# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A global public service brought to you by the U.S. government

Information for the General Public

How to Correct Your Address in GPS Devices, Apps, & Online Maps

Do GPS devices show your home or business in the wrong place? The problem is not GPS! It's the mapping software.

Report your issue to the software providers

Featured Content

What's for Pros

Information and resources for improving positioning, navigation, and timing resilience, especially in critical infrastructure

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
space-based positioning navigation and timing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Official U.S. government information about the Global Positioning System (GPS) and related topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of content, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks.[1][2] While challenges to the definition of social media arise[3][4] due to the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some common features:[2]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sanctions Programs and Country Information

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Globalization, or globalisation ( Commonwealth English; see spelling differences), is the process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide. The term globalization first appeared in the early 20th century (supplanting an earlier French term mondialisation), developed its current meaning sometime in the second half of the 20th century, and came into popular use in the 1990s to describe the unprecedented international connectivity of the post-Cold War world. Its origins can be traced back to 18th and 19th centuries due to advances in transportation and communications technology. This increase in global interactions has caused a growth in international trade and the exchange of ideas, beliefs, and culture. Globalization is primarily an economic process of interaction and integration that is associated with social and cultural aspects. However, disputes and international diplomacy are also large parts of the history of globalization, and of modern globalization.

Economically, globalization involves goods, services, data, technology, and the economic resources of capital. The expansion of global markets liberalizes the economic activities of the exchange of goods and funds. Removal of cross-border trade barriers has made the formation of global markets more feasible. Advances in transportation, like the steam locomotive, steamship, jet engine, and container ships, and developments in telecommunication infrastructure such as the telegraph, the Internet, mobile phones, and smartphones, have been major factors in globalization and have generated further interdependence of economic and cultural activities around the globe.

Though many scholars place the origins of globalization in modern times, others trace its history to long before the European Age of Discovery and voyages to the New World, and some even to the third millennium BCE. Large-scale globalization began in the 1820s, and in the late 19th century and early 20th century drove a rapid expansion in the connectivity of the world's economies and cultures. The term global city was subsequently popularized by sociologist Saskia Sassen in her work The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (1991).

In 2000, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) identified four basic aspects of globalization: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of people, and the dissemination of knowledge. Globalizing processes affect and are affected by business and work organization, economics, sociocultural resources, and the natural environment. Academic literature commonly divides globalization into three major areas: economic globalization, cultural globalization, and political globalization.

Etymology and usage

The word globalization was used in the English language as early as the 1930s, but only in the context of education, and the term failed to gain traction. Over the next few decades, the term was occasionally used by other scholars and media, but it was not clearly defined. One of the first usages of the term in the meaning resembling the later, common usage was by French economist François Perroux in his essays from the early 1960s (in his French works he used the term " mondialisation" (literarly worldization in French), also translated as mundialization). Theodore Levitt is often credited with popularizing the term and bringing it into the mainstream business audience in the later in the middle of 1980s.

Though often treated as synonyms, in French, globalization is seen as a stage following mondialisation, a stage that implies the dissolution of national identities and the abolishment of borders inside the world network of economic exchanges.

Since its inception, the concept of globalization has inspired competing definitions and interpretations. Its antecedents date back to the great movements of trade and empire across Asia and the Indian Ocean from the 15th century onward.

In 1848, Karl Marx noticed the increasing level of national inter-dependence brought on by capitalism, and predicted the universal character of the modern world society. He states:

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. . . . In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.

Sociologists Martin Albrow and Elizabeth King define globalization as "all those processes by which the people of the world are incorporated into a single world society." In The Consequences of Modernity, Anthony Giddens writes: "Globalization can thus be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa." In 1992, Roland Robertson, professor of sociology at the University of Aberdeen and an early writer in the field, described globalization as "the compression of the world and the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole."

In Global Transformations, David Held and his co-writers state:

Although in its simplistic sense globalization refers to the widening, deepening and speeding up of global interconnection, such a definition begs further elaboration. ... Globalization can be on a continuum with the local, national and regional. At one end of the continuum lie social and economic relations and networks which are organized on a local and/or national basis; at the other end lie social and economic relations and networks which crystallize on the wider scale of regional and global interactions. Globalization can refer to those spatial-temporal processes of change which underpin a transformation in the organization of human affairs by linking together and expanding human activity across regions and continents. Without reference to such expansive spatial connections, there can be no clear or coherent formulation of this term. ... A satisfactory definition of globalization must capture each of these elements: extensity (stretching), intensity, velocity and impact.

Swedish journalist Thomas Larsson, in his book The Race to the Top: The Real Story of Globalization, states that globalization:

...is the process of world shrinkage, of distances getting shorter, things moving closer. It pertains to the increasing ease with which somebody on one side of the world can interact, to mutual benefit, with somebody on the other side of the world.

Paul James defines globalization with a more direct and historically contextualized emphasis:

Globalization is the extension of social relations across world-space, defining that world-space in terms of the historically variable ways that it has been practiced and socially understood through changing world-time.

Manfred Steger, professor of global studies and research leader in the Global Cities Institute at RMIT University, identifies four main empirical dimensions of globalization: economic, political, cultural, and ecological. A fifth dimension-the ideological-cutting across the other four. The ideological dimension, according to Steger, is filled with a range of norms, claims, beliefs, and narratives about the phenomenon itself.

James and Steger stated that the concept of globalization "emerged from the intersection of four interrelated sets of ' communities of practice' ( Wenger, 1998): academics, journalists, publishers/editors, and librarians." They note the term was used "in education to describe the global life of the mind"; in international relations to describe the extension of the European Common Market, and in journalism to describe how the "American Negro and his problem are taking on a global significance". They have also argued that four forms of globalization can be distinguished that complement and cut across the solely empirical dimensions. According to James, the oldest dominant form of globalization is embodied globalization, the movement of people. A second form is agency-extended globalization, the circulation of agents of different institutions, organizations, and polities, including imperial agents. Object-extended globalization, a third form, is the movement of commodities and other objects of exchange. He calls the transmission of ideas, images, knowledge, and information across world-space disembodied globalization, maintaining that it is currently the dominant form of globalization. James holds that this series of distinctions allows for an understanding of how, today, the most embodied forms of globalization such as the movement of refugees and migrants are increasingly restricted, while the most disembodied forms such as the circulation of financial instruments and codes are the most deregulated.

The journalist Thomas L. Friedman popularized the term "flat world", arguing that globalized trade, outsourcing, supply-chaining, and political forces had permanently changed the world, for better and worse. He asserted that the pace of globalization was quickening and that its impact on business organization and practice would continue to grow.

Lechner and Boli (2012) define globalization as more people across large distances becoming connected in more and different ways.

"Globophobia" is used to refer to the fear of globalization, though it can also mean the fear of balloons.

Archaic globalization conventionally refers to a phase in the history of globalization including globalizing events and developments from the time of the earliest civilizations until roughly the 1600s. This term is used to describe the relationships between communities and states and how they were created by the geographical spread of ideas and social norms at both local and regional levels.

In this schema, three main prerequisites are posited for globalization to occur. The first is the idea of Eastern Origins, which shows how Western states have adapted and implemented learned principles from the East. Without the spread of traditional ideas from the East, Western globalization would not have emerged the way it did. The interactions of states were not on a global scale and most often were confined to Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and certain parts of Europe. With early globalization, it was difficult for states to interact with others that were not close. Eventually, technological advances allowed states to learn of others' existence and thus another phase of globalization can occur. The third has to do with inter-dependency, stability, and regularity. If a state is not dependent on another, then there is no way for either state to be mutually affected by the other. This is one of the driving forces behind global connections and trade; without either, globalization would not have emerged the way it did and states would still be dependent on their own production and resources to work. This is one of the arguments surrounding the idea of early globalization. It is argued that archaic globalization did not function in a similar manner to modern globalization because states were not as interdependent on others as they are today.

Portuguese carrack in Nagasaki, 17th-century Japanese Nanban art

Native New World crops exchanged globally (clockwise): Maize, tomato, potato, vanilla, rubber, cacao, tobacco

Trade on the Silk Road was a significant factor in the development of civilizations from China, the Indian subcontinent, Persia, Europe, and Arabia, opening long-distance political and economic interactions between them. Though silk was certainly the major trade item from China, common goods such as salt and sugar were traded as well; and religions, syncretic philosophies, and various technologies, as well as diseases, also traveled along the Silk Routes. In addition to economic trade, the Silk Road served as a means of carrying out cultural trade among the civilizations along its network. The movement of people, such as refugees, artists, craftsmen, missionaries, robbers, and envoys, resulted in the exchange of religions, art, languages, and new technologies.

Early modern

" Early modern" or "proto-globalization" covers a period of the history of globalization roughly spanning the years between 1600 and 1800. The concept of "proto-globalization" was first introduced by historians A. G. Hopkins and Christopher Bayly. The term describes the phase of increasing trade links and cultural exchange that characterized the period immediately preceding the advent of high "modern globalization" in the late 19th century. This phase of globalization was characterized by the rise of maritime European empires, in the 15th and 17th centuries, first the Portuguese Empire (1415) followed by the Spanish Empire (1492), and later the Dutch and British Empires. In the 17th century, world trade developed further when chartered companies like the British East India Company (founded in 1600) and the Dutch East India Company (founded in 1602, often described as the first multinational corporation in which stock was offered) were established.

Lisbon in the 1570s had many Africans.

An alternative view from historians Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, postulated that: globalization began with the first circumnavigation of the globe under the Magellan-Elcano expedition which preluded the rise of global silver trade.

Early modern globalization is distinguished from modern globalization on the basis of expansionism, the method of managing global trade, and the level of information exchange. The period is marked by the shift of hegemony to Western Europe, the rise of larger-scale conflicts between powerful nations such as the Thirty Years' War, and demand for commodities, most particularly slaves. The triangular trade made it possible for Europe to take advantage of resources within the Western Hemisphere. The transfer of animal stocks, plant crops, and epidemic diseases associated with Alfred W. Crosby's concept of the Columbian exchange also played a central role in this process. European, Middle Eastern, Indian, Southeast Asian, and Chinese merchants were all involved in early modern trade and communications, particularly in the Indian Ocean region.

The 1843 launch of the Great Britain, the revolutionary ship of Isambard Kingdom Brunel

The conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars brought in an era of relative peace in Europe.

Innovations in transportation technology reduced trade costs substantially.

New industrial military technologies increased the power of European states and the United States, and allowed these powers to forcibly open up markets across the world and extend their empires.

A gradual move towards greater liberalization in European countries.

During the 19th century, globalization approached its form as a direct result of the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization allowed standardized production of household items using economies of scale while rapid population growth created sustained demand for commodities. In the 19th century, steamships reduced the cost of international transportation significantly and railroads made inland transportation cheaper. The transportation revolution occurred some time between 1820 and 1850. More nations embraced international trade. Globalization in this period was decisively shaped by nineteenth-century imperialism such as in Africa and Asia. The invention of shipping containers in 1956 helped advance the globalization of commerce.

After World War II, work by politicians led to the agreements of the Bretton Woods Conference, in which major governments laid down the framework for international monetary policy, commerce, and finance, and the founding of several international institutions intended to facilitate economic growth by lowering trade barriers. Initially, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) led to a series of agreements to remove trade restrictions. GATT's successor was the World Trade Organization (WTO), which provided a framework for negotiating and formalizing trade agreements and a dispute resolution process. Exports nearly doubled from 8.5% of total gross world product in 1970 to 16.2% in 2001. The approach of using global agreements to advance trade stumbled with the failure of the Doha Development Round of trade negotiation. Many countries then shifted to bilateral or smaller multilateral agreements, such as the 2011 United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement.

Since the 1970s, aviation has become increasingly affordable to middle classes in developed countries. Open skies policies and low-cost carriers have helped to bring competition to the market. In the 1990s, the growth of low-cost communication networks cut the cost of communicating between countries. More work can be performed using a computer without regard to location. This included accounting, software development, and engineering design.

Student exchange programs became popular after World War II, and are intended to increase the participants' understanding and tolerance of other cultures, as well as improving their language skills and broadening their social horizons. Between 1963 and 2006 the number of students studying in a foreign country increased 9 times.

Since the 1980s, modern globalization has spread rapidly through the expansion of capitalism and neoliberal ideologies. The implementation of neoliberal policies has allowed for the privatization of public industry, deregulation of laws or policies that interfered with the free flow of the market, as well as cut-backs to governmental social services. These neoliberal policies were introduced to many developing countries in the form of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that were implemented by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These programs required that the country receiving monetary aid would open its markets to capitalism, privatize public industry, allow free trade, cut social services like healthcare and education and allow the free movement of giant multinational corporations. These programs allowed the World Bank and the IMF to become global financial market regulators that would promote neoliberalism and the creation of free markets for multinational corporations on a global scale.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, the connectedness of the world's economies and cultures grew very quickly. This slowed down from the 1910s onward due to the World Wars and the Cold War, but picked up again in the 1980s and 1990s. The revolutions of 1989 and subsequent liberalization in many parts of the world resulted in a significant expansion of global interconnectedness. The migration and movement of people can also be highlighted as a prominent feature of the globalization process. In the period between 1965 and 1990, the proportion of the labor force migrating approximately doubled. Most migration occurred between the developing countries and least developed countries (LDCs). As economic integration intensified workers moved to areas with higher wages and most of the developing world oriented toward the international market economy. The collapse of the Soviet Union not only ended the Cold War's division of the world - it also left the United States its sole policeman and an unfettered advocate of free market.[according to whom? ] It also resulted in the growing prominence of attention focused on the movement of diseases, the proliferation of popular culture and consumer values, the growing prominence of international institutions like the UN, and concerted international action on such issues as the environment and human rights. Other developments as dramatic were the Internet's becoming influential in connecting people across the world; As of June 2012, more than 2.4 billion people-over a third of the world's human population-have used the services of the Internet. Growth of globalization has never been smooth. One influential event was the late 2000s recession, which was associated with lower growth (in areas such as cross-border phone calls and Skype usage) or even temporarily negative growth (in areas such as trade) of global interconnectedness.

The China-United States trade war, starting in 2018, negatively affected trade between the two largest national economies. The economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic included a massive decline in tourism and international business travel as many countries temporarily closed borders. The 2021-2022 global supply chain crisis resulted from temporary shutdowns of manufacturing and transportation facilities, and labor shortages. Supply problems incentivized some switches to domestic production. The economic impact of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine included a blockade of Ukrainian ports and international sanctions on Russia, resulting in some de-coupling of the Russian economy with global trade, especially with the European Union and other Western countries.

Modern consensus for the last 15 years regards globalization as having run its course and gone into decline. A common argument for this is that trade has dropped since its peak in 2008, and never recovered since the global financial crisis. New opposing views from some economists have argued such trends are a result of price drops and in actuality, trade volume is increasing, especially with agricultural products, natural resources and refined petroleum.

Economic globalization

U.S. Trade Balance and Trade Policy (1895-2015)

Dividends worth CZK 289 billion were paid to the foreign owners of Czech companies in 2016.[62]

Economic globalization is the increasing economic interdependence of national economies across the world through a rapid increase in cross- border movement of goods, services, technology, and capital. Whereas the globalization of business is centered around the diminution of international trade regulations as well as tariffs, taxes, and other impediments that suppresses global trade, economic globalization is the process of increasing economic integration between countries, leading to the emergence of a global marketplace or a single world market. Depending on the paradigm, economic globalization can be viewed as either a positive or a negative phenomenon. Economic globalization comprises: globalization of production; which refers to the obtainment of goods and services from a particular source from locations around the globe to benefit from difference in cost and quality. Likewise, it also comprises globalization of markets; which is defined as the union of different and separate markets into a massive global marketplace. Economic globalization also includes competition, technology, and corporations and industries.

International standards have made trade in goods and services more efficient. An example of such standard is the intermodal container. Containerization dramatically reduced the costs of transportation, supported the post-war boom in international trade, and was a major element in globalization. International standards are set by the International Organization for Standardization, which is composed of representatives from various national standards organizations.

A multinational corporation, or worldwide enterprise, is an organization that owns or controls the production of goods or services in one or more countries other than their home country. It can also be referred to as an international corporation, a transnational corporation, or a stateless corporation.

A free-trade area is the region encompassing a trade bloc whose member countries have signed a free-trade agreement (FTA). Such agreements involve cooperation between at least two countries to reduce trade barriers - import quotas and tariffs - and to increase trade of goods and services with each other.

Trade facilitation looks at how procedures and controls governing the movement of goods across national borders can be improved to reduce associated cost burdens and maximize efficiency while safeguarding legitimate regulatory objectives.

Global trade in services is also significant. For example, in India, business process outsourcing has been described as the "primary engine of the country's development over the next few decades, contributing broadly to GDP growth, employment growth, and poverty alleviation".

Cultural globalization

Cross-cultural communication is a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavor to communicate across cultures. Intercultural communication is a related field of study.

Cultural diffusion is the spread of cultural items-such as ideas, styles, religions, technologies, languages etc. Cultural globalization has increased cross-cultural contacts, but may be accompanied by a decrease in the uniqueness of once-isolated communities. For example, sushi is available in Germany as well as Japan, but Euro-Disney outdraws the city of Paris, potentially reducing demand for "authentic" French pastry. Globalization's contribution to the alienation of individuals from their traditions may be modest compared to the impact of modernity itself, as alleged by existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Globalization has expanded recreational opportunities by spreading pop culture, particularly via the Internet and satellite television. The cultural diffusion can create a homogenizing force, where globalization is seen as synonymous with homogenizing force via connectedness of markets, cultures, politics and the desire for modernizations through imperial countries sphere of influence.

Religions were among the earliest cultural elements to globalize, being spread by force, migration, evangelists, imperialists, and traders. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and more recently sects such as Mormonism are among those religions which have taken root and influenced endemic cultures in places far from their origins.

Globalization has strongly influenced sports. For example, the modern Olympic Games has athletes from more than 200 nations participating in a variety of competitions. The FIFA World Cup is the most widely viewed and followed sporting event in the world, exceeding even the Olympic Games; a ninth of the entire population of the planet watched the 2006 FIFA World Cup Final.

Music has an important role in economic and cultural development during globalization. Music genres such as jazz and reggae began locally and later became international phenomena. Globalization gave support to the world music phenomenon by allowing music from developing countries to reach broader audiences. Though the term "World Music" was originally intended for ethnic-specific music, globalization is now expanding its scope such that the term often includes hybrid subgenres such as "world fusion", "global fusion", "ethnic fusion", and worldbeat.

Use of chili pepper has spread from the Americas to cuisines around the world, including Thailand, Korea, China, and Italy.[92]

A 2005 UNESCO report showed that cultural exchange is becoming more frequent from Eastern Asia, but that Western countries are still the main exporters of cultural goods. In 2002, China was the third largest exporter of cultural goods, after the UK and US. Between 1994 and 2002, both North America's and the European Union's shares of cultural exports declined while Asia's cultural exports grew to surpass North America. Related factors are the fact that Asia's population and area are several times that of North America. Americanization is related to a period of high political American clout and of significant growth of America's shops, markets and objects being brought into other countries.

Transculturalism is defined as "seeing oneself in the other". Transcultural is in turn described as "extending through all human cultures" or "involving, encompassing, or combining elements of more than one culture". Children brought up in transcultural backgrounds are sometimes called third-culture kids.

Political globalization

Political globalization refers to the growth of the worldwide political system, both in size and complexity. That system includes national governments, their governmental and intergovernmental organizations as well as government-independent elements of global civil society such as international non-governmental organizations and social movement organizations. One of the key aspects of the political globalization is the declining importance of the nation-state and the rise of other actors on the political scene. William R. Thompson has defined it as "the expansion of a global political system, and its institutions, in which inter-regional transactions (including, but certainly not limited to trade) are managed". Political globalization is one of the three main dimensions of globalization commonly found in academic literature, with the two other being economic globalization and cultural globalization.

Intergovernmentalism is a term in political science with two meanings. The first refers to a theory of regional integration originally proposed by Stanley Hoffmann; the second treats states and the national government as the primary factors for integration. Multi-level governance is an approach in political science and public administration theory that originated from studies on European integration. Multi-level governance gives expression to the idea that there are many interacting authority structures at work in the emergent global political economy. It illuminates the intimate entanglement between the domestic and international levels of authority.

Some people are citizens of multiple nation-states. Multiple citizenship, also called dual citizenship or multiple nationality or dual nationality, is a person's citizenship status, in which a person is concurrently regarded as a citizen of more than one state under the laws of those states.

U.S. military presence around the world in 2007. As of 2015, the U.S. still had many bases and troops stationed globally.[101]

Increasingly, non-governmental organizations influence public policy across national boundaries, including humanitarian aid and developmental efforts. Philanthropic organizations with global missions are also coming to the forefront of humanitarian efforts; charities such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Accion International, the Acumen Fund (now Acumen) and the Echoing Green have combined the business model with philanthropy, giving rise to business organizations such as the Global Philanthropy Group and new associations of philanthropists such as the Global Philanthropy Forum. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation projects include a current multibillion-dollar commitment to funding immunizations in some of the world's more impoverished but rapidly growing countries. The Hudson Institute estimates total private philanthropic flows to developing countries at US$ 59 billion in 2010.

As a response to globalization, some countries have embraced isolationist policies. For example, the North Korean government makes it very difficult for foreigners to enter the country and strictly monitors their activities when they do. Aid workers are subject to considerable scrutiny and excluded from places and regions the government does not wish them to enter. Citizens cannot freely leave the country.

Globalization and gender

From the documentary Ukraine Is Not a Brothel. Radical group Femen protest against the increase in sex tourism into Ukraine.

Other dimensions

Scholars also occasionally discuss other, less common dimensions of globalization, such as environmental globalization (the internationally coordinated practices and regulations, often in the form of international treaties, regarding environmental protection) or military globalization (growth in global extent and scope of security relationships). Those dimensions, however, receive much less attention the three described above, as academic literature commonly subdivides globalization into three major areas: economic globalization, cultural globalization and political globalization.

Movement of people

Tourism is travel for pleasure. The developments in technology and transportation infrastructure, such as jumbo jets, low-cost airlines, and more accessible airports have made many types of tourism more affordable. At any given moment half a million people are in the air. International tourist arrivals surpassed the milestone of 1 billion tourists globally for the first time in 2012. A visa is a conditional authorization granted by a country to a foreigner, allowing them to enter and temporarily remain within, or to leave that country. Some countries - such as those in the Schengen Area - have agreements with other countries allowing each other's citizens to travel between them without visas (for example, Switzerland is part of a Schengen Agreement allowing easy travel for people from countries within the European Union). The World Tourism Organization announced that the number of tourists who require a visa before traveling was at its lowest level ever in 2015.

