Lecture 12.2. Globalization and regional processes
Globalization
More than ever before, the twentieth century world became interconnected through trade, cultural exchange, and political interaction on a mass scale. By the end of the century there was no single system of global hierarchy, beyond the domination of advanced Western nations in the areas of finance, trade, culture, and technology. However, even the European supremacy of past centuries began to be challenged by rising regional powers like China.
Trade organizations
Trade organizations are tasked with regulating trade and investment.
Organization | Description |
World Bank | Created by the United States to ease reconstruction at the end of World War II, the World Bank assembles and distributes loans from wealthier nations to poorer ones. It uses its power to influence development in ways that favor established patterns and parties in the world economy. |
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
| A postwar U.S. creation that coordinates monetary exchange rates to maintain global financial stability. |
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
| An economic group originating in postwar Europe that expanded in 1960 to include other Western-oriented capitalist democracies. |
World Trade Organization (WTO)
| Replaced the postwar General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1995. WTO is a worldwide group that works to promote unrestricted global trade, following the Free Trade theory first put forth by industrial Britain in the nineteenth century. Just as in the past, free trade for competitive industries runs up against the desire for tariff protection for agricultural producers; countries are more willing to depend on trade partners for manufactured goods than they are for their food supply. |
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
| The only example here which does not represent the institutional dominance of the wealthy industrialized West. OPEC was organized in 1960 by four Arab states and Venezuela, as a cartel to raise the price of oil. In 1973, to retaliate against Western support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War, the mostly Muslim OPEC declared an oil embargo against the United States, Britain, and other allies, and raised oil prices worldwide. The short-term effects on the world economy were harsh, but in the long term OPEC lost influence as oil companies found new reserves outside of the group’s control. |
Regional organizations
Regional organizations have formed to protect local interests. Unlike economic associations, these groups represent less powerful and formerly colonized areas in opposition to Western pressures.
Organization | Description |
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) | Formed in 1967 to accelerate economic progress and promote political stability in the nations of the southeast Asian archipelago. In recent years it has expanded relations with neighboring regional superpowers like India, China, Japan, and Australia. |
European Union (EU) | Formed from the European Community in 1993 in an effort to strengthen European economic trade relations and balance the influence of the United States. It has worked to smooth the reabsorption of formerly Communist eastern states into a larger but still Western-oriented Europe. Part of its policy has been to form an economic superpower equal to the United States through the adoption of a single multinational currency, the Euro. |
Organization of American States (OAS)
| The postwar successor of Western Hemisphere conferences that go back to the 1890s. It has been torn between a sense of mutual security in the face of threats from outside the hemisphere and internal conflicts mostly involving Latin American suspicion of U.S. dominance. |
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) | Involves the United States, Canada, and Mexico, working since 1994 to remove trade barriers between these countries. To some degree it is a response to the EU’s greater integration since the end of the Cold War. |
Arab League
| Includes twenty-two Arabic-speaking Muslim nations from northwest Africa to the Persian Gulf. Since 1945, it has tried to coordinate regional responses to a continual series of crises in the Middle East and northern Africa. |
Organization of African Unity (OAU) | Begun in 1963 as sub-Saharan Africa rapidly gained independence from Britain, France, and Belgium. Along with providing coordination and cooperation among member states, the OAU explicitly supported the end of white minority and colonial rule in the continent. With no military force and a policy of noninterference, the OAU was ineffective in stopping wars or human rights violations among its members. In 2002, it was replaced by the African Union (AU), which attempts to emulate the EU with tighter monetary and military bonds among member states. |
International Peace and Human Rights
Before the First World War, European nations set up a permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague in the Netherlands in order to prevent wars by giving nations a way to settle international differences. This was supplemented after the First World War by a World Court operated by the League of Nations; the United Nations restored the World Court after the Second World War. The World Court continues to administer and judge cases of international law between consenting parties, enforced primarily by the UN Security Council. Before World War I, agreements such as the Hague and Geneva Conventions defined the laws of war and war crimes; after World War II and the Holocaust, the victors set up tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo to prosecute war criminals. The Cold War stopped any universal standards from being enforced as each side protected its own interests. The UN did set up tribunals for the genocides committed in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s.
