Global
State Formation
In World
Historical Perspective
Christopher Chase-Dunn, Hiroko
Inoue,
Alexis Alvarez, Richard Niemeyer
and Hala Sheikh-Mohamed
Institute for
Research on World-Systems ,
Abstract: The
long-term trend since the Stone Age is for polities and states to get larger,
but all interpolity systems oscillate between relatively greater centralization
and decentralization. The long-term upward trend is produced by occasional
upward sweeps in which a new polity that is larger than any earlier one
emerges. This chapter is based on a study of upward sweeps of cities and
empires since the Bronze Age. The modern world-system is different from earlier
systems in that the centralization/decentralization sequence has taken the form
of the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers rather than the earlier pattern
of the rise and fall of core-wide empires. Imperialism in the modern
world-system has usually taken the form of vast dispersed colonial empires, and
formal empire has been abolished as the system of states that began in
To be presented at the conference on “Hegemonic Transitions
and the State” held at the Centre for Global Political Economy, Simon Fraser
University, February 23-24-2007. Draft v.2-19-07 10,141 words. This
is IROWS Working Paper # 32 available at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows32/irows32.htm
Table of Contents page
#
Upward Sweeps and Ceilings 2
Urban Upward Sweeps 5
Theories of Rise, Fall and Upward Sweeps 7
Extension of the State System to the Periphery 9
The Trajectory of Global Governance and Political
Globalization 11
Political Globalization and Global Party Formation 13
Contemporary Contestation in World Politics 15
Manifestos Galore in the World Revolution of 20xx 17
The Multicentric Network of Movements 18
North/South Issues 19
Democratizing Global Governance 20
All systems of interacting polities oscillate between relatively greater and lesser centralization as relatively large polities rise and fall. This is true of systems of chiefdoms, states, empires and the modern system of the rise and fall of hegemonic core states. But there has also been a long-term trend in which polities have increased in population and territorial size since the Stone Age and the total number of polities has decreased. These trends have been somewhat masked in recent centuries because the processes of decolonization and the emergence of nation-states out of older tributary empires have increased the number of smaller polities. But the general toward larger polities trend can be seen in the transition from smaller to larger hegemonic core states (from the Dutch, to the British to the United States), and in the emergence of international political organizations and an expanded and active global civil society[1] that participates in world politics.
This paper reports some of the results of a project that is studying the growth of states and cities since the Bronze Age in order to model the socio-cultural evolution of larger and larger polities and potential future world state formation. [2] We empirically identify “upward sweeps,” when the scale of cities and states dramatically increased. We review and synthesize explanations of chiefdom-formation, state-formation, empire-formation and the rise and fall of modern hegemonic core states in order to produce formal explanatory models. And we study the emergent characteristics that distinguish these different scales in order to comprehend how the processes have qualitatively evolved, and in order to consider what kinds of qualitative transformation might occur in the future. Our approach avoids the unscientific pitfalls of progressivist, functionalist, inevitabalist and teleological presumptions that have plagued many earlier approaches to socio-cultural evolution. We do not identify complexity and hierarchy with progress, but neither do we assume that they are the opposite of progress.
Upward Sweeps
and Ceilings
Figure 1 (next page) is a stylized depiction of the rise and fall of large polities and occasional upward sweeps that portrays, not the history of a single world region, but rather the general evolution[3] of what has happened over the past 12,000 years as many small polities (bands, tribes and chiefdoms) have been consolidated into a much smaller number of larger polities (states, empires and a possible future world state).
Figure 1: Rise, Fall and Upward Sweeps of Polity Size
George Modelski’s (2003) recent study of the growth of cities over the past 5000 years points to a phenomenon also noticed and theorized by Roland Fletcher (1995) – cities grow and decline in size, but occasionally a single new city will attain a size that is much larger than any earlier city, and then other cities catch up with that new scale, but do not much exceed it. It is as if cities reach a size ceiling that it is not possible to exceed until new conditions are met that allow for that ceiling to be breached.