Immigration is the international movement of people into a destination country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle or reside there, especially as permanent residents or naturalized citizens, or to take-up employment as a migrant worker or temporarily as a foreign worker. According to the International Labour Organization, as of 2014 there were an estimated 232 million international migrants in the world (defined as persons outside their country of origin for 12 months or more) and approximately half of them were estimated to be economically active (i.e. being employed or seeking employment). International movement of labor is often seen as important to economic development. For example, freedom of movement for workers in the European Union means that people can move freely between member states to live, work, study or retire in another country.

2010 London Youth Games opening ceremony. About 69% of children born in London in 2015 had at least one parent who was born abroad.[120]

Globalization is associated with a dramatic rise in international education. The development of global cross-cultural competence in the workforce through ad-hoc training has deserved increasing attention in recent times. More and more students are seeking higher education in foreign countries and many international students now consider overseas study a stepping-stone to permanent residency within a country. The contributions that foreign students make to host nation economies, both culturally and financially has encouraged major players to implement further initiatives to facilitate the arrival and integration of overseas students, including substantial amendments to immigration and visa policies and procedures.

A transnational marriage is a marriage between two people from different countries. A variety of special issues arise in marriages between people from different countries, including those related to citizenship and culture, which add complexity and challenges to these kinds of relationships. In an age of increasing globalization, where a growing number of people have ties to networks of people and places across the globe, rather than to a current geographic location, people are increasingly marrying across national boundaries. Transnational marriage is a by-product of the movement and migration of people.

Movement of information

Before electronic communications, long-distance communications relied on mail. Speed of global communications was limited by the maximum speed of courier services (especially horses and ships) until the mid-19th century. The electric telegraph was the first method of instant long-distance communication. For example, before the first transatlantic cable, communications between Europe and the Americas took weeks because ships had to carry mail across the ocean. The first transatlantic cable reduced communication time considerably, allowing a message and a response in the same day. Lasting transatlantic telegraph connections were achieved in the 1865-1866. The first wireless telegraphy transmitters were developed in 1895.

The Internet has been instrumental in connecting people across geographical boundaries. For example, Facebook is a social networking service which has more than 1.65 billion monthly active users as of 31 March 2016.

Globalization and disease

Coronavirus disease 2019, abbreviated COVID-19, first appeared in Wuhan, China in November 2019. More than 180 countries have reported cases since then. As of April 6, 2020, the U.S. has the most confirmed active cases in the world. More than 3.4 million people from the worst-affected countries entered the U.S. in the first three months since the inception of the COVID-19 pandemic. This has caused a detrimental impact on the global economy, particularly for SME's and Microbusinesses with unlimited liability/self-employed, leaving them vulnerable to financial difficulties, increasing the market share for oligopolistic markets as well as increasing the barriers of entry.

Measurement

One index of globalization is the KOF Index of Globalization, which measures three important dimensions of globalization: economic, social, and political. Another is the A.T. Kearney / Foreign Policy Magazine Globalization Index.

Measurements of economic globalization typically focus on variables such as trade, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), Gross Domestic Product (GDP), portfolio investment, and income. However, newer indices attempt to measure globalization in more general terms, including variables related to political, social, cultural, and even environmental aspects of globalization.

The DHL Global Connectedness Index studies four main types of cross-border flow: trade (in both goods and services), information, people (including tourists, students, and migrants), and capital. It shows that the depth of global integration fell by about one-tenth after 2008, but by 2013 had recovered well above its pre-crash peak. The report also found a shift of economic activity to emerging economies.

Support and criticism

Reactions to processes contributing to globalization have varied widely with a history as long as extraterritorial contact and trade. Philosophical differences regarding the costs and benefits of such processes give rise to a broad-range of ideologies and social movements. Proponents of economic growth, expansion, and development, in general, view globalizing processes as desirable or necessary to the well-being of human society.

Antagonists view one or more globalizing processes as detrimental to social well-being on a global or local scale; this includes those who focus on social or natural sustainability of long-term and continuous economic expansion, the social structural inequality caused by these processes, and the colonial, imperialistic, or hegemonic ethnocentrism, cultural assimilation and cultural appropriation that underlie such processes.

Globalization tends to bring people into contact with foreign people and cultures. Xenophobia is the fear of that which is perceived to be foreign or strange. Xenophobia can manifest itself in many ways involving the relations and perceptions of an ingroup towards an outgroup, including a fear of losing identity, suspicion of its activities, aggression, and desire to eliminate its presence to secure a presumed purity.

Critiques of globalization generally stem from discussions surrounding the impact of such processes on the planet as well as the human costs. They challenge directly traditional metrics, such as GDP, and look to other measures, such as the Gini coefficient or the Happy Planet Index, and point to a "multitude of interconnected fatal consequences-social disintegration, a breakdown of democracy, more rapid and extensive deterioration of the environment, the spread of new diseases, increasing poverty and alienation" which they claim are the unintended consequences of globalization. Others point out that, while the forces of globalization have led to the spread of western-style democracy, this has been accompanied by an increase in inter-ethnic tension and violence as free market economic policies combine with democratic processes of universal suffrage as well as an escalation in militarization to impose democratic principles and as a means to conflict resolution.

On 9 August 2019, Pope Francis denounced isolationism and hinted that the Catholic Church will embrace globalization at the October 2019 Amazonia Synod, stating "the whole is greater than the parts. Globalization and unity should not be conceived as a sphere, but as a polyhedron: each people retains its identity in unity with others"

Public opinion

As a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, globalization is considered by some as a form of capitalist expansion which entails the integration of local and national economies into a global, unregulated market economy. A 2005 study by Peer Fis and Paul Hirsch found a large increase in articles negative towards globalization in the years prior. In 1998, negative articles outpaced positive articles by two to one. The number of newspaper articles showing negative framing rose from about 10% of the total in 1991 to 55% of the total in 1999. This increase occurred during a period when the total number of articles concerning globalization nearly doubled.

A number of international polls have shown that residents of Africa and Asia tend to view globalization more favorably than residents of Europe or North America. In Africa, a Gallup poll found that 70% of the population views globalization favorably. The BBC found that 50% of people believed that economic globalization was proceeding too rapidly, while 35% believed it was proceeding too slowly.

In 2004, Philip Gordon stated that "a clear majority of Europeans believe that globalization can enrich their lives, while believing the European Union can help them take advantage of globalization's benefits while shielding them from its negative effects." The main opposition consisted of socialists, environmental groups, and nationalists. Residents of the EU did not appear to feel threatened by globalization in 2004. The EU job market was more stable and workers were less likely to accept wage/benefit cuts. Social spending was much higher than in the US. In a Danish poll in 2007, 76% responded that globalization is a good thing.

Fiss, et al., surveyed US opinion in 1993. Their survey showed that, in 1993, more than 40% of respondents were unfamiliar with the concept of globalization. When the survey was repeated in 1998, 89% of the respondents had a polarized view of globalization as being either good or bad. At the same time, discourse on globalization, which began in the financial community before shifting to a heated debate between proponents and disenchanted students and workers. Polarization increased dramatically after the establishment of the WTO in 1995; this event and subsequent protests led to a large-scale anti-globalization movement. Initially, college educated workers were likely to support globalization. Less educated workers, who were more likely to compete with immigrants and workers in developing countries, tended to be opponents. The situation changed after the financial crisis of 2007. According to a 1997 poll 58% of college graduates said globalization had been good for the US. By 2008 only 33% thought it was good. Respondents with high school education also became more opposed.

According to Takenaka Heizo and Chida Ryokichi, as of 1998 there was a perception in Japan that the economy was "Small and Frail". However, Japan was resource-poor and used exports to pay for its raw materials. Anxiety over their position caused terms such as internationalization and globalization to enter everyday language. However, Japanese tradition was to be as self-sufficient as possible, particularly in agriculture.

Many in developing countries see globalization as a positive force that lifts them out of poverty. Those opposing globalization typically combine environmental concerns with nationalism. Opponents consider governments as agents of neo-colonialism that are subservient to multinational corporations. Much of this criticism comes from the middle class; the Brookings Institution suggested this was because the middle class perceived upwardly mobile low-income groups as threatening to their economic security.

Hu Jintao of China and George W. Bush meet while attending an APEC summit in Santiago de Chile, 2004.

The literature analyzing the economics of free trade is extremely rich with extensive work having been done on the theoretical and empirical effects. Though it creates winners and losers, the broad consensus among economists is that free trade is a large and unambiguous net gain for society. In a 2006 survey of 83 American economists, "87.5% agree that the U.S. should eliminate remaining tariffs and other barriers to trade" and "90.1% disagree with the suggestion that the U.S. should restrict employers from outsourcing work to foreign countries."

Quoting Harvard economics professor N. Gregory Mankiw, "Few propositions command as much consensus among professional economists as that open world trade increases economic growth and raises living standards." In a survey of leading economists, none disagreed with the notion that "freer trade improves productive efficiency and offers consumers better choices, and in the long run these gains are much larger than any effects on employment." Most economists would agree that although increasing returns to scale might mean that certain industry could settle in a geographical area without any strong economic reason derived from comparative advantage, this is not a reason to argue against free trade because the absolute level of output enjoyed by both "winner" and "loser" will increase with the "winner" gaining more than the "loser" but both gaining more than before in an absolute level.

In the book The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs discusses how many factors can affect a country's ability to enter the world market, including government corruption; legal and social disparities based on gender, ethnicity, or caste; diseases such as AIDS and malaria; lack of infrastructure (including transportation, communications, health, and trade); unstable political landscapes; protectionism; and geographic barriers. Jagdish Bhagwati, a former adviser to the U.N. on globalization, holds that, although there are obvious problems with overly rapid development, globalization is a very positive force that lifts countries out of poverty by causing a virtuous economic cycle associated with faster economic growth. However, economic growth does not necessarily mean a reduction in poverty; in fact, the two can coexist. Economic growth is conventionally measured using indicators such as GDP and GNI that do not accurately reflect the growing disparities in wealth. Additionally, Oxfam International argues that poor people are often excluded from globalization-induced opportunities "by a lack of productive assets, weak infrastructure, poor education and ill-health;" effectively leaving these marginalized groups in a poverty trap. Economist Paul Krugman is another staunch supporter of globalization and free trade with a record of disagreeing with many critics of globalization. He argues that many of them lack a basic understanding of comparative advantage and its importance in today's world.

There has been a rapid economic growth in Asia after embracing market orientation-based economic policies that encourage private property rights, free enterprise and competition. In particular, in East Asian developing countries, GDP per head rose at 5.9% a year from 1975 to 2001 (according to 2003 Human Development Report of UNDP). Like this, the British economic journalist Martin Wolf says that incomes of poor developing countries, with more than half the world's population, grew substantially faster than those of the world's richest countries that remained relatively stable in its growth, leading to reduced international inequality and the incidence of poverty.

Of the factors influencing the duration of economic growth in both developed and developing countries, income equality has a more beneficial impact than trade openness, sound political institutions, and foreign investment.[165]

Certain demographic changes in the developing world after active economic liberalization and international integration resulted in rising general welfare and, hence, reduced inequality. According to Wolf, in the developing world as a whole, life expectancy rose by four months each year after 1970 and infant mortality rate declined from 107 per thousand in 1970 to 58 in 2000 due to improvements in standards of living and health conditions. Also, adult literacy in developing countries rose from 53% in 1970 to 74% in 1998 and much lower illiteracy rate among the young guarantees that rates will continue to fall as time passes. Furthermore, the reduction in fertility rate in the developing world as a whole from 4.1 births per woman in 1980 to 2.8 in 2000 indicates improved education level of women on fertility, and control of fewer children with more parental attention and investment. Consequently, more prosperous and educated parents with fewer children have chosen to withdraw their children from the labor force to give them opportunities to be educated at school improving the issue of child labor. Thus, despite seemingly unequal distribution of income within these developing countries, their economic growth and development have brought about improved standards of living and welfare for the population as a whole.

The globalization of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has led to the resurfacing of the idea that the growth of economic interdependence promotes peace. This idea had been very powerful during the globalization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was a central doctrine of classical liberals of that era, such as the young John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946).

Some opponents of globalization see the phenomenon as a promotion of corporate interests. They also claim that the increasing autonomy and strength of corporate entities shapes the political policy of countries. They advocate global institutions and policies that they believe better address the moral claims of poor and working classes as well as environmental concerns. Economic arguments by fair trade theorists claim that unrestricted free trade benefits those with more financial leverage (i.e. the rich) at the expense of the poor.

Globalization allows corporations to outsource manufacturing and service jobs from high-cost locations, creating economic opportunities with the most competitive wages and worker benefits. Critics of globalization say that it disadvantages poorer countries. While it is true that free trade encourages globalization among countries, some countries try to protect their domestic suppliers. The main export of poorer countries is usually agricultural productions. Larger countries often subsidize their farmers (e.g., the EU's Common Agricultural Policy), which lowers the market price for foreign crops.

Global democracy

Democratic globalization is a movement towards an institutional system of global democracy that would give world citizens a say in political organizations. This would, in their view, bypass nation-states, corporate oligopolies, ideological non-governmental organizations (NGO), political cults and mafias. One of its most prolific proponents is the British political thinker David Held. Advocates of democratic globalization argue that economic expansion and development should be the first phase of democratic globalization, which is to be followed by a phase of building global political institutions. Francesco Stipo, Director of the United States Association of the Club of Rome, advocates unifying nations under a world government, suggesting that it "should reflect the political and economic balances of world nations. A world confederation would not supersede the authority of the State governments but rather complement it, as both the States and the world authority would have power within their sphere of competence". Former Canadian Senator Douglas Roche, O.C., viewed globalization as inevitable and advocated creating institutions such as a directly elected United Nations Parliamentary Assembly to exercise oversight over unelected international bodies.

Global civics

Global civics suggests that civics can be understood, in a global sense, as a social contract between global citizens in the age of interdependence and interaction. The disseminators of the concept define it as the notion that we have certain rights and responsibilities towards each other by the mere fact of being human on Earth. World citizen has a variety of similar meanings, often referring to a person who disapproves of traditional geopolitical divisions derived from national citizenship. An early incarnation of this sentiment can be found in Socrates, whom Plutarch quoted as saying: "I am not an Athenian, or a Greek, but a citizen of the world." In an increasingly interdependent world, world citizens need a compass to frame their mindsets and create a shared consciousness and sense of global responsibility in world issues such as environmental problems and nuclear proliferation.

Baha'i-inspired author Meyjes, while favoring the single world community and emergent global consciousness, warns of globalization as a cloak for an expeditious economic, social, and cultural Anglo-dominance that is insufficiently inclusive to inform the emergence of an optimal world civilization. He proposes a process of " universalization" as an alternative.

Cosmopolitanism is the proposal that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality. A person who adheres to the idea of cosmopolitanism in any of its forms is called a cosmopolitan or cosmopolite. A cosmopolitan community might be based on an inclusive morality, a shared economic relationship, or a political structure that encompasses different nations. The cosmopolitan community is one in which individuals from different places (e.g. nation-states) form relationships based on mutual respect. For instance, Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests the possibility of a cosmopolitan community in which individuals from varying locations (physical, economic, etc.) enter relationships of mutual respect despite their differing beliefs (religious, political, etc.).

Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan popularized the term Global Village beginning in 1962. His view suggested that globalization would lead to a world where people from all countries will become more integrated and aware of common interests and shared humanity.

International cooperation

Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev after signing the New START treaty in Prague, 2010

Military cooperation - Past examples of international cooperation exist. One example is the security cooperation between the United States and the former Soviet Union after the end of the Cold War, which astonished international society. Arms control and disarmament agreements, including the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (see START I, START II, START III, and New START) and the establishment of NATO's Partnership for Peace, the Russia NATO Council, and the G8 Global Partnership against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, constitute concrete initiatives of arms control and de-nuclearization. The US-Russian cooperation was further strengthened by anti-terrorism agreements enacted in the wake of 9/11.

Environmental cooperation - One of the biggest successes of environmental cooperation has been the agreement to reduce chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions, as specified in the Montreal Protocol, in order to stop ozone depletion. The most recent debate around nuclear energy and the non-alternative coal-burning power plants constitutes one more consensus on what not to do. Thirdly, significant achievements in IC can be observed through development studies.

Economic cooperation - One of the biggest challenges in 2019 with globalization is that many believe the progress made in the past decades are now back tracking. The back tracking of globalization has coined the term "Slobalization." Slobalization is a new, slower pattern of globalization.

Anti-globalization movement

Anti-globalization, or counter-globalization, consists of a number of criticisms of globalization but, in general, is critical of the globalization of corporate capitalism. The movement is also commonly referred to as the alter-globalization movement, anti-globalist movement, anti-corporate globalization movement, or movement against neoliberal globalization. Opponents of globalization argue that power and respect in terms of international trade between the developed and underdeveloped countries of the world are unequally distributed. The diverse subgroups that make up this movement include some of the following: trade unionists, environmentalists, anarchists, land rights and indigenous rights activists, organizations promoting human rights and sustainable development, opponents of privatization, and anti-sweatshop campaigners.

In The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, Christopher Lasch analyzes the widening gap between the top and bottom of the social composition in the United States. For him, our epoch is determined by a social phenomenon: the revolt of the elites, in reference to The Revolt of the Masses (1929) by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. According to Lasch, the new elites, i.e. those who are in the top 20% in terms of income, through globalization which allows total mobility of capital, no longer live in the same world as their fellow-citizens. In this, they oppose the old bourgeoisie of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which was constrained by its spatial stability to a minimum of rooting and civic obligations. Globalization, according to the sociologist, has turned elites into tourists in their own countries. The denationalization of business enterprise tends to produce a class who see themselves as "world citizens, but without accepting ... any of the obligations that citizenship in a polity normally implies". Their ties to an international culture of work, leisure, information - make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of national decline. Instead of financing public services and the public treasury, new elites are investing their money in improving their voluntary ghettos: private schools in their residential neighborhoods, private police, garbage collection systems. They have "withdrawn from common life". Composed of those who control the international flows of capital and information, who preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher education, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus fix the terms of public debate. So, the political debate is limited mainly to the dominant classes and political ideologies lose all contact with the concerns of the ordinary citizen. The result of this is that no one has a likely solution to these problems and that there are furious ideological battles on related issues. However, they remain protected from the problems affecting the working classes: the decline of industrial activity, the resulting loss of employment, the decline of the middle class, increasing the number of the poor, the rising crime rate, growing drug trafficking, the urban crisis.

D.A. Snow et al. contend that the anti-globalization movement is an example of a new social movement, which uses tactics that are unique and use different resources than previously used before in other social movements.

Opposition to capital market integration

Those opposed to capital market integration on the basis of human rights issues are especially disturbed[according to whom? ] by the various abuses which they think are perpetuated by global and international institutions that, they say, promote neoliberalism without regard to ethical standards. Common targets include the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and free trade treaties like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). In light of the economic gap between rich and poor countries, movement adherents claim free trade without measures in place to protect the under-capitalized will contribute only to the strengthening the power of industrialized nations (often termed the "North" in opposition to the developing world's "South").[better source needed ]

Anti-corporatism and anti-consumerism

Corporatist ideology, which privileges the rights of corporations ( artificial or juridical persons) over those of natural persons, is an underlying factor in the recent rapid expansion of global commerce. In recent years, there have been an increasing number of books ( Naomi Klein's 2000 , for example) and films ( e.g. The Corporation & ) popularizing an anti-corporate ideology to the public.

A related contemporary ideology, consumerism, which encourages the personal acquisition of goods and services, also drives globalization. Anti-consumerism is a social movement against equating personal happiness with consumption and the purchase of material possessions. Concern over the treatment of consumers by large corporations has spawned substantial activism, and the incorporation of consumer education into school curricula. Social activists hold materialism is connected to global retail merchandizing and supplier convergence, war, greed, anomie, crime, environmental degradation, and general social malaise and discontent. One variation on this topic is activism by postconsumers, with the strategic emphasis on moving beyond addictive consumerism.

Global justice and inequality

Global justice

Differences in national income equality around the world as measured by the national Gini coefficient, as of 2018[200]

The global justice movement is the loose collection of individuals and groups-often referred to as a " movement of movements"-who advocate fair trade rules and perceive current institutions of global economic integration as problems. The movement is often labeled an anti-globalization movement by the mainstream media. Those involved, however, frequently deny that they are anti-globalization, insisting that they support the globalization of communication and people and oppose only the global expansion of corporate power. The movement is based in the idea of social justice, desiring the creation of a society or institution based on the principles of equality and solidarity, the values of human rights, and the dignity of every human being. Social inequality within and between nations, including a growing global digital divide, is a focal point of the movement. Many nongovernmental organizations have now arisen to fight these inequalities that many in Latin America, Africa and Asia face. A few very popular and well known non-governmental organizations (NGOs) include: War Child, Red Cross, Free The Children and CARE International. They often create partnerships where they work towards improving the lives of those who live in developing countries by building schools, fixing infrastructure, cleaning water supplies, purchasing equipment and supplies for hospitals, and other aid efforts.

Social inequality

Global share of wealth by wealth group, Credit Suisse, 2017

The economies of the world have developed unevenly, historically, such that entire geographical regions were left mired in poverty and disease while others began to reduce poverty and disease on a wholesale basis. From around 1980 through at least 2011, the GDP gap, while still wide, appeared to be closing and, in some more rapidly developing countries, life expectancies began to rise. If we look at the Gini coefficient for world income, since the late 1980s, the gap between some regions has markedly narrowed-between Asia and the advanced economies of the West, for example-but huge gaps remain globally. Overall equality across humanity, considered as individuals, has improved very little. Within the decade between 2003 and 2013, income inequality grew even in traditionally egalitarian countries like Germany, Sweden and Denmark. With a few exceptions-France, Japan, Spain-the top 10 percent of earners in most advanced economies raced ahead, while the bottom 10 percent fell further behind. By 2013, 85 multibillionaires had amassed wealth equivalent to all the wealth owned by the poorest half (3.5 billion) of the world's total population of 7 billion.

Critics of globalization argue that globalization results in weak labor unions: the surplus in cheap labor coupled with an ever-growing number of companies in transition weakened labor unions in high-cost areas. Unions become less effective and workers their enthusiasm for unions when membership begins to decline. They also cite an increase in the exploitation of child labor: countries with weak protections for children are vulnerable to infestation by rogue companies and criminal gangs who exploit them. Examples include quarrying, salvage, and farm work as well as trafficking, bondage, forced labor, prostitution and pornography.

Women often participate in the workforce in precarious work, including export-oriented employment. Evidence suggests that while globalization has expanded women's access to employment, the long-term goal[whose? ] of transforming gender inequalities remains unmet and appears unattainable without regulation of capital and a reorientation and expansion of the state's role in funding public goods and providing a social safety net. Furthermore, the intersectionality of gender, race, class, can be overlooked by scholars and commentators when assessing the impact of globalization.

Anti-global governance

Beginning in the 1930s, opposition arose to the idea of a world government, as advocated by organizations such as the World Federalist Movement (WFM). Those who oppose global governance typically do so on objections that the idea is unfeasible, inevitably oppressive, or simply unnecessary. In general, these opponents are wary of the concentration of power or wealth that such governance might represent. Such reasoning dates back to the founding of the League of Nations and, later, the United Nations.

Environmentalist opposition

Deforestation of the Madagascar Highland Plateau has led to extensive siltation and unstable flows of western rivers.

a shows carbon footprint (CF) hotspots of foreign final consumption in China. b-d show carbon footprint hotspots of the consumption of the United States, Hong Kong, and Japan, respectively. Among all foreign regions, the United States, Hong Kong, and Japan have the largest CFs in China, contributing ~23.0%, 10.8%, and 9.0%, respectively, to the total foreign CF in China in 2012.

Environmentalism is a broad philosophy, ideology and social movement regarding concerns for environmental conservation and improvement of the health of the environment. Environmentalist concerns with globalization include issues such as global warming, global water supply and water crises, inequity in energy consumption and energy conservation, transnational air pollution and pollution of the world ocean, overpopulation, world habitat sustainability, deforestation, biodiversity loss and species extinction.

Helena Norberg-Hodge, the director and founder of Local Futures/ International Society for Ecology and Culture, criticizes globalization in many ways. In her book Ancient Futures, Norberg-Hodge claims that "centuries of ecological balance and social harmony are under threat from the pressures of development and globalization." She also criticizes the standardization and rationalization of globalization, as it does not always yield the expected growth outcomes. Although globalization takes similar steps in most countries, scholars such as Hodge claim that it might not be effective to certain countries and that globalization has actually moved some countries backward instead of developing them.

A related area of concern is the pollution haven hypothesis, which posits that, when large industrialized nations seek to set up factories or offices abroad, they will often look for the cheapest option in terms of resources and labor that offers the land and material access they require (see Race to the bottom). This often comes at the cost of environmentally sound practices. Developing countries with cheap resources and labor tend to have less stringent environmental regulations, and conversely, nations with stricter environmental regulations become more expensive for companies as a result of the costs associated with meeting these standards. Thus, companies that choose to physically invest in foreign countries tend to (re)locate to the countries with the lowest environmental standards or weakest enforcement.

The European Union-Mercosur Free Trade Agreement, which would form one of the world's largest free trade areas, has been denounced by environmental activists and indigenous rights campaigners. The fear is that the deal could lead to more deforestation of the Amazon rainforest as it expands market access to Brazilian beef.

Food security

Globalization is associated with a more efficient system of food production. This is because crops are grown in countries with optimum growing conditions. This improvement causes an increase in the world's food supply which encourages improved food security. The political movement 'BREXIT' was considered a step back in globalization; it has greatly disrupted food chains within the UK, as they import 26% of food produce from the EU.

Norway's limited crop range advocates globalization of food production and availability. The northernmost country in Europe requires trade with other countries to ensure population food demands are met. The degree of self-sufficiency in food production was around 50% in Norway in 2007.

References

Further reading

Ampuja, Marko. Theorizing Globalization: A Critique of the Mediatization of Social Theory (Brill, 2012)

Conner, Tom, and Ikuko Torimoto, eds. Globalization Redux: New Name, Same Game (University Press of America, 2004).

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. "Globalization." in Handbook of Political Anthropology (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018).

Frey, James W. "The Global Moment: The Emergence of Globality, 1866-1867, and the Origins of Nineteenth-Century Globalization." The Historian 81.1 (2019): 9. online Archived 3 December 2019 at the Wayback Machine, focus on trade and Suez Canal

Gunder Frank, Andre, and Robert A. Denemark. ReOrienting the 19th Century: Global Economy in the Continuing Asian Age (Paradigm Publishers, 2013);

Hopkins, A.G., ed. Globalization in World History (Norton, 2003).

Lechner, Frank J., and John Boli, eds. The Globalization Reader (4th ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Leibler, Anat. "The Emergence of a Global Economic Order: From Scientific Internationalism to Infrastructural Globalism." in Science, Numbers and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019) pp. 121-145 online.

Mir, Salam. "Colonialism, Postcolonialism, Globalization, and Arab Culture." Arab Studies Quarterly 41.1 (2019): 33-58. online

Olstein, Diego (2015) "Proto-globalization and Proto-glocalizations in the Middle Millennium." In Kedar, Benjamin and Wiesner-Hanks, Merry (Eds.), Cambridge World History. Volume 5: Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conquest, 500-1500 CE. Cambridge University Press, pp. 665-684

Pfister, Ulrich (2012), Globalization, EGO - European History Online, Mainz: Institute of European History, retrieved: 25 March 2021 (pdf).

Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. Globalization and culture: Global mélange (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).

Rosenberg, Justin. "Globalization Theory: A Post Mortem," International Politics 42:1 (2005), 2-74.

Steger, Manfred B. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (4th ed. Oxford University Press, 2017)

Van Der Bly, Martha C.E. "Globalization: A Triumph of Ambiguity," Current Sociology 53:6 (November 2005), 875-893

Wallerstein, Immanuel. "Globalization or the Age of Transition? A Long-Term View of the Trajectory of the World System," International Sociology 15:2 (June 2000), 251-267.

External links

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Globalization, or globalisation ( Commonwealth English; see spelling differences), is the process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide. The term globalization first appeared in the early 20th century (supplanting an earlier French term mondialisation), developed its current meaning sometime in the second half of the 20th century, and came into popular use in the 1990s to describe the unprecedented international connectivity of the post-Cold War world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Détente (a French word meaning release from tension) is the name given to a period of improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union that began tentatively in 1971 and took decisive form when President Richard M. Nixon visited the secretary-general of the Soviet Communist party, Leonid I. Brezhnev, in Moscow, May 1972.

Both countries stood to gain if trade could be increased and the danger of nuclear warfare reduced. In addition, Nixon-a candidate for reelection-was under fire at home from those demanding social change, racial equality, and an end to the Vietnam War. The trip to Russia, like his historic trip to China a few months earlier, permitted him to keep public attention focused on his foreign policy achievements rather than his domestic problems. Nixon's trip to China had also heightened the Soviets' interest in détente; given the growing antagonism between Russia and China, Brezhnev had no wish to see his most potent rivals close ranks against him.

On May 22 Nixon became the first U.S. president to visit Moscow. He and Brezhnev signed seven agreements covering the prevention of accidental military clashes; arms control, as recommended by the recent Strategic Arms Limitation Talks ( salt); cooperative research in a variety of areas, including space exploration; and expanded commerce. The salt treaty was approved by Congress later that summer, as was a three-year agreement on the sale of grain to the Soviets. In June 1973, Brezhnev visited the United States for Summit II; this meeting added few new agreements, but did symbolize the two countries' continuing commitment to peace. Summit III, in June 1974, was the least productive; by then, the salt talks had ground to a halt, several commercial agreements had been blocked in Congress because of Soviet treatment of Jews, and the Watergate investigation was approaching a climax. Nixon's successor in the talks, President Jimmy Carter, supported salt ii, but also pressed a military buildup and a human rights campaign, which cooled relations between the countries. With the election of Ronald Reagan, who emphasized military preparedness as the key to Soviet-American relations, détente as Nixon had envisioned it came to an end.

The Reader's Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Détente (a French word meaning release from tension) is the name given to a period of improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union that began tentatively in 1971 and took decisive form in 1972 when President Richard Nixon visited Secretary General of the Soviet Communist party, Leonid Brezhnev, in Moscow.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
“Missile Crisis” redirects here. For the missile crisis in Cyprus, see Cypriot S-300 crisis.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The domino theory was a Cold War policy that suggested a communist government in one nation would quickly lead to communist takeovers in neighboring states, each falling like a row of dominos. In Southeast Asia, the U.S. government used the now-discredited domino theory to justify its involvement in the Vietnam War and its support for a non-communist dictator in South Vietnam. In fact, the American failure to prevent a communist victory in Vietnam had much less of an impact than had been assumed by proponents of the domino theory. With the exception of Laos and Cambodia, communism failed to spread throughout Southeast Asia.

North and South Vietnam

In September 1945, the Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam's independence from France, beginning a war that pitted Ho's communist-led Viet Minh regime in Hanoi (North Vietnam) against a French-backed regime in Saigon (South Vietnam).

Under President Harry Truman, the U.S. government provided covert military and financial aid to the French; the rationale was that a communist victory in Indochina would precipitate the spread of communism throughout Southeast Asia. Using this same logic, Truman would also give aid to Greece and Turkey during the late 1940s to help contain communism in Europe and the Middle East.

What Was the Domino Theory?

By 1950, U.S. foreign policy officials had firmly embraced the idea that the fall of Indochina to communism would lead rapidly to the collapse of other nations in Southeast Asia. The National Security Council included the theory in a 1952 report on Indochina, and in April 1954, during the decisive battle between Viet Minh and French forces at Dien Bien Phu, President Dwight D. Eisenhower articulated it as the "falling domino" principle:

"You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly," Eisenhower said. "So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences."

In Eisenhower's view, the loss of Vietnam to communist control would lead to similar communist victories in neighboring countries in Southeast Asia (including Laos, Cambodia and Thailand) and elsewhere ( India, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and even Australia and New Zealand). "The possible consequences of the loss [of Indochina]," Eisenhower said, "are just incalculable to the free world."

After Eisenhower's speech, the phrase "domino theory" began to be used as a shorthand expression of the strategic importance of South Vietnam to the United States, as well as the need to contain the spread of communism throughout the world.

U.S. Involvement in Vietnam Deepens

After the Geneva Conference ended the French-Viet Minh war and split Vietnam along the latitude known as the 17th parallel, the United States spearheaded the organization of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), a loose alliance of nations committed to taking action against "security threats" in the region.

John F. Kennedy, Eisenhower's successor in the White House, would increase the commitment of U.S. resources in support of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime in South Vietnam and of non-communist forces fighting a civil war in Laos in 1961-62. In 1963, after serious domestic opposition to Diem arose, Kennedy backed away from support of Diem himself but publicly reaffirmed belief in the domino theory and the importance of containing communism in Southeast Asia.

Three weeks after Diem was murdered in a military coup in early November 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas; his successor Lyndon B. Johnson would continue to use the domino theory to justify the escalation of the U.S. military presence in Vietnam from a few thousand soldiers to more than 500,000 over the next five years.

Nations Are Not Dominoes

The domino theory is now largely discredited, having failed to take into account the character of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong struggle in the Vietnam War.

By assuming Ho Chi Minh was a pawn of the communist giants Soviet Union and China, American policymakers failed to see that the actual goal of Ho and his supporters was Vietnamese independence, not the spread of communism.

In the end, even though the American effort to block a communist takeover failed, and North Vietnamese forces marched into Saigon in 1975, communism did not spread throughout the rest of Southeast Asia. With the exception of Laos and Cambodia, the nations of the region remained out of communist control.

Sources

Domino Theory. ScienceDirect.
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, Indochina, Volume XIII, Part 1: Editorial Note. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian.
World War II, Race, and the Southeast Asian Origins of the Domino Theory. Wilson Center.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Domino Theory: Definition, Cold War & Vietnam War - HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The domino theory was a Cold War policy that suggested a communist government in one nation would quickly lead to communist takeovers in neighboring states, each falling like a row of dominos. In Southeast Asia, the U.S. government used the now-discredited domino theory to justify its involvement in the Vietnam War and its support for a non-communist dictator in South Vietnam.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The United Nations ( UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and serve as a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations. It is the world's largest international organization. The UN is headquartered in New York City (in the United States, but with certain extraterritorial privileges), and the organization has other offices in Geneva, Nairobi, Vienna, and The Hague, where the International Court of Justice is headquartered.

The UN was established after World War II with the aim of preventing future world wars, and succeeded the League of Nations, which was characterized as ineffective. On 25 April 1945, 50 nations met in San Francisco, California for a conference and started drafting the UN Charter, which was adopted on 25 June 1945. The charter took effect on 24 October 1945, when the UN began operations. The organization's objectives, as defined by its charter, include maintaining international peace and security, protecting human rights, delivering humanitarian aid, promoting sustainable development, and upholding international law. At its founding, the UN had 51 member states; as of 2023, it has 193 - almost all of the world's sovereign states.

The organization's mission to preserve world peace was complicated in its early decades due in part to Cold War tensions that existed between the United States and Soviet Union and their respective allies. Its mission has included the provision of primarily unarmed military observers and lightly armed troops charged with primarily monitoring, reporting and confidence-building roles. UN membership grew significantly following widespread decolonization in the 1960s. Since then, 80 former colonies have gained independence, including 11 trust territories that had been monitored by the Trusteeship Council. By the 1970s, the UN's budget for economic and social development programmes vastly exceeded its spending on peacekeeping. After the end of the Cold War in 1991, the UN shifted and expanded its field operations, undertaking a wide variety of complex tasks.

The UN has six principal operational organizations: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the International Court of Justice, the UN Secretariat, and the Trusteeship Council, although the Trusteeship Council has been inactive since 1994. The UN System includes a multitude of specialized agencies, funds, and programmes, including the World Bank Group, the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, UNESCO, and UNICEF. Additionally, non-governmental organizations may be granted consultative status with the Economic and Social Council and other agencies.

The UN's chief administrative officer is the secretary-general, currently Portuguese politician and diplomat António Guterres, who began his first five year-term on 1 January 2017 and was re-elected on 8 June 2021. The organization is financed by assessed and voluntary contributions from its member states.

The UN, its officers, and its agencies have won many Nobel Peace Prizes, though other evaluations of its effectiveness have been mixed. Some commentators believe the organization to be an important force for peace and human development, while others have called it ineffective, biased, and corrupt.

Background (pre-1941)

In the century prior to the UN's creation, several international organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross were formed to ensure protection and assistance for victims of armed conflict and strife.

During World War I, several major leaders, especially American President Woodrow Wilson, advocated for a world body to guarantee peace. The winners of the war, the Allies, met to decide on formal peace terms at the Paris Peace Conference. The League of Nations was approved, and started operations, but the United States never joined. On 10 January 1920, the League of Nations formally came into being when the Covenant of the League of Nations, ratified by 42 nations in 1919, took effect. The League Council acted as an executive body directing the Assembly's business. It began with four permanent members-the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Japan.

After some limited successes and failures during the 1920s, the League proved ineffective in the 1930s, as it failed to act against the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1933. Forty nations voted for Japan to withdraw from Manchuria but Japan voted against it and walked out of the League instead of withdrawing from Manchuria. It also failed to act against the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, when calls for economic sanctions against Italy failed. Italy and other nations left the League.

When war broke out in 1939, the League closed down.

Declarations by the Allies of World War II (1941-1944)

The first step towards the establishment of the United Nations was the Inter-Allied Conference that led to the Declaration of St James's Palace on 12 June 1941. By August 1941, American President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had drafted the Atlantic Charter; which defined goals for the post-war world. At the subsequent meeting of the Inter-Allied Council in London on 24 September 1941, the eight governments in exile of countries under Axis occupation, together with the Soviet Union and representatives of the Free French Forces, unanimously adopted adherence to the common principles of policy set forth by Britain and the United States.

Roosevelt and Churchill met at the White House in December 1941 for the Arcadia Conference. Roosevelt, considered a founder of the UN, coined the term United Nations to describe the Allied countries. Churchill accepted it, noting its use by Lord Byron. The text of the Declaration by United Nations was drafted on 29 December 1941, by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Harry Hopkins. It incorporated Soviet suggestions but included no role for France. One major change from the Atlantic Charter was the addition of a provision for religious freedom, which Stalin approved after Roosevelt insisted.

Roosevelt's idea of the " Four Powers", referring to the four major Allied countries, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China, emerged in the Declaration by the United Nations. On New Year's Day 1942, Roosevelt, Churchill, the Soviet Union's former Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, and the Chinese Premier T. V. Soong signed the " Declaration by United Nations", and the next day the representatives of twenty-two other nations added their signatures. During the war, the United Nations became the official term for the Allies. In order to join, countries had to sign the Declaration and declare war on the Axis powers.

The October 1943 Moscow Conference resulted in the Moscow Declarations, including the Four Power Declaration on General Security which aimed for the creation "at the earliest possible date of a general international organization". This was the first public announcement that a new international organization was being contemplated to replace the League of Nations. The Tehran Conference followed shortly afterwards at which Roosevelt, Churchill and Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, met and discussed the idea of a post-war international organization.

The new international organisation was formulated and negotiated amongst the delegations from the Allied Big Four at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference from 21 September to 7 October 1944. They agreed on proposals for the aims, structure and functioning of the new organization. It took the conference at Yalta in February 1945, and further negotiations with Moscow, before all the issues were resolved.

Founding (1945)

The UN in 1945: founding members in light blue, protectorates and territories of the founding members in dark blue

By 1 March 1945, 21 additional states had signed the Declaration by the United Nations. After months of planning, the UN Conference on International Organization opened in San Francisco on 25 April 1945. It was attended by 50 nation's governments and a number of non-governmental organizations. The delegations of the Big Four chaired the plenary meetings. Churchill urged Roosevelt to restore France to its status of a major power after the liberation of Paris in August 1944. The drafting of the Charter of the United Nations was completed over the following two months, and it was signed on 26 June 1945 by the representatives of the 50 countries. The UN officially came into existence on 24 October 1945, upon ratification of the Charter by the five permanent members of the Security Council: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union and China - and by a majority of the other 46 nations.

The first meetings of the General Assembly, with 51 nations represented, and the Security Council took place in London beginning in January 1946. Debates began at once, covering topical issues such as the presence of Russian troops in Iranian Azerbaijan and British forces in Greece. British diplomat Gladwyn Jebb served as interim secretary-general.

The General Assembly selected New York City as the site for the headquarters of the UN. Construction began on 14 September 1948 and the facility was completed on 9 October 1952. The Norwegian Foreign Minister, Trygve Lie, was elected as the first UN secretary-general (Jebb was only in the position until a permanent secretary-general was elected).

Cold War (1947-1991)

Though the UN's primary mandate was peacekeeping, the division between the United States and the Soviet Union often paralysed the organization; generally allowing it to intervene only in conflicts distant from the Cold War. Two notable exceptions were a Security Council resolution on 7 July 1950 authorizing a US-led coalition to repel the North Korean invasion of South Korea, passed in the absence of the Soviet Union, and the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement on 27 July 1953.

On 29 November 1947, the General Assembly approved a resolution to partition Palestine, approving the creation of Israel. Two years later, Ralph Bunche, a UN official, negotiated an armistice to the resulting conflict. On 7 November 1956, the first UN peacekeeping force was established to end the Suez Crisis; however, the UN was unable to intervene against the Soviet Union's simultaneous invasion of Hungary, following the country's revolution.

On 14 July 1960, the UN established the United Nations Operation in the Congo (or UNOC), the largest military force of its early decades, to bring order to Katanga, restoring it to the control of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by 11 May 1964. While travelling to meet rebel leader Moise Tshombe during the conflict, Dag Hammarskjöld, often named as one of the UN's most effective secretary-generals, died in a plane crash. Months later he was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1964, Hammarskjöld's successor, U Thant, deployed the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, which would become one of the UN's longest-running peacekeeping missions.

With the spread of decolonization in the 1960s, the organization's membership shot up due to an influx of newly independent nations. In 1960 alone, 17 new states joined the UN, 16 of them from Africa. On 25 October 1971, with opposition from the United States, but with the support of many Third World nations, the People's Republic of China was given the Chinese seat on the Security Council in place of the Republic of China (also known as Taiwan). The vote was widely seen as a sign of waning American influence in the organization. Third World nations organized themselves into the Group of 77 under the leadership of Algeria, which briefly became a dominant power at the UN. On 10 November 1975, a bloc comprising the Soviet Union and Third World nations passed a resolution, over strenuous American and Israeli opposition, declaring Zionism to be racism. The resolution was repealed on 16 December 1991, shortly after the end of the Cold War.

With an increasing Third World presence and the failure of UN mediation in conflicts in the Middle East, Vietnam, and Kashmir, the UN increasingly shifted its attention to its secondary goals of economic development and cultural exchange. By the 1970s, the UN budget for social and economic development was far greater than its peacekeeping budget.

Post-Cold War (1991-present)

After the Cold War, the UN saw a radical expansion in its peacekeeping duties, taking on more missions in five years than it had in the previous four decades. Between 1988 and 2000, the number of adopted Security Council resolutions more than doubled, and the peacekeeping budget increased by more than tenfold. The UN negotiated an end to the Salvadoran Civil War, launched a successful peacekeeping mission in Namibia, and oversaw democratic elections in post- apartheid South Africa and post- Khmer Rouge Cambodia. In 1991, the UN authorized a US-led coalition that repulsed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Brian Urquhart, the under-secretary-general of the UN from 1971 to 1985, later described the hopes raised by these successes as a "false renaissance" for the organization, given the more troubled missions that followed.

Beginning in the last decades of the Cold War, critics of the UN condemned the organization for perceived mismanagement and corruption. In 1984, American President Ronald Reagan withdrew the United States' funding from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (or UNESCO) over allegations of mismanagement, followed by the United Kingdom and Singapore. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the secretary-general from 1992 to 1996, initiated a reform of the Secretariat, somewhat reducing the size of the organisation. His successor, Kofi Annan, initiated further management reforms in the face of threats from the US to withhold its UN dues.

Though the UN Charter had been written primarily to prevent aggression by one nation against another, in the early 1990s the UN faced several simultaneous, serious crises within Somalia, Haiti, Mozambique, and the nations that previously made up Yugoslavia. The UN mission in Somalia was widely viewed as a failure after the United States' withdrawal following casualties in the Battle of Mogadishu. The UN mission to Bosnia faced worldwide ridicule for its indecisive and confused mission in the face of ethnic cleansing. In 1994, the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda failed to intervene in the Rwandan genocide amidst indecision in the Security Council.

From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, international interventions authorized by the UN took a wider variety of forms. The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244 authorised the NATO-led Kosovo Force beginning in 1999. The UN mission in the Sierra Leone Civil War was supplemented by a British military intervention. The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was overseen by NATO. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq despite failing to pass a UN Security Council resolution for authorization, prompting a new round of questioning of the organization's effectiveness.

Under the eighth secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, the UN intervened with peacekeepers in crises such as the War in Darfur in Sudan and the Kivu conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and sent observers and chemical weapons inspectors to the Syrian Civil War. In 2013, an internal review of UN actions in the final battles of the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2009 concluded that the organization had suffered a "systemic failure". In 2010, the organization suffered the worst loss of life in its history, when 101 personnel died in the Haiti earthquake. Acting under the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 in 2011, NATO countries intervened in the First Libyan Civil War.

