4 - The Economic Response to Globalization; Recovery and Growth; the Integration of Eastern and Western Europe

Summary

The New International Economic Environment: Technological Revolution

During the last decades of the twentieth century, a new chapter opened in world economic history: the robust new technological revolution, led by information and communication technologies. This was combined with a near-total internationalization of the world economy, or globalization. Internationalization had a long history in Europe, going back to the late nineteenth century and more directly to its reemergence after World War II after the backlash in the interwar decades. However, the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s became the real watershed for its breakthrough. Globalization emerged as a new policy that replaced colonialism for the leading economic powers, but it also had an objective economic base in the new technological and corporative-managerial revolution.

The communication and technological revolution that conquered the advanced world after 1980 like the British industrial revolution had 200 years before, has a history that is several decades long. Its beginning goes back to World War II, when the first mainframe computer, the British “Colossus,” started decoding German military communications at the beginning of 1944. The other most visible invention of the time, which had monstrous worldwide reverberations, was the atomic bomb, or, better put, the path-breaking use of nuclear energy.