Understanding Waves of Globalization and Resistance
in the Capitalist World(-)System*:
Social
Movements and Critical Global(ization) Studies
Christopher
Chase-Dunn <chriscd@mail.ucr.edu>
Institute
for Research on World-Systems
University of California, Riverside
and
Barry
Gills <gills@hawaii.edu>
University of Hawaii
Abstract: The world(-)systems* perspective provides a useful framework for discerning the continuities and discontinuities (emergent properties) of long historical waves of global integration (globalization) and social resistance to (capitalist) globalization.. The capitalist world(-)system has experienced long cycles of economic and political integration for centuries and these have been interspersed by periods of social resistance to capitalist globalization, in which disadvantaged, exploited and dominated groups contest the hierarchies that global capitalism and hegemonic states have constructed. In the contemporary period the intensification of capitalist globalization has been accompanied by a strengthening of social resistance and the emergence of new social movements that resist neoliberal globalization and attempt to build alternatives. Careful study of these long waves of globalization and resistance can provide us with important insights that are relevant to the task of building a more humane and democratic global commonwealth in the 21st century. Research and teaching on the role of the new social movements and the historical dialectic between globalization, resistance, and democratization should be a central aspect of the new critical Global(ization) Studies.
To be presented at the conference on Critical Globalization Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, May 2-4, 2003. V. 4-30-03 (xxxx words) This paper is available on the web at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows12/irows12.htm
*This odd construction is meant
to signify both the presence and the absence of the hyphen. See page four.
Waves of Decolonization, 1750-2000: Henige 1970. Colonial empires of Britain, Italy, Japan, the
Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and France were coded.
“The best way to predict the future is to
create it.”
The debate on the politics
of globalization and resistance is being simplified by advocates of
neoliberalism into a binary opposition between
(good and right) pro-globalization (read neoliberal corporate led
economic globalization) and (bad and wrong)
‘anti-globalization’ forces who are depicted as first cousins of the
Luddites, i.e. wrong headed fools opposing the natural laws of historical
development and the march of progress. However, it is our view that we need to
avoid this dichotomy, which represents social forces of resistance to
neoliberalism around the globe as merely a reaction, or simply a ‘negative’
‘anti-globalization’ protest. At this point in history, the only truly
‘anti-globalization’ forces are extremists of nationalist or fundamentalist
bent (in whatever religion, including Christianity and Hinduism) and extreme
‘localists’ of any bent. Indeed, all of these forces are ‘bent’ and tend to be
reactionary.
Everyone
else engaged with the new politics of globalization are actually ‘for’ some version of a preferred
globalization or some ‘alternative globalization, for example under the slogan
from the World Social Forum -- ‘Another World is Possible.’ In other words, even the resistance to
neoliberal capitalist globalization is largely becoming a global social movement
for ‘another globalization’, one not based on narrow corporate interests and
leadership, but rather a globalization reflecting the broad popular interest
and based on values of social justice, equality, and participatory democracy.
Therefore, the politics of resistance to neoliberal globalization (Gills 2000)
is perhaps not best characterized as a ‘backlash’ (Broad 2002), but rather has a historical set of social forces
engendered by the conditions of contemporary global capitalism but seeking to transform
social relations and the global system. These social forces are therefore
fundamentally progressive rather than reactive. It is true that among the
progressives there are differences with regard to the analysis of the
historical situation, the emphasis on one or another aspect of global social
problems, and also with regard to strategies for overcoming the inadequacies of
the current global social order. Some emphasize local self-reliance while
others focus on the reform or transformation of global institutions. Critical
Global(ization) Studies should make the study of the role of these social
movements, past, present and future, a central aspect of its approach to
constructing knowledge and contributing to social change.
The
study of world historical systems (including comparative analysis of different
world(-) systems) uses whole world(-)systems (i.e. intersocietal interaction
networks) as the unit of analysis to describe and explain social change. All
world(-)systems, large and small, experience oscillations in which interaction
networks expand and larger-scale interactions become denser, and then the
networks contract spatially and large scale interactions decrease in intensity.
These historical oscillations, which we term “pulsations,” have even been found
also even in a very small-scale world(-)system in Northern California before
this region was incorporated into the expanding Europe-centered world-system
(Chase-Dunn and Mann 1998) as well as in the very large scale ‘Afro-Eurasian
world system’ (Gills and Frank 1992) In this paper we will provide a
conceptualization of globalization that sees recent waves of international and
transnational integration in the modern world(-)system as a continuation of the
pulsations of intersocietal interaction
networks that have been occurring in world
(-)systems for millennia.
We will seek to comprehend both the continuities and the discontinuities or
newly emergent properties that have occurred in the long waves of globalization and resistance.