Figure 2
plots Rein Taagepera’s (1978a,1978b,1979,1997) estimates of the territorial
sizes of the largest and second largest empires in the “Central System”[4]
for the purpose of identifying empire upsweeps. We know that the first upsweep
was that of the Uruk expansion that began on the flood plain of Southern Mesopotamia
(Algaze 1993), but we do not have quantitative estimates of the settlement and
empire sizes in the early Bronze Age. After a long period of competing
city-states in
Figure 2: Rise, Fall and Upward Sweeps as revealed by
Taagepera's estimates of the territorial sizes of the largest empires in the
Central System
After the fall of the Akkadian
Empire there was a millennium of no comparably large states until
Figure 3: City Size Upsweeps in the Central System
Urban Upward
Sweeps
Figure 3
graphs the population size estimates of largest cities in the Central System.[6] We
have no estimate of the size of
Largest City 2nd Largest City
|
1875 |
|
4,241,000 |
|
2,250,000 |
|
1900 |
|
6,480,000 |
|
4,242,000 |
|
1914 |
|
7,419,000 |
|
6,700,000 |
|
1925 |
|
7,774,000 |
|
7,742,000 |
|
1950 |
|
12,463,000 |
|
8,860,000 |
|
1970 |
|
20,450,000 |
|
17,252,000 |
Table 1: Largest and Second Largest City Populations, 1875-1970
After the 1950s a new ceiling of around 20 millions is
reached by the largest urban agglomerations. Megacities in
The huge
size of
Figure 4
uses George Modelski’s (2003) estimates of the sizes of the largest cities in
Figure 4: East Asian Urban Upsweeps (City populations are logged to the base 10)
What we see here are four urban upsweeps in the East Asia region: an early appearance of cities that peaks around 800 BCE, a second upswing that starts around 500 BCE and then wobbles around 2.5 (log10), and the a third upsweep that has its first peak in about 900 CE when Changan reaches 3, and then a fourth upsweep in the 19th century. Figure 4 also shows the size of the second largest cities in the region.
As
mentioned above, our project to identify empire and urban upsweeps will examine
both expanding interstate systems (political-military networks) like the
Central System, and constant regions such as East Asia, South Asia, West Asia-Mediterranean
as well as regions in the
Theories of
Rise, Fall and Upward Sweeps
There are many theories about why systems of interacting polities experience cycles of rise and fall. A thorough overview of the anthropological literature on “cycling” – the rise and fall of large chiefdoms-- is presented in David G. Anderson’s (1995) The Savannah River Chiefdoms. Chase-Dunn (2005) presents an overview of earlier theories and a new theoretical synthesis based on Peter Turchin's (2003) model of the dynamics of agrarian state growth and decline, network theory, a population pressure iteration model and explanations of the rise and fall of modern hegemons. This approach has been further modified to reincorporate the operation of trade networks (Chase-Dunn, Alvarez, Inoue, Niemeyer, Carlson, Fierro and Lawrence 2006). Explaining the upsweeps requires adding a discussion of emergent properties and the increasing geographical scale of interaction networks to the theories of rise and fall.
The question of the timing of upward sweeps to new levels is entirely germane
to the problem of modeling global state formation. So also is the issue of how
unusually large states have been formed in the past. Upward sweeps have mainly
been instances of a semiperipheral marcher state conquering and unifying
adjacent older core states and nearby peripheral areas. Conquest of adjacent
territories has been the main mechanism of large-scale political integration in
the past. But the pattern of hegemonic rise and fall in the modern world-system
has been different. The most powerful states, the hegemons (the Dutch, the
British and the
Figure 6: Core-Wide Empire vs. Modern Hegemony
Only during hegemonic decline have the modern capitalist hegemons shown a tendency toward “imperial overreach” in which their military power is employed in a last ditch effort to prop up a declining economic hegemony. These efforts have not been successful, and a new hegemon only emerges after a period of hegemonic rivalry and world war. This is a primitive method of choosing “global leadership” that we can no longer afford to employ because of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. This is analogous to the succession problem within states. The construction of institutions that can peacefully resolve the struggle for hegemony is of the first importance for our very survival as a species.
The approach that we propose is to model the main causes of state formation and
upward sweeps taking into account the ways in which the basic processes have
been altered by the emergence of new institutions. We elaborate and
improve upon the recent work of Robert Bates Graber (2004). Graber
develops both an ahistorical and an historical population pressure model of
political integration. His ahistorical model is a very simplified version of
the iteration model that includes population growth rates and the number of
independent polities. Graber’s historical model takes account of the emergence
of the
The main political structure of global governance in the modern world-system
has been, and remains, the international system of states as theorized and
constituted in the Peace of Westphalia. This international system of competing
and allying national states was extended to the periphery of the modern
world-system in two large waves of decolonization of the colonial empires of
core powers. The modern system already differed from earlier imperial systems
in that its core remained multicentric rather than being occasionally conquered
and turned into a core-wide empire. Instead, empires became organized as
distant peripheral colonies rather than as conquered adjacent territories.
