by Kevin Reilly
Soviet Industrialization
Industrialization in European Offshoots
Newly Industrialized Countries
From Divergence to Convergence
A Densely Connected World
A Deeply Divided World
Progress for the Poor
Failures and Instabilities
Internal Inequalities
Debating a Mixed Record
Alternative Globalizations
A Diminished World
Defining the Environmental Impact
Environmentalism
Political Globalization
The National Idea: Triumphant and Challenged?
Anticolonial Nationalism
Nationalism and Communism
The Failure of Alternatives
Challenges to the National Idea: Globalization
Challenges to the National Idea: Ethnic Separatism
Challenges to the National Idea: World Government
The Democratic Idea: Challenged and Triumphant?
Modern Democracy
Gains and Setbacks
Democracy after World War II
Democracy in Decline
A Resurgence of Democracy?
Cultural Globalization
Popular Culture/Global Culture
Global Feminism
Communism and Women
Western Feminism
Women’s Movements in the Third World
Feminism on a Global Scale
Conclusion: Coming Together and Growing Apart
BENEATH THE great public events of the past century—wars, revolutions, the end of empires, the collapse of communism, and changes in the balance of power—lay a set of related global processes that influenced those events and affected the lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Population growth, industrial development, environmental deterioration, globalization, and the worldwide spread of modern science, the English language, feminism, democracy, and nationalism—all of these less visible or more slowly developing processes shaped the world of the past century just as much as the more dramatic surface events of public life and with perhaps more lasting impact.
More of Us: Population
Growth in the Past Century
For starters, world population quadrupled from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6.2 billion in 2000. This rate of increase was unprecedented, peaking in the late 1960s at 2.1 percent per year. Since then, global population has increased as a slower rate (about 1.2 percent yearly since 1990). At this rate, UN specialists expect global population to reach 10 billion but then slow down further to replacement level and stabilize in the next 200 years. Why was there such a rapid increase? And why is it now abating?
A Demographic Transition
A graph of human population would show a line meandering at a steady low level from the urban revolution until the seventeenth century, at which point the graph would climb at almost a 90-degree angle up the page. Only very recently has that spike begun to slow down. The reason for that spike around 1700 was the beginning of a radical decline in death rates (the percentage of people who died in any one year). The cause of declining deaths was due to the improved nutrition of newly imported American crops like corn and potatoes and scientific and technological breakthroughs in sanitation, medicine, and immunization. These changes were initially felt in the richer industrializing countries but gradually extended to European colonies and developing countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In India, for example, an annual mortality rate of about 50 per 1,000 people in 1900 dropped to 15.3 in 1970. Public health measures, pushed by colonial governments, independent states, and international agencies, contributed much. Vaccinations, draining swamps, the use of pesticides, wider availability of sulfa drugs and penicillin, and health education promoting the germ theory of disease—all of this brought down death rates throughout the world. One of the most successful efforts occurred in communist China. Life expectancy was perhaps 30 years when the revolution triumphed in 1949, but it had grown to over 70 years by 2000 through the use of “barefoot doctors” to bring basic health care to the masses and massive nationwide campaigns to promote cleanliness and better hygiene.
The crucial impact of lower death rates was not so much that old folks lived longer. There were always some who lived into their nineties. Life expectancy rose dramatically because more women survived child birth and more infants grew to be adults. In traditional societies, high birthrates compensated for high death rates. Children were old-age insurance policies as well as necessary helpers and breadwinners. With high death rates, a mother might have 10 children to ensure that a few would survive. Suddenly, in family after family, from 1700 to 1900, more children survived long enough to have their own families. New crops, expanded farmlands, and advanced technologies helped the process continue.
The custom of having lots of children lasted beyond the period it was necessary to balance high death rates. Eventually, as families grew in size, parents realized that they did not need so many children. Governments also felt population pressure as a disruptive force. In cities and in societies that sent children to schools, the young ones became extra mouths to feed. In societies that offered social security, they became less essential.
By the end of the twentieth century, global population growth began to moderate as birthrates also dropped. This transition had occurred earlier in the more urbanized industrial countries, where birth control measures were widely available, educated women were pursuing careers, and large families were economically burdensome. As the world urbanized, such logic began to take hold in developing countries as well, assisted by vigorous family planning programs in many places.
Consequences
Variations and Redistributions . The population explosion of the twentieth century was highly uneven. Its most intense effects were felt in developing countries after 1950. For the preceding century and a half, the most rapid growth had occurred in the rich countries; now the poorer regions of the world took the lead. Asia, Africa, and Latin America gained at the expense of Europe and Russia. Thus, behind the struggles for national independence, the Chinese Revolution, and Islamic renewal movements lay the surging populations of Third World regions.
Enough to Eat? While population growth put great pressure on rural areas of the world, it did not lead to global food shortages and famines of the kind predicted by some observers in the 1950s. Food production on a world level more than kept up with population growth, in part because of “green revolution” technologies, such as high-yielding seeds and chemical fertilizers. But famines there were, such as those in China and Russia following collectivization and in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. These were the result of poverty or government policies that emphasized food exports instead of local food production.
To the Cities . Population growth contributed to rural misery in many places. Popular upheavals of the twentieth century—the Mexican Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and rebellions in Peru, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Chiapas—testified to that misery. So too did the massive urbanization in developing countries everywhere as rural people flocked to what they believed to be better opportunities in the cities. By the end of the century, close to half of the world’s population were urban residents, another startling reversal of older patterns, and many of the largest and most rapidly growing cities were in the global South: Mexico City, Bombay (Mumbai), São Paulo, Shanghai, Lagos, Calcutta, and Buenos Aires. The population history of Egypt provides a telling example. In 1897, Egypt had a population of 9.6 million, of which about 9 percent lived in Cairo. A century later, Egypt had grown sixfold to 59 million, but Cairo had grown 14-fold to about 13 million people, or 22 percent of the population. These were social changes of revolutionary dimensions.
In Europe and the United States, modern population growth and urbanization were accompanied by industrial development, providing urban jobs, even if poorly paid, for newcomers to the cities. This was less evident in Third World countries,
where urban migration greatly outpaced the growth of modern industry. Third World cities displayed wealthy enclaves surrounded by slums. These cities were marked by massive unemployment, wholly inadequate housing, and little or no sewage facilities. Nonetheless, as limited as cities were, they attracted more jobs, investment, medical and educational facilities, and a wider range of opportunities than the country. The rural poor kept coming.
On the Move . Changing patterns of population growth also altered the flow of migrants around the world. In the nineteenth century, rapidly growing Europe sent huge numbers to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. That flow largely stopped by the 1920s. After World War II, European emigration was replaced by a massive movement of people from Asia and Latin America, the new high-growth rate regions of the world. Pakistanis, Indians, and West Indians moved to England and the United States; Algerians and West Africans to France; and Filipinos, Koreans, and Latin Americans to the United States. Chinese continued long-established patterns of migration to Southeast Asia and beyond. Many of these migrants found themselves living in poverty, limited to the least desirable jobs, and facing various forms of racial and cultural prejudice. Family members left behind also felt the pain of immigration, as reflected in this poem by a young Moroccan wife whose husband left for work in Europe in the 1970s:
Germany, Belgium, France
and Netherlands
Where are you situated?
Where are you?
Where can I find you?
I have never seen your countries, I do
not
speak your language.
I have heard it said that you are beautiful,
I have heard it said that you are clean.
I am afraid, afraid that my love forgets
me in your paradise.
I ask you to save him for me.
One day after our wedding he left,
with his suitcase in his hand, his eyes
looking ahead.
You must not say that he is bad or
aggressive;
I have seen his tears, deep in his heart,
when he went away.
He looked at me with the eyes of a child;
He gave me his small empty hand and
asked me:
“What should I do?”
I could not utter a word; my heart bled
for him . . .
With you he stays one year, with me just
one month,
To you he gives his health and sweat,
To me he only comes to recuperate.
Then he leaves again to work for you, to
beautify
you as a bride, each day anew.
And I, I wait; I am like a flower that
withers, more each day . . .
I ask you: give him back to me.1
Young and Old . Changing relationships between birthrates and death rates substantially transformed the age structure of human societies although in quite different ways. In industrialized countries, slowing birthrates (in some cases just at or below replacement levels), coupled with extended life expectancies, were creating aging populations by the end of the twentieth century. Such changes produced conflicts between generations as a growing and politically influential older population demanded medical services and retirement benefits that a smaller cohort of younger workers found it difficult to support. Struggles in the United States over Medicare and Social Security payments illustrated such conflicts.
On the whole, however, the twentieth century was an “age of the young”2 as high birthrates in Third World regions pushed the median age of world population by 1970 to less than 22 years. This has meant tremendous problems for developing countries in attempting to provide schools, jobs, and medical care to their youthful populations. It has also contributed to political volatility in some areas and to the creation of a youth culture of global dimensions.
