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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The modern/colonial/capitalist world-system in the twentieth century : global processes,

antisystemic movements, and the geopolitics of knowledge / edited by Ramon Grosfoguel
and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez.
p. cm.(Contributions in economics and economic history, ISSN 0084-9235 ;
no. 227)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-313-31804-2 (alk. paper)
1. Social systems. 2. Economic developmentSocial aspects. 3. Globalization.
I. Grosfoguel, Ram6n. II. Cervantes-Rodriguez, Ana Margarita. III. Series.
HM701.M63 2002
306dc21 2001050111
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright 2002 by Ramon Grosfoguel and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without
the express written consent of the publisher.
A paperback edition of The Modern/Colonial/Capitalist World-System in the Twentieth
Century is available from Praeger Publishers, an imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group,
Inc. (ISBN 0-275-97197-X).
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001050111
ISBN: 0-313-31804-2
ISSN: 0084-9235
First published in 2002
Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.greenwood.com
Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction. Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric

Mythologies: Universalist Knowledges, Decolonization, and
Developmentalism xi
Ramon Grosfoguel and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez

The Twentieth Century: Darkness at N o o n ? xxxi

Immanuel Wallerstein

I. Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic

Movements 1

1. Globalization and the National Security State Corporate

C o m p l e x (NSSCC) in the Long Twentieth Century 3
Thomas Ehrlich Reifer

2. Bucking the System: The TimeSpace of Antisystemic

Movements 21
Richard E. Lee

3. Some Initial Empirical Observations on Inequality in the

World-Economy ( 1 8 7 0 - 2 0 0 0 ) 33
Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz, Angela Stach,
David Consiglio, and Timothy Patrick Moran

4. Transnationalism, Power, and Hegemony: Review of

Alternative Perspectives and Their Implications for
World-Systems Analysis 47
Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez
vi Contents

5. M a s s Migration in the World-System: An Antisystemic

M o v e m e n t in the Long Run? 79
Eric Mielants

6. Twentieth-Century Antisystemic Historical Processes

and U.S. Hegemony: Free Trade Imperialism, National
Economic Development, and Free Enterprise
Imperialism 103
Satoshi Ikeda

II. W o m e n ' s Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems

Analysis 125

7. Commodity Chains and Gendered Exploitation:

Rescuing W o m e n from the Periphery of World-Systems
Thought 127
Wilma A. Dunaway

8. Revisioning Social Change: Situated Knowledge and

Unit of Analysis in the M o d e r n World-System 147
Nancy Forsytbe

9. Intersecting and Contesting Positions: Postcolonial,

Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 171
Shelley Feldman

10. Writing on Gender in World-Systems Perspective 199

Sheila Pelizzon

HI. T h e Aftermath of the Colonial System, Coloniality, and

the Geopolitics of Knowledge 213

11. The Genesis of the Development Framework: The End

of Laissez-Faire, the Eclipse of Colonial Empires, and
the Structure of U.S. H e g e m o n y 215
Fouad Makki

12. The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science,

or Can There Be a Shared M e t h o d o l o g y for World-
Systems Analysis, Postcolonial Theory, and Subaltern
Studies? 237
Santiago Castro-Gomez and Oscar Guar diola-Riv era

13. M a k i n g "Africa" in Brazil: Old Trends and N e w

Opportunities 251
Livio Sansone
Contents vii

14. The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science:

"Border Thinking" as an Alternative to the Classical
Comparative M e t h o d 267
Khaldoun Subhi Samntan

Index 287

A b o u t the Contributors 303

 Acknowledgments

This volume has its origins in the 2 4 t h Annual Conference of the Political
E c o n o m y of the World-System (PEWS) section of the American Sociological
Association, held at Boston College on March 24 and 2 5 , 2 0 0 0 . The con-
tributors to the volume have engaged in serious thinking about processes,
relations, and trends that are at the core of world-systems analysis, or those
that should gain greater centrality in the perspective. They have done so
through rigorous and committed analyses of the issues explored and
through cooperation and camaraderie throughout the entire process, from
the organization of every detail for the conference in Boston, to the pains-
taking editorial process leading to the publication of the volume. Their
criticism of conservative lines of thought as distorters of history, their ef-
forts to improve world-system analysis through conceptual refinement, and
the erasure of borders with other perspectives with which it shares impor-
tant commonalities constitute the Confucian thread of this volume. Other
than that, this w o r k is far from reflecting uncritical linearity in the course
of thought. Rather, intellectual cooperation and overlapping have gone
hand in hand with the elaboration of divergent points of view on issues
pertaining to antisystemic movements, the w a y s through which world-
systems analysis should incorporate alternative perspectives, and the use-
fulness of such combination for advancing our knowledge on the most
general processes and the subprocesses of the world-system. We hope that
this volume will represent an important building bloc for further advancing
our understanding of these processes. We also hope that our graduate stu-
dents, seasoned scholars and intellectuals all, in the Gramscian sense, will
find the insightful chapters presented here useful for their respective aca-
demic endeavors and emancipatory projects.
X Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the people at Boston College w h o made the organi-

zation of the conference possible. We w o u l d like to express gratitude to
the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Boston College, Dr. Michael Smyer, for
his encouragement and full support. We are also grateful to Leah Schmalz-
bauer, Brenda Pepe, and Magdalena Derdzinska, w h o s e active and intense
work made the conference possible. Chloe S. Gec-ras and N a d i a Grosfoguel
were important sources of emotional support throughout the organization
of the conference. Our colleagues Stephen Pfohl, William Gamson, and
Charles Derber in the Sociology Department at Boston College were also
great sources of support for its success. We would also like to express our
appreciation to Dr. Azara Santiago-Rivera for her constant encouragement
during the editorial stage and to Dr. Edna Acosta-Belen, director of the
Center for Latino, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies (CELAC) at the
State University of N e w York, for allocating students for training and ser-
vice purposes during different phases of the editorial process. We especially
thank our c o m m o n friend, Dr. William C. Smith, and our respective fam-
ilies for their unconditional support.
An equal distribution of duties and intellectual contribution by the edi-
tors has led to the production of this volume, and has strengthened our
friendship and unveiled the points of interception of our intellectual curi-
osity. As a result, our cooperation has grown stronger based on a solid
foundation of mutual respect for our o w n academic and political commit-
ment against oppression, regardless of the shape it takes, the locus in which
it manifests itself, and the ideology backing it. Finally, we appreciate Im-
manuel Wallerstein's encouragement and devoted support throughout the
entire process. We are proud to belong to a generation that has the o p -
portunity to engage in a live debate with one of the most prominent figures
of the social thought of our epoch. We hope that we will contribute,
through this effort, to a further advancement of his valuable legacy.
 Introduction

Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric

Mythologies: Universalist Knowledges,
Decolonization, and Developmentalism

Ramon Grosfoguel and

Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez

Throughout the twentieth century, the world-system has operated through

some mythologies that mold the w a y we conceptualize the world today.
There are three mythologies that we w o u l d like to address in this intro-
duction: objectivist/universalist knowledges, the decolonization of the m o d -
ern world-system, and developmentalism. The three are intertwined with
each other and tied to Eurocentric forms of thinking and knowledge pro-
duction. The developmentalist myth cannot be fully understood without
awareness of the myth of decolonization, and neither of them is compre-
hensible unless we identify their connection with the myth of universality
in the production of knowledge. To be sure, Occidentalism, or the discourse
about the superiority of the West, has been the c o m m o n denominator of
the three myths in question. Occidentalism and its corresponding mythol-
ogies serve the function of concealing the root causes of European/Euro-
American power and privilege systems in the global hierarchy of the
world-system and the global designs u p o n which they have been erected.
They have also been efficient in silencing the "Other"; historically defined
throughout several centuries of European colonial expansion. Conse-
quently, these myths have perniciously controlled our imagination and
eclipsed our representations of alternative w a y s of life, political options,
and epistemologies.

T H E M Y T H O F OBJECTTVTST A N D UNIVERSALIST
KNOWLEDGES

It is important that w e , as scholars, recognize that we always speak from

a specific site in the gender, class, racial, and sexual hierarchies of a given
xii Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies

region in the modern/colonial world-system. Our knowledges, as the fem-

inist thinker D o n n a Haraway (1997) contends, are always already "situ-
ated." Following Quijano (1993) and M i g n o l o ( 2 0 0 0 ) , we can add that the
colonial difference produced by the coloniality of power in the modern/
colonial world-system frames the situatedness of our knowledges in im-
portant ways. The notions of "coloniality of power" (Quijano 1 9 9 1 , 1 9 9 3 ,
2 0 0 0 ) and "colonial difference" (Mignolo 2 0 0 0 ) have become crucial to
geopolitically situating the forms of thinking and cosmologies produced by
subaltern groups in relation to dominant ones. Major constitutive elements
of the coloniality of power are the racial classification and reclassification
of the world's population (for which the concept of "culture" has been
instrumental), and the development of the corresponding Eurocentric in-
stitutional structures (state apparatuses, universities, church) and episte-
mological perspectives to reinforce the global racial/ethnic hierarchy
associated with such classification (Quijano 1 9 9 8 ; M i g n o l o 2 0 0 0 ) . Histor-
ically, the coloniality of power is entangled with the rise of capitalism and
its consolidation through European conquest and colonization in the Amer-
icas. Thus, coloniality of power is enacted by the "colonial difference" or
the Eurocentric "classification of the planet in the 'modern/colonial' imag-
inary." Such dichotomy has been forcefully articulated through the "Oc-
cidentalism" metaphor (Mignolo 2 0 0 0 : 1 3 ; also Arrighi 1 9 9 4 ; Quijano and
Wallerstein 1 9 9 2 ) .
The capitalist world-system w a s formed by the Spanish/Portuguese ex-
pansion to the Americas in the long sixteenth century (Wallerstein 1 9 7 4 ) .
This first modernity (from 1 4 9 2 to 1 6 5 0 ) built the foundations of the racist/
colonial culture and global capitalist system that we are living today. The
expansion to the Americas in 1 4 9 2 and the expulsion of Arabs and Jews
from Spain in the name of "blood purity" {pureza de la sangre) were con-
temporaneous processes. Thus, the "internal border" meant to keep Arabs
and Jews at arm's length w a s built simultaneously to the "external border"
separating the peoples from peripheral geographical zones (Mignolo 2 0 0 0 ) .
The Spanish and Portuguese expansion to the Americas w a s crucial for the
construction of the racial categories that w o u l d later be generalized to the
rest of the world (Quijano and Wallerstein 1 9 9 2 ) . Racial designations such
as White, N e g r o , and Indian were instrumental in the European coloniza-
tion of the Americas. In addition, the formation of a global racial/ethnic
hierarchy w a s contemporaneous with the development of the international
division of labor. As Quijano asserts, there w a s no "pre" or "post" in their
joint constitution. Christianity w a s also central in the constitution of the
colonial imaginary of the world-system during the first century of European
colonization. The myth of the "superiority" of the "civilized" Westerners/
Europeans over the "uncivilized" non-Europeans, based on racial narra-
tives on "superior/inferior" peoples and cosmovisions w a s constructed in
this period. This is w h y it has been suggested that "Occidentalism" (the
Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies xiii

dominant discourse of the first modernity) is the socio-historical precon-

dition for the emergence of "Orientalism" (the dominant discourse of the
second modernity) (Mignolo 2 0 0 0 ) .
During the second modernity ( 1 6 5 0 - 1 9 4 5 ) , the core of the world-system
shifted from Spain and Portugal to Germany, the Netherlands, England,
and France. The emergence of Northwestern Europe as the core of the
capitalist world-system continued, expanded, and deepened the "internal
imaginary border" against the Jews, Arabs, and Gypsies and the "external
imaginary border" built during the first modernity against the Americas
and later expanded to include other geographical zones such as Africa, the
Middle East, and Asia (Wallerstein 1 9 8 0 ; M i g n o l o 2 0 0 0 ) . However, the
second modernity added a n e w border, this time between Northwestern
Europeans and Iberian peoples. Hispanic/Latin Southern European cultures
were constructed as inferior to the Northwestern Europeans. This hierar-
chical division within Europe w o u l d extend to encompass N o r t h America
where, under the Anglo-Saxon-Protestant hegemony, the Euro-Americans
of Spanish descent were regarded as an inferior "Other." Specifically, the
Hispanic/Anglo border w o u l d be reenacted in the context of the U.S. im-
perial expansion in 1 8 4 8 (Mexican-American War) and 1 8 9 8 (the Spanish-
American War). Despite the disparate forms adopted by the outcomes of
such events (annexation of half of M e x i c a n territory, political annexation
of Puerto Rico, and the formation of a protectorate in Cuba), these t w o
imperial wars set the foundations of the prospective coloniality of power
by setting the regional grounds of w h a t w o u l d constitute U.S. global he-
gemony. Equally relevant, by redrawing "the early division between Anglo
and Latin America" these t w o events w o u l d mark "the historical core of
an ethnic conflict, regardless of the place of origin of those called 'Hispan-
ics' or 'Latino/as' " (Mignolo 2 0 0 0 : 1 3 6 ) . From there on, within the context
of the United States, "Hispanic cultures" of the Americas were subalter-
nized, and the notion of "Whiteness" w o u l d be further distanced from its
meanings in Latin America.
Latin American independence, achieved in struggles against Spain and
Portugal, w a s hegemonized by Euro-American elites. It w a s not a process
of social, political, cultural, or economic decolonization. White creole elites
continued to dominate the power relations of the newly independent re-
publics of South and Central America in the nineteenth century. Blacks,
mulattoes, Native Americans, and people of color remained in subordinated
and disenfranchised positions, n o w under an emerging coloniality of power
that did not need colonial administrations for its enactment. H o w e v e r , as
w a s outlined above, in the context of the U.S. expansion, White Spaniards
(or their "criollo" descendants) were excluded from the notion of "White-
ness" in the United States, and "Hispanics" were constructed as part of the
inferior "Other" and excluded from the superior "White," "European"
races. Eventually, the American notion of Whiteness w o u l d expand to in-
xiv Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies

d u d e groups that were internal colonial subjects of Europe under North-

western European hegemony (e.g., the Irish, Eastern Europeans, and the
Jews), which w o u l d emphasize class as a major social marker within these
groups, while the Indians and the Blacks w o u l d continue to be racial/co-
lonial subjects. H o w e v e r , the supremacy of the White over the Black and
the Indian did not exhaust the multiple strategie's of "Othering" deployed
as the United States further expanded its global power. The history of the
second modernity is crucial to understanding the present tendency to ra-
cialize immigrants from Latin America and their descendants.
The second modernity represents a milestone since the capitalist world-
system expanded to cover the whole planet (Wallerstein 1 9 7 9 ) . European
(understood not merely in geographic terms but in the broader cultural and
political sense of White European supremacy) and Euro-American pro-
cesses of nation building, such as the struggles for citizenship rights, de-
velopment of parliamentary regimes, and the definition of the official
languages, were also part and parcel of a global colonial/racist imaginary
that established "internal" and "external" borders (Quijano 1 9 9 3 ; M i g n o l o
2 0 0 0 ) . The invisibility of global coloniality (Quijano 2 0 0 0 ) in the process
of building modern nation-states in nineteenth-century Europe and the
Americas reflects h o w powerful and ingrained its colonial/racist culture w a s
and still is. While categories of modernity such as citizenship, democracy,
and nation building were acknowledged for the dominant Northwestern
Europeans, the colonial "Others" were submitted to foreign military pres-
ence, forms of political tutelage, coerced forms of labor exploitation, and
subjected to authoritarian rule in their countries as a w a y of granting the
systemic equilibrium required for the development of the intertwined pro-
cesses of nation building and global expansion. While sociobiology or eu-
genics were knowledges produced in the name of science to justify or
articulate "biological racist discourses," under the more recent forms of
coloniality, "biological racism" has been gradually replaced by w h a t is
called the "new racism," or "cultural racist" discourses. Yet the complicity
between "science" and "racism" manifests more bluntly today in the "sci-
entific" articulation of the "neo-culture of poverty" approaches. Ultimately,
these approaches tend to blame the culture of racialized groups for the
perpetual cycle of impoverishment in which they have been trapped
throughout generations. "Cultural racist" discourses do not contend that %
the failure of "colonial/racialized" groups is due to "inferior genes" or
"inferior IQ" (although this is still a pervasive and popular perception and
we are witnessing renewed academic attempts to revive it), but rather to
"improper" cultural habits and/or an "inferior" culture.
H o w e v e r , the trajectories of coloniality and the colonial difference(s)
have not been linear or unproblematic from the perspective of the construc-
tion of knowledge under "Occidentalism." The works of Chicana and Chi-
cano scholars such as Gloria Anzaldua ( 1 9 8 7 ) , N o r m a Alarcon ( 1 9 8 1 ) , Jose
Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies xv

David Saldivar ( 1 9 9 8 ) , and Walter Mignolo's ( 1 9 9 5 , 2 0 0 0 ) explicit critical

dialogues with Darcy Ribeiro's early [ 1 9 6 0 s ] notion of "subaltern knowl-
edges" as well as Foucault's [ 1 9 7 6 ] "subjugated knowledges," remind us
that the colonial experience leads to complex translocal scenarios that
shape the production and dissemination of knowledge, including "subaltern
knowledges." The notions of "subjugated knowledges," "subaltern knowl-
edges," and "border thinking" (Mignolo 2 0 0 0 ) eloquently illustrate this
point. "Border thinking" in particular manifests itself through knowledge
produced by people w h o m o v e transnationally between former colonizing
countries and their respective colonies, and also a m o n g people "around
w h o m the world m o v e d " (locus of enunciation) (Mignolo 2 0 0 0 ) . "Border
thinking" refers also, perhaps principally, to the "in-between" location of
subaltern knowledges, critical of both global hegemony (global coloniality)
and local power relations corresponding to local histories (internal colo-
niality). From this perspective, the "colonial difference(s)" are thus the
"house where border epistemology dwells" and where the Eurocentric cri-
tique to Eurocentrism yields to critiques of Eurocentrism from the subaltern
side of the colonial difference (Mignolo 2 0 0 0 : 3 7 ) . The notion is also in-
tended to call our attention to the "double critique" (to both Occidentalism
and other forms of fundamentalism) implicit in "border thinking" which
ultimately relies on "spatial confrontations between different concepts of
history" (67). Thus, the conceptual triada of "coloniality of power," "the
colonial difference," and "border thinking" helps to situate, geopolitically,
our understanding of power relations as manifested in dominant metaphors
and discourses that shape our knowledge of society today. Altogether, such
conceptual apparatus is meant to improve Gramsci's notion of "subaltern-
ity"understood as a power structure molded around class relationsby
incorporating the role of colonial/racial relations and non-Western religions
in shaping subalternity.
If the modern world is constituted by a colonial difference, if there is no
modernity without coloniality, and, therefore, we still live in a modern/
colonial world, then knowledges are not produced from a universal neutral
location. Thus, we need to epistemologically account for the geopolitics of
knowledge production. The question remains: From which location in the
colonial divide are knowledges produced? Nationalist and colonialist dis-
courses are articulated from a power position in the colonial divide of the
modern/colonial world, while subaltern subjects articulate thinking and dis-
courses from the subordinate position of the colonial difference. Colonialist
discourses reproduce the North-South global colonial divide, while nation-
alist discourses reproduce an "internal" colonial divide within national for-
mations. The knowledge, critical insights, and political strategies produced
from the subaltern side of the colonial difference serve as a point of de-
parture to move beyond colonialist and nationalist discourses. In other
words, rather than exclusively acknowledge the subalterns, we need to ac-
xvi Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies

knowledge that their cosmologies, thinking processes, and political strate-

gies constitute foundational elements to dismantle and transgress dominant
perspectives in the process of knowledge production.
The authors included in Part III of this volume explicitly deal with the
myth of universal knowledges and their corresponding hegemonic designs,
and search for alternative w a y s of looking at world-historical processes and
their corresponding forms of agency. Khaldoun Samman (Chapter 14) spe-
cifically argues that despite the differences that exist between world-system
analysis and subaltern and postcolonial studies, they all share a " c o m m o n
thread": "their understanding of h o w one should study society, nation, and
civilization . .. they all are attempting to overturn the traditional methods
that have dominated social sciences over the past t w o centuries." Alto-
gether, these perspectives constitute a "world-historical field." Santiago
Castro-Gomez and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (Chapter 12) offer a radical
postcolonial critique to the n e w forms of global designs and Eurocentric
knowledges in the present "globalization" era, which they conceptualize as
n e w forms of global coloniality: "Today, neither the nation-state nor the
group function organically but only as w a y s of coding, decoding, and re-
coding the activity of agents that are n o w treated as merely another space
or value-creative force that can be colonized. The result is a process of
colonization in which there are only colonies and no colonizer countries as
such, since the colonial character of power acquires yet another form: it
does not c o m e from the (organic) nation-state but from global and ideo-
logical state apparatuses." Their argument is central for the analysis of the
reproduction of global coloniality and the understanding of the invisibility
of colonial relations today. Livio Sansone (Chapter 13) s h o w s the global
cultural exchanges across the Black Atlantic and the different meanings that
"Africa" acquires according to the diversity of local histories. The different
"essentialistic" attempts to fix the meaning of "Africa" and to build global
designs about Africans and the African diaspora are confronted with the
different colonial histories and the resistance of Black people as colonial
subjects of the capitalist world-system. This is w h a t underlies Sansone's
statement that "the case of Brazil and of the transatlantic fluxes et refluxes
of people, commodities, symbols, and ideas linking South America with
N o r t h America, Europe, and Africathe Black Atlanticis evidence that
the icons have become more genuinely global than their shared meaning. %

It also s h o w s that there have been very powerful 'localizing' forces in the
ways things African have been classified and ranked."
The process of "Othering" peoples has operated through a set of op-
positions such as the West and the Rest, civilized and savage, intelligent
and stupid, hardworking and lazy, superior and inferior, masculine and
feminine, pure and impure, clean and dirty, and so o n . There are world-
systemic historical/structural processes that constitute these narratives,
which are schematically designated as the relationship between European
Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies xvii

modernity (e.g., citizenship, nation building, democracy, civil/social rights),

European colonial expansion, colonial modernities, and White/masculinist
supremacy. H o w e v e r , as some contributions to this volume explicitly illus-
trate (Chapters 4, 7, 8, and 9), the process of "Othering" occurs in every-
day life and through intermediate processes. As such, it is informed by
several power/empowering logics that require specification. Drawing on
feminist analyses' concern w i t h essentialism, Shelley Feldman (Chapter 9)
warns us that world-historical analyses are not insulated from the Enlight-
enment trap, which, she emphasizes, also manifests in the reduction of the
"Othering" problematic to the "West/Rest" dichotomy. On this line, Feld-
man invites us to examine the "post" perspectives more carefully, including
"postcolonial studies," and their basic assumption that difference and het-
erogeneity matter: "Recognizing difference, however, is not invoked from
the point of view of a struggle for sameness, which is the position of the
developmentalist project where the West serves as the mark and direction
of a linear path to progress. N o r is difference invoked to express the m o v e
from the pre-political to the liberal democratic. Rather, difference in the
post-tradition represents plurality, non-homogeneity, complementarity, and
contradiction that do not depend on a presumption of radical relativism."
N a n c y Forsythe (Chapter 8) argues in favor of "a feminist world-systems
analysis" on the grounds that "the world-systems study of long-term, large-
scale social change is helpful in advancing our understanding of and politics
of embodiment and multiplicity." She also notes that w o m e n ' s movements
will also benefit from world-systems analysis since the relationality among
body, social status, and science as integral components of social change has
a TimeSpace dimension "that roughly corresponds to the modern world-
system." For her, such a cross-fertilization is possible insofar as world-
systems analysis does not assume a lack of correspondence between the
long term and the large scale, on the one hand, and spatial and temporal
boundaries of the study of long-term, large-scale social change, on the
other. Such a dialogue between feminist theory and world-systems analysis,
she argues, requires a more careful attention to the issue of the unit of
analysis. For this, Forsythe contends, the key for world-systems analysis is
"establishing, rather than assuming, the meaning of, and then, the ration-
ality among, the conceptual, spatial and temporal dimensions of the topic
at hand." Forsythe and Feldman agree that world-systems analysis lacks a
sound theorization on the issue of empowerment. For Feldman, however,
the understanding of political practice must antecede, analytically, the issue
of w o m e n ' s empowerment. She finds Terence K. Hopkins' comprehension
of intersectionality and causality particularly useful for this endeavor.
Building u p o n H o p k i n s she argues that "gender, caste, sexuality, and ethnic
relations" should be revisited, "not viewed as derivative of accumulation
practices." Arguing for the gendering of the analysis of political action, she
xviii Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies

notes that "gender differentiation not only is a consequence of particular

economic relations but actually contributes to their structuring."
In a parsimonious critique of the neglect of w o m e n in world-systems
analysis, Wilma D u n a w a y (Chapter 7) advocates the "engendering" of the
households, the commodity chains, and the very notion of exploitation.
She takes issue with the w a y in which world-systems analysis conceptualizes
household processes w h o s e understanding is pivotal in the study of the
household as a major institution of the world-economy. For example, in
her critique of the notion of "income pooling," she contends that "resource
pooling" instead of "income pooling" better grasps "the fact that n o n w a g e
and unpaid labor is the pivotal thesis of the world-systems model of house-
holds." She is also troubled by the lack of theorization on the issue of "the
power struggles and inequalities within households." D u n a w a y also envi-
sions the global commodity chains conceptualization as a promising re-
search area through which world-systems analysis can integrate w o m e n and
households, but this will only happen, she argues, if "everyday life" moves
to a more prominent position in the global commodity chains conceptu-
alization. D u n a w a y , Feldman, and Forsythe convincingly contend that the
neglect of w o m e n in world-systems analysis relinquishes w o m e n ' s issues to
the wrong epistemological and political hands.
Through a mapping of h o w the link between transnationalism and power
relations is conceptualized from different perspectives, Ana Margarita
Cervantes-Rodriguez (Chapter 4) encourages the critical engagement of
world-systems analysis with current studies of transnationalism,
particularly those developed through conceptual apparatuses that defy
modernization, political realism, and the neo-classical dogma. Cervantes-
Rodriguez argues that the incorporation of insights from studies of the link
between transnationalism and power relations that specifically focus on
issues such as transnational migrations, social movements, strategies of ac-
cumulation, advocacy networks, and terrorist networks help frame the
analysis of power relations beyond the nation-state frontier. Her contri-
bution illustrates h o w such approaches help improve our understanding of
the complex interplay of class, ethnicity, gender, religion, national origin,
and citizenship, in shaping systems of hegemony and power relations that
span borders. An innovative integration of such insights into world-systems
1
analysis, she argues, constitutes a prerequisite for a better grasp of the link
between power and production strategies following the global commodity
chains conceptualization, the analysis of power regimes related to house-
hold strategies under the current dynamics of the world-economy and cur-
rent migratory regimes, and the study of the antisystemic potential of
transnational processes.
Sheila Pelizzon (Chapter 10) also deals with the issue of a dialogue
among perspectives but, different from the ones outlined above, employs
world-systems analysis as the predominant argumentation "locus": "By
Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies xix

studying gender in world-systems perspective, world-systems analysis

gained a n e w structure that explains a lot about ways that eliteswhether
the state and its agents, local elites, or capitalists, keep social control and
w h y households as we k n o w them were formed in the first place." She also
argues that by studying gender in world-systems perspective, "political
e c o n o m y could have gained more complete insights into the relationship
between state, capital, and labor. Even the orthodox Marxists w o u l d have
gained n e w insight into the class struggle" while "feminists could have seen
that patriarchy has been part of a structural component of capitalism, not
a holdover from a remote past."
All these works confirm in one w a y or another that the global, hege-
monic, colonial culture involves a very intricate and uneven set of gender,
racial, and sexual narratives with long histories that are reenacted in the
present through the emergence of complex sets of mediations. Simultane-
ously, they also s h o w that counter-narratives are making significant inroads
in knowledge production and that there is no objectivist, neutral, god-eye
view above and beyond the geopolitical "situatedness" of knowledge pro-
duction in the colonial horizon of modernity.

THE M Y T H OF DECOLONIZATION

The politico-juridical decolonization of the periphery in the capitalist

world-system w a s finalized in the twentieth century as a result of the an-
ticolonial struggles of "Third World" peoples and the concomitant
transformation of direct colonial rule into a costly, unfeasible hegemonic
project. This has led to the creation of a n e w , pervasive mythology accord-
ing to which we are n o w living in a "postcolonial" era. The epistemological
conclusion is that the "old language" of "core-periphery" relationships is
obsolete to account for global inequality and poverty. This argument is
linked to the developmentalist assumption that each nation-state is inde-
pendent from each other and that they are all evolving toward self-
determination and progress. In some cases, the assumption is that as
nation-states have emerged out of the "former" colonies, there is no reason
to continue talking about metropolitan exploitation or domination. The
questions at stake are: D i d the world decolonize with the end of colonial
administrations in the second half of the twentieth century? H o w do we
make sense of the demise of the colonial administrations in the periphery
of the capitalist world-economy in the presence of an ever-growing gap
between rich and p o o r nations? W h a t n e w global forms of power relations
have been created to discipline and control the periphery of the world-
e c o n o m y in the process of surplus extraction, in the absence of direct c o -
lonial rule as the dominant form of core-periphery relationships in the
world-system?
The distinction between colonialism and coloniality opens a promising
XX Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies

conceptual route for the analysis of these issues without falling for the
seductive "postcolonial" myth (Quijano 1 9 9 1 , 1 9 9 3 , 1 9 9 8 ) . Since its for-
mation in the sixteenth century, that is, for over 4 5 0 years ( 1 4 9 2 - 1 9 4 5 ) ,
the modern/colonial capitalist world-system enacted colonialism as the
dominant form of core-periphery relationships (Wallerstein 1 9 7 4 ; M i g n o l o
1 9 9 5 ) . Colonialism w a s central to the formation of an international divi-
sion of labor and an inter-state system structured into core, peripheries,
and semi-peripheries. It w a s also central for the formation of a hegemonic
Eurocentric global culture that shaped values, knowledge production,
status, concept of beauty, education, art, politics, and so on. The formation
of an international division of labor, as mentioned before, w a s contem-
poraneous with the formation of global racial/ethnic hierarchies but also
gender and sexual hierarchies (Grosfoguel 2 0 0 2 ) . Thus, the European c o -
lonial expansion not only formed a capitalist world-system, where capitalist
accumulation became the driving force of the system, but it also embodied
the simultaneous formation of a global hierarchy of European/non-
European, male/female, and heterosexual/homosexual with its respective
geoculture of racism, sexism, and h o m o p h o b i a (ibid.). To be sure, the con-
temporary dilemma of w h i c h comes first, capitalist accumulation or gender/
sexual/racial oppression, is a false dilemma. Historically, these hierarchies
have gone hand in hand with their corresponding systems of dominance.
These forms of oppression, under the scope of Occidentalism, are not
merely instrumental to, but constitutive of capitalist accumulation processes
on a world scale. Sexual, gender, and racial hierarchies are intertwined with
capitalist accumulation hierarchies in the world-system. The European c o -
lonial expansion w a s predominantly a European-capitalist-heterosexual-
male expansion. Wherever Europeans colonized, they imposed the values,
hierarchical order, and privileges corresponding to their particular sexual,
gender, class, and racial/ethnic loci. The particular values of European-
capitalist-heterosexual-males were made the "universal truth," "world
rationality," and "global c o m m o n sense" of the modern/colonial world-
system through colonialism.
Core-periphery inequalities and asymmetries inherent to the interna-
tional division of labor; the inter-state system; the racial/ethnic, gender, and
sexual hierarchies; and Eurocentric culture/knowledge production have not
1
been significantly altered following the end of colonial administrations .
This does not mean, however, that systems of hegemonies and power re-
gimes informed by such continuity manifest exclusively between the core
and the periphery, nor that coloniality of power is the only logic shaping
power relations. W h a t we are trying to emphasize, and emphasis implies
simplification for the purpose of argumentation, is the subjacent continuity
that characterizes capitalist, cultural, and geopolitical relations on a global
scale after the collapse of "global colonialism" in the p o s t - 1 9 4 5 era. Anibal
Quijano (2000) captures such continuity in his concept of "global coloni-
Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies xxi