Earlier instances of this type of colonial empire were produced by
thallasocratic states, mainly semiperipheral capitalist city-states that
specialized in trade (e.g.,
Extension of
the State System to the Periphery
The decolonization waves were part of the formation of a truly global polity of
states. The system of European core states, each with its own colonial empire
in Asia, Africa and the
Figure 7: Waves of colonization and decolonization based on Henige’s Colonial Governors (1970)
Our historical model adds marketization, decolonization, new lead technologies, the rise and fall of hegemons, and the rise of international political organizations to the population pressure model in order to forecast future trajectories of global state formation. Because we are sensitive to the cyclical nature of many processes we can easily consider how downward plunges and possible collapses might affect the probable trajectories of global state formation.
We also take into account the structural differences between recent and earlier
periods. For example, the period of British hegemonic decline moved rather
quickly toward conflictive hegemonic rivalry because economic competitors such
as
Figure 8: Trajectory of
Our modeling of the global future also considers changes in labor relations, urban-rural relations, the nature of emergent city regions, and the shrinking of the global reserve army of labor (Silver 2003).
The Trajectory of Global Governance and Political Globalization
Global governance refers to
the nature of power institutions in a world-system. So there has been global
governance all along. It has not emerged. But it has changed its nature. The
modern world-system was originally the European interstate system in which
states allied and fought with one another for territory, control of trade
routes, and other resources. As
The
interstate system that emerged in
The emergence
of colonial empires corresponded with the reproduction of a multicentric core
in which several European states allied with and fought each other. This system
came to be taken for granted by international relations theorists as the
natural mode of global governance. Despite that earlier systems had repeatedly
seen the emergence of “universal states” such as the
The oscillation of earlier systems morphed
into the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers in the modern system. A series
of hegemons emerged from the semiperiphery -- the Dutch, the British and the
The evolution that occurred with the rise and fall of the hegemonic core powers needs to be seen as a sequence of forms of world order that evolved to solve the political, economic and technical problems of successively more global waves of capitalist accumulation. The expansion of global production involved accessing raw materials to feed the new industries, and food to feed the expanding populations (Bunker and Ciccantell 2004). As in any hierarchy, coercion is a very inefficient means of domination, and so the hegemons sought legitimacy by proclaiming leadership in advancing civilization and democracy. But the terms of these claims were also employed by those below who sought to protect themselves from exploitation and domination. And so the evolution of hegemony was a dynamic interaction between the global elites and the global masses. World orders were challenged and reconstructed in a series of world revolutions (Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein 1984; Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2000)
Political Globalization and Global Party Formation
The nineteenth century saw the beginning of what we shall
call political globalization – the emergence and growth of an overlayer of
regional and increasingly global formal organizational structures on top of the
interstate system. We conceptualize
political globalization analogously to our understanding of economic
globalization -- the relative strength and density of larger versus smaller
interaction networks and organizational structures (Chase-Dunn, Kawano and
Brewer 2000). The most obvious indication of political globalization is
the evolution of the uneven and halting upward trend in the transitions from
the Concert of Europe to the
The
trend toward political globalization can also be seen in the emergence of the
Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank)
and the more recent restructuring of the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade
as the World Trade Organization, and the heightened visibility of other
international fora (the Trilateral Commission, the Group of Seven [Eight].
Some of
the proponents of a recent stage of global capitalism contend that strong
transnational capitalist firms and there political operatives working within
national states have combined with existing international organizations to
constitute an emerging transnational capitalist state (e.g. Robinson 2004).
This version of the global state formation hypothesis claims that a rather
integrated transnational capitalist class has emerged since the 1970s, and that
this global class uses both international organizations and existing national
state apparatuses as coordinated instruments of its rule. This perspective
probably overstates the degree of integration of class governance on a global
scale. The current reality is that both the old system of nationally competing
capitalist classes and a very high degree of global integration now exist and
these contend with one another to an extent that is much greater than in the
past. An internationally integrated global capitalist class was also in
formation in the second half of the nineteenth century, but this did not
prevent the world polity from descending into the violent interimperial rivalry
of the two twentieth century World Wars (Barr et al 2006). The degree of integration of both elites and
masses is undoubtedly greater in the current round of globalization, but will
it be strongly integrated enough to allow for readjustments without descent
into a repetition of the Age of Extremes? That is the question.
