okay starting in the last Decades of the 20th century Europe essentially became globalized in its economy and society and I reckon we ought to talk about how that happened and what that means so if you're ready to get them brain cows milked let's get to it okay now globalization is a word that describes the increasing economic political and social interconnectedness of the world and as you know this phenomenon didn't begin during this period in terms of European history some iteration of globalization had been occurring since the beginning of this course with the first wave of imperialism but in the 20th and 21st centuries globalization became more widespread in the process by which it occurred was happening at a much greater speed than it ever had before and there are three reasons for this first was the proliferation of multinational corporations Now by definition a multinational corporation is an entity which is Incorporated in one country but manufactures and sells Goods in other countries and the architecture of these corporations is as follows the corporations employ knowledge workers in their own countries manufacture goods for sale in other countries and then sell those goods on a global market a good example of a multinational corporation is Nestle this company is headquartered in Switzerland purchases and manufactures their chocolate with low-wage work in West Africa and in some cases child and enslaved labor and sells their glorious treats on the world market now the second reason globalization occurred so rapidly in the late 20th century was the rise of international governing body here you can think about the European Union or the United Nations these bodies often enact policies that are made for a global community over policies that would benefit a single state and the third reason globalization occurred so rapidly in the 20th century was the rapid rise of communication and transportation Technologies and for that let's move on to the next point so new communication and transportation Technologies multiplied connections across time and space for example the telephone increasingly connected people in distant locations this kind of Technology also made migration and immigration more palatable since those who moved away could easily stay in contact with their families back home and during the 1930s the radio Rose to prominence and during the 1950s the television and the television especially democratized entertainment prior to this if people wanted to see moving pictures they went to the theater and in general because it was expensive this was an elite activity however with a decreasing cost of the television throughout the 50s and 60s more and more the average people could watch television programming in their homes but what does that have to do with globalization ux well especially in the beginning much of the programming came from the United States and I'll talk more about that in a moment then in the late 90s and early 2000s the rise of the Internet connected the world in a way that had never been seen before people could log on to the World Wide Web through those newfangled devices called a computer and the entire world was open to this meant that ideas from all over the world could influence people and with the rise of online retailers like amazon.com Commerce increased rapidly as well now as I say in about every video that all sounds really great right but there were some objectives to these new communication Technologies and in Europe one of the main gripes was that much of their entertainment was being imported from the United States this was done in the 1930s mainly through the export of American movies and then as the television was adopted in more and more homes through the 50s and the 60s this was done through television programs American Media producers sold their shows to European broadcasters for a fraction of what it would cost them to produce the programs on their own this seemed like a good thing like after all people really liked these shows so what's the problem the problem is that entertainment is not neutral every movie or television show is written according to the values that culture holds and so as Europeans were digesting American entertainment by the metric but low they were also metabolizing American values that in some cases were contradictory to their own so this tension grew between enthusiasm for new technology and criticism against this kind of American imperialism by entertainment okay now everything I've said so far has to do with communication Technologies but transportation Technologies were equally Innovative in the first half of the 20th century people mainly got around by riding trains starting in the 1930s Europeans began to adopt the automobile more and more by the end of the 20th century entire cities and suburbs and rural areas were completely remade into the image of the car what I mean is roads were now the primary way to get anywhere you needed to go with this kind of ease of Transportation migration took place more easily as well during this period we also saw the rise of green parties across Western and Central Europe who made it their aim to challenge the effects of increasing consumerism and its corresponding environmental degradation and toward the end of the 20th century they begin to challenge globalization we've already talked in this course about how the Industrial Revolution affected the environment which is to say it was nasty in those days unrestrained capitalism led to the pollution of the air the fouling of the water supplies and the severe strain on the Earth's natural resource and that reality Inc increased by a factor of a metric but load in the age of globalization by the 1970s it became apparent in Western and Eastern Europe that the globalizing effect of Commerce was taking its toll environmentally for example the Ryan River was polluted and stank worse than an elderly monkey's armpit also oil spills spoiled ecosystems and destroyed the natural beauty of Brittany and France and on and off and so as a result green parties arose whose goal was to get politicians elected who would enact policy to fix these problems now first green party candidates didn't gain much traction but eventually they did the first real success came from the German green party who ran on a platform of opposing nuclear energy and I became especially prominent after the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union which deposited untold amounts of radioactive material into the environment by the end of the 20th century every European state had its own version of a green party and they are still rallying against globalization policies that degrade the environment all right click here to keep reviewing for unit 9 of AP Europe and since that National exam is coming up click here to grab my AP Euro review pack which has everything you need to get a five on that exam not catch on the flip-flop heimler out