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NEW CHALLENGES IN A NEW MILLENNIUM

I. Globalization and Economic Crisis

A. An Interconnected Economy
1. Although there was a general global economic slowdown around 2001, continued
economic growth in China and India, along with their large populations, made them future world
economic powers. These nations and the United States increased their demand for oil to the point
that the price per barrel rose from $20 in 1999 to $70 in 2006, then fell abruptly during the
economic crisis of 2008.
2. To promote economic growth and reduce vulnerabilities, many countries formed free-trade
zones and regional trade associations. The strengthening of the European Union (EU) and the
creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were notable examples of this
trend. By 2010, however, the European Union was under considerable strain to maintain its
signature achievement: the Euro, a common currency.
3. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was formed in 2001 with China, Russia,
and four former U.S.S.R. regions initially for the purposes of collective security. Oil-rich Iran
applied for membership in 2008.
4. The World Trade Organization (WTO) was founded in 1995 to encourage reduced trading
barriers and enforce international trade agreements. The organization has numerous vocal critics.
B. Global Financial Crisis
1. The 2008 financial crisis had complicated roots, but in part began in the Asian crisis of
1997 when the investment boom in Asian countries burst. Money then flowed the other way, much
to the U.S., allowing the U.S. to fight two wars while lowering taxes.
2. In 2008 the U.S. housing boom collapsed causing devaluation in housing and generating a
large number of home foreclosures. U.S. financial firms and banks, many of which had used home
mortgages to create new sorts of financial instruments to trade, teetered on the brink of collapse.
Unemployment increased. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama won the election in part from
faith in his ability to stem the economic crisis. However, economic recovery has been slow and
fragile, hampered in part by American legislative gridlock. Despite the slow recovery, President
Obama was re-elected by a substantial margin in 2012.
C. Globalization and Democracy
1. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the number of democratic institutions
increased throughout the world.
2. The great appeal of democracy is that it allows for the peaceful resolution of differences
among a country’s social, cultural, and regional groups, and reduces the threat of war between
democratic nations.
3. The economic crisis of 2008 caused some new democratic governments to fall.

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4. Asian countries, including Indonesia and Myanmar (Burma), have moved toward more
open political processes. The election of the BJP in India increased tensions between India’s
Hindus and Muslims. In 2004, the BJP lost a national election to the Congress Party and peacefully
handed over power.
5. Democracy in Pakistan seemed uncertain; President Pervez Musharraf stepped down rather
than face impeachment because of his support of the U.S. The government also faced growing
strength of the Pakistani Taliban.
6. With the notable exception of South Africa, elections in sub-Saharan Africa have often
been used by would-be dictators as the first step in establishing their political and military
dominance. In Sudan, violence in Darfur led to Omar al-Bashir becoming the first sitting head of
state to be charged with genocide by the International Criminal Court in 2009.
7. In 2010 and 2011 the “Arab Spring” toppled unpopular and undemocratic regimes in
Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen, and brought Syria into civil war.
D. Regime Change in Iraq and Afghanistan
1. Experiments in democratization took place in Afghanistan and Iraq after the United States
overthrew both regimes.
2. Ruled by the Taliban at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and harboring Usama bin Laden,
Afghanistan became the target of the United States in December 2001. With the fall of the Taliban,
Hamid Karzai was elected interim president in 2002 and was Afghanistan’s first democratically
elected president in 2004.
3. The United States began a preemptive strike against Iraq on March 20, 2003, under the
belief that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), although United Nations weapons
inspectors had not found any evidence of WMDs in Iraq.
4. After the American invasion Iraq fell into a state of turmoil. By the time Barack Obama
took office, however, a few signs of stabilization led him to announce withdrawal of U.S. combat
forces by August 2010. Although Iraq does possess an elected government and a new constitution,
there were concerns that such stability was fragile at best.
5. The hardships of democratization in Iraq and Afghanistan led other Middle Eastern
countries to question U.S. urgings to liberalize their political systems. The capture of 23 seats in
the Lebanese parliament by Hezbollah in 2005 and the majority of seats won by Hamas in the
Palestine Governing Council seemed to confirm for oil-producing countries their hesitancy to hold
free elections. In 2007, Hamas attacks against Israel led to aerial bombardment by Israel on the
Gaza Strip.
6. Afghanistan’s government has not proven strong enough to control warlords in some
outlying regions, and it has had to fight attempts by the Taliban to regain power. Despite efforts
to the stem production, the majority of Afghanistan’s agricultural income comes from opium
production.
II. The Question of Values
A. Faith and Politics

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1. Evangelical Protestants became a powerful, conservative political force in the United