In addition to the formation of regional and global
international organizations, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also saw
the emergence of transnational social movements and the enlargement of what has
come to be known as global civil society. These have also altered the form of
global governance by providing expanded arenas in which individuals and
organizations participate directly in world politics rather than through the
mediating shell of national states. Specialized international and transnational
non-governmental organizations (e.g. the International Postal Union) exploded
in the middle of the 19th century (Murphy 1994). Abolitionism,
feminism and the labor movement became increasingly transnational in
nature. Earlier local movements had also
had a transnational aspect because sailors, pirates, slaves and indentured
servants carried ideas and sentiments
back and forth across the Atlantic (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000) but the large
global consequences of these movements occurred when many mainly local developments
(e.g. slave revolts) occurred synchronously or within the same time period.
The
Black Jacobins of the Haitian revolution, by depriving Napoleonic France of
important sources of food and wealth, played a role in the rise of British
hegemony (Santiago-Valles 2005). These kinds of effects of resistance from
below became stronger in the middle decades of the 19th century –
the years around the world revolution of 1848.
This is usually thought of in terms of developments in Europe, but
millenarian and revolutionary ideas traveled to the New World to play a role in
the “burned over district” in upstate
These developments ramped up during the Age of Extremes,
the first half of the twentieth century.
Internationalism in the labor movement had emerged in the second half of
the nineteenth century. Global political
parties were becoming active in world politics, especially during and after the
world revolution of 1917. The Communist International (Comintern) convened
large conferences of representative from all over the globe in
The
Comintern was abolished in 1943, though the
The
Bandung Conference in 1954 was an important forum in which the leaders of the
emerging nations explicated
Contemporary
Contestation in World Politics
While transnational
social movements date back to at least the Protestant Reformation, the scope
and scale of international ties among social activists have risen dramatically
over the past few decades, as they have increasingly shared information,
conceptual frameworks and other resources, and coordinated actions across
borders and continents (Moghadam 2005). In the 1980s and 1990s, the number of
formal transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) rose by nearly 200
percent. While TSMOs are still largely
housed in the global north, a rising portion are located in, and have ties to,
the global south; the number of TSMOs with multi-issue agendas increased
significantly, from 43 in 1983 to 161 in 2000 (Smith 2004). This rise in transnational organizing
contributed to, and helped to produce the global justice movement. The global justice movement is a “movement
of movements,” that includes all those who are engaged in sustained and
contentious challenges to neoliberal global capitalism, propose alternative
political and economic structures, and mobilize poor and relatively powerless
peoples. While this movement resorts to non-institutional forms of collective
action, it often collaborates with institutional “insiders,” such as NGOs that
lobby and provide services to people, as well as policy-makers (Tarrow 2005;
Keck and Sikkink 1998). The global justice movement and its allies includes a
variety of social actors and groups: unions, NGOs, SMOs, transnational advocacy
networks, as well as policy-makers, scholars, artists, journalists,
entertainers and other individuals.
Two important sections of global civil society and
transnational activism are: (1) The participants in the World Economic Forum
(WEF), who tend to see neo-liberal corporate globalization as a positive
development, and (2) those that identify with the global justice movement and
attend the World Social Forum (WSF). The WSF and the WEF represent two rather
different slices of global civil society and may presage a new era in global
party formation and political contention over the future of world society (Carroll
2006a,2006b; Chase-Dunn and Reese forthcoming).[7]
The organizational forms, discourses, and goals are intentionally different,
with the WSF being a popular alternative to the “leadership” focus of the
WEF. And yet some of the discourse and
goals of the two forums overlap, and some individuals and organizations
participate in both.
The WEF was established
in 1971 as a non-partisan independent international organization committed to
improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape
global, regional and industry agendas.[8]
The WEF maintains a headquarters in
The WSF was established in
2001 as a counter-hegemonic popular project focusing on issues of global
justice and democracy.[10]
Initially organized by the Brazilian labor movement and the landless peasant
movement, the WSF was intended to be a forum for the participants in, and
supporters of, grass roots movements from all over the world rather than a
conference of representatives of political parties or governments. The WSF was
organized as the popular alternative to the WEF. The WSF has been supported by
the Brazilian Workers Party, and has been most frequently held in
Some have claimed that the pattern of hegemonic rise and fall is now morphing into a new
structure of core condominium (Goldfrank 1999) while others see the rise of the
neoconservatives in the United States as a repetition of the pattern of
“imperial overstretch” that may portend another period of contentious
interimperial rivalry. Several outcomes are possible, including a repeat
of what happened after the last decline of a hegemon -- another world war among
core states (Chase-Dunn and Podobnik 1995). The current crisis of the
world-system seems fraught with several possible, and potentially interactive,
dangers of collapse – huge international and growing within-nation
inequalities, ecological disaster, what would appear to be an unsustainable
trade and investment imbalance, and a huge mountain of debt structured as
“secure” claims on future profit streams.
