive elements

of global culture have their origins in the West raisesconcerns in many quarters about cultural imperialism.Critics complain that entertainment conglomerates areflooding the world’s movie theaters and television screenswith Western tastes and styles and that manufacturersare flooding world markets with Western goods—bothrelying on sophisticated advertising techniques that pro-mote consumption and cultural conformity. In this view,global marketing is an especially insidious effort notonly to overwhelm the world with a single Western out-

The Media andthe Message

look shaped by capitalist ideology, but also to suppressor devalue traditional cultures and alternative ideolo-gies. As the leader of the capitalist world, the UnitedStates is seen as the primary culprit.

But in truth, technology plays a more central rolethan ideology in spreading Western culture. Even thoughimperialist forces old and new shape choices, stronglydemocratic forces are also at work as people around theworld make their selections in the cultural marketplace.Thus, a diversity of voices is more characteristic of cul-tural globalization than the cultural imperialism thesismaintains.

The pace of cultural globalization began to quickenduring the economic recovery after World War II. TheHollywood films and American jazz recordings that hadbecome popular in Europe and parts of Asia continuedto spread. But the birth of electronic technology openedcontacts with large numbers of people who could neverhave afforded to go to a movie or buy a record.

The first step was the development of cheap transis-tor radios that could run for months on a couple ofsmall batteries. Perfected by American scientists at BellTelephone Laboratories in 1948, solid-state electronictransistors replaced power-hungry and less reliableelectron tubes in radios and a wide array of other de-vices. Just as tube radios had spread in Europe andAmerica in the decades before the war, small portabletransistor radios, most made in Japan and elsewhere inAsia, spread rapidly in parts of the world where homeslacked electricity.

Because the transistor radios sold in Asia and Africawere designed to receive shortwave broadcasts, theybrought people in remote villages the news, views, andmusic that American, European, Soviet, and Chinesetransmitters beamed to the world. For the first time inhistory, the whole world could learn of major politi-cal and cultural events simultaneously. Although suchbroadcasts came in local and regional languages, manywere in English. Electronic audiotape and CD playersadded to the diversity of music available to individualseverywhere.

Television, made possible by the invention of anelectron scanning gun in 1928, became widely availableto consumers in Western countries in the 1950s. Inpoorer parts of the world TVs were not common until the1980s and 1990s, after mass production and cheap tran-sistors made sets more affordable and reliable. Outsidethe United States, television broadcasting was usually agovernment monopoly at first, following the pattern oftelegraph and postal service and radio broadcasting.Governments expected news reports and other pro-gramming to disseminate a unified national viewpoint.

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Government monopolies eroded as the high cost oftelevision production opened up global markets for re-broadcasts of American soap operas, adventure series,and situation comedies. By the 1990s a global network ofsatellites brought privately owned television broadcast-ing to even remote areas of the world, and the VCR(videocassette recorder) brought an even greater varietyof programs to people everywhere. British programsfound a secondary market in the United States, Canada,Australia, and other countries. As a result of wider circu-lation of programming, people often became familiarwith different dialects of English and other languages.People in Portugal, for example, who in the 1960s hadfound it difficult to understand Brazilian Portuguese,have become avid fans of Brazilian soap operas. Immi-grants from Albania and North Africa often arrive in Italywith a command of Italian learned from Italian stationswhose signals they could pick up at home.

Further internationalization of culture resulted fromsatellite transmission of TV signals. Specializing in rockmusic videos aimed at a youth audience, MTV (MusicTelevision) became an international enterprise offeringspecial editions in different parts of the world. Musicvideos shown in Uzbekistan˚, for example, often fea-tured Russian bands, and Chinese groups appeared inMTV programs shown in Singapore. CNN (Cable NewsNetwork) expanded its international market after be-coming the most-viewed and informative news sourceduring the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when it broadcast livefrom Baghdad. Despite CNN’s fundamentally Americanview of the news, its round-the-clock coverage andglobal resources began to supplant other commercialand government news programming as the best sourceof information about rapidly developing events. By thenew millennium global satellite networks (Fox, Sky) as-sembled by Rupert Murdock and new regional networkscompeted for viewers.

The Internet, a linkage of academic, government,and business computer networks developed in the 1960s,became a major cultural phenomenon. Personal com-puters proliferated in the 1980s, and with the establish-ment of the easy-to-use graphic interface of the WorldWide Web in 1994, the number of Internet users sky-rocketed. Myriad new companies formed to exploit “e-commerce,” the commercial dimension of the Inter-net. In the new century many college students spent lesstime studying conventional books and scholarly re-sources than they spent exploring the Web for informa-tion and entertainment.

As had happened so often throughout history,technological developments had unanticipated conse-quences. Although the new telecommunications andentertainment technologies derived disproportion-ately from American invention, industry, and culturalcreativity, Japan and other East Asian nations came todominate the manufacture and refinement of com-puter devices. In the 1990s Japan introduced digital tel-evision broadcasting at about the time that diskscontaining digitized movies and computer programswith movie-like action became increasingly available.In the early 2000s digital cameras, DVD players, andnew generations of cell phones became popular, pro-viding opportunities for companies in a variety of de-veloping countries to capture a corner of the market. Incontrast to these rapid changes in technology, Western,especially American, cultural domination of the con-tent of the Web has changed more slowly, but peoplearound the world can adapt the medium to their ownpurposes.

New technologies changedperceptions of culture as wellas its distribution around theworld and among different

social classes. For most of history, popular culture wasfolk culture, highly localized ways of dress, food, mu-sic, and expression. Only the educated and urban fewhad access to the riches of a broader “great tradition,”such as Confucianism in East Asia or Western culturein Europe and the Americas. The schools of modernnation-states promoted national values and beliefs,and tastes in painting, literature, and art. Govern-ments also promoted a common language or dialectand frequently suppressed local traditions and lan-guages. In a more democratic way, the transistorhelped break down barriers and create a global popu-lar culture that transcended regional great traditionsand national cultures.

Initially, the content of global pop culture was heav-ily American. Singer Michael Jackson was almost aswell known to the youth of Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania)and Bangkok (Thailand) as to American fans. Basket-ball star Michael Jordan became a worldwide celebrity,heavily promoted by Nike, McDonald’s, and television.American television programs such as Wheel of For-tune and Friends acquired immense followings and in-spired local imitations. In the late twentieth centuryAmerican movies, which had long had great popularappeal, substantially increased their share of world

The Spread ofPop Culture


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markets. In the 1990s the vast majority of the most pop-ular films in Europe were American made. Many Euro-peans complained loudly about this American culturalimperialism—and then bought tickets to see the latestHollywood spectacular.

As with music and fast food, companies spent heav-ily to promote profitable overseas markets, but theUnited States did not have a lock on global pop culture.Latin American soap operas, telenovelas, have a vast fol-lowing in the Americas, eastern Europe, and elsewhere.Bombay, India, long the largest producer of films in theworld, is now making more films for an international au-dience, rather than just for the home market. Bruce Leepopularized kung fu (Chinese martial arts) movies. Asophisticated kung fu film, Crouching Tiger, HiddenDragon by Hong Kong-born director Ang Lee, was verypopular in the United States and won four AcademyAwards for 2000, including one for the best foreign-language film.

In the post–World War II decades American, Euro-pean, and Japanese companies sought internationalmarkets for their products. In the 1970s and 1980s Amer-ican brand names like Levi’s, Coca-Cola, Marlboro,Gillette, McDonald’s, and Kentucky Fried Chicken wereglobal phenomena. But in time Asian names—Hitachi,Sony, Sanyo, and Mitsubishi— were blazoned in neonand on giant video screens on the sides of skyscrapers,along with European brands such as Nestlé, Mercedes,Pirelli, and Benetton. The location of manufacturingplants overseas and the acquisition of corporate opera-tions by foreign buyers rendered such global firms astransnational as the products they sell.

