1 gen 2025 anni - Summary

Descrizione:

globalization:The spread of economic, political, and cultural influences and connections among countries, businesses, and individuals through trade, migration, and communication.


When the Cold War ended in 1991, a new era in world history began, with significant consequences for the United States. Communism was in retreat, and capitalism advanced across the world, inaugurating a period of rapid globalization in which we’re still living. The spread of economic, political, and cultural influences and connections among countries, businesses, and individuals through trade, migration, and communication — the hallmarks of globalization — defines the decades after 1991. With this deepening worldwide interconnectedness came new domestic challenges for Americans, such as immigration policy and the effects of economic competition on industries and communities, as well as global dilemmas, such as shifting trade networks and military alliances. For the United States, globalization brought even greater urgency to the task of balancing national priorities with global realities.

Globalization was not itself new — think of the Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century linking Europe, the Americas, and Africa, for example. But Americans had turned inward in the decades of post–World War II prosperity and in the uneasy 1960s and 1970s as well — even as war in Vietnam, industrial competition from Europe and Japan, and oil politics in the Middle East exerted powerful influences. After the end of the Cold War, the country rediscovered, as it had in previous eras, just how vast and varied its connections to global cultural and economic life were. Beginning in the last decade of the twentieth century, this current era has seen the rapid spread of capitalism around the world, huge increases in global trade and commerce, and a diffusion of communications technology, including the Internet, linking the world’s people to one another in ways unimaginable a generation earlier.

Globalization engulfed the United States just as the nation’s politics were becoming increasingly divisive and fractious. The triumphant Reagan Revolution of the 1980s continued to inspire conservative Americans, while liberals regrouped and sought to ignite a new generation of voters. Increasingly, however, national political life seemed to offer fewer and fewer points of compromise, on issues ranging from abortion, immigration, and affirmative action to taxes and welfare spending. By the 2010s — a decade during which the nation was led by two strikingly different presidents, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — polls showed that the Democratic and Republican parties had grown starkly ideologically divided. At the same time, more Americans than ever, nearly 40 percent, labeled themselves as politically “independent,” refusing to identify solely with one or the other of the major political parties.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, few issues were more critical, in the United States and across the globe, than energy and the environment. This wind farm is an example of the search for nonfossil sources of new energy, a search that is among the many challenges facing the globalized world of our century.

Globalization — the worldwide flow of capital, goods, and people across borders — accelerated at the end of the Cold War. The number of multinational corporations, many of them based in the United States, increased dramatically. Financial markets, in particular, grew increasingly open and interconnected. Technological innovations strengthened the American economy and transformed daily life. The computer revolution and the spread of the Internet changed how Americans shopped, worked, learned, and communicated. Globalization also facilitated the immigration of millions of Asians and Latin Americans into the United States.

But even as America’s connection to the wider world intensified a divisive cultural conflict emerged in domestic politics in the years after 1990. Conservatives spoke out strongly, and with increasing effectiveness, against multiculturalism and what they viewed as serious threats to “family values.” Debates over access to abortion, affirmative action, and the legal rights of homosexuals intensified. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, diverted attention from this increasingly bitter partisanship, but that partisanship found a new expression with the advent of the war on terror and the subsequent invasion of Iraq in 2003. Barack Obama made history in 2008 as the nation’s first African American president, but faced two inherited wars and a profound economic crisis upon taking office. His, and the nation’s, efforts to address these and other pressing issues found initial success before stalling in a deepening partisan stalemate, especially after his 2012 reelection. The election of celebrity businessman Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 on a platform of right-wing nationalism affirmed that globalization and domestic cultural divisions remain at the core of American politics. Trump won the election despite losing the popular vote by a wide margin. His presidency opened with the country more divided than it had been since the turbulent 1960s.

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