The Millennium Summit was held in 2000 to discuss the UN's role in the 21st century. The three-day meeting was the largest gathering of world leaders in history, and it culminated in the adoption by all member states of the Millennium Development Goals (or MDGs), a commitment to achieve international development in areas such as poverty reduction, gender equality and public health. Progress towards these goals, which were to be met by 2015, was ultimately uneven. The 2005 World Summit reaffirmed the UN's focus on promoting development, peacekeeping, human rights and global security. The Sustainable Development Goals (or SDGs) were launched in 2015 to succeed the Millennium Development Goals.

In addition to addressing global challenges, the UN has sought to improve its accountability and democratic legitimacy by engaging more with civil society and fostering a global constituency. In an effort to enhance transparency, in 2016 the organization held its first public debate between candidates for secretary-general. On 1 January 2017, Portuguese diplomat António Guterres, who had previously served as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, became the ninth secretary-general. Guterres has highlighted several key goals for his administration, including an emphasis on diplomacy for preventing conflicts, more effective peacekeeping efforts, and streamlining the organization to be more responsive and versatile to international needs.

On 13 June 2019, the UN signed a Strategic Partnership Framework with the World Economic Forum in order to "jointly accelerate" the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The United Nations is part of the broader UN System, which includes an extensive network of institutions and entities. Central to the organization are five principal organs established by the UN Charter: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the International Court of Justice and the UN Secretariat. A sixth principal organ, the Trusteeship Council, suspended its operations on 1 November 1994 upon the independence of Palau; the last remaining UN trustee territory.

Four of the five principal organs are located at the main UN Headquarters in New York City, while the International Court of Justice is seated in The Hague. Most other major agencies are based in the UN offices at Geneva, Vienna, and Nairobi, and additional UN institutions are located throughout the world. The six official languages of the UN, used in intergovernmental meetings and documents, are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. On the basis of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, the UN and its agencies are immune from the laws of the countries where they operate, safeguarding the UN's impartiality with regard to host and member countries.

Below the six organs are, in the words of the author Linda Fasulo, "an amazing collection of entities and organizations, some of which are actually older than the UN itself and operate with almost complete independence from it". These include specialized agencies, research and training institutions, programmes and funds and other UN entities.

All organizations in the UN system obey the Noblemaire principle, which calls for salaries that will attract and retain citizens of countries where compensation is highest, and which ensures equal pay for work of equal value regardless of the employee's nationality. In practice, the International Civil Service Commission, which governs the conditions of UN personnel, takes reference to the highest-paying national civil service. Staff salaries are subject to an internal tax that is administered by the UN organizations.

General Assembly

The General Assembly is the main deliberative assembly of the UN. Composed of all UN member states, the assembly meets in regular yearly sessions at the General Assembly Hall, but emergency sessions can also be called. The assembly is led by a president, elected by the member states on a rotating regional basis, and 21 vice-presidents. The first session convened on 10 January 1946 in the Methodist Central Hall in London and included representatives of 51 nations.

When the General Assembly decides on important questions such as those on peace and security, admission of new members and budgetary matters, a two-thirds majority of those present and voting is required. All other questions are decided by a majority vote. Each member has one vote. Apart from the approval of budgetary matters, resolutions are not binding on the members. The Assembly may make recommendations on any matters within the scope of the UN, except matters of peace and security that are under consideration by the Security Council.

Draft resolutions can be forwarded to the General Assembly by its six main committees:

As well as by the following two committees:

General Committee - a supervisory committee consisting of the assembly's president, vice-presidents, and committee heads

Credentials Committee - responsible for determining the credentials of each member nation's UN representatives

Security Council

Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, demonstrates a vial with alleged Iraq chemical weapon probes to the UN Security Council on Iraq war hearings, 5 February 2003.

The Security Council is charged with maintaining peace and security amongst nations. While other organs of the UN can only make recommendations to member states, the Security Council has the power to make binding decisions that member states have agreed to carry out, under the terms of Charter Article 25. The decisions of the council are known as United Nations Security Council resolutions.

The Security Council is made up of fifteen member states: five permanent members (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States) and ten non-permanent members (currently Albania, Brazil, Gabon, Ghana, India, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico, Norway and the United Arab Emirates). The five permanent members hold veto power over UN resolutions, allowing a permanent member to block adoption of a resolution, though not debate. The ten temporary seats are held for two-year terms, with five members elected each year by the General Assembly on a regional basis. The presidency of the Security Council rotates alphabetically each month.

UN Secretariat

The UN Secretariat carries out the day-to-day duties required to operate and maintain the UN system. It is composed of tens of thousands of international civil servants worldwide and headed by the secretary-general, who is assisted by the deputy secretary-general. The Secretariat's duties include providing information and facilities needed by UN bodies for their meetings and carrying out tasks as directed by the Security Council, the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council, and other UN bodies.

The secretary-general acts as the spokesperson and leader of the UN. The position is defined in the UN Charter as the organization's chief administrative officer. Article 99 of the charter states that the secretary-general can bring to the Security Council's attention "any matter which in their opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security", a phrase that secretaries-general since Trygve Lie have interpreted as giving the position broad scope for action on the world stage. The office has evolved into a dual role of an administrator of the UN organization and a diplomat and mediator addressing disputes between member states and finding consensus to global issues.

The secretary-general is appointed by the General Assembly, after being recommended by the Security Council, where the permanent members have veto power. There are no specific criteria for the post, but over the years it has become accepted that the position shall be held for one or two terms of five years. The current secretary-general is António Guterres of Portugal, who replaced Ban Ki-moon in 2017.

International Court of Justice

The International Court of Justice (or ICJ), sometimes known as the World Court, is the primary judicial organ of the UN. It is the successor to the Permanent Court of International Justice and occupies the body's former headquarters in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands, making it the only principal organ not based in New York City. The ICJ's main function is adjudicating disputes among nations. Examples of issues they have heard include war crimes, violations of state sovereignty and ethnic cleansing. The court can also be called upon by other UN organs to provide advisory opinions on matters of international law. All UN member states are parties to the ICJ Statute, which forms an integral part of the UN Charter, and non-members may also become parties. The ICJ's rulings are binding upon parties and, along with its advisory opinions, serve as sources of international law. The court is composed of 15 judges appointed to nine-year terms by the General Assembly. Every sitting judge must be from a different nation.

Economic and Social Council

The Economic and Social Council (or the ECOSOC) assists the General Assembly in promoting international economic and social co-operation and development. It was established to serve as the UN's primary forum for global issues and is the largest and most complex UN body. The ECOSOC's functions include gathering data, conducting studies and advising and making recommendations to member states. Its work is carried out primarily by subsidiary bodies focused on a wide variety of topics. These include the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which advises UN agencies on issues relating to indigenous peoples, the United Nations Forum on Forests, which coordinates and promotes sustainable forest management, the United Nations Statistical Commission, which co-ordinates information-gathering efforts between agencies, and the Commission on Sustainable Development, which co-ordinates efforts between UN agencies and NGOs working towards sustainable development. ECOSOC may also grant consultative status to non-governmental organizations. as of April 2021 almost 5,600 organizations have this status.

Specialized agencies

The UN Charter stipulates that each primary organ of the United Nations can establish various specialized agencies to fulfill its duties. Specialized agencies are autonomous organizations working with the United Nations and each other through the co-ordinating machinery of the Economic and Social Council. Each was integrated into the UN system through an agreement with the UN under UN Charter article 57. There are fifteen specialized agencies, which perform functions as diverse as facilitating international travel, preventing and addressing pandemics, and promoting economic development.

Funds, programmes, and other bodies

The United Nations system includes a myriad of autonomous, separately administered funds, programmes, research and training institutes, and other subsidiary bodies. Each of these entities have their own area of work, governance structure, and budget such as the World Trade Organization (or the WTO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (or the IAEA), operate independently of the UN but maintain formal partnership agreements. The UN performs much of its humanitarian work through these institutions, such as preventing famine and malnutrition (the World Food Programme), protecting vulnerable and displaced people (the UNHCR), and combating the HIV/AIDS pandemic (the UNAIDS).

Membership

2 eligible Non-Member States (Niue, Cook Islands)

All the world's undisputed independent states, apart from Vatican City, are members of the United Nations. South Sudan, which joined 14 July 2011, is the most recent addition, bringing a total of 193 UN member states. The UN Charter outlines the membership rules:

1. Membership in the United Nations is open to all other peace-loving states that accept the obligations contained in the present Charter and, in the judgment of the Organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations.

2. The admission of any such state to membership in the United Nations will be effected by a decision of the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council. Chapter II, Article 4.

In addition, there are two non-member observer states: the Vatican City and Palestine. The Cook Islands and Niue, both states in free association with New Zealand, are full members of several UN specialized agencies and have had their "full treaty-making capacity" recognized by the Secretariat.

Indonesia was the first and the only nation that attempted to withdraw its membership from the United Nations, in protest to the election of Malaysia as a non-permanent member of the Security Council in 1965 during conflict between the two countries. After forming CONEFO as a short-lived rival to the UN, Indonesia resumed its membership in 1966.

The Group of 77 (or the G77) at the UN is a loose coalition of developing nations that is designed to promote its members' collective economic interests and create an enhanced joint negotiating capacity in the UN. Seventy-seven nations founded the organization, but by November 2013 the organization had since expanded to 133 member countries. The group was founded 15 June 1964 by the "Joint Declaration of the Seventy-Seven Countries" issued at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (or the UNCTAD). The group held its first major meeting in Algiers in 1967, where it adopted the Charter of Algiers and established the basis for permanent institutional structures. With the adoption of the New International Economic Order by developing countries in the 1970s, the work of the G77 spread throughout the UN system. Similar groupings of developing states also operate in other UN agencies, such as the Group of 24 (or the G-24), which operates in the IMF on monetary affairs.

Objectives

The overarching strategy of the United Nations is captured in the United Nations Common Agenda.

Peacekeeping and security

The UN, after approval by the Security Council, sends peacekeepers to regions where armed conflict has recently ceased or paused to enforce the terms of peace agreements and to discourage combatants from resuming hostilities. Since the UN does not maintain its own military, peacekeeping forces are voluntarily provided by member states. These soldiers are sometimes nicknamed "Blue Helmets" because they wear distinctive blue helmets. Peacekeeping forces as a whole received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1988.

A Nepalese soldier on a peacekeeping deployment providing security at a rice distribution site in Haiti during 2010

The UN has carried out 71 peacekeeping operations since 1947, and as of April 2021, over 88,000 peacekeeping personnel from 121 nations have been deployed on missions. The largest is the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (or UNMISS), which has close to 19,200 uniformed personnel, and the smallest, the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (or UNMOGIP), consists of 113 civilians and experts charged with monitoring the ceasefire in Jammu and Kashmir. UN peacekeepers with the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (or UNTSO) have been stationed in the Middle East since 1948, the longest-running active peacekeeping mission.

A study by the RAND Corporation in 2005 found the UN to be successful in two-thirds of their peacekeeping efforts. It compared efforts at nation-building by the UN to those of the United States, and found that 87.5% of UN cases are at peace, as compared with 50% of U.S. cases at peace. Also in 2005, the Human Security Report documented a decline in the number of wars, genocides, and human rights abuses since the end of the Cold War, and presented evidence, albeit circumstantial, that international activism - mostly spearheaded by the UN - has been the main cause of the decline in armed conflict. Situations in which the UN has not only acted to keep the peace but also intervened include the Korean War and the authorization of intervention in Iraq after the Gulf War. Further studies published between 2008 and 2021 determined UN peacekeeping operations to be more effective at ensuring long-lasting peace and minimizing civilian casualties.

The UN has also drawn criticism for perceived failures. In many cases, member states have shown reluctance to achieve or enforce Security Council resolutions. Disagreements in the Security Council about military action and intervention are seen as having failed to prevent the Bangladesh genocide in 1971, the Cambodian genocide in the 1970s, and the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Similarly, UN inaction is blamed for failing to either prevent the Srebrenica massacre or complete the peacekeeping operations during the Somali Civil War. UN peacekeepers have also been accused of child rape, soliciting prostitutes, and sexual abuse during various peacekeeping missions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Liberia, Sudan, Burundi, and Côte d'Ivoire. Scientists cited UN peacekeepers from Nepal as the source of the 2010s Haiti cholera outbreak, which killed more than 8,000 people.

In addition to peacekeeping, the UN is also active in encouraging disarmament. Regulation of armaments was included in the writing of the UN Charter in 1945 and was envisioned as a way of limiting the use of human and economic resources for their creation. The advent of nuclear weapons came only weeks after the signing of the charter, resulting in the first resolution of the first General Assembly meeting calling for specific proposals for "the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction". The UN has been involved with arms-limitation treaties such as the Outer Space Treaty, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the Seabed Arms Control Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the Ottawa Treaty. Three UN bodies oversee arms proliferation issues: the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization Preparatory Commission. Additionally, many peacekeeping missions focus on disarmament: several operations in West Africa disarmed roughly 250,000 former combatants and secured tens of thousands of weapons and millions of munitions.

Human rights

One of the UN's primary purposes is "promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion", and member states pledge to undertake "joint and separate action" to protect these rights.

In 1948, the General Assembly adopted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted by a committee headed by American diplomat and activist Eleanor Roosevelt, and including the French lawyer René Cassin. The document proclaims basic civil, political and economic rights common to all human beings, though its effectiveness towards achieving these ends has been disputed since its drafting. The Declaration serves as a "common standard of achievement for all people and all nations" rather than a legally binding document, but it has become the basis of two binding treaties, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. In practice, the UN is unable to take significant action against human rights abuses without a Security Council resolution, though it does substantial work in investigating and reporting abuses.

In 1979, the General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women; followed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. With the end of the Cold War, the push for human rights action took on new impetus. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights was formed in 1993 to oversee human rights issues for the UN, following the recommendation of that year's World Conference on Human Rights. Jacques Fomerand, a scholar of the UN, describes the organization's mandate as "broad and vague", with only "meagre" resources to carry it out. In 2006, it was replaced by a Human Rights Council consisting of 47 nations. Also in 2006, the General Assembly passed a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, and in 2011 it passed its first resolution recognizing the rights of members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Other UN bodies responsible for women's rights issues include the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, the United Nations Development Fund for Women and the United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women. The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, one of three bodies with a mandate to oversee issues related to indigenous peoples, held its first session in 2002.

Economic development and humanitarian assistance

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

2. Achieve universal primary education

3. Promote gender equality and empower women

4. Reduce child mortality

5. Improve maternal health

6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases

7. Ensure environmental sustainability

8. Develop a global partnership for development

Another primary purpose of the UN is "to achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural and humanitarian character". Numerous bodies have been created to work towards this goal, primarily under the authority of the General Assembly and the ECOSOC. In 2000, the 192 UN member states agreed to achieve eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015. The Sustainable Development Goals were launched in 2015 to succeed the Millennium Development Goals. The SDGs have an associated financing framework called the Addis Ababa Action Agenda.

The UN Development Programme (or the UNDP), an organization for grant-based technical assistance, is one of the leading bodies in the field of international development. The organization also publishes the UN Human Development Index, a comparative measure ranking countries by poverty, literacy, education, life expectancy, and other factors. The Food and Agriculture Organization (or the FAO) promotes agricultural development and food security. The United Nations Children's Fund (or UNICEF) was created in 1946 to aid European children after the Second World War and expanded its mission to provide aid around the world and to uphold the convention on the Rights of the Child.

The World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund (or the IMF) are independent, specialized agencies and observers within the UN framework. They were initially formed separately from the UN through the Bretton Woods Agreement. The World Bank provides loans for international development, while the IMF promotes international economic co-operation and gives emergency loans to indebted countries.

In Jordan, UNHCR remains responsible for the Syrian refugees and the Zaatari refugee camp.

The World Health Organization (or WHO), which focuses on international health issues and disease eradication, is another of the UN's largest agencies. In 1980, the agency announced that the eradication of smallpox had been completed. In subsequent decades, WHO eradicated polio, river blindness, and leprosy. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (or UNAIDS) co-ordinated the organization's response to the AIDS epidemic. The UN Population Fund, which also dedicates part of its resources to combating HIV, is the world's largest source of funding for reproductive health and family planning services.

Along with the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, the UN takes a leading role in co-ordinating emergency relief. The World Food Programme (or the WFP) provides food aid in response to famine, natural disasters, and armed conflict. The organization feeds an average of 90 million people in 80 nations per year. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (or the UNHCR) works to protect the rights of refugees, asylum seekers and stateless people. The UNHCR and the WFP programmes are funded by voluntary contributions from governments, corporations, and individuals, though the UNHCR's administrative costs are paid for by the UN's primary budget.

Environment and climate

Beginning with the formation of the UN Environmental Programme (or the UNEP) in 1972, the UN has made environmental issues a prominent part of its agenda. A lack of success in the first two decades of UN work in this area led to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992; which sought to give new impetus to these efforts. In 1988, the UNEP and the World Meteorological Organization (or the WMO), another UN organization, established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which assesses and reports on research on global warming. The UN-sponsored Kyoto Protocol set legally binding emissions reduction targets for ratifying states.

Other global issues

Since the UN's creation, over 80 colonies have attained independence. The General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in 1960 with no votes against but abstentions from all major colonial powers. The UN works towards decolonization through groups including the UN Committee on Decolonization. The committee lists seventeen remaining " non-self-governing territories", the largest and most populous of which is the Western Sahara.

The UN budget for 2022 was $3.1 billion, not including additional resources donated by members, such as peacekeeping forces.

The UN is financed from assessed and voluntary contributions from its member states. The General Assembly approves the regular budget and determines the assessment for each member. This is broadly based on the relative capacity of each nation to pay, as measured by its gross national income (or GNI), with adjustments for external debt and low per capita income.

The Assembly has established the principle that the UN should not be unduly dependent on any one member to finance its operations. Thus, there is a "ceiling" rate, setting the maximum amount that any member can be assessed for the regular budget. In December 2000, the Assembly revised the scale of assessments in response to pressure from the United States. As part of that revision, the regular budget ceiling was reduced from 25% to 22%. For the least developed countries (or LDCs), a ceiling rate of 0.01% is applied. In addition to the ceiling rates, the minimum amount assessed to any member nation (or "floor" rate) is set at 0.001% of the UN budget ($31,000 for the two-year budget 2021-2022).

A large share of the UN's expenditure addresses its core mission of peace and security, and this budget is assessed separately from the main organizational budget. The peacekeeping budget for the 2021-2022 fiscal year is $6.38 billion, supporting 75,224 personnel deployed in 10 missions worldwide. UN peace operations are funded by assessments, using a formula derived from the regular funding scale that includes a weighted surcharge for the five permanent Security Council members, who must approve all peacekeeping operations. This surcharge serves to offset discounted peacekeeping assessment rates for less developed countries. The largest contributors to the UN peacekeeping budget for 2020-2021 are: the United States (27.89%), China (15.21%), Japan (8.56%), Germany (6.09%), the United Kingdom (5.78%), France (5.61%), Italy (3.30%), Russia (3.04%), Canada (2.73%), and South Korea (2.26%).

Special UN programmes not included in the regular budget, such as UNICEF and the World Food Programme, are financed by voluntary contributions from member governments, corporations, and private individuals.

Evaluations, awards, and criticism

The 2001 Nobel Peace Prize to the UN-diploma in the lobby of the UN Headquarters in New York City

Evaluations

In evaluating the UN as a whole, Jacques Fomerand writes that the "accomplishments of the United Nations in the last 60 years are impressive in their own terms. Progress in human development during the 20th century has been dramatic, and the UN and its agencies have certainly helped the world become a more hospitable and livable place for millions". Evaluating the first 50 years of the UN's history, the author Stanley Meisler writes that "the United Nations never fulfilled the hopes of its founders, but it accomplished a great deal nevertheless", citing its role in decolonization and its many successful peacekeeping efforts.

British historian Paul Kennedy states that while the organization has suffered some major setbacks, "when all its aspects are considered, the UN has brought great benefits to our generation and will bring benefits to our children's and grandchildren's generations as well."

Then French President François Hollande stated in 2012 that "France trusts the United Nations. She knows that no state, no matter how powerful, can solve urgent problems, fight for development and bring an end to all crises. France wants the UN to be the centre of global governance". In his 1953 address to the United States Committee for United Nations Day, American President Dwight D. Eisenhower expressed his view that, for all its flaws, "the United Nations represents man's best organized hope to substitute the conference table for the battlefield".

UN peacekeeping missions are assessed to be generally successful. An analysis of 47 peace operations by Virginia Page Fortna of Columbia University found that UN-led conflict resolution usually resulted in long-term peace. Political scientists Hanne Fjelde, Lisa Hultman and Desiree Nilsson of Uppsala University studied twenty years of data on peacekeeping missions, concluding that they were more effective at reducing civilian casualties than counterterrorism operations by nation states. Georgetown University professor Lise Howard postulates that UN peacekeeping operations are more effective due to their emphasis on "verbal persuasion, financial inducements and coercion short of offensive military force, including surveillance and arrest", which are likelier to change the behavior of warring parties.

A number of agencies and individuals associated with the UN have won the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of their work. Two secretaries-general, Dag Hammarskjöld and Kofi Annan, were each awarded the prize; as were Ralph Bunche, a UN negotiator, René Cassin, a contributor to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the American Secretary of State Cordell Hull for his role in the organization's founding. Lester B. Pearson, the Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs, was awarded the prize in 1957 for his role in organizing the UN's first peacekeeping force to resolve the Suez Crisis. UNICEF won the prize in 1965, the International Labour Organization in 1969, the UN Peacekeeping Forces in 1988, the International Atomic Energy Agency (which reports to the UN) in 2005, and the UN-supported Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in 2013. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees was awarded the prize in 1954 and 1981, becoming one of only two recipients to win the prize twice. The UN as a whole was awarded the prize in 2001, sharing it with Annan. In 2007, the IPCC received the prize "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

Marking of the UN's 70th anniversary - Budapest, 2015

In a sometimes-misquoted statement, American President George W. Bush stated in February 2003-referring to UN uncertainty towards Iraqi provocations under the Saddam Hussein regime-that "free nations will not allow the UN to fade into history as an ineffective, irrelevant debating society."

In 2020, former American President Barack Obama, in his memoir A Promised Land noted, "In the middle of the Cold War, the chances of reaching any consensus had been slim, which is why the UN had stood idle as Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary or U.S. planes dropped napalm on the Vietnamese countryside. Even after the Cold War, divisions within the Security Council continued to hamstring the UN's ability to tackle problems. Its member states lacked either the means or the collective will to reconstruct failing states like Somalia, or prevent an ethnic slaughter in places like Sri Lanka."

Since its founding, there have been many calls for reform of the UN but little consensus on how to do so. Some want the UN to play a greater or more effective role in world affairs, while others want its role reduced to humanitarian work.

Representation and structure

Core features of the UN apparatus, such as the veto privileges of some nations in the Security Council, are often described as fundamentally undemocratic, contrary to the UN mission, and a main cause of inaction on genocides and crimes against humanity.

