Key Points

• World-system theory has its origins in Marxist thought, with the critique of imperialism being especially influential.

• Lenin's analysis of imperialism argued that the world economy was divided into a core and periphery, and that capitalists in the core used profits derived from the exploitation of the periphery to pacify their own workers.

• Lenin's theory of imperialism was especially influential in the 1917-39 period when the great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s appeared to confirm that capitalism was going through its final crisis.

• Theories of international relations derived from the Marxist critique of imperialism became much less influential in the West following the end of the Second World War.

Wallerstein and World-System Theory

There can be little doubt that it was developments in the real world of world politics that led to a resur­gence of interest in Marxist-influenced analyses. The oil shocks and deep global recession of the 1970s, combined with the parallel process of detente between East and West, served to push economic issues centre-stage. What had previously been rather dismissively referred to as 'low polities', that is questions pertaining to global economic rela­tions, were now at the centre of the political agenda. Analyses which stressed the indissoluble linkage between the economic and the political realms, appeared far better placed to make sense of 'really existing' world politics than the theoretical lenses worn by most scholars of international pol­itics. In these circumstances, Marxist-influenced approaches received a huge fillip and were devel­oped with renewed vigour.

Without doubt, the outstanding figure to emerge from this intellectual ferment is. Immanuel Wallerstein. The rest of this chapter will concen­trate on his work. But before proceeding any fur­ther, two caveats are in order. First, it must be stressed that Wallerstein's work is only one of many approaches which can loosely be described as Marxist-influenced. In Box 7.2 we briefly summa­rize a number of others, many of whom were key influences on Wallerstein. Secondly, Wallerstein's project is still evolving. He remains an impressively prolific author and thus in the following, we can do no more than offer a snapshot of what is still 'work in progress'.

Wallerstein's first works were studies of African states in the pre- and post-colonial era. As his work progressed, Wallerstein became increasingly dissat­isfied with the kind of approach that only looked at one country at a time. There was much that could not be explained about the continued poverty of many African countries if they were only studied individually. Thus, in order to understand their development, or, more correctly, lack of develop­ment, it would be necessary to analyse specific countries within one social whole: an entity that he was to label the modern world-system.

Box 7.2. Other Theorists of Global Capitalism

This chapter has concentrated on the work of Immanuel Wallerstein as a key example of someone who has devel­oped a radical approach to understanding international relations. However this should not detract from the fact that numerous other writers have contributed to the development of a radical perspective on the nature of global capitalism. The Dependency (or dependencia) School is the name given to a group of scholars who have studied the nature of economic relations between Latin America and the developed world. The key figures in this group include: Frank, Cardoso, and Prebisch. Andre Gunder Frank is a key figure in the dependency school and is largely responsible for generating an interest in the approach in North America. Frank has been criticized from within the dependency school for providing a rather crude version of the theory. More recently Frank has become deeply involved in the world-system approach. Key Work: Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979). Raul Prebisch was the first Executive Director of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America. Together with a team of Latin American economists he was responsible for the development of concepts which became central for the Dependency school. These included developing Lenin's notion of centre-periphery relations, and the idea that countries in the developing world were on the losing side of the declining terms of trade: namely that year by year the earnings from the sale of primary products (the main export of developing countries) could purchase less in the way of manufac­tured goods (the main export of developed countries). Key Work: Towards a New Trade Policy for Development (New York: United Nations, 1964). The Annales School is the name given to a group of scholars associated with the French journal Annales d'histoire economique et sociale. The Annales school comprised a marked change from traditional historical approaches. In contrast to conventional historical approaches which concentrate on the very detailed description of specific events, and life histories of indi­viduals (usually kings, politicians, and soldiers), the Annalistes sought a rather different approach which focused on long-term social change. Key writers include Fernand Braudel, Marc Bloch, and Lucien Febvre. Fernand Braudel is a key influence on Wallerstein, pri­marily due to his analysis of historical time. In his major works Braudel employs a three-way approach based on different conceptions of time. The 'long term' (or la longue duree) concerns how environmental factors, such as climate change, affect human development. The 'middle term' is concerned with tracing the effects of human structures such as capitalism, racism, and patriarchy. The 'short term' is the level of more con­ventional history and relates events. Key work: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (London: Fontana, 1975). Paul Baran developed Lenin's views on monopoly capi­talism in the post-World War II period. Baran stressed the absolute (rather than relative) losses that were involved in trade between developed and underdeveloped countries. Essentially countries of the developing world became underdeveloped as a result of their trad­ing relations with the rest of the world. Furthermore the extraction of wealth was not used for investment purposes in the developed world, but was instead squandered through advertising, and more impor­tantly arms expenditure. Key Work: The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957). Christopher Chase-Dunn lays much more emphasis on the role of the inter-state system than does Wallerstein. He argues that the capitalist mode of production has a single logic in which both politico-military and exploitative economic relations play key roles. Key Work: Global Formation: Structures of the World-Economy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). Janet Abu-Lughod has challenged Wallerstein's account of the emergence of the modern world-system in the sixteenth century. She argues that during the medieval period Europe comprised a peripheral area to a world-economy centred on the Middle Fast. Key Work: Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250-1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Henrique Fernando Cardoso is now president of Brazil! He was also a contributor to, and critic of, the Dependency School. Most famous for his work with Enzo Faletto on Brazil. They argued that rather than there being one situation of dependency between core and periphery, situations of dependency would vary depending on the different relationships of domestic classes, transnational capital, and core state Governments. Key Work: with Enzo Faletto, Depend­ency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Walter Rodney extended a structuralist approach to the study of Africa, concentrating on the impact of slavery and colonialism in Undermining the dynamism of African societies. Key Work: How Europe Under­developed Africa (London: Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1972). Johan Galtung stressed the importance of considering a wide range of factors in the analysis of imperialism. He " argued that Lenin and Hobson had concentrated too much on an economic analysis. It was also necessary to consider other factors of dominance such as political, military, cultural, and communications. Galtung also emphasized the importance of examining the rela­tionships and coinciding interests between elites in the core and in the centre (i.e. comprador class). Key work: 'A Structural Theory of Imperialism', journal of Peace Research, 8: 1 (1971), 81-117.

The world-system is the central feature of Wallerstein's work. He contends that 'the appropri­ate "unit of analysis" for the study of social or soci­etal behaviour is a "world-system".' (1991a: 267) One should note that this is a claim which, if true, has very far-reaching implications. For what Wallerstein is in effect arguing is that all social phe­nomena, from poverty in West African villages to ethnic conflict in the Balkans, and from interna­tional relations to the nature of family life, have to be understood in the context of this larger entity. To understand what he means by world-system, it is useful to unpack the term itself.

For Wallerstein system has two defining characteristics. First,, all the elements within a system are interlinked. They exist in a dynamic relationship with each other and if one is to understand the attributes, the functions or the behaviour of one element, one must understand its position within the whole. Accordingly, Wallerstein argues that attempts to distinguish and differentiate between. for example, economic phenomena and political and socio-cultural phenomena are misleading. Nothing in the system can be understood in isola­tion: a holistic approach is the only valid one.

Second, life within the system is more or less self-contained. This means that if the system were cut off from all external influences the outcomes within that system would be identical. Thus any-one seeking to explain changes within the system must seek to focus upon those internal dynamics responsible for change rather than search tor external (exogenous) factors.

When attached to the term world-system, the prefix world is not meant to imply that any particular system necessarily encompasses the whole globe. Rather 'world' is used here to refer to a dis­crete, self-contain realm For example, Wallerstein would consider that the Roman empire was a world-system even though its boundaries did not incorporate the whole globe. Thus world-sys­tem refers to a particular geographical ягря gov­erned by the logic of single system. That said, it should be noted that one of the novel features of the world-system that we inhabit—the modern world-system—is that it has grown to incorporate the whole globe.

Wallerstein argues that history has witnessed two types of world-system: world-empires, and world- II economies. The main distinction between a world-ll 'empire and a world-economy relates to how decisions about resource distribution—crudely, who gets what—are made. In a world-empire a cen­tralized political system uses its power to redistrib­ute resources from peripheral areas to the central core area. In the Roman empire this took the form' of the payment of 'tributes' by the outlying provinces back to the Roman heartland. By con­trast, in a world-economy_there is no single centre of political authority, but rather we find multiple ( competing centres of power. Resources are there-fore not distributed according to central political decree, but rather through the medium of a mar­ket. However, although the mechanism for -resource distribution is different, as we shall see, the net effect in both a world-economy and a world-empire is similar, and that is the transfer of resources from the peripheral areas to the core.

The modern world-system is an example of a world-economy. According to Wallerstein this system emerged in Europe at around the turn of the 'sixteenth century. It subsequently expanded to bring about the current situation where there is no corner of the globe which is not thoroughly impli­cated within it. The driving force behind this seem­ingly relentless process of expansion and incorporation has been the 'ceaseless accumulation of capital': or, in a nutshell, capitalism. Thus the modern world-system is above all else a capitalist system—it is this which provides its central dynamic.

Wallerstein defines capitalism as 'a system of production for sale in a market for profit and appropri­ation of this profit on the basis of individual or collective ownership' (1979: 66). Note that this is a description of a relationship rather than a particu­lar set of institutions. Indeed, Wallerstein is adamant that within the context of this broader relationship, institutions are continually being cre­ated and recreated. This state of flux not only extends to what are normally considered to be nar­rowly economic institutions such as particular companies or even industries. It is equally true for what are often thought to be permanent, even pri­mordial institutions, such as the family unit, ethnic groups, and states. According to Wallerstein, none of these are timeless—none remain the same. To claim otherwise is to adopt an ahistoric attitude, that is, to fail to understand that the characteristics of social institutions are historically specific. For Wallerstein and his colleagues, all social institutions, large and small, are continually adapting and changing within the context of a dynamic world-system.

Furthermore, and crucially, it is not only the elements within the system which change. Waller­stein argues that the system itself is historically bounded. It had a beginning and, as we shall see, Wallerstein argues that it is nearing its end. To understand the nature of the system we shall now turn to the more formal description of its charac­teristics and attributes.