The content of international pop culture does nothave to remain any more monolithic than the typicalMcDonald’s lunch, which consists of a meat pattynamed for a German city, potatoes prepared in a Frenchmanner, and a soft drink named after the South Ameri-can coca leaves and West African kola that were its origi-nal ingredients. Popular music also became increasinglyinternational. Latin American styles extended their ap-peal beyond the Americas. The hybrid rhythms known asAfropop spread around Africa and found fans in Europeand the Americas.

While the globalization of pop-ular culture has been criticized,cultural links across nationaland ethnic boundaries at a

more elite level have generated little controversy. Theend of the Cold War reopened intellectual and cultural

Emerging Global Culture

contacts between former adversaries, making possiblesuch things as Russian-American collaboration on spacemissions and extensive business contacts among for-mer rivals. The English language, modern science, andhigher education became the key elements of this globalculture.

The emergence of English as the first global lan-guage depended on developments that had been build-ing for centuries. The British Empire introduced thelanguage to far-flung colonies. When the last parts of the

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empire gained independence after World War II, mostformer colonies chose to continue using English as anofficial language because it provided national unity anda link to the outside world that the dozens or hundredsof local languages could not. After independence, repre-sentatives of former British colonies formed the Com-monwealth on the basis of their shared language andcommercial ties. Newly independent countries thatmade a local language official for nationalist reasons of-ten found the decision counterproductive. Indian na-tionalists had pushed for Hindi to be India’s officiallanguage, but they found that students taught in Hindiwere unable to compete internationally because of poorknowledge of English. Sri Lanka, which had made Sin-hala its official language in 1956, reversed itself after lo-cal reporters revealed in 1989 that prominent officialswere sending their children to English-medium privateschools.

The use of English as a second language was greatlystimulated by the importance of the United States inpostwar world affairs. Individuals recognized the impor-tance of mastering English for successful business,diplomatic, and military careers. After the collapse of So-viet domination, students in eastern Europe flocked tostudy English instead of Russian. Ninety percent of stu-dents in Cambodia (a former French colony) choose tostudy English, even though a Canadian agency offers asizable cash bonus if they will study French. In the 1990sChina made the study of English as a second languagenearly universal from junior high school onwards, butalso forced an English-medium school in Hong Kong toteach most subjects in Chinese.

English has become the language of choice for mostinternational academic conferences, business meetings,and diplomatic gatherings. International organizationsthat provide equal status to many languages, such as theUnited Nations and the European Union, tend to con-duct all informal committee meetings in English. Eng-lish has even replaced Latin as the working languagefor international consultations in the Catholic Church.In cities throughout the world, signs and notices are nowposted in the local language and English.

The utility of English as a global language is also ev-ident in the emergence of an international literature inEnglish (see Diversity and Dominance: World Litera-ture in English). The trend has been evident for decadesin former British colonies in Africa, where most writersuse English to reach both a national audience and aninternational one. Wole Soyinka, the first sub-SaharanAfrican to win the Nobel Prize in literature for 1986,wrote in English, the national language of Nigeria,

rather than his native Yoruba. When Arundhati Roy wonthe prestigious Booker Prize in 1997 for The God ofSmall Things, a novel set in her native state of Kerala insouthwest India, she was part of an English-languageliterary tradition that has been growing in India for acentury. V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad, winner of the NobelPrize in literature for 2001, is a good example of the wayglobal migration has fostered the use of English.Naipaul’s ancestors had emigrated from India in thenineteenth century.


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World literature remains highly diverse in form andlanguage, but science and technology have becomestandardized components of global culture. Though im-perialism helped spread the Western disciplines of biol-ogy, chemistry, and physics around the world, theirpopularity continued to expand even after imperial sys-tems ended because they worked so much better thanother approaches to the natural world. Their truth wasuniversal even if plants and animals continue to be clas-sified in Latin and the less common elements are calledby names originally derived from Latin and Greek.Global manufacturing could not function without acommon system of applied science. Because of their sci-entific basis Western medicine and drugs are increas-ingly accepted as the best treatments, even though manycultures also use traditional remedies.

The third pillar of global elite culture is the univer-sity. The structure and curricula of modern universitiesare nearly indistinguishable around the world, permit-ting students today to cross national boundaries asfreely as students in the medieval Latin West or the Mus-lim world. Instruction in the pure sciences varies littlefrom place to place, and standardization is nearly ascommon in social science and applied sciences such asengineering and medicine. There may be more diversityin the humanities, but professors and students aroundthe world pay attention to the latest literary theories andtopics of historical interest.

While university subjects are taught in many lan-guages, instruction in English is spreading rapidly. Be-cause discoveries are often first published in English,advanced students in science, business, and interna-tional relations need to know that language to keep upwith the latest developments. The global mobility of pro-fessors and students also promotes classroom instruc-tion in the most global language. Many courses in theNetherlands and in Scandinavian countries have longbeen offered in English, and elsewhere in Europe offer-ing more courses in English was the obvious way to facil-itate the EU’s efforts to encourage students to studyoutside their countries of origin. When South Africaended the apartheid educational systems that had re-quired people to study in their own languages, most stu-dents chose to study in English.

Because global elite culture is so deeply rooted inyears of training, complex institutions, and practicalutility, it is less subject to fads and commercial promo-tion than is global pop culture. Because such elite cul-ture is confined to a distinct minority in most places, itposes little threat to national and folk cultures and,therefore, is much less controversial.

Although protestors regularlydenounce the “Americaniza-tion” of the world, a closer looksuggests that cultural global-

ization is more complex and multifaceted. Just as Eng-lish has largely spread as a second language, so globalculture is primarily a second culture that dominatessome contexts but does not displace other traditions.From this perspective, American music, fast food, andfashions are more likely to add to a society’s options thanto displace local culture. In any event, the amount ofglobal change largely rests with the world’s 6 billionpeople.

Japan first demonstrated that a country with a non-Western culture could perform at a high industrial level.Individuality was less valued in Japan than the ability ofeach person to fit into a group, whether as an employee,a member of an athletic team, or a student in a class.Moreover, the Japanese considered it unmannerly to di-rectly contradict, correct, or refuse the request of an-other person. From a Western point of view, theseJapanese customs seemed to discourage individual ini-tiative and personality development and to preserve tra-ditional hierarchies. Japanese women, for example, eventhough they often worked outside the home, respondedonly slowly to the American and European feminist ad-vocacy of equality in economic and social relations.However, the Japanese approach to social relations waswell suited to an industrial economy. The efficiency,pride in workmanship, and group solidarity of Japaneseworkers, supported by closely coordinated governmentand corporate policies, played a major role in transform-ing Japan from a defeated nation with a demolished in-dustrial base in 1945 to an economic power by the 1980s.

Japan’s success in the modern industrial worldcalled into question the older assumption that success-ful industrialization required the adoption of Westernculture. As awareness of the economic impact of Japa-nese culture and society began to spread, it became ap-parent that Taiwan and South Korea, along withSingapore and Hong Kong (a British colony before beingreunited with China in 1997), were developing dynamicindustrial economies of their own. Other countries seemlikely to follow this model.

This does not mean that the world’s culture diver-sity is secure. Every decade a number of languages ceaseto be spoken, usually as the result of the spread of na-tional languages. Many religious practices are also dis-appearing in the face of the successful expansion ofIslam, Christianity, and other religions, although secu-lar values also play a role. Televised national ceremonies

Enduring CulturalDiversity

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T he linguistic diversity of the world is part of its richness,but it is also an impediment to global communication.