Jacques Fomerand state that the most enduring divide in views of the UN is "the North-South split" between richer Northern nations and developing Southern nations. Southern nations tend to favour a more empowered UN with a stronger General Assembly, allowing them a greater voice in world affairs, while Northern nations prefer an economically laissez-faire UN that focuses on transnational threats such as terrorism.

There have also been numerous calls for the UN Security Council's membership to be increased, for different ways of electing the UN's secretary-general, and for a UN Parliamentary Assembly.

Exclusion of countries

After World War II, the French Committee of National Liberation was late to be recognized by the United States as the government of France, and so the country was initially excluded from the conferences that created the new organization. Future French president Charles de Gaulle criticized the UN, famously calling it a machin (contraption), and was not convinced that a global security alliance would help maintain world peace, preferring direct defence treaties between countries.

Since 1971, the Republic of China, also known as Taiwan, has been excluded from the UN and consistently denied membership in its reapplications. The UN officially adheres to the " One China" policy endorsed by most member states, which recognizes the People's Republic of China as the only legitimate Chinese government. Critics allege that this position reflects a failure of the organization's development goals and guidelines, and it garnered renewed scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Taiwan was denied membership into the World Health Organization despite its relatively effective response to the virus. Support for Taiwan's inclusion is subject to pressure from the People's Republic of China, which regards the territories administered by Taiwan as their own territory.

Independence

Ironically, the United States had simultaneously scrutinized the UN for employing communists and Soviet sympathizers, following a high-profile accusation that Alger Hiss, an American who had taken part in the establishment of the UN, had been a Soviet spy. American Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that the UN Secretariat under Secretary-General Lie harboured American communists, leading to further pressure that the UN chief resign. The United States saw nascent opposition to the UN in the 1960s, particularly amongst conservatives, with groups such as the John Birch Society stating that the organization was an instrument for communism. Popular opposition to the UN was expressed through bumper stickers and signs with slogans such as "Get the U.S. out of the U.N. and the U.N. out of the U.S.!" and "You can't spell communism without U.N."

National sovereignty

In the United States, there were concerns about supposed threats to national sovereignty, most notably promoted by the John Birch Society, which mounted a nationwide campaign in opposition to the UN during the 1960s.

Beginning in the 1990s, the same concern appeared with the American Sovereignty Restoration Act, which has been introduced multiple times in the United States Congress. In 1997, an amendment containing the bill received a floor vote, with 54 representatives voting in favor. The 2007 version of the bill ( H.R. 1146) was authored by U.S. Representative Ron Paul, to effect the United States' withdrawal from the United Nations. It would repeal various laws pertaining to the UN, terminate authorization for funds to be spent on the UN, terminate UN presence on American property, and withdraw diplomatic immunity for UN employees. It would provide up to two years for the United States to withdraw. The Yale Law Journal cited the Act as proof that "the United States's complaints against the United Nations have intensified." The most recent iteration, as of 2022, is H.R.7806, introduced by Mike D. Rogers.

The UN's attention to Israel's treatment of Palestinians is considered excessive by a range of critics, including Israeli diplomat Dore Gold, British scholar Robert S. Wistrich, American legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, Australian politician Mark Dreyfus, and the Anti-Defamation League. In September 2015, Saudi Arabia's Faisal bin Hassan Trad was elected chair of an advisory committee in the UN Human Rights Council, a move criticized by human rights groups. The UNHRC has likewise been accused of anti-Israel bias, as it has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than the rest of the world combined.

Effectiveness

In 1994, former special representative of the secretary-general of the UN to Somalia Mohamed Sahnoun published Somalia: The Missed Opportunities, a book in which he analyses the reasons for the failure of the 1992 UN intervention in Somalia. Sahnoun claims that between the start of the Somali civil war in 1988 and the fall of the Siad Barre regime in January 1991, the UN missed at least three opportunities to prevent major human tragedies. When the UN tried to provide humanitarian assistance, they were totally outperformed by NGOs, whose competence and dedication sharply contrasted with the UN's excessive caution and bureaucratic inefficiencies. Sahnoun warned that if radical reform were not undertaken, then the UN would continue to respond to such crises with inept improvisation.

Beyond specific instances or areas of alleged ineffectiveness, some scholars debate the overall effectiveness of the UN. Adherents to the realist school of international relations take a pessimistic position, arguing that the UN is not an effective organization because it is dominated and constrained by great powers. Liberal scholars counter that it is an effective organization because it has proved capable of solving many problems by working around the restrictions imposed by powerful member states. The UN is generally considered by scholars to be more effective in realms such as public health, humanitarian assistance, and conflict resolution.

Inefficiency and corruption

Critics have also accused the UN of bureaucratic inefficiency, waste, and corruption. In 1976, the General Assembly established the Joint Inspection Unit to seek out inefficiencies within the UN system. During the 1990s, the United States withheld dues citing inefficiency and only started repayment on the condition that a major reforms initiative be introduced. In 1994, the Office of Internal Oversight Services (or the OIOS) was established by the General Assembly to serve as an efficiency watchdog.

Model United Nations

The United Nations has inspired the extracurricular activity Model United Nations (or MUN). MUN is a simulation of United Nations activity based on the UN agenda and following UN procedure. It is usually attended by high school and university students who organize conferences to simulate the various UN committees to discuss important issues of the day. Today, MUN educates tens of thousands on the activities of the UN around the world. MUN has many famous and notable alumni, such as the former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

References

Bibliography

Ball, Howard (2011). Genocide: A Reference Handbook. Contemporary World Issues. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-59884-488-7.

Fomerand, Jacques (2009). The A to Z of the United Nations. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-5547-2.

Grant, Thomas D. (2009). Admission to the United Nations: Charter Article 4 and the Rise of Universal Organization. Legal Aspects of International Organization. Vol. 50. Leiden, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. ISBN 978-90-04-17363-7. ISSN 0924-4883.

Manchester, William; Reid, Paul (2012). The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill. Vol. 3: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965. New York: Little Brown and Company. ISBN 978-0-316-54770-3.

Mires, Charlene (2013). Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations. New York University Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-0794-4.

Sherwood, Robert E. (1948). Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Weiss, Thomas G.; Daws, Sam, eds. (2009) [2007]. The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-956010-3.

Further reading

Lowe, Vaughan; Roberts, Adam; Welsh, Jennifer; Zaum, Dominik, eds. (2008). The United Nations Security Council and War: The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-953343-5.

Mazower, Mark (2009). No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations. Princeton University Press.

Roberts, Adam; Kingsbury, Benedict, eds. (1994). United Nations, Divided World: The UN's Roles in International Relations (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-827926-6.

External links

Official websites

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The United Nations ( UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and serve as a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations. It is the world's largest international organization.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This article is about the state-sponsored genocide of European Jews during World War II. For all peoples persecuted during this era, see Holocaust victims.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Adolf Hitler greets British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at the beginning of the Bad Godesberg meeting on 24 September 1938 in which Hitler demanded annexation of Czech border areas without delay, leading to the Godesberg Memorandum

Appeasement, in an international context, is a diplomatic policy of making political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power to avoid conflict. The term is most often applied to the foreign policy of the British governments of Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald (in office 1929-1935), Stanley Baldwin (in office 1935-1937) and (most notably) Neville Chamberlain (in office 1937-1940) towards Nazi Germany (from 1933) and Fascist Italy (from 1922) between 1935 and 1939. Under British pressure, appeasement of Nazism and Fascism also played a role in French foreign policy of the period but was always much less popular there than in the United Kingdom.

As alarm grew about the rise of fascism in Europe, Chamberlain resorted to attempts at news censorship to control public opinion. He confidently announced after Munich that he had secured " peace for our time".

Academics, politicians and diplomats have intensely debated the 1930s appeasement policies ever since they occurred. Historians' assessments have ranged from condemnation (" Lesson of Munich") for allowing Hitler's Germany to grow too strong to the judgment that Germany was so strong that it might well win a war and that postponing a showdown was in the best interests of the West.

Appeasement policy, the policy of appeasing Hitler and Mussolini, operating jointly at that time, during 1937 and 1938 by continuous concessions granted in the hope of reaching a point of saturation when the dictators would be willing to accede to international collaboration.... It came to an end when Hitler seized Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, in defiance of his promises given at Munich, and Prime Minister Chamberlain, who had championed appeasement before, decided on a policy of resistance to further German aggression.

-  Walter Theimer (ed.), The Penguin Political Dictionary, 1939

Chamberlain's policy of appeasement emerged from the failure of the League of Nations and the failure of collective security. The League of Nations was set up in the aftermath of World War I in the hope that international co-operation and collective resistance to aggression might prevent another war. Members of the League were entitled to the assistance of other members if they came under attack. The policy of collective security ran in parallel with measures to achieve international disarmament and, if possible, was to be based on economic sanctions against an aggressor. The policy appeared to be ineffectual when confronted by the aggression of dictators, notably Germany's Remilitarization of the Rhineland and Italy's Benito Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia.

In September 1931, the Empire of Japan, a member of the League of Nations, invaded Manchuria, in northeast China, by claiming that the regional population was not only Chinese but was multi-ethnic. The Republic of China appealed to the League of Nations and to the United States for assistance. The League of Nations Council asked the parties to withdraw to their original positions to permit a peaceful settlement. The United States reminded them of their duty under the Kellogg-Briand Pact to settle matters peacefully. Japan was undeterred and went on to occupy the whole of Manchuria. The League set up a commission of inquiry that condemned Japan, and the League duly adopted the report in February 1933. In response, Japan resigned from the League and continued its advance into China, with neither the League nor the United States taking any action. However, the U.S. issued the Stimson Doctrine and refused to recognize Japan's conquest, which played a role in shifting U.S. policy to favour China over Japan during the late 1930s. Some historians, such as David Thomson, assert that the League's "inactivity and ineffectualness in the Far East lent every encouragement to European aggressors who planned similar acts of defiance".

The 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement had Britain permit Germany to begin rebuilding the German Navy, including its U-boats, despite Germany having repeatedly violated the Treaty of Versailles.

Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, circa 1942

Earlier, in April 1935, Italy had joined Britain and France in protest against German rearmament. France was anxious to placate Mussolini to keep him away from an alliance with Germany. Britain was less hostile to Germany and set the pace in imposing sanctions and moved a naval fleet into the Mediterranean, but in November 1935, British Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare and French Prime Minister, Pierre Laval had secret discussions in which they agreed to concede two thirds of Abyssinia to Italy. However, the press leaked the content of the discussions, and a public outcry forced Hoare and Laval to resign. In May 1936, undeterred by sanctions, Italy captured Addis Ababa, the Abyssinian capital, and proclaimed Victor Emmanuel III as Emperor of Ethiopia. In July the League abandoned sanctions. The episode, in which sanctions were incomplete and appeared to be easily given up, seriously discredited the League.

UK Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin

Under the Versailles Settlement, the Rhineland was demilitarised. Germany accepted that arrangement under the Locarno Treaties of 1925. Hitler claimed that it threatened Germany and, on 7 March 1936, sent the Wehrmacht into the Rhineland. He gambled on Britain not getting involved but was unsure of how France would react. The action was opposed by many of his advisers. His officers had orders to withdraw if they met French resistance. France consulted Britain and lodged protests with the League but took no action. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin said that Britain lacked the forces to back its guarantees to France and that in any case, public opinion would not allow so. In Britain, it was thought that the Germans were merely walking into "their own backyard". Hugh Dalton, a Labour Party MP who usually advocated stiff resistance to Germany, said that neither the British people nor Labour would support military or economic sanctions. In the Council of the League, only the Soviet Union proposed sanctions against Germany. Hitler, who was invited to negotiate, proposed a non-aggression pact with the Western powers. When asked for details, he did not reply. Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland had persuaded him that the international community would not resist him, and it put Germany in a powerful strategic position.[citation needed ]

Many historians argue that the British policy of non-intervention was a product of the Establishment's anti-communist stance. Scott Ramsay (2019) instead argues that Britain demonstrated " benevolent neutrality" and was simply hedging its bets by avoiding the favouring of one side or the other. The goal was that in a European war Britain would enjoy the "benevolent neutrality" of whichever side won in Spain.

Conduct of appeasement, 1937-1939

Seyss-Inquart and Hitler in Vienna, March 1938

In 1937, Stanley Baldwin resigned as Prime Minister. He was replaced by Neville Chamberlain, who pursued a policy of appeasement and rearmament. Chamberlain's reputation for appeasement rests in large measure on his negotiations with Hitler over Czechoslovakia in 1938.

When the German Empire and Austria-Hungary were broken up in 1918, Austria was left as a rump state with the temporary adopted name Deutschösterreich (" German-Austria"), with the vast majority of Austrians wanting to join Germany. However, the victors' agreements of World War I (the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Saint-Germain) strictly forbade union between Austria and Germany without League consent, as well as the name "German-Austria", which reverted to "Austria" after the emergence of the First Republic of Austria in September 1919. The constitutions of both the Weimar Republic and the First Republic of Austria, included the aim of unification, which was supported by democratic parties. However, the rise of Hitler dampened the enthusiasm of the Austrian government for such a plan. Hitler, an Austrian by birth, had been a pan-German from a very young age and had promoted a Pan-German vision of a Greater Germanic Reich from the beginning of his career in politics. He wrote in (1924) that he would attempt a union of his birth country Austria with Germany by any means possible and by force if necessary. By early 1938, Hitler had consolidated his power in Germany and was ready to implement his long-held plan.

Although the Allies had prohibited the union of Austria and Germany, their reaction to the Anschluss was mild. Even the strongest voices against annexation, particularly those of Fascist Italy, France and Britain (the " Stresa Front"), were not backed by force. In the British House of Commons, Chamberlain said, "The hard fact is that nothing could have arrested what has actually happened [in Austria] unless this country and other countries had been prepared to use force". The American reaction was similar. The international reaction to the events of 12 March 1938 led Hitler to conclude that he could use even more aggressive tactics in his plan to expand the Third Reich.[citation needed ] The Anschluss paved the way for Munich in September 1938 because it indicated the likely non-response of Britain and France to future German aggression.

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.

- Neville Chamberlain, 27 September 1938, 8 p.m. radio broadcast, on Czechoslovak refusal to accept Nazi demands to cede border areas to Germany.

From left to right: Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini and Ciano pictured before they sign the Munich Agreement, which gave the Czechoslovak border areas to Germany.

Under the Versailles Settlement, Czechoslovakia was created with the territory of the Czech part more or less corresponding to the Czech Crown lands as they had existed within Austria-Hungary and earlier. The new country included Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia and had border areas with a majority-German population that was known as the Sudetenland and areas with significant numbers of other ethnic minorities (notably Hungarians, Poles and Ruthenians). In April 1938, the Sudeten German Party, led by Konrad Henlein, agitated for autonomy and then threatened, in Henlein's words, "direct action to bring the Sudeten Germans within the frontiers of the Reich". An international crisis ensued.

France and Britain advised Czechoslovak acceptance of Sudeten autonomy. The Czechoslovak government refused and ordered a partial mobilisation in expectation of German aggression. Lord Runciman was sent by Chamberlain to mediate in Prague and persuaded the Czechoslovak government to grant autonomy. Germany escalated the dispute, with the country's press carrying stories of alleged atrocities against Sudeten Germans, and Hitler ordering 750,000 troops to the Czechoslovak border. In August, Henlein broke off negotiations with the Czechoslovak authorities. At a Nazi party rally in Nuremberg on 12 September, Hitler made a speech attacking Czechoslovakia and there was an increase of violence by Sudeten Nazis against Czechoslovak and Jewish targets.

Chamberlain, faced with the prospect of a German invasion, flew to Berchtesgaden on 15 September to negotiate directly with Hitler, who now demanded that Chamberlain accept not Sudeten self-government within Czechoslovakia but the absorption of the Sudeten lands into Germany. Chamberlain became convinced that refusal would lead to war. The geography of Europe was such that Britain and France could forcibly prevent the German occupation of the Sudetenland only by the invasion of Germany. Chamberlain, therefore, returned to Britain and agreed to Hitler's demands. Britain and France told the Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš to hand over to Germany all territory with a German majority. Hitler increased his aggression against Czechoslovakia and ordered the establishment of a Sudeten German paramilitary organisation, which proceeded to carry out terrorist attacks on Czechoslovak targets.

On 22 September, Chamberlain flew to Bad Godesberg for his second meeting with Hitler and said that he was willing to accept the cession of the Sudetenland to Germany. He was startled by the response of Hitler that the cession of the Sudetenland was not enough and that Czechoslovakia, which Hitler had described as a "fraudulent state", must be broken up completely. Later in the day, Hitler resiled by saying that he was willing to accept the cession of the Sudetenland by 1 October. On 24 September, Germany issued the Godesberg Memorandum, which demanded cession by 28 September or war. The Czechoslovak government rejected those demands, France ordered mobilisation and Britain mobilised the Royal Navy.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, landing at Heston Aerodrome on 30 September 1938 after his meeting with Hitler at Munich. In his hand, he holds the peace agreement between Britain and Germany.

On 26 September, Hitler made a speech at the Sportpalast in Berlin in which he claimed that the Sudetenland was "the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe", and he gave Czechoslovakia an ultimatum of 28 September at 2:00pm to cede the territory to Germany or to face war.

In the atmosphere of growing conflict, Mussolini persuaded Hitler to put the dispute to a four-power conference. On 29 September 1938, Hitler, Chamberlain, French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier and Mussolini met in Munich. Czechoslovakia was not to be a party to these talks, nor was the Soviet Union. The four powers agreed that Germany would complete its occupation of the Sudetenland but that an international commission would consider other disputed areas. Czechoslovakia was told that if it did not submit, it would stand alone. At Chamberlain's request, Hitler readily signed an agreement for between the United Kingdom and Germany. Chamberlain returned to Britain and promised " peace for our time". Before Munich, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had sent a telegram to Chamberlain that said, "Good man" and he later told the American ambassador in Rome, William Phillips, "I am not a bit upset over the final result".

As a result of the annexation of the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia lost 800,000 citizens, much of its industry and its mountain defences in the west. The rest of Czechoslovakia was left weak and powerless to resist subsequent occupation. In the following months, Czechoslovakia was broken up and ceased to exist, as Germany occupied the Sudetenland; Hungary took part of Slovakia, including Carpathian Ruthenia; and Poland annexed Trans-Olza. On 15 March 1939, the German moved into the remainder of Czechoslovakia, and from Prague Castle, Hitler proclaimed Bohemia and Moravia to be the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, completing the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. Slovakia separated and created under a puppet government of Germany.

In March 1939, Chamberlain foresaw a possible disarmament conference between himself, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. British Home Secretary, Samuel Hoare, said, "These five men, working together in Europe and blessed in their efforts by the President of the United States of America, might make themselves eternal benefactors of the human race".

In effect, the British and French had by the Munich negotiations pressured their ally of Czechoslovakia to cede part of its territory to a hostile neighbour in order to preserve peace. Churchill likened the negotiations at Berchtesgarten, Bad Godesberg and Munich to a man demanding £1, then, when it is offered, demanding £2, then when it is refused settling for £1.17s.6d. British leaders committed to the Munich Agreement in spite of their awareness of Hitler's vulnerability at the time. In August 1938, General Ludwig Beck relayed a message to Lord Halifax to explain that most of the German General Staff had prepared a coup against the Fuhrer for if there was "proof that England will fight if Czechoslovakia is attacked". When Chamberlain received the news, he dismissed it out of hand. In September, the British received assurance that the General Staff's offer to launch the coup still stood with key private sector police and army support, even though Beck had resigned his post. Chamberlain ultimately ceded to all of Hitler's demands at Munich because he believed Britain and Nazi Germany were "the two pillars of European peace and buttresses against communism".

Czechoslovakia had a modern well-prepared military, and Hitler, on entering Prague, conceded that a war would have cost Germany much blood but the decision by France and Britain not to defend Czechoslovakia in the event of war and the exclusion from the equation of the Soviet Union, which Chamberlain distrusted, meant that the outcome would have been uncertain. The event forms the main part of what became known as Munich betrayal ( Czech: Mnichovská zrada) in Czechoslovakia and the rest of Eastern Europe, as the Czechoslovak view was that Britain and France had pressured it to cede territory to prevent a major war, which would involve Western Europe. The Western view is that the pressure was done to save Czechoslovakia from total annihilation.

German annexation of Lithuania's Klaipėda Region

Rumours had reached the Lithuanian government to the effect that Germany had specific plans to take over Klaipėda. On 12 March 1939, Foreign Minister Juozas Urbšys represented Lithuania at the coronation of Pope Pius XII in Rome. On Urbšys's return to Lithuania, he stopped in Berlin with the hope of clarifying the growing rumours. On 20 March, just five days after the German occupation of Prague, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop agreed to meet Urbšys but not the Lithuanian Ambassador to Berlin, Kazys Škirpa, who was asked to wait in another room. The conversation lasted for about 40 minutes. Ribbentrop demanded the return of Klaipėda to Germany and threatened military action. Urbšys relayed the verbal ultimatum to the Lithuanian government. Because the ultimatum was never set down in writing and did not include a formal deadline, some historians downplay its importance and describe it as a "set of demands", rather than as an ultimatum. However, it was made clear that force would be used should Lithuania resist, and Lithuania was warned not to seek help from other nations. A clear deadline was not given, but Lithuania was told to make a speedy decision and that any clashes or German casualties would inevitably provoke a response from the German military.

Lithuania secretly informed the signatories of the Klaipėda Convention about those demands since technically, Lithuania could not transfer Klaipėda without the signatories' approvals. Italy and Japan supported Germany in the matter, and the United Kingdom and France expressed sympathy for Lithuania but chose not to offer any material assistance and followed a well-publicized policy of appeasing Hitler. The British treated the issue in the same way as the earlier Sudeten Crisis and made no plans to assist Lithuania or the other Baltic States if they were attacked by Germany. The Soviets supported Lithuania in principle but did not wish to disrupt their relations with Germany since they were contemplating the German-Soviet Pact. Without any material international support, Lithuania had no choice but to accept the ultimatum. Lithuanian diplomacy characterized the concession as a "necessary evil" to enable Lithuania to preserve its independence, and it maintained the hope that it was merely a temporary retreat.

By August 1939, Hitler was convinced that the democratic nations would never put up any effective opposition to him. He expressed his contempt for them in a speech that he delivered to his Commanders in Chief: "Our enemies have leaders who are below the average. No personalities. No masters, no men of action.... Our enemies are small fry. I saw them in Munich".

On 1 September 1939, German forces started their invasion of Poland. Britain and France joined the war against Germany but initially averted serious military involvement during the period known as the Phoney War. After the German invasion of Norway, opinion turned against Chamberlain's conduct of the war. He resigned after the Norway Debate in the British House of Commons, and on 10 May 1940 Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. In July, after the Fall of France, when Britain stood almost alone against Germany, Hitler offered peace. Some politicians both inside and outside the government were willing to consider the offer, but Churchill refused to do so. Chamberlain died on 9 November the same year. Churchill delivered a tribute to him in which he said, "Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged".