The
scientific study of globalization should begin with the recognition that
globalization is a contested concept (Gills 2000). One reason why there is so
much confusion and contention about the meaning of globalization is that it is
both a political ideology and a long-term structural process of spatial
integration of formerly unconnected or only loosely connected peoples. In order
to sort this out we distinguish between what we call structural globalization –
the expansion and intensification of large-scale interaction networks relative
to more local interactions (Tilly 1995),[1]
and the “globalization project” (McMichael 2000) – a specific political
ideology that glorifies the efficiency of markets and privately held firms in
order to attack labor unions, entitlements and other institutions that have
protected the incomes of workers. This neoliberal political ideology emerged as
Reaganism-Thatcherism in the 1970s and then spread to almost all state-level
and international institutions as the “Washington Consensus.” The ideological
hegemony of neoliberalism was bolstered by new developments in information
technology that were used to justify privatization, deregulation, streamlining
and downsizing of organizations across the world. Neoliberalism replaced an
earlier dominant paradigm – Keynesian national development – that focused state
policies on the development of industrial capabilities in the context of
institutions that were designed to increase the purchasing power of workers.
Neoliberals adopted several of the tactics and some of the ideological
principles of the 1968 New Left – the attack on bureaucracies, direct action
protests, and support for selected opposition movements in the non-core.
We will study both structural
globalization as integration and the globalization project in order to make
sense out of contemporary world history. Structural globalization has several
different but inter-related dimensions. We find it useful to distinguish
between two types of economic globalization (trade and investment), and to
conceptualize political and cultural globalization in terms of interaction
networks that are analogous to economic globalization (Chase-Dunn 1999). The latest wave of post World War II
structural economic globalization was preceded by an earlier great wave of
expanded international trade and investment in the second half of the
nineteenth century (Chase-Dunn, Kawano and Brewer 2000, O’Rourke and Williamson
2000). These waves of global economic integration were separated by a troubled
trough of deglobalization and globalization backlash that included the decline
of British hegemony, the Great Depression of 1873-1896 the Mexican, Russian and
Chinese revolutions, the worldwide depression of the 1930s, the rise of
fascism, World War II and the decolonization of the periphery.
This
essay provides a brief summary of the main concepts and theoretical
propositions that have come to be associated with the structural and
comparative world(-)systems perspective on world history and a discussion of
the implications of this approach for comprehending the contemporary period of
globalization and globalization backlash.
World(-)Systems Theory
The
intellectual history of world-systems theory has roots in classical sociology,
Marxian revolutionary theory, geopolitical strategizing and theories of social
evolution. But in explicit form the world-systems perspective emerged only in
the 1970’s when Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein began
to formulate the concepts and to narrate the analytic history of the modern
world-system.
This
essay uses an intentionally inclusive definition of “world(-)systems/world
systems theory” (with and without the hyphen).
The use of the hyphen emphasizes the idea of the whole system, the point being that all the human interaction
networks small and large, from the household to global trade, constitute the
world(-)system. It is not just a matter of “international relations” or
global-scale institutions such as the World Bank, etc. Rather at the present
time it is all the people of the earth and all their cultural, economic and
political institutions and the interactions and connections among them. This said, the hyphen has also come, for
some scholars, to connote a degree of loyalty to Wallerstein’s (2000)
approach. Other versions drop the
hyphen (e.g. Denemark,, Friedman, Gills and Modelski 2000; Gills 2002) Hyphen
or not, the world(-)systems approach has long been far more internally
differentiated than most of its critics have understood.
We
work within the tradition of world(-)systems theory. We agree on the necessity
for structuralist long term historical sociological analysis of both the
processes that led to the present global system going back many millennia and
that there are many continuities from these historical patterns that are
intrinsic to present-day capitalist accumulation and globalization patterns. We
contend that a focus on capital accumulation patterns and the formation of
social forces of resistance to capitalist accumulation are key elements of a
world(-)systems analysis of globalization.
Moreover, we both strongly agree on the necessity of maintaining a focus
on the structurally reproduced inequalities and the differentiation of the core
and peripheral and semiperiperhal zones of the capitalist world(-)system. We agree that peripheral and semiperipheral
zones play a very significant role not only in waves of capital accumulation on
global scale but also in waves of resistance for understanding the past, the
present and the future.
The world(-)systems perspective looks at
human institutions over long periods of time and employs the spatial scale that
is required for comprehending whole interaction systems. Single societies have always interacted in
consequential ways with neighboring societies, and so intersocietal interaction
must be studied in order to understand social change. This does not mean that
all the important processes causing social change are intersocietal, but rather
that enough of them are so that it is usually disastrous to ignore
intersocietal relations.
The
world(-)systems perspective is neither Eurocentric nor core-centric, at least
in principle. The main idea is simple:
human interaction networks have been increasing in spatial scale for millennia
as new technologies of communications and transportation have been developed.
With the emergence of ocean-going transportation in the fifteenth century the
multicentric Afroeurasian system incorporated important parts of the Western
Hemisphere. Before the incorporation of the Americas into the Afroeurasian
system there were numerous local and regional world(-) systems (intersocietal
networks). Most of these became
inserted into the expanding European-centered system largely by force, and
their populations were mobilized to supply labor for a colonial economy that
was repeatedly reorganized by the changing geopolitical and economic forces
emanating from the European and (later) North American core societies.
This
whole process can be understood structurally as a stratification system
composed of economically and politically dominant core societies (themselves in
competition with one another) and dependent peripheral and semiperipheral
regions, a few of which have been successful in improving their positions in
the larger core/periphery hierarchy, while most have simply maintained their
relative positions as the whole system develops.
This structural perspective on world history allows us to
analyze the cyclical features of social change and the long-term trends of
development in historical and comparative perspective. We can see the
development of the modern world(-)system as driven primarily by capitalist
accumulation and geopolitics in which businesses and states compete with one
another for power and wealth.
Competition among states and capitals is conditioned by the dynamics of
struggle among classes and by the resistance of peripheral and semiperipheral
peoples to domination and exploitation from the core. In the modern world(-)system the semiperiphery is composed of
large and powerful countries in the Third World (e.g. Mexico, India, Brazil,
China) as well as smaller countries that have intermediate levels of economic
development (e.g. the East Asian NICs). It is not possible to understand the
history of social change in the system as a whole without taking into account
both the strategies of the winners and the strategies and organizational
actions of those who have resisted domination and exploitation.
It is also difficult to understand why and where
innovative social change emerges without a conceptualization of the
world-system as a whole. New organizational forms that transform institutions
and that lead to upward mobility most often emerge from societies in
semiperipheral locations. Thus all the
countries that became hegemonic core states in the modern system had formerly
been semiperipheral (the Dutch, the British, and the United States). This is a
continuation of a long-term pattern of social evolution that Chase-Dunn and
Hall (1997) have called “semiperipheral development.” Historically, it can be
argues that Semiperipheral marcher
states and semiperipheral capitalist city-states often acted as the agents of
empire formation and commercialization, for millennia. This phenomenon arguably
also includes organizational innovations in contemporary semiperipheral
countries (e.g. Mexico, India, South Korea, Brazil) that may transform the
now-global system.
This
approach requires that we think structurally. We must be able to abstract from
the particularities of the game of musical chairs that constitutes uneven
development in the system to see the structural continuities. The core/periphery hierarchy remains, though
some countries have moved up or down.
The interstate system remains, though the internationalization of capital
has further constrained the abilities of states to structure national
economies. States have always been
subjected to larger geopolitical and economic forces in the world-system and,
as is still the case, some have been more successful at exploiting opportunities
and protecting themselves from liabilities than others.
In
this perspective many of the phenomena that have been called “globalization”
correspond to recently expanded international trade, financial flows and
foreign investment by transnational corporations and banks. The globalization
discourse generally assumes that until recently there were separate national
societies and economies, and that these have now been superseded by an
expansion of international integration driven by information and transportation
technologies. Rather than a wholly
unique and new phenomenon, globalization is primarily international economic
integration, and as such it is a feature of world-systems that has been
oscillating as well as increasing for centuries. Recent research comparing the
19th and 20th centuries has shown that trade
globalization is both a cycle and a trend (Chase-Dunn, Kawano and Brewer 2000).
The
Great Chartered Companies of the seventeenth century were already playing an
important role in shaping the development of world regions. Certainly the
transnational corporations of the present are much more important players, but
the point is that “foreign investment’ is not an institution that only became
important since 1970 (nor since World War II).
Giovanni Arrighi (1994) has shown that finance capital has been a
central component of the commanding heights of the world-system since the
fourteenth century. The current floods
and ebbs of world money are typical of the late phase of very long “systemic cycles
of accumulation.”
An inclusive bounding of the circle of world(-)system
scholarship should include all those who see the global system of the late 20th
century as having important systemic continuities with the nearly-global system
of the 19th century. While
this is a growing and interdisciplinary band, the temporal depth criterion
excludes most of the breathless globalization scholars who see such radical
recent discontinuities that they need know nothing about what happened before
1960. The information age, the New Economy, global cities, the transnational
capitalist class, and other hypothetically new and radical departures are seen
as digging a huge chasm between recent decades and earlier world history. Those
who believe that everything has changed must be subjected to some historically
grounded criticism.
A second criterion that might be invoked to draw a
boundary around
world(-)systems
scholarship is a concern for analyzing international stratification, what some
world(-)system analysts call the core/periphery hierarchy. Certainly this was a primary focus for
Wallerstein, Amin and the classical Gunder Frank. These progenitors were themselves influenced by the Latin
American dependency school and by the Third Worldism of Monthly Review Marxism. Wallerstein was an Africanist when he
discovered Fernand Braudel and Marion Malowist and the dependent development of
Eastern Europe in the long sixteenth century.
The epiphany that Latin America and Africa were like Eastern Europe –
that they had all been peripheralized and underdeveloped by core exploitation
and domination over a period of centuries -- mushroomed into the idea that
international stratification is a fundamental part of capitalist development
and that core/periphery inequalities are systematically reproduced.
It
is possible to have good temporal depth but still to ignore the periphery and
the dynamics of global inequalities.
The important theoretical and empirical work of political scientists
George Modelski and William R. Thompson (1996) is an example. Modelski and
Thompson theorize a “power cycle” in which “system leaders” rise and fall since
the Portuguese led European expansion in the 15th century. They also
study the important phenomenon of “new lead industries” and the way in which
the Kondratieff Wave, a 40 to 60 year business cycle, is regularly related to
the rise and decline of “system leaders.” Modelski and Thompson largely ignore
core/periphery relations to concentrate on the “great powers.” But so does
Giovanni Arrighi’s (1994) masterful 600-year examination of “systemic cycles of
accumulation.” Andre Gunder
Frank’s(1998) latest work on economic history shines the spotlight on the
centrality of Asia before 1750 and particularly on China in the Afroeurasian
world(-) system. Frank argues that the rise of European power to global
hegemony occurred in the period between approximately 1750-1800.[2]
However, his analysis of this transition does not focus on core/periphery
exploitation.
So too does the “world polity school” led by sociologist John W. Meyer (1997). This institutionalist approach adds a valuable sensitivity to the civilizational assumptions of Western Christendom and their diffusion from the core to the periphery. But rather than a dynamic struggle with authentic resistance from the periphery and the semiperiphery, the world polity school stresses how the discourses of resistance, national self-determination and individual liberties have mainly been constructed out of the assumptions of the European Enlightenment. This is not entirely wrong, but the focus on the diffusion of ideology deflects attention from the real expansion of material global inequalities and the instances in which indigenous cultures contributed to effective resistance.
Most world-systems scholars contend that
leaving out the core/periphery dimension or treating the periphery as inert are
grave mistakes, not only for reasons of completeness, but also because the
ability of core capitalists and their states to exploit peripheral resources
and labor has been a major factor in deciding the winners of the competition
among core contenders. And the resistance to exploitation and domination
mounted by peripheral peoples has played a powerful role in shaping the
historical development of world orders (Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2000). The comparison of the modern world-system
with earlier regional systems has also revealed that all hierarchical
world-systems have experienced a process of semiperipheral development in which
some of the societies “in the middle” innovate and implement new technologies
of power that drive the processes of expansion and systemic transformation (see
below). Thus world history cannot be
properly understood without attention to the core/periphery hierarchy.
It is often assumed that world-systems must necessarily
be of large geographical scale. But systemness means that groups are tightly
wound, so that an event in one place has important consequences for people in
another place. By that criterion, intersocietal systems have only become global
(Earth-wide) with the emergence of intercontinental sea faring. Earlier
world-systems were smaller regional affairs. An important determinant of system
size is the kind of transportation and communications technologies that are
available. At the very small extreme we have intergroup networks of sedentary
foragers who primarily used “backpacking” to transport goods. This kind of
hauling produces rather local networks.
Such small systems still existed until the 19th century in
some regions of North America, and Australia. But they were similar in many
respects to small world(-)systems all over the Earth before the emergence of
states. An important theoretical task
is to specify how to bound the spatial scale of human interaction networks
(Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). Working
this out makes it possible to compare small, medium-sized and large
world(-)systems, and to use world(-)systems concepts to rethink theories of
human social evolution on a millennial
time scale.
Anthropologists and archaeologists have been doing just
that. Kasja Ekholm and Jonathan Friedman (1982) have pioneered what they have
called “global anthropology,” by which they mean regional intersocietal systems
that expanded to become the Earth-wide system of today.[3]
Archaeologists studying the U.S. Southwest, provoked by the theorizing and
excavations of Charles DiPeso, began using world-systems concepts to understand
regional relations and interactions with Mesoamerica (e.g. Wilcox 1986). It was
archaeologist Phil Kohl (1979) who first applied and critiqued the idea of
core/periphery relations in ancient Western Asia and Mesopotamia. Guillermo
Algaze’s (1993) The Uruk World System
is a major contribution, as is Gil Stein’s (1999) careful examination of the
relationship between his village on the upper Tigris and the powerful Uruk core
state. Stein develops important new concepts for understanding core/periphery
relations in early state systems. Research and theoretical debates among
Mesoamericanists has also mushroomed (e.g. Blanton and Feinman 1984). And Peter
Peregrine’s (1992) innovative interpretation of the Mississippian world-system
as a Friedmanesque prestige goods system has cajoled and provoked the defenders
of local archaeological turf to reconsider the possibilities of larger scale
interaction networks in the territory that eventually became the United States
of America (see also Chase-Dunn and Hall 1998).
Especially
for Wallerstein, the study of the modern world-system was explicitly delineated
as a perspective rather than a theory or a set of theories. A terminology was
deployed to tell the story. The guiding ideas were explicitly not a set of precisely defined concepts
being used to formulate theoretical explanations. Universalistic theoretical explanations were rejected and the
historicity of all social science was embraced. Indeed, Wallerstein radically
collapsed the metatheoretical opposites of nomothetic ahistoricism/ideographic
historicism into the contradictory unity of “historical systems.” Efforts to formalize a theory or theories
out of the resulting analytic narratives are only confounded if they assume
that the changing meanings of “concepts” are unintentional. Rather there has
been sensitivity to context and difference that has abjured specifying
definitions and formalizing propositions.
Thomas Richard Shannon’s
(1996) Introduction to the World-Systems
Perspective remains the most valuable tool for introducing the main ideas
to undergraduates. But Shannon displays a misplaced exasperation when he
encounters apparently inconsistent terminological usages in Wallerstein’s work.
This is because Shannon’s effort to explicate assumes a single and unvarying
set of meanings, while Wallerstein allows his vocabulary to adapt to the
historical context that it is being used to analyze.
Some theorists have adopted a more nomothetic and
structuralist approach to world-systems theory with the understanding that
model building can interact fruitfully with the more historicist approach. All macrosociologists may be arrayed along a
continuum from purely nomothetic ahistoricism to completely descriptive
idiographic historicism. The possible
metatheoretical stances are not two, but many, depending on the extent to which
different institutional realms are thought to be law-like or contingent and
conjunctural. Fernand Braudel was more
historicist than Wallerstein. Samir Amin, an economist, is more
nomothetic. Giovanni Arrighi’s (1994)
monumental work on 600 years of “systemic cycles of accumulation” sees
qualitative differences in each hegemony, while Wallerstein, despite his
aversion to explicating models, sees rather more continuity in the logic of the
system, even extending to the most recent era of globalization. Andre Gunder Frank (1998) now argues that
there was no transition to capitalism in the modern era, and that the logic of
“capital imperialism” has not changed since the emergence of cities and states
in Mesopotamia 5000 years ago. Metatheory
comes before theory. It focuses our theoretical spotlight on some questions
while leaving others in the shadows.
Globalization and Contemporary Social Movements of Resistance
Because
of alleged overemphasis on large-scale social structures like the
core/periphery hierarchy, some critics have asserted that the world(-)systems
perspective denies the possibility of agency. On the contrary, the focus is on
both how successful power-holders concoct new strategies of domination and
exploitation, and how dominated and exploited peoples struggle to protect
themselves and build new institutions for social justice. The structuralist
aspects of the world(-)systems perspective make it more possible to understand
where the agency of social forces is more likely to be successful, and perhaps
where not.
Phillip McMichael (2000) has studied the “globalization
project” – the abandoning of Keynesian models of national development and a new
(or renewed) emphasis on deregulation and opening national commodity and
financial markets to foreign trade and investment. This approach focuses on the ideological aspects of the recent
wave of international economic integration. The term many prefer for this turn
in global discourse is “neo-liberalism” but it has also been called
“Reaganism/Thatcherism” and the “Washington Consensus.” The worldwide decline
of the political Left predated the revolutions of 1989 and the demise of the
Soviet Union, but it was certainly also accelerated by these events.
It
has been argued that the main structural basis of the rise of the globalization
project is the new level of integration reached by the global capitalist class.
The internationalization of capital has long been an important part of the
trend toward economic globalization. And there have been many claims to represent
the general interests of business before. Indeed every modern hegemon has made
this claim. But the real integration of the interests of capitalists all over
the world has very likely reached a level greater than at the peak of the
nineteenth century wave of globalization.
This
is the part of the theory of a global stage of capitalism that must be taken
most seriously, though it can certainly be over-stated. The world(-)system has now reached a point
at which both the old interstate system based on separate national capitalist
classes, and new institutions representing the global interests of capital
exist, and are powerful simultaneously In this sense, the old inter-state
system now co-exists with a more globalized or ‘transnationalized’ world
economic system brought about by the past two decades of neoliberal economic
globalization. In this light each country can be seen to have an important
ruling class or capitalist class fraction that is allied with the transnational
capitalist class. A central question is whether or not this (new) level of
transnational class integration will be strong enough to prevent competition
among states for world hegemony from turning into warfare, as it has always
done in the past, during a period in which a reigning hegemon (i.e. the United
States) is entering its declining phase (Chase-Dunn and Podobnik 1995).
Neo-liberalism began as the Reagan-Thatcher attack on the
welfare state and labor unions. It evolved into the Structural Adjustment
Policies of the International Monetary Fund and the triumphalism of the
ideologues of corporate globalization after the demise of the Soviet
Union. In United States foreign policy
it has found expression in a new emphasis on “democracy promotion” in the
periphery and semiperiphery. Rather
than propping up military dictatorships in Latin America, the emphasis has
shifted toward coordinated action between the C.I.A and the U.S. National
Endowment for Democracy to promote electoral institutions in Latin America and
other semiperipheral and peripheral regions.
William I. Robinson (1994) and Barry Gills et. al (1993) point out that
the kind of “low intensity democracy” being promoted by global and national
neoliberal elites is really best understood as a regime form in which elites
orchestrate a process of electoral competition and governance that legitimates
state power and undercuts more radical political alternatives that might
threaten their ability to maintain their wealth and power by exploiting workers
and peasants. Robinson convincingly argues that ‘polyarchy’ and
democracy-promotion are the political forms that are most congruent with a
globalized and neo-liberal world economy in which capital is given free reign
to generate accumulation wherever profits are greatest. Gills et. al. (1993)
argued that low intensity democracy is a form that facilitates the imposition
of neoliberal economic policies, including liberalization, marketization and
privatization, the three pillars of the Washington Consensus.
The insight that capitalist globalization has occurred in
waves, and that these waves of integration are followed by periods of
resistance to capitalist globalization, has important implications for the
future. Capitalist globalization increased both intranational and international
inequalities in the nineteenth century (O’Rourke and Williamson 2000) and it
has done the same thing in the late twentieth century. Those countries and
groups that are left out of the “belle époque” either mobilize to challenge the
hegemony of the powerful or they retreat into self-reliance, or both.
