NORTH LUZON PHILIPPINES STATE COLLEGE Adal a de kalidad, dur-as ti

panagbiag
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Contemporary World
Chapter I

Module Outcomes
At the end of the unit, the students should have:
 Analyzed the various contemporary drivers of globalization.
 Described the emergence of global economic and political systems.

Lesson 1
Description and a Working Definition

Introduction
After centuries of technological progress and advances in international cooperation, the world is more
connected than ever. But how much has the rise of trade and the modern global economy helped or hurt American
businesses, workers, and consumers? Here is a basic guide to the economic side of this broad and much-debated,
drawn from current research.

What is Globalization?
Globalization is the word used to describe the growing interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures,
and populations, brought about by cross-border trade in goods and services, technology, and flows of investment,
people, and information. Countries have built economic partnerships to facilitate these movements over many
centuries. But the term gained popularity after the Cold War in the early 1990sas these cooperative arrangements
shaped modern everyday life. This guide uses the term more narrowly to refer to international trade and some of the
investment flows among advanced economies, mostly focusing on the United States.
The wide-ranging effects of globalization are complex and politically charged. As with major technological
advances, globalization benefits society as a whole, while harming certain groups. Understanding the relative costs
and benefits can pave the way for alleviating problems while sustaining wider payoffs.

Globalization is also about:

 Activating your commitments.
 Connecting across differences.
 Forging new relationships.
 Spread and connectedness of production,
communication, and technologies across the
world.

WHAT IS THE GLOBE?

 Culturally specific set of commitments.
 Relationships
 Set of practices

WHAT ARE THE FIVE ASPECTS OF GLOBALIZATION?

1. ECONOMIC
 EARLY CAPITALIST IDEAS:
1. “Free Market Economy” (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776), the Market is “free” from State
control.
2. Division of labor
3. Competition
 TODAY:
 Economies Are Increasingly Linked Together
 EXS: NAFTA (MX, CA, US), the EU, WTO (World Trade Organization)
WTO
 Only global international organizations deal with the rules of trade between nations.
 The WTO is the latest embodiment of multilateral efforts to promote cooperation among
trading nations that began even before the end of World War II.
 Provides a legal and institutional framework for national policies that directly or indirectly
affect international trade among its members.
 Goal: help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business
and promote freer and more predictable conditions of trade.

 MULTI-NATIONAL CORPORATIONS
OLD: Dutch East India Company?
 1602 company of Dutch merchants &
independent trading companies.
 Spice trade monopoly in East Asia.
 Power to colonize territories & enslave
indigenous people.
 Indonesia & South Africa
NEW: Nike, Wal-Mart, and Royal/Dutch Shell
 The top 100 multinationals are all US-owned companies!
 Royal/Dutch Shell: a global group of energy and petrochemical companies, operating in more than
140 countries and territories, employing more than 112,000 people.
2. TECHNOLOGICAL
 “World Wide Web” has exploded in the last 10 years
 Computers can move money around the world = “finance
capital”
 Silicon Valley is the 9th largest economy in the world!
 The number of telephones is decreasing.
 More computers in Manhattan than in all of Africa!
 Post-colonial infrastructures don’t support technology.
3. CULTURAL
 Cultural Imperialism = Dominance of one culture over others Hollywood movies, MacDonald’s, Disneyland,
Starbucks. The dominance of the English language and invasion of other languages.
 “Culture Industry” = opportunities for Africans to sell their culture in the “global market” that values
traditional culture.
4. POLITICAL
The United Nations: Global association of governments facilitating cooperation in international law, security,
economic development, and social equity.
 Whose interests does the UN represent?
 The US and the UK were the only nations in support of going to war in Iraq.
 Can global politics with social values exist?
Alternative political gatherings: Annual World Social Forums since 2001, The Piece Process@ Gav!
 In 2001, US pharmaceutical corporations sued South African companies for infringing on AIDS
medication patent laws.
 In 2003, President George W. Bush announced the Emergency Plan in 2003 - the largest international
health initiative in history by one nation to address a single disease.
5. MILITARY
 Global alliances become clear during war time.
Ex: Today’s US alliance with Britain in wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.
 What will happen with North Korea and nuclear weapons?
 “Trade in Arms” = US sold $227 million in arms to AF in 1990s.
 US train and provide weapons for African armies on both sides of their civil wars (ex. Mobutu civil war in
Zaire).
 US - the number one exporter of weapons globally, and the last on the list of exporters of non-military aid to
the developing world.

Contemporary World
Chapter II

Module Outcomes
At the end of the unit, the students should have:
 Defined economic globalization.
 Identified the actors that facilitate economic globalization.
 Narrated a short history of global market integration in the 21 st century.
 Articulated a stance on global economic integration.

Lesson 2
Globalization of World Economics

WHAT IS INTERNATIONAL TRADING SYSTEMS ALL ABOUT?

The international trading “system” comprises many thousands of unilateral, bilateral, regional, and multilateral
rules and agreements among more than two hundred independent nations. Atop this complex and rapidly evolving
mass of political and economic arrangements is the World Trade Organization (WTO), with 153 members that together
account for nearly all of the world trade.
Concerns about these shortcomings of the GATT provided much of the agenda for the ambitious Uruguay
Round (1986-1994), which culminated in the establishment of the WTO. Yet despite the fanfare surrounding the
WTO‟s birth in 1995, doubts regarding the new organization soon began to materialize. These doubts were heightened
by the lack of progress in the Doha Round began in 2001, the first round of multilateral negotiations sponsored by the
WTO. Some critics have called for a new Bretton Woods conference to reconfigure the three major international
economic organizations and reallocate responsibilities among them. The goal would be to increase their overall
effectiveness in addressing problems in global governance not anticipated in the 1940s, including huge bilateral trade
imbalances and national efforts to limit climate change.
The oldest known international trade route was the “SILK ROAD” -a network of pathways in the ancient world
that spanned from China to what is now in the Middle East and Europe. It was called such because the most profitable
product traded through this network was silk, which was highly prized, especially in the area that is now in the Middle
East as well as in the West(today’s Europe). Traders used the Silk Road regularly from 130 BCE when the Chinese Han
Dynasty opened trade to the west until 1453 BCE when the Ottoman Empire closed it.

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

The GATT was an agreement rather than a full-fledged international organization and had “contracting parties”
rather than members. It came into effect during the ITO negotiations, with the goal of achieving immediate tariff
reductions among the 23 participating countries.
The GATT had already sponsored seven rounds of multilateral trade negotiations. These had achieved a
significant cumulative reduction in tariff rates. By 1986, the trade-weighted average of tariffs on manufactured goods
had been reduced to about 6.4 percent, from about 35 percent in 1947.
The GATT has thus been credited with a key role in facilitating the massive growth in the volume of world
trade during the post-war era (Irwin 2002, 165-170). Yet the GATT left some critical issues unresolved (Crowley
2003).
Moreover, GATT rules pertained mainly to trade in tangible goods, a significant limitation with international
trade in services growing at a rapid rate.
 And perhaps most central, the GATT provided no effective way to resolve disputes among the contracting
parties.
Concerns about these shortcomings of the GATT provided much of the agenda for the ambitious Uruguay
Round (1986-1994), which culminated in the establishment of the WTO.

GATT/WTO principles and discriminatory trading

At the start, the primary goal of the GATT was to promote non-discriminatory trade liberalization. The
fundamental guidelines were non-discrimination (most-favored-nation treatment among signatories), reciprocity, and
transparency. MFN treatment was deemed important enough to be the subject of Article I of the GATT 1947, while the
8 agreement’s preamble called for members to enter into “reciprocal and mutually advantageous arrangements
directed to the substantial reduction of tariffs and other barriers to trade” and Article XXVIII required “compensatory
adjustment” when previously agreed concessions were modified. The need for increased transparency was expressed
in several GATT articles, especially Article X, requiring prompt publication by signatories of new laws and regulations
affecting trade, and Article XI, calling for the general elimination of quantitative restrictions on trade. The underlying
goal was to ensure that foreign suppliers would face known and constant barriers, ones that could be overcome by
sufficiently competitive producers. The strong preference specifically for the use of tariffs over quantitative restrictions
or other types of trade policies also stemmed from the view that reliance on tariffs would simplify the future process
of reciprocal liberalization.
The early GATT priorities reflected the negotiating nations’ desire to undo the harm to the international trading
system that had occurred during the 1930s. The Smoot-Hawley tariffs enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1930 had soon
been followed by similar “beggar-thy-neighbor” actions by other countries, as well as discriminatory arrangements
such as the United Kingdom’s imperial preferences, which entailed lower tariffs on imports from its colonies and
dominions. With the United States and England taking the leading roles, negotiators resumed efforts begun before
World War II to lower barriers to trade through reciprocal reductions in bound tariff rates (reciprocity), to replace
quantitative restrictions and other nontariff barriers by tariff protection (transparency), and to eliminate discriminatory
arrangements (most-favored-nation treatment).
The GATT/WTO position on PTAs recognizes the desirability of increasing trade through voluntary agreements
between two or more members. However, there is also the concern that such agreements should facilitate trade
among the partner countries without raising barriers to trade with non-partner countries.
Beyond an expectation that new PTAs will be notified to the WTO, the rules on preferential trading appear to
exercise little if any discipline over such arrangements. In practice, no preferential agreements among GATT or WTO
members, whether developed or developing, have ever been challenged by other members. This laissez-faire posture
has given rise to increasing concern about the effects of proliferating free trade agreements on progress toward
multilateral trade liberalization. This deleterious effect could arise for either of two reasons (Krueger 2007).
First, the limited capacity of many countries to conduct international trade negotiations may be taxed by
efforts to form PTAs. Second, WTO members‟ incentives to engage in multilateral liberalization may be lessened to
the extent that the benefits derived from current PTA membership would thereby be eroded.

