Wallerstein, I. (1974). The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16(4), 387-415.

387 – “One of the great strengths of Marxism was that, being an oppositional and hence critical doctrine, it called attention not merely to the contradictions of the system but to those of its ideologists, by appealing to the empirical evidence of historical reality which unmasked the irrelevancy of the models proposed for the explanation of the social world”

388 – “Marxism is a whole collection of models”

389 – stages of development; determine the units

389 – “Can stages be skipped? This question is only logically meaningful if we have ‘stages’ that ‘co-exist’ within a single empirical framework.”

390 – “If a stage can be skipped, it isn’t a stage.”  [mini-systems]

390 – defining characteristic of a social system: sectors are dependent on others | must share common political structure and culture

391 – “the so-called nineteenth-century empires, such as Great Britain or France, were not world-empires at all, but nation-states with colonial appendages operating within the framework of a world-economy.” (introduce 16th century capitalism)

392 – “‘the development of underdevelopment‘, that is, the view that the economic structures of contemporary underdeveloped countries is not the form which a ‘traditional’ society takes upon contact with ‘developed’ societies, not an earlier stage in the ‘transition’ to industrialization. It is rather the result of being involved in the world-economy as a peripheral, raw material
producing area, or as Frank puts it for Chile, ‘underdevelopment … is the necessary product of four centuries of capitalism itself’.”

392 – world capitalist system = ‘capitalist mode of production‘ + ‘participation in a world capitalist economic system’

394 – Questions:  “Is England, or Mexico, or the West Indies a unit of analysis ? Does each have a separate ‘mode of production‘? Or is the unit (for the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries) the European world-economy, including England and Mexico, in which case what was the ‘mode of production’ of this world-economy?

394 – 395 – “three stages after bourgeois rule: (1)a post-revolutionary government, (2) a socialist state, and eventually (3) communism” and then (4) socialist state of the people

stages | unit of analysis | end points | when are the phenomena separate? (the chronological phenomena or the race/cultural phenomena)

397 – grid of exchange relationships; 398 – “Members of a system (a mini-system or a world-system) can be linked in limited exchanges with elements located outside the system, in the ‘external arena’ of the system.”

401 – The three structural positions in a world – economy-core, periphery, and semi-periphery - had become stabilized by about 1640.

402 – “The tendency of the capitalist mode of production to become worldwide is manifested not only through the constitution of a group of national economies forming a complex and hierarchical structure, including an imperialist pole and a dominated one, and not only through the antagonistic relations that develop between the different ‘national economies’ and the different states, but also through the constant ‘transcending’ of’ national limits’ by big capital (the formation of ‘international big capital’, ‘world
firms’, etc….).”

403 – “the strength of the state-machinery in core states is a function of the weakness of other state-machineries”

404 – “There have been three major mechanisms that have enabled world-systems to retain relative political stability: (1) concentration of military strength in the hands of the dominant forces; (2) pervasiveness of an ideological commitment
to the system as a whole; (3) the division of the majority into a larger lower stratum and a smaller middle stratum”

405 – semi-periphery is more political than economic

406 – “The meaning of ethnic consciousness in a core area is considerably different from that of ethnic consciousness in a peripheral area precisely because of the different class position such ethnic groups have in the world-economy”

408 – “Stage three of the capitalist world-economy begins then, a stage of industrial rather than of agricultural capitalism. Henceforth, industrial production is no longer a minor aspect of the world market but comprises an ever larger percentage of world gross production – and even more important, of world gross surplus. This involves a whole series of consequences for the world-system. First of all, it led to the further geographic expansion of the European world-economy to include now the whole of the globe”

408 – “industrial production required access to raw materials of a nature and in a quantity such that the needs could not be supplied within the former boundaries”; “geographic expansion of the European world-economy meant the elimination of other world-systems as well as the absorption of the remaining mini-system”; “independences in the Latin American countries did nothing to change their peripheral status”