ality." The notion points out that core states in the international division
of labor continue to be located primarily in Western Europe and/or coun-
tries with predominantly European-descendant populations, while the pe-
ripheral zones are mainly populated by non-European people. The only
exception to the rule is Japan, which is the only non-European country in
the core of the capitalist world-economy. However, as is widely acknowl-
edged in world-systems analysis, Japan w a s never colonized or peripher-
alized by the West and participated in the West's colonial expansion by
building its o w n modern/colonial empire.
The historical precondition for the emergence of "global coloniality" is
"global colonialism." Without 4 5 0 years of "global colonialism" there
would be no "global coloniality" today. The point is that global inequal-
ities and asymmetries are still informed by the strongholds of the Eurocen-
tric imaginary, and shaped by the continuities of colonial relations on a
world scale without the existence of colonial administrations. Production
has reached unprecedented decentralization levels, and global financial
flows, ignited by n e w technological paradigms, play a fundamental role in
the transfer of wealth. H o w e v e r , these processes have also gone hand in
hand with the hyper-concentration and centralization of capital and wealth
in core states, and within them in global cities (Sassen 1 9 9 1 ) , and with the
pervasive role of labor in the process of value making (Castells 2 0 0 0 ) . The
transfer of surplus value from periphery to core, from non-Europe to Eu-
rope/Euro-America, has been instrumental in these dynamics. The subor-
dination and exploitation of the periphery continues to be a central axis of
the capitalist world-economy. Important changes have occurred, however.
On the one hand, new disciplinary institutions of global capitalism, such
as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade
Organization, have replaced colonial administrations in the deployment of
direct economic intervention in the periphery. The global media also play
an important role in the diffusion of values, consumption habits, and sys-
tems of beliefs that reinforce the racial/ethnic/gender/sexual global hierar-
chies. Moreover, core-controlled military organizations such as the N o r t h
Atlantic Treaty Organization ( N A T O ) and "virtual wars" are increasingly
employed as mechanisms of punishment and control of subordinated p o p -
ulations.
T h o m a s Reifer's contribution (Chapter 1) is crucial for the understanding
of the historical connections between the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Prot-
estant) establishment, U.S. hegemony, and the resurgence of high finance
and heavy industry in the late twentieth century. Reifer s h o w s h o w capi-
talist accumulation has been entangled with militarism and White suprem-
acy. Reifer argues that the concept of "the geopolitical e c o n o m y " "provides
the real missing link between state and capital, capital accumulation, social
classes, and geopolitics, as well as structure and agency, that has haunted
historical sociology. Corporate lawyers, investment bankers and allied in-
xxii Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies

dustrialists played key roles in America's wars, from World War I to the
present, through groups like the N S L and the Cold War Committee on the
Present Danger." In his view, these corporate groups constitute the bour-
geoisie's "organic intellectuals" of the capitalist world-system.
The imbrications of gender inequality with racial/ethnic hierarchies also
play an important role in shaping the n e w forms adopted by the interna-
tional division of labor. Recruitment practices, and externally induced p o -
litical turmoil have given w a y to the "free" mobility of labor to the core,
sometimes under extreme xenophobic situations that have led to attempts
at blocking immigrants' access to social services and citizenship rights.
Non-European w o m e n constitute the main source of cheap labor for mul-
tinational corporations. The rapid expansion of the Export Processing
Z o n e s in Northern M e x i c o , the Dominican Republic, southern China, M a -
laysia, India, and Central America is part of this trend. From a subaltern
perspective, contemporary academic debates in terms of w h a t determines
in the last instance the "economy" or the "geoculture" are also c h i c k e n -
egg dilemmas. The unprecedented use of "Third World" labor in core so-
cieties is another important feature of the world-economy.
The postwar processes of nation building in the vast majority of the
periphery of the capitalist world-economy are still informed by the colonial
legacies and by the colonial/racial culture built during centuries of Euro-
pean colonial expansion. The Eurocentric colonial culture as an ideology
is not geographically limited to Europe, but rather constitutes the geocul-
ture and imaginary of the modern/colonial world-system. Hence, modernity
is always constituted by coloniality. H o w e v e r appealing the notion "post-
colonial" may be, it proves to be empirically inadequate. Colonial relations
are not merely an institutional phenomenon. Current evidence on forms of
political and cultural domination and economic exploitation suggest that
the coloniality of power is not historically limited to the period of colonial
rule. Despite the rhetoric of their power brokers, the n e w institutions of
global dominance that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century
are not meant to promote a "postcolonial" order based on democracy,
development, and "self-determination" in the periphery, but have rather
functioned as strongholds of the long-lasting colonial imaginaries, identi-
ties, and symbols upon which global capitalism has erected its system of
domination and exploitation since the sixteenth century. The myth that we,
live in a decolonized world needs to be challenged since it has crucial p o -
litical implications in terms of h o w we conceive social change, struggles
against inequality, scientific disciplines, knowledge production, Utopian
thinking, democracy, and decolonization itself.

THE M Y T H OF DEVELOPMENT

It is hard to think of a concept with a greater centrality in the episteme

of power than the concept of development. Development, in its most c o m -
Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies xxiii

prehensive form, is rationalized as a three-dimensional process that includes

"self-sustained" economic growth, the consolidation of institutions to pro-
tect and further consolidate democracy and the respect for individual rights,
and greater access to social benefits for the population at large. As such,
the concept of development has been used as a powerful tool to advance
social projects rooted in emancipatory ideals. H o w e v e r , the concept of de-
velopment has also predominantly acted as a "comprehensive concept of
1
control."
The "development system" w a s an important political innovation of the
second half of the twentieth century. Since then, Craig Murphy (1990)
reminds us, the issue of "development" has m o v e d to the top of the agendas
of "every one of the postwar global intergovernmental organizations, in-
cluding agencies like the IMF, the International Telecommunciations Un-
ion, the communication satellite agency (INTELSALT), and the World
Intellectual Property Organization," a m o n g others. According to Murphy,
the "development system" has performed multiple valuable functions for
the core states. One of the most salient functions has been to match the
rationality of private investors with capitalist expansion (Craig 1 9 9 0 ) . Ac-
cording to him, other major functions have been the replacement of colo-
nial institutions at a lower cost; to protect the international financial system
from fiscal crises in peripheral states; as a deterrence mechanism against
Soviet and Sino expansionism in the periphery; and as a populist tool to
support authoritarian regimes in the periphery with which the core con-
trolled both the marginalized and the privileged groups that eventually be-
came the main benefactors of development programs through clientelism
(Craig 1 9 9 0 ) . Satoshi Ikeda (Chapter 6) refers to the challenge that pro-
tectionist policies that promoted "national" enterprises occasionally rep-
resented for U.S. corporations, but emphasizes that there were important
compensatory rationales: "The idea of national economic development w a s
not necessarily in contradiction with the system of free enterprise as long
as the U.S. enterprise could operate freely within a given national border.
. . . Even though the project of 'national' economic development w a s some-
w h a t contradictory to the earlier design of world-economy, the U.S. ac-
cepted this strategy as a countermeasure against Communist expansion."
M o r e recently, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the incorporation of
vast zones of the periphery and semi-periphery, including China, into the
"maquiladora system" has relied on a n e w global design: the neoliberal
project, which to a large extent has pushed deregulation in the periphery.
Fouad Makki (Chapter 11) highlights that while the concept of devel-
opment is hardly a novelty of the postwar period, developmentalism as an
ideology "represented a historically specific power-knowledge nexus that
emerged at a particular conjuncture." Such historical conjuncture, Makki
argues, manifested a transition in the nature of the colonial relation and
w a s framed by three historical processes: the attempt to form "national
economies" in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the obsolescence
xxiv Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies

of the notion of "self-regulating markets," decolonization movements, and

the consolidation of U.S. hegemony. M a k k i further explicates the interplay
of the temporal/spatial dimensions of the developmental project. His con-
tribution supports the thesis that "development" became a crucial concept
in the transition from a hegemonic discourse, based on w h a t can be re-
garded as the originary forms of "Othering" the colonial subjects at the
onset of colonization (e.g. "civilize" vis-a-vis "primitive"), into a univer-
salizing discourse: " 'Development' w a s in this respect crucial in reconfig-
uring the global identity of ex-colonies in a w a y that w a s incorporative and
universalistic, yet still hierarchical. It not only defined the terms in which
colonial exploitation and relative inequality were understood but also pro-
vided the promise of a future beyond colonialism." By mastering the his-
torical processes involved in the formation of the developmentalist project
throughout his chapter, M a k k i argues that "globalization" emerges as the
n e w concept candidate to suit the universalizing discourse under current
conditions characterized by actual processes of transnationalization and the
embracing of neoliberal ideas. His contribution illustrates one of his m o s t
salient conclusions: "The history of the development framework, with its
displacements and reversals of an earlier imperial process of globalization
. . . permits us to think more critically on this late twentieth-century process
of globalization."
Developmentalism as an ideology reinforces the a u t o n o m o u s illusion of
peripheral nation-states and the evolutionary notion of progress (Waller-
stein 1 9 9 2 a , 1 9 9 2 b ) . The central idea is that each peripheral nation-state
is "independent" and will pass through the same "stages" of the core states,
and that sooner or later the former w o u l d mirror-image the latter in the
modernization path. The developmentalist fallacy induced practitioners and
theoreticians in the periphery to focus their political efforts toward devel-
opment, more frequently than not narrowly defined as economic growth
and technological improvement but strategically conceived as a realizable
goal in each nation-state of the periphery and semi-periphery. Thus, while
the world-economy w a s being organized around global capital flows within
a hierarchical international division of labor informed by the global racial/
ethnic hierarchy, politics w a s being fragmented in an array of nation-states,
each one organized around false premises such as the premise of
developmentalism (Wallerstein 1 9 8 4 , 1995). On this line, Richard Lee
(Chapter 2) argues that "[t]he decline of the 'old,' state-oriented nationalist
and class-based movements w a s a result of the realization of their failure
to deliver on promises of progress and paralleled the collapse of the East-
West confrontation and the renewed awareness of the North-South split."
Lee s h o w s the complicity between structures of knowledge and the limits
to imagining alternative worlds beyond developmentalism and the nation-
state as the privileged site for political action. Developmentalist illusions
contributed to channeling the antisystemic movements' political efforts in
Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies xxv

the periphery in national state policies with the objective of achieving de-
velopment by means of overlooking the global political-economic relations
of inequality and the global racial-ethnic hierarchy linked to the former
that stand in the w a y of "national development." Ultimately, the fallacy of
"national development" w a s crucial to concealing the persistence of global
colonial relations in the "postcolonial" world-system. W h e n antisystemic
movements were channeled through the path of taking over the nation-
state, they reproduced the old colonial hierarchies disguised as "postcolo-
nial" under the assumptions that the elimination of a colonial
administration w a s enough to eradicate colonial relations, and that the
country in question could "nationally develop" without foreign interven-
tion. The idea about the possibility of "national development" without
global structural changes is one of the greatest myths of the twentieth cen-
tury. In Chapter 3, Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz, Angela Stach, David
Consiglio, and Timothy Patrick M o r a n tear d o w n the developmentalist il-
lusion with an analysis of inequality trends throughout the twentieth cen-
tury. Their w o r k relied on a painstaking methodological procedure with
which they question the accuracy of adjusting income data for purchasing
power parities, which gives the false impression that the levels of inequality
have declined in recent decades. They conclude that income inequality has
grown in recent decades to the point that "by the m i d - 1 9 9 0 s world in-
equalities were at their highest recorded level over the past t w o centuries."
Their w o r k confirms that none of the three variants (Communist move-
ments, social-democratic movements, and national liberation movements)
through which the "Old Left" seized p o w e r throughout the twentieth cen-
tury (Wallerstein 1 9 9 5 ) altered the fundamental dynamics of world income
inequality. The global income inequality trend, the authors sustain, will be
reduced only by the implementation of t w o sets of reform: (1) a massive
transfer of resources from wealthy to poor countries and (2) the elimination
of restrictions to labor mobility "designed to enhance the bargaining power
of the poor by opening up markets that w o u l d truly make a difference in
the lives of the poor." They do not place so much hope, however, in actual
implementation of such reforms.
The developmentalist fallacy affected the scope of antisystemic move-
ments. Instead of fighting the systems of oppression at all levels, within and
beyond the structures of the nation-state, major progressive groups ex-
hausted political efforts in the administration of the nation-state following
a developmentalist illusion. Neither socialist and social-democratic devel-
opmental attempts nor national liberation movements could escape its bi-
zarre results (Wallerstein 1 9 9 5 ) . Enchanted by the developmentalist
promise, "Third World" leaders believed that by taking over the nation-
state, they could achieve "real" sovereignty and development and reduce
the inequality gap between their economies and the economies of the center.
Radical social movements became bureaucratized and metamorphosed into
xxvi Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies

conservative forces once they took over the state apparatus and focused on
the goal of "development." In the name of "national development" both
"socialist" and "capitalist" regimes justified oppression, including flagrant
repression of labor movements and violations of labor rights. They evoked
endless sacrifices and harsh austerity measures toward the working classes
and paved the w a y for their submission to global capitalism while there
w a s a process of elite reaccommodation, which under socialist regimes
adopted the form of "the n e w class." It is increasingly acknowledged that
the "socialist" regimes based their structure in state capitalist forms of pro-
duction and consequently tended to maximize state power, while the "cap-
italist" regimes tried to imitate mechanisms employed in the center for the
maximization of profits. They were different forms of productive organi-
zation within a capitalist world-system organized around a single interna-
tional division of labor (Wallerstein 1 9 7 9 ) . However, the promised land of
development remained an illusion. Paradoxically, despite the revolutionary
jargon and developmentalist rhetoric of socialist movements in the periph-
ery, they did not lead to significant changes in the peripheral locations in
the international division of labor. Cuba, which has experienced one of the
most radical revolutions of all "Third World" revolutions, constitutes per-
haps one of the saddest cases because of the dramatic detachment that the
radical "sovereignty" and "developmentalist" discourses have had with the
needs and changing expectations of the population on the one hand, and
world-systemic forces, on the other. The island's growing dependence on
U.S. labor markets through the escalating dependence of thousands of Cu-
ban households on the migradollars sent by relatives residing in the United
States, the de facto dollarization of the Cuban e c o n o m y after the collapse
of the Soviet bloc, and unfulfilled labor, w o m e n ' s , and ethnic minority
expectations or the steady reversal of some of the previous achievements
in these directions indicate that taking over the state apparatus combined
with a developmentalist agenda has represented, at best, an unpaved route
toward emancipation.
The recent Zapatista armed struggle in Chiapas represents an effort to
provide an alternative response to the failure of national liberation and
socialist movements in the twentieth century. The Zapatistas are usually
portrayed as the first post-developmentalist, post-national, and postcolonial
guerrilla movement, critical of the traditional guerrilla movements in the
region as a w a y out of oppression. They have challenged global capitalism
and global coloniality. They decentered the struggle from the goal of ad-
ministration of the nation-state and refocused the struggle toward a global
strategy through transnational forms of agency, including the use of the
Internet, against modern/colonial capitalist forms of exploitation. We do
not k n o w the results of this struggle yet, but so far they have been quite
successful in challenging the old coloniality of power of the M e x i c a n state
without falling into the temptation of administrating the nation-state. In
Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies xxvii

