The World-System(s)
Dmytro
Khutkyy and Christopher Chase-Dunn
Institute
for Research on World-Systems,
University
of California Riverside
Forthcoming in William Outhwaite and Stephen Turner (eds) Sage
Handbook on Political Sociology
v. 9-20-16 7634 words
This is IROWS Working Paper #112
available at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows112/irows112.htm
The
world-systems perspective is an integral social science approach that advocates
the study of long-term, large-scale historical systems in their totality. Its
evolutionary version includes comparisons between the modern Europe-centered
system of the last six centuries with earlier regional whole interpolity
networks. Relevant evidence comes from archaeology, ethnography and historical
documents as well as demographic and economic estimates. Research by
anthropologists, political scientists, historians, ecologists, geographers,
economists and sociologists is often germane to studies of whole interaction
systems. The general theoretical approach rests on institutional materialism
with roots in the works of Marx and Weber (Chase-Dunn and Hall 2000).
Immanuel
Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank and
Giovanni Arrighi were the originators of the
world-system perspective in the 1960s and the 1970s (Amin 1980a; Frank 1966,
1967,1969; Arrighi 2010[1994]; Wallerstein 2011a[1974]).
They focused primarily on the modern world-system that had emerged with
European predominance. Wallerstein (2000: 74) enounces:
we take the defining
characteristic of a social system to be the existence within it of a division
of labor, such that the various sectors or areas are dependent upon economic
exchange with others for the smooth and continuous provisioning of the needs of
the area.
In
such a formulation human social systems are clusters of social life with
recurrent social relations implying an established structure of interdependent
parts. In complexity science terms this approach emphasizes the primacy of properties
of the system as a whole over its components. Wallerstein’ s approach employs a
typology of world-systems as follows: a mini-system is an entity with a
complete division of labor and a single cultural framework; a world-economy is
a unit with a single division of labor and multiple cultural and political
entities; a world-empire is a division of labor with a single political authority
(Wallerstein 2000: 75). Then, the modern global system is a world-economy with
multiple sovereign states linked into a single economic division of labor. The
“world” idea refers to a whole self-sufficient entity, which is not necessarily
Earth-wide. In the past there were whole regional world-systems.
The
comparative evolutionary[1]
world-systems perspective emerged when some of the world-system scholars became
interested in the long-term continuities as well as the qualitative
transformations in the logic of development that only become evident when the
modern world-system is compared with earlier world-systems (Frank and Gills
1993; Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997).
The
comparative and evolutionary world-systems perspective is a strategy that
focuses on whole interpolity systems (world-systems) rather than single
polities; its main insight is that important interaction networks (trade,
information flows, alliances, and fighting) have woven polities together since
the beginning of human sociocultural evolution (Chase-Dunn and Khutkyy 2016).
World-systems
are defined as whole systems of interacting polities and settlements.[2]
Systemness here means that these polities and
settlements are interacting with one another in important ways – such
interactions are two-way, necessary, structured, regularized and reproductive. These
interactions impact human life and affect the resulting social continuity or
social change.
Systemic
Spatial Boundaries
Social
groups are connected by information flows, luxury goods exchanges, bulk goods
provisioning and trade, and political-military interactions. These interactions
form networks that have different spatial scales, especially in older and
smaller regional world-systems. In order to spatially bound whole interpolity
interaction networks it is necessary to adopt a “place-centric” approach. This
is because nearly all human polities interact with their immediate neighbors,
and so if we count all indirect connections there has been a single global
network since the humans migrated to all the continents. But such a diffuse
global network is not really a single system because the consequences of interactions
dissipate with distance. So it is necessary to focus on a single locale and to
ask what is the world-system of which this locale is a part?