408 – 409 – “The absorption of Africa as part of the periphery meant the end of slavery world-wide for two reasons: (1) the manpower that was used as slaves was now needed for cash-crop production in Africa itself, whereas in the eighteenth century Europeans had sought to discourage just such cash-crop production; (2) Africa was part of the periphery and not the external arena, slavery was no longer economic”

411 – WWI: “stage of the consolidation of the industrial capitalist world-economy”

411 – 412 – WWII: “Three alternative areas were available and each was pursued with assiduity: (1) Western Europe had to be rapidly ‘reconstructed’, and it was the Marshall Plan which thus allowed this area to play a primary role in the expansion of world productivity; (2) Latin America became the reserve of U.S. investment from which now Britain and Germany were completely cut off; (3) Southern Asia, the Middle East and Africa had to be decolonized… in order to mobilize productive potential in a way that had never been achieved in the colonial era”

412 – “a world capitalist economy does not permit true imperium”

412 – “a decline in U.S. state hegemony has actually increased the freedom of action of capitalist enterprises, the larger of which have now taken the form of multinational corporations which are able to maneuver against state bureaucracies whenever the national politicians become too responsive to internal worker pressures”

413 – “the mode of operation of a capitalist market-system: seeking increased efficiency of production in order to realize a maximum price on sales, thus achieving a more favorable allocation of the surplus of the world-economy”

414 – “Consolidation, however, does not mean the absence of contradictions and does not mean the likelihood of long-term survival”

414 – “two fundamental contradictions… involved in the workings of the capitalist world-system:

1) in the short-run the maximization of profit requires maximizing the withdrawal of surplus from immediate consumption of the majority, in the long-run the continued production of surplus requires a mass demand which can only be created by redistributing the surplus withdrawn. Since these two considerations move in opposite directions (a ‘contradiction’), the system has constant crises which in the long-run both weaken it and make the game for those with privilege less worth playing.

2) whenever the tenants of privilege seek to co-opt an oppositional movement by including them in a minor share of the privilege, they may no doubt eliminate opponents in the short-run; but they also up the ante for the next oppositional movement created in the next crisis of the world-economy. Thus the cost of ‘co-option‘ rises ever higher and the advantages of co-option seem ever less worthwhile”

Ren, X. 2010. “World System,” in Encyclopedia of Urban Studies, Sage Publications.

Arrighi, G., & Silver, B. J. (2001). Capitalism and World (dis)order. Review of International Studies, 27(05), 257-279. doi:10.1017/S0260210501008117

257 – “Wallerstein has claimed that the year 1989 marks the end of the particular politico-cultural era launched by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. For Wallerstein, however, it also marks the beginnings of a terminal crisis of the modern world system that came into existence in the ‘long sixteenth century’”

258 – Three observations:

(1) “the beginning and the end of the twentieth century are broadly comparable periods, with the centrality of ‘finance capital’being one of the crucial common denominators between the two periods”

(2) “derived from Fernand Braudel’s argument that this financialization of capital has been a recurrent feature of historical capitalism since the sixteenth century”

(3) “periods of financial expansion are not just an expression of cyclical processes of historical capitalism… rather they also have been periods of major reorganizations of the world capitalist system—what we call hegemonic transitions”

“The centrality of finance capital at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century gave rise to liberal and Marxist theories of ‘finance capital’ and ‘imperialism’, which saw this phenomenon as signalling a new, unprecedented or
highest stage of capitalism”

259 – globalization’and ‘financialization of capital’ – highest stage of capitalist development

260 – “Four systemic cycles of accumulation, named after (and defined by) the particular complex of governmental and business agencies that led the world capitalist system, first towards the material and then towards the financial expansions that jointly constitute the cycle”:

(A) 1400′s – 1600′s: Genoese-Iberian cycle

(B) 1650′s – 1750′s: Dutch cycle

(C) 1750′s – 1950′s: British cycle,

(D) 1950′s – present: US cycle

261 – “consecutive systemic cycles of accumulation overlap with one another at their beginnings and ends. All phases of financial expansion have indeed been the ‘autumn’of major developments of world capitalism. But they have also been periods of hegemonic transition, in the course of which a new leadership emerged interstitially and over time reorganized the system so as to make its further expansion possible”

