GK Preimer 1

1. Introduction & insights

A global chess match is in play, but unlike other chess games, this one is being carried out on a wide range of playing fields –
and the stakes are unbelievably high. The players in this match are as diverse as the game itself; rising regional groups such as the EU, governments with large economies, international organizations such as the UN and NATO, plus many others
The moves in this game are as awesome as the players themselves; national pawns are sacrificed for international security,knights check and countercheck each other over control of the world’s resources, rooks vie for political influence, and bishops
scrap doctrine for global unity. The powerhouses of the world – the Kings and Queens who really pull the strings – continually shuffle and reshuffle the board, looking to leverage their supremacy in this globalization game.
It’s a perplexing contest; many of the players and issues are interconnected through treaties and alliances. At the same time,however, these players viciously compete with one another, often using and abusing the very alliances that enabled them to
cooperate.

2. Macro view of the world today

* As of June 2008, the world's population is close to 6.7 billion
* Asia accounts for over 60% of the world population with almost 3.8 billion people.
* China and India alone comprise 20% and 16% respectively.
* United Nations recognises 192 countries as its member nations
Major forms of government
* Democracy: A system of govt by which political sovereignty is retained by the people and either exercised directly by
citizens or through their elected representatives. Examples: India. USA
* Communist state: A form of govt in which the state operates under a one-party system and declares allegiance to Marxism-
Leninism or a derivative thereof. Communist Party is constitutionally guaranteed a dominant role in govt. Institutions of the state and of the Communist Party become intimately entwined. Ex-North Korea, Cuba, China.
* Theocracy: A form of government in which a 'god' or 'deity' is recognized as the supreme civil ruler. Despite having an
elected Parliament, Iran is a theocracy, since the elected president and legislature are constitutionally subject to the
supervision of offices reserved for Shia clerics. Example: Iran
* Monarchy: A form of govt in which an individual rules as head of state, often for life or until abdication. The monarch rules
as an autocrat, with absolute power over the state and govt—for example, the right to rule by decree, promulgate laws,
and impose punishments. Examples: Jordan Saudi Arabia
Major economic systems
* Capitalism: An economic system in which property is owned by either private individuals or a corporation.
* Communism: A socio-economic structure that promotes the establishment of a classless, stateless society based on
common ownership of the means of production.
* Mixed economy: An economic system that contains both private-owned and state-owned enterprises or a mix of market
economy and planned economy characteristics.

Major international organisations

United Nations
An international organization whose stated aims are to facilitate cooperation in international security, economic development,
social progress and human rights issues. Founded in 1945 to replace the League of Nations, to stop wars between nations and
to provide a platform for dialogue.

World Bank
The World Bank is one of the two Bretton Woods Institutions which were created in 1944 to rebuild a war-torn Europe after
World War II. Now the bank provides financial and technical assistance to developing countries for development programs with
the stated goal of reducing poverty.

International Monetary Fund
An international organization that oversees the global financial system by following the macroeconomic policies of its member
countries, in particular those with an impact on exchange rates and the balance of payments. It also offers financial and
technical assistance to its members, making it an international lender of last resort.

World Trade Organization
An international organization designed to supervise and liberalize international trade. Is responsible for negotiating and
implementing new trade agreements, and is in charge of policing member countries' adherence to all the WTO agreements