Globalization protests emerged in the non-core with the anti-IMF riots of the
1980s. The several transnational social movements that participated in the 1999
protest in Seattle brought globalization protest to the attention of observers
in the core, and this resistance to capitalist globalization has continued and
grown despite the setback that occurred in response to the terrorist attacks on
New York and Washington in 2001 (Podobnik 2003). The recent global antiwar demonstrations
against the Bush administration’s “preventative” war against Iraq have involved
many of the same movements as well as some new recruits. The several
transnational social movements face difficult problems of forming alliances and
cooperative action. The idea of semiperipheral development implies that support
for more democratic institutions of global governance will come from democratic
socialist regimes that come to power in the semiperiphery. This has already
happened in Brazil, where the new labor government strongly supports the
movement for global social justice.
There is an apparent tension between those who advocate
deglobalization and delinking from the global capitalist economy and the
building of stronger, more cooperative and self-reliant social relations in the
periphery and semiperiphery (e.g. Bello 2003, Amin 1998), on the one hand, and
those who seek to mobilize support for new, or reformed institutions of
democratic global governance. But in fact these strategies are complementary,
and each can benefit by supporting the other. Self-reliance by itself, though
an understandable reaction to exploitation, is not likely to solve the problems
of humanity in the long run. The great challenge of the twenty-first century
will be the building of a democratic and collectively rational global
commonwealth. World(-)systems theory can be an important contributor to this
effort.
The
intensification of trans-border or transnational economic interaction,
including global financial flows, requires a corresponding transnational social
and political response and elicits precisely this response from social forces.
As Barry Gills has argued, “to the extent that there is now… already a truly
global economic system based on the free movement of capital, then there is
also an objective and logical need for new forms of global political order to
accompany this global economic system”(Gills 2002: 160) The primary questions
are how such a new global political architecture will be built and whose
interests will it represent- the global elite or the global popular majority?
While many governments and political parties seem captured by neoliberal dogma,
the new social movements appear to have more maneuverability and better
potential to bridge the gap between national and global political spheres. It
is precisely because neoliberal elites and governments are constraining the
ability of governments and traditional political parties to pursue substantive
democracy and social justice that neoliberal globalization can be understood to
be activating new social movements across the globe. So widespread and so deep are the deleterious effects of
neoliberalism that it works to stimulate people into action in defense of their
own interests. (Gills 2000) Therefore, the new political economy of neoliberal
globalization encourages a great diversity of movements and more over creates
both the objective need and the material conditions for these movements to
unify at global level. Thus the globalization of capitalist economics leads
directly to the globalization of political activism.
It
is not a coincidence that the new global social movements of resistance are led
primarily from the South, i.e. from the global periphery and
semiperiphery. This composition of
social forces of resistance reflects the fact that much of the gains of
neoliberal economic globalization have been at the expense of the South and
among its poor or working majority. The
advent of better global communications has served not only the expansion of
global capital but also the expansion of global solidarity among resistance
forces. We can call this ‘the globalization of resistance’. With such a broad
array of social forces coming into action and able to communicate with one
another, even to meet physically, it is natural that global solidarity
movements pursue a politics that is not only more participatory and direct but
also more inclusive than in the past. This is useful in order to mobilize the
maximum strength of global social forces in opposition to corporate led
neoliberal globalization, and in the post 9/11 era, in opposition to war. Opposition to corporate control of the
global economy and globalization is the over-arching theme unifying the social
movements of resistance (Broad 2002, p. 3) However, positive values also
characterize these movements, which are ultimately about reinvigorating a
politics based on grassroots motivation, participation, democracy,
decentralization and autonomy, while at the same time striving to build bridges
and solidarities.
The
core values of the new global social movements of resistance include
non-violent struggle, democratic practice, social justice, inclusiveness,
secularism (as opposed to religious fundamentalism), peace (in opposition to
the use of force in international affairs), solidarity (in opposition to
localism, parochialism and narrow nationalism or chauvinism) and equality
(including opposition to patriarchal forms of oppression against women as well
as class, caste, and ethnic based discrimination).
The
new movements differ in important ways from those that characterized the
earlier wave of resistance to colonialism and imperialism in this century.
Unlike the traditional armed revolutionary movements, with their focus on
taking state power, and the traditional left parties, with their too often
typical hierarchical discipline and single ideologies, the new movements do not
seek violent revolution or the capture of state power to this end. There is now
a much more diffuse pattern of ideas and organization that characterizes many
of the new movements, and there is a higher participation by women and other
previously marginalized groups. The diverse and often ad hoc nature of these
social movements and their spontaneity and autonomy can make them appear
somewhat disorganized. However, the movements themselves recognize this
situation but are not prepared to attempt to unify all the movements under a
single ideology (even a general one such as ‘anti-capitalist’), organization,
or party. Rather, there primary goal today
appears to be to create a new political space at national, regional and global
levels in which the many movements can meet together and share experiences of
action and resistance, and sometimes plan or take common actions based on areas
of agreement. The World Social Forum,
which met for the third annual gathering in Porto Alegre, Brazil in January
2003, continues to argue for this approach and for an open and plural process
that works with a great diversity of resistances, organizations and proposals (WSF
International Council, 2003). The world social movements that convene at the
WSF reflect an extremely broad agenda of the new social movements of
resistance. These social movements declared at Porto Alegre in 2003 that they
are ‘fighting for social justice, citizenship, participatory democracy,
universal rights and the right for peoples to decide their own future.’ (WSF,
2003)
To
date the main features of the new social movements of resistance acting on
global scale has been their focus on protests, popular education, and
networking. The global protests that began in Seattle in November 1999 and
continued in Washington DC, Prague, Davos, Porto Alegre, Quebec City, Genoa,
Sydney, and Florence made the invisible visible, i.e. exposed the important
social-political relations underlying the technical decision-making taking
place in the elite led organizations that run the global economy. This was a
crucial achievement of the new movements. Post 9/11 and in the lead up to the
US invasion of Iraq, the movement shifted to anti-war demonstrations, with a
million marching in Florence in late 2002, some 100,000 marching in Porto
Alegre in January 2003, and the largest coordinated anti-war demonstrations in
world history taking place in several cities in mid February 2003, including
some 2 million marching in London.