“Far from proceeding along a single track laid some four to five hundred years ago — as Wallerstein implies — the formation and expansion of the world capitalist system has thus occurred through several switches to new tracks laid by speci?c complexes of governmental and business agencies”

262 – “Financial expansions and the evolution of world capitalism:

Material and financial expansions are both processes of the world capitalist system  — a system that has increased in scale and scope over the centuries but has encompassed from its earliest beginnings a large number and variety of governmental and business agencies.”

“from co-operation to competition, the relevant organizational structures are not those of the units of the system but those of the system itself”

“Where do the profits come from if not from the production and exchange of commodities?”

1. redistribution of profits within the capitalist class – “the link between the crises of over-accumulation that signal the end of material expansions and the financial expansions that follow”
2. redistribution of wealth and income in capitalists’ favor
3. capitalists moving funds out of “less profitable and into more profitable areas of production and exchange” – supersession of financial expansions by a new phase of material expansion”

264 – primitive accumulation – “an accumulation not the result of the capitalist mode of production, but its starting point”

In this Figure, going up the column from “No” to “Yes” means internalizing something that was previously externalized.

266 – “double movement” – simultaneous forward and backward movement

267 – “The development of historical capitalism as a world system has thus been based on the formation of ever more powerful cosmopolitan-imperial (or corporate-national) blocs of governmental and business organizations endowed with the capability of widening (or deepening) the functional and spatial scope of the world capitalist system. And yet, the more powerful these blocs have become, the shorter the life-cycle of the regimes of accumulation”

268 – “The question that remains open is whether this long established pattern can be expected to result, in the future as it did in the past,in the replacement of the still dominant US regime by another regime”

269 – “Hegemonic transitions: past and present”

1. “within ten or at most twenty years the US regime would experience its terminal crisis
2. over time (about 20 yrs) the crisis would be superseded by the formation of a new regime capable of sustaining a new material expansion of world capitalism
3. the leading governmental organization of this new regime would approximate the features of a ‘world-state’ more closely than the United States already has
4. unlike the US regime, the new regime would be of the extensive (‘cosmopolitan-imperial’) rather than of the intensive (‘corporate-national’) variety
5. most important, the new regime would internalize reproduction costs, that is, the kind of costs that the US regime has tended to externalize ever more massively”

“the overall model of hegemonic transition that has emerged from the analysis”

270 – “expansion increases what Emile Durkheim has called the ‘volume’ and ‘dynamic density’of the system, that is, the number of socially relevant units that interact within the system and the number, variety and velocity of transactions that link the units to one another”

271 – “Hegemonic crises have been characterized by three distinct but closely related processes:

1. the intensification of interstate and inter-enterprise competition;
2. the escalation of social conflicts; and
3. the interstitial emergence of new configurations of power

“Hegemonic breakdowns are the decisive turning points of hegemonic transitions”

272 – “The breakdown of any given hegemonic order is ultimately due to the fact that the increase in the volume and dynamic density of the system outgrows the organizational capabilities of the particular hegemonic complex that had created the conditions of the systemic expansion”

“each cycle differs from the preceding one in two main respects:

1. the greater concentration of organizational capabilities wielded by the hegemonic state in comparison with its predecessor
2. the higher volume and dynamic density of the system that is being reorganized by the hegemonic state”

“the relation of the power of the declining hegemons tended to blind them to the increasingly fragile nature of their dominance”

275 – Possible futures

276 – “In past hegemonic transitions, systemwide financial expansions contributed to an escalation of social conflict”

“the present financial expansion has been primarily an instrument — to paraphrase Wallerstein — of the containment of the combined demands of the peoples of the non-Western world (for relatively little per person but for a lot of people) and of the Western working classes (for relatively few people but for quite a lot per person)”

278 – “The fall [of the Western world] is likely because the leading states of the West are prisoners of the developmental paths that have made their fortunes, both political and economic”

“international system breaks down not only because unbalanced and aggressive new powers seek to dominate their neighbours,
but also because declining powers, rather than adjusting and accommodating, try to cement their slipping pre-eminence into an exploitative hegemony”

Agnew, 1994. “The territorial trap: The geographical assumptions of international relations theory,” in RIPE, 1(1), p.53-80.

