Scarica Impact of Decolonization, Cold War & Global Migration on People, Cultures & Ideologies e più Prove d'esame in PDF di Storia Delle Relazioni Internazionali solo su Docsity! Beatrice De Lazzari 11938161 25 ottobre 2017 Globalization and International Relations since 1920s Mobility of people, cultures, and political ideologies In this essay, I will discuss the main shaping points of Globalization and International Relations since 1920s in relation to the mobility of people, cultures, and political ideologies. Indeed, since Globalization and International Relations imply an interconnected world where the borders are cut across, they are inevitably shaped by these worldwide flows. The changing events that I will analyze will be: Decolonization, Cold War, Global Migration, and therefore their effects in the global order. Firstly, one of the major structuring event of the twentieth century is the Decolonization. It led to the collapse of a great number of imperial systems, especially the British one, “transforming colonies and dependent territories into nation states”.1 It can be considered as the culmination of a series of conflicts and interactions between colonizer and colonized, in which the latter tried to struggle for national freedom and independence.2 Though decolonization took place in different countries and phases, it was mainly shaped by the two world wars. Indeed, the Great War fostered critiques of the injustices of western capitalist civilization, that were an essential part of the decolonization movements. Then, the interwar period witnessed economic and political developments that accelerated the pressures on empires. Finally, the Second World War “destroyed the credibility of the imperialist nation state system as it existed till then”3. In this scenario, decolonization led to the creation of 6 1 Prasenjit Duara, ‘Decolonization and Its Legacy’, in John McNeill and Kenneth Pomeranz (eds.), The Cambridge World History, Vol. VII, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p.395 2 Martin Shipway, ‘Introduction: Decolonization in Comparative Perspective’, in Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), p.5 3 Prasenjit Duara, ‘Decolonization and Its Legacy’, in John McNeill and Kenneth Pomeranz (eds.), The Cambridge World History, Vol. VII, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p.402 international institutions, like the United Nation in 1946, European Economic Community and other pan-nationalisms, that are important in the history of globalization, since they linked distant countries. Particularly, the former institutionalized principles such as national self-determination and sovereignty, and human rights, which represented the goals of decolonization.4 Furthermore, the Baldung Conference of 1955, which gathered representatives of twenty-nine new nations of Asia and Africa, created an African-Asian Movement, which entailed the non-aligned movement in 1961. This one promoted both solidarity against imperialism and racism, and economic and cultural cooperation among these nations.5 These issues were indeed fundamental, since every newly independent nation born through the process of decolonization, faced a deeply divided world due to the Cold War of that period. Thus, decolonization is strictly connected to the Cold War, another major shaping point in the history of globalization and international relations. This conflict is known as the superpower rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States, which began in 1917 with each nation’s efforts to transform the other with its nationalism, affecting the decolonizing politics and the real world order. Indeed, both were capable of dominate these newly independent states, and this bipolarity tended to freeze regimes, building unpopular ones governed by military groups.6 Thus, a lot of these new nations could not fulfill their aspirations for full sovereignty or for truly representative institutions, and they entered a competitive nation state system, fundamental in the development of International Relations. Indeed the conflict, as a struggle for the dominant ideology and expansion, increased the worldwide competition, especially after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, turning the world into “a sort of oversized scorecard measuring the relative success of each social system”7. The ideological focus was pointed out by George F. Kennan in his “Long Telegram”, defining the Soviet Union as the terrestrial incarnation of an ideology, that the United States had to contain. He described the differences and commonalities between the superpowers, stating that owing to these, the clash of ideologies, between American Liberalism and Marxism/Leninism, was inevitable. Therefore, this partitioning of the world 6 4 Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), ch. 6 (p.120) 5 Prasenjit Duara, ‘Decolonization and Its Legacy’, in John McNeill and Kenneth Pomeranz (eds.), The Cambridge World History, Vol. VII, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p.415 6 Prasenjit Duara, ‘Decolonization and Its Legacy’, in John McNeill and Kenneth Pomeranz (eds.), The Cambridge World History, Vol. VII, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p.407-410 7 David C. Engerman, “Ideology and the origins of the Cold War, 1917-1962.” Chapter 2 in The Cambridge History of the Cold War Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p.33