Bulk
goods such as everyday foods and building materials tend to have been mostly obtained
locally. Households and local kin groups provided most of the food, but feasts
were occasionally held in which neighboring villages or more distant allies
were invited to partake. The bulk goods provisioning network fell off quickly
with distance. Nearly all autonomous polities engage in warfare and military
alliances with other polities and so there is an interpolity[3]
warfare/alliance web that Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) call the
political/military network (PMN). This a network of fighting and allying
polities that is analogous to the contemporary international system of states
except that the polities may be bands, tribes, or chiefdoms as well as states
and empires. The political/military network tends to be larger than the bulk
goods network, as illustrated in Figure 1. An even larger network is based on
the exchange of prestige (luxury) goods. Wallerstein claimed that luxury goods,
which he called “preciosities” were not systemic and so they were exchanged
between a world-system and its “external arena” (other world-systems). But many
anthropologists contend that there have been prestige goods systems in which
local social hierarchies are constructed around the monopoly that elites have
over the importation of exotic goods that are required for important social
rituals such as marriage. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) also posit the existence
of a large information or communications network that can have systemic
importance in some world-systems (see Figure 1).
Figure
1: The spatial boundaries of interaction networks
These different types of interaction may also
differ with regard to their importance for the reproduction or change in local
social structures. The bulk goods and political/military networks are important
in all systems, but the prestige and information networks are typically less
important and may be not be systemic in some regions. The nature of these interactions
may also differ across systems. Bulk goods may be obtained through sharing and
reciprocity in small-scale world-systems, whereas in larger systems they may be
mainly obtained as purchased commodities. Prestige goods systems may be of the
kind mentioned above in which these goods serve as a mechanism for rewarding
subalterns, but they may also operate as storable forms of wealth that can be
used during times of shortage to obtain food from neighboring polities (Chase-Dunn
and Mann 1998).
Long-distance
trade initially involved luxury goods because they are valuable enough to move
long distances. At the beginning of the first millennium the Silk Road
connected states and empires in China, South-East Asia, India, Central Asia,
Western Asia, North Africa and Europe. Moreover, some states and empires were
organically linked to major trade routes – like Sogdiana, Turgis
Kaghanate, Arab Empire and the Byzantine Empire
(Beckwith 2009). At first, long-distance trade was small scale, monopolized,
and extremely profitable. Major wars were caused by efforts to control key
trade routes. The Crusades of the eleventh-thirteenth centuries CE had a latent
economic goal of seizing Palestinian cities in order to raise the Moslem blockade
of the Silk Road trade. The Portuguese circumnavigation of Africa was financed
by Genoese merchants who desired an alternative route to Southeast Asian spices
in order to compete with Venice.
Immanuel Wallerstein's (1974) definition of the
spatial boundaries of a world‑system focused on links in an
interdependent network of the
exchange of "fundamental commodities," by which he meant food and other necessities of everyday life (here called bulk
goods). He excluded the exchange of "preciosities" (luxuries)
that were alleged to not have important consequences for the exchanging parties
or their societies. Wallerstein also emphasized the importance of mode of
production (capitalism) as a feature of a whole world-system that could be used
to distinguish between the modern Europe-centered system and the Ottoman
Empire. And he used the idea of a core/periphery division of labor to
distinguish between “external arenas” and the periphery within the modern
system (Wallerstein 2011[1974]).
Some social scientists have claimed that there
has been a single global world system extending back for thousands of years
(e.g. Modelski 2003; Lenski 2005). Others focus exclusively on only one of the systems that
eventually incorporated all the others into a global system (Frank and Gills
1993). The first of these positions is misleading because it does not concern
itself with the strength of cultural, political and economic systemness across space. The second position is
impoverished by its failure to seize the opportunity to compare what were
separate regional world-systems with one another. Frank and Gills (1993) focused on the 5000-year history of what they
saw as a system with great continuities that began with the rise of cities and
states in Mesopotamia. They traced the expansion of this system and noted that it
did not include the Americas before 1492 CE. They claimed that this system that
began in Mesopotamia already displayed a “capital-imperial” mode of
accumulation[4] and that this mode was
continuous until the present, and so there was no “transition to capitalism”
that occurred with the rise of the West. They also emphasized the centrality of
China in the Eurasian world-system. But they failed to compare the expanding
system they were studying with other world-systems that existed outside it.
The
most explicit and detailed approach to specifying systemic spatial boundaries
in world history has been developed by David Wilkinson, a political scientist
who focuses on networks of fighting and allying states (what Chase-Dunn and
Hall call political/military networks (or PMNs). Wilkinson has mastered the
historical literature on warfare and alliance-making in order to determine the
times and places in which that interpolity network that emerged in Mesopotamia
became systemically linked with other areas (see Figure 2).
Figure
2: Chronograph of the spatial boundaries of political/military networks (PMNs)
showing the expansion of what David Wilkinson (1987) calls “Central
Civilization”
Core/Periphery
Hierarchies
Wallerstein’s
definition of a world-system as a division of labor has in mind a hierarchical division of labor in which
some polities exploit or dominate others. In world-systems parlance this kind
of structure is often called a core/periphery hierarchy in which core, peripheral
and semiperipheral polities are in systemic and asymmetric (hierarchical) interaction
with one another.
Figure
3: A core/periphery hierarchy
Core/periphery
relations are one of the most important foci of world-systems analysis (see
Figure 3.[5]
Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) took the position that world-systems could exist in
the absence of core/periphery relations. Chase-Dunn and Mann (1998) studied
such a system in precontact Northern California but
it did not fit Wallerstein’s definition of a “mini-system” (single culture and
a division of labor) because the interacting (trading, allying and fighting)
polities spoke very different languages and had different cultures. This was a
small-scale world-system composed of sedentary foragers (hunter-gatherers) in
which there was little or no interpolity exploitation or domination. Core/periphery
hierarchies emerged and became institutionalized as some polities invented
methods for extracting resources from, and dominating, distant other polities.
The question of the spatial scale of interaction discussed above is prior to
the issue of core/periphery relations. Unconnected polities cannot have
core/periphery relations with one another.
The
first cities and states emerged in Mesopotamia (a region in which chiefdoms and
irrigated agriculture already existed) around 3,000 BCE. Uruk
was the first of these theocracies, and similar city-states soon emerged on the
floodplain of the Tigris and the Euphrates to form an intercity-state system of
allying and war-making states that were also interacting with adjacent
horticultural chiefdoms and nomadic pastoralists.
After a period of several centuries in which
hegemonic city-states rose and fell, Sargon’s Akkadian Empire conquered all the
Mesopotamian city-states as well some adjacent areas to form the first conquest
empire. This pattern of rise and fall of the largest settlements and polities
was repeated in several world regions with some interesting and important
differences: Egypt, the Indus River valley, the valley of the Huáng Hé (Yellow) River, the Andes, and Mesoamerica.
These are important instances of parallel sociocultural evolution in which
similar social structures and institutions emerged under similar conditions in
areas that were unconnected or only weakly connected with one another. This,
and the independent emergence of horticulture in eight world regions, is strong
evidence in favor of the existence of sociocultural evolution.[6]
There
were long-term upward trends in the sizes of largest cities and largest polities
that corresponded with the increasing complexity and hierarchy of human
polities. These long-term trends in spatial scale and complexity of have been
constituted by upsweeps – events in which the sizes of cities and polities
increased significantly over what they had been in the past (Inoue et al 2012; Inoue et al 2015). A study of twenty-one upsweeps in the territorial
sizes of states and empires in five world regions since the Bronze Age found
that to thirteen of them involved the actions of non-core polities, mostly
semiperipheral marcher states ((see also Inoue et al 2016). This is strong evidence for the importance of
interpolity competition in processes of state expansion. And it demonstrates that core/periphery
relations need to be taken into account in explanations of sociocultural
evolution.
Figure 4 does not depict what has happened in
any single regional system but rather what has happened when the totality of
all the systems are considered.
