Post Cold War 3 / Current

New Challenges in the Twenty-first Century

The Prospect of Population Decline
Population continues to grow rapidly in many poor countries but not so in industrialized nations. In 2000, women in developed countries had 1.6 children on average, with the United States having 2.1 children per woman, Italy 1.2, Spain, Germany, and Russia slightly higher, and France, Poland, and Britain 1.6. Europe's population would decline and age, with the number of people of working age dropping by a third and almost half of the population being over sixty. Social security taxes will need to be greatly raised to provide pensions and health care for seniors. The population decline is due to high unemployment rates on young people and women’s rejection of motherhood and parenting. By 2000, 30% of German women born in 1965 were childless, whereas 90% would have had children in earlier generations. The main reason is that careers and the quest for gender equality lowered the birthrate. Many women postponed the birth of their first child into their thirties in order to finish their education and establish themselves in their careers. After the difficulties of the first child, moth-ers were more likely to postpone a second child or possibly forgo. By 2002, birthrates appeared to have stabilized, as opinion leaders, politicians, and the media started to press the case for more ba-bies and more support for families with children.

The Growth of Immigration
As western Europe’s population declined, migrants came in from Africa, Asia, and eastern Europe, with many legally and some illegally. Until 1973, western Europe drew heavily on North Africa and Turkey for manual laborers, as that was when unemployment stated to rise and governments stopped the inflow. Many foreign workers stayed and eventually brought their families over. The collapse of communism and the civil wars in Yugoslavia sent hundreds of thousands of refugees westward, with many other brutal conflicts increasing immigration. Illegal immigration into the European Union rose from 50,000 people in 1993 to 500,000 in 2003, compared to 300,000 unauthorized foreigners entering the United States each year. Many migrants applied for political asylum and refugee status but were denied. Illegal immigration soared because powerful criminal gangs smuggled people for big, low-risk profits. Russian-speaking gangs would smuggle humans across Russia, though the Balkans, and then land them on Italy, where they could travel to any member state of the United States by way of a 1998 rule. Many illegal immigrants were young women from eastern Europe, while some were kidnapped and forced to be prostitutes or worse. Many people did not like immigrants because they took jobs from the unemployed and undermined national unity. Immigration created ethnic conflicts, such as the French government’s decision to ban the wearing of headscarves by Muslim girls in public schools. Many people challenged the anti-immigrant campaign and its racist overtones by arguing that Europe needed newcomers to limit the impending population decline and provide valuable technical skills.

Promoting Human Rights
Because Europeans had a guilty conscience after limiting or expelling their foreigners, many intellec-tuals and opinion makers promoted domestic peace and human rights in those lands plagued by in-stability, violence, and oppression. European leaders and humanitarians believed it was their mission to require more global agreements and new international institutions to set moral standards and to regulate countries, political leaders, armies, corporations, and individuals. American leaders stressed the perseveration of U.S. freedom of action in world affairs, especially after George W. Bush was elected president in 2000. To stop civil wars and to prevent tyrannical governments from slaughtering their own people, the European Union joined with the United States to stop the killing in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia and to protect the rights of minorities. The European Union supported U.N.-sponsored conferences and treaties to verify the compliance of anti-germ warfare conventions, outlaw land mines, and establish a new international court to prosecute war criminals. When the death penalty was abolished in the European Union, Europeans condemned its continued use in other countries as inhumane and uncivilized. Rights for Europeans in their personal relations continued to expand, as well as other progressive laws in the Netherlands. Western Europeans pushed to extend their concept of social and economic rights to the world’s poor countries. Moderate social democrats in Europe often combined with human rights campaigners in 2001 to help African governments secure price cuts from the big international drug companies on the drugs needs to combat Africa’s AIDS crisis.

The al-Qaeda Attack of September 11, 2001
On September 11, 2001, two hijacked passenger planes from Boston crashed into and destroyed the World Trade Center towers in New York City, with a third plane crashing into the Pentagon and a fourth, possibly en route to the White House or the U.S. Capitol, crashing into a field in rural Pennsyl-vania. These attacks killed more than three thousand people from many countries and put the per-sonal safety of ordinary citizens at a high priority in the West. The United States, led by President George W. Bush, launched a military campaign to destroy Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network of terrorists and Afghanistan’s reactionary Muslim government, the Taliban. Using the world’s sympathy and a broad international coalition that included western Europe, Russia, and Pakistan, the United States joined with the faltering Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and by mid-October 2001, American special forces on the ground were directing air strikes that devastates Taliban and al-Qaeda troops, allowing for the Northern Alliance to take the offensive. In mid-November, the Taliban collapse, and Afghan opposition leaders and United Nations mediators worked out plans for a new broad-based government while American troops searched for bin Laden and his supporters. Terrorism dates back to the 1920s and peaked in the 1960s, when many nationalist movements used terrorism to achieve political independence and decolonization, as in Algeria, Cyprus, Ireland, Israel, and Yemen. The ter-rorists usually targeted police forces in order to break down colonial governments. In the Vietnam War era, some far-left supporters of the communist Vietcong, such as the American Weathermen, the German Red Army Faction, and the Italian Red Brigade, used terrorism in the forms of bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, and especially airplane hijackings, where more than one hundred each year occurred in the 1970s. The recent wave of terrorism has been a result of extreme Islamic fun-damentalism, as well as other religious faiths and religious sects. In Afghanistan’s fight against the Soviet Union, bin Laden and his supporters developed terrorist skills and a narrow-minded, fanatical Islamic puritanism, as well as a hatred of most existing Arab government, which they viewed as cor-rupt, un-Islamic, and unresponsive to the needs of ordinary Muslims. When Islamic extremists re-turned home from Afghanistan and began to organize, they were often jailed and blamed the United States for being the supporter and corrupter of existing Arab governments. This would lead to the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, which claimed nearly 200 lives.