In this essay novelist and Indian diplomat Shashi Tharoorexplains why he chooses to write in English. His decision touse English is not unusual among writers in India and manyother lands where English is not the first language. Mr. Tha-roor has worked for the United Nations since 1978. In 2002he became Under-Secretary-General for Communicationsand Public Information.

For the record, the national languages of India are Hindi(spoken by 30 percent of the population) and English, whichdominates communication among India’s elite. Fourteenother languages are official at the provincial level, with Eng-lish having official status in the provinces of East Bengal,Kerala, and Orissa.

As an Indian writer living in New York, I find myself con-stantly asked a question with which my American confreresnever have to contend: “But whom do you write for?”

In my case, the question is complicated by both geogra-phy and language. I live in the United States (because of mywork at the United Nations) and I write about India; and I doso in English, a language mastered, if the last census is to bebelieved, by only 2 percent of the Indian population. There isan unspoken accusation implicit in the question: Am I notguilty of the terrible sin of inauthenticity, of writing aboutmy country for foreigners? . . .

This is ironic, because few developments in world literaturehave been more remarkable than the emergence, over the lasttwo decades, of a new generation of Indian writers in English.

Beginning with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in1981, they have expanded the boundaries of their craft andtheir nation’s literary heritage, enriching English with therhythms of ancient legends and the larger-then-life com-plexities of another civilization, while reinventing India inthe confident cadences of English prose. Of the unintendedconsequences of empire, it is hard to imagine one of greatervalue to both colonizers and colonized.

The new Indian writers dip into a deep well off memory,and experience far removed from those of their fellow nov-elists in the English language. But whereas Americans or Eng-

lishmen or Australians have also set their fictions in distantlands Indians write of India without exoticism, their insightsundimmed by the dislocations of foreignness. And they do soin an English they have both learned and lived, an English offreshness and vigor, a language that is as natural to them astheir quarrels at the school playground or the surreptitiousnotes they slipped each other in their classrooms.

Yet Indian critics still suggest that there is something ar-tificial and un-Indian about an Indian writing in English. Onecritic disparagingly declared that the acid test ought to be,“Could this have been written only by an Indian?” I havenever been much of a literary theoretician—I always felt thatfor a writer to study literature at university would be likelearning about girls at medical school—but for most, thoughnot all, of my own writing, I would answer that my workscould not only have been written only by an Indian, but onlyby an Indian in English.

I write for anyone who will read me, but first of all for In-dians like myself, Indians who have grown up speaking, writ-ing, playing, wooing and quarreling in English, all over India.(No writer really chooses a language: the circumstances ofhis upbringing ensure that the language chooses him.)

Members of this class have entered the groves of academeand condemned themselves in terms of bitter self-reproach:one Indian scholar, Harish Trivedi, has asserted (in English)that Indian writers in that language are “cut off from the ex-periential mainstream and from that common cultural ma-trix . . . shared with writers of all other Indian languages.” Dr.Trivedi metaphorically cites the fictional English-mediumschool in an R. K. Narayan story where the students must firstrub off the sandalwood-paste caste marks from their fore-heads before they enter its portals: “For this golden gate isonly for the déraciné to pass through, for those who haveerased their antecedents.” [R. K. Narayan (1906–2001) pio-neered writing in English in Madras in the 1930s, publishingthree dozen novels and many short stories and essays.]

It’s an evocative image, even though I thought the secu-lar Indian state was supposed to encourage the erasure ofcasteism from the classroom. But the more important pointis that writers like myself do share a “common cultural ma-trix,” albeit one devoid of helpfully identifying caste marks.

D I V E R S I T Y A N D D O M I N A N C E

WORLD LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

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It is one that consists of an urban upbringing and a pan-national outlook on the Indian reality. I do not think this isany less authentically “Indian” than the worldviews of writ-ers in other Indian languages. Why should the rural peasantor the small-town schoolteacher with his sandalwood-smeared forehead be considered more quintessentially In-dian than the punning collegian or the Bombay socialite,who are as much a part of the Indian reality?