Developing countries in the international trading system

Although the 23 nations participating in the negotiations that produced the original GATT in 1947 included 12
developing countries, in its early days the GATT was disparaged as a “rich man’s club. The GATT initially focused
almost entirely on trade in manufactured goods, i.e., goods that were then exported mainly by the developed
countries, and GATT rules for poor countries were mostly the same as those for rich countries. However, developing
countries were accorded special treatment through exemptions from some rules, e.g., permission under Article XVIII
to use tariffs and quotas to promote an infant industry or to deal with the balance of payments problems
Developing countries also benefited via most-favored-nation treatments from the liberalization commitments
of the advanced nations without being required to engage in the reciprocal opening of their own markets.
The principle of special treatment for developing countries was formalized by the addition in 1966 of Part IV,
“Trade and Development,” to the GATT. The Tokyo Round went even further with the adoption of the Enabling Clause
(officially, “Differential and More Favorable Treatment of Developing Countries”) in 1979. The Enabling Clause allows
advanced countries to discriminate in favor of poorer countries, and especially the least developed countries—as had
already been done through the enactment of the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP). The Enabling Clause also
allows developing countries to negotiate preferential trade agreements that do not satisfy the usual GATT criteria as
spelled out in Article XXIV.

Trade sanctions as a means of enforcing socioeconomic norms

The WTO is unique among international organizations in possessing an effective system by which its rules can
be enforced. As a result, there has been continuing pressure going back to the GATT era to use the WTO to enforce
socioeconomic norms shared by a significant number of participating countries. The justification for involving the
GATT/WTO is that failure to honor social norms usually confers a cost advantage. A country’s failure to meet such
norms may therefore be regarded as “social dumping” and treated in an analogous way.

WHAT IS THE GOLD STANDARD?

 Its goal was to create a common system-allow for more efficient trade and prevent the isolationism of the
mercantilist era.
 The countries thus established a common basis for currency prices and a fixed exchange rate system-all
based on the value of gold.
 During World War I, many were forced to abandon the gold standard since European countries had low gold
reserves; they adopted floating currencies that were no longer redeemable in gold.
 Returning to a pure standard became more difficult as the global economic crisis called the “ Great
Depression” which started during 1920-1930 further emptying government coffers.
 This depression was the worst and longest recession ever experienced by the Western world.
 Economic historian BARRY EICHENGREEN argues that the recovery of the US really began when having
abandoned the gold standard.
 Today, the world economy operates based on what is called fiat currencies - this system allows
governments to freely and actively manage their economies by increasing or decreasing the amount of
money in circulation as they see fit.
 WHAT IS INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND?
 Regards “economic globalization” as a historical process representing the result of human innovation and
technological progress.
 Characterized by the increasing integration of economies around the world through the movement of goods,
services, and capital across borders.
 These changes are the products of people, organizations, institutions, and technologies.
 The value of trade (goods and services) as a percentage of world GDP increased from 42.1% (1980) to
62.1% (2007).
 Increased trade also means that investments are moving all over the world at faster speeds

Lesson 3
THE BRETTON WOODS SYSTEM

WHAT IS BRETTON WOODS’S SYSTEM?

The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial
relations among the United States, Canada, Western European countries, Australia, and Japan after the 1944 Bretton
Woods Agreement. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to
govern monetary relations among independent states. The chief features of the Bretton Woods system were an
obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained its external exchange rates within 1 percent by
tying its currency to gold and the ability of the IMF to bridge temporary imbalances of payments. Also, there was a
need to address (CRAN).the lack of cooperation among other countries and to prevent competitive devaluation of the
currencies as well.
Preparing to rebuild the international economic system while World War II was still raging, 730 delegates from all 44
Allied nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, for the
United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, also known as the Bretton Woods Conference.
The delegates deliberated during 1–22 July 1944 and signed the Bretton Woods agreement on its final day.
Setting up a system of rules, institutions, and procedures to regulate the international monetary system, these
accords established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (IBRD), which today is part of the World Bank Group. The United States, which controlled two-thirds of
the world's gold, insisted that the Bretton Woods system rest on both gold and the US dollar.
Soviet representatives attended the conference but later declined to ratify the final agreements, charging that
the institutions they had created were "branches of Wall Street". These organizations became operational in1945 after
a sufficient number of countries had ratified the agreement. On 15 August 1971, the United States unilaterally
terminated the convertibility of the US dollar to gold, effectively bringing the Bretton Woods system to an end and
rendering the dollar a fiat currency. At the same time, many fixed currencies (such as the pound sterling) also became
free-floating.

Delegates at Bretton Woods agreed to create 2 financial institutions:

1. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD)-World Bank; responsible for funding post-
war reconstruction projects. It was a critical institution at a time when many of the world’s cities had been
destroyed by the war.
2. International Monetary Fund (IMF) -it was to be the global lender of last resort to prevent individual countries
from spiraling into a credit crisis.

ORIGINS
The political basis for the Bretton Woods system was in the confluence of two key conditions: the shared
experiences of two World Wars, with the sense that failure to deal with economic problems after the first war had led
to the second; and the concentration of power in a small number of states.
 Interwar period
There was a high level of agreement among the powerful nations that failure to coordinate exchange
rates during the interwar period had exacerbated political tensions. This facilitated the decisions reached by the
Bretton Woods Conference. Furthermore, all the participating governments at Bretton Woods agreed that the
monetary chaos of the interwar period had yielded several valuable lessons.
The experience of World War I was fresh in the minds of public officials. The planners at Bretton
Woods hoped to avoid a repeat of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, which had created enough
economic and political tension to lead to WWII. The intransigent insistence by creditor nations for the
repayment of Allied war debts and reparations, combined with an inclination to isolationism, led to a
breakdown of the international financial system and a worldwide economic depression. The so-called "beggar
thy neighbor" policies that emerged as the crisis continued saw some trading nations using currency
devaluations in an attempt to increase their competitiveness (i.e. raise exports and lower imports), though
recent research suggests this de facto inflationary policy probably offset some of the contractionary forces in
world price levels.
In the 1920s, international flows of speculative financial capital increased, leading to extremes in the
balance of payments situations in various European countries and the US. The various anarchic and often
autarkic protectionist and neo-mercantilist national policies – often mutually inconsistent – that emerged over
the first half of the decade worked inconsistently and self-defeating to promote national import substitution,
increase national exports, divert foreign investment and trade flows, and even prevent certain categories of
cross-border trade and investment outright.
Britain in the 1930s had an exclusionary trade bloc with nations of the British Empire known as the
"Sterling Area”. Thus, Britain survived by keeping Sterling nation surpluses in its banking system, and
Germany survived by forcing trading partners to purchase its own products.
 Post-war negotiations
When many of the same experts who observed the 1930s became the architects of a new, unified,
post-war system at Bretton Woods, their guiding principles became "no more beggar thy neighbor" and
"control flows of speculative financial capital". Preventing a repetition of this process of competitive
devaluations was desired, but in a way that would not force debtor nations to contract their industrial bases by
keeping interest rates at a level high enough to attract foreign bank deposits.
 John Maynard Keynes, wary of repeating the Great Depression, was behind Britain's proposal that
surplus nations be forced by a "use-it-or-lose-it" mechanism, to either import from debtor nations, build
factories in debtor nations or donate to debtor nations’ treasury, Harry Dexter White, rejected Keynes'
proposals, in favor of an International Monetary Fund with enough resources to counteract destabilizing flows
of speculative finance. However, unlike the modern IMF, White's proposed fund would have counteracted
dangerous speculative flows automatically, with no political strings attached—i.e., no IMF conditionality.
According to economic historian Brad Delong, on almost every point where he was overruled by the
Americans, Keynes was later proved correct by events.
In 1944 at Bretton Woods, as a result of the collective conventional wisdom of the time,
representatives from all the leading allied nations collectively favored a regulated system of fixed exchange
rates, indirectly disciplined by a US dollar tied to gold—a system that relied on a regulated market economy
with tight controls on the values of currencies.

Economic security
Also based on the experience of the inter-war years, U.S. planners developed a concept of economic security
—that a liberal international economic system would enhance the possibilities of postwar peace. One of those who saw
such a security link was Cordell Hull, the United States Secretary of State from 1933 to 1944. Hull believed that the
fundamental causes of the two world wars lay in economic discrimination and trade warfare. Specifically, he had in
mind the trade and exchange controls (bilateral arrangements) of Nazi Germany and the imperial preference system
practiced by Britain, by which members or former members of the British Empire were accorded special trade status,
itself provoked by German, French, and American protectionist policies.

Rise of governmental intervention

The developed countries also agreed that the liberal international economic system required governmental
intervention. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, public management of the economy emerged as a primary
activity of governments in the developed states.
The system of economic protection for at-risk citizens sometimes called the welfare state grew out of the
Great Depression, which created a popular demand for governmental intervention in the economy, and out of the
theoretical contributions of the Keynesian school of economics, which asserted the need for governmental intervention
to counter market imperfections.
Design of the financial system
The new economic system required an accepted vehicle for investment, trade, and payments. Unlike national
economies, however, the international economy lacks a central government that can issue currency and manages its
use. In the past, this problem had been solved through the gold standard, but the architects of Bretton Woods did not
consider this option feasible for the postwar political economy. Instead, they set up a system of fixed exchange rates
managed by a series of newly created international institutions using the U.S. dollar (which was a gold standard
currency for central banks) as a reserve currency.

