Introduction

If the world of the 1990s may well be classified by historians as another seminal sea change (a phrase you were introduced to in the previous Module), how is it viewed from a liberal perspective?  The New World Order of President George H.W. Bush didn't seem much different to realists.  To liberals, however, the phenomenal growth in regional and global NGOs and IGOs along with concerted effort by the international community to deal with a variety of issues and challenges suggests that collaborative behavior has replaced individual behavior, despite the unilateralism of the younger Bush administration and the Trump administration.  The emergence of a number of new democracies led Francis Fukuyama to suggest that this accelerated trend toward democracy made the post-WWII world of ideological competition "history."  As you will see in our exercise for this Module, such predictions were built on shaky grounds.

1. Status of Democracies Assignmentgo to https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2020/leaderless-struggle-democracy (Links to an external site.) and open the full Report pdf.  Examine the Report and use it to answer the  following: 
   
   1. what are the major conclusions at the beginning of the Report?
   2. looking at the gains/losses of the schematic, which years show the greatest gains and losses?  (keep this in mind for the next Module's assignment)
   3. contrast the placement of the United States during the Obama and Trump administrations.
   4. pick any of the 25 established democracies that are in decline and explain why they were judged to be in decline (excluding the United States and India).
   5. go to the interactive world map and determine which countries are the most free and why; which geographic region (i.e., North America, Middle East, sub-Sarahan Africa, etc.) is the least free and why.
2. Submit a 4 page (suggested) double-spaced, footnoted  (with bibliography) on the above topic.