Jackie Smith and Dawn Wiest. Social Movements in the World-System: The Politics of Crisis and Transformation.
New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2012. $39.95 (cloth)
Reviewed for Mobilizations by Chris Chase-Dunn and Michaela Curran, University of California – Riverside
Jackie Smith and Dawn Wiest trace the rise of antisystemic
social movements since World War II in their book Social Movements in the
World-System. The major aim of the book is to examine the proposition that
“global institutions – including states and international organizations – are
best seen as the products of contestation among a diverse array of global
actors (including social movements) competing in an arena that is defined by
these same institutions and the norms and cultural practices they generate
(14).” The authors argue that transnational antisystemic
mobilization[1]
has increased tremendously due to the emergence of greater opportunities for
and increased capacities of these movements. This book is an exciting
accomplishment for those who study the evolution of the modern world-system and
for those world citizens who are trying to help humanity avoid major disasters
and move toward a more humane world civilization.
In Chapter 1 the authors deploy a powerful
fusion of organizational and institutional analyses, social movement theory,
the world-systems perspective and the world polity approach. This synthetic theoretical formulation is used
to interpret the findings of the author’s study of social movement
organizations. They provide a world
historical perspective within which national societies, world regions and the
distinction between the Global North and the Global South are important
contexts for the actions of transnational movements.
In Chapter 2 Smith and Wiest
focus their research on the period since World War II. The creation and
emergence of the United Nations (UN) and a great wave of decolonization
movements in the Global South produced a tide of change that altered the
landscape of competition among states and transnational actors. Chapter 3
investigates world regions and the regionalization of world politics during and
after the Cold War. In Chapter 4 the authors show that the UN’s sponsorship of
global conferences encouraged the expansion and development of transnational
social movement organizations. Chapter 5 examines the paradoxical nature of
social movements in the global context by illustrating how global institutions
both allow social movement actors to gain political leverage and channel many
of them into single-issue and reformist activities. Finally, in Chapter 6,
Smith and Wiest chart a model for understanding the coevolution
of global institutions and social movements. They also explore the idea that the
contemporary situation should be understood as a world revolution.
Smith and Wiest
draw their data on social movement organizations from the Yearbook of
International Organizations. This yearbook has been published annually
since the early 1950s. Data from this source show that the number of
international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) has risen from fewer than
1,000 in the 1950s to almost 20,000 by 2003, supporting Smith and Wiest’s contention that global mobilization increased substantially
during the decades studied. The authors focus upon organizations that had specifically
designated movement goals. They exclude religious bodies and research
institutes. They also utilize qualitative data about transnational campaigns,
alliances, and international organizational dynamics in order to help understand
the behavior of social movement organizations. They admit that their data on
social movement organizations have limitations, but they provide convincing
justifications for their assumptions and they employ triangulation and coding
reliability checks in order to examine potential errors.
A Shift From
Guns to Norms?
The biggest idea in this book is
that the deterritorialization of sovereignty that has
been a consequence of neoliberal globalization has weakened the role of force
and coercion in world politics and has strengthened the importance of a complex
emerging and contested global moral order and arena of civil world politics. Smith and Wiest say
“The opportunities and capacities for transnational antisystemic
mobilization have, we argue, increased significantly. In addition, the primary
bases of power and authority have shifted from coercion and territorial
sovereignty to normative claims based on universal rights.” (14). In support of
these contentions they show that international governmental organizations (the
U.N. and regional international organizations) have made substantial efforts to
incorporate international non-governmental organizations and social movement
organizations ( INGOs and SMOs) into global and regional political
participation. They contend that these changes have increased the opportunities
for oppositional (antisystemic and counter-hegemonic[2])
forces to play an important role in world politics and to challenge the rule of
the powers-that-be. It is also claimed that international law has become more
important in recent decades. They contend that Susan Olzak’s
(2006) finding that sub-national ethnic movements have mainly adopted a human
rights discourse rather than a nationalist vocabulary supports their claim that
there has been shift toward greater normative regulation based human rights. And
Smith and Wiest find that the percentage of
transnational social movement organizations with ties to international
governmental organizations (e.g. the UN) has decreased over time, which they
interpret as supporting the idea that an emerging global moral order is
increasing its influence over world events and that social movements have
heeded the warnings of the autonomists that involvement with, and dependence on
national states, is a hopeless cul de sac that prevents the emergence of a new politics.
The evidence in favor of the
increasing influence of transnational social movements is convincing. But the idea
that military power is less important than it was during the Cold War may be an
illusion. Rather there is a single superpower (the United States) with an
overwhelming military advantage over all potential challengers. This results in
fewer interstate wars but should not be seen as an indicator of the declining
relevance of military power. The
contention that an emergent global human rights moral order is now a more
important regulatory force in world politics than is military power is also implicit
in the neo-functionalist world polity approach (except that it is not seen as a
recent development) and in the international regime school of international
relations.
Smith and Wiest
do not discuss how market and financial forces and global private corporations
fit in with, or contradict, the idea of the growing importance of a global
moral order. Most of the literature
about deterritorialization points to global
marketization and the rising power of capitalist firms as the main factors that
are compromising the power of national states in the age of neoliberal
globalizations. Markets and money work well to coordinate the actions of
complex economies and crosscultural interactions
precisely because they do not require much agreement about morality (Chase-Dunn
1998: Chapter 5). One can readily agree that an emergent global moral order is
becoming more important, and that this is a significant opportunity for
transnational social movements. But the idea that normative regulation has
already become more important than military regulation may be
wishful thinking that obstructs a true comprehension of the nature of the
contemporary global system and that could also be a grave mistake for the cause
of global democratization. That said, Social Movements in the World-System is a great
work that takes the analysis of the evolution of world politics to new heights.
It should be closely read and debated.
References
Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence K.
Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1989 Antisystemic
Movements. London: Verso.
Chase-Dunn,
Christopher 1998 Chapter 5, “World culture, normative integration and community”
in Global Formation: Structures of the World
Economy Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield
Olzak, Susan 2006 The Global Dynamics of Racial and Ethnic Mobilization. Stanford:
Stanford University
Press.
Wallerstein, Immanuel 1990 “Antisystemic
movements: history and dilemmas” in Transforming the
Revolution edited by Samir Amin,
Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder
Frank and Immanuel
Wallerstein. New York:
Monthly Review Press.
[1] Smith and Wiest
define antisystemic as follows: ‘“Antisystemic
movements” include a diverse “family of movements” working to advance greater
democracy and equality (Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein 1989). According to Wallerstein, “to be antisystemic
is to argue that neither liberty nor equality is possible under the existing
system and that both are possible only in a transformed world” (1990:36).
[ 10].’
[2]
“Counter-hegemonic movements are those oriented toward challenging the
leadership of the dominant state actor in the world-system, which since the mid-twentieth
century has been the United States.
These movements are a subset of the larger collection of antisystemic movements …”.