Figure
4: The rise-and-fall polities with occasional upward sweeps in polity size and
complexity
The
Modern World-System and Definitions of Capitalism
Fernand
Braudel (1992) performed an encompassing study of
material life in medieval Europe that portrayed the links between simple household
and village production (the first level of the local economy) with market exchange
(the second level of economy), manufacturing, long-distance trade, banking, and
monopolies (the third level of economy) marking the last level as the realm of
capitalist accumulation. Braudel noted that market
exchange is usually beneficial for all parties and is substantially fair. He
contrasts this with capitalist accumulation which is usually based on unequal
exchange, exploitation and monopolization that employs military, political,
religious, and ideological means to extract surplus. Among the many definitions
of capitalism, one of the most laconic is that capitalism is a system that is
organized around the endless accumulation of capital (Arrighi
2010[1994]: 33). Of course, there can be different sources of capital
accumulation. Profits can be made from long-distance trade, banking, agricultural
or industrial production or services. This provides capitalism with its
outstanding flexibility (Arrighi 2010[1994]: 5). In
modern times profitable commercial deployment of new leading technologies
(alternative energy, biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, artificial
intelligence, cloud computing etc.) endow both corporations and states with
considerable advantages.
A
longer list of capitalism’s defining characteristics should include: (1)
generalized commodity production in which the “fictitious commodities” of land,
labor, and wealth are substantially commodified, (2) ownership and/or control
of the means of production, exercised by individuals, organizations and states,
(3) accumulation of capital based on a mix of competitive production of
commodities and political-military power, (4) exploitation of commodified
labor, and (5) a combination of class exploitation and core/periphery exploitation
(Chase-Dunn 1998: 43).
The
world-systems perspective views capitalism as a logic of development that
combines Marx’s definition of capital accumulation based on wage labor with an
equally necessary component of accumulation based on coerced labor that occurs
in the non-core. It is emphasized that capitalist slavery and capitalist
serfdom were very important to the development of the capitalist world-system
and that extra-economic coercion remains a significant aspect of even the 21st
century capitalism.
Capitalism
first became a predominant logic of accumulation in a whole world-system six hundred
years ago, when Genoa and Portugal combined forces to rewire the emerging
Europe-centered world-system (Arrighi 2010[1994]). And then in the seventeenth century the United
Provinces of the Netherlands rose as a fore-reaching capitalist state that
combined features of earlier city-states with a federal structure that supported
the emergence of joint stock companies, a stock exchange and a colonial empire
built around profit-taking rather than taxation (Wallerstein 2000).
A
capitalist state is one in which those gaining most of their wealth from
commodity production and market trade hold predominant control over the state
apparatus. Capitalist city-states had existed since the Bronze Age, but they
were usually located in the semiperiphery of larger world-systems in which
tributary states (that used state power itself as the main institutional basis
of accumulation) were predominant. The rise of the capitalist city-states of
Italy and then the capitalist nation-state of the Dutch signified a move from
the semiperiphery to the core and the rise of a world-system in which
capitalism was increasingly becoming the predominant mode of accumulation.
But
even in the capitalist world-system economic agents still rely on states to
promote their interests by military and political means and to deal with social
unrest. At the same time, the existence of multiple competing states – the
international system – provides maneuvering space for capitalists who can
bargain better conditions for profit making by pitting competing states against
one another. This is why many capitalists are wary of the emergence of a world
state (Chase-Dunn 1998).
New
lead industries and generative sectors have played important roles in the
unequal distribution of surplus within different parts of the modern
world-economy (Modelski and Thompson 1996; Bunker and
Ciccantell 2005). The emergence of new technologies
and sectors allows those who control them to earn technological rents because
they hold a monopoly until these innovations spread to the competitive sector. The
large accumulators flexibly move their capital to new leading industries in new
regions, creating quasi-monopolies that facilitate capitalist accumulation
(Wallerstein 2004: 27). But there is also an important degree of uneven
development in the competition among core states and the emergence of
challengers from the none-core zones.
An
important debate about the nature of socialist states occurred among political
sociologists in the 1970s. Albert Szymanski (1979) claimed that "state
socialism" did exist in the Soviet Union and that the existing socialist
states constituted a separate socialist world-system. On the other hand, Tony Cliff (1974) contended that the Soviet
political economy was “state capitalism" while Paul Sweezy
and Charles Bettelheim (1975) argued that that the Soviet Union and China were
transitional forms between socialism and capitalism. Alternatively, Christopher
Chase-Dunn (1980) claimed that the existing socialist states in which communist
parties held state power had become functional parts of the larger capitalist
world-economy that played an important supportive role in the reproduction of the
global system. He argued that the semiperipheral Soviet Union had mobilized
autarchic national development, industrializing the national economy and
attempting to be upwardly mobile within the global system. Chase-Dunn contended
that this was a version of semiperipheral development not entirely dissimilar
to the developmental path that had been taken by earlier semiperipheral
challengers. But did the communist states constitute a separate socialist
world-system as argued by Szymanski? Indeed, there had been a substantial political-economic
interaction within the communist bloc and relatively autonomous centrally
planned industrialization. But the heavy geopolitical and military competition
within the global system of states was an important constraint on the Soviet
efforts to construct socialism, and in the end it was the huge expenditures on
arms at the expense of consumer goods that brought the Soviet regime down.
Despite
a significant cooperation within the bloc, socialist states were affected by
global geopolitics and their economies were influenced by the world market.
They remained functional parts of the global capitalist system. The Yalta
agreements after World War II cemented the post-war borders and implied
ideological condemnation, so the struggle between the so-called Communist and
Free Worlds permitted a tight internal control within each camp (Wallerstein
1992). In 1970s and the 1980s scholars observed that the socialist states were
becoming reintegrated into the capitalist world economy by growing East-West
trade and efforts to keep up with the West with regard to consumer products (Derluguian 2005, Frank 1980). The these trends were
subsequently confirmed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the entrance of the
Eastern European states into the European Union and NATO, Chinese neoliberal
reforms, as well as diplomatic and touristic openings.
Some
have claimed that the world-system perspective overemphasizes political economy
and structure over agency. Wallerstein has responded to this criticism by
focusing his most recent work on “geoculture”, by
which he means the evolution of the political ideology of liberalism in the 19th
century (Wallerstein 2011b). Arrighi, Hopkins and
Wallerstein (2011[1989]) have also focused on “world revolutions” –
constellations of rebellions and transnational social movements – that have
driven the evolution of global governance institutions for centuries.
World-System
Structures
Fernand
Braudel viewed the ascendance of world cities as
constitutive centers of capitalist world-economies (1992: 26-35). Later, Saskia Sassen (2000: 1-4) explicated the interconnectedness and
hierarchy of global cities, and their central role in the contemporary world
economy. They serve as central locations for international transactions – containers
of industry and physical infrastructure and highly concentrated business
districts and banking centers).
The
political dimension of the modern world-system has been constituted as a system
of states are connected by trade, alliances and completion within a coherent
interstate system. The interstate system is composed of unequally powerful
nation states that compete for resources by supporting profitable commodity
production and by engaging in geopolitical and military competition (Chase-Dunn
1998: 49). Nevertheless geopolitics is
not just an anarchic competition for power.
A semblance of global order has been provided by the sequential rise and
fall of hegemonic core powers. This governance by hegemony and continues to be
the strongest institutional element in the contemporary world-system though it
has become imbricated within a dense matric of international organizations.
Hegemony
is one of the central concepts of the world-system perspective. Chase-Dunn (1998:50) explicates the idea of
the hegemonic sequence as follows “The hegemonic sequence… refers to a
fluctuation of hegemony versus multicentricity in the
distribution of military power and economic competitive advantage in production
among core states. ” Hegemony in the interstate system occurs during a time period, “in which the ongoing rivalry
between the so-called "great powers" is so unbalanced that one power
can largely impose its rules and its wishes… in the economic, political,
military, diplomatic, and even cultural arenas” (Wallerstein 2000: 255). While
Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony refers to ideological class domination
within national societies, Immanuel Wallerstein’s concept of hegemony refers to
the concentration of power in the world-system. According to Wallerstein, the
United Provinces of the Netherlands was the first hegemon during the 17th
century, and it was followed by the United Kingdom of Great Britain in the 19th
century which was followed by the United States of America in the 20th
century. [7]
According to Immanuel Wallerstein, hegemony is based on advantages in three
critical economic domains: agro-industrial, commercial, and financial (2000:
256). For instance, Great Britain first intensified its agricultural
production, then developed its industry, followed by extensive overseas trade
and financial operations, establishing pound sterling as world money, dominated
militarily, and only later enjoyed language, educational, tourist and other
cultural benefits. Elaborating on Wallerstein’s conception of hegemony, we
would suggest a more comprehensive list of its aspects: technological-economic
(technological, production, commercial, and financial), military-political
(military, political, and diplomatic), socio-cultural (institutional,
normative, and cultural).
