Honors World History Unit 11 Review: Our Interconnected World

Trade agreements are treaties that set the rules for buying and selling across borders, mostly by cutting tariffs (taxes on imports) and quotas (limits on how much can be imported). The modern system started after World War II. Leaders blamed the high tariffs of the 1930s for deepening the Great Depression. At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 they created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and in 1947, 23 countries signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

GATT held eight rounds of talks that steadily lowered tariffs. In 1995 the World Trade Organization (WTO) became the permanent organization overseeing the global trade system. It provides a forum for member governments to negotiate agreements, administers the resulting rules, settles disputes and reviews members' trade policies. The updated GATT 1994 remained in force as one of the WTO's agreements, alongside rules covering services and intellectual property. The WTO now has more than 160 members. China joined in 2001, which helped it become the world's largest manufacturer.

Regional deals go further among fewer countries. NAFTA, signed in 1992 and in force from 1994, phased out most tariffs among the United States, Canada and Mexico. The USMCA replaced it in 2020 with stricter rules on cars and labor.

Supporters point to cheaper goods and export growth. Critics point to factory jobs lost in places like the US Midwest and to WTO rules they say favor wealthy countries.

The European Union began as a plan to make another war between France and Germany impossible. In 1951 the Treaty of Paris created the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), where six countries (France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) put their coal and steel industries under a shared authority. Coal and steel were what you needed to build weapons, so pooling them made a secret arms buildup very hard.

The same six signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957, creating the European Economic Community, a common market for goods, services, capital and people. The Maastricht Treaty, signed in 1992 and in force in 1993, created the European Union, incorporated the existing European Communities and expanded cooperation on foreign policy and justice. The euro launched in 1999, with coins and bills in 2002. In 2004, ten countries joined at once, including eight former communist countries from Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic region, plus Cyprus and Malta.

The EU is supranational, meaning members hand some decisions to EU institutions. The European Commission proposes laws, and the elected European Parliament and the Council of the EU (ministers from member governments) pass them. That loss of control fueled Brexit. British voters chose to leave in a 2016 referendum, and the UK left in 2020, leaving 27 members.

The internet grew from US Department of Defense-funded computer networking research. ARPANET connected universities and research centers so they could share computing resources, and it sent its first message from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute on October 29, 1969. It used packet switching, which breaks data into small pieces that can travel along different routes. This design made the network more flexible and resilient, but it did not eliminate every possible single point of failure. In 1983 ARPANET adopted TCP/IP, the shared rules that let different networks connect into one internet.

The internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing. The internet is the network of connected computers. The Web is a system of linked pages that runs on top of it, invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland in 1989 and opened to the public in 1991. The dot-com bubble burst in 2000, but companies like Amazon survived, and the iPhone's 2007 launch helped popularize smartphone internet access.

The digital revolution sped up globalization. Companies moved call centers and software work to cities like Bangalore, India. Activists used social media during the Arab Spring in 2010-2011. Access is still unequal, with roughly 2.6 billion people offline in 2023, and governments like China's filter what their citizens can see.

Global culture is the set of music, films, foods, brands and ideas that people recognize across many countries. Satellite TV, the internet and streaming services let cultural products cross borders almost instantly, and English became the most common shared language of business, science and the internet.

Historians argue over what this does to local cultures. The homogenization view says cultures are becoming more alike, often described as Americanization, as McDonald's, Hollywood and Marvel films show up from Jakarta to Johannesburg. Critics call this cultural imperialism, meaning powerful countries spread their values through media and products.

The evidence also shows strong flows in other directions. South Korea's K-pop reached global charts in the 2010s, and the Korean drama Squid Game became Netflix's most-watched series in 2021. India's Bollywood and Nigeria's Nollywood, one of the largest film industries in the world by number of films, have audiences across Africa, Asia and diaspora communities. Companies also practice glocalization, adjusting global products to local tastes. McDonald's in India sells the McAloo Tikki potato burger and no beef, out of respect for Hindu customers.

The strongest argument usually combines both views, since global influences spread widely but get mixed into local traditions instead of simply replacing them.

Migration is the movement of people from one place to another, and most decisions involve both push factors (reasons to leave) and pull factors (reasons to go somewhere). The UN counted about 281 million international migrants in 2020, roughly 3.6% of the world's people.