Manifestos
Galore in the World Revolution of 20xx
It is in this context that a new world revolution is
brewing. The movement of movements at the World Social Forum is in the midst of
a manifesto/charter writing frenzy as those who seek a more organized approach
to confronting global capitalism and neoliberalism attempt to put workable
coalitions together (Wallerstein 2007).
One issue is whether or not the World Social Forum itself
should formulate a political program and take formal stances on issues. The
Charter of the WSF explicitly forbids this and a significant group of
participants strongly supports maintaining the WSF as an “open space” for
debate and organizing. A survey of 625 attendees at the World Social Forum
meeting in
But this is not necessary. The WSF Charter also
encourages the formation of new political organizations. So those participants
who want to form a new global political organization are free to act, as long
as they do not do so in the name of the WSF as a whole.
In recent Social Forum meetings, “Assemblies of Social
Movements” and other groups have issued calls for global action and other
political statements. At the end of the 2005 meeting in
At present there is an impasse between those who are
willing to risk charges of Napoleonism and those who want proposals and totemic
texts to bubble up from the movements. And there are also important
disagreements about both goals and tactics. Such political statements,
particularly those issued by the 19 notables in 2005 and the Bamako Appeal,
have generated considerable controversy about process and legitimacy, since
they were issued by socially privileged and unelected leaders, mainly
intellectuals, who claim to speak on behalf of the “masses.” Creating
democratic mechanisms of accountability through which WSF participants can
engage in global collective action and move towards greater political unity
remains an important political task.
The
issue of process is strongly raised in several of the critiques of the Bamako
Appeal in a collection of documents published just before the World Social
Forum meeting in Nairobi in January of 2007 (Sen et al 2007). This
collection includes the Communist Manifesto, documents that came out of the
Bandung Conference, recent communiqués from the Zapatistas in
The
Multicentric Network of Movements
Just as
world revolutions in the past have resulted in restructuring world orders, it
can be presumed that the current one will also do this. But do the activists
themselves agree on the nature of the most important problems, visions of a
desirable future or notions of appropriate tactics and forms of movement
organization? A study of the structure
of overlapping links among movements as represented by attendees of the World
Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2005 who identify with and/or are actively
involved in a long list of movements shows that the structure of movement
overlaps is a multicentric network (Chase-Dunn, Petit, Niemeyer, Hanneman,
Alvarez, Gutierrez and Reese 2006). Human rights, anti-war, alternative media,
anti-globalization and environmental movements are strongly linked with one another
and are bridges to almost all the other movements (See Figure 9).
Figure
9: The network of WSF movement linkages
This structure means that the transnational
activists who participate in the World Social Forum process share goals and
support the general global justice framework asserted in the World Social Forum
Charter. It also means that this group is relatively integrated and is not prone to splits. A united front
approach that pays attention to the nature of this network structure can have
reasonable hope for mobilizing a strong force for collective action in world
politics, though solutions need to be found to address the issues of process
that have become apparent in the first wave of manifesto-writing.
North-South Issues
The
focus on global justice and north/south inequalities and the critique of
neoliberalism provide strong orienting frames for the transnational activists
of the World Social Forum. But there are difficult issues for collective action
that are heavily structured by the huge international inequalities that exist
in the contemporary world-system and these issues must be directly confronted.
A survey of the attendees of the 2005 World Social Forum found some important
differences between activists from the core, the periphery and the
semiperiphery (Chase-Dunn, Reese, Herkenrath,
Alvarez, Gutierrez, Kim, and Petit. Forthcoming).
Those
from the periphery were fewer, older, and more likely to be men. In addition,
participants from the periphery were more likely to be associated with
externally sponsored NGOs, rather than with self-funded SMOs and unions, as
NGOs have greater access to travel funds. Southern respondents were significantly
more likely than those from the global
north to be skeptical toward creating and
strengtheningor reforming global-level political
institutions and to favor the abolition of global institutions.