Abstract:

“Even when political rule is territorial, territoriality does not necessarily entail the practices of total mutual exclusion which dominant understandings of the modem territorial state attribute to it. However, when the territoriality of the state is debated by international relations theorists the discussion is overwhelmingly in terms of the persistence or obsolescence of the territorial state as an unchanging entity rather than in terms of its significance and meaning in different historical-geographical circumstances. Contemporary events call this approach into question. The end of the Cold War, the increased velocity and volatility of the world economy, and the emergence of political movements outside the framework of territorial states, suggest the need to consider the territoriality of states in historical context.”

“Conventional thinking relies on three geographical assumptions that have led into the ‘territorial trap’:

1. states as fixed units of sovereign space,
2. the domestic/foreign polarity, and
3. states as ‘containers’ of societies”

state = “exercise of power through a set of central political institutions” + “clear spatial demarcation of the territory within which
the state exercises its power”

54 – “even when rule is territorial and fixed, territory does not necessarily entail the practices of total mutual exclusion which the
dominant understanding of the territorial state attributes to it”

SPACE AND SPATIALITY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

55 – “‘space = the presumed effect of location and spatial setting, or where political-economic processes are taking place, upon those processes”

“spatiality = to how space is represented as having effects”

THE TERRITORIAL STATE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY

57 – “fear of domination by others rather than the desire to dominate them drives inter-state competition; states are unitary
actors whose nature is determined by their interaction with one another.  Processes involving sub-state units (e.g. localities, regions) or larger units (e.g. world regions, the globe) are necessarily excluded”

58 – “The state system’ thus has an existence outside the historical contexts in which it has evolved”

“The question Keohane (1984) seeks to address is the orthodox ‘idealist’ one of how cooperation is possible in the international system without a dominant or hegemonic power“?

states as “utility rather than status maximizers”

three contextual factors have interacted to reproduce the dominant view about state territoriality:

1. “the preference for abstract and ‘closed system‘ thinking among advocates of a scientific (positivist) approach to international relations… [where] a ‘state’ is an ideal-type or logical object rather than any particular state and, thus, states can be written about without reference to the concrete conditions in which they exist”
2. muddling nation and state into “nation-state“
3. “the intellectual division of labour and associated intellectual taxonomy of the ‘fields’ of political science that emerged in the aftermath of WWI”

The Territorial Trap – “the geographical assumptions that have led to the privileging of a territorial conception of the state:”

1. “state territories have been reified as set or fixed units of sovereign space”
2. “the use of domestic/foreign and national/international polarities has served to obscure the interaction between processes operating at different scales”
3. “the territorial state has been viewed as existing prior to and as a container of society; as a consequence, society becomes a national phenomenon”

STATE SOVEREIGNTY AND TERRITORIAL SPACE

60 – 64 – without sovereignty, the state would just be another organization; “only the state can…”

The “relationship of security to spatial sovereignty has had four consequences for international relations theory”

1. “it has led to the definition of political identity in exclusively state-territorial terms”
2. “the rigid separation between those people within the territorial space pursuing ‘universal’ values (politics) and those outside
   practising different, and inferior, values”
3. “the security-spatial sovereignty nexus involves viewing the territorial state ‘not in its historical particularity, but abstractly, as an idealised decision-making subject’”
4. “the principle of state sovereignty ‘denies alternative possibilities because it fixes our understanding of the future oppor-
   tunities in relation to a distinction between history and progress within statist communities and mere contingency outside them’”