Both
Wallerstein and Arrighi note that each hegemony (or
what Arrighi calls “systemic cycles of accumulation”)
develops in a sequence of similar stages. The first stage is based on the successful
production and export of consumer goods. The second stage is based on capital
goods. And the third stage is based on the advantages that the hegemon has
accrued as a center of global trade and finance. Financial services and control
of world money are the key to the last stage. As leading technologies spread
out, production and other economic advantages are lost. Eventually military
capability is reduced as well as remaining socio-cultural benefits. According
to Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver (1999: 29, the
hegemonic crisis is marked by an increase of competition, social conflicts and
the emergence of systemic chaos. States and elites group around the contenders
for a new round of hegemony. The system systems heads back into an inter-regnum
in which interimperial rivalry heightens the probably
of world war (Bornschier and Chase-Dunn 2012; Klare 2016).
The
Modern Core/Periphery Hierarchy
Based
on historical studies of medieval Europe Fernand Braudel
outlined a pattern of the concentration of wealth and resources in particular
sites of accumulation at the expense of other regions (1992: 35-38). As we have
said, a fundamental organizing principle of the modern world-system is the
structural hierarchy composed of the core, the semiperiphery and the periphery.
Core areas specialize in core production – relatively capital intensive
production utilizing skilled, high wage labor. Peripheral areas contain mostly
peripheral production – labor intensive, low wage and unskilled labor (Chase-Dunn
1998: 49). The core/periphery relationship was brought into existence by extraeconomic plunder, conquest, and colonialism, and is
sustained by the normal operation of political-military and economic
competition in the capitalist world-economy (Chase-Dunn 1998: 39). Core
production is controlled by quasi-monopolies and is thus more profitable,
whereas peripheral production is truly competitive and hence less profitable. In
the process of global trade monopolized products from the core are in a
stronger position than competitive products from periphery. This results in a
flow of surplus-value from the periphery to the core – unequal exchange
(Wallerstein 2004: 28).
The
semiperiphery is characterized by a rough balance of core and peripheral
production. The semiperiphery mediates the surplus extraction from periphery to
the core, and serves as a buffer zone between the two hierarchical components
of the world-system, providing an ideological fig leaf by holding out the
possibility of “development” for the non-core.
Salvatore
Babones (2005) has conducted a vivid quantitative
estimation of the structural positions of nation-states in the modern
world-system. Applying GDP per capita measurements to the 1975-2002 cross
national data panel, he concluded that 25 countries (33.8%) were organic to the
core, 14 counties (18.1%) – were organic to the semiperiphery, and 35 countries
(48.1%) – were organic to the periphery. Eighteen countries (24.3%)
demonstrated inter-zonal mobility, but exactly half of them moved downward and half
moved upward. The main finding is that the three zones are strikingly stable
over time (see Figure 5).
Figure
5: The contemporary global core/periphery hierarchy
The
“global capitalism” school has emphasized the interconnectedness of elites into
a global network (Carroll 2010, Robinson
2014). Leslie Sklair (1995: 71) argues that there is
a transnational capitalist class comprised of corporate executives, state
bureaucrats, neoliberal politicians and professionals from many countries. William
Robinson (2014: 8) explains the mechanisms by which the transnational
capitalist class can influence governments – competition among national states
to attract transnationally mobile capital provides structural power of
capitalists over states. Robinson also theorizes an emerging global class
structure in which transnationalized segments of
different classes exist in within countries in the emerging global society (see
Figure 6). And he contends that a transnational state has emerged in which
existing state structures act as agents of the transnational capitalist class.
The world-system scholars have noted that there
has long been a global class structure in the sense of objective class
membership. Samir Amin (1980b) analyzed the global class structure prior to the
emergence of the global capitalism school. Guy Standing’s designation of the
emergence of a
global precariat acknowledges that the class situation of most workers in the non-core has always been precarious (Standing 2011).
Figure 6: The global class structure with transnational
segments (based on Robinson 2014).
There
has been a great debate among social scientists regarding trends in global
wealth and income inequality. Many contend that, due to the rising household
incomes in China and India, global inequality has decreased, while others contend
that global economic inequality has increased during recent decades. Both within-county and between-country inequality trends
need to be taken into account in order to know the true overall trend in income
distribution for the whole population of the Earth. And there are difficult
issues regarding the conversion of national currencies into a single global
metric (usually U.S. dollars). A conservative estimate based on the
contentious quantitative literature on trends in global income inequality is
that global inequality increased greatly during the 19th century and it has remained at about
the same high level or possibly decreased slightly since then (Bornschier 2010). Though the magnitude of
global income inequality expanded in the 19th century, there were already important
amounts of political inequality that had emerged between the core and the
periphery as a result of European colonialism. And these structures were both
outcomes of, and causes of, resistance and rebellions that occurred within the
European core and in the colonized regions.
The
cycle of world war severity has had a 40- to 60-year period (Chase-Dunn 1998:
51). Hegemony and resistance have co-evolved and this tension has been a major
factor in structuring world historical social change. Resistance and rebellions
by subordinate classes and in the non-core have tended to cluster together in
time as the contradictions of power, domination and exploitation have produced
somewhat similar conditions in regions that are distant from one another (Chase-Dunn
and Khutkyy 2016). Even though the non-core
rebellions and resistance movements were not very directly connected with one
another in earlier centuries, their synchronous consequences converged on the
core states, and especially on the hegemon. This phenomenon of widespread
synchronous resistance and rebellion is termed “world revolution.” World
revolutions have become much more directly interconnected as social movements
have become increasingly transnational, and popular groups and global parties
have emerged to engage in politics on a global scale. Wars and revolutions
periodically reset the rules of international politics and the global economy resulting
in a spiral of capitalism and socialism (Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2000).
One
important long term trend has been the increased size of the hegemons: from the
Italian city-states to the United Provinces of the Netherlands to the United
Kingdom of Great Britain to the continent-wide United States. In order for this
trend of increasing scale to continue the next hegemon would need to be either an
alliance of states or a federal world state.
Structural
Continuities and Possible Futures
In
1970s the world-system entered another period of economic stagnation: core
states witnessed a decline of profits in manufacturing as Germany and Japan
caught up with the U.S., producing global overcapacity relative to effective
demand. Many industries began relocating to the noncore where there were lower
wages and fewer regulations. Economic growth slowed down and there was a shift
of investments from production to financial speculation. The United States lost
a major war against Vietnam and economic challengers emerged from the non-core
(Wallerstein 2006). This was the beginning of the end of U.S. hegemony. But since
United States domestic economy was such a large portion of the global economy
and the U.S. global military apparatus was so huge, the decline of the U.S. has
been gradual.
The
U.S. domestic economy was 35% of world GDP in 1945 and there were 737 U.S. military
bases all over the world in 2011 (Chase-Dunn et al 2011: 7). The United States has lost much of its predominance
in manufacturing and in world trade to China. But its continued predominance in
global financial services and its ability to print world money (what Michael
Mann 2002; 2006) has called dollar seigniorage) cannot
last forever. Global financial centrality and dollar seigniorage
have allowed the U.S. to engage in unilateral military engagements without
having to raise taxes. Another global financial debacle along the lines of what
happened in 2008 may bring the bubble down.
An
alternative to U.S. hegemonic decline would be a second round of U.S. hegemony.