Those
who favor reforming or replacing global institutions in order to resolve global
problems (see discussion of Monbiot below) need to squarely face these facts.
This skepticism probably stems from the historical experience of peoples from
the non-core with colonialism and global-level institutions that claim to be
operating on universal principles of fairness, but whose actions have either
not solved problems or have made them worse. These new abolitionists are posing
a strong challenge to both existing global institutions and to those who want
to reform or replace these institutions. These realities must be addressed, not
ignored.
Democratizing
Global Governance
Ideas
of democracy that are deeply institutionalized in modern societies are being
increasingly applied at the global level, raising issues about the democratic
nature of existing institutions of global governance. Why are some countries
allowed to have weapons of mass destruction while others are not? How have
these decisions been made? Are the institutions and actors that made them
legitimate in the eyes of the peoples of the world?
Ann Florini (2004) acknowledges the need for democratic
global governance processes to address global issues that simply cannot be
dealt with by separate national states. Florini contends that global state
formation is impossible, undesirable and would engender huge opposition from
all quarters. Instead she sees a huge potential for democratizing global
governance through uses of the Internet for mobilizing global civil society.
Florini and others point out that existing institutions of global governance
have a huge democratic deficit. The most important and powerful elective office
in the world is that of the U.S. presidency, but only citizens of the United
States can vote for contenders for this office. Thus is existing global
governance illegitimate even by its own rules..
George Monbiot’s Manifesto
for a New World Order (2003) is a reasoned and insightful call for
radically democratizing the existing institutions of global governance and for
establishing a global peoples’ parliament that would be directly elected by the
whole population of the Earth. Monbiot also advocates the establishment of a
trade clearinghouse (first proposed by John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods)
that would reward national economies with balanced trade, and that would use
some of the surpluses generated by those with trade surpluses to invest in
those with trade deficits. He also proposes a radical reversal of the World
Trade Organization regime, which imposes free trade on the non-core but allows
core economies to engage in protectionism – a “fair trade organization” that
would help to reduce global development inequalities. Monbiot also advocates
abolition of the U.N. Security Council, and shifting its power over
peace-keeping to a General Assembly in which representatives’ votes would be
weighted by the population size of their country.
And Monbiot advocates global enforcement of a carbon
tax and a carbon swap structure that would reduce environmental degradation and
reward those who utilize green technologies. Monbiot also points out that the current level
of indebtedness of non-core countries could be used as formidable leverage over
the world’s largest banks if all the debtors acted in concert. This could
provide the muscle behind a significant wave of global democratization. But in
order for this to happen the global justice movement would have to organize a
strong coalition of the non-core countries that can overcome the splits that
tend to occur between the periphery and the semiperiphery. This is far from being a utopian
fantasy. It is a practical program for
global democracy.
Upward sweeps
have led to new levels of political integration in the past. What are the
prospects for another upward sweep that would result in the formation of a real
global state? It is generally the case that increases in organizational
complexity and hierarchy require the appropriation and control of greater
amounts of energy (Christian 2003). The last big upward sweep of city sizes and
colonial empires was greatly facilitated by the harvesting of fossil fuels that
stored the sunlight and heat of billions of years of photosynthesis and carbon
storage below the surface of the Earth. New energy technologies will eventually
emerge that can facilitate new levels of human complexity, but in the mean time
we will have to deal with the negative anthropogenic environmental consequences
of this colossal harvest of energy, the coming of “peak oil” and the eventual
exhaustion of the fossil fuel stores. It
would be reckless to bet on a “technological fix” that will arrive in time to
allow us to continue to rely on the existing institutions of global governance.
Thus the processes of political globalization, the growth of transnational
activism, and the potentials for democratizing global governance that we have
discussed above are needed to manage the huge issues that are on the immediate
horizon: the interimperial rivalry between a declining U.S. economic hegemony
and the rise of East Asia, the timely achievement of demographic stability as
the non-core moves on from an industrial death rate and an agricultural birth
rate to the demographic transition, the transition to a sustainable
relationship with the biosphere and the geosphere, and the reduction of global
inequalities.
The global
democracy movement is global state formation from below, whether or not it is
politic to say so. Perhaps it would be better to call it “multilateral global
governance.” Hopefully the
The European
Union process itself only creates a larger core state that can contend with the
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