Lesson 4
NEOLIBERALISM & ITS DISCONTENT

WHAT IS NEOLIBERALISM?
"Neoliberalism" is contemporarily used to refer to market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating price
controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers "and reducing state influence in the economy,
especially through privatization and austerity.

ORIGIN
Neoliberalism or neo-liberalism is the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with laissez-
faire economic liberalism and free market capitalism. It is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization
including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, austerity, and reductions in government spending in
order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.
Neoliberalism constituted a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus which had lasted
from 1945 to 1980. English speakers have used the term "neoliberalism" since the start of the 20th century with
different meanings, but it became more prevalent in its current meaning in the 1970s and 1980s, used by scholars in
a wide variety of social sciences as well as by critics.
The term is rarely used by proponents of free market policies. Some scholars have described the term as
meaning different things to different people as neoliberalism has "mutated" into geopolitically distinct hybrids as it
traveled around the world. As such, neoliberalism shares many attributes with other concepts that have contested
meanings, including representative democracy. The definition and usage of the term have changed over time As an
economic philosophy, neoliberalism emerged among European liberal scholars in the 1930s as they attempted to
revive and renew central ideas from classical liberalism as they saw these ideas diminish in popularity, overtaken by
recognition of the need to control markets, following the Great Depression and manifested in policies designed to
counter the volatility of free markets, and mitigate their negative social consequences. One impetus for the
formulation of policies to mitigate free market volatility was a desire to avoid repeating the economic failures of the
early 1930s, failures sometimes attributed principally to the economic policy of classical liberalism. When the term
entered into common use in the 1980s in connection with Augusto Pinochet's economic reforms in Chile, it quickly
took on negative connotations and was employed principally by critics of market reform and laissez-faire capitalism.
Scholars tended to associate it with the theories of Mont Pelerin Society economists Friedrich Hayek, Milton
Friedman, and James M. Buchanan, along with politicians and policy-makers such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald
Reagan, and Alan Greenspan.
Early use of the term in English was in 1898 by the French economist Charles Gide to describe the economic
beliefs of the Italian economist Maffeo Pantaleoni, with the term "néo-libéralisme" previously existing in French, and
the term was later used by others including the classical liberal economist Milton Friedman in his 1951 essay "Neo-
Liberalism and its Prospects.

NEOLIBERALISM & ITS DISCONTENTS

Global Keynesianism came in the mid-1940s-1970s. During this period, governments’ poured money into their
economies, allowing people to purchase more goods and, in the process, increase demand for these products.
 In the early 1970s, however, the prices of oil rose sharply as a result of the Organization of Arab Petroleum
Exporting Countries(OAPEC) imposition of an embargo in response to the decision of the US and other countries
to resupply the Israeli military with the needed arms during the Yom Kippur War.
 Arab countries also used the embargo to stabilize their economies and growth.
 The “oil embargo” affected the Western economies that were reliant on oil.
 After the US stopped linking the dollar to gold, which was the time of Bretton Woods System ended.
 The result was a phenomenon called STAGFLATION-decline in economic growth and employment (stagnation)
takes place alongside a sharp increase in prices (inflation).
 Around this time, a new form of economic thinking was the beginning to challenge the Keynesian orthodoxy.
 Friedrich Hayek & Milton Friedman argued that the government’s practice of pouring money into their economies
had caused inflation by increasing demand for goods without necessarily increasing supply.
 Economist like Friedman used the economic turmoil to challenge the consensus around Keynes’ ideas.
 From the 1980s onward, neoliberalism became the codified strategy of the US Treasury Department, the World
Trade Organization (WTO)-a new organization founded in 1995 to continue the tariff reduction under the GATT.
 The policies they forwarded came to be called the Washington Consensus.
 The Washington Consensus dominated global economic policies from 1980s-2000s.
 It advocates pushed for minimal government spending to reduce government debt.
 They also called for privatization of government-controlled services like water, power, communications, and
transport, believing that the free market can produce the best result.
 Advocates of the Washington Consensus conceded that, along the way, certain industries would be affected and
die, but they considered this “shock therapy” necessary for long term economic growth.
 The appeal of neoliberalism was in its simplicity.
 Its advocates like US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher justified their
reduction in government spending by comparing national economies to households.
 Thatcher, in particular, promoted an image of herself as a mother, who reined in overspending to reduce the
national debt.

NUMBER OF DISTINCT USAGES IN DIFFERENT SPHERES

1. As a development model, it refers to the rejection of structuralism economics in favor of the Washington
Consensus.
2. As an ideology, it denotes a conception of freedom as an overarching social value associated with reducing state
functions to those of a minimal state.
3. As a public policy, it involves the privatization of public economic sectors or services, the deregulation of private
corporations, sharp decrease of government debt and reduction of spending on public works.

Lesson 5
THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS, NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS,
AND THE NEOLIBERAL YEARS OF CAPITALISM

The 2008 global financial crisis was the consequence of financialization or the creation of massive fictitious
financial wealth, and of the Hegemony of a reactionary ideology, namely, neoliberalism, based on the self-regulated
and efficient markets. Although laissez-faire capitalism is intrinsically unstable, the lessons from the stock-market
crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s were transformed into theories and institutions that led to the
“30 glorious years of capitalism”. Yet, after the late-1970s, a coalition of rentiers and “financists” achieved hegemony,
deliberately promoted deregulation, and created financial innovations that made these markets even more risky.
These were the “neoliberal years of capitalism”.
Neoclassical economics played the role of a meta-ideology as it legitimized, mathematically and
“scientifically”, neoliberal ideology and deregulation. From this crisis, a new democratic capitalist system will emerge,
though its character is difficult to predict. It will not be so financialized, and probably the tendencies present in the 30
glorious years toward global and knowledge-based capitalism, as well as the tendency to improve democracy by
making it more social and participatory, will be resumed.
The global financial crisis will probably represent a turning point in the history of capitalism and economic thought. It
was a crisis not only of neoliberalism but also of neoclassical economics – of the general equilibrium model, of
neoclassical macroeconomics, and of neoclassical financial theory. On the other hand, the political coalition behind the
neoliberal years and the deregulation and financialization that it promoted – a coalition of capitalist rentiers and
professional financists – will probably lose ground to a new arrangement of the previous Fordist coalition. The banking
crisis that began in 2007 and became a global crisis in 2008 is also a social crisis since the International Labor
Organization estimated that unemployment had reached around 20 million to 50 million by the end of 2009, whereas,
according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, as the incomes of the poor are falling due to the crisis but the
international prices of food commodities remain high, the number of undernourished people in the world increased by
11 percent in 2009, and, for the first time, exceeded one billion. The questions that this major crisis raises are many.
Why did it happen? Why did the theories, organizations, and institutions that emerged from previous crises fail to
prevent this one? Was it inevitable given the unstable nature of capitalism, or was it a consequence of perverse
ideological developments since the 1980s? Given that capitalism is essentially an unstable economic system, we are
tempted to respond to this last question in the affirmative, but we would be wrong to do so.

From the 30 glorious years to the neoliberal years of capitalism

The 2008 global crisis began as financial crisis in rich countries and was essentially caused by the deregulation
of financial markets and the wild speculation that such deregulation made possible. Deregulation was the historical
new fact that allowed the crisis. An alternative explanation of the crisis maintains that the US Federal Reserve Bank’s
monetary policy after 2001/2 kept interest rates too low for too long – which would have caused the major increase in
the credit supply required to produce the high leverage levels associated with the crisis.

An “unavoidable” crisis
Financial crises happened in the past and will happen in the future, but an economic crisis as profound as the
present one could have been avoided. If, after it broke the governments of the rich countries had not suddenly woken
up and adopted Keynesian policies of reducing interest rates, increasing liquidity drastically, and, principally, engaging
in fiscal expansion, this crisis would have probably done more damage to the world economy than the Great
Depression.
Capitalism is unstable, and crises are intrinsic to it, but, given that a lot has been done to avoid a repetition
of the 1929 crisis, it is not sufficient to rely on the cyclical character of financial crises or on the greedy character of
financists to explain such a severe crisis as the present one.

Political and moral crisis

The causes of the crisis are also moral. The immediate cause of the crisis was the practical bankruptcy of US
banks as a result of households defaulting on mortgages that, in an increasingly deregulated financial market, were
able to grow unchecked. Banks relied on “financial innovations” to repackage the relevant securities in such a manner
that the new bundles looked to their acquirers safer than the original loans. When the fraud came to light and the
banks failed, the confidence of consumers and businesspeople, which was already deeply shaken, finally collapsed,
and they sought protection by avoiding all forms of consumption and investment; aggregate demand plunged
vertically, and the turmoil, which was at first limited to the banking industry, became an economic crisis.

