Re: Prof Barendse's Discussion (fwd)

        Please forgive this second posting, but I'm not sure the first one
made it into the cyber-world.

        www


        Both Chase-Dunn and Barendse are right.  How is this possible?
Because Barendse thinks of "hegemony" primarily as domination and
Chase-Dunn thinks of hegemony primarily as "leadership," or, better yet,
"decisively influential innovation."  As Gramsci and others have argued,
the original meaning of "hegemony" is "leadership."  The two meanings are
not interchangeable.  For example, in my judgment, France was hegemonic or
at least trying very hard to be hegemonic between the reign of Louis XIV
and the reign of Napoleon I--but only in the sense of wielding 
preponderant political, military, cultural, and economic power.  Yet at no
time during this period could it be said that France was leading the way
to the future of Europe or Western or world civilization, except perhaps
in the realm of political ideas.  The same goes for Germany in its
hey-day, from 1871 to 1945.  Germany was the greatest power in Europe
during most of those years, but not conspicuously innovative, except in
certain areas of science and scholarship.

        On balance, I think it is unfortunate that world-systems
theorists have landed on the word "hegemony," because its original Greek
meaning has largely been forgotten and most people think it means
literal domination, which is the only synonym listed in my Merriam-Webster
Collegiate Dictionary.  Explaining to my students how, for example,
Giovanni Arrighi can properly call Renaissance Genoa "hegemonic" is a real
nuisance.  They also cannot fathom why world-systemists have so little
interest in France and Germany.  It doesn't help that the current
"hegemon," the United States, appears to be hegemonic in both senses of
the term, something that never quite applied to its predecessor, Britain.
The historic role of Britain, from William III on through George VI, was
to prevent any Continental power from becoming hegemonic (in the second
sense), but not to be hegemonic in itself (also in the second sense).  To
be sure, Britain was clearly hegemonic (in the first sense), and for a
time also in the second sense, navy-wise.  But her naval power did not
prevent Napoleonic France or Hitlerian Germany from grabbing nearly
all of Europe.

        Cheers,

        Warren Wagar


On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, christopher chase-dunn wrote:

> Thanks to Prof. Barendse for his cogent comments on the _Baltimore Sun_
> article that summarized my book with Terry Boswell, _The Spiral of
> Capitalism and Socialism_.
> I am off for a trip and do not have time for a complete response, but
> would like clear up a couple of apparent misunderstandings.
> 
> The first is regarding the mention in the Sun article of hegemonic
> overextension. Apparently Michael Hill, the excellent journalist who
> wrote the article, had been influenced by Paul Kennedy's work. I did not
> discuss my explanations of hegemonic decline with Mr. Hill.  It is a big
> topic that is discussed in detail in Chapter 9 of my _Global Formation_.
> 
> Secondly, Prof. Barendse questions the idea of Dutch hegemony in the
> seventeenth century. Professor Barendse knows much more than I do about
> the history of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. But some of his
> criticisms are based on a misunderstanding of what Boswell and I think
> about the role of the Dutch in the history of the European-centered
> subsystem, and in world history.
> 
> We do not claim that the Dutch state was hegemonic over the globe in the
> 17th century. Important other core regions had not yet been incorporated
> into the expanding European-centered system. In this we agree with
> Gunder Frank.
> Remember that we are talking about a regional system that is expanding.
> Europe was undergoing a long process of core formation even while it
> remained peripheral and semiperipheral in the larger Afro-Eurasian
> world-system.(See C. Chase-Dunn and T. Hall, _Rise and Demise 1997).
>  The significance of the Dutch revolution and subsequent economic and
> political/military leadership was as an agent of the development of
> capitalism. Here we disagree with Frank, who claims there was no
> transition to capitalism.
> 
> As Peter Taylor (The Way the Modern World Works, 1996) has said, the
> United Provinces were half way between a capitalist city state and a
> modern capitalist nation state. There had been semiperipheral capitalist
> city states in the interstices of the tributary empires at least since
> the emegence of the Phoenicians. (Indeed ancient Dilmun may have been
> one - see Chapter 6 of _Rise and Demise_). But the reemergence of
> commodity production the context of fuedal  Europe, an exceedingly
> decentralized form of the tributary mode of accumulation, created first
> a number of rather strong and adjacent capitalist city states in Europe,
> and eventually the capitalists of Amsterdam took effective control of
> the Dutch state.
> This was the first capitalist core state on Earth. It acted to use state
> power at the behest of the accumulation of profits rather than to tax
> peasant or extract tributes. And it did this on an intercontinental
> scale. True it was not the largest military power in Europe. But it was
> a significant naval power with intercontinetal reach. In this regard it
> was truly transitional between the earlier capitalist city states and
> later British hegemony of the 19th century.  So the Dutch hegemony was
> an important part of the development of capitalism as well as of the
> expansion of European power.
> 
> Important research that supports this approach has been published by
> Joya Misra and Terry Boswell 1997 "Dutch hegemony: global leadership
> during the age of mercantilism" _Acta Politica_ 32:174-209 and George
> Modelski and William R. Thompson 1996 _Leading Sectors and World
> Powers_.
> 
> Chris Chase-Dunn
> 
>