States, particularly during the presidency of George W. Bush. Catholic conservatives led opposition
to abortion, homosexuality, marriage of priests, and admission of women to the priesthood. Israel’s
hyperorthodox Jews, known as haredim, vehemently resisted both Israel’s unilateral withdrawal
from Gaza in 2005 and plans for withdrawal from parts of the West Bank. In India, Hindu zealots
made the BJP party a powerful political force.
2. The birth of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 made the current of Muslim political
assertiveness visible to all, but by the year 2000, acts of terrorism by non-Iranian Muslim groups
claiming to be acting for religious reasons were capturing the headlines. Media technology increased
terrorism’s effectiveness as a political tactic from the 1980s onward, especially with spectacular
attacks against the United States and Europe.
3. Most notorious of the terrorists was the Saudi-born charismatic leader Usama bin Laden.
Through his group of fighters called al-Qaeda, he attacked American embassies, the U.S. Navy
destroyer Cole, and the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. Further terrorist attacks by
Indonesians in 2002, North Africans in 2004, English-born Muslims in 2005 and Pakistanis in
Mumbai in 2008 suggested that the violence begun by al-Qaeda had become decentralized and that
recruits might no longer be taking orders from bin Laden. Debate has not settled on the reasons
for the increasing violence but fear of terrorism became pervasive throughout the world, and many
peaceful Muslims found themselves suspect because of their beliefs.
B. Universal Rights and Values
1. The United Nations sought to protect the rights of individuals through the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, passed by the General Assembly in December 1948. The
declaration’s emphasis on individual rights was derived mostly from European and American
history; many of the countries that later signed this declaration did so because it implicitly
condemned European colonial regimes.
2. Rather than addressing fundamental philosophical issues regarding the concept of human
rights, human rights activists worked through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and
focused their efforts on agreed-upon violations of human rights: torture, imprisonment without
trial, and summary execution by death squads, and on famine relief and refugee assistance.
3. U.S. demands that its citizens be exempted from the jurisdiction of the International
Criminal Court and that “enemy combatants” taken prisoner during the “war on terrorism” did
not have to be treated in accordance with the Third Geneva Convention, and its withdrawal from
the Kyoto agreement has prompted significant reaction from critics of the U.S. government.
C. Women’s Rights
1. Positions on the question of women’s rights clearly demonstrate the dichotomy of views
between the western industrialized nations and the nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
2. The feminist movement in the west was concerned with voting rights, equal access to
education and jobs, and an end to gender discrimination and sexual exploitation. Feminists in the
west also decried the oppression of women in other parts of the world.
3. Some nonwestern women complained about the deterioration of morality and family life
in the west and questioned the priorities of the western feminist movement.

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4. International conferences have focused attention on women’s issues more than they have
generated solutions. Increasing women’s education and ensuring better employment
opportunities are seen as fundamental, but at times western human rights workers have come
under criticism as trying to carry out a sort of cultural imperialism.
III. Global Culture
A. The Media and the Message
1. In the 1960s, television began to spread to most of the nonwestern world, where
government monopolies ensured that the new medium would be used to disseminate a unified
national viewpoint rather than function as a medium for the transmission of western culture and
opinions. By the 1980s satellites had brought a much wider array of programming and
information even to the remote parts of the world. American organizations like CNN (Cable
News Network) used satellite transmission technology to enter the international market,
proffering a fundamentally American view of the news. In response to CNN, other countries
have developed their own twenty-four-hour news coverage, such as Al-Jazeera, based in the
Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, which interprets the news of the Iraq War, for instance, from a
different perspective than U.S. news media.
2. The development of digital technology offered the possibility of combining the separate
technologies of movies, television, and computers, while the development of the Internet
transformed business and education. By 2011, it was apparent that “social media” had become
very powerful in organizing political movements, as was seen in the “Arab Spring” in particular.
B. The Spread of Pop Culture
1. Initially, the content was heavily American but consumer products of American,
European, and Japanese transnational companies found their way into international markets and
filmmakers around the world began to be inspired to produce films on global themes for
international audiences.
C. Emerging Global Culture
1. Cultural links across national and ethnic boundaries at the elite level generated much less
controversy than did the globalization of popular culture. Russian-American collaboration on space
missions and in the business world, the flow of graduate students and researchers from around the
world to American scientific laboratories, and the use of English as a global language were all
aspects of globalization at the elite level.
2. Although world literature remained highly diverse, English emerged as the first real global
language, a development with roots in both the spread of the British Empire in the nineteenth
century and the post-1945 rise of the United States to global political and economic predominance.
3. Western universities have become the model for higher education around the world.
D. Enduring Cultural Diversity
1. Diverse cultural traditions persisted at the end of the twentieth century despite the
globalization of industrial society and the integration of economic markets. Japan, for example, was
for a long time a success in the modern industrial world in spite of—or perhaps because of—its
group-oriented, hierarchical approach to social relations.

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2. The existence of cultural diversity in the future is not secure though, in the face of these
globalizing trends and influences. Yet anthropologists would remind us that cultures that do not
adapt and change do not survive.

PS: Note that this is only an outline!!!! Do not forget to read the weekly
assigned pages and carefully examine the pictures and maps provided in
your course book!!!