New capitalism
The Fordist regime and its final act, the 30 glorious years of capitalism, came to an end in the 1970s. The 30
neoliberal years of capitalism followed. Now, after the 2008 global crisis, what new regime of accumulation will
succeed it? First of all, it will not be based on financialized capitalism in so far as this latest period has represented a
step backward in the history of capitalism. Second, the power and privilege of professionals will continue to increase
in relation to those of capitalists, because knowledge will become more and more strategic, and capital less and less
so. Third, income inequality in rich countries will probably intensify even though their stage of growth is compatible
with a reduction of inequality in so far as technological progress is mainly capital-saving, that is, it reduces the costs
or increases the productivity of capital. Fourth, capitalism will continue to be unstable, but less so. Social learning will
eventually prevail. Finance-based capitalism dismantled the institutions and forgot the economic theories we learned
after the Great Depression of the 1930s; it recklessly deregulated financial markets and shunned Keynesian and
developed mentalist ideas. Now nations will be engaged in re-regulating markets.
Capitalism will change, but we should not overestimate the immediate changes.

ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION TODAY

 That has become too integrated.
 It is undeniable that some form of international trade remains essential for countries to develop in the
contemporary world.
 The WTO-led reduction of trade barriers, known as trade liberalization, has profoundly altered the dynamics of the
global economy.
 According to the IMF-the global per capita GDP rose over fivefold in the second half of the 20th century

Contemporary World
Chapter III

Lesson 6: Global Politics

Global politics, also known as world politics, names both the discipline that studies the political and economic
patterns of the world and the field that is being studied. At the center of that field are the different processes of
political globalization in relation to questions of social power. The discipline studies the relationships between cities,
nation-states, shell-states, multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations, and international
organizations. Current areas of discussion include national and ethnic conflict regulation, democracy and the politics of
national self-determination, globalization and its relationship to democracy, conflict and peace studies, comparative
politics, political economy, and the international political economy of the environment. One important area of global
politics is contestation in the global political sphere over legitimacy.
Global politics is said by some to be distinct from the field of international politics (commonly seen as a branch
of international relations), as it "does not stress the primacy of intergovernmental relations and transactions". This
distinction however has not always been held among authors and political scientists, who often use the term
"international politics" to mean global politics.

Defining the field

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, several groups extended the definition of the political community
beyond nation-states to include much, if not all, of humanity. These internationalists include Marxists, human rights
advocates, environmentalists, peace activists, feminists, and minority groups. This was the general direction of
thinking on global politics; though the term was not used as such.
The modern world politics perspective is often identified with the works, in particular, their 1972 work
Transnational Relations and World Politics. Here, the authors argued that state-centric views of international relations
were inadequate frameworks to utilize in political science or international relations studies due to the increased
globalization. Today, the practices of global politics are defined by values, norms of human rights, ideas of human
development, and beliefs such as Internationalism or cosmopolitanism about how we should relate to each. Over the
last couple of decades cosmopolitanism has become one of the key contested ideologies of global politics:
“Cosmopolitanism can be defined as a global politics that, firstly, projects a sociality of common political
engagement among all human beings across the globe, and, secondly, suggests that this sociality should be either
ethically or organizationally privileged over other forms of sociality.”

Debates
The intensification of globalization led some writers to suggest that states were no longer relevant to global
politics. This view has been subject to debate:
“On the other hand, other commentators have been arguing that states have remained essential to global
politics. They have facilitated globalizing processes and projects; not been eclipsed by them. They have been
rejuvenated because, among other reasons, they are still the primary providers of (military) security in the global
arena; they are still the paramount loci for articulating the voices of (procedurally democratic) national communities,
and for ordering their interactions with similar policies; and finally, they are indispensable to relations of (unequal)
economic exchange insofar as they legitimize and enforce the global legal frameworks that enable globalization in the
first place.”

ATTRIBUTES OF TODAY’S GLOBAL SYSTEM

The world today has four key attributes:
1. There are countries or states that are independent and govern themselves.
2. This country interacts with each other through diplomacy.
3. There are international organizations, like the UN that facilitate these interactions.
4. Beyond simply facilitating meetings between states, international organizations also take on lives of their own.

WHAT ARE THE ORIGINS OF THIS SYSTEM?

A good start is by unpacking what one means when he/she says a “country”, or what academics also call the
Nation-State.
 This concept is not as simple as it seems.
 It is a relatively modern phenomenon in human history, and people did not always organize themselves as
countries.
 Composed of 2 non-interchangeable terms.
(Not all states are nations and not all nations are states)

“In layman’s terms, state refers to a country and its government.”

A state has 4 attributes:
 It exercises authority over a specific population called citizens.
 It governs a specific territory.
 A state has a structure of government that crafts various rules that people follow.
 The state has sovereignty (refers to external and internal authority) over its territory.
 INTERNALLY, no individuals or groups can operate in a given national territory by ignoring the state.
 This means that groups like churches, civil society organizations, corporations, and other entities have to follow
the laws of the state where they establish their parishes, offices, or headquarters.
 EXTERNALLY, sovereignty means that a state’s policies and procedures are independent of the interventions of
other states.
 On the other hand, according to BENEDICT ANDERSON, is an “imagined community”.
 It is limited because it does not go beyond a given “official boundary”, and because rights and responsibilities are
mainly the privilege and concern of the citizens of the nations.

Calling it imagined, does not mean that the nation is made up. Rather, the nation allows one to feel a
connection with a community of people even if he/she will never meet all of them in his/her lifetime.
 Nation and state are closely related because it is nationalism that facilitates state formation.
 In the modern and contemporary era, it has been the nationalist movements that have allowed for the creation of
nation-states.
 Sovereignty is one of the fundamental principles of modern state politics.

LESSON 8:
The Interstate System and International
 The origins of the present-day concept of sovereignty can be traced back to the Treaty of Westphalia, which
was a set of agreements signed in 1648 to end the 30years War between the major continental powers of Europe.
 The Westphalian system provided stability for the nation of Europe until it faced its first major challenge by
Napoleon Bonaparte.
 -believed in spreading the principles of the French Revolution-liberty, equality, and fraternity-to the rest of Europe
and thus challenged the power of kings, nobility, and religion in Europe.
 The Napoleonic Wars lasted from 1803-1815 with Napoleon and his armies marching all over much of Europe.
 In every country they conquered, the French implemented the Napoleonic Code that forbade birth privileges,
encouraged freedom of religion, and promoted meritocracy in government service.
 Anglo and Prussian armies finally defeated Napoleon in the battle of Waterloo in 1815, ending the latter’s
mission to spread his liberal code across Europe.
 To prevent another war and to keep their systems of privilege, the royal powers created a new system that, in
effect, restored the Westphalian system.
 The Concert of Europe was an alliance of “great powers”-the UK, Austria, Russia, and Prussia-that sought to
restore the world of monarchical, hereditary, and religious privileges of the time before the French Revolution and
the Napoleonic Wars.
 Under the Metternich System (named after the Austrian diplomat, Klemens Von Metternich, who was the system’s
main architect & architect of the “Concert of Europe”), the Concert’s power and authority lasted from 1815-1914,
at the dawn of World War I.

INTERNATIONALISM
 The Westphalia and concert systems divided the world into separate, sovereign entities.
 Others imagine a system of heightened interaction between various sovereign states, particularly the desire for
greater cooperation and unity among states and people-this is called internationalism.
 It comes in different forms, but the principle may be divided into 2 broad categories: liberal internationalism and
social internationalism.

Liberal internationalism
It was the late 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant-likened states in a global system to people
living in a given territory; he imagined a form of global government. Writing in the late 18 th century as well, British
philosopher Jeremy Bentham (who coined the word “international” in 1780), advocated the creation of “international
Law” that would govern inter-state relations. He believed that the objective of global legislators should aim to propose
legislation that would create “the greatest happiness of all nations taken together”.
 The first thinker to reconcile nationalism with liberal internationalism was the 19 th-century Italian patriot Giuseppe
Mazzini.
 Mazzini was both an advocate of the unification of the various Italian-speaking mini-states and a major critic of
the Metternich system.
 He forwarded the principle of self-determination - the belief that the world’s nations had a right to a free and
sovereign government.
 Means of Production-the capitalist referred to the owners of factories, companies, and others.
 Socialist International-was a union of European socialist and labor parties established in Paris in 1889.
 May 1 as Labor Day and the creation of an International Women’s Day.
 As the SI collapsed, a more radical version emerged.
 In the so-called Russian Revolution of 1917, Czar Nicholas II was overthrown and replaced by a revolutionary
government led by the Bolshevik Party and its leader, Vladimir Lenin.
 This new state was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR.
 To encourage these socialist revolutions across the world, Lenin established the Communist International in 1919.
 After the war, however, Stalin re-established the Comintern as the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform).
 It helped direct the various communist parties that had taken power in Eastern Europe.
 For the post-war period, however, liberal Internationalism would once again ascendant.
 And the best evidence of this is the rise of the United Nations as the center of global governance.

LESSON 9:
The Definition of Global Governance and International Organization

What is Global Governance?

Global governance is the capacity within the international system, at any given moment, to provide government-
like services and public goods in the absence of a world government. It is the combination of informal and formal
ideas, values, rules, norms, procedures, practices, policies, and organizations that help all actors – states, IGOs, civil
society and NGOs, TNCs, and individuals – identify, understand, and address transboundary problems. At its simplest,
global governance is a set of questions that enable us to work out how the world is, was, and could be governed, and
how changes in grand and not-so-grand patterns of governance occurred, are occurring, and ought to occur (Weiss,
2013).
GLOBAL GOVERNANCE refers to the various intersecting processes that create these sources. There are some
sources of Global Governance or key actors participating in resource governance at an international level including
national governments, private transnational entities operating on a commercial or nonprofit basis, and transnational
communities of interest in a civil society. One lesson will not be able to cover the various ways of Global Governance;
this lesson will only examine how global governance is articulated by intergovernmental organizations. This will focus
primarily on the UN because it is the most prominent intergovernmental organizations today.

INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION
It is likewise when scholars refer to groups like the UN or institutions like the IMF and the World Bank.
International NGO's sometimes considered IOs (international organizations) - this term is commonly used to refer to
international intergovernmental organizations or groups that are primarily made up of member states.
One major fallacy about IOs (international organizations) is that they are merely an amalgamation of various state
interests.

Here are Michael N. Barnett & Martha Finnemore’s power of IOs listed;
 First, IOs have the power of classifications they can invent and apply categories and it creates powerful global
standards.
 Second, IOs have the power to fix meanings, it is a broader function related to the first. Here, the terms like
"security" or "development" need to be well-defined.
 Finally, IOs have the power to diffuse norms; Norms are accepted codes of conduct that may not be strict laws.
 Furthermore, IOs do not only classify and fix meanings; they also spread their ideas across the world. However,
because of these immense powers, IOs can be sources of great good and great harm. Also, it can promote
relevant norms like environmental protection and human rights.

The United Nations

One important example of a non-state actor, an international government organization (IGO) playing a vital
role in the world’s affairs, is the United Nations (UN). The United Nations is an IGO designed to make the enforcement
of international law, security, human rights, economic development, and social progress easier for countries around
the world.

The UN today is divided into five branches:

1. The UN General Assembly – is the main decision-making and representative assembly and is responsible
for upholding the principles of the UN through its policies and recommendations. It is composed of all
member states and headed by a president elected by the member states.
2. The UN Security Council – can authorize the deployment of UN member states’ militaries, can mandate a
cease-fire during conflicts and can enforce penalties on countries if they do not comply with given
mandates. It is composed of five permanent members and 10 rotating members.
3. The International Court of Justice – can settle, according to international law, legal disputes between
States and give opinions, mostly advisory, on legal questions brought to it by UN organs and agencies.
4. The Economic and Social Council – assists the UN General Assembly in promoting economic and social
development, as well as cooperation of member states.
5. The Secretariat – headed by the Secretary-General, provides studies, information and other dates when
needed by other UN branches for their meetings.

LESSON 10:
The United Nations and its Challenges

THE UNITED NATIONS

Having examined the powers, limitations, and weaknesses of IOs, the spotlight will now fall on the most
prominent IO in the contemporary world, the United Nations (UN). After the collapse of the League of Nations at the
end of World War II, countries that worried about another global war began to push for the formation of a more
lasting international league.
The result was the creation of the UN. Although the organization is far from perfect, it should be emphasized
that it has so far achieved its primary goal of averting another global war. For reason alone, the UN should be
considered a success.

ORGANS OF THE UNITED NATIONS

A. General Assembly (GA) is the UN’s “main deliberative policymaking and representative organ.” According to the
UN charter, “Decisions on important questions, such as those on peace and security, admission of new members,
and budgetary matters, require a two–thirds majority of the General Assembly. Decisions on the other questions
are done by a simple majority. Annually, the General Assembly elects a GA President to serve a one-year term of
office”. All member-states (currently at 193) have seats in the GA.
B. Security Council (SC) commentators consider this to be the most powerful. According to the UN, this body consists
of 15 member-states. The GA elects ten of these 15 ten two-year terms. The other five-sometimes referred to as
the Permanent 5 (P5)-are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These states have
been permanent members since the founding of the UN and cannot be replaced through an election. The SC takes
the lead in determining the existence of a threat to the peace or an act of aggression. It calls upon the parties to a
dispute to settle the act by peaceful means and recommends methods of adjustments or terms of a settlement. In
some cases, it can resort to imposing sanctions or even authorizing the use of force to maintain or restore
international peace and security. Much attention has been placed on the SC’s P5 due to their permanent seats and
because each country holds veto power over the council’s decisions. It only takes one veto vote from a P5
member to stop an SC action dead in its tracks. In this sense, the SC is heir to the tradition of “great power”
diplomacy that began with the Metternich/Concert of Europe system. It is especially telling that the P5 consists of
the major Allied Powers that won World War II.
C. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) “the principal body for coordination, policy review, policy dialogue, and
recommendations on social and environmental issues, as well as the implementation of internationally agreed
development goals”
D. International Court of Justice “is to settle, in accordance with the international law, legal disputes submitted to it
by states and to give advisory opinions referred to it by authorized United Nations organs and specialized
agencies. “The secretariat consists of the “Secretary-General and tens of thousands of international UN staff
members who carry out the day-to-day work of the UN as mandated by the General Assembly and the
organization’s other principal organs. “It is the bureaucracy of the UN, serving as a kind of international civil
service. Members of the secretariat serve in their capacity as UN employees and not as state representatives.

CHALLENGES OF THE UNITED NATIONS

Given the scope of the UN’s activities, it naturally faces numerous challenges. Chief among these are the
limits placed upon its various organs and programs by the need to respect state sovereignty.
The UN is not a world government, and its functions are primarily because of voluntary cooperation from
states. If states refuse to cooperate, the influence of the UN can be severely circumscribed.
For example, the UN Council on Human Rights can send special rapporteurs to countries where alleged human
rights violations are occurring. If a country does not invite the rapporteur or places conditions on his/her activities,
however, this information-gathering mechanism usually fails to achieve its goals.
However, the biggest challenge of the United Nations is related to issues of security. The UN Security Council
is tasked with authorizing international acts of military intervention. Because of the P5’s veto power, it is tough for the
council to release a formal resolution, much more implement it.
For example; in the late 1990’s when the United States sought to intervene in the Kosovo war. Serbian leader
Slobodan Milosevic was committing acts of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Muslim Albanians in the province of
Kasoro.
Hundreds and thousands of Albanians were victims of massacres, mass deportations, and internal
displacement. Amid this systematic terror, members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), led by the
United States, sought SC authorization to intervene in the Kosovo war on humanitarian grounds. China and Russia
threatened to veto any action, rendering the UN incapable of addressing the crisis.
NATO decided to intervene in it. Though the NATO intervention was largely a success, it nevertheless, left the UN
ineffectual.
Today, a similar is evident in Syria, which is undergoing a civil war. Russia has threatened to veto any SC
resolution against Syria, thus the UN has done very little to stop state-sanctioned violence against opponents of the
government.
Since Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is an ally of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, the latter has shied away
from any policy that could weaken the legitimacy of the former.
The UN is again ineffectual amid a conflict that has led to over 220,000 people dead and 11 million displaced.
Despite these problems, it remains important for the SC to place a high bar on military intervention.
However, UN members Russia, China, and France and France were unconvinced and vetoed the UN resolution
for intervention, forcing the United States to load a small “coalition of the willing "with its allies.
It has since been discovered that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and the invasion of Iraq has
caused problems for the country and the region that last until today.

Contemporary World
Chapter V

Lesson 11: World Region

WHAT ARE WORLD REGIONS?

 A region is an area with common features that set it apart from other areas.
 Areas on earth that differ from each other feature are called regions; such features can be physical, human,
economic, cultural, or political.
 Regions can vary in size from very small to half of the earth's surface.
 Especially those that pertain to identities, ethics, religion, ecological sustainability, and health.
 Regions are defined as a high degree of uniformity, Limited variability, and more or less lasting boundaries.
 MAJOR WORLD REGIONS
 Europe
 Russia and Neighboring counties
 East Asia
 Southern Asia and South Pacific
 South Asia
 North Africa And Southwestern Asia
 Africa South of the Sahara
 Latin America
 North America

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REGIONALIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION

Regionalization and Globalization
 REGIONALIZATION- it is the process of dividing an area into smaller segments called regions.
 Example: Division of a nation into states or provinces
 Business sectors also use regionalization as a management tool
 Globalization: It is the process of international integration arising from the interchange of world views,
products, ideas, and other aspects such as technology, etc.
 The increasing level of interconnections among people throughout the world.
 The speed and intensity of globalization in terms of world trade and the flow of financial investments
increased markedly in the 1990s.

HOW REGIONS ARE FORMED?

A region is an area that includes a number of places - all of which have something in common. Geographers
categorize regions in two basic ways: physical and cultural.
 Physical regions are defined by landforms (continents and mountain ranges), climate, soil, and natural
vegetation.
 Cultural regions are distinguished by such traits as language, politics, religion, economics, and industry.

THE ADVANTAGE AND DISADVANTAGE OF REGIONALISM

 The advantage of regionalism includes having individuals learn their roles in the community.
 The disadvantage of regionalism is that it can be too inclusive and keep new individuals out.

FACTORS LEADING TO A GREATER INTEGRATION OF THE ASIAN REGION

There are many factors that are leading the Asian Region into a greater integration such as:
1. TRADE: The world economy is intertwined with each other whether we like it or not. We all want or need
something from another part of the world, and global trade facilitates that.
2. SIMILAR CULTURE: The cultures of Asia are diverse but they do share many things. This makes it an easier fit
during times of negotiations
3. COMMON GOALS: The Asian region recognizes the mutual benefit of a slow integration. The territories involved
are not far from each other and the industriousness of its population can work as a powerful negotiating block
against those from other parts of the world.