As the policy of appeasement failed to prevent war, those who advocated it were quickly criticised. Appeasement came to be seen as something to be avoided by those with responsibility for the diplomacy of Britain or any other democratic country. By contrast, the few who stood out against appeasement were seen as "voices in the wilderness whose wise counsels were largely ignored, with almost catastrophic consequences for the nation in 1939-40". More recently, however, historians have questioned the accuracy of that simple distinction between appeasers and anti-appeasers. "Few appeasers were really prepared to seek peace at any price; few, if any, anti-appeasers were prepared for Britain to make a stand against aggression whatever the circumstances and wherever the location in which it occurred".

Chamberlain's policy in many respects continued the policies of MacDonald and Baldwin and was popular until the failure of the Munich Agreement to stop Hitler in Czechoslovakia. "Appeasement" had been a respectable term between 1919 and 1937 to signify the pursuit of peace. Many believed after the First World War that wars were started by mistake, in which case the League of Nations could prevent them; or that they were caused by large-scale armaments, in which case disarmament was the remedy; or that they were caused by national grievances, in which case the grievances should be redressed peacefully. Many thought that the Versailles Treaty had been unjust, that the German minorities were entitled to self-determination, and that Germany was entitled to equality in armaments.[citation needed ]

Appeasement was accepted by most of those responsible for British foreign policy in the 1930s; by leading journalists and academics; and by members of the British royal family such as King Edward VIII and his successor, George VI. Anti-communism was sometimes acknowledged as a deciding factor, as mass labour unrest resurfaced in Britain, and news of Stalin's bloody purges disturbed the West. A common upper-class slogan was "better Hitlerism than Communism". (In France, right-wingers were sometimes accused of believing "Better Hitler than Blum" in reference to the French Socialist Prime Minister Léon Blum at the time. Anti-communism was a motiv of a close ally of Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, who said after he had visited Göring and met Hitler in Germany in 1936 and 1937: "Nationalism and Racialism is a powerful force but I can't feel that it's either unnatural or immoral! I cannot myself doubt that these fellows are genuine haters of Communism, etc.! And I daresay if we were in their position we might feel the same!"

Most Conservative MPs were also in favour, but Churchill said that their supporters were divided and in 1936 led a delegation of leading Conservative politicians to express to Baldwin their alarm about the speed of German rearmament and the fact that Britain was falling behind. Baldwin rejected their sense of urgency and declared that he would not get Britain to war with anybody "for the League of Nations or anybody else" and that if there were to be any fighting in Europe, "I should like to see the Bolshies and Nazis doing it". Amongst Conservatives, Churchill was unusual in believing that Germany menaced freedom and democracy, that British rearmament should proceed more rapidly and that Germany should be resisted over Czechoslovakia. His criticism of Hitler began from the start of the decade, but Churchill was slow to attack fascism overall because of his own vitriolic opposition to communists, " international Jews" and socialism generally. Churchill's sustained warnings about fascism commenced only in 1938 after Francisco Franco, who was receiving aid from Italy and Germany during the Spanish Civil War, decimated the left in Spain.

The week before Munich, Churchill warned, "The partition of Czechoslovakia under pressure from the UK and France amounts to the complete surrender of the Western Democracies to the Nazi threat of force. Such a collapse will bring peace or security neither to the UK nor to France". He and a few other Conservatives who refused to vote for the Munich settlement were attacked by their local constituency parties. However, Churchill's subsequent leadership of Britain during the war and his role in creating the post-war consensus against appeasement have tended to obscure the fact that "his contemporary criticism of totalitarian regimes other than Hitler's Germany was at best muted". It was not until May 1938 that he began "consistently to withhold his support from the National Government's conduct of foreign policy in the division lobbies of the House of Commons". He seems "to have been convinced by the Sudeten German leader, Henlein, in the spring of 1938, that a satisfactory settlement could be reached if Britain managed to persuade the Czech government to make concessions to the German minority".

In Britain, the Royal Navy generally favoured appeasement although it was during the Abyssinia Crisis of 1937 that it was confident it could easily defeat the Royal Italian Navy in open warfare. However, it favoured appeasement because it did not want to commit a large fraction of its naval power to the Mediterranean Sea, which would weaken its positions against Germany and Japan. In 1938, the Royal Navy approved appeasement regarding Munich because it calculated that Britain then lacked the political and military resources to intervene and to maintain an imperial defence capability simultaneously.

Public opinion in Britain throughout the 1930s was frightened by the prospect of German terror bombing of British cities, which had started during the First World War. The media emphasised the dangers, and the general consensus was that defence was impossible and, as Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had said in 1932, " The bomber will always get through". However, the Royal Air Force had two major weapons systems in the works: better interceptors ( Hurricanes and Spitfires) and especially radar. They promised to counter the German bombing offensive but were not yet ready and so appeasement was necessary to cause a delay. Specifically, regarding the fighters, the RAF warned the government in October 1938 that the German Luftwaffe bombers would probably get through: "the situation... will be definitely unsatisfactory throughout the next twelve months".

In France, the Armée de l'Air intelligence section closely examined the strength of the Luftwaffe and decided the German pursuit planes and bombers were the best in the world and that the Germans were producing 1000 warplanes a month. It perceived decisive German air superiority and so it was pessimistic about its ability to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938. Guy La Chambre, the civilian air minister, optimistically informed the government that the air force could stop the Luftwaffe. However, General Joseph Vuillemin, air force chief of staff, warned that it was far inferior and consistently opposed war against Germany.

The Labour Party opposed the fascist dictators on principle but until the late 1930s also opposed rearmament and had a significant pacifist wing. In 1935, its pacifist leader, George Lansbury, resigned after a party resolution in favour of sanctions against Italy, which he opposed. He was replaced by Clement Attlee, who at first opposed rearmament by advocating the abolition of national armaments and a world peacekeeping force under the direction of the League of Nations. However, with the rising threat from Nazi Germany and the ineffectiveness of the League of Nations, that policy eventually lost credibility, and in 1937, Ernest Bevin and Hugh Dalton persuaded the party to support rearmament and oppose appeasement.

A few on the left said that Chamberlain looked forward to a war between Germany and the Soviet Union. Attlee claimed in one political speech in 1937 that the National Government had connived at German rearmament "because of its hatred of Russia". British communists, following the party line defined by Joseph Stalin, argued that appeasement had been a pro-fascist policy and that the British ruling class preferred fascism to socialism. The Communist MP Willie Gallacher said that "many prominent representatives of the Conservative Party, speaking for powerful landed and financial interests in the country, would welcome Hitler and the German Army if they believed that such was the only alternative to the establishment of Socialism in this country".

British public opinion had been strongly opposed to war and rearmament in the early 1930s, but that began to shift by mid-decade. At a debate at the Oxford Union Society in 1933, a group of undergraduates passed a motion saying that they would not fight for King and country, which persuaded some in Germany that Britain would never go to war. Baldwin told the House of Commons that in 1933, he had been unable to pursue a policy of rearmament because of the strong pacifist sentiment in the country. In 1935, eleven million responded to the League of Nations " Peace Ballot" by pledging support for the reduction of armaments by international agreement. On the other hand, the same survey also found that 58.7% of British voters favoured "collective military sanctions" against aggressors, and public reaction to the Hoare-Laval Pact with Mussolini was extremely unfavorable. Even the left wing of the pacifist movement quickly began to turn with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and many peace-balloters began signing up for the International Brigades to fight Franco. By the height of the Spanish conflict in 1937, the majority of young pacifists had modified their views to accept that war could be a legitimate response to aggression and fascism.

Czechoslovakia did not concern most people until mid-September 1938, when they began to object to a small democratic state being bullied. Nevertheless, the initial response of the British public to the Munich agreement was generally favourable. As Chamberlain left for Munich in 1938, the whole House of Commons cheered him noisily. On 30 September, on his return to Britain, Chamberlain delivered his famous "peace for our time" speech to delighted crowds. He was invited by the royal family onto the balcony at Buckingham Palace before he had reported to Parliament. The agreement was supported by most of the press, with only Reynold's News and the Daily Worker dissenting. In Parliament, the Labour Party opposed the agreement. Some Conservatives abstained in the vote, but the only MP to advocate war was the Conservative Duff Cooper, who had resigned from the government to protest the agreement.

Positive opinion of appeasement was shaped partly by media manipulation. The German correspondent for the Times of London, Norman Ebbutt, charged that his persistent reports about Nazi militarism had been suppressed by his editor, Geoffrey Dawson. Historians such as Richard Cockett, William Shirer and Frank McDonough have confirmed the claim and have also noted the links between The Observer The results of an October 1938 Gallup poll, which showed 86% of the public believed Hitler was lying about his future territorial ambitions, was censored from the News Chronicle at the last minute by the publisher, who was loyal to Chamberlain. For the few journalists who were asking challenging questions about appeasement, primarily members of the foreign press, Chamberlain often froze them out or intimidated them. When asked at press conferences about Hitler's abuse of Jews and other minority groups, he went so far as to denounce these reports as "Jewish-Communist propaganda".

Chamberlain's direct manipulation of the BBC was sustained and egregious. For example, Lord Halifax told radio producers not to offend Hitler and Mussolini, and they complied by censoring anti-fascist commentary made by Labour and Popular Front MPs. The BBC also suppressed the fact that 15,000 people protested the prime minister in Trafalgar Square as he returned from Munich in 1938 (10,000 more than welcomed him at 10 Downing Street). The BBC radio producers continued to censor news of persecution of Jews even after the war broken out, as Chamberlain still held out hopes of a quick armistice and did not want to inflame the atmosphere. As Richard Cockett noted:

[Chamberlain] had successfully demonstrated how a government in a democracy could influence and control the press to a remarkable degree. The danger in this for Chamberlain was that he preferred to forget that he exercised such influence, and so increasingly mistook his pliant press for real public opinion... the truth of the matter was that by controlling the press he was merely ensuring that the press was unable to reflect public opinion.

The journalist Shiela Grant Duff's Penguin Special, Europe and the Czechs, was published and distributed to every MP on the day that Chamberlain returned from Munich. Her book was a spirited defence of the Czech nation and a detailed criticism of British policy and confronted the need for war if necessary. It was influential and widely read. Although she argued against the policy of "peace at almost any price", she did not take a personal tone, unlike two years later.

Once Germany invaded Poland and so ignited World War II, consensus was that appeasement was responsible. The Labour MP Hugh Dalton identified the policy with wealthy people in the City of London, Conservatives and members of the peerage who were soft on Hitler. The appointment of Churchill as Prime Minister after the Norway Debate hardened opinion against appeasement and encouraged the search for those responsible. Three British journalists, Michael Foot, Frank Owen and Peter Howard, writing under the name of "Cato" in their book , called for the removal from office of 15 public figures they held accountable, including Chamberlain. The book defined appeasement as the "deliberate surrender of small nations in the face of Hitler's blatant bullying". It was hastily written and has few claims to historical scholarship, but Guilty Men shaped subsequent thinking about appeasement, and it is said that it contributed to the defeat of the Conservatives in the 1945 general election.

The change in the meaning of "appeasement" after Munich was summarised later by the historian David Dilks: "The word in its normal meaning connotes the pacific settlement of disputes; in the meaning usually applied to the period of Neville Chamberlain['s] premiership, it has come to indicate something sinister, the granting from fear or cowardice of unwarranted concessions in order to buy temporary peace at someone else's expense."

Churchill's book The Gathering Storm, published in 1948, made a similar judgment to Guilty Men though in moderate tones. The book and Churchill's authority confirmed the orthodox view.[citation needed ]

Historians have subsequently explained Chamberlain's policies in various ways. It could be said that he believed sincerely that the objectives of Hitler and Mussolini were limited, and that the settlement of their grievances would protect the world from war since for safety, military and air power should be strengthened.

One of the first dissents to the prevailing criticism of appeasement was made by John F. Kennedy in his 1940 Harvard College thesis, Why England Slept, in which he argued that appeasement had been necessary because the United Kingdom and France were unprepared for a world war.

In 1961, the view of appeasement as avoidable error and cowardice was similarly set on its head by A.J.P. Taylor in his book The Origins of the Second World War. Taylor argued that Hitler did not have a blueprint for war and behaved much as any other German leader might have. Appeasement was an active policy, not a passive one, and allowing Hitler to consolidate was a policy implemented by "men confronted with real problems, doing their best in the circumstances of their time". Taylor said that appeasement ought to be seen as a rational response to an unpredictable leader that was both diplomatically and politically appropriate to the time.

His view has been shared by other historians. For example, Paul Kennedy, who says of the choices facing politicians at the time, "Each course brought its share of disadvantages: there was only a choice of evils. The crisis in the British global position by this time was such that it was, in the last resort, insoluble, in the sense that there was no good or proper solution". Martin Gilbert expressed a similar view: "At bottom, the old appeasement was a mood of hope, Victorian in its optimism, Burkean in its belief that societies evolved from bad to good and that progress could only be for the better. The new appeasement was a mood of fear, Hobbesian in its insistence upon swallowing the bad in order to preserve some remnant of the good, pessimistic in its belief that Nazism was there to stay and, however horrible it might be, should be accepted as a way of life with which Britain ought to deal".

The arguments in Taylor's Origins of the Second World War, which have sometimes been described as " revisionist", were rejected by many historians at the time, and reviews of his book in Britain and the United States were generally critical. Nevertheless, he was praised for some of his insights. By showing that appeasement was a popular policy and that there was a continuity in British foreign policy after 1933, he shattered the common view of the appeasers as a small degenerate clique that had mysteriously hijacked the British government sometime in the 1930s that had carried out their policies in the face of massive public resistance. Also, by portraying the leaders of the 1930s as real people attempting to deal with real problems, he made the first strides towards explaining the actions of the appeasers, rather than merely condemning them.

In the early 1990s a new theory of appeasement, sometimes called "counter-revisionist", emerged as historians argued that appeasement was probably the only choice for the British government in the 1930s but that it was poorly implemented, carried out too late and not enforced strongly enough to constrain Hitler. Appeasement was considered a viable policy because of the strains that the British Empire faced in recuperating from World War I, and Chamberlain was said to have adopted a policy suitable to Britain's cultural and political needs. Frank McDonough is a leading proponent of that view of appeasement, which was described his book Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War as a "post revisionist" study. Appeasement was a crisis management strategy seeking a peaceful settlement of Hitler's grievances. "Chamberlain's worst error", says McDonough, "was to believe that he could march Hitler on the yellow brick road to peace when in reality Hitler was marching very firmly on the road to war". He criticised revisionist historians for concentrating on Chamberlain's motivations, rather than how appeasement worked in practice, as a "usable policy" to deal with Hitler. James P. Levy argues against the outright condemnation of appeasement. "Knowing what Hitler did later", he writes, "the critics of Appeasement condemn the men who tried to keep the peace in the 1930s, men who could not know what would come later.... The political leaders responsible for Appeasement made many errors. They were not blameless. But what they attempted was logical, rational, and humane".

The view of Chamberlain colluding with Hitler to attack the Soviet Union has persisted, however, particularly on the far left. In 1999, Christopher Hitchens wrote that Chamberlain "had made a cold calculation that Hitler should be re-armed... partly to encourage his 'tough-minded' solution to the Bolshevik problem in the East". Consciously encouraging war with Stalin is not widely accepted to be a motive of the Downing Street appeasers, but there is a historical consensus that anti-communism was central to appeasement's appeal for the conservative elite. As Antony Beevor writes, "The policy of appeasement was not Neville Chamberlin's invention. Its roots lay in a fear of bolshevism. The general strike of 1926 and the depression made the possibility of revolution a very real concern to conservative politicians. As a result, they had mixed feelings towards the German and Italian regimes which had crushed the communists and socialists in their own countries".

Statesmen in the postwar years have often referred to their opposition to appeasement as a justification for firm, sometimes armed, action in international relations.

After the Viet Minh won the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in a letter to British Prime Minister Churchill, "We failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?" Similarly, President Lyndon Johnson said to defend the Vietnam War, "Everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I'd be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II. I'd be giving a big fat reward to aggression".

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay and various hawks within the Kennedy administration for an air strike on Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba compared Kennedy's hesitance to do so to appeasement. That was partially a jab at Kennedy's father Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who had supported appeasement while he was U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom and later supported a negotiated surrender to Germany during the May 1940 War Cabinet Crisis and the Battle of Britain.

During the Cold War, the "lessons" of appeasement were cited by prominent conservative allies of Reagan, who urged him to be assertive in " rolling back" Soviet-backed regimes throughout the world. The Heritage Foundation's Michael Johns, for instance, wrote in 1987 that "seven years after Ronald Reagan's arrival in Washington, the United States government and its allies are still dominated by the culture of appeasement that drove Neville Chamberlain to Munich in 1938." Some conservatives even compared Reagan to Chamberlain after his withdrawal of the Multinational Force in Lebanon because of the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher invoked the example of Churchill during the Falklands War of 1982: "When the American Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, urged her to reach a compromise with the Argentines she rapped sharply on the table and told him, pointedly, 'that this was the table at which Neville Chamberlain sat in 1938 and spoke of the Czechs as a faraway people about whom we know so little'". Thatcher, along with U.S. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, made similar arguments after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the planning for the Gulf War. The spectre of appeasement was raised in discussions of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair also cited Churchill's warnings about German rearmament to justify their action in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War.

In 2013, Obama administration officials such as Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel claimed that a failure of the United States to intervene in the Syrian Civil War after the Ghouta chemical attack would be an act of appeasement towards Bashar al-Assad.

In May 2008, U.S. President George W. Bush cautioned against "the false comfort of appeasement" when dealing with Iran and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Opponents of President Barack Obama later criticized the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action as an act of appeasement with Iran. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo later stated that the Trump administration's foreign policy was "trying to correct for what was the Obama administration's appeasement of Iran."

The Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali demands a confrontational policy at the European level to meet the threat of radical Islam and compares policies of non-confrontation to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler.

Tibetan separatists consider the policy of the West towards the People's Republic of China with regard to Tibet as appeasement.

The minimal international reactions to the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in violation of international law is seen by some as the cause that encouraged Russian president Vladimir Putin to conduct a full-scale invasion of the rest of Ukraine in 2022.

Some commentators have suggested that some NATO countries are following the policy of appeasement towards Vladimir Putin's Russia by rejecting the support of Ukrainian democracy through military operations during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Grant Duff, Sheila (1938). Europe and the Czechs. London: Penguin.

Adams, R.J.Q., British Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of Appeasement, 1935-1939 (1993)

Alexandroff A. and Rosecrance R., "Deterrence in 1939," World Politics 29#3 (1977), pp. 404-24.

Beck R.J., "Munich's Lessons Reconsidered" in International Security, 14, 1989

Bouverie, Tim. Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War (2019) online review

Cameron Watt, Donald. How War Came: Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938-39 (1990)

Doer P.W., British Foreign Policy 1919-39 (1988)

Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste. France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939 (2004); translation of his highly influential La décadence, 1932-1939 (1979)

Dutton D., Neville Chamberlain

Faber, David. Munich, 1938: Appeasement and World War II (2009) excerpt and text search

Farmer Alan. British Foreign and Imperial Affairs 1919-39 (2000), textbook

Feiling, Keith. The Life of Neville Chamberlain (1947) online

Gilbert, Martin, Winston Churchill, The Wilderness Years. (Macmillan, 1981).

Goddard, Stacie E. "The rhetoric of appeasement: Hitler's legitimation and British foreign policy, 1938-39." Security Studies 24.1 (2015): 95-130.

Hill C., Cabinet Decisions on Foreign Policy: The British Experience, October 1938 - June 1941, (1991).

Hucker, Daniel. Public Opinion and the End of Appeasement in Britain and France. (Routledge, 2016).

Jenkins Roy, Baldwin New York: HarperCollins (1987)

Johns, Michael, "Peace in Our Time: The Spirit of Munich Lives On", Policy Review magazine, Summer 1987

Levy J., Appeasement and Rearmament: Britain, 1936-1939, 2006

McDonough, F., Neville Chamberlain, appeasement, and the British road to war (Manchester UP, 1998)

Mommsen W.J. and Kettenacker L. (eds), The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1983 ISBN 0-04-940068-1.

Murray, Williamson. "Munich, 1938: The military confrontation." Journal of Strategic Studies (1979) 2#3 pp. 282-302.

Neville P., Hitler and Appeasement: The British Attempt to Prevent the Second World War, 2005

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Proponents and Critics of Appeasement

Parker, R.A.C. Chamberlain and appeasement: British policy and the coming of the Second World War (Macmillan, 1993)

Peden G. C., "A Matter of Timing: The Economic Background to British Foreign Policy, 1937-1939," History, 69, 1984

Post G., Dilemmas of Appeasement: British Deterrence and Defense, 1934-1937, Cornell UP, 1993.

Ramsay, Scott. "Ensuring Benevolent Neutrality: The British Government's Appeasement of General Franco during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939". International History Review 41:3 (2019): 604-623. DOI: Ensuring Benevolent Neutrality: The British Government's Appeasement of General Franco during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. online review in H-DIPLO

Record, Jeffrey. Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (Naval Institute Press, 2002).

Riggs, Bruce Timothy. "Geoffrey Dawson, editor of "The Times" (London), and his contribution to the appeasement movement" (PhD dissertation, U of North Texas, 1993) online, bibliography pp. 229-33.

Roberts, Andrew. 'The Holy Fox': A Biography of Lord Halifax (1991) online

Rock S.R., Appeasement in International Politics, 2000

Rock W.R., British Appeasement in the 1930s

Shay R.P., British Rearmament in the Thirties: Politics and Profits, Princeton University Press, 1977.

Sontag, Raymond J. "Appeasement, 1937" Catholic Historical Review 38#4 (1953), pp. 385-396 online

Stedman, A. D. (2007). 'Then what could Chamberlain do, other than what Chamberlain did'? A Synthesis and Analysis of the Alternatives to Chamberlain's Policy of Appeasing Germany, 1936-1939 (PhD). Kingston University. OCLC 500402799. Docket uk.bl.ethos.440347.

Wheeler-Bennett J., Munich: Prologue to Tragedy, New York, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948

Barros, Andrew, Talbot C. Imlay, Evan Resnick, Norrin M. Ripsman, and Jack S. Levy. "Debating British Decision-making toward Nazi Germany in the 1930s." International Security 34#1 (2009): 173-98. online.

Cole, Robert A. "Appeasing Hitler: The Munich Crisis of 1938: A Teaching and Learning Resource," New England Journal of History (2010) 66#2 pp. 1-30.

Dimuccio, Ralph BA. "The study of appeasement in international relations: Polemics, paradigms, and problems." Journal of peace research 35.2 (1998): 245-259.