Economic pulls are the most common. Gulf states like Qatar and the UAE rely on workers from South and Southeast Asia, who make up a majority of their populations. Conflict and persecution force people out. The Syrian Civil War, which began in 2011, displaced more than 13 million people, and a 2017 military campaign in Myanmar drove over 700,000 Rohingya Muslims into Bangladesh. Colonial history shapes routes too, which is why many Algerians moved to France and many South Asians and Caribbeans moved to Britain.

A diaspora is a community living outside its homeland that keeps ties to it. The Indian, Chinese and Filipino diasporas each number in the millions. Diasporas send remittances, money sent home to family, which reached more than $600 billion to low- and middle-income countries in 2023, more than all foreign aid combined. Established communities also make chain migration easier, since new arrivals get housing, jobs and advice from people who came before them.

Environmental problems became global because pollution ignores borders. One major global environmental problem is climate change, driven by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane that trap heat. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen from about 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to over 420 today, mostly from burning coal, oil and gas. Deforestation adds more, and the Amazon has lost roughly 17% of its forest in about 50 years, much of it cleared for cattle and soy.

Globalization connects to these problems directly. Supply chains move factories to countries with cheaper labor and looser rules, so goods bought in wealthy countries are often made, and their pollution produced, elsewhere. This is a tragedy of the commons, where each country gains from polluting a shared atmosphere while everyone pays the cost.

Countries have tried to cooperate with mixed results. The Montreal Protocol (1987) phased out chemicals damaging the ozone layer and largely worked. The Kyoto Protocol (1997) set binding cuts only for developed countries, and the US never ratified it. The Paris Agreement (2015) brought nearly every country into a system of nationally chosen targets meant to keep warming well below 2°C and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. Countries must submit, update and report on their targets, but the agreement does not legally require them to achieve a particular emissions result. A core dispute is fairness, since rich countries emitted most historic carbon while China has been the largest annual emitter since the mid-2000s.

Terrorism is the use or threat of violence, especially against civilians or other noncombatants, to intimidate a broader audience and pursue political, religious or ideological goals. Definitions vary, but the aim is usually psychological, using fear and publicity to pressure governments or societies. Political violence is old, but air travel, 24-hour news and later the internet gave late 20th-century groups a global stage.

In 1972 the Palestinian group Black September took Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympics on live television. Al-Qaeda, founded by Osama bin Laden in 1988 during the final phase of the Soviet-Afghan War, built a network spread across many countries. On September 11, 2001, its members hijacked four planes and killed nearly 3,000 people. The US launched the War on Terror and invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to target al-Qaeda and the Taliban government that sheltered it. The US also invaded Iraq in 2003 as part of the broader campaign, although Iraq was not responsible for the September 11 attacks.

ISIS declared a caliphate across parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014 and used social media to recruit thousands of foreign fighters before losing its last territory in 2019. Attacks in Madrid (2004), London (2005) and Paris (2015) showed the reach of these networks. Terrorism is not tied to one religion. Far-right terrorism has also produced major attacks, including the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand.

A multinational corporation (MNC) is a company that runs operations, like factories, offices or stores, in more than one country. Early versions existed, such as the English East India Company (1600) and the Dutch East India Company (1602), but MNCs multiplied after World War II.

Three changes drove that growth. Standardized container shipping took off in 1956, when a converted tanker carried 58 containers from Newark to Houston, and it made moving goods across oceans far cheaper. Trade agreements such as NAFTA and the agreements administered by the WTO lowered barriers, and many countries offered tax breaks and special economic zones to attract investment. Satellites, fiber-optic cables and the internet let headquarters run operations on several continents in real time.

MNCs expand through foreign direct investment, like a Japanese automaker building a plant in Kentucky, and through buying foreign companies, like India's Tata Motors buying Jaguar and Land Rover in 2008. Many build global supply chains, so an iPhone uses parts from several countries before final assembly in China.

Supporters say MNCs bring jobs, technology and capital to host countries. Critics point to a race to the bottom on wages and safety, like the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,100 garment workers making clothes for Western brands. Some MNCs report annual revenue greater than the GDP of small countries, although revenue and GDP measure different things. Their control over investment, supply contracts and jobs can still give them leverage over governments.