Lesson 12: Regionalism

WHAT IS REGIONALISM
Regionalism is characterized by the involvement of almost all governments in the world, but it also involves
a wide variety of non-state actors. This results in a multitude of formal and informal regional types of governance and
regional networks in most fields of politics.
In politics, regionalism is a political ideology focusing on the "development of a political or social system based
on one or more" regions and/or the national, normative or economic interests of a specific region, group of regions, or
another sub-national entity, gaining strength from or aiming to strengthen the "consciousness of and loyalty to a
distinct region with a homogeneous population", similarly to nationalism.
Regions may be delineated by administrative divisions, culture, language, and religion, among others.
Regionalists aim at increasing the political power and influence available to all or some residents of a region.
Their demands occur in "strong" forms, such as sovereignty, separatism, secession, and independence, as well as
more moderate campaigns for greater autonomy (such as states' rights, decentralization, or devolution).
Strictly, regionalists favor confederations over unitary nation-states with strong central governments. They
may, however, embrace intermediate forms of federalism. Proponents of regionalism usually claim that strengthening
the governing bodies and political powers within a region, at the expense of a central government, will benefit local
populations by improving regional or local economies, in terms of better fiscal responsibility, regional development,
allocation of resources, implementation of local policies and plans, competitiveness among regions and, ultimately, the
whole country, consistent with the principle of subsidiary.

THREE DISTINCT ELEMENTS OF REGIONALISM

 Movements demanding territorial autonomy within unitary states.
 The organization of the central state on a regional basis for the delivery of its policies including regional
development policies.
 Political decentralization and regional autonomy.

NEW REGIONALISM
This article analyzes the emergence of a “new regionalism” and situates this movement within the historical
evolution of regional planning.

KEY CHARACTERISTICS
1. a focus on specific territories and spatial planning;
2. a response to the particular problems of the postmodern metropolitan region;
3. a holistic perspective that integrates planning specialties as well as environmental, equity, and economic goals;
4. a renewed emphasis on physical planning, urban design, and sense of place; and
5. a more activist or normative stance on the part of planners. The implementation of new regionalist concepts is
likely to come about not through top-down regional government, but through incremental development of social
capital, institutions, ad hoc partnerships, and frameworks of incentives and mandates between existing levels of
government.

ORGANIZATIONS REPRESENTING THIS NEW REGIONALISM

 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)
 European Union (EU)
 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
 Southern African Development Community (SADC)

New regionalism is identified with the reformists who share the same values, norms, institutions, and systems
that exist outside of the traditional, established mainstream institutions and systems.
Their strategies and tactics likewise vary. Some organizations partner with governments to initiate social
change. Those who work with governments (legitimizers) participate in institutional mechanisms that afford some
civil society groups voice and influence technocratic policy-making processes.
Example: The ASEAN issued its Human Rights Declaration in 2009, but the regional body left it to member
countries to apply the declaration’s principles as they see fit. Aware that democratic rights are limited in many ASEAN
countries. NEW REGIONALISM organizations used this official declaration to pressure and promote human rights.
In South America, left-wing governments support the Hemispheric Social Alliance’s opposition to the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), while members of the Mesa de Articulacion de Asociaciones
Nacionales y Redes de ONGs de America Latina y El Caribe (Roundtable of National Association and NGOs in
Latin America and the Caribbean) participate in “forums, summits, and dialogues with presidents and minister.”
Other Regional organizations dedicate themselves to specialized causes. Activists across Central and South
America established rainforests in Brazil, Guyana, Panama, and Peru.
Young Christians from ASIA, AFRICA, THE MIDDLE EAST, and THE AMERICAS, AND THE CARIBBEAN
formed the following:
 REGIONAL INTERFAITH YOUTH NETWORKS to promote “conflict prevention, resolution, peace, education and
sustainable development”.
 THE MIGRANT FORUM in Asia is another regional network of NGOs and trade union committed to protect and
promoting the rights and welfare of migrant workers.

These organizations primary power lies in their moral standing and their ability to combine lobbying with pressure
politics. Unfortunately, most of them are poorly financed, which places at a disadvantage when dealing with their
official counter parts who have large state funds. Their impact in global politics is, therefore, limited.
New regionalism differs significantly from traditional state-to-state regionalism when it comes to identifying
problem. For example, states treat poverty or environmental degradation as technical or economic issues that can be
resolved by refining existing programs of state agencies, making minor changes in economic policies, and creating
new officers that address these issues.
Another challenge for new regionalism is the discord that may merge among them. For example, disagreements
surface over issues like gender and religion, with pro-choice NGOs breaking from religious civil society groups that
side with the church, Muslim imams, or governments opposed to reproductive rights and other pro-women policies.
Moreover, while civil society groups are able to dialogue with governments, the latter may not be welcoming to
this new trend and set up one obstacle after another. The coordination of Action Research on AIDS (CARAM), lobbed
ASEAN governments to defend migrant labor rights. Their program of action, however, slowed down once countries
like Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand refused to recognize the rights of undocumented migrant workers and the
rights of the families of migrants.

LESSON 13:
CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES TO REGIONALISM

CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES TO REGIONALISM

Today, regionalisms face multiple challenges, the most serious of which is the resurgence of militant
nationalism and populism.
The refusal to dismantle NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, has become the basis of
the anti-NATO rhetoric of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Now, even the relationship of the United States-the alliance's
core member -with NATO has become problematic after Donald Trump demonized the organization as simply leeching
off American military power without giving anything in return.
The continuing financial crisis of the region is forcing countries like Greece to consider leaving the Union to
gain more flexibility in their economic policy.
Anti-immigrant sentiment and a populist campaign against Europe have already led to the United Kingdom
voting to leave the European Union in a move that the media has termed "Brexit": which shows how the net
income of the firm is arrived at over a stated period, United Kingdom, island country located off the northwestern
coast of mainland Europe.
The European Union (EU) is a group of 28 countries that operates as a cohesive economic and political block.
ASEAN members continue to disagree over the extent to which member countries should sacrifice their
sovereignty for the sake of regional stability.
The association's Link with East Asia has also been problematic. Recently, ASEAN countries also disagreed
over how to relate to China with the Philippines unable to get the other countries to support its condemnation of
China's occupation of the West Philippine Sea.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is a regional intergovernmental organization comprising ten
countries in Southeast Asia, which promotes intergovernmental cooperation and facilitates economic, political,
security, military, educational, and socio-cultural.
 Moreover, when some formerly authoritarian countries democratized, this participatory regionalism clashed
with ASEAN's policy of non-interference, as civil society groups in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand demanded
that the other countries democratized and adopt a more open attitude towards foreign criticism.
The second feature of participatory regionalism is the development of a close nexus between governments
and civil society in managing regional and transnational issues.
A final challenge pertains to differing visions of what regionalism should be for. Western governments may see
regional organizations not simply as economic formations but also as instruments of Political democratization.
Non-Western and developing societies, however, may have different views regarding globalization,
development, and democracy.
Western cultures, sometimes equated with Western civilization, Occidental culture ... Tendencies that have
come to define modern Western societies include the concept of politics.

Contemporary World
Chapter VI

LESSON 14:
REALITIES OF RELIGION

REALITIES OF RELIGION
In actuality, the relationship between religion and globalism is much more complicated. Peter Berger argues
that far from being secularized, the “Contemporary World is… furiously religious in most of the world, there are
veritable explosions of religious fervor, occurring in one form or another in all the major religious traditions –
Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Confucianism (if one wants to call it a religion) – and in
many places in the imaginative synthesis of one or more world religions with indigenous faith.
Religions are the foundation of modern republics, the Malaysians Government places religion at the center
of the political system. Its constitution explicitly states that “Islam is the religion of the federation”, and the rulers of
each state were also the “Head of the religion of Islam”.
Late Iranian Religious Leader, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, bragged about the superiority of Islamic rule over
its secular counterparts and pointed out that “there are no fundamental distinctions among constitutional despotic,
dictatorial, democratic and communistic regimes”.
To Khomeini, all secular ideologies were the same, and Islamic rule was the superior form of government
because it was spiritual. Yet, Iran calls itself a Republic, a turn that it associated with secular. Moreover, the Religious
movement does not hesitate to appropriate secular themes and practices.
The moderate Muslim associates Nahdlatul Ulama in Indonesia has Islamic Schools (Pesantren) where
students are taught not only about Islam but also about Modern Science such as:
 social sciences,
 Modern Banking
 Civic Education
 Rights of Women
 Pluralism
 Democracy
In other cases, religion was the result of a shift in a state policy. The Church of England, for example, was
“shaped by the rationality of modern democratic (and bureaucratic) culture”
King Henry VIII broke away from Roman Catholicism and established his own church to bolster his own power.
In the United States, religion and law were fused together to help build this “Modern Secular Society”. It was
observed in the early 1800s by French historian and Diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote “Not only do the
Americans practice their religions out of self-interest but they often even place in this world the interest which they
have in practicing it”.
Jose Casanova confirms this statement by noting that “historically religion has always been at the very center
of all great political conflicts and movements of social reform”. From independence to abolition, from nativism to
women's suffrage, from prohibition to the civil rights movements, religion had always been at the center of these
conflicts, but also on both sides of the political barricades “it remains the case until today with the power the Christian
right has on the republican party”.

RELIGION FOR AND AGAINST GLOBALIZATION

 Religion - An organized system of beliefs, ceremonies, and rules used to worship God or a group of gods.
 Globalization - It is the process in which people’s ideas and goods spread throughout the world, boosting more
interaction and integration between the world’s cultures, governments, and economies.
The two old religions – Christianity and Islam see Globalization as an opportunity to expand their reach all
over the world.
Globalization has brought benefits in developing countries as well as negative effects one of these is the
disturbance of the “cultural system.”
Globalization continues to use “the full range of modern means of communication and organization associated
with economic transformation, fast long-distance transport, and communications, availability of English, modern
management and marketing.
The spread of involving too many people and making them is known as the “ promiscuous propagation” of
religious forms.
The fundamentalist organizations are the result of the increase of Born-again group, Islam, Daesh known as
ISIS, and also the spread of globalization which is the opposite of what other assumes. Religious fundamentalism and
globalization both find ways to benefit or take advantage of each other.
But still, the tension with globalists does not subside. Muslim view globalization as a “Trojan horse- hiding supporters
of Western values ready to spread ideas and take over them”.
The World Council of Churches Association of different protestant leaders criticizes the negative effects of
Globalization. Churches should be accountable and become an advocate of inside and outside “the center of powers”.
Catholic Church condemned globalization “It suffocates hope and increases risks and threats.”
 Lutheran World Federation 10 th Assembly- “Our world is split into parts by forces we often don’t understand—
Relationship in this world continues to be ruptured (break) due to greed (selfish desire) injustices and various forms of
violence”.
The advocacies gained the attention of Global Institutions in 1998 the World Bank brought a discussion with
religious leaders about global poverty. Although it only provides an insignificant result (WB supported anti-poverty
projects ONLY in Kenya and Ethiopia). Evidently, they are responsible for the liberationist, moral critiques of economic
globalization, including writing on social justice coming from the religious.

Contemporary World
Chapter VII

Lesson 15: Media and Globalization

GLOBALIZATION ENTAILS THE SPREAD OF VARIOUS CULTURES

 When a film is made in Hollywood, it is shown not only in the United States but also in other cities across the
globe.
 Globalization also involves the spread of ideas. (For example, the notion of the rights of Lesbians, gay, bisexual,
and transgender (LGBT) communities is spreading across the world and becoming more widely accepted.)
 Similarly, the conservative Christian Church that opposes these rights moves from places like South America and
Korea to Burundi in Africa.
 People who travel the globe teaching and preaching their beliefs in Universities, Churches, public forums,
classrooms, or even as guests of a family play a major role in the spread of culture and ideas.
 Today, television programs, social media groups, books, movies, magazines, and the like have made it easier for
advocates to reach larger audiences.
 Globalization relies on media as its main conduit for the spread of global culture and ideas.

Jack Lule was then right to ask, “Could Global trades have been involved without a flow of information on
markets, prices, commodities, and more?
According to Jack Lule could empires have stretched across the world without communication throughout their
borders?
Could religion, music, poetry, film, fiction, cuisine, and fashion develop as they have without the intermingling
of media and culture?
There is an intimate relationship between globalization and media that must be unraveled to further
understand the contemporary world.

MEDIA AND ITS FUNCTION

Lule describes media as “a means of conveying something, such as a channel of communication."
 Print Media include books, magazines, and newspapers.
 Broadcast Media involves radio, film, and television.
Finally, digital media cover the internet and mobile main communication. While it is relatively easy to define the
term "media", it is more difficult to determine what media do and how they affect societies. Media theorist Marshall
McLuhan once declared that “the medium is the message."

LESSON 16:
THE GLOBAL VILLAGE AND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM’S CRITIQUES
THE GLOBAL VILLAGE AND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM

McLuhan used his analysis of technology to examine the impact of electronic media. Since he was writing
around the 1960s, he mainly analyzed the social changes brought about by television-electronic media. Broadcast or
storage media take advantage of electronic technology. They may include television, radio, Internet, fax, CD-ROMs,
DVD, and any other medium that requires electricity or digital encoding of information. The term 'electronic media' is
often used in contrast with print media.
McLuhan declared that television was turning the world into a "global village". By this, he meant that, as
more and more people sat down in front of their television sets and listened to the same stories, their perception of
the world would contract.
In the years after McLuhan, media scholars further grappled with the challenges of a Global media culture.
A lot of these early thinkers assumed that global media had a tendency to homogenize culture. They argued that as
global media spread, people from all over the world would begin to watch, listen to, and read the same things.
 Commentators, therefore, believed that media globalization coupled with American hegemony would create a form
of cultural imperialism whereby American values and culture would overwhelm all others.
 In 1976, media critic Herbert Schiller argued that not only was the world being Americanized but that this process
also led to the spread of "American" capitalist values like consumerism.
 Similarly, for John Tomlinson, cultural globalization is simply a euphemism for "Western cultural imperialism" since
it promotes” Homogenized, westernized, consumer culture".
These scholars who decry cultural imperialism, however, have a top-down view of the media, since they are
more concerned with the broad structures that determine media content.
Moreover, their focus on America has led them to neglect other global flows of information that the media can
enable. This media/cultural imperialism theory has, therefore, been subject to significant critique.
 If cultural globalization merely entails the spread of a Western monoculture, what explains the prevalence of
regional cultural trends?
For example: The regionalization of culture was a boon to Filipino telenovelas.
– From 2000 to 2002, ABS -CBN aired ”Pangako Sa’yo” starring Jericho Rosales and Kristine Hermosa.
– The show soon became a hit in Singapore and Malaysia, and its two stars became household names.

LESSON 17:
CRITIQUES OF CULTURAL IMPERIALISM

CRITIQUES OF CULTURAL IMPERIALISM

 Proponents of the idea of cultural imperialism ignored the fact that media messages are not just made by
producers; they are also consumed by audiences.
 In the 1980s, media scholars began to pay attention to the ways in which audiences understood and interpreted
media messages.
 In 1985, Indonesian cultural critic Len Ang studied the ways in which different viewers in the Netherlands
experienced watching the American soap opera Dallas.

In 1990, Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes decided to push Ang's analysis further by examining how viewers from
distinct cultural communities interpreted Dallas.
 They argued that texts are received differently by varied interpretive communities because they derived different
meanings and pleasures from these texts.
 Thus, people from diverse cultural backgrounds had their own ways of understanding the show.

Apart from the challenge of audience studies, the cultural imperialism thesis has been belied by the renewed
strength of regional trends in the globalization process.
Asian culture, for example, has proliferated worldwide through the globalization of media.
Japanese brands–from Hello Kitty to the Mario Brothers to Pokemon– are now an indelible part of global popular
culture.
The same can be said for Korean pop (K-pop) and Korean telenovelas, which are widely successful regionally
and globally.
 The observation even applies to culinary tastes
 The most obvious case of globalized Asian cuisine is sushi.

Given these patterns, it is no longer tenable to insist that globalization is a unidirectional process of foreign
cultures overwhelming local ones.
Globalization, as noted in Lesson 1, will be an uneven process, and it will produce inequalities.

LESSON 18:
CREATION OF CYBER GHETTOS

CREATION OF CYBER GHETTOS

However, social media also have their dark side. In early 2000, commentators began referring to the
emergence of a splinternet and the phenomenon of cyber balkanization to refer to the various bubble people place
themselves in when they are online.
 Splinternet- is a characterization of the Internet as splintering and dividing due to various factors, such as
technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion, and interests.
 Cyber balkanization is the segregation of the Internet into smaller groups with similar interests, to a degree that
they show a narrow-minded approach to outsiders or those with contradictory views.
In the United States, voters of the Democratic Party largely read the liberal website, and voters of the
Republican Party largely read the conservative website.
Democratic Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with its
main rival, the Republican Party. This segmentation, notes an article in the journal science, has been exacerbated by
the nature of social media feeds, which leads users to read articles, memes, and videos shared by like-minded friends

SOCIAL MEDIA FEEDS

Social media feeds are described as Twitter Walls, or as an Event Beat Screen Cast, which enables you to
gather and publish social content onto public screens at events. Social media feeds have been proven to increase
participation and customer engagement at events, through social interaction and social signage.
As such, being on Facebook can resemble living within an Echo chamber which reinforces ones existing beliefs
and opinions.
 Echo Chamber–is a metaphorical description of a situation in which beliefs are amplified or reinforced by
communication and repetition inside a closed system. This echo chamber precludes users from listening to or
reading opinions and information that challenge their viewpoint, thus making them more partisan and close-
minded.
 The Social media Bubbles–is a hypothesis stating that there was a speculative boom and bust phenomenon in the
field of social media in the 2010s, particularly in the United States. It can be exploited by politicians with less than
Democratic intentions and demagogues wanting to whip up popular anger. The same inexpensiveness that allows
social media to be a democratic force likewise makes it a cheap tool of government propaganda.

Propaganda is the spreading of information in support of a cause.
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has hired armies of social media trolls to manipulate public opinion through
intimidation and the spreading of Fake news. Most recently, American intelligence agencies established that Putin used
trolls and online misinformation to help Donald Trump win the presidency.

Contemporary World
Chapter VIII

LESSON 19:
Why Study Global Cities

So far, much of the analysis of globalization in the previous lessons have looked at how ideas of
internationalism shape modern world politics.
We also examined cultural movements like k-pop and how they spread through media like the internet.
What this lesson will emphasize? However, that globalization is spatial. This statement means two things.
First, globalization is spatial because it occurs in physical spaces. People who are working in these businesses
or Filipinos working abroad start to purchase or rent high-rise condominium units and better homes. As all these
events happen, more people are driven out of city centers to make way for the new developments.
 Second, globalization is spatial because what makes it move is the fact that it is based in places. In other
words
"Cities acts on globalization and, globalization acts on cities"

GLOBAL CITIES
 Centers of authority.
 It also centers on higher learning and culture.
 May also be considered centers of political influence.
 A decision made in that city can, therefore, affect the political economy of an entire continent and beyond.