India is a vast and complex country; in Whitman’s phrase,it contains multitudes. I write of an India of multiple truthsand multiple realities, an India that is greater than the sumof its parts. English expresses that diversity better than anyIndian language precisely because it is not “rooted” in anyone region of my vast country. At the same time, as an In-dian, I remain conscious of, and connected to, my pre-urbanand non-Anglophone antecedents: my novels reflect an in-tellectual heritage that embraces the ancient epic the Ma-habharata, the Kerala folk dance called the ottamthullal (ofwhich my father was a gifted practitioner) and the Hindi B-movies of Bollywood [the large movie-making industry ofBombay], as well as Shakespeare, Wodehouse and the Beatles.

As a first-generation urbanite myself, I keep returning tothe Kerala villages of my parents, in my life as in my writing.Yet I have grown up in Bombay, Calicutta and Delhi, Indiancities a thousand miles apart from one another; the motherof my children is half-Kashmiri, half-Bengali; and my ownmother now lives in the southern town of Coimbatore. Thismay be a wider cultural matrix than the good Dr. Trivediimagined, but it draws from a rather broad range of Indianexperience. And English is the language that brings thosevarious threads of my India together, the language in whichmy wife could speak to her mother-in-law, the language thatenables a Calcuttan to function in Coimbatore, the languagethat serves to express the complexity of that polyphonousIndian experience better than any other language I know.

As a novelist, I believe in distracting in order to instruct—my novels are, to some degree, didactic works masqueradingas entertainments. Like Molière I believe that you have to en-tertain in order to edify. But the entertainment, and the ed-ification, might strike different readers differently.

My first novel, The Great Indian Novel, as a satirical rein-vention of the Mahabharata inevitably touches Indians in away that most foreigners will not fully appreciate. But mypublishers in the West enjoyed its stories and the risks it tookwith narrative form. My second, Show Business, did ex-tremely well with American reviewers and readers, who en-joyed the way I tried to portray the lives and stories ofBollywood as a metaphor for Indian society. With India: FromMidnight to the Millennium, an attempt to look back at thelast 50 years of India’s history; I found an additional audi-ence of Indian-Americans seeking to rediscover their roots;their interest has helped the American edition outsell the In-dian one.

In my new novel, Riot, for the first time I have major non-Indian characters, Americans as it happens, and that is boundto influence the way the book is perceived in the UnitedStates, and in India. Inevitably the English fundamentally af-fects the content of each book, but it does not determine theaudience of the writer; as long as translations exist, languageis a vehicle, not a destination.

Of course, there is no shame in acknowledging that Eng-lish is the legacy of the colonial connection, but one no lessuseful and valid than the railway, the telegraphs or the lawcourts that were also left behind by the British. Historically,English helped us to find our Indian voice: that great Indiannationalist Jawaharlal Nehru wrote The Discovery of India inEnglish. But the eclipse of that dreadful phrase “the Indo-Anglian novel” has occurred precisely because Indian writershave evolved well beyond the British connection to theirnative land.

The days when Indians wrote novels in English either toflatter or rail against their colonial masters are well behindus. Now we have Indians in India writing as naturally aboutthemselves in English as Australians or South Africans do,and their tribe has been supplemented by India’s rich dias-pora in the United States, which has already produced a dis-tinctive crop of impressive novelists, with Pulitzer Prizes andNational Book Awards to their names.

Their addresses don’t matter because writers really live in-side their heads and on the page, and geography is merely acircumstance. They write secure of themselves in heritage ofdiversity, and they write free of the anxiety of audience, fortheirs are narratives that appeal as easily to Americans as toIndians—and indeed to readers irrespective of ethnicity.

