Abstract
Thanks to Salvatore Babones for his cogent exposition and critique of certain aspects of the world-systems perspective and his effort to formulate a more coherent theoretical research program. I agree with much of what Babones says about the core/periphery hierarchy, especially his point about the importance of relative state strength in the global stratification system. I am also happy that Babones has addressed the issues of the spatial boundaries of world-systems, hegemonic rise and fall and other systemic cycles and trends. Babones directs most of his attention to the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein, but the world-systems perspective was also founded by Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank and Giovanni Arrighi. Nevertheless, I agree that it is important to clearly understand the ways in which Wallerstein cognizes key concepts.
As Babones points out, Wallerstein is a dedicated and thoughtful holist, and so he reserves the term ‘system’ for what he thinks of as whole, relatively autonomous systems. Thus Babones’s use of the terms cultural system, economic system and political system makes no sense from a Wallersteinian point of view. Wallerstein’s impassioned and erudite analysis of the whole system is an explicit and powerful critique of the notion that politics and economics are two different systems that can be analyzed separately from one another (see especially Wallerstein, 2011 [1974]: Introduction: On the study of social change). With regard to culture, both politics and economics are part of culture in the sense that they have always involved humanly-invented and taken-for-granted institutions. The kin-based modes of accumulation in very small world-systems were not more cultural than state-based or capitalist modes, but they were more reliant on consensual moral order. The culturally-integrated global system analyzed by John Meyer (2010) is heavily reliant for its very existence on the existence of markets and states. A global system in which normative regulation is predominant is probably an impossibility. 1
One reason why it is important to compare the modern world-system with earlier smaller regional world-systems involves the constraints that Babones mentions that follow from having only a single case. Analysis of the singular modern system makes it difficult (but not impossible) to test hypotheses about causation. But in order to increase the ‘N’ we must compare the modern system with earlier regional systems, and this requires a sensible and reliable way of spatially and temporally bounding earlier nonglobal world-systems. This is why Thomas Hall and I devised our approach, which defines whole systems as interaction networks that impinge on a particular place. All human polities interact with their neighbors, so if we count all indirect connections there has been a single global network since humans migrated to the continents. But it makes more sense to bound world-systems by examining the actual interactions that are taking place and by limiting the number of indirect interactions to those that have actual or potential short-term consequences for a focal location (Chase-Dunn and Jorgenson, 2003). Using these rules, we can compare world-systems to one another, and this has been done by especially focusing on variable characteristics of systems that can be quantitatively compared across very different kinds and sizes of systems (the population sizes of settlements [Inoue et al., forthcoming] and the territorial sizes of polities [Inoue et al., 2012]).
Contra Babones, Wallerstein’s (1984) 2 conception of hegemony is evolutionary, focusing on institutional leadership in the development of capitalism as eventuated in comparative advantages in technology and organization. Wallerstein sees hegemonies as involving three stages: comparative advantage in consumer goods, which is then lost and superceded by comparative advantage in capital goods, which is subsequently lost to competitors and then shifts to centrality in financial services. Giovanni Arrighi’s (1994) systemic cycles of accumulation elaborated upon these stages of hegemony. A very similar approach using somewhat different language was proposed by George Modelski and William R. Thompson (1996).
Babones claims that hegemony is not very important because it is so episodic, whereas the multistate system of the core is the more usual configuration. Wallerstein says much the same thing. Babones then ridicules the notion that the tiny Dutch Republic was hegemonic in the 17th century, as has Wilkinson, whom he cites. But the Dutch were what Wilkinson calls ‘forereachers’, developers of the transnational corporations, the stock exchange, buyer-driven commodity chains and key players in the diplomacy that led to the formal establishment of the rules of the interstate system at Westphalia. They did not compel obedience. They led.
Regarding the United States, Babones’s approach is similar to that of Peter Gowan (2006). By these lights the US empire has already been erected. There is little doubt that the United States is the only remaining superpower in military terms. The questions are whether or not this is hegemony or supremacy, and whether or not unilateral force will produce order or a renewed round of inter-imperial rivalry. George Modelski (2005) sees the US as having played its last card (military power) as an instance of ‘imperial over-reach’ similar to what the British did in their effort to take over Africa, most visible in the Boer Wars. This is a sign of hegemonic decline, not world-empire. But another round of US hegemony in the leadership and economic sense is also a possible future that is considered in the last chapter of my undergraduate textbook (Chase-Dunn and Lerro, 2014). A multipolar inter-regnum is the most likely future for the next several decades. And that may not be followed by another hegemon, but rather by the emergence of a global state (Chase-Dunn et al., 2011).