Debates and Controversies
Too Many People? Global population growth not only changed social life and the demographic balance among various regions of the world but also triggered fierce intellectual debate and policy disputes. One of the most contentious involved the question of “overpopulation.” Was the world generating too many people? In the 1960s and early 1970s, an influential study called “The Limits of Growth” and Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb argued that the world’s resource base was inadequate to sustain the rapidly growing population and that without sharp curbs on further growth, impoverishment, malnutrition, famine, and global disaster awaited. Such studies prompted a variety of responses. Some economists countered that population growth actually encouraged economic growth rather than threatening it. Did not Europe and the United States, after all, industrialize during a period of rapid population growth? For others, there was a racial dimension to arguments for limiting population growth, for was it not primarily white people urging darker people to have fewer children? Mao Zedong and other leaders in developing countries for a time viewed birth control programs as a Western device to curtail the weight of Third World countries in the global arena. Still others noted that it was the enormous consumer appetites of the wealthy minority rather than the basic needs of the poor majority that threatened the health of the planet. And official Catholic policy objected to any artificial restraint of procreation on religious grounds.
Controlling Population Growth . Despite these debates, world opinion by the 1980s had largely swung to the view that limiting population growth was necessary. But how was this to be done? In all the industrialized countries, birthrates declined sharply as average income rose, education and employment opportunities for women increased, and raising a large number of children became a serious economic burden. Thus, by 1983, 12 European countries had achieved zero population growth, and several other developed nations (the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan) had growth rates of less than 1 percent per year. This experience suggested to some that the most effective route to population control lay in modern development, with a particular focus on education and jobs for women.
But growing numbers of developing countries determined that they could not wait for development to run its course and that more deliberate and planned efforts to reduce births were necessary. By the 1990s, the vast majority of the world’s governments supported some kind of family planning. China’s “one-child family” program has been the most far reaching of these efforts. By combining massive public education, easy availability of birth control devices, a system of economic incentives and punishments, and political intrusion into the most personal areas of life, China reduced its population growth rate to about 1.4 percent per year by the 1980s. Sri Lanka, Cuba, Costa Rica, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, and parts of India have also brought down birthrates through active family planning programs coupled with social and economic reforms. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world seemed poised for a historic change in favor of small families and experts began to predict eventual stabilization although at much higher levels.
These efforts at deliberately limiting population growth occasioned a great deal of conflict and controversy. In many places, they ran up against deeply ingrained cultural values favoring large families. A coercive sterilization program in India in the 1970s stimulated violent protests and the defeat of the governing party in elections of 1977. China’s aggressive efforts to limit births has been much criticized for forcing women to undergo abortions for unauthorized pregnancies and for its unintended outcome of encouraging the disposal of unwanted girl babies so that couples could try again for a much-desired boy. Political pressures in the United States have pushed policymakers to deny American funding for family planning programs that involve abortion. And conflict at the more intimate level of family life also surfaced in Latin America and elsewhere when women sometimes hid birth control pills from their disapproving husbands. The echoes of the population explosion were heard in boardrooms, staterooms, and bedrooms around the world.
Econom
ic Globalization
Economic growth has been even more explosive than population growth in the past 100 years. While world population has quadrupled, world economic production has increased 20 times.3 Whether we use measures of economic output (like the gross domestic product of the world’s countries) or trade density (like shipping tonnage) or the speed of economic transactions (since the age of the telegraph), economic growth not only has increased much faster than population growth but has increased at an increasingly faster rate. Most of the economic growth of the past 100 years has occurred in the past 50 years—the period in which population growth began to slow. So it is hardly population growth that accounts for economic growth. Higher production, distribution, and standard of living has been a result of improving technologies and immensely greater world trade, communication, and movement: the process of economic globalization.
An Industrializing World
The twentieth century saw the extension of industrial society well beyond those few places that experienced it in the nineteenth. Driven by rapid advances in science and technology, global industrialization underwrote the massive increase in human population, liberated many millions of people from ancient drudgeries, lengthened life spans by decades, and cut infant mortality sharply. But it also contributed enormously to pollution of all kinds as coal and oil were burned in enormous quantities to fuel cars, factories, and homes, particularly in the wealthier parts of the world. Historian John McNeill calculated that the twentieth century used more energy than the previous 100 centuries combined.4 Furthermore, the expectation of continuous and rapid economic growth, unknown for most of human history, became deeply embedded in both popular and official thinking throughout the world. Capitalist, communist, and developing countries alike pushed economic growth to the top of their national agendas as the legitimacy—and sometimes the survival—of their governments came to depend ever more heavily on economic performance.