Surely that’s the whole point about literature—that for abody of fiction to constitute a literature it must rise above itsorigins, its setting, even its language, to render accessible toa reader anywhere some insight into the human condition.Read my books and those of other Indian writers not becausewe’re Indian, not necessarily because you are interested inIndia; but because they are worth reading in and of them-selves. And dear reader, whoever you are, if you pick up oneof my books, ask not for whom I write: I write for you.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS1. What does Shashi Tharoor mean when he states that

his novels could only have been written in English?2. What is the relationship between national literature

and global literature?3. What does the author mean when he says that for writ-

ers “geography is merely a circumstance”?

Source: Shashi Tharoor, “A Bedeviling Question in the Cadence of English,” New YorkTimes, July 30, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted by per-mission.

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or performances for tourists may prevent folk customsand costumes from dying out, but they also tend tostandardize rituals that once had many local variations.While it was possible to recognize the nationality ofpeople from their clothing and grooming a century ago,today most urban men dress the same the world over,although women’s clothing shows much greater variety.As much as one may regret the disappearance orcommercialization of some folkways, most anthropolo-gists would agree that change is characteristic of allhealthy cultures. What doesn’t change risks extinction.

CONCLUSION

Have we entered a golden age, or is the world de-scending into a fiery abyss? The future is unknow-

able, but the study of history suggests that neitherextreme is likely. Golden ages and dark ages are rare, andour understanding of our own time is easily swayed byhopes, fears, and other emotions. If the exuberant opti-mism of the 1990s now seems excessive, the pessimismof the early 2000s may in time seem equally far offthe mark.

What is undeniable is that the turn of the millen-nium has been a time of important global changes. TheIron Curtain that had divided Europe since the end ofthe Second World War fell, taking with it the tensions andrisks of the Cold War. The great Soviet Empire broke up,while dozens of countries joined new economic coali-tions. The bastions of communism embraced capitalismwith varying degrees of enthusiasm. As trading barrierstumbled, world trade surged, creating new wealth andnew inequalities in its distribution.

Aided by new electronic marvels, individuals com-municated around the planet and interacted across cul-tural barriers in ways never before imagined. News ofdisasters and human rights violations brought morerapid responses than ever before. Culturally, the Englishlanguage, higher education, and science formed a viableglobal culture for the elite.

History teaches that change is always uneven. Therate of change in global telecommunications and inter-national economic institutions was notably faster thanin international political institutions. The nation-stateremained supreme. The structure of the United Nationswas little different than at its founding six decades ear-lier. States resisted limits on their autonomy, and themore powerful ones took unilateral actions, whethersupported or opposed by international public opinion.Never before had one state, the United States, stood sofar above the rest.

Rather than giving ground to globalization, manyolder ideas and values continued to be strong. The lesspowerful adapted slowly, dug in their heals to resistchange, or raised voices and fists against it. Protestsforced new attention on global poverty, disease, exploita-tion, and environmental damage that globalizationcaused or failed to relieve. Adjustments were made, buton the whole change on these fronts also came slowly.

In many places religious fundamentalism, ethnicnationalism, and social conservatism seemed to reachnew levels of intensity. In some quarters globalizationfomented and fostered violent responses and provoked anew war on terrorism led by the United States. The re-sulting clashes raised concerns and inspired apocalypticvisions. Adjusting to the new age of globalization wouldbe neither quick nor easy.

■ Key Termsglobalization

ethnic cleansing

weapons of mass destruction

terrorism

Usama bin Laden

World Trade Organization (WTO)

millenarianism

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)

cultural imperialism

pop culture

global culture

■ Suggested ReadingAmong those attempting to describe the world at the turn ofthe millennium are Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld:How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World (1995);Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999);Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Re-making of the World Order (1996); and Paul Kennedy, Preparingfor the Twenty-First Century (1993).

Recent studies of American military policies and the wideningsplit with Europe include Dana Priest, The Mission:Waging Warand Keeping Peace with America’s Military (2003); Robert Kap-lan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the NewWorld Order (2002); Charles A. Kulpchan, The End of the Ameri-can Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-First Century (2002); and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., The Paradox ofAmerican Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go ItAlone (2002).