addition, antisystemic movements may also manifest through acts of resis-

tance of subjugated subjects of the "global South" in core societies and
even as the unintended consequences of the extremist conservative agendas.
The significant growth of Latino/as in recent decades has run into the surge
of racism and xenophobia. The question is to w h a t extent such attitudes
are intrinsically antisystemic on their o w n . In Chapter 5, Eric Mielants
addresses this question. He calls our attention to the limits that racism and
xenophobia addressed against immigrants have for the stability of the sys-
tem. He does so by distinguishing w h a t he sees as t w o antisystemic gradi-
ents of "mass migration." One refers to the "antisystemic pressure" that
"mass migration," and particularly population movements related to eco-
logical crises put "on the inter-state system." The second, to the antisys-
temic character of the racial agenda: "it is important to acknowledge the
increasing significance of the far-right, with a racial anti-meritocratic
agenda, as a possible anti-systemic movement in itself, instead of treating
it as nothing more than an accidental outburst in national elections or a
pure local p h e n o m e n o n within a nation-state in a period of economic re-
cession. " Mielants' point challenges traditional conceptualizations of anti-
immigrant xenophobic and racist movements in the core. The effects of
these movements on the different dynamics of the modern/colonial world-
system as a w h o l e remain to be seen in the coming years.

(IN)CONCLUSION

The importance of a systematic analysis of the outlined mythologies is

that they contribute to concealing in the present "postcolonial administra-
tions" modern/colonial world-system the continued hierarchical/unequal
relations of domination and exploitation between metropolitan/European/
Euro-American centers and non-European peripheral regions. Developmen-
talism, Eurocentric universalist knowledges, and the myth of decolonization
form part of the colonial/Eurocentric imaginary of the modern/colonial
world-system. The n e w dominant globalization discourse assumes a hori-
zontal, equal, non-exploitative world where everybody can make it if they
work hard enough, while it also opens up the local economy to interna-
tional financial institutions and transnational corporations. In the mean-
time, poverty is hyper-concentrated in the South and in the periphery within
the core, while wealth is hyper-concentrated in the N o r t h and in the core
within the core. While the periphery is globally fragmented in multiple
nation-states, corporations are organized at a world scale, which keeps
reproducing a global colonial hierarchy in the so-called "postcolonial" era
(the last 50 years). Under these circumstances it is relatively easy to place
the responsibility of peripheral mass poverty in the periphery itself and
dismiss European/Euro-American responsibility. The n e w face of develop-
mentalism is global neoliberalism. Although the outcome of the neoliberal
xxviii Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies

policies has been to dismantle the developmentalist states, global neoliber-

alism still operates under a basic developmentalist premise: that by applying
market liberalization at the nation-state level, each country w o u l d sooner
or later achieve economic growth and development. This has led to a fe-
rocious competition among peripheral states in terms of selling their re-
sources most cheaply to transnational corporations while millions of
workers suffer irreversible traumatic experiences as migrants in the core,
where they try to secure a family income, which is increasingly hard to find
in the periphery.
In sum, developmentalism, Eurocentric universalist knowledges, and the
myth of decolonization have been crucial ideologies in concealing Euro-
pean/Euro-American responsibility in the fate of peripheral regions around
the world. The world needs a second decolonization more profound than
the juridical-political decolonization experienced in the last 50 years. This
second decolonization should address the global class, gender, racial, sex-
ual, and regional asymmetries produced by the hierarchical structures of
the modern/colonial capitalist world-system. Definitely, a global problem
cannot have a "national" solution: it requires global solutions (plural).

NOTE
1. Bode (1979), cited and further analyzed in van der Pijl, Transnational Classes
and International Relations. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

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Anzaldua, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Fran-
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Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the
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Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol.
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Craig, Murphy. 1990. "Freezing the North-South Bloc(k) after the East-West
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Grosfoguel, Ramon. 2002. Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspec-
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Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Na-
ture. New York: Routledge.
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Mignolo, Walter. 1995. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality
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. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Essays on the Coloniality of Power,
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Quijano, Anibal. 1991. "Colonialidad y Modemidad/Racionalidad." Peru Indigena
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. 1993. " 'Raza,' 'Etnia' y 'Nation' en Mariategui: Cuestiones Abiertas." In
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culture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth
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. 1979. The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge
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. 1980. The Modern World System, Vol. II: Mercantilism and the Consoli-
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. 1983. Historical Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
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bridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme.
. 1992a. "The Concept of National Development, 1917-1989: Elegy and
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. 1995. After Liberalism. New York: New Press.
 The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon?

Immanuel Wallerstein

In the middle of the twentieth century, Arthur Koestler wrote a novel about
the Soviet regime and its s h o w trials, which he entitled Darkness at Noon.
I w o u l d like to take this as my metaphor for the entire twentieth century,
not just the Soviet regime. But at the same time, the century w a s in many
ways also "Bright Sun at Midnight." Indeed, the w a y that we think about
this century, so difficult to assess, has depended very much on the place
from which and the m o m e n t at which we observe it. We have been on
something of a roller-coaster ride. We should remember that roller-coaster
rides end in one of t w o ways. Usually, they return to their starting point,
more or less, although the riders may have been either exhilarated or very
frightened. But sometimes they derail.
Henry Luce called the twentieth century "the American century." He was
unquestionably right, although this is only part of the story. The rise of the
United States to hegemony in the world-system started circa 1 8 7 0 in the
w a k e of the beginning of the decline of the United Kingdom from its erst-
while heights. The United States and Germany competed with each other
as contenders for the succession to the United Kingdom. W h a t happened
is well k n o w n and straightforward. Both the United States and Germany
greatly expanded their industrial base between 1 8 7 0 and 1 9 1 4 , both sur-
passing Great Britain. One, however, w a s a sea/air power, and the other a
land power. Their lines of economic expansion were correspondingly dif-
ferent, as w a s the nature of their military investment. The United States
was allied economically and politically with the declining erstwhile hege-
monic power, Great Britain. Eventually, there were the t w o world wars,
which one can best think of as a single "thirty years' war," essentially be-
xxxii The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon?

