Re: Comment on Chris Chase Dunn and Terry Boswell

I haven't read the new book, so the following comments are addressed not
so much to Chase Dunn as what appears to me to a consensus among most if
not all of the world-systems heavyweights regarding the importance of
intercore conflict in the coming decades.  I should say at the outset that
I'm in substantial agreement with the thesis that "the world as we know
it" is coming to an end (and it is this claim above all others that lends
particular salience to world-systems analysis).  And it is precisely for
this reason that I'm puzzled by the insistent efforts, no matter how
qualified, to define the trajectory of the current conjuncture in terms of
historical parallels in the modern world-system.  

The divergences from transitions past have been
noted: the fact that throughout the last B-phase, capital flowed back to
the OLD hegemon; the failure of a substantial geopolitical challenge to
the US to materialize; and the absence of the start to a new "Thirty Years
War", which by all rights should have commenced at the conclusion of the
1980's, and not 20-30 years from now.  And yet, despite clear signals that
the familiar systemic logic is being superceded by something new, we
continue to focus on economic challenges to the US as the
main engine of change.  We hear that the Asian crisis is but a temporary
setback in the continued rise of Japan/China/East Asia as a whole.  We
note that the American success of the past decade is the merely periodic
swing that favored Europe in the 70's and Asia in the 80's.  We try to
wring every ounce of significance out of every disagreement between the US
and its allies (though it is really hard to say whether those
disagreements are any more profound today than they were 50 years ago).
These sentiments were particularly plentiful around the time of the Kosovo
conflict, which even at its conclusion was portrayed as an American
defeat.

Arno Tausch has noted the role of ideological differences in the
preparation of armed conflict, and of course he is correct.  But equally
important are the concretely common interests of the core powers.  With
income differentials expanding system-wide, and with ecological
imperatives militating against a China or India "catching up", Germany,
Japan and the US have the maintenance of the value-added hierarchy to
unite them, and against this, the divisions appear quite petty.  The fear
of large, poor states with little to lose (an everpresent challenge
in Europe and Asia but not North America) should be enough to keep the
Europeans and Japanese in their roles as clients of the US.

In addition, the possibility of competing effectively with the US is
precluded by continued political disunity on the part of the
"challengers".  An article posted on this list sometime last summer (the
name of the author escapes me but I think it has since been printed by New
Left Review) argued that the Kosovo War effectively buried the dream of a
European counterweight to the US, both politically and culturally.  No
political unity = smaller markets and greater difficulty of defending
one's interests in the international arena (witness the US successes in
the Gulf and the Caspian Sea basin in the last 10 years).  Of course, the
geopolitically and militarily privileged position  of the US also allows
it to destabilize its allies (by perpetuating conflict in Korea; by
creating and then containing Saddam Hussain and Milosevic) and thus keep
them on a short leash.  Little wonder that under these conditions
international investors continue to seek out American markets as safe
havens (Clinton is right and the isolationists are wrong - the US
expansion of the last 10 years IS premised on the global economy).  It
takes a stretch of the imagination to picture Europeans or Asians turning
the tables, even if their military spending begins to approach US levels
(not likely either).  The struggle for hegemony appears to have been
replaced by the far more dangerous struggle for survival, in which the
lineups will probably conform to those suggested by Mr. Tausch.

I think that it is not too early to begin seriously investigating the
possibility that, given the concentration of power in the US we are now in
a transition to some form of world-empire.  That eventuality has always
been mentioned as one of the three likely outcomes of the current crisis
(along with a new hegemony and chaotic disintegration) by world-systems
theorists, but for some reason it was the hegemonic variant that has
dominated all discussion.  If this is indeed the case, then British and
Dutch hegemony lose their status as precedents, for which we will have to
look elsewhere (if anywhere at all).  And a whole range of questions, up
to now subordinate to (and functional for) the struggle for hegemony will
suddenly open up as issues of the first order.  Not only will we have to
identify the ideas which will serve as ideologies of a world-empire in our
time and locate their possible sources of origin, but we will also have to
confront the question of whether a far more fundamental shift in how we
know the world is in the making.

-- 
Boris Stremlin
bc70219@binghamton.edu