9 Translate from Russian into English:

1 В мировой политике 20-го века доминировали циклы войны и мира, именно 2 мировые войны и Холодная война привели к основным изменениям в мировой политике.

2 Каждая глобальная война является свидетелем появления гегемона, который, приобретя огромную мощь, начинает диктовать правила и переделывает существующую систему.

3 Еще до убийства эрцгерцога Фердинанда, наследника Австро-Венгерского престола, образовались 2 враждебных союза, что в результате привело к первой мировой войне.

4 Несмотря на тяжелые последствия Первой мировой войны ( гибель 10 млн человек, крушение империй, появление новых государств), возникло новое соперничество держав, что неизбежно вело к новой глобальной войне.

5 Хотя Германия проиграла Первую мировую войну, она не отказалась от агрессивного курса. Наоборот, ее претензии на мировое господство и влияние многократно усилились.

6 После Второй мировой войны США и СССР приобрели беспримерную мощь, дающую им возможность навязывать свою волю другим странам, которые по сравнению со сверхдержавами казались карликами.

7 Непосредственным следствием окончания Холодной войны является изменившаяся после драматичного распада СССР глобальная иерархия, на вершине которой находится лишь США.

10 Questions for discussions:

1 Long-cycle theory hypotheses.

2 World War I, its participants and consequences.

3 World War II, its participants and consequences.

4 The Cold War, its participants and consequences.

5 Is World War III possible? Give your reasons.

Unit 6 the plight and policy posture of the less developed global south

The earth is divided into two hemispheres, north and south, at the equator. Life in the north is very different, in many ways, from life in the south. One American college student learned this lesson, painfully, during his first visit to South America. He found a reality far different from his own experience growing up in the United States. He was moved to write:

I spent the first 24 years of my life in South Carolina. When I left for Colombia [South America], I fully expected Bogota to be like any large U.S. city, only with citizens who spoke Spanish. When I arrived there I found my expectations were wrong. I was not in the U.S., I was on Mars! I was a victim of culture shock. As a personal experience this shock was occasionally funny and sometimes sad. But after all the laughing and the crying were over, it forced me to reevaluate both my life and the society in which I live.

Colombia is a poor country by American standards. It has a per capita GNP of $550 and a very unequal distribution of income. These were the facts that I knew before I left.

But to "know" these things intellectually is much different from experiencing first-hand how they affect people's lives. It is one thing to lecture in air conditioned classrooms about the problems of world poverty. It is quite another to see four-year-old children begging or sleeping in the streets.

It tore me apart emotionally to see the reality of what I had studied for so long:"low per capita GNP and maldistribution of income." What this means in human terms is children with dirty faces who beg for bread, money or turn into pickpockets because the principle of private property gets blurred by empty stomachs.

It means other children whose minds and bodies will never develop fully because they were malnourished as infants. It means cripples who can’t even turn to thievery and must beg to stay alive. It means street vendors wno sell candy and cigarettes 14 hours a day in order to feed their families.

It also means well-dressed businessmen and petty bureaucrats who indifferently pass this poverty every day as they seek asylum in their fortified houses to the north of the city.

It means rich people who prefer not to see the poor, except for maids and security guards.

It means foreigners like me who come to Colombia and spend more in one month than the average Colombian earns in a year.

It means politicians across the ideological spectrum who are so full of abstract solutions or personal greed that they forget that it is real people they are dealing with.

Somewhere within the polemics of the politicians and the "objectivity" of the social scientists, the human being has been lost. (Wallace)

What created these conditions that are characteristic of the countries in the south? To understand possible answers we need to begin by taking into consideration the legacy and impact of colonialism on the peoples who were colonized by European conquerors. The now independent sovereign states in the Southern Hemisphere were almost all former colonies.

The end of colonialism was one of the most remarkable developments in twentieth-century world politics. As U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz observed in 1983, "Since the Second World War, the world has undergone a vast transformation as more than 100 new states have come into being. An international system that had been centred on Europe for centuries, and that regarded all non-European areas as peripheral or as objects of rivalry, has become in an amazingly short span of time a truly global arena of sovereign states."

Despite their legal status as independent entities, sovereignty could not erase the colonial heritage and vulnerabilities that the former colonies faced. Indeed, the new poor states born after World War II were thrust into the international periphery; dominated by the rich great powers at the core of an international system they had no voice in shaping, the new states viewed the inherited rules and structures as barriers to their true independence and growth.

The term Third World was first used to distinguish the growing number of newly emerging, economically less developed states that tended to share a common colonial heritage from those identified with either the East or West in the Cold War struggle, but it soon took on largely economic connotations. Compared with the First World industrialized countries, the Third World had failed to advance toward levels of economic development comparable to Western Europe, North America, and Japan. The Second World—consisting of the Soviet Union, its allies, and other communist societies—was distinguished by a commitment to planned economic practices rather than reliance on market forces to determine the supply of and demand for goods and services. Today the states comprising the former Second World are commonly described as "countries in transition."

The term "Third World" carries Cold War baggage that makes it no longer useful. Today the terms Global North, which refers to what was previously known as the First World, and Global South, which refers to the rest of the world, are preferred. As always, placement of particular states within these categories is sometimes problematic. Many of the countries in transition, those formerly referred to as Second World, are particularly difficult to place. Generally, four dimensions distinguish the North and South: politics, technology, wealth, and demography.

States composing the Global North are democratic, technologically inventive, wealthy, and aging, as their societies tend toward zero population growth. Some states in the Global South share many of these characteristics, but none shares them all. Saudi Arabia is rich but not democratic; China is populous but only a fraction of its slow-growing population has recently become wealthy; India is democratic but burdened with an enormous and growing population; and Singapore is both wealthy and technologically innovative, with a comparatively modest population growth rate, but is not democratic. Beyond this are many states that are not democratic, technologically innovative, or wealthy, but who are experiencing rapid population growth that increasingly strains over-taxed social and ecological systems. These, the least developed of the less developed countries, are sometimes described today as the "Third World's Third World." Many, but not all, are in Africa, south of the Sahara.

The Global South is home to more than 80 percent of the world's people but commands less than 20 percent of its wealth. These disparities underlie the long festering "North-South conflict" dispute more than do political and technological differences. The contest between the wealthy North and the poor South has historically been a politics of mutual suspicion and struggle because of the fears and resentments that differences in status and unequal opportunities to economically compete naturally arouse.

Exercises: