A Concise History of the World (Cambridge Concise Histories)
Page 40
Movements for greater social egalitarianism continued, however. The student and civil rights movements of the 1960s led to a renewed women's rights movement in the 1970s, when women around the world organized, marched, and mobilized to achieve what was termed “women's liberation” and full political, legal, and economic equality. They opened rape crisis centers and shelters for battered women, pressured for an end to sex discrimination in hiring practices and wages, pushed for laws against sexual harassment, and called for better schools for girls and university courses on women. The reinvigorated feminist movement sparked conservative reactions in many countries, with arguments often couched in terms of “tradition,” and “women's libbers” accused of causing an increase in the divorce rate, the number of children born out of wedlock, family violence, and juvenile delinquency. Such arguments were effective in stopping some legal changes, but the trend toward greater gender egalitarianism in political participation, education, and employment continued in most parts of the world. In many countries, gay and lesbian rights activists also organized beginning in the 1970s, and worked to end discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, including the right to marry.
In southern Africa, white minority rule slowly crumbled. Portugal had resisted decolonization, but armed guerrilla movements defeated colonial forces and new nations were established. Their leaders were generally Marxist, and experimented with central planning or combining socialism with African traditions of sharing resources. In South Africa, the Afrikaner-dominated government had limited black ownership of land to native reserves that formed a tiny share of the poorest land in the country and held none of its mineral wealth, and after World War II created an increasingly more stringent system of white supremacy and racial segregation officially known as apartheid. Protests against the system were put down with brutal police actions, and many leaders, including Nelson Mandela (1918–2013), were jailed, along with thousands of others. Global sanctions and local actions combined to force negotiations; Mandela was freed from prison and in 1994 became South Africa's first black president.
Women had been active in opposition to imperial rule, but their roles in the new African nations were frequently limited. Young male nationalists were often successful at changing traditions through which older men had held power over them, such as painful initiation rituals and unfavorable inheritance practices, but viewed traditions though which men held power over women or that restricted women's actions positively. Carmen Pereira, an independence leader who fought the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau in the 1970s, recognized this tendency, and noted that women were “fighting two colonialisms”—one of nationalist struggle and one of gender discrimination. In the 1990s, women became more prominent in formal political processes, part of a trend toward reform and broader democracy in much of Africa. Urban middle-class male and female professionals educated at new universities in their own countries generally led such movements against the privileges and corruption of the elites. Similarly in Latin America, women led public protests against the actions of military dictatorships. The most famous of these, the “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” in Argentina, gathered weekly wearing white headscarves embroidered with the names of the “disappeared” and painting their silhouettes on walls. Public pressure combined with military leaders’ inept decisions led to the return of democratic elections and civilian governments in most of Latin America during the 1980s.
These shifts toward greater political and social liberation and more egalitarianism occurred within a climate of economic liberalization, however, which generally increased disparities of wealth and power rather than lessening them. Economic liberalization, often termed “neoliberalism,” favors the free circulation of goods and capital, deregulation, the privatization of state-run enterprises, and reductions in government spending, generally through cutting social programs. Its proponents have included leaders regarded as politically conservative as well as politically liberal. Such measures were sparked in part by the oil crisis of the 1970s. Seeking to gain control of their resources from Western corporations, many oil exporting countries nationalized their industries and formed a cartel—the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)—which in 1973 placed an embargo on oil exports during the Arab-Israeli War, and the price of oil quadrupled. Productivity declined worldwide as industries cut back to deal with higher energy prices, while unemployment and inflation rose. In western Europe the welfare system prevented mass suffering, but taxes did not rise to match increased government spending, and leaders increasingly introduced austerity measures to deal with the recession. OPEC countries deposited their money in international banks, often headquartered in the United States, which then loaned this money, dubbed “petrodollars,” to governments to build infrastructure, deal with fluctuations in the prices of raw materials and agricultural commodities (still the primary export of many countries), purchase military equipment, line their corrupt and authoritarian leaders’ pockets, and other uses. Nations trying to industrialize thus faced both higher energy costs and a mounting public debt. Debt obligations became crushing for many poor countries, but as a condition of receiving further loans or a cancellation of some of their existing loan obligations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and other financial organizations imposed neoliberal policies throughout the world in a process of structural adjustment that required countries to open their economies to private and foreign investment, lessen their foreign debt obligations, and reduce government spending on social programs.
5.8 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo protest against the 1986 “law of full stop.” (Punto Final), which halted investigations and prosecutions of people accused of political violence and violations of human rights during the military dictatorship in Argentina. The law was repealed in 2003, and the government reopened some cases of crimes against humanity.
Throughout the West, employers responded to the economic downturn by slowing the pace of wage increases, and from that point real wages of both white- and blue-collar workers have been largely flat. Productivity has continued to rise, but the profits from this have gone to stockholders and corporative executives, as income inequality has again risen to late nineteenth-century levels. Families responded to this situation by borrowing, as credit became easier to obtain, and by working more hours. They also sent more family members into the labor force, as the paid work of two people was increasingly essential to achieving and maintaining a middle-class lifestyle or simply keeping the home bought on credit. Married mothers with children became the fastest-growing group within the paid labor force in many countries; their labor force participation in the USA, for example, more than tripled from 1950 to 1995, from less than 20 percent to more than 60 percent. The growth in women's paid employment was largely concentrated in lower-paying service jobs such as office work, retail sales, child care, hairdressing, and cleaning (dubbed the “pink collar ghetto”), so that women's average full-time earnings were less than those of men. The movement of women into the labor force was thus a result of both women's liberation and economic liberalization policies.
Economic liberalization, particularly the development of free markets, spread into communist countries as well as capitalist ones. After the disaster of the Cultural Revolution, leaders in China during the 1970s and 1980s allowed peasants to farm land in small family units again, which increased food production significantly. Although most large-scale industry remained state-owned, factories owned by foreign capitalist investors were permitted in southern China. Young workers flowed in from the countryside, as they had in early nineteenth-century England or early twentieth-century Japan, but on a far larger scale. Because many of these factories used coal, the environmental degradation was just as awful as it had been in industrial cities in Britain, or perhaps worse. Greater economic freedom was not accompanied by greater freedom in other realms of life, however. Chinese leaders worried that population growth would overtake economic expansion, and called for a “one-child” policy in whi
ch families who had more than one child were penalized by fines and the loss of access to opportunities. The policy was strictly enforced in urban areas, and though the government tried to minimize gender differences in its effects, because the value put on having a son was higher, the sex ratio—the number of males for each female in a population—slowly became higher, though whether this was the result of sex-selective abortion or the underreporting of daughters is disputed. The leaders of China cracked down on a wave of political dissent and student-led demonstrations in 1989, arresting, jailing, and sometimes executing critics of the regime. They continued to open the economy, however, and encouraged consumerism and private enterprise. Giant factories producing electronics, clothing, chemicals, toys, and other products for a global market were opened, the standard of living rose, and in 2011 China replaced Japan as the world's second-largest economy. As in China, during the 1980s the leaders of Vietnam began to move away from a planned economy toward open markets and private ownership, transforming Vietnam into a capitalist economy in which communist leaders hold political power.
In South Korea, and also in Taiwan and Singapore, nationalist anti-communist authoritarian political leaders worked with multinational capitalist corporations, banks, and conglomerates to transform the economies from agricultural to industrial, specializing in high-tech and electronic products and with a pace of growth so fast they were dubbed the “Asian tigers.” Singapore created a distinctive mixture of free-market practices, economic planning, public order, and social engineering. For example, the government became concerned that men who were college graduates were marrying women who were not, leaving college graduate women unmarried and childless, with negative effects on the national gene pool. In 1984 the government established a special dating network for graduates and gave college graduate mothers tax rebates and other benefits, although the birth rate for all women remains among the lowest in the world.
During the 1980s, economic crisis spread to eastern Europe, with dramatic political and social as well as economic consequences. This began in Poland, which had been the most resistant to Soviet efforts at collectivization and where the Catholic Church remained strong. Economic turmoil led workers to form an independent and democratic trade union they called Solidarity. Its leaders were initially arrested, but continued economic decline, non-violent protests, and strong popular support from workers, students, intellectuals, and church leaders led the Communist Party in Poland to allow free elections to the Polish Parliament, and the communists were voted out of power in 1989. A series of largely peaceful revolutions overturned the other communist regimes in eastern Europe and brought in democratic elections. In the early 1990s the anti-communist movement swept into the Soviet Union itself, which was also in the midst of severe economic troubles caused in part by continued high military expenditures. In contrast to China, the government was not able stop change, and the Soviet Union broke apart into separate states, each with its own leaders, goals, and policies.
The end of communism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe brought greater personal freedom, but also more economic disparity and social dislocation. As state monopolies became private companies, a few of their owners became fabulously wealthy, especially through oil, sometimes intimidating their rivals through physical force as well as economic pressure in what has been called a “plutocracy,” or government by the rich. For most people, the end of communism meant soaring prices, food shortages, a decline in health care and public services such as government-supported day care centers, a drop in income, increased alcoholism and street violence, and, for women, a huge growth in prostitution. Average life expectancy for a Russian man dropped from 69 years in 1991 to 59 in 2007, with some commentators describing this as Russia's becoming a Third World nation.
Ethnic and religious conflicts flared up in many parts of what had been the Second World, most devastatingly in Yugoslavia, a federation of regions under communist rule that broke into states hostile to one another in the 1990s. The resultant war brought murder, rape, brutal cruelty, and concentration camps, along with forced migration and genocide—especially of boys and men— described by its practitioners as “ethnic cleansing” that would rid an area of unwanted groups. Military intervention from Western nations brought this civil war to an end, and some of its leaders were tried for crimes against humanity by a war crimes tribunal in the Netherlands, but tensions remained.