European Union
A political and economic community of twenty-seven member states, located in Europe.
Was established in 1993 by the Maastricht Treaty, adding new areas of policy to the existing European Community.
Major turning points of the 20th century
* First World War (1914-1918)
* Second World War (1939-1944)
* Fall of communism & the emergence of a new world order. (1991-The World (Europe) after WW2
After WW2, Europe changed greatly from the pre-world years. Some of the changes were political; others were economic. The biggest of the many political changes, was the separation of Eastern and Western Europe. Eastern Europe was pushing for a Communist-led government, while Western Europe wanted democracy spread throughout all countries. This was the fuel for the Cold War. A threat for a third World War was very high and the Soviet Union was prepared. They tried to bring in as many
allies as possible. All of these Communist allies signed the Warsaw Pact, so if any of the countries were invaded, their allies would join the war. The United States and Western Europe countered with a treaty called the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO). After WW2, the US and the Soviet Union squared off as superpowers. The Cold War grew stronger.
Another political barrier came up as Germany when West Germany became a democracy while East Germany remained a Communist-led government. The area where the two countries were divided was in the center of Berlin, the nations capital. A
wall that was taken down few years ago showed the true separation of not just communism against democracy, but also East vs. West, brother vs. brother.
The economic changes in Europe were just as significant as the political changes. Since the Soviet Union spent so much money in war technology and the space race, their economy took a severe hit for the worse. Even today, the Soviet Union (Russia), is
several years behind the U.S. in technological advancement. In Western Europe, the economy is much different from Russia’s.Because of the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe had the ability to turn factories back to producing like they had been
before the war. After an early reduction in the economy, Western Europe today has a very strong economy. One reason for this is the European Union, which enhances free trade. The cooperation among countries contributes to Western Europe’s strong
economy.

3. Fall of communism and the emergence of a new world order

3.1 The cold war

The Cold War was the period of conflict, tension and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies from the mid-1940s until the early 1990s. Throughout this period, the rivalry between the two superpowers
unfolded in multiple arenas, such as military coalitions; ideology; psychology; espionage; and military, industrial, and technological developments, which included the space race. In sports, rising tensions between the US and the USSR led to
boycotts of major events. The Cold War generated for both superpowers costly defence spending, a massive conventional and nuclear arms race, and many proxy wars.
While there was never a direct military engagement between the US and the Soviet Union, there was half a century of military buildup and political battles for support around the world, including significant involvement of allied and satellite nations in local "third party" wars. Although the US and the Soviet Union had been allied against the Axis powers, the two sides differed on how to reconstruct the postwar world even before the end of World War II.Over the following decades, the Cold War spread outside Europe to every region of the world, as the US sought the
"containment" of communism and forged numerous alliances to this end, particularly in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. There were repeated crises that threatened to escalate into world wars but never did, most notably the Berlin
Blockade (1948–49), the Korean War (1950–53), the Vietnam War (1959–1975), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), and the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–89). There were also periods when tension was reduced as both sides sought détente. Direct military
attacks on adversaries were deterred by the potential for mutual assured destruction using deliverable nuclear weapons.The Cold War drew to a close in the late 1980s following Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's summit conferences with United
States President Ronald Reagan, and Gorbachev's launching of perestroika and glasnost reform programs. After the end of the Cold War, both sides cut military expenditures dramatically and the arms race finally came to an end. Due to the severe
financial problems Russia was facing, the United States became the sole superpower in a unipolar world.In the specific sense of the Cold War referring to the post-World War II geopolitical tensions between the Soviet Union and the
United States, the term has been attributed to American financier and U.S. presidential advisor Bernard Baruch. The Cassell Companion to Quotations cites a speech Baruch gave in South Carolina, April 16, 1947, in which he said, "Let us not be
deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war". The Cassell Companion notes that the phrase was actually suggested to Baruch by his speechwriter, Herbert Bayard Swope, who had been using it privately since 1940. Columnist Walter Lippmann
also gave the term wide currency after his 1947 book titled Cold War.

3.2 What was the Iron Curtain?

The "Iron Curtain" was the symbolic, ideological, and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War, roughly 1945 to 1991. At both sides of the Iron Curtain, the states developed
their own international economic and military alliances, COMECON and the Warsaw Pact on the east side with the USSR as most important member, and the NATO and the European Community on the west side, with the United States as its most important member.
The Iron Curtain took physical shape in the shape of border defenses between the countries of the western and Eastern Europe, most notably the Berlin Wall, which served as a longtime symbol of the Iron Curtain altogether.Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels was the first to refer to an "Iron Curtain" coming down across Europe after World War II, in a manifesto he published in the German newspaper Das Reich in February 1945. The term was not widely used until March 5, 1946, when Winston Churchill popularized it in his address ‘Sinews of Peace’.

