AP World History
Chapter 32 Notes Outline
Outline Chapter 32: New Challenges in a New Millennium
I. Globalization and Economic Crisis
A. An Interconnected Economy
1. Economic growth in China and India, along with their large populations, made them
future world economic powers. These nations and the United States increased their demand
for oil to the point that the price per barrel rose from $20 in 1999 to $70 in 2006, then fell
abruptly during the economic crisis of 2008.
2. To promote economic growth and reduce vulnerabilities, many countries formed freetrade zones and regional trade associations. The strengthening of the European Union (EU)
and the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were notable
examples of this trend.
3. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was formed in 2001 with China, Russia,
and four former U.S.S.R. regions initially for the purposes of collective security. Oil-rich Iran
applied for membership in 2008.
4. The World Trade Organization (WTO) was founded in 1995 to encourage reduced
trading barriers and enforce international trade agreements. The organization has numerous
vocal critics. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank provide assistance
to countries in economic trouble, but few expected the drastic downturn in the global
economy.
B. Global Financial Crisis
1. The 2008 financial crisis had roots in the Asian crisis of 1997 when the investment boom
in Asian countries burst. Money then flowed the other way, much to the U.S., allowing the
U.S. to fight two wars while lowering taxes.
2. In 2008 the U.S. housing boom collapsed causing devaluation in housing and generating
a large number of home foreclosures. U.S. financial firms and banks teetered on the brink of
collapse. Unemployment increased. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama won the
election in part from faith in his ability to stem the economic crisis.
C. Globalization and Democracy
1. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the number of democratic institutions
increased throughout the world.
2. The great appeal of democracy is that it allows for the peaceful resolution of differences
among a country’s social, cultural, and regional groups, and reduces the threat of war
between democratic nations.
3. The economic crisis of 2008 caused some new democratic governments to fall.
AP World History
Chapter 32 Notes Outline
4. Democracy in Pakistan seemed uncertain; President Pervez Musharraf stepped down
rather than face impeachment because of his support of the U.S. The government also
faced growing strength of the Pakistani Taliban.
5. Asian countries have moved toward more open political processes. The election of the
BJP in India increased tensions between India’s Hindus and Muslims. In 2004, the BJP lost
a national election to the Congress Party and peacefully handed over power.
6. With the notable exception of South Africa, elections in sub-Saharan Africa have often
been used by would-be dictators as the first step in establishing their political and military
dominance. In Sudan, violence in Darfur led to Omar al-Bashir becoming the first sitting
head of state to be charged with genocide by the International Criminal Court in 2009.
D. Regime Change in Iraq and Afghanistan
1. Experiments in democracy took place in Afghanistan and Iraq after the United States
overthrew both regimes.
2. Ruled by the Taliban at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and harboring Usama bin Laden,
Afghanistan became the target of the United States in December 2001. With the fall of the
Taliban, Hamid Karzai was elected interim president in 2002 and was Afghanistan’s first
democratically elected president in 2004.
3. Afghanistan’s government has not proven strong enough to control warlords in some
outlying regions, and it has had to fight attempts by the Taliban to regain power. Despite
efforts to the stem production, the majority of Afghanistan’s agricultural income comes from
opium production.
4. The United States began a preemptive strike against Iraq on March 20, 2003, under the
belief that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), although United Nations
weapons inspectors had not found any evidence of WMDs in Iraq. When no WMDs were
found, President George W. Bush then stated that the reason for the invasion was to
liberate the Iraqi people from oppression and install a democracy.
5. After “major fighting” ended in Iraq, the United States led Iraqis through the steps to a
constitutionally elected government in January 2005. As democracy took shape in Iraq, they
also endured a guerilla insurgency and, after the election of a Shi-ite majority, conflict
between Shi-ite and Sunni factions, verging on civil war. By the time Barak Obama took
office, however, signs of stabilization led him to announce withdrawal of U.S. combat forces
by August 2010.
6. The hardships of democratization in Iraq and Afghanistan led other Middle Eastern
countries to question U.S. urgings to liberalize their political systems. The capture of 23
seats in the Lebanese parliament by Hezbollah in 2005 and the majority of seats won by
Hamas in the Palestine Governing Council seemed to confirm for oil-producing countries
their hesitancy to hold free elections. In 2007, Hamas attacks against Israel led to aerial
bombardment by Israel on the Gaza Strip.
II. The Question of Values
AP World History
Chapter 32 Notes Outline
A. Faith and Politics
1. Evangelical Protestants became a powerful, conservative political force in the United
States, particularly during the presidency of George W. Bush. Catholic conservatives led
opposition to abortion, homosexuality, marriage of priests, and admission of women to the
priesthood. Israel’s hyper-orthodox Jews, known as haredim, vehemently resisted both
Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and plans for withdrawal from parts of the
West Bank. In India, Hindu zealots made the BJP party a powerful political force.
2. The birth of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 made the current of Muslim political
assertiveness visible to all, but by the year 2000, acts of terrorism by non-Iranian Muslim
groups claiming to be acting for religious reasons were capturing the headlines. Media
technology increased terrorism’s effectiveness as a political tactic from the 1980s onward,
especially with spectacular attacks against the United States and Europe.
