While the late twentieth century saw the emergence of a global economy, in many poorer regions this period also saw the arrival of brutal civil wars, vast differences in wealth, and increasingly limited access to fundamental features of modern

Question

civilizations. In what ways have the collapse of the Soviet Union, decolonization, and competing claims on environmental, fuel, and agricultural resources fueled this change?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: More trade and more intercommunication promoted peace, increased prosperity, and stimulated cultural exchange. The benefits of globalization, however, were unevenly distributed. A relatively few vast business corporations, most of them centered in the United States, handled a disproportionate amount of the world's economic activity. Shunting their assets around the world, those businesses evaded regulation by individual governments. Powerful countries—the United States above all—were able to demand free trade where it suited them but retain protective tariffs or subsidies for businesses they favored. To some extent, globalization perpetuated the old colonial pattern of the world economy—peasants and sweated labor in poor countries supplied rich ones with cheap goods, twisting the poverty gap into a poverty spiral. Such defects, however, could probably be fixed. Some Asian countries demonstrated that they could exploit the opportunities of the global economy, that well-run communities could break out of underdevelopment into prosperity, and that globalization—if properly managed—could make them as rich as the West. The accelerating trade of tiger economies generated potential for investment all around the world. Communities and investments moved around the Pacific's shores with increasing ease and freedom. East Asian communities, including China, had begun to catch up economically with Western countries. The great shift of the balance of population, wealth, and power westward from Asia into European and North American hands—the dominant trend of global history in the nineteenth century—began to go into reverse. The prospect revived that global history would again unfold from the east as the era of Chinese disintegration and weakness came to an end. Meanwhile, Latin American countries struggled to play catch-up with the rest of the West. The game began after the global economic crisis of the 1930s, when governments in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil saw selective industrialization as a solution to the collapse of markets for their primary products. As these policies spread through the continent, their effects proved mixed. New industries relied on machinery imported from North America and Europe. The falling prices of basic commodities made it hard for Latin American economies to accumulate capital to reinvest in industry. Mechanization made unemployment worse. In the 1960s and 1970s, partly in response to these problems, authoritarian regimes took over most of the region. In most cases, authoritarian rule only protracted the economic disappointments, straining some countries' relations with trading partners elsewhere in the world, subjecting others to new forms of dependency on U.S. and European corporate allies and creditors. The economic problems of decolonized lands mounted. In the 1970s and 1980s, the value of many primary products on the world market collapsed. This was largely the result of two so-called revolutions: the first, known as the green revolution, oversolved the problems of famine by glutting the world with cheap grains. Simultaneously, an information revolution replaced many traditional industries and propelled the West into a postindustrial age, in which services and information replaced manufacture as the main sources of employment. An abyss opened where before there had merely been a gap in wealth between the ex-imperialists and their former subjects.