3.3 Division of Europe into rival blocks

Even before the defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945, the United States and the USSR had become divided over the political future of Poland. Stalin, whose forces had driven the Germans out of Poland in 1944 and 1945 and established a pro-
Communist provisional government there, believed that Soviet control of Poland was necessary for his country’s security. This met with opposition from the Allies, and it was not long before the quarrel had extended to the political future of other Eastern
European nations. The struggle over the fate of Eastern Europe thus constituted the first crucial phase of the Cold War. Yet during this period, which lasted from 1944 to 1946, both sides clung to the hope that their growing differences could be
surmounted and something of the spirit of their earlier wartime cooperation could be preserved. While the United States accused the USSR of seeking to expand Communism in Europe and Asia, the USSR viewed itself as the leader of history’s progressive forces and charged the United States with attempting to stamp out revolutionary activity
wherever it arose. In 1946 and 1947 the USSR helped bring Communist governments to power in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary,and Poland (Communists had gained control of Albania and Yugoslavia in 1944 and 1945). In 1947 United States president
Harry S. Truman issued the Truman Doctrine, which authorized U.S. aid to anti-Communist forces in Greece and Turkey. Later, this policy was expanded to justify support for any nation that the U.S. government considered to be threatened by Soviet
expansionism. Known as the containment doctrine, this policy, aimed at containing the spread of Communism around the world, was outlined in a famous 1947 Foreign Affairs article by American diplomat George F. Kennan. Containment soon became the official U.S. policy with regard to the USSR.
By 1948 neither side believed any longer in the possibility of preserving some level of partnership amidst the growing tension and competition. During this new and more intense phase of the Cold War, developments in and around postwar Germany
emerged as the core of the conflict. Following its defeat in World War II, Germany had been divided into separate British,French, American, and Soviet occupation zones. The city of Berlin, located in the Soviet zone, was also divided into four
administrative sectors. The occupying governments could not reach agreement on what the political and economic structure of postwar Germany should be, and in mid-1947 the United States and Britain decided to merge their separate administrative
zones. The two Western governments worried that to keep Germany fragmented indefinitely, particularly when the Soviet and Western occupation regimes were growing so far apart ideologically, could have negative economic consequences for the
Western sphere of responsibility. This concern echoed a larger fear that the economic problems of Western Europe—a result of the war's devastation—had left the region vulnerable to Soviet penetration through European Communist parties under
Moscow's control. To head off this danger, in the summer of 1947 the United States committed itself to a massive economic aid program designed to rebuild Western European economies. The program was called the Marshall Plan, after U.S. secretary of
state George C. Marshall.In June 1948 France merged its administrative zone with the joint British-American zone, thus laying the foundation for a West
German republic. Stalin and his lieutenants opposed the establishment of a West German state, fearing that it would be rearmed and welcomed into an American-led military alliance. In the summer of 1948 the Soviets responded to the Western
governments’ plans for West Germany by attempting to cut those governments off from their sectors in Berlin through a land blockade. In the first direct military confrontation between the USSR and the Western powers, the Western governments
organized a massive airlift of supplies to West Berlin, circumventing the Soviet blockade. After 11 months and thousands of flights, the Western powers succeeded in breaking the blockade.Meanwhile, in February 1948 Soviet-backed Communists in Czechoslovakia provoked a crisis that led to the formation of a new,Communist-dominated government. With this, all the countries of Eastern Europe were under Communist control, and the creation of the Soviet bloc was complete. The events of 1948 contributed to a growing conviction among political leaders in
both the United States and the USSR that the opposing power posed a broad and fundamental threat to their nation’s interests.The Berlin blockade and the spread of Communism in Europe led to negotiations between Western Europe, Canada, and the
United States that resulted in the North Atlantic Treaty, which was signed in April 1949, thereby establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Berlin crisis also accelerated the emergence of a state of West Germany, which was formally
established in May 1949. (The Communist republic of East Germany, comprising the remainder of German territory, was formally proclaimed in October of that year.) And finally, the Berlin confrontation prompted the Western powers to begin
thinking seriously about rearming their half of Germany, despite the divisiveness of this issue among West Europeans.The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 had a significant impact on the course of the Cold War. His successors, including Nikita
Khrushchev, who ultimately replaced Stalin as Soviet leader, sought to ease some of the rigidities of Soviet policy toward the West, but without resolving the core issue: a divided Germany at the heart of a divided Europe. The Western powers
responded cautiously but sympathetically to the softening of Soviet policy, and in the mid-1950s the USSR and the Western powers convened the first of several summit conferences in Geneva, Switzerland, to address the key issues of the Cold War.
These issues now included not only the problem of German reunification, but also the danger of surprise nuclear attack and, in the background, the momentarily quieted but still unresolved conflicts in Korea and Indochina. The 1955 Geneva Conference
achieved little progress on the central issues of Germany, Eastern Europe, and arms control. However, on the eve of the conference the two sides resolved the issue of Austria, which had been united with Germany during the war and divided into
American, British, French, and Soviet occupation zones in its aftermath. The signing of the State Treaty between Austria and the Allies established Austria’s neutrality, freed it of occupation forces, and reestablished the Austrian republic. This period also saw fundamental change in one critical realm: Both the United States and the USSR came to recognize that nuclear weapons had produced a revolution in military affairs—making war among the great powers, while still a possibility, no longer a sane
policy recourse.Meanwhile, the struggle over Europe continued. West Germany was recognized as an independent nation in 1955 and was allowed to rearm and join NATO. In response to this development, a group of Eastern European Communist nations led by the
USSR formed the Warsaw Pact. In the late 1950s Khrushchev launched a new series of crises over Berlin, and in 1961 the Soviet government built the Berlin Wall to prevent East Germans from fleeing to West Germany.
3.4 Cold War Classifications
Mirror images of the two Superpowers
Categories US (‘Us’) Soviet Union (‘Them’)

