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The Globalized Modern World
After the Cold War, markets, container ships and the internet tied the world together as never before. Hundreds of millions of people rose out of extreme poverty, China became an economic superpower, and a phone in the pocket gave access to the knowledge of the world. The same connections also spread financial crises, pandemics and misinformation, and climate change became a problem that no country can solve alone.
One world market
THEME ONE
The end of the Soviet bloc and China's opening brought billions of people into the world market. The World Trade Organization was founded in 1995, China joined it in 2001, and the European Union created a single market and, from 1999, the euro. Container ships carried goods made in factories spread across several countries. The share of humanity living in extreme poverty fell from more than a third in 1990 to about a tenth before the pandemic.
The digital revolution
THEME TWO
In 1991 the World Wide Web, created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, opened to the public. Search engines, online shops, Wikipedia (2001) and social networks followed, and after 2007 the smartphone put the internet into billions of pockets. By the mid-2020s about two thirds of humanity was online. Generative artificial intelligence became a mass technology in the 2020s.
Shocks and conflicts
THEME THREE
The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States were followed by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2008 a crisis that began in American mortgage markets became the worst global recession since the 1930s. In 2011 uprisings shook the Arab world. The COVID-19 pandemic, declared in 2020, closed borders and economies, and Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 began the largest war in Europe since 1945.
Climate and the shared future
THEME FOUR
Burning coal, oil and gas has raised the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air to its highest level in hundreds of thousands of years. At the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 states agreed to act, and in the Paris Agreement of 2015 almost every country pledged to keep warming well below 2 °C. In 2024, the warmest year on record, the global average was for the first time about 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.
Periods
After the Cold War
1991 – 2001
New states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, wars in the former Yugoslavia, the European Union and the euro, the World Trade Organization and the spread of the internet.
Terror, growth and crisis
2001 – 2019
The attacks of 11 September and the wars that followed, the rapid rise of China and India, the smartphone, the financial crisis of 2008 and the Arab uprisings.
A new age of uncertainty
2020 – PRESENT
The COVID-19 pandemic, war in Europe, rising rivalry between great powers, record temperatures and the arrival of artificial intelligence in everyday life.
Key dates
- 1991The Soviet Union dissolves, and the World Wide Web opens to the public.
- 2001The attacks of 11 September, and China joins the World Trade Organization.
- 2008The global financial crisis.
- 2015The Paris Agreement on climate change.
- 2020The COVID-19 pandemic.
- 2022The world's population reaches 8 billion.
Questions and answers
What is globalization?
The growing connection of the world's economies, societies and cultures through trade, investment, migration, travel and communication. It is old - the Silk Road and the Age of Exploration were early forms of it - but since the 1990s it has become faster and deeper than ever before.
Why does this chapter have no end date?
Because we are living in it. Historians need distance to see where an age ends. It may later turn out that 2008, 2020 or some other year began a new period that we cannot yet name.