Example: Los Angeles

The centers of the American film Industry may be considered a global city. It is the cultural power of global
cities that ties them to the imagination. Today, global cities become culturally diverse; in a global city, one can try
cuisines from different parts of the world.

DEFINING THE GLOBAL CITY

Saskia Sassen popularized the term "global city" in the 1990s. Her criteria for what constitute a global city
were primarily economic. She identified three global cities: New York, London, and Tokyo.
They are the homes, for instance of the world’s top stock exchanges where investors buy and sell shares in
major corporations.
Limiting the discussions of global cities to these three metropolises however, is proving more and more
restrictive.
San Francisco must now factor in as another global city because it is the home of the most powerful internet
companies-Face book, twitter, and Google. Other considers some cities are "global"-because they are great places to
live in. Melbourne referred to it as the world’s "most livable city" which means a place with a good transportation.
INDICATORS FOR GLOBALITY
The multiple attributes of global city:
Economic power largely determines which cities are global. For example, Shanghai may have smaller stock
market compare to New York and Tokyo but plays a critical role in the global economic supply chain ever since China
has become manufacturing center of the world.

LESSON 20:
The Global City and the Poor

THE GLOBAL CITY AND THE POOR

Economic Globalization has paved the way for massive inequality. This phenomenon is thus pronounced in
some large cities, particularly those in Scandinavia, have found ways to mitigate inequality through state-led social
redistribution programs. Particularly, those in developing countries are sites of contradiction.
In places like Mumbai, Jakarta, and Manila, it is common to find gleaming buildings alongside massive shanty
towns.
In the outskirts of New York and San Francisco are poor urban enslaves occupied by Africa- America and
immigrant families who are often denied opportunities at a better life.
Slowly, they are being forced to move farther away from the economic centers of their cities. As a city attracts
more capital and richer residents are forced to relocate to far away but cheaper areas. This phenomenon of driving
out the poor in favor of newer, wealthier residents is called gentrification.
In France, poor Muslim migrants are forced out to parts and have clustered around ethnic enclaves known as
“Banlieve”.
In most of the world’s global cities, the middle class is also thinning out. Globalization creates high-income
jobs that are concentrated in global cities.
These high earners, in turn, generate demand for an unskilled labor force (hotel, cleaners, nannies, maids,
waitress) they will attend to their increasing needs. Meanwhile, many middle-income jobs in manufacturing and
business process out sourcing (call center) are moving to other countries. This following out of the middle class in the
global cities has heightened the inequality within them. A large global city may thus be a paradise for some, but a
purgatory for others.

Contemporary World
Chapter IX

LESSON 21:
The Perils of Overpopulation

International migration also plays a part. Today, 191 million people live in countries other than their own, and
the United Nations projects that over 2.2 million will move from the developing world to the First World countries.
Countries welcome immigrants as they offset the debilitating effects of an aging population, but they are also
perceived as threats to the job market because they compete against citizens for jobs and often have the edge
because they are open to receiving lower wages. Voters' pressure has often constrained their governments to institute
striker immigration policies

THE "PERILS" OF OVERPOPULATION

Development planners are urbanization and industrialization as indicators of a developing society but disagree
on the role of population growth or decline in modernization. This lengthy discussion brings back ideas of British
scholar Thomas Malthus who warned in his 1798" An essay on the Principle of Population “that population growth will
inevitably exhaust the world food supply by the middle of the 19th century. Malthus' prediction was off base, but it
was received in the late 1960s when American biologist Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, wrote the "Population
Bomb, which argued that overpopulation in the 1970s and the 1980s will bring about global environmental disasters
that would, in turn, lead to food shortage and mass starvation. They proposed that countries like the United States
take the lead in the promotion of global population control in order to reduce the growth to zero. Their
recommendations ranched from the bizarre (chemical castration) to the policy-oriented (taxing an additional child
luxury takes on child-related products) to monetary incentives (paying off men who would agree to be sterilized after
two children) to institution-building (a powerful Department of Population and Environment)
There was some reason for this fear to persist. The rate of global population increase was at its highest
between 1955 and 1975 when nations were finally able to return to normalcy after the devastations wrought by World
War II. The growth rate rose from 1.8 % per year from 1955 to 1975, peaking at a 2.06 % annual growth rate
between 1965 and 1970.
By limiting the population, vital resources could be used for economic progress and not be diverted" and
"wasted" to feed more mouths. This argument became the basis for government “population control" programs
worldwide.
In the mid-20th country, the Philippines, China, and India sought to lower birth rates on the belief that unless
controlled, the free expansion of family members would lead to a crisis in resources, which in turn may result in
widespread poverty, mass hunger, and political instability. As early as 1958, the American policy journal, Foreign
Affairs, had already advocated "contraception and sterilization" as the practical solutions to global economic, social,
political problems. While there have been criticism that challenged this argument, it persists even to this very day.
In May 2009, a group of American billionaires warned of how a "nightmarish" explosion of people was "a
potentially disastrous environmental, social, and industrial threat " to the world.
Finally, politics determine these "birth control" programs. Developed countries justify their support for population
control in developing countries by depicting the latter as conservative societies. For instance, population experts
blamed the "irresponsible fecundity” of Egyptians for that nations run-on population growth, and the Iranian peasant's
''natural" libidinal tendencies for the same rise in population.
From 1920 onwards, the Indian government " marked lower castes, working poor, and Muslims as
hypersexual and hyper-fecund and hence a drain on policies like the forced sterilization of twenty million " violators
“of the Chinese government one-child policy. Vietnam and Mexico also conducted coercive mass sterilization.

TWO SIGNIFICANT PARTS OF FAMILY INCOMES

 Rural families view multiple children and large kinship networks as critical investments. Children, for example,
can take over agricultural work. Their houses can also become the “retirement homes” of their parents, who will
then proceed to take care of their grandchildren.
 Urban families, however, may not have the same kinship network anymore because couples live on their own, or
because they move out of the farmlands. Thus, it is usually the basic family unit that is left to deal with life’s
challenges on its own.

 These different versions of family life determine the economic and social policies that countries craft regarding
their respective populations. Countries in the “less developed regions in the world” that rely on agriculture tend to
maintain high levels of population growth.
 The 1980 United Nations report on urban and rural population growth states that “these areas contained 85
percent of the world population in 1975are projected to contain 90 percent by the end of the 20th century.”
 Since then, global agricultural population has declined. In 2011, it accounted for over 37 percent of the world
population, compared to the statistics in1980, in which rural and urban population percentages were more or less
the same. The blog site “Nourishing the Planet,” however, noted that even as the agricultural population shrunk
as a share of total population between 1980 and 2011, it grew numerically from 2.2 billion to 2.6 billion people
during this period.”
 Urban population has grown, but necessarily because families are having more children . It is rather the
combination or the natural outcome of significant migration to the cities by people working work in the “more
modern” sectors of society. This movement of people is especially manifest in the developing countries where
industries and businesses in the cities are attracting people from the rural areas. This trend has been noticeable
since the 1950’s with the pace accelerating in next half-a-century. By the start of the 21 st century the world had
become “44 percent urban, while the corresponding figures for developed countries are 52percent to 75 percent.”
 International migration plays a part. Today, 191million people live in countries other than their own, and the
United Nations projects that over 2.2 million will move from the developing world to the First World countries.
Countries welcome immigrants as they offset the debilitating effects of an aging population, but they are also
perceived as threats to the job market because they compete against citizens for jobs and often have the edge
because they are open to receiving lower wages. Voter pressure has often constrained their governments to
institute stricter immigration policies.

LESSON 22:
Population Growth and Food Security
Today’s global population has reached 7.4 billion, and it is estimated to increase to 9.5 billion in 2050, then
11.2 billion by 2100. The median age of this population is 30.1, with the male age at 29.4 years and female, 30.9
years. Ninety five percent of this population growth will happen in the developing countries, with demographers
predicting that by the middle of this country, several countries will have tripled these populations. The opposite is
happening in the developed world. Where populations remain steady in general but decline in some of the most
advanced countries (Japan and Singapore). However, this scenario is not a run-off that could get out to control.
Demographers predict that the world population will stabilize by 2050 to 9 billion, although they warn that feeding this
population will be an immense challenge.
The decline in fertility and the existence of a young productive population, however, may not be enough to
offset this concern over food security. The food and agriculture organization (FAO) warns that in order for countries to
mitigate the impact of population growth, food production must increase by 70 percent annual cereal production must
rise to 3 billion tons from the current 2.1 billion; and yearly meat production must go up to 200 global rates of growth
of cereals had declined considerably from 3.2 percent in 1960 to just 1.5 percent in 2000.
The FAO recommends that countries increase their investments in agriculture, craft long-term policies aimed
at fighting poverty and invest in research and development. The UN body also suggests that countries develop a
comprehensive social service program that includes food assistance, consistent delivery of health services, and
education, especially for the poor. If domestic production is not enough, it becomes essential for nations to import.
The FAO, therefore, enjoins governments to keep their markets open, and to eventually “move towards a global
trading system that is fair and competitive and that contributes to a dependable market for food.
 The aforementioned are worthy recommendations but nation states shall need the political will push through
these sweeping changes in population growth and food security. This will take some time to happen given that good
governance is also a goal that may nations, especially in the developing world, have yet to attain.