1.Universalist Free World Enslaved World
vision

2.Politics Democracy Totalitarianism

3.Political Capitalism Communism
economy

4.Theology Good Evil

5.Geography West East

3.5 Geopolitical reductionism

The terms First World, Second World, and Third World were used to divide the nations of Earth into three broad categories.The three terms did not arise simultaneously. After World War II, people began to speak of the NATO and Warsaw Pact countries as two major blocs, often using such terms as the "Western Bloc" and the "Eastern Bloc". The two "worlds" were not numbered. It was eventually pointed out that there were a great many countries that fit into neither category, and in 1952 French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the term "Third World" to describe this latter group; retroactively, the first two groups came to be known as the "First World" and "Second World".There were a number of countries that did not fit comfortably into this neat definition of partition, including Switzerland,Sweden, and the Republic of Ireland, who chose to be neutral. Finland was under the Soviet Union's sphere of influence but was not communist, nor was it a member of the Warsaw Pact. Yugoslavia adopted a policy of neutrality, and was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement. Austria was under the United States' sphere of influence, but in 1955, when the country became a fully independent republic, it did so under the condition that it remain neutral. Turkey and Greece, both of which joined NATO in 1952, were not predominantly in Western Europe. Spain did not join NATO until 1982, towards the end of the Cold War and after the death of the authoritarian dictator Francisco Franco. In recent years, as many "developing" countries have industrialized, the term Fourth World has been coined to refer to countries that remain predominantly agricultural or nomadic and lack industrial infrastructure. In contrast, countries that were previously considered developing countries and that now have a more developed economy, yet not fully developed, are grouped under the term Newly-industrialized countries or NIC. Some nations have developed their own classification scheme consisting of the "Third World" and the "Two-Thirds World". This system is similar to the former in that it also reflects economic status or behaviour. In terms of material resources, the "Third World" consumes one third, while the "Two-Thirds World" consumes two-thirds of the resources.