Human rights began to gain more attention from international organizations. In 1948, the newly formed United Nations issued a Universal Declaration of Human Rights to set the standard by which totalitarian or other abusive regimes could be judged and sanctioned. The conflict between the West’s most modern conceptions of human rights (religious tolerance, political freedom, and women’s liberation) and the conventional social and political practices of numerous non-Western member states has yet to be fully resolved. In addition, Western individualism and capitalism continues to conflict with collectivist notions that human rights include basic needs like food, health care, and income.
Finally, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as CARE, Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and Greenpeace are rooted in citizen activism and have roots going back to Britain’s Anti-Slavery Society in the early 1800s. NGOs work to tackle problems that reach beyond national boundaries and governments. These groups operate like nonprofits, in contrast to influential multinational corporations like Wal-Mart, General Motors, China Petro-Chemical, Hitachi, and Siemens, whose operations are at the heart of globalization, affecting hundreds of millions of people.
International terrorism and war
Collapse of the Communist states paved way in some cases for violence. In Russia national movement in Chechnya, which want to break away, was brutally suppressed in two Chechen wars (1994–96, 1999–2009).
In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia and separated South Osetia and Abkhazia.
In March of 2014, the Russian Federation annexed Crimea. Russia continues support of separatists within Ukraine by military aids and sending there its troops what provokes widespread condemnation from the international community.
Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia – which controlled most of Yugoslavia’s armed forces – exploited nationalist fervor to seize territory from Croatia and Bosnia.
Serbian forces and Bosnian Serb paramilitaries committed mass rape, massacred civilians (most infamously at Srebrenica, where more than 8000 Bosniaks were killed in 1995) and carried out forced deportations called “ethnic cleansings.” At least 100 000 were killed. And two million more made refugees.
In late 1995, the UN and NATO intervened and imposed the Dayton Accords.
Another round of fighting followed in 1998–1999, as Serbia attempted to remove ethnic Albanians from the province of Kosovo. NATO reacted with bombardment of Serbia and ended the hostilities.
In 1994, the Rwandan genocide resulted in the deaths of 800,000 members of the Tutsi minority at the hands of their Hutu rivals.
Since 2003, Sudan’s persecution of its non-Arab Darfur minority (region of darfur) has killed more than half a million people and created millions of refugees.
Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 under the leadership of Saddam Hussein because Iraq wanted to gain control of the world’s oil reserves.
In January 1991, the United Nations, and the Unites States, sent forces to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War (U.S.-led coalition launched Operation Desert Storm to push Hussein out of Kuwait). Kuwait was liberated, Iraq was subjected to economic sanctions. Hussein held on to his brutal dictatorship.
In 2003, a coalition of countries (primarily the U.S. and Great Britain) invaded Iraq and ousted Saddam from power. The Democratic government was established.
During the 1980s, Afghanistan was a field of battles between the Soviet troops and local guerillas (holy warriors) backed by the Western powers. The end of war in 1989 was followed by a civil war between various groups.
In 1996, the power was taken by the Taliban, an Islamic fundamentalist regime, in 1996. The new government imposed strict Islamic law and severe restrictions on women.
It also provided safe haven for Osama bin Laden, leader of a terrorist network, known as Al Qaeda.
On September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda managed to take control of four American passenger jets and fly two of them into the World Trade Center in New York City. Two towers fell to the ground, killing more than 2500 civilians. Very soon, the U.S. and UN forces occupied Afghanistan, removed Taliban. Al Qaeda still survives. Osama bin Laden was eliminated in May of 2011.
The recent rise of so-called Islamic State (IS, ISIL, or ISIS) in Iraq and Syria has led to constant instability in that region.
The terrorist group Boko Haram has led to violence in West Africa (Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroon). In 2015, ISIS and Boko Haram concluded alliance.