Chapter 24: Accelerating Global Interaction

Accelerating Global Interaction:

Throughout the twentieth century, a dense web of political relationships, economic transactions, and cultural influences increasingly bound the world together.

         Economic globalization accompanied, and maybe helped generate, the greatest economic growth spurt in world history; immense creation of wealth. Massive chasm has developed between rich industrialized countries and everyone else. Growing economic inequality within individual states and growing popular movement against globalization emerged in the 1990s.

         The “woman question” became a global issue in the twentieth century. At that time, sharp divisions happened within global feminism. Global backlash viewed feminism as undermining family life.

Fundamentalism is a major reaction against modernization and globalization. Many features of the modern world appear threatening to established religion. So, fundamentalists have responded with selective rejection of modernity. Another fundamentalism, called Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism developed in India in the 1980s.Islamic fundamentalism is the most prominent fundamentalism of the late twentieth century.