Global apartheid is a term used to mean the worldwide control of resources, the economy, and government by an ethnic minority. The term comes from apartheid, a governmental system that ruled South Africa in which the Afrikaners, or "whites", controlled most of the resources and where non-whites were denied access to these resources. Apartheid or 'separate development' was introduced by the National Party after the 1948 election to protect European interests and identity by enforcing separation between the 'races'. The term is often used to describe the gap between whites and nonwhites, and global socioeconomic inequality, the existence of which has been proven by statistics. As in South Africa, there is a hierarchy of group rights in the world: