Week 13 Outline
Week 13 Outline
Week 13 Outline
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GE 209
History of the World Civilizations
Online
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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GE 209
History of the World Civilizations
Online
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GE 209
History of the World Civilizations
Online
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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GE 209
History of the World Civilizations
Online
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!!!