Rebecca Lee

Globalization, to most people, is referring to the acceleration in international economic transactions that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century. After World War II, the conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 created a set of agreements and institutions that laid the foundations for postwar globalization. Technology contributed to the acceleration as well. In the 1970s this type of economic globalization was known as neoliberalism. Following the contractions of the 1930s a "reglobalization" occurred; money as well as goods increased global mobility in three ways. The fist was foreign direct investments. The second was short-term movement of capital. The third forms of money movement involved the personal funds of individuals. Central to this was the global businesses known as transnational corporations (TNCs), which produced goods or delivered services simultaneously in many countries. There were also new patterns of human migration that occurred ...

In the 1900 the European empires in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Ocean were still very much alive, but by the end of the 1900s they were gone. This disappearance started in Asia and the Middle East in the late 1940s. In the mid-1950s through mid-1970s African countries gained their independence. In the 1970s the regions in the Pacific Ocean also became independent. The Caribbeans countries achieved their independence in the 1960s and 1970s. In a sense these empire breaks were the latest case of imperial dissolution, which in some ways is comparable to the first decolonization in the Americas. However, these newly independent countries not only asserted their political independence, they also affirmed the vitality of their cultures. Empire after empire was dissolved. The Austrian and Ottoman empires collapsed after World War I, the Russian empire, the German and Japanese empires after World War II. Out of these collapses grew the idea that humankind was divided into sepa...

Communism arose from the the political and philosophical roots of the nineteenth century socialist movement. It was inspired by the teachings of Karl Marx. The Marxist theory referred to communism as the "final stage of historical development when social equality and collective living would be most fully developed, largely without private property" (Strayer 930). By the 1970s about 1/3 of the world's population lived in communist societies. The two biggest being Russia (the world's largest country in size) and China (the world's largest population). Also under communist rule was Mongolia, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Latin America, and Afghanistan. However, communist movements took place all over the world, especially in Greece, Italy, France, and sometimes in the United States (this lead to political repression known as McCarthyism). Also many African states were Marxist for some time. All these different expressions of communism were linked by a common ideolo...