Anaylisis of Historical Global Developments and their Relevance to the
Internal Situation of the United States
Written by dmorista
In this article I will endeavor to try to look at the current world situation, and particularly that of the U.S, in socioeconomic, political, and military terms, in a historical perspective. I will use some of the theoretical systems developed on the left, to analyze the Capitalist world milieu and the nations and socioeconomic systems that compose it. First a discussion of some of the basic concepts and theoretical constucts I will use to couch my arguments. Those who are familiar with World-Systems Theory mignt want to go to the end of main body of the article and read the concluding section: Application of World Systems Theory to the Current Situation.
Introduction:
There can be no doubt, as we look at the great sweep of human history, that great civilizations and empires; are “born”; they “rise”; they pass through a period of “greatness”, during which their power, institutions, and culture reach a peak; and eventually they “decay and fall”. There has been a lot of theoretical work on these issues, especially for the particular case of Empires that rise to the level of being the Global Hegemon; a position that the U.S. has occupied for around a century, but would seem to be sliding out of at this time. The time period during which the U.S., to one degree or another, occupied that position stretches from around 1908 to the present day. The dynamics of the situation, how it affected the U.S. internally, and who the other major powers, rivals, and allies that were involved has changed over time.
The examination of Capitalism, Global Hegemony, and the dynamics of the various Global Hegemons has been taken up by many scholars. Among the most prominent are Immanuel Wallerstein, George Modelski, and Giovanni Arrighi. Wallerstein, whose analysis proposed that there is a World System of capitalism, engendered a school of thought called World-Systems Theory. Wallerstein propounded and expanded upon these ideas in a 4 volume work in which he proposed that Holland was the first Global Hegemonic Power, then the British Empire, and finally the United States; and he analyzed the operations of capitalism during these respective Hegemonic Epochs in great detail (Wallerstein, 1974, 1980, 1989, 2011). Wallerstein proposed relatively short periods of what he termed “Uncontested Hegemony” exercised by each of those three societies, (See Table 1). He examined developments outside of those restricted time periods in great detail, but did not propose a formalized framework for a recurring cycle of developments, inside and outside of the respective Hegemonic Powers, that explained these events. George Modelski described 5 global hegemonies each about one century in length, and proposed a set of cyclical events that helped explain the recurring phenomenon of Hegemonic Rise, Ascendancy, and eventual Decline (Modelski, 1987). {See Table 2A in the Appendix for Modelski's proposal and Table 2 in the text for my modification of it}. Giovanni Arrighi outlined the occurrence of 4 global hegemonies, each with increasing power and control over the global economic system, but ironically of declining temporal length (Arrighi, 1988). {See Table 3A in the Appendix for Modelski's proposal and Table 3 in the text for my very slight modification of it}. Joshua Goldstein writing about Long Economic Cycles and political power among the major powers, proposed his own explanation of the evolution of Great Power Global Hegemony (Goldstein, 1988). All the major variants of theories proposing a World Capitalist System and a succession of hegemonic powers agree on two things: that in the last few decades of its power, the ruling class of the declining hegemon shifts over from actual productive capitalism to financial capitalism; and that “Hegemonic Wars”, of particularly horrific intensity and length, mark the transition from one hegemony to the next.
Some theorists have proposed that the first hegemon was Portugal, and they advance involved arguments as to why Portugal was hegemonic (the Portugese Empire did have more extensive holdings in Asia and Africa than the Spanish Empire did) rather than Spain. The Spanish Empire, however, was actually larger and it produced far more of the gold and silver; that played a pivotal role in the economic developments of the 15th - 17th centuries. I prefer to just call the first Hegemonic Epoch that of “Iberia” for the reason that it involves the two empires; that were the first and the second empires to control areas in both the “Old World” (Eurasia and Africa) and also in the “New World” (the Americas), i.e. the first truly global empires. I also think that France was the third Global Hegemon, or a very close miss, that had its period of hegemony, or near hegemony, after that of Holland and before that of the British Empire. There is plenty of evidence to support either the postion that France was a hegemonic power, and perhaps more that affirms that it was not, it is beyond the scope of this essay to address it at any length.1 All historians are in agreement that, neither Spain nor Portugal, had the sophisticated financial institutions needed to process the wealth that flowed into those countries; and that therefore their banking was handled by financial institutions in the Italian city states, most notably Genoa and Venice. Giovanni Arrighi argues that Genoa was actually the first Global Hegemonic power and that both Portugal, and Spain, depended on the Genoese Bankers; and in turn were manipulated by them to utilize their geographic, military, and political power, largely in the service of Genoa's ruling class' agenda; he discussed this at length in his seminal book on the subject (Arrighi, 1988)
