Lo instituido: la familia, la escuela y el Estado

Introduction

Wallerstein’s prodigious writing on what he called the ‘modern World System’, unlike dependency theory, continues to arouse interest and feature in academic discourse. Compared with Gunder Frank, Wallerstein did not abandon the belief that capitalism was distinctly important and continued to play a key role in the shaping of the global economy and global politics. Wallerstein’s theorising has been influential across the social sciences, though he tended to skirt the issue of imperialism. He preferred to view questions of political and economic preponderance through the prism of hegemony rather than imperialism. One reason for subjecting some of Wallerstein’s writing on World Systems theory to scrutiny is that it grew out of the anti-systemic movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which were significantly informed by imperialism theory. Furthermore, although imperialism was not central to his theoretical concerns, Wallerstein conceded that it had been and was an inherent part of the modern World System. An aim of Wallerstein’s remains the unravelling of core, periphery and semi- periphery relationships in order to inform the struggle for the building of a post- capitalist world system. The three-tiered structure of states, or ‘tri-modal hierarchy of the world capitalist economy’ (Howard and King 1992: 178), is Wallerstein’s

modification of the neo-Marxist standard bi-furcation of states. Wallerstein is closely associated with neo-Marxist approaches to the theorising of imperialism.

Adopting a long-term approach in his theoretical work based on Fernand Braudel’s

lalongue durée historiographical method (Howard and King 1992: 178), Wallerstein was especially interested in the rise and decline of hegemonic powers. Another important element in Wallerstein’s World Systems theory – Kondratieff cycles – postulate alternating phases of expansion and contraction in capitalist economies over forty-five to sixty year time frames. The emphasis Wallerstein places on the long-term (longue durée) is matched by his emphasis on the global rather than on smaller units of analysis such as nation-states. Such emphases on the long-term and the global means that Wallerstein tended to overlook those qualitative changes to

capitalism that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century identified by the ‘pioneers of imperialism theory’.

This chapter argues that Wallerstein’s macro-level analysis led him to minimise the role of imperialism in his theorising. In the grand sweep of world history and the world economy, imperialism, for Wallerstein, like globalisation, perhaps is merely a ‘momentary expression of reality’ reified into a fashionable theory (Wallerstein 2000: xviii-xix). According to Wallerstein, problems associated with ‘stages’ of development when not viewed from a broader World Systems perspective make certain analyses - modernisation theory and some Marxist theorising, for example - untenable. Wallerstein claims that this was a unit of analysis problem, with writers mistakenly focusing on parts of the totality (such as nation-states) and neglecting the wider systemic structure (Wallerstein 1980a: 3-10). On this basis it would be

reasonable to maintain that Lenin’s observation of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism did not interest Wallerstein, because such an assertion is a generalisation, abstracted from the changes to specific national economies. What is clear is that Wallerstein’s minimal engagement with imperialism and imperialism theory is in keeping with the diffusion of interest in imperialism common to the neo-Marxists whose writing has been critically analysed thus far.

As Wallerstein has been so prolific, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to critically analyse all his works in depth. Choice selections, then, are taken from his work in order to illustrate the major elements of his meta-theory. These include volume one of

The Modern World-System (Wallerstein 1974), a collection of essays titled The Capitalist World-Economy (1980a), another collection of his essays called The Essential Wallerstein (2000) and The Decline of American Power (2003). Prior to examining the relevant sections of Wallerstein’s work, the first section of this chapter provides a brief summary of the historical and theoretical context out of which Wallerstein’s World Systems theory emerged. The chapter then outlines the most salient aspects of Wallerstein’s World Systems theory before presenting an overview of his three-tiered system of states. The next section examines how labour is divided between the core, semiperipheral and peripheral regions and the type of labour control that was typical of each region. World-empire, hegemony and hegemonic cycles are the subjects of the fifth section. Here it is discussed how Wallerstein recognised that imperialism has a role in the modern World System, yet he preferred to use hegemony to map out the dynamics of the geopolitics of the modern era. The sixth section

considers the connections that Wallerstein made between his notion of hegemonic cycles and Kondratieff’s long wave economic cycles. On the basis of the marriage between these long-term views, Wallerstein predicted that the US was in a period of hegemonic decline and the modern World System was in transition. Finally, it is argued that Wallerstein’s macro-historical and large unit of analysis approach precludes him from substantive engagement with imperialism theory before some concluding remarks summarise what has been covered.