Mike Moore, a former director-general of the WTO, provides aninsider’s view of the global economy in A World Without Walls:Freedom, Development, Free Trade and Global Governance


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(2003). Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free MarketDemocracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003),offers a quite different perspective.

Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Chris-tianity and Judaism in the Modern World (1994), Philip Jenkins,The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (2002),and Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Is-lam and Modernity in the Middle East (2003), deal with re-cent religious-political movements. Eugen Weber, Apocalypses:Prophesies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs Through the Ages(1999), provides a deeper historical perspective. The Bosniancrisis is well covered in Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy:Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War (1995). Other worldcrises involving international intervention are treated inWilliam J. Durch, ed., UN Peacekeeping, American Policy, andthe Uncivil Wars of the 1990s (1996). Terrorism is well covered byBruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (1998).

Standard reviews of human rights include Thomas Buergen-thal, et al., International Human Rights in a Nutshell, 3d ed.(2002); Carol Devine and Carol Rae Hansen, Human Rights: TheEssential Reference (1999); and Jack Donnelly, International Hu-man Rights, 2d ed. (1998). Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris,Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around theWorld (2003), surveys the condition of women.

The interrelationships between high culture and popular cul-ture during the twentieth century are treated from differentperspectives in Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: CulturalDimensions of Globalization (1996); Peter L. Berger and SamuelHuntington, eds., Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity inthe Contemporary World (2002); Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruc-tion: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures (2002);and Diana Crane, Nobuko Kawashima, and Kenichi Kawasaka,

eds., Global Culture: Media Arts, Policy (2002). Two very read-able books by James B. Twitchell detail the rise of popular cul-ture in the United States and present various reactions to thisphenomenon: Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in Amer-ica (1992) and Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in Amer-ican Culture (1996). Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and theNew Global Capitalism (1999), explores the relationship be-tween a sports star and global marketing.

Some personal accounts of cultural change are Philippe Wamba,Kinship: A Family’s Journey in Africa and America (1999); WilliamDalrymple, The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters(1998); V. S. Naipaul, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Amongthe Converted Peoples (1997); Fergal Keane, A Season of Blood:A Rwandan Journey (1995); Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Free-dom (1994); and Mark Mathabane, African Women: Three Gen-erations (1994).

On global English see David Crystal, English as a Global Lan-guage (1997); Alistaire Pennycock, The Cultural Politics of Eng-lish as an International Language (1994); and Robert Phillipson,Linguistic Imperialism (1992).

■ Notes1. “Liberty’s Great Advance,” The Economist, June 28–July 4,

2003, pp. 5-6.2. Richard Landes, “Apocalyptic Islam and bin Laden,” avail-

able at http://www.mille.org; and Bernard Lewis, “The Re-volt of Islam: When Did the Conflict with the West Begin?”The New Yorker, November 11, 2001.

3. “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” in Twenty-fiveHuman Rights Documents (New York: Center for the Studyof Human Rights, Columbia University, 1994), 6.

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DOCUMENT 5Beijing Women’s Conference in 1995 (photo, p. 896)

DOCUMENT 6World Literature in English (Diversity and Dominance,pp. 902–903)

How does Shashi Tharoor’s argument in Document 6reflect divergent views of the global community?What additional types of documents would helpyou analyze the factors fostering and hindering thepolitical, economic, and cultural integration of theglobal community?

Document-Based QuestionGlobal IntegrationUsing the following documents, analyze the factorsfostering and hindering the political, economic, andcultural integration of the global community.

DOCUMENT 1Map 33.1 Global Distribution of Wealth (p. 886)

DOCUMENT 2Map 33.2 Regional Trade Associations, 2004 (p. 888)

DOCUMENT 3Map 33.3 World Religions (p. 891)

DOCUMENT 4Excerpt from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights(p. 894)

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