The West Divided and War in Iraq
Afghanistan soon turned into quarreling and international crisis over the prospect of war with Iraq. As soon as he was elected in 2000, President Bush and his most influential advisers, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, began to consider how to overthrow Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and remake the Middle East. Many in the administration argued that a democratic, pro-American Iraq would transform the Middle East, make peace with Israel, provide easy access to the world’s second-largest oil reserves, and show small states the strength of the United States. American fears of renewed terrorism were used to charge Hussein with developing weapons of mass destruction in disregard of his promise to end all programs following the first war with Iraq in 1991. He had used chemical weapons in his war with Iran in the 1980s and against the Kurdish population of northern Iraq and that he could use them again against the United States and its allies. In August 2002, Cheney promised Iraqi exiles that the United States would depose Saddam against the United Nations charter that states that armed forces can only be used in self-defense. Large numbers of Americans shared doubts about the legality and wisdom of an American attack on Iraq and argued for a peaceful settlement of the Iraqi weapons crisis. Thus, the Bush administration reluctantly agreed to new Security Council resolutions requiring Iraq to accept the return of United Nations weapons inspectors and destroy any remaining prohibited weapons. Iraq accepted the inspectors, who were unable to find any weapons of mass destruction. The United States and Britain said Iraq was hiding prohibited weapons, moved armies to the Middle East, and lobbied for a new United Nations resolution authorizing immediate military action against Iraq. France, Russia, China, Germany, and other smaller states argued for continued weapons inspections. Western governments became divided, and the Security Council deadlocked and failed to act. In March 2003, the United States and Britain invaded Iraq from bases in Kuwait and quickly overwhelmed the Iraqi army. As Saddam’s dictatorship collapsed, chaos spread, and looters stripped government buildings and hospitals of everything from computers to faucets, American and British troops ignored these actions. Disbanding the Iraqi army alienated the population, worsened security, and created great unemployment, while the failure to seize stocks of weapons left Iraqi insurgents with guns and explosives for counterattacks, the allies found no weapons of mass destruction. In November 2003, the Bush administration decided to grant full sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government by July 2004 and hold national elections the following year. In late June 2004, the United States and Britain proclaimed a fully sovereign Iraqi government, headed by an Iraqi exile with close ties to the CIA and the Pentagon. American and British soldiers remained to support the new government, and fighting with Iraqi insurgents continued.

The Future in Perspective
Predictions about the future often change from pessimism to optimism in the great seesaw in the develop-ment of the Western world. In the late 1990s, the United States was not troubled by high unemployment or corporate downsizing but instead embraced a booming stock market, its military power, leadership in world affairs, and excellence in advanced technologies. In 2000, the mood shifted because the dot-com bubble burst and the U.S. economy slid into a recession in 2001. September 11 created economic problems and brought national grief and fear. Terrorist groups were feared to have biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

Individuals in Society: Kofi Annan
Kofi Annan is an African diplomat born in 1938 who headed the United Nations Security Council beginning in 1997. He attended Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he developed an idealistic commitment to international peace and understanding. In 1962, he became a budget officer with the World Health Organization. He then gradually worked his way up the ladder in the United Nations. In 1992, the United Nations secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali put Annan in change of all United Nations peacekeeping operations. With civil war enveloped a host of countries after the Cold War, Annan had to manage a great amount of peacekeeping efforts. Civilian and military peacekeepers working for the United Nations rose from ten thousand in 1992 to seventy thousand in 1995. Annan was selected secretary-general for a five-year term beginning in 1997 and began serving a second term in 2002. His first act as secretary-general was to reform the United Nations by reducing total spending but by refocusing the organization’s efforts on the welfare of the world’s poorest citizens. His Annan Doctrine argues that states must no longer use their rights of sovereignty as a shield for gross violations of human rights and that the global community has at times a duty to intervene. Annan helped lead the international attack on the HIV/AIDS epidemic.