Recall that Modelski and Thompson (1996) contended
that Great Britain enjoyed two “power cycles.” The United States still has,
despite the depredations of neoliberal austerity, comparative advantages in
higher education and research. It continues to lead in technological
innovations in biotechnology, green technology and nanotechnology and to have a
relatively flexible institutional structure. These features suggest that another
round of hegemony for the U.S. is a possibility. But iIn
order for this to happen there would have to be a serious and sustained effort
by the federal government and state governments that was supported by a significant
contingent of the U.S. capitalist class. This seems unlikely. And so the 21st
century world is moving toward multipolarity with intensified
political and economic rivalry among strong contenders. Military rivalry is
also likely to emerge as the U.S. loses its advantages in the global financial
system and so has to tax its own citizens in order to fund the global military
apparatus.[8]
Michael Klare’s (2016) report that big wars are back
on the drawing boards of military strategists because of Russian intransigence
reveals more about the institutional resilience of the war machine than it does
about the current geomilitary situation. Russia is in
no position to challenge NATO or the U.S. militarily at present. But that
situation is likely to change as the costs of the U.S. monopoly on military
capability can no longer be sustained by dollar seignorage.
Wallerstein
(2011: 35) contends that the capitalist world-system has been experiencing a
systemic crisis since 1970s. This crisis is characterized chaotic fluctuations
that will lead to either systemic revival or to collapse. Wallerstein argues
that the world revolution of 1968 was a decisive turning point that marked the
end of the supremacy of centrist liberal ideology, disassembling the global geoculture that fused the political institutions of the
world-system (Wallerstein 2004: 77). Student, civil rights and anti-war
protests in the big cities of the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, the United Kingdom,
France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and China shook
both capitalist and socialist states. They indicated mass discontent with
social inequalities and political coercion and manifested demands for a more
just social order. Though these movements were repressed and did not transform
the world-system, they initiated processes that brought more civil rights to
some segments of population. The protests of 1989-1991 in the USSR were based
on socio-economic demands from blue-collar and white-collar proletarians that,
faced with weakness and unresponsiveness of central authorities, sought
expression on movements for civil rights (Derluguian
2005). The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 were a similar incarnation of
civil rights demands. The latest major protests of 2010-2012, commonly called “the
Arab Spring”, occurred in Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan,
Kuwait, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria,
Tunisia, Western Sahara,and Yemen. These were
constellations of local, national, and transnational protest movements that were
united by similar agendas and signified opposition to oppressive national and
global governance.
Wallerstein
(2004) notes that capitalism is reaching assymtotes
based on the costs of labor, taxation and raw materials. Capitalists are
experiencing pressures to internalize previously externalized costs. Wages are
going up as global proletarianization labor movements
in the non-core continue to emerge (Silver 2003). Capitalist who employ the “spatial fix” by
outsourcing, moving production from the
core to the periphery find that there are fewer and fewer places with cheap,
disciplined and skilled labor, low ecological standards, cheap raw materials,
low taxation levels and modest welfare expectations. Formerly profitable
production in China, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan is
becoming more expensive, as local workers demand higher wages.
We
agree with Michael Mann’s (2013) point that the global capitalism school, which
he calls “hyperglobalists”, often overemphasizes the extent to which the
nation-state has been transcended or repurposed by global capitalism. But we do
not agree with Mann’s contention that contingency and the loose coupling of
political, ideological, military and economic trajectories of development mean
that there is no such thing as a single global system. While human history is
undoubtedly somewhat open ended because social change is a complex and
contingent outcome of accidents and contentious intentions, this does not mean
that there is no global system. Nor does it mean that the future is completely
unpredictable. Demographic trends are relatively certain. And some of the
possible 21st century futures are far more probable than others.
Mann
and those world historians who emphasize contingency and open-endedness are protagonists
of a hyperhumanism, in which both individuals and
organizations are deemed capable of, and are expected to, author themselves and
their destinies. While we also value the human species, individual lives and
collective freedoms, these values do not blind us to the existence of
structural and institutional forces that condition the possible human futures
of the 21st century. And as social scientists we are duty bound to
report upon and dissect the predominant cultural values of our own global
society as well as the moral orders of the past. We are not determinists, but
we agree with Marx that the institutions that past humans have created strongly
act upon and condition the possibilities for the humans of the present and the
future. Understanding these constraints is a strong medicine that will be of
great use to the struggle for a better future.
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