However,
despite all these important achievements and the momentum established to
continue networking and mobilization, there is a growing self-criticism and
concern among the movements that a new stage is needed if the movements are to
be successful in the long term. Critics of the new movements argue that there
is a serious lack of specific goals and coherent platform, and that tactics and
strategy remain unclear. Weaknesses of the new form of resistance point to a
lack of coherent ideology, a lack of formal organizational structure, and the
lack of a common political platform and strategy to achieve its goals. The
great diversity of the new movements may explain the lack of ‘coherence’ and
the prudent choice to avoid a premature effort to unify all the movements in
this way, but it does not relieve the anxiety that such a diffuse set of
movements will suffer from inherent weaknesses or limitations on action.
The
most important theoretical and practical political question facing the new
social movements of global resistance is whether they are capable of acting as
a ‘counter-hegemonic’ bloc in global politics and achieving significant
transformation of the global system. Can they overcome the political weakness
inherent in such a broad and inclusive movement and work towards achieving more
coherence in organization, program and action?
Can they move beyond the initial phase of protest, education and
networking and develop a more structured organizational form that allows them
to enter into a position of political ‘negotiation’ with the neoliberal power
structure, forcing it to make concessions to popular demands? The real
challenge in this new wave of resistance to capitalist globalization is to
maintain the impetus to action and to global solidarity and achieve more
concrete political results. It is the diversity of the movements and their
insistence on participation, inclusiveness, and autonomy that gives the new
movements their real strength. However, these same qualities now challenge the
global movement to solve the problem of political representation and
organization in the new global politics of resistance.
References
Algaze,
Guillermo 1993 The Uruk World-System.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Amin,
Samir 1997 Capitalism in an Age of
Globalization. London: Zed Books.
Arrighi,
Giovanni 1994 The Long Twentieth Century
London: Verso.
Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel
Wallerstein. 1989. Antisystemic Movements.
London and New York: Verso.
Arrighi, Giovanni and Beverly Silver 1999 Chaos and Governance in the Modern
World-System: Comparing Hegemonic
Transitions.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Bairoch,
Paul 1996 "Globalization Myths and
Realities: One Century of External Trade and Foreign Investment", in
Robert
Boyer and Daniel Drache (eds.) , States Against Markets: The Limits of
Globalization, London: Routledge.
Bello, Walden 2001 The
Future in the Balance: Essays on Globalization and Resistance. Oakland, CA:
Food First
Books.
___________ 2003 Deglobalization.
Blanton, Richard and Gary Feinman 1984 “The Mesoamerican
world-system” American Anthropologist
86,3:673-
682.
Bonacich,
Edna and Richard Appelbaum 2000 Behind
the Label. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bornschier,
Volker and Christopher Chase-Dunn (eds.)
2000 The Future of Global Conflict.
London: Sage
Boswell, Terry and Christopher Chase-Dunn 2000 The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism:
Toward Global
Democracy. Boulder: Lynne Rienner.
Broad,
Robin (ed.) 2002 Global Backlash: Citizen
Initiatives for a Just World, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher 1998 Global Formation: Structures of the World-Economy (2nd
ed.) Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher 1999 “Globalization: a
world-systems perspective,” Journal of
World-Systems Research
5,2: 187-216 (Summer)
http://csf.colorado.edu/jwsr/archive/vol5/vol5_number2/html/chase-dunn/index.shtml
Chase-Dunn, Christopher 2002 "Globalization from
below: toward a collectively rational and democratic global
commonwealth” Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science Volume 581 (May).
Chase-Dunn,
Christopher and Bruce Podobnik, "The next
world war: world-system cycles and trends," Journal of World-Systems Research 1:6, 1995. Spanish translation in
John Saxe-Fernandez (Coordinator) Globalizacion:
Critica de un paradigma. Mexico, D.F.: Instituto de Investigaciones
Economicas, UNAM, 1997.
Chase-Dunn,
Christopher and Thomas D. Hall 1997 Rise
and Demise: Comparing World-Systems. Boulder, CO: Westview
Chase-Dunn, Christopher and Thomas D. Hall, 1998
"World-Systems in North America: Networks, Rise and Fall and Pulsations of
Trade in Stateless Systems," American
Indian Culture and Research Journal 22,1:23-72.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher and Kelly M. Mann 1998 The Wintu and Their Neighbors: A Very Small World-System in
Northern
California. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Chase-Dunn,
Christopher, Yukio Kawano and Benjamin D. Brewer 2000 “Trade globalization since
1795:
waves of integration in the
worlde-system” American Sociological
Review 65,1: 77-95.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher and Susan Manning, 2002 "City systems and
world-systems: four millennia of city growth
and decline," Cross-Cultural
Research 36, 4 (November).
