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Furthermore, the new organization would address almost all questions of global governance through a comprehensive set of organizations whose functions extended from questions of collective security to economic and social development and even cultural cooperation.
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This would be a more comprehensive organization than the League of Nations that was narrowly based and did not have the U.S. and Russia agreed that a new organization called the United Nations would be established as the proper instrument of global governance. It may be useful to take a brief look at these dimensions to comprehend the nature of the competition in each domain.Īs the War was coming to a close, the victors including the U.S. Their cooperative interactions were minimal. These configurations that began to be referred to as “poles” were competitors and often adversaries along four dimensions: politics, security, economics, and ideology. What was meant by polarization? As WW II was coming to a close, the countries that had been fighting each other began to assemble, in part voluntarily and in part by coercion by the victorious powers, around two major countries that engaged in a multi-lateral competition with each other. The world or regions had been divided into competitive camps in earlier parts of history but the state of relations between those camps had not been described as polarization, suggesting that we were faced with a phenomenon that we had not witnessed before. The term continued to be employed after the war as long as the nature of those relations retained the basic characteristics that had initially come to define it. The concept of polarization was initially employed to describe the nature of relations that came to prevail between the Socialist and Western Blocs that emerged as the Second World War was coming to a close. Before offering judgments on whether we are headed toward a world order characterized by multi-polarity, it may be useful first to take a look at the concept of Cold War and the bipolarity it represented and then how this has changed after the Cold War came to an end. Instead, regional groupings and power centers began to emerge, leading to assertions that a multi-polar world was being born.
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Still, it was not in a position to become the leader of a single pole, determining what others would do in multifarious ways. would naturally play a major role in shaping what happens. As the most powerful country in the world, the U.S. Soon it became clear that the world would not head in the direction of becoming a uni-polar system. as to whether foreign and security policies that had been developed during the Cold War calling for substantial investments in the security domain should be continued under such widely altered conditions. Furthermore, the end of the Cold War stimulated domestic debate in the U.S. However, the collapse of the bipolar order led all actors to review how they related to the world, the extent they would accept the leadership of a single country to prevail in global politics and the kind of global order they aspired to build. In retrospect, such prognoses appear to have been based on continuing to use the Cold War analytical framework where the disappearance of one pole was predicted to lead to the prevalence of the other. Some initial evaluations suggested that the bipolar world was now being replaced by a unipolar system in which the U.S. Under these conditions, questions were raised regarding what kind of an international order would emerge to replace the bipolar order that had evolved after the Second World War. In this way, the USSR came to an end, to be replaced by the Russian Federation which experts predicted would be occupied with internal questions for many years to come. Second, the Soviet Union itself collapsed, with many of the republics constituting the union declaring their independence.
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First, the Warsaw Pact that had been established under the leadership of the Soviet Union collapsed, thereby ending the “perceived” threat of Soviet expansion toward Western Europe. Two major developments brought about the conclusion of the Cold War.
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Presumably, all countries would now gravitate toward competitive politics and market economies.
#Cold war phenomena definition free#
The competition between the free world characterized by politics of liberal democracy and economies driven by market forces and the socialist world run by authoritarian single-party regimes and state-operated economies had been concluded in favor of the former. When the Cold War ended, the world rejoiced that a problematic state of international relations had ended.
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