The global transition from the 19th to the 20th century. Capitalist restructuring and global violence. A reading from the south The transitions of the XIX-XX and XX-XXI centuries

Abstract

Between 1890 and 1910 the international society experienced a radical transformation. It was a transition period characterized by the contradictions and the rivalries among the industrialized countries, with projections almost pregivers over the Afro-Asian and the Pacific societies, who were dominated by the colonial violence, and also over Latin America, were it was like a renewed theater of the European power competition and the rising domination of the United States of America in the economical and cultural aspects. Just about every debate that inspired the XX Century, in every field of the institutional, social, and scientific life arose over those years, also the systematization of the main problems that now days still oppress the human kind. A hundred years later the post cold war experience a similar confliction and uncertainly, living an intense transition, characterized by the feeling of revolutionary times. We found a historical structure that adjust and express in different ways, according to the develop of their material conditions and needs, but that still preserves the instabilities, fragilities and violence, conditions inherent to their historical nature. We get to know the results of those tensions in 1914-1918 and we fear for the ones that will follow the tensions of our days.