Religious fundamentalism and diversity
Conflicts in the former Yugoslavia point toward another global force that along with economic liberalism became more powerful in the later twentieth century: religious fundamentalism. The word “fundamentalism” comes from a movement within Protestant Christianity in the early twentieth century that downplayed complex doctrines in favor of what were described as fundamental teachings, opposed the cultural changes of modernity, and advocated a conservative social agenda. It is now used for similar movements in all religions. Within most religions, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, the last half of the twentieth century saw disagreements and conflicts between a fundamentalist wing that advocated a return to what were viewed as core texts, patriarchal gender norms, and a rejection of secular values, and a more liberal wing that advocated greater gender egalitarianism, toleration of other faiths, and an emphasis on social and economic justice. Fundamentalism combined with nationalism, ethnic identity, anti-colonialism, and economic grievances as a motivation for action, which sometimes included violence and extremism.
In Iran, an economic slump in 1979 led to strikes and protests; the shah fled, and leadership in Iran was increasingly assumed by fundamentalist Shi'ite Islamic clerics led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–89). They overturned the shah's modernization and replaced secular law with the Islamic Shari'a, forbidding alcohol, requiring women to wear veils and forbidding them from public socializing with men, censoring the media, and jailing or executing their opponents. The Iranian Revolution alarmed Western powers, and also Iran's neighbors, most of which were led by Sunni Muslims. Iraq launched a war against Iran in 1980, which drew in outsiders but was ultimately inconclusive, and then itself became the target of two wars led by the United States, a brief but very bloody one in 1991 and a much longer one that began in 2003. In Saudi Arabia, modernization and religious fundamentalism have coexisted rather than conflicted, as the Saudi royal family has used oil money to build schools, hospitals, and shopping malls, but has also continued to support Wahhabism. Although the royal family has a close relationship with US leaders, Wahhabists often oppose US military bases on Saudi soil, and in some cases their opposition has led to violence. Most of the young men who carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks on the USA were well-educated, middle-class Saudis, who described their motivation primarily in religious terms; the letter they wrote on the night before the attack explaining their action mentions God more than a hundred times.
The movement of fundamentalist activism within Islam—often termed Islamism—has made conservative gender patterns a primary symbol of Islamic purity against Western cultural imperialism and commercialism. In part because of this, the movement of women into the paid labor force has been the slowest in Muslim countries of the Middle East, where in 2000 it was generally only between 2 and 10 percent, with many of these highly educated professionals such as teachers and health-care workers, trained to assist other women in sex-segregated settings. Young women in Muslim countries outside the Middle East, such as Malaysia, were caught between two sets of expectations and values. Their labor in factories was essential to their families’ survival, as they sent the majority of their wages home, yet they were also criticized for flouting Muslim norms. Women's dress has often been a flashpoint: Muslim women in many parts of the world have adopted the veil or other types of covering dress as a way to affirm their religious devotion, express their social and moral values, and travel outside the home without being subject to male harassment. They regard Muslim dress as a means of empowering themselves, whil
e others—both Muslims and non-Muslims—have viewed it as an example of women's oppression, and in some cases prohibited head- and body-coverings. As with other types of religious symbols, the veil clearly has multiple meanings that vary with the individual and with the political setting.
Islamic fundamentalism has had the most widespread political and social impact, but fundamentalism in other religions has also become more powerful, and has sometimes contributed to violence. In the 1990s the power of conservative Hindu nationalist parties in India began to grow. They argued that India's schools, legal system, culture, and other aspects of life should be more clearly Hindu, and that both Western and Muslim influence should be rejected. In Israel, a right-wing Jewish extremist assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 for signing a peace agreement with the Muslim Palestinians. Strictly orthodox Jews, known as Haredi, who represent perhaps one-tenth of the population of Israel, have successfully pressured bus companies not to include any women in their bus advertising, and until recently many public buses were gender segregated, with men in the front and women in the back. Incidents of harassment involving female bus passengers who refused to move back led to a court decision in 2011 ruling mandatory gender segregation in buses illegal, though it continues at the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, and in the public spaces of Haredi communities in the United States. Christian extremists in the United States have shot abortion providers and bombed clinics, and in Nagaland of northwest India have forced conversions through violence. A bill to drastically increase punishments for homosexuality was introduced in Uganda shortly after US Christian fundamentalists held an anti-gay conference there, and became law in 2014, though the final version dropped the death penalty. Buddhist monks have led attacks on mosques in Sri Lanka and burned Muslim homes in Burma, killing their residents; displaced Rohingya Muslims have fled into neighboring countries or refugee camps. Religious violence is often directed not only at those of a completely different religion, but also at those of a different variety of one's own, who are perceived with even more hostility. Sectarian violence between Protestants and Catholics tore Northern Ireland apart for many decades, and hostility between Shi'a and Sunni Muslims continues to erupt in many countries.