Finney, Patrick. "The romance of decline: The historiography of appeasement and British national identity." Electronic Journal of International History 1 (2000). online; comprehensive evaluation of the scholarship

Hughes, R. Gerald. "The Ghosts of Appeasement: Britain and the Legacy of the Munich Agreement." Journal of Contemporary History (2013) 48#4 pp. 688-716.

Record, Jeffrey. "Appeasement Reconsidered - Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s" (Strategic Studies Institute, 2005) online

Roi, Michael. "Introduction: Appeasement: Rethinking the Policy and the Policy-Makers." Diplomacy and Statecraft 19.3 (2008): 383-390.

Strang, G. Bruce. "The spirit of Ulysses? Ideology and british appeasement in the 1930s." Diplomacy and Statecraft 19.3 (2008): 481-526.

Van Tol, David. "History extension 2019: Constructing history case study: Appeasement." Teaching History 51.3 (2017): 35+.

Walker, Stephen G. "Solving the Appeasement Puzzle: Contending Historical Interpretations of British Diplomacy during the 1930s." British Journal of International Studies 6#3 (1980): 219-46. online.

Watt, D. C. "The Historiography of Appeasement", in Crisis and Controversy: Essays in Honour of A. J. P. Taylor, ed. A. Sked and C. Cook (London, 1976)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Appeasement, in an international context, is a diplomatic policy of making political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power to avoid conflict. The term is most often applied to the foreign policy of the British governments of Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald (in office 1929-1935), Stanley Baldwin (in office 1935-1937) and (most notably) Neville Chamberlain (in office 1937-1940) towards Nazi Germany (from 1933) and Fascist Italy (from 1922) between 1935 and 1939.

# data[].attributes.body
Belief in strong military

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Areas of Africa controlled by European colonial powers in 1913: Belgian (yellow), British (red), French (blue), German (teal), Italian (lime green), Portuguese (purple), and Spanish (pink) empires.

The Scramble for Africa, as used by historians, describes the invasion, annexation, division, and colonization of most of Africa by seven Western European powers during an era known as " New Imperialism" (between 1833 and 1914). The 10 percent of Africa that was under formal European control in 1870 increased to almost 90 percent by 1914, with only Liberia and Ethiopia remaining independent.

The Berlin Conference of 1884, which regulated European colonization and trade in Africa, is usually accepted as the beginning. In the last quarter of the 19th century, there were considerable political rivalries between the European empires, which provided the impetus for the Scramble. The later years of the 19th century saw a transition from " informal imperialism" - military influence and economic dominance - to direct rule.

Most of Africa was decolonised during the Cold War period. However, the old imperial boundaries and economic systems imposed by the Scramble still affect the politics and economy of African nations to today.

By 1841, businessmen from Europe had established small trading posts along the coasts of Africa, but they seldom moved inland, preferring to stay near the sea. They primarily traded with locals. Large parts of the continent were essentially uninhabitable for Europeans because of their high mortality rates from tropical diseases such as malaria. In the middle of the 19th century, European explorers mapped much of East Africa and Central Africa.

As late as the 1870s, Europeans controlled approximately 10% of the African continent, with all their territories located near the coasts. The most important holdings were Angola and Mozambique, held by Portugal; the Cape Colony, held by Great Britain; and Algeria, held by France. By 1914, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent of European control, with the former eventually being occupied by Italy in 1936 and the latter having strong connections to the United States.

Technological advances facilitated European expansion overseas. Industrialization brought about rapid advancements in transportation and communication, especially in the forms of steamships, railways and telegraphs. Medical advances also played an important role, especially medicines for tropical diseases, which helped control their adverse effects. The development of quinine, an effective treatment for malaria, made vast expanses of the tropics more accessible for Europeans.

Map of African civilizations and kingdoms prior to European colonialism (spanning roughly 500 BCE to 1500 CE)

Comparison of Africa in the years 1880 and 1913

Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the last regions of the world largely untouched by "informal imperialism", was attractive to business entrepreneurs. During a time when Britain's balance of trade showed a growing deficit, with shrinking and increasingly protectionist continental markets during the Long Depression (1873-1896), Africa offered Britain, Germany, France, and other countries an open market that would garner them a trade surplus: a market that bought more from the colonial power than it sold overall.

Surplus capital was often more profitably invested overseas, where cheap materials, limited competition, and abundant raw materials made a greater premium possible. Another inducement for imperialism arose from the demand for raw materials, especially ivory, rubber, palm oil, cocoa, diamonds, tea, and tin. Additionally, Britain wanted control of areas of southern and eastern coasts of Africa for stopover ports on the route to Asia and its empire in India. But, excluding the area which became the Union of South Africa in 1910, European nations invested relatively limited amounts of capital in Africa .

Pro-imperialist colonial lobbyists such as the Alldeutscher Verband, Francesco Crispi and Jules Ferry, argued that sheltered overseas markets in Africa would solve the problems of low prices and overproduction caused by shrinking continental markets. John A. Hobson argued in Imperialism that this shrinking of continental markets was a key factor of the global "New Imperialism" period. William Easterly, however, disagrees with the link made between capitalism and imperialism, arguing that colonialism is used mostly to promote state-led development rather than corporate development. He has said that "imperialism is not so clearly linked to capitalism and the free markets... historically there has been a closer link between colonialism/imperialism and state-led approaches to development."

While tropical Africa was not a large zone of investment, other overseas regions were. The vast interior between Egypt and the gold and diamond-rich Southern Africa had strategic value in securing the flow of overseas trade. Britain was under political pressure to build up lucrative markets in India, Malaya, Australia and New Zealand. Thus, it wanted to secure the key waterway between East and West - the Suez Canal, completed in 1869. However, a theory that Britain sought to annex East Africa during the 1880 onwards, out of geo-strategic concerns connected to Egypt (especially the Suez Canal), has been challenged by historians such as John Darwin (1997) and Jonas F. Gjersø (2015).

The scramble for African territory also reflected concern for the acquisition of military and naval bases, for strategic purposes and the exercise of power. The growing navies, and new ships driven by steam power, required coaling stations and ports for maintenance. Defence bases were also needed for the protection of sea routes and communication lines, particularly of expensive and vital international waterways such as the Suez Canal.

Colonies were seen as assets in balance of power negotiations, useful as items of exchange at times of international bargaining. Colonies with large native populations were also a source of military power; Britain and France used large numbers of British Indian and North African soldiers, respectively, in many of their colonial wars (and would do so again in the coming World Wars). In the age of nationalism there was pressure for a nation to acquire an empire as a status symbol; the idea of "greatness" became linked with the " White Man's Burden", or sense of duty, underlying many nations' strategies.

In the early 1880s, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza was exploring the region along the Kongo river for France, at the same time Henry Morton Stanley explored it on behalf of the Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo, backed by Leopold II of Belgium, who would have it as his personal Congo Free State. Leopold had earlier hoped to recruit Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, but turned to Henry Morton Stanley when the latter was recruited by the French government. France occupied Tunisia in May 1881, which may have convinced Italy to join the German-Austrian Dual Alliance in 1882, thus forming the Triple Alliance. The same year, Britain occupied Egypt (hitherto an autonomous state owing nominal fealty to the Ottoman Empire), which ruled over Sudan and parts of Chad, Eritrea, and Somalia. In 1884, Germany declared Togoland, the Cameroons and South West Africa to be under its protection; and France occupied Guinea. French West Africa was founded in 1895 and French Equatorial Africa in 1910. In French Somaliland, a short-lived Russian colony in the Egyptian fort of Sagallo was briefly proclaimed by Terek Cossacks in 1889.

Germany, divided into small states, was not initially a colonial power. In 1862, Otto von Bismarck became Minister-President of the Kingdom of Prussia, and through a series of wars with both Austria in 1866 and France in 1870 was able to unify all of Germany under Prussian rule. The German Empire was formally proclaimed on 18 January 1871. At first, Bismarck disliked colonies but gave in to popular and elite pressure in the 1880s. He sponsored the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, which set the rules of effective control of African territories, and reduced the risk of conflict between colonial powers. Bismarck used private companies to set up small colonial operations in Africa and the Pacific.

Pan-Germanism became linked to the young nation's new imperialist drives. In the beginning of the 1880s, the Deutscher Kolonialverein was created, and published the Kolonialzeitung. This colonial lobby was also relayed by the nationalist Alldeutscher Verband. Weltpolitik (world policy) was the foreign policy adopted by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1890, with the aim of transforming Germany into a global power through aggressive diplomacy, and the development of a large navy. Germany became the third-largest colonial power in Africa, the location of most of its 2.6 million square kilometres of colonial territory and 14 million colonial subjects in 1914. The African possessions were Southwest Africa, Togoland, the Cameroons, and Tanganyika. Germany tried to isolate France in 1905 with the First Moroccan Crisis. This led to the 1905 Algeciras Conference, in which France's influence on Morocco was compensated by the exchange of other territories, and then to the Agadir Crisis in 1911.

After fighting alongside France during the Crimean War (1853-56), the Kingdom of Sardinia sought to unify the Italian peninsula, with French support. Following a war with Austria in 1859, Sardinia, under the leadership of Giuseppe Garibaldi, was able to unify most of the peninsula by 1861, establishing the Kingdom of Italy. Following unification, Italy sought to expand its territory and become a great power, taking possession of parts of Eritrea in 1870 and 1882. In 1889-90, it occupied territory on the south side of the horn of Africa, forming what would become Italian Somaliland. In the disorder that followed the 1889 death of Emperor Yohannes IV, General  Oreste Baratieri occupied the Ethiopian Highlands along the Eritrean coast, and Italy proclaimed the establishment of a new colony of Eritrea, with its capital moved from Massawa to Asmara. When relations between Italy and Ethiopia deteriorated, the First Italo-Ethiopian War broke out in 1895; Italian troops were defeated as the Ethiopians had numerical superiority, better organization, and support from Russia and France. In 1911, Italy engaged in a war with the Ottoman Empire, in which it acquired Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, that together formed what became known as Italian Libya. In 1919 Enrico Corradini developed the concept of Proletarian Nationalism, which was supposed to legitimise Italy's imperialism by a mixture of socialism with nationalism:

We must start by recognizing the fact that there are proletarian nations as well as proletarian classes; that is to say, there are nations whose living conditions are subject...to the way of life of other nations, just as classes are. Once this is realised, nationalism must insist firmly on this truth: Italy is, materially and morally, a proletarian nation.

The Second Italo-Abyssinian War (1935-36), ordered by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, was the last colonial war (that is, intended to colonise a country, as opposed to wars of national liberation), occupying Ethiopia-which had remained the last independent African territory, apart from Liberia. Italian Ethiopia was occupied by fascist Italian forces in World War II as part of Italian East Africa though much of the mountainous countryside had remained out of Italian control due to resistance from the Arbegnoch. The occupation is an example of the expansionist policy that characterized the Axis powers as opposed to the Scramble for Africa.

David Livingstone's explorations, carried on by Henry Morton Stanley, excited imaginations with Stanley's grandiose ideas for colonisation; but these found little support owing to the problems and scale of action required, except from Leopold II of Belgium, who in 1876 had organised the International African Association. From 1869 to 1874, Stanley was secretly sent by Leopold II to the Congo region, where he made treaties with several African chiefs along the Congo River and by 1882 had sufficient territory to form the basis of the Congo Free State.

While Stanley was exploring the Congo on behalf of Leopold II of Belgium, the Franco-Italian marine officer Pierre de Brazza travelled into the western Congo Basin and raised the French flag over the newly founded Brazzaville in 1881, thus occupying today's Republic of the Congo. Portugal, which also claimed the area because of old treaties with the Kingdom of Kongo, made a treaty with Britain on 26 February 1884 to block off Leopold's access to the Atlantic.

By 1890 the Congo Free State had consolidated control of its territory between Leopoldville and Stanleyville and was looking to push south down the Lualaba River from Stanleyville. At the same time, the British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes was expanding north from the Limpopo River, sending the Pioneer Column (guided by Frederick Selous) through Matabeleland, and starting a colony in Mashonaland.

Tippu Tip, a Zanzibari Arab based in the Sultanate of Zanzibar, also played a major role as a "protector of European explorers", ivory trader and slave trader. Having established a trading empire within Zanzibar and neighboring areas in East Africa, Tippu Tip would shift his alignment towards the rising colonial powers in the region and at the proposal of Henry Morton Stanley, Tippu Tip became a governor of the " Stanley Falls District" ( Boyoma Falls) in Leopold's Congo Free State, before being involved in the Congo-Arab War against Leopold II's colonial state.

To the west, in the land where their expansions would meet, was Katanga, site of the Yeke Kingdom of Msiri. Msiri was the most militarily powerful ruler in the area and traded large quantities of copper, ivory and slaves-and rumors of gold reached European ears. The scramble for Katanga was a prime example of the period. Rhodes sent two expeditions to Msiri in 1890 led by Alfred Sharpe, who was rebuffed, and Joseph Thomson, who failed to reach Katanga. Leopold sent four expeditions. First, the Le Marinel expedition could only extract a vaguely worded letter. The Delcommune expedition was rebuffed. The well-armed Stairs expedition was given orders to take Katanga with or without Msiri's consent. Msiri refused, was shot, and his head was cut off and stuck on a pole as a "barbaric lesson" to the people. The Bia River expedition finished the job of establishing an administration of sorts and a "police presence" in Katanga. Thus, the half million square kilometres of Katanga came into Leopold's possession and brought his African realm up to 2,300,000 square kilometres (890,000 sq mi), about 75 times larger than Belgium. The Congo Free State imposed such a terror regime on the colonized people, including mass killings and forced labour, that Belgium, under pressure from the Congo Reform Association, ended Leopold II's rule and annexed it on 20 August 1908 as a colony of Belgium, known as the Belgian Congo.

The brutality of King Leopold II in his former colony of the Congo Free State was well documented; up to 8 million of the estimated 16 million native inhabitants died between 1885 and 1908. According to Roger Casement, an Irish diplomat of the time, this depopulation had four main causes: "indiscriminate war", starvation, reduction of births and diseases. Sleeping sickness ravaged the country and must also be taken into account for the dramatic decrease in population; it has been estimated that sleeping sickness and smallpox killed nearly half the population in the areas surrounding the lower Congo River. Estimates of the death toll vary considerably. As the first census did not take place until 1924, it is difficult to quantify the population loss of the period. The Casement Report set it at three million. William Rubinstein writes: "More basically, it appears almost certain that the population figures given by Hochschild are inaccurate. There is, of course, no way of ascertaining the population of the Congo before the twentieth century, and estimates like 20 million are purely guesses. Most of the interior of the Congo was literally unexplored if not inaccessible."

A similar situation occurred in the neighbouring French Congo, where most of the resource extraction was run by concession companies, whose brutal methods, along with the introduction of disease, resulted in the loss of up to 50% of the indigenous population according to Hochschild. The French government appointed a commission headed by de Brazza in 1905 to investigate the rumoured abuses in the colony. However, de Brazza died on the return trip, and his "searingly critical" report was neither acted upon nor released to the public. In the 1920s, about 20,000 forced labourers died building a railroad through the French territory.

In order to construct the Suez Canal, French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps had obtained many concessions from Isma'il Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt and Sudan in 1854-56. Some sources estimate the workforce at 30,000, but others estimate that 120,000 workers died over the ten years of construction from malnutrition, fatigue, and disease, especially cholera. Shortly before its completion in 1869, Khedive Isma'il borrowed enormous sums from British and French bankers at high rates of interest. By 1875, he was facing financial difficulties and was forced to sell his block of shares in the Suez Canal. The shares were snapped up by Britain, under Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who sought to give his country practical control in the management of this strategic waterway. When Isma'il repudiated Egypt's foreign debt in 1879, Britain and France seized joint financial control over the country, forcing the Egyptian ruler to abdicate and installing his eldest son Tewfik Pasha in his place. The Egyptian and Sudanese ruling classes did not relish foreign intervention.

Mahdist War

During the 1870s, European initiatives against the slave trade caused an economic crisis in northern Sudan, precipitating the rise of Mahdist forces. In 1881, the Mahdist revolt erupted in Sudan under Muhammad Ahmad, severing Tewfik's authority in Sudan. The same year, Tewfik suffered an even more perilous rebellion by his own Egyptian army in the form of the Urabi revolt. In 1882, Tewfik appealed for direct British military assistance, commencing Britain's administration of Egypt. A joint British-Egyptian military force entered in the Mahdist War. Additionally the Egyptian province of Equatoria (located in South Sudan) led by Emin Pasha was also subject to an ostensible relief expedition of Emin Pasha against Mahdist forces. The British-Egyptian force ultimately defeated the Mahdist forces in Sudan in 1898. Thereafter, Britain seized effective control of Sudan, which was nominally called Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

Otto von Bismarck at the Berlin Conference, 1884

The occupation of Egypt and the acquisition of the Congo were the first major moves in what came to be a precipitous scramble for African territory. In 1884, Otto von Bismarck convened the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference to discuss the African problem. While diplomatic discussions were held regarding ending the remaining slave trade as well as the reach of missionary activities, the primary concern of those in attendance was preventing war between the European powers as they divided the continent among themselves. More importantly, the diplomats in Berlin laid down the rules of competition by which the great powers were to be guided in seeking colonies. They also agreed that the area along the Congo River was to be administered by Leopold II as a neutral area in which trade and navigation were to be free. No nation was to stake claims in Africa without notifying other powers of its intentions. No territory could be formally claimed prior to being effectively occupied. However, the competitors ignored the rules when convenient, and on several occasions war was only narrowly avoided (see Fashoda Incident).[citation needed ] The Swahili coast territories of the Sultanate of Zanzibar were partitioned between Germany and Britain, initially leaving the archipelago of Zanzibar independent until 1890, when that remnant of the Sultanate was made into a British protectorate with the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty.

Britain's administration of Egypt and the Cape Colony contributed to a preoccupation over securing the source of the Nile River. Egypt was taken over by the British in 1882, leaving the Ottoman Empire in a nominal role until 1914, when London made it a protectorate. Egypt was never an actual British colony. Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda were subjugated in the 1890s and early 20th century; and in the south, the Cape Colony (first acquired in 1795) provided a base for the subjugation of neighbouring African states and the Dutch Afrikaner settlers who had left the Cape to avoid the British and then founded their own republics. Theophilus Shepstone annexed the South African Republic in 1877 for the British Empire, after it had been independent for twenty years. In 1879, after the Anglo-Zulu War, Britain consolidated its control of most of the territories of South Africa. The Boers protested, and in December 1880 they revolted, leading to the First Boer War. British Prime Minister William Gladstone signed a peace treaty on 23 March 1881, giving self-government to the Boers in the Transvaal. The Jameson Raid of 1895 was a failed attempt by the British South Africa Company and the Johannesburg Reform Committee to overthrow the Boer government in the Transvaal. The Second Boer War, fought between 1899 and 1902, was about control of the gold and diamond industries; the independent Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the South African Republic were this time defeated and absorbed into the British Empire.

The French thrust into the African interior was mainly from the coasts of West Africa (present-day Senegal) eastward, through the Sahel along the southern border of the Sahara. Their ultimate aim was to have an uninterrupted colonial empire from the Niger River to the Nile, thus controlling all trade to and from the Sahel region by virtue of their existing control over the caravan routes through the Sahara. The British, on the other hand, wanted to link their possessions in Southern Africa with their territories in East Africa and these two areas with the Nile basin.

The Sudan (which included most of present-day Uganda) was the key to the fulfillment of these ambitions, especially since Egypt was already under British control. This "red line" through Africa is made most famous by Cecil Rhodes. Along with Lord Milner, the British colonial minister in South Africa, Rhodes advocated such a "Cape to Cairo" empire, linking the Suez Canal to the mineral-rich South Africa by rail. Though hampered by German occupation of Tanganyika until the end of World War I, Rhodes successfully lobbied on behalf of such a sprawling African empire.

Britain had sought to extend its East African empire contiguously from Cairo to the Cape of Good Hope, while France had sought to extend its own holdings from Dakar to the Sudan, which would enable its empire to span the entire continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. If one draws a line from Cape Town to Cairo (Rhodes's dream), and one from Dakar to the Horn of Africa (the French ambition), these two lines intersect somewhere in eastern Sudan near Fashoda, explaining its strategic importance.

A French force under Jean-Baptiste Marchand arrived first at the strategically located fort at Fashoda, soon followed by a British force under Lord Kitchener, commander in chief of the British Army since 1892. The French withdrew after a standoff and continued to press claims to other posts in the region. The Fashoda Incident ultimately led to the signature of the Entente Cordiale of 1904, which guaranteed peace between the two.

In 1890, both the United Kingdom and France were able to reach a diplomatic solution over a colonial dispute that would guarantee freedom of trade for the British Empire while allowing France to expand their influence in North Africa. In exchange for France recognizing Britain's protectorate over Zanzibar, the British Empire recognized France's claim to Madagascar as well as their sphere of influence in North Africa stretching down to the border region of Sokoto. However, finely demarcating this border was difficult to do without a large map.

Although the Berlin Conference had set the rules for the Scramble for Africa, it had not weakened the rival imperialists. As a result of the Entente Cordiale, the German Kaiser decided to test the solidity of such influence, using the contested territory of Morocco as a battlefield. Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Tangier on 31 March 1905 and made a speech in favour of Moroccan independence, challenging French influence in Morocco. France's presence had been reaffirmed by Britain and Spain in 1904. The Kaiser's speech bolstered French nationalism, and with British support the French foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, took a defiant line. The crisis peaked in mid-June 1905, when Delcassé was forced out of the ministry by the more conciliation-minded premier Maurice Rouvier. But by July 1905 Germany was becoming isolated, and the French agreed to a conference to solve the crisis.

The 1906 Algeciras Conference was called to settle the dispute. Of the thirteen nations present, the German representatives found their only supporter was Austria-Hungary, which had no interest in Africa. France had firm support from Britain, the U.S., Russia, Italy, and Spain. The Germans eventually accepted an agreement, signed on 31 May 1906, whereby France yielded certain domestic changes in Morocco but retained control of key areas.

However, five years later the Second Moroccan Crisis (or Agadir Crisis) was sparked by the deployment of the German gunboat to the port of Agadir in July 1911. Germany had started to attempt to match Britain's naval supremacy-the British navy had a policy of remaining larger than the next two rival fleets in the world combined. When the British heard of the Panther's arrival in Morocco, they wrongly believed that the Germans meant to turn Agadir into a naval base on the Atlantic. The German move was aimed at reinforcing claims for compensation for acceptance of effective French control of the North African kingdom, where France's pre-eminence had been upheld by the 1906 Algeciras Conference. In November 1911, a compromise was reached under which Germany accepted France's position in Morocco in return for a slice of territory in the French Equatorial African colony of Middle Congo.