64 – WEAK POINT: “The lack of interest in the creation of specific states has allowed the European confusion of ‘state’ and ‘nation’”

65 – TIME LINE: “the territorial state as a primary mode of political organization is no older than the 18th century”

THE DOMESTIC/FOREIGN POLARITY

65 – 66 – “Regarding territorial states as the ‘nodes‘ of international political economy, many theorists adopt what can be thought of as a version of abstract individualism; intellectual choices eliminate the possibility of seeing the territorial state and its power as dependent on the interaction between global and local”

67 – “Cox (1981) suggests that territorial states are in a constant condition of reconstruction at the intersection of global and local
material conditions”

“Three ‘historical structures’ of global geopolitical order for the period 1815-1990 can be identified in which the political-economic position and meaning of the territorial state changed profoundly:”

1. 1815-1875: “Concert of Europe and Britain’s economic and naval ascendancy”
2. 1875-1945: “‘rival imperialisms’ in which state economic activities expanded, interstate rivalry grew, and nationalism intensified”
3. 1945-1990: Neo-liberal State: “interstate competition and conflict were largely transformed by the US reconstruction of the industrial capitalist states along liberal capitalist lines”
   1. “security as a member of a stable alliance system”
   2. “economic growth as a participant in an open world economy”
   3. “to adjust the national economy to growth of the world economy”
   4. “to facilitate adaptation rather than to protect existing positions”

67 – US, Western Europe, and Japan becoming increasingly competitive with each other but “their common stake in an expanding world economy encourages commitment to some variety of ‘transnational liberalism’”

68 – “The competitiveness of many firms in a wide range of industries is now determined by non-territorial factors:

• “access to technology vested in firms”
• “marketing strategy”
• “responsiveness to consumers”
• “flexible management techniques”

THE TERRITORIAL STATE AS CONTAINER OF SOCIETY

68 – society: “the social order or organization within the territory of a state”; state guaranteeing social order

70 – results from fusion of the territorial state with society – “The state-defined society… (socio-spatial basis of organisation) is not centralised and territorial… [and] has varied considerably through the history of societies… so consequently have [sic] the power of states”

71 – “spatial exclusivity is vital to the incorporation of social practices under state regulation”; no society without the state

THE TERRITORIAL TRAP is (pg. 72) “circular and cumulative”

EMERGING SPATIAL FORMS

the disappearance of space; pg. 73 “space is not identical to state territoriality” e.g. Kuwait; “Kuwait has a spatial identity as a node in the network of informational capitalism”

74 – “Why have these apparently contradictory spatial forms of fragmentation and globalization emerged together? The most obvious point is that globalization is not synonymous with homogenization”

75 – “evolving redefinition of economic interests from national and sectoral (age group, social class, etc.) divisions to regional and local levels”; “The state still provides ‘legitimation services’ through social spending and potential levers over economic transactions”

76 – “The main point in reviewing the continuing strengths of territorial states is to suggest that globalization and fragmentation do not signal their terminal decline; the Final Fall of the territorial state. But at the same time, and the main point of the paper, the world that is in the process of emergence cannot be adequately understood in terms of the fixed territorial spaces of mainstream international relations theory.”

Conclusion

Geographical Assumptions:

1. “reification of state territorial spaces as fixed units of secure sovereign space”
2. “division of the domestic from the foreign”
3. “territorial state as existing prior to and as a container of society”

“Each of these assumptions is problematic, and increasingly so. Social, economic, and political life cannot be ontologically contained within the territorial boundaries of states through the methodological assumption of ‘timeless space’. Complex population
movements, the growing mobility of capital, increased ecological interdependence, the expanding information economy, and the ‘chronopolitics’ of new military technologies challenge the geographical basis of conventional international relations theory.
The critical theoretical issue, therefore, is the historical relationship between territorial states and the broader social and economic structures and geopolitical order (or form of spatial practice) in which these states must operate.”