The Transformation of the World Economy

• Most people think of globalization as the massive increase in worldwide economic transactions that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century and continues into the twenty-first. Many people have grown to see this process as nearly natural, unavoidable, and virtually unstoppable.

• In the face of a global economic crisis, major governments withdrew home, preferring high tariffs and economic autonomy.

• The “Bretton Woods system” established the rules for commercial and financial interactions among major capitalist nations, encouraging relatively open trade, stable currency values tied to the US dollar, and high levels of capital investment.

Reglobalization

• These circumstances laid the groundwork for a rapid acceleration of global economic transactions during World War II, a “globalization” of the global economy following the 1930s recession. The accelerated mobility of commodities, wealth, and people reflected this enormously important activity.

• Money, like products, has attained incredible global mobility in three ways. The first was what is known as "foreign direct investment," in which a company from the United States, for example, builds a plant in China or Mexico. After 1960, corporations in developed countries flocked to developing countries to take advantage of cheap labor, tax advantages, and laxer environmental laws.

• Transnational companies (TNCs), which manufacture goods or provide services concurrently in many countries, have played a key role in the acceleration of economic globalization.

• However, since the 1960s, the most notable trend of global migration has been a massive flow of people from underdeveloped Asia, Africa, and Latin America to the industrialized world of Europe and North America.

• Many of them on the move were en route to the United States, attracted by the country's reputation for wealth and opportunity. Between 1971 and 2010, almost 20 million immigrants arrived lawfully in the United States, and millions more entered illegally, the great majority of them came from Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Asia.

Globalization and an American Empire

• For many individuals, opposition to this type of globalization was a form of protest against the United States' growing strength and influence across the world. Some say that the face of globalization is an "American Empire."

• In some aspects, the United States' worldwide influence might be compared to the "informal empires" that Europeans established in China and the Middle East throughout the nineteenth century. In all situations, dominating countries attempted to construct communities and governments that were consistent with their ideas and interests through economic infiltration, political pressure, and occasional military intervention.

• With the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war in the early 1990s, the United States military superiority was unchallenged. When Islamic terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, such force was released first in Afghanistan (2001), which had housed the al-Qaeda instigators of the attack, and subsequently against Iraq (2003).

• Since the 1980s, when the United States' relative military power peaked, it has faced increasing foreign economic rivalry. The recovery of Europe and Japan, as well as the industrialization of South Korea, Taiwan, China, and India, decreased the United States' share of global output from over 50% in 1945 to around 20% in the 1980s.

Feminism in the Global South

• Women mobilizing outside of the Western world encountered vastly different conditions than white women in the United States and Europe during the twentieth century.

• Different realities in underdeveloped nations have prompted harsh criticism of Western feminism at times. In the 1970s and later, many African feminists thought their American or European sisters' worries were too individualistic, too focused on sexuality, and too concerned with issues of maternity, marriage, and poverty to be of much help.

• Women's movements in the Global South sprang from a variety of causes, not all of which were openly gender-related. The women's group movement was a prominent method of mobilization in Kenya, an East African country. By the late 1980s, more than a million women were members of 27,000 tiny women's organizations, which sprang out of conventional self-help groups.

• Other concerns and methods took precedence elsewhere. Morocco's Family Law Code, which still classified women as minors, was the target of a more centrally coordinated and nationally oriented feminist movement in the North African Islamic kingdom. Morocco's feminist movement launched a protracted campaign in 2004, frequently with the aid of sympathetic males and a liberal monarch.