Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Dependency PDF
Dependency PDF
(1997) have called ‘‘semiperipheral develop- capital has been a central component of the com-
ment.’’ Semiperipheral marcher states and semi- manding heights of the world-system since the
peripheral capitalist city-states had acted as the fourteenth century. The current floods and ebbs
main agents of empire formation and commer- of world money are typical of the late phase of
cialization for millennia. This phenomenon very long ‘‘systemic cycles of accumulation.’’
arguably also includes organizational innova- Most world-systems scholars contend that
tions in contemporary semiperipheral countries leaving out the core/periphery dimension or
(e.g., Mexico, India, South Korea, Brazil) that treating the periphery as inert are grave mis-
may transform the now-global system. takes, not only for reasons of completeness, but
This approach requires that we think struc- also because the ability of core capitalists and
turally. We must be able to abstract from the their states to exploit peripheral resources and
particularities of the game of musical chairs labor has been a major factor in deciding the
that constitutes uneven development in the winners of the competition among core conten-
system to see the structural continuities. The ders. And the resistance to exploitation and
core/periphery hierarchy remains, though domination mounted by peripheral peoples has
some countries have moved up or down. The played a powerful role in shaping the historical
interstate system remains, though the interna- development of world orders. Thus world his-
tionalization of capital has further constrained tory cannot be properly understood without
the abilities of states to structure national attention to the core/periphery hierarchy.
economies. States have always been subjected McMichael (2000) has studied the ‘‘globali-
to larger geopolitical and economic forces in the zation project’’ – the abandoning of Keynesian
world-system, and as is still the case, some have models of national development and a new (or
been more successful at exploiting opportu- renewed) emphasis on deregulation and open-
nities and protecting themselves from liabilities ing national commodity and financial markets
than others. to foreign trade and investment. This approach
In this perspective many of the phenomena focuses on the political and ideological aspects
that have been called ‘‘globalization’’ corre- of the recent wave of international integration.
spond to recently expanded international trade, The term many prefer for this turn in global
financial flows, and foreign investment by discourse is ‘‘neoliberalism,’’ but it has also
transnational corporations and banks. Much of been called ‘‘Reaganism/Thatcherism’’ and
the globalization discourse assumes that until the ‘‘Washington Consensus.’’ The worldwide
recently there were separate national societies decline of the political left predated the revolu-
and economies, and that these have now been tions of 1989 and the demise of the Soviet
superseded by an expansion of international Union, but it was certainly also accelerated by
integration driven by information and transpor- these events. The structural basis of the rise of
tation technologies. Rather than a wholly unique the globalization project is the new level of
and new phenomenon, globalization is primarily integration reached by the global capitalist
international economic integration, and as such class. The internationalization of capital has
it is a feature of the world-system that has been long been an important part of the trend
oscillating as well as increasing for centuries. toward economic globalization, and there have
Recent research comparing the nineteenth and been many claims to represent the general
twentieth centuries has shown that trade globa- interests of business before. Indeed, every mod-
lization is both a cycle and a trend. ern dominant state has made this claim. But the
The Great Chartered Companies of the real integration of the interests of capitalists all
seventeenth century were already playing an over the world has very likely reached a level
important role in shaping the development of greater than at the peak of the nineteenth-cen-
world regions. Certainly, the transnational cor- tury wave of globalization.
porations of the present are much more impor- This is the part of the theory of a global
tant players, but the point is that ‘‘foreign stage of capitalism that must be taken most
investment’’ is not an institution that only seriously, though it can certainly be overdone.
became important since 1970 (nor since World The world-system has now reached a point at
War II). Arrighi (1994) has shown that finance which the old interstate system based on
1062 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2005)
separate national capitalist classes exists simul- SEE ALSO: Capitalism; Colonialism (Neocoloni-
taneously with new institutions representing alism); Development: Political Economy;
the global interests of capital, and both are Empire; Global Economy; Global Justice as a
powerful forces. In this light each country can Social Movement; Global Politics; International
be seen to have an important ruling class fac- Gender Division of Labor; Kondratieff Cycles;
tion that is allied with the transnational capital- Revolutions; Transnational Movements; World
ist class. The big question is whether or not Conflict
this new level of transnational integration will
be strong enough to prevent competition
among states for world hegemony from turning
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED
into warfare, as it has always done in the past,
READINGS
during a period in which a dominant state (now
the United States) is declining.
Amin, S. (1997) Capitalism in the Age of Globaliza-
The insight that capitalist globalization has tion. Zed Press, London.
occurred in waves, and that these waves of Arrighi, G. (1994) The Long Twentieth Century.
integration are followed by periods of globali- Verso, London.
zation backlash, has important implications for Cardoso, F. H. & Faletto, E. (1979) Dependency and
the future. Capitalist globalization increased Development in Latin America. University of Cali-
both intranational and international inequalities fornia Press, Berkeley.
in the nineteenth century and it has done the Chase-Dunn, C. (1998) Global Formation. Rowman
same thing in the late twentieth century & Littlefield, Lanham, MD.
(O’Rourke & Williamson 2000). Those countries Chase-Dunn, C. & Hall, T. D. (1997) Rise and
Demise: Comparing World-Systems. Westview,
and groups that are left out of the ‘‘beautiful
Boulder, CO.
époque’’ either mobilize to challenge the status McMichael, P. (2000) Development and Social
of the powerful or they retreat into self-reliance, Change: A Global Perspective. Pine Forge Press,
or both. Thousand Oaks, CA.
Globalization protests emerged in the non- O’Rourke, K. H. & Williamson, J. G. (2000) Globa-
core with the anti-IMF riots of the 1980s. The lization and History. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
several transnational social movements that Shannon, T. R. (1996) An Introduction to the World-
participated in the 1999 protest in Seattle Systems Perspective. Westview, Boulder, CO.
brought globalization protest to the attention Wallerstein, I. (2000) The Essential Wallerstein. New
of observers in the core, and this resistance to Press, New York.
capitalist globalization has continued and
grown despite the setback that occurred in
response to the terrorist attacks on New York
and Washington in 2001.
There is an apparent tension between, on the
one hand, those who advocate deglobalization Derrida, Jacques
and delinking from the global capitalist econ-
omy and the building of stronger, more coop- (1930–2005)
erative and self-reliant social relations in the
periphery and semiperiphery and, on the other Michael Lipscomb
hand, those who seek to mobilize support for
new, or reformed, institutions of democratic Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born philoso-
global governance. Self-reliance by itself, pher remembered for his development of
though an understandable reaction to exploita- deconstruction, an approach to thinking that
tion, is not likely to solve the problems of seeks carefully to analyze signifying objects in
humanity in the long run. The great challenge terms of the differences that are constitutive of
of the twenty-first century will be the building those objects. Typically, this deconstructive
of a democratic and collectively rational global approach proceeds through a close analysis of
commonwealth. World-systems theory can be the ambivalent and marginal terms that help
an important contributor to this effort. secure the bounded understanding of a text,