Chase-Dunn,
Christopher, Rebecca Giem, Andrew Jorgenson, Thomas Reifer and John Rogers,
2003 "The Trajectory
of the United States in the World-System: A Quantitative Reflection"
IROWS Working Paper # 8. https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows8/irows8.htm
Davis, Mike 2002 Late Victorian Holocausts. London: Verso.
Denemark, Robert,
Friedman, Jonathan, Gills, Barry
K., and Modelski, George (eds) 2000,
World System
History
London: Routledge.
Ekholm, Kasja and Jonathan Friedman 1982 “Capital
imperialism and exploitation in the ancient world-
systems” Review 6,1: 87-110.
Frank, Andre Gunder 1998 Reorient. Berkeley: University of California Press
Gills, Barry K. (ed) 2000 Globalization and the
Politics of Resistance. New York: St. Martin’s Press
Gills, B.K., 2002, ‘Democratizing Globalization and
Globalizing Democracy, The Annals of American Political
Science, 581,
pp. 158-171
Gills, Barry K. 2002, “World System analysis, historical sociology
and international relations: the difference a
hyphen makes’ in Stephen
Hobden and John Hobson (eds) Historical Sociology of International
Relations,
Cambridge University Press, pp. 141-161.
Gills, B, Rocamora, J, and Wsilson, R. (eds) Low
Intensity Democracy: Political Power in the new World
Order,
London, Pluto.
Gills, Barry K. and Andre Gunder Frank, 1992, ‘World System Cycles, Crises, and hegemonic
Shifts, 1700 BC
to 1700 AD’ Review 15
(4) : 621-87
Henige, David P. 1970 Colonial
Governors from the Fifteenth Century to the Present. Madison, WI.:
University of
Wisconsin Press.
Kohl, Phillip 1978
“The ‘world economy’ in West Asia in the third millennium B.C.” Pp. 55-85 in M.
Toddei
(ed.) South Asian Archaeology, Naples: Institute Universitario Orientale.
McMichael, Philip 2000 Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Pine Forge
Press.
Meyer, John W.,
John Boli, George M. Thomas and Francisco Ramirez 1997 “World society and the
nation
state” American Journal of Sociology 103:144-81.
Modelski, George and William R. Thompson 1996 Leading Sectors and World Powers: the
Coevolution of Global Politics
and
World Economics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Murphy, Craig 1994 International Organization and Industrial Change: Global Governance
since 1850. New York:
Oxford.
O’Rourke, Kevin H and Jeffrey G. Williamson 2000 Globalization and History: The Evolution of
a 19th Century Atlantic Economy. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
Peregrine,
Peter 1992 Mississippian Evolution: A
World-Systems Perspective. Monographs in World Archaeology, No.
9. Madison, WI. Prehistory Press.
Podobnik,
Bruce 2002 “The Globalization Protest Movement: An Analysis of Broad Trends and
the
Impact
of Sept. 11," American Sociological Association Meeting, Chicago, IL.
Robinson, William I 1994 Promoting Polyarchy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Robinson, William I. and Jerry Harris. 2000. “Toward a
Global Ruling Class? Globalization and the
Transnational Capitalist
Class,” Science & Society 64(1):
11-54
Ross,
Robert and Kent Trachte 1990 Global
Capitalism: The New Leviathan. Albany: State University of New
York Press.
Sassen,
Saskia. 1991. Global Cities.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Shannon, Thomas R. 1996 An Introduction to the World-System Perspective Boulder, CO.:
Westview.
Silver, Beverly 1995 "World-Scale Patterns of
Labor-Capital Conflict: Labor Unrest, Long Waves & Cycles of
Hegemony." Review 18,1:53.
Sklair, Leslie. 2001. The
Transnational Capitalist Class. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Stevis, Dmitris and Terry Boswell 1997 “Labor: from
national resistance to international politics.” New Political
Economy 2,1:
93-104.
Stein, Gil J. 1999 Rethinking World-Systems: Diasporas,
Colonies and Interaction in
Uruk Mesopotamia. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Suter, Christian 1992 Debt
Cycles in the World Economy: Foreign Loans, Financial Crises and Debt
Settlements, 1820-
1987.
Boulder, CO: Westview.
World Social Forum, ‘Call of
the Social Movements’ Porto Alegre, brazil, January 27, 2003, online at:
http://www.focusweb.org
Taylor, Peter J. 1996 The
Way the Modern World Works: World Hegemony to World Impasse. New York:
Wiley
Tilly, Charles 1995 “Globalization threatens labor’s
rights” International Labor and
Working-Class History 47:1-23.
Van der Pijl, Kees. 1984. The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class. London: Verso.
Wallerstein, Immanuel 1998 Utopistics. New York: New Press.
Wallerstein, Immanuel 2000 The Essential Wallerstein. New York: New Press.
Wilcox, David 1986
‘A historical analysis of the problem of Southwest-Mesoamerican connections”
Pp. 9-44 in
Frances J. Mathien and Randall
H. McGuire (eds) Ripples in the Chichimec
Sea. Carbondale,IL: Southern
Illinois University Press.