France and Spain subsequently established a full protectorate over Morocco on 30 March 1912, ending what remained of the country's formal independence. Furthermore, British backing for France during the two Moroccan crises reinforced the Entente between the two countries and added to Anglo-German estrangement, deepening the divisions that would culminate in the First World War.

Following the Berlin Conference, the British, Italians, and Ethiopians sought to claim lands inhabited by the Somalis. The Dervish movement, led by Sayid Muhammed Abdullah Hassan, existed for 21 years, from 1899 until 1920. The Dervish movement successfully repulsed the British Empire four times and forced it to retreat to the coastal region. Because of these successful expeditions, the Dervish movement was recognized as an ally by the Ottoman and German empires. The Turks named Hassan Emir of the Somali nation, and the Germans promised to officially recognise any territories the Dervishes were to acquire. After a quarter of a century of holding the British at bay, the Dervishes were finally defeated in 1920 as a direct consequence of Britain's use of aircraft.

Between 1904 and 1908, Germany's colonies in German South West Africa and German East Africa were rocked by separate, contemporaneous native revolts against their rule. In both territories the threat to German rule was quickly defeated once large-scale reinforcements from Germany arrived, with the Herero rebels in German South West Africa being defeated at the Battle of Waterberg and the Maji-Maji rebels in German East Africa being steadily crushed by German forces slowly advancing through the countryside, with the natives resorting to guerrilla warfare.

German efforts to clear the bush of civilians in German South West Africa resulted in a genocide of the population. In total, as many as 65,000 Herero (80% of the total Herero population), and 10,000 Namaqua (50% of the total Namaqua population) either starved, died of thirst, or were worked to death in camps such as Shark Island concentration camp between 1904 and 1908. Between 24,000 and 100,000 Hereros, 10,000 Nama, and an unknown number of San died in the genocide. Characteristic of this genocide was death from starvation, thirst, and possibly the poisoning of the population's wells, whilst they were trapped in the Namib Desert.

Pygmies and a European. Some pygmies would be exposed in human zoos, such as Ota Benga displayed by eugenicist Madison Grant in the Bronx Zoo.

In its earlier stages, imperialism was generally the act of individual explorers as well as some adventurous merchantmen. The colonial powers were a long way from approving without any dissent the expensive adventures carried out abroad. Various important political leaders, such as William Gladstone, opposed colonization in its first years. However, during his second premiership between 1880 and 1885 he could not resist the colonial lobby in his cabinet, and thus did not execute his electoral promise to disengage from Egypt. Although Gladstone was personally opposed to imperialism, the social tensions caused by the Long Depression pushed him to favour jingoism: the imperialists had become the "parasites of patriotism." In France, Radical politician Georges Clemenceau was adamantly opposed to it: he thought colonization was a diversion from the "blue line of the Vosges" mountains, that is revanchism and the patriotic urge to reclaim the Alsace-Lorraine region which had been annexed by the German Empire with the 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt. Clemenceau actually made Jules Ferry's cabinet fall after the 1885 Tonkin disaster. According to Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), this expansion of national sovereignty on overseas territories contradicted the unity of the nation state which provided citizenship to its population. Thus, a tension between the universalist will to respect human rights of the colonized people, as they may be considered as "citizens" of the nation state, and the imperialist drive to cynically exploit populations deemed inferior began to surface. Some, in colonizing countries, opposed what they saw as unnecessary evils of the colonial administration when left to itself; as described in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899)-published around the same time as Kipling's The White Man's Burden-or in Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night (1932).

Colonial lobbies emerged to legitimise the Scramble for Africa and other expensive overseas adventures. In Germany, France, and Britain, the middle class often sought strong overseas policies to ensure the market's growth. Even in lesser powers, voices like Enrico Corradini claimed a "place in the sun" for so-called "proletarian nations", bolstering nationalism and militarism in an early prototype of fascism.

A plethora of colonialist propaganda pamphlets, ideas, and imagery played on the colonial powers' psychology of popular jingoism and proud nationalism. A hallmark of the French colonial project in the late 19th century and early 20th century was the civilizing mission ( mission civilisatrice), the principle that it was Europe's duty to bring civilisation to benighted peoples. As such, colonial officials undertook a policy of Franco-Europeanisation in French colonies, most notably French West Africa and Madagascar. During the 19th century, French citizenship along with the right to elect a deputy to the French Chamber of Deputies was granted to the four old colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyanne and Réunion as well as to the residents of the " Four Communes" in Senegal. In most cases, the elected deputies were white Frenchmen, although there were some black deputies, such as the Senegalese Blaise Diagne, who was elected in 1914.

By the end of World War I the colonial empires had become very popular almost everywhere in Europe: public opinion had been convinced of the needs of a colonial empire, although most of the metropolitans would never see a piece of it. Colonial exhibitions were instrumental in this change of popular mentalities brought about by the colonial propaganda, supported by the colonial lobby and by various scientists. Thus, conquests of territories were inevitably followed by public displays of the indigenous people for scientific and leisure purposes.

Carl Hagenbeck, a German merchant in wild animals and a future entrepreneur of most Europeans zoos, decided in 1874 to exhibit Samoa and Sami people as "purely natural" populations. In 1876, he sent one of his collaborators to the newly conquered Egyptian Sudan to bring back some wild beasts and Nubians. Presented in Paris, London, and Berlin these Nubians were very successful. Such " human zoos" could be found in Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona, London, Milan, New York City, Paris, etc., with 200,000 to 300,000 visitors attending each exhibition. Tuaregs were exhibited after the French conquest of Timbuktu (visited by René Caillié, disguised as a Muslim, in 1828, thereby winning the prize offered by the French Société de Géographie); Malagasy after the occupation of Madagascar; Amazons of Abomey after Behanzin's mediatic defeat against the French in 1894. Not used to the climatic conditions, some of the indigenous died from exposure, such as some Galibis in Paris in 1892.

Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, director of the Jardin d'Acclimatation, decided in 1877 to organise two "ethnological spectacles", presenting Nubians and Inuit. Ticket sales at the Jardin d'Acclimatation doubled, with a million paying entrances that year, a huge success for these times. Between 1877 and 1912, approximately thirty "ethnological exhibitions" were presented at the zoo. "Negro villages" were presented in Paris' 1878 World's Fair; the 1900 World's Fair presented the famous diorama "living" in Madagascar, while the Colonial Exhibitions in Marseilles (1906 and 1922) and in Paris (1907 and 1931)displayed human beings in cages, often nudes or quasi-nudes. Nomadic "Senegalese villages" were also created, thus displaying the power of the colonial empire to all the population.

In the U.S., Madison Grant, head of the New York Zoological Society, exposed Pygmy Ota Benga in the Bronx Zoo alongside the apes and others in 1906. At the behest of Grant, a scientific racist and eugenicist, zoo director William Temple Hornaday placed Ota Benga in a cage with an orangutan and labeled him "The Missing Link" in an attempt to illustrate Darwinism, and in particular that Africans like Ota Benga are closer to apes than were Europeans. Other colonial exhibitions included the 1924 British Empire Exhibition and the 1931 Paris "Exposition coloniale".

From the beginning of the 20th century, the elimination or control of disease in tropical countries became a driving force for all colonial powers. The sleeping sickness epidemic in Africa was arrested through mobile teams systematically screening millions of people at risk. In the 1880s cattle brought from British Asia to feed Italian soldiers invading Eritrea turned out to be infected with a disease called rinderpest. It continues to infect 90% of Africa's cattle[contradictory ]. Decimation of native herds severely damaged local livelihoods, forcing people to labor for their colonizers.

In the 20th century, Africa saw the biggest increase in its population because of lessening of the mortality rate in many countries through peace, famine relief, medicine, and above all, the end or decline of the slave trade. Africa's population has grown from 120 million in 1900 to over 1 billion today.

The continuing anti-slavery movement in Western Europe became a reason and an excuse for the conquest and colonization of Africa. It was the central theme of the Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference 1889-90. From start of the Scramble for Africa, virtually all colonial regimes claimed to be motivated by a desire to suppress slavery and the slave trade. In French West Africa, following conquest and abolition by the French, over one million slaves fled from their masters to earlier homes between 1906 and 1911. In Madagascar, the French abolished slavery in 1896, and approximately 500,000 slaves were freed. Slavery was abolished in the French controlled Sahel by 1911. Independent nations attempting to westernize or impress Europe sometimes cultivated an image of slavery suppression. In response to European pressure, the Sokoto Caliphate abolished slavery in 1900, and Ethiopia officially abolished slavery in 1932. Colonial powers were mostly successful in abolishing slavery, though slavery remained active in Africa, even though it has gradually moved to a wage economy. Slavery was never fully eradicated in Africa.

During the New Imperialism period, by the end of the 19th century, Europe added almost 9,000,000 square miles (23,000,000 km ²) - one-fifth of the land area of the globe - to its overseas colonial possessions. Europe's formal holdings included the entire African continent except Ethiopia, Liberia, and Saguia el-Hamra, the latter of which was eventually integrated into Spanish Sahara. Between 1885 and 1914, Britain took nearly 30% of Africa's population under its control; 15% for France, 11% for Portugal, 9% for Germany, 7% for Belgium and 1% for Italy.[citation needed ] Nigeria alone contributed 15 million subjects, more than in the whole of French West Africa or the entire German colonial empire. In terms of surface area occupied, the French were the marginal leaders, but much of their territory consisted of the sparsely populated Sahara.

Political imperialism followed the economic expansion, with the "colonial lobbies" bolstering chauvinism and jingoism at each crisis in order to legitimise the colonial enterprise. The tensions between the imperial powers led to a succession of crises, which exploded in August 1914, when previous rivalries and alliances created a domino situation that drew the major European nations into World War I.

After the First World War, Germany's possessions were partitioned among Britain (which took a sliver of western Cameroon, Tanzania, western Togo, and Namibia), France (which took most of Cameroon and eastern Togo) and Belgium (which took Rwanda and Burundi).

During the interwar period, Italian Ethiopia formed together with Italian Eritrea and Italian Somaliland the Italian East Africa (A.O.I., "Africa Orientale Italiana", also defined by the fascist government as L'Impero).

Marracuene in Portuguese Mozambique was the site of a decisive battle between Portuguese and Gaza king Gungunhana in 1895

The British were primarily interested in maintaining secure communication lines to India, which led to initial interest in Egypt and South Africa. Once these two areas were secure, it was the intent of British colonialists such as Cecil Rhodes to establish a Cape-Cairo railway and to exploit mineral and agricultural resources. Control of the Nile was viewed as a strategic and commercial advantage.

Liberia was founded, colonised, established and controlled by the American Colonization Society, a private organisation established in order to relocate freed African American and Caribbean slaves from the United States and the Caribbean islands in 1822. Liberia declared its independence from the American Colonization Society on July 26, 1847. Liberia is Africa's oldest republic and the second-oldest black republic in the world (after Haiti). Liberia maintained its independence during the period as it was viewed by European powers as either a territory, colony or protectorate of the United States.

The same powers assumed Ethiopia to be a protectorate of Italy although the country had never accepted this, and its independence from Italy was recognized after the Battle of Adwa which resulted in the Treaty of Addis Ababa in 1896. With the exception of Italian occupation between 1936 and 1941 by Benito Mussolini's military forces, Ethiopia is Africa's oldest independent nation.

Anti-neoliberal scholars connect the old scramble to a new scramble for Africa, coinciding with the emergence of an "Afro-neoliberal" capitalist movement in postcolonial Africa. When African nations began to gain independence after World War II, their postcolonial economic structures remained undiversified and linear. In most cases, the bulk of a nation's economy relied on cash crops or natural resources. These scholars claim that the decolonisation process kept independent African nations at the mercy of colonial powers by structurally dependent economic relations. They also claim that structural adjustment programs led to the privatization and liberalization of many African political and economic systems, forcefully pushing Africa into the global capitalist market, and that these factors led to development under Western ideological systems of economics and politics.

In the era of globalization, several African countries have emerged as petrostates (for example Angola, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Sudan). These are nations with an economic and political partnership between transnational oil companies and the ruling elite class in oil-rich African nations. Numerous countries have entered into a neo-imperial relationship with Africa during this time period. Mary Gilmartin notes that "material and symbolic appropriation of space [is] central to imperial expansion and control"; nations in the globalization era who invest in controlling land internationally are engaging in neocolonialism. Chinese (and other Asian countries) state oil companies have entered Africa's highly competitive oil sector. China National Petroleum Corporation purchased 40% of Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company. Furthermore, the Sudan exports 50-60% of its domestically produced oil to China, making up 7% of China's imports. China has also been purchasing equity shares in African oil fields, invested in industry related infrastructure development and acquired continental oil concessions throughout Africa.

Aldrich, Robert. Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (1996)

Atkinson, David. "Constructing Italian Africa: Geography and Geopolitics". Italian colonialism (2005): 15-26.

Axelson, Eric. Portugal and the Scramble for Africa: 1875-1891 (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand UP, 1967)

Betts, Raymond F., ed. The scramble for Africa: causes and dimensions of empire (Heath, 1972), short excerpts from historians. online

Boddy-Evans, Alistair. "What Caused the Scramble for Africa?" African History (2012). online

Brantlinger, Patrick. "Victorians and Africans: The genealogy of the myth of the dark continent." Critical Inquiry (1985): 166-203. online

Chamberlain, Muriel Evelyn. The scramble for Africa (4th ed. Routledge, 2014) excerpt and text search; also complete text of 2nd edition 1999

Curtin, Philip D. Disease and empire: The health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Darwin, John. "Imperialism and the Victorians: The dynamics of territorial expansion." English Historical Review (1997) 112#447 pp. 614-42.

Finaldi, Giuseppe. Italian National Identity in the Scramble for Africa: Italy's African Wars in the Era of Nation-building, 1870-1900 (Peter Lang, 2009)

Förster, Stig, Wolfgang Justin Mommsen, and Ronald Edward Robinson, eds. Bismarck, Europe and Africa: The Berlin Africa conference 1884-1885 and the onset of partition (Oxford University Press, 1988) online

Gifford, Prosser, and William Roger Louis. France and Britain in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule (1971)

Gifford, Prosser, and William Roger Louis. Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial rivalry and colonial rule (1967) online.

Gjersø, Jonas Fossli (2015). "The Scramble for East Africa: British Motives Reconsidered, 1884-95". Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. 43 (5): 831-860. doi:10.1080/03086534.2015.1026131. S2CID 143514840.

Hammond, Richard James. Portugal and Africa, 1815-1910: a study in uneconomic imperialism (Stanford University Press, 1966) online

Henderson, W.O. The German Colonial Empire, 1884-1919 (London: Frank Cass, 1993)

Hinsley, F.H. ed. The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. 11: Material Progress and World-Wide Problems, 1870-98 (1962) contents pp. 593-40.

Klein, Martin A. Slavery and colonial rule in French West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Koponen, Juhani, The Partition of Africa: A Scramble for a Mirage? Nordic Journal of African Studies, 2, no. 1 (1993): 134.

Lewis, David Levering. The race to Fashoda : European colonialism and African resistance in the scramble for Africa (1988) online

Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in slavery: a history of slavery in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Lloyd, Trevor Owen. Empire: the history of the British Empire (2001).

Mackenzie J.M. The Partition of Africa, 1880-1900, and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (London 1983) online

Middleton, Lamar. The Rape Of Africa (London, 1936) online

Minawi, Mustafa. The Ottoman Scramble for Africa Empire and Diplomacy an the Sahara and the Hijaz (2016) online

Oliver, Roland, Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa (1959) online

Penrose, E.F., ed. European Imperialism and the Partition of Africa (London, 1975).

Perraudin, Michael, and Jürgen Zimmerer, eds. German colonialism and national identity (London: Taylor & Francis, 2010).

Porter, Andrew, ed. The Oxford history of the British Empire: The nineteenth century. Vol. 3 (1999) online pp 624-650.

Robinson, Ronald, and John Gallagher. "The partition of Africa", in The New Cambridge Modern History vol XI, pp. 593-640 (Cambridge, 1962).

Robinson, Ronald, and John Gallagher. Africa and the Victorians: The official mind of imperialism (Macmillan, 1961). online

Rotberg, Robert I. The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power (1988) excerpt and text search;

Sarr, Felwine, and Savoy, Bénédicte, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage, Toward a New Relational Ethics (2018) http://restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf Archived 2021-03-26 at the Wayback Machine

Sanderson, G.N., "The European partition of Africa: Coincidence or conjuncture?" Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (1974) 3#1 pp. 1-54.

Stoecker, Helmut. German imperialism in Africa: From the beginnings until the Second World War (Hurst & Co., 1986.)

Thomas, Antony. Rhodes: The Race for Africa (1997) excerpt and text search

Thompson, Virginia, and Richard Adloff. French West Africa (Stanford University Press, 1958)

Vandervort, Bruce. Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa, 1830―1914 (Indiana University Press, 2009).

Wesseling, H.L. and Arnold J. Pomerans. Divide and rule: The partition of Africa, 1880-1914 (Praeger, 1996.)

Brooke-Smith, Robin. Documents And Debate: The Scramble For Africa (Macmillan Education, 1987) online

Chamberlain. M.E. The Scramble for Africa (2nd ed. 1999) pp 94-125 online

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Scramble for Africa, as used by historians, describes the invasion, annexation, division, and colonization of most of Africa by seven Western European powers during an era known as " New Imperialism" (between 1833 and 1914). The 10 percent of Africa that was under formal European control in 1870 increased to almost 90 percent by 1914, with only Liberia and Ethiopia remaining independent.

# data[].attributes.body
established by the society

# data[].attributes.body
freedom

# data[].attributes.body
power over people

# data[].attributes.body
new items were made during this time period

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From: Roosh Valizadeh, the publisher Re: Permanent closure of Return Of Kings Return Of Kings started as an idea in a cafe in Kharkov, Ukraine in 2012. At that time, a book I was reading about the achievements of Alexander the Great inflamed my ego and I decided that I, too, wanted to do something great to change the world.

# data[].attributes.body
The divine right of kings, divine right, or God's mandate is a political and religious doctrine of royal and political legitimacy. It asserts that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving the right to rule directly from the will of God.

# data[].attributes.body
Triangular trade or triangle trade is a historical term indicating trade among three ports or regions. Triangular trade usually evolves when a region has export commodities that are not required in the region from which its major imports come

# data[].attributes.body
the economic theory that trade generates wealth and is stimulated by the accumulation of profitable balances, which a government should encourage by means of protectionism.

# data[].attributes.body
The Columbian exchange, also known as the Columbian interchange, named for Christopher Columbus.

# data[].attributes.body
The Reformation was a schism in Western Christianity initiated by Martin Luther and continued by Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin and other Protestant Reformers in 16th-century Europe.

# data[].attributes.body
Humanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence over acceptance of dogma or superstition.

# data[].attributes.body
Belief in your nation

# data[].attributes.body
The Commercial Revolution consisted in the creation of a European economy based on trade, which began in the 11th century and lasted until it was succeeded by the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century.

# data[].attributes.body
It is an extension of the Middle Ages, and is bridged by the Age of Enlightenment to modern history.

# data[].attributes.body
Diplomacy is the basic means of communication between states or rulers for settling disputes

# data[].attributes.body
raising livestock

# data[].attributes.body
Striving or struggling

# data[].attributes.body
Manorialism, also called manorial system, seignorialism, or seignorial system, political, economic, and social system by which the peasants of medieval Europe were rendered dependent on their land and on their lord.

# data[].attributes.body
When peasants are protected

# data[].attributes.body
a line of hereditary rulers of a country.

# data[].attributes.body
All of these terms that I have here are all relevant today. Some of these words apply to the middle age governments but it can show you where the words originated from. Some of the other words on this padlet are used everyday and seem like new words but were used long ago. With are government today we have a social hierarchy and are lead by Donald Trump our president, long ago people were ruled by kings, priests, and popes. That is why I think it is important to to learn/study these terms.

# data[].attributes.body
It is a social system in medieval Europe in which the higher rank you were in the social Hierarchy the more you could do/more freedom.

# data[].attributes.body
This was a rule created by the Zhou that there could be only one leader.

# data[].attributes.body
It is a person/specialist in a sort of study.

# data[].attributes.body
It was a cart with two wheels made to be pulled by a horse and was a common way to get around in the middle ages.

# data[].attributes.body
It is a material used for rope and other paper sorts of items. Also was created by ancient Egypt.

# data[].attributes.body
It is a language used in Rome/middle ages.

# data[].attributes.body
It is when you are fired or dismissed from employment.

# data[].attributes.body
It is when the weather or environment changes.

# data[].attributes.body
A group of states or countries under a single supreme authority

# data[].attributes.body
The peace of Rome.

# data[].attributes.body
The increase of price and fall of price in the value of money.

# data[].attributes.body
The concern of which someone making money. Also it can be a trainer soldier.

# data[].attributes.body
It can be a murder of an important person.

# data[].attributes.body
It is when a civilization is most powerful and rules the most.

# data[].attributes.body
It was a Greek society on a battle field.

# data[].attributes.body
It was an alliance formed with Greek city-states and run by the Athens in 478 BCE.

# data[].attributes.body
It is when the people who live in the country vote for/decide which policy's to go forth.

# data[].attributes.body
A group of people in control of a country.

# data[].attributes.body
It is when the high classes rule the government.

# data[].attributes.body
It is when a group or family represents a dynasty.

# data[].attributes.body
It is a country or area of land where it is under political control.

# data[].attributes.body
It is land being used to grow crops or capable of doing so.

# data[].attributes.body
It is the ranking of the people in a civilization or city-state.

# data[].attributes.body
When a priest rules in the name of God.

# data[].attributes.body
It is when a society reaches the most advanced point in their time.

# data[].attributes.body
It was a law written by ancient Mesopotamia.

# data[].attributes.body
It is when someone worships or believes in one god.

# data[].attributes.body
It is when someone worships or believes in more than one god.

# data[].attributes.body
It is a line of rulers in the same family.

# data[].attributes.body
It is a city with its surround territory forms a state.

# data[].attributes.body
It is when people take items that they own and exchange them with other people to either get something they don't have or to gain something.

# data[].attributes.body
It is the cultivation of land and breeding of animals and plants to provide food

# data[].attributes.body
It was a time where there was a wide-scale transition of many human cultures.

# data[].attributes.body
It is a new item or method.

# data[].attributes.body
Is a member of a community of people without fixed habitation who regularly move to and from the same areas

# data[].attributes.body
It is where a civilization took place crescent shaped land.

# data[].attributes.body
It is what human believe in or the way they go by life.

# data[].attributes.body
A member of a civilization where the are the hunters, fishers, and collect the necessities that they need to live.

# data[].attributes.body
A type of movement when a organism moves by two legs.

# data[].attributes.body
This refers to homo sapiens a type of human species.

# data[].attributes.body
This was an era of life about 2.5 million years ago.

# data[].attributes.body
It was a time in 14 BYA when an explosion happened and created life.