On Wed, 12 Nov 1997, Dennis R Redmond wrote:
> burnt-out war-ravaged economies. I think Wallerstein talks somewhere about
> the "semi-periphery", which can either rise a la Japan and South Korea in
> the global food chain, or deteriorate a la Britain and Argentina. You
> My own suspicion is that, barring major political changes, the US may well
> lose its "core" status in the medium-term future, due to the rise of the
> euro, more efficient East Asian coordination, and the generalized
> neoliberal decadence of what used to be the American Empire, and become
> a very large but declining semi-periphery. But maybe that's too
> -- Dennis
I may have missed something about world-systems theory, but does the
"core" not include all countries in the same rough development level as
the hegemonic power and at or near the centre of transnational financial
flows? By this definition, decline as hegemon hardly means transition to
semiperipheral status. The only country that underwent such a drop that
comes to mind is Spain, for a while. Has anyone _ever_ counted the UK in
the semiperiphery, even in the 1970s? And even if influence becomes more
diffuse or centred on the EU or any other region, why should that mean the
USA falling out of the top tier? Once a country "joins the club," so to
speak, do late-capitalist technology flows not essentially guarantee that
it more or less stays in?
--AKW
===============================================================================
Adam K. Webb
Department of Politics
Princeton University
Princeton NJ 08544 USA
609-258-9028
http://www.princeton.edu/~akwebb