3. Most notorious of the terrorists was the Saudi-born charismatic leader Usama bin
Laden.Through his group of fighters called al-Qaeda, he attacked American embassies, the
U.S. Navy destroyer Cole, and the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. Further
terrorist attacks by Indonesians in 2002, North Africans in 2004, and English-born Muslims
in 2005 suggested that the violence begun by al-Qaeda had become decentralized and that
recruits might no longer be taking orders from bin Laden. Debate has not settled on the
reasons for the increasing violence but fear of terrorism became pervasive throughout the
world, and many peaceful Muslims found themselves suspect because of their beliefs.
B. Universal Rights and Values
1. The United Nations sought to protect the rights of individuals through the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, passed by the General Assembly in December 1948. The
declaration’s emphasis on individual rights was derived mostly from European and
American history; many of the countries that later signed this declaration had reservations
about the universal nature of concepts that had been formulated exclusively on the basis of
the western cultural tradition.
2. Rather than addressing fundamental philosophical issues regarding the concept of
human rights, human rights activists worked through nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) and focused their efforts on agreed-upon violations of human rights: torture,
imprisonment without trial, and summary execution by death squads, and on famine relief
and refugee assistance.
3. U.S. demands that its citizens be exempted from the jurisdiction of the International
Criminal Court and that “enemy combatants” taken prisoner during the “war on terrorism” did
not have to be treated in accordance with the Third Geneva Convention, and its withdrawal
from the Kyoto agreement has prompted charges of hypocrisy from critics of the U.S.
government. The election of Barak Obama, the first African-American president of the U.S.,
seemed to signal a change in American attitudes on international rights issues.
C. Women’s Rights
AP World History
Chapter 32 Notes Outline
1. Positions on the question of women’s rights clearly demonstrate the dichotomy of views
between the western industrialized nations and the nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin
America.
2. The feminist movement in the west was concerned with voting rights, equal access to
education and jobs, and an end to gender discrimination and sexual exploitation. Feminists
in the west also decried the oppression of women in other parts of the world.
3. Some nonwestern women complained about the deterioration of morality and family life
in the west and questioned the priorities of the western feminist movement. Efforts to
coordinate the struggle for women’s rights internationally gained momentum in the 1970s,
but these efforts were not able to overcome deep-seated cultural disagreement on the
definition of women’s rights.
4. International conferences have focused attention on women’s issues more than they
have generated solutions. On the other hand, increasing women’s education, better
employment opportunities, political participation, and control of fertility are goals that
promise to lead to better gender equality.
III. Global Culture
A. The Media and the Message
1. After World War II, the United States became the world’s main exporter of movies,
challenged only by India, Egypt, and Hong Kong.
2. In the 1960s, television began to spread to most of the nonwestern world, where
government monopolies ensured that the new medium would be used to disseminate a
unified national viewpoint rather than function as a medium for the transmission of western
culture and opinions. American organizations like CNN (Cable News Network) used satellite
transmission technology to enter the international market, proffering a fundamentally
American view of the news. In response to CNN, other countries have developed their own
twenty-four-hour news coverage, such as Al-Jazeera, based in the Persian Gulf emirate of
Qatar, which interprets the news of the Iraq War, for instance, from a different perspective
than U.S. news media.
3. The development of digital technology offered the possibility of combining the separate
technologies of movies, television, and computers, while the development of the Internet
transformed business and education. These technological innovations could be seen as
portents of western—especially American—cultural domination, but as technology became
more widespread, people around the world had more opportunities to adapt that technology
to their own purposes.
B. The Spread of Pop Culture
1. The new technologies helped change perceptions of culture by allowing popular culture
to become more and more visible. At the beginning of the twentieth century, European
composers, choreographers, writers, and artists drew on popular cultures to inspire and
enliven their work.
AP World History
Chapter 32 Notes Outline
2. Initially, the content was heavily American but consumer products of American,
European, and Japanese transnational companies found their way into international
markets and filmmakers began to be inspired by global themes for international audiences.
C. Emerging Global Culture
1. Cultural links across national and ethnic boundaries at the elite level generated much
less controversy than did the globalization of popular culture. Russian-American
collaboration on space missions and in the business world, the flow of graduate students
and researchers from around the world to American scientific laboratories, and the use of
English as a global language were all aspects of globalization at the elite level.
2. The importance of English as a global language became evident in the emergence of an
international literature in English, though world literature remained highly diverse..
3. Western universities have become the model for higher education around the world.
D. Enduring Cultural Diversity
1. Diverse cultural traditions persisted at the end of the twentieth century despite the
globalization of industrial society and the integration of economic markets. Japan, for
example, has been a success in the modern industrial world in spite of—or perhaps
because of—its group-oriented, hierarchical approach to social relations.
2. The economic success of Japan and other Asian countries calls into question the
longstanding western assumption that all of world history culminated in the exceptional
convergence of political freedom, secularism, and industrialization that emerged in the west.
Also coming into question was whether industrialization offered the only viable route to
prosperity.