tween the United States and Germany to determine hegemony in the world-
system.
Germany tried the path of transforming the world-system into a world-
empire, what they called a tausendjahriges Reich. The path of imperial
conquest has never w o r k e d as a viable path to dominance within the frame-
w o r k of the capitalist world-economy, as N a p o l e o n had previously learned.
The world-imperial thrust has the short-term advantage of its military vigor
and precipitateness. It has the middle-term disadvantage of being very ex-
pensive and uniting all the opposition forces. As the constitutional and
quasi-liberal monarchy of Great Britain had rallied autocratic, tsarist
Russia against N a p o l e o n , so the quasi-liberal representative republic of the
United States rallied the Stalinist Soviet U n i o n against Hitler, or, rather,
both N a p o l e o n and Hitler did g o o d jobs in uniting the t w o ends of the
European land mass against the voracious power structure located between
them.
H o w shall we assess the consequences of this struggle? Let us start with
the material outcome. In 1 9 4 5 , after incredibly destructive warfare every-
where on the European continent and similarly destructive warfare in East
Asiadestructive in terms both of lives and of infrastructurethe United
States w a s the only major industrial power to emerge unscathed e c o n o m -
ically, even strengthened as the result of wartime buildup. For several years
after 1 9 4 5 , there w a s actual hunger in all the other previously economically
advanced regions, and in any case there w a s a difficult process of basic
reconstruction of these zones.
It w a s quite easy in such a situation for U.S. industries to dominate the
world market. Their major problem initially w a s not t o o many competitive
sellers but t o o little effective demand, t w o few buyers worldwide because
of the decline of purchasing power in Western Europe and East Asia. This
required more than relief; it required reconstruction. H o w e v e r profitable
such reconstruction w o u l d be for U.S. industry, it w a s costly from the point
of view of U.S. taxpayers. Meeting the short-run costs posed an internal
political problem for the U.S. government.
Meanwhile, there seemed to be a political-military problem as well. The
U.S.S.R., despite the destruction, l o o m e d large as a military power, occu-
pying half of Europe. It proclaimed itself a socialist state with a theoretical
mission to lead the w h o l e world to socialism (and then, in theory again, to
Communism). Between 1 9 4 5 and 1 9 4 8 , so-called popular democracies, un-
der the aegis of the Communist Party, were put into place, one by one, in
the zones where the Red Army w a s to be found at the end of World War
II. By 1 9 4 6 , Winston Churchill spoke of an "Iron Curtain" that had fallen
on Europe from Stettin to Trieste.
In addition, in the immediate p o s t - 1 9 4 5 years, Communist parties
s h o w e d themselves to be extremely strong in a large number of European
countries. We tend to forget today that Communist parties w o n 2 5 - 4 0 %
The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon? xxxiii

of the vote in the early postwar elections in France, Italy, Belgium, Finland,
and Czechoslovakiathe result both of their previous strength in the in-
terwar years and of their wartime role in animating a g o o d part of the
resistance against Nazism/fascism. The same w a s true in Asia. In China,
the Communist Party w a s marching on Shanghai against a Nationalist gov-
ernment that had lost its legitimacy. Communist parties and/or guerrillas
were remarkably strong as well in Japan, the Philippines, Indochina, and
the D u t c h East Indies and not negligible elsewhere.
Communist movements had, as the French say, le vent en poupe. They
claimed that history w a s on their side, and they acted as though they be-
lieved it. So did a lot of others believe it, ranging from conservative move-
ments to center-left movements, most particularly, the majority of the social
democrats. These others were afraid that, in a few years, their countries,
too, w o u l d become popular democracies. And they didn't wish this to hap-
pen. M o r e emphatically, they were ready to resist actively w h a t n o w w a s
rhetorically called a Communist menace to the free world.
In the last 30 years, there has been a large amount of revisionist histo-
riography, coming from both the left and the right. The left revisionists
have tended to claim that the so-called Communist menace w a s a bogey-
man, erected by the U.S. government and world right forces, both to ensure
U.S. hegemony in the world-system and to put d o w n (or at least limit) the
strength of left and workers' movements in the Western liberal states. The
right-wing revisionists have tended to claim, especially since the availability
of Soviet documents after 1 9 8 9 , that there w a s indeed a worldwide network
of spies for the Soviet Union, which did indeed have every intention of
subverting non-Communist states and transforming them into popular de-
mocracies.
The fact is that both the left and the right historiographical revisionists
are probably largely right in their empirical assertions and fundamentally
wrong in their historical interpretation. No doubt, both sides asserted both
publicly and even more in private w h a t the revisionists said they had as-
serted. Probably, most individuals in the key agencies of each side believed
the rhetoric, or at least believed much of it. No doubt, t o o , both sides
engaged in actions that went in the direction of carrying out the rhetoric,
and no doubt finally, both sides w o u l d have been delighted to see the other
side collapse and were for the most part even hoping for it.
Still we need a little sangfroid and a little realpolitik in our appreciation
of what really w e n t on. It seems clear, in retrospect, that the Cold War
was a highly restrained, carefully constructed and monitored exercise that
never got out of hand and never led to the world war of which everyone
was afraid. I have called it a minuet. Furthermore, in retrospect, nothing
much happened, in the sense that the boundary lines as of 1 9 8 9 were pretty
much the boundary lines as of 1 9 4 5 , and there w a s in the end neither Soviet
aggression in Western Europe nor U.S. "rollback" in Eastern Europe. Fur-
xxxiv The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon?

thermore, there were many points at which each side showed restraint
above and beyond the call of rhetoric. Of course, we can say that none of
this was the intent, merely the result of a stalemate, and to some extent
that may be true. Still, stalemates are abetted by lassitudes that result from
tacit intents.
Such a historical scenario calls for caution in assessing the motives and
the priorities of each side. Let us look at t w o code words: Yalta and con-
tainment. Yalta w a s the name of a meeting of the heads of state of the
United States, the U.S.S.R., and Great Britain in February 1 9 4 5 . Yalta os-
tensibly fixed the boundaries of the prospective postwar garrisoning of
troops and therefore of geopolitical influence, as well as the modalities of
constituting governments in liberated countries. Containment w a s a doc-
trine invented by George Kennan a few years later. Kennan, speaking for
himself but indirectly for the United States establishment, advocated just
that, containment by the United States of the Soviet U n i o n n o t , however,
containment in place of w e l c o m e but containment in place of rollback, a
cold war that w o u l d not and should not become a hot one. Before John
Foster Dulles became secretary of state under Eisenhower in 1 9 5 3 , he had
advocated, against Kennan, rollback. But, once in power, Dulles in fact
practiced containment (most notably in 1 9 5 6 in relation to the Hungarian
Revolution), and rollback w a s relegated to the discourse of marginal pol-
iticians.
W h a t Yalta/containment achieved ( w h o will ever k n o w the inner motives
of all the actors?) is quite clear. T h e Soviet Union had a zone under its
absolute control (most of w h a t we call East and Central Europe). The
United States claimed all the rest of the world. The United States never
interfered in the Soviet zone (except by propaganda). See U.S. actions (or
rather inaction) in 1 9 5 3 , 1 9 5 6 , 1 9 6 8 , and 1 9 8 1 in response to various
versions of what later came to be called the Brezhnev Doctrinethe right
claimed by the U.S.S.R. to maintain forcibly within its bloc any state that
w a s part of it. On the other hand, the U.S.S.R. never really interfered in
any zone outside its sphere with more than political propaganda and a little
money, with the sole serious exception of Afghanistan (a big mistake, as
they were to learn). To be sure, some countries ignored this nice bilateral
U.S.-Soviet arrangement, and we will come to that.
What had Yalta to do with the issue of U.S. world-economic priorities
in the immediate postwar period? As we have said, the United States needed
to create world effective demand; however, the United States did not have
unlimited m o n e y with which to do that. In the allocation of its resources,
the United States gave priority to Western Europe for both economic and
political reasons. The result w a s the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan, let
us nonetheless remember, w a s offered by Marshall to all the allies. Did the
United States really w a n t the Soviet Union to accept? I doubt it very much,
The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon? xxxv

and I remember hearing a State Department spokesman admit as much

publicly at the time.
In any case, the Soviet U n i o n declined to be part of the proposal and
made sure that none of the countries in its zone responded favorably. This
was a bonanza for the U.S. government for t w o reasons. H a d the Soviet
Union c o m e in on the plan, it w o u l d have become t o o expensive, and in
addition the U.S. Congress w o u l d never have voted it. The main argument
that obtained bipartisan congressional support for the Marshall Plan w a s
the need to contain Communism. So what in fact was happening? Marshall
Plan aid w a s the other side of the Yalta arrangements. The Soviet Union
was free to establish a mercantilist bloc within the world-economy, but
then it got no economic aid in its reconstruction. No interference, but no
aid. The only time that these nice arrangements seemed threatened w a s the
moment of the Berlin Blockade. But the net result of the blockade w a s a
truce at the point where it started, giving the United States the excuse to
launch N A T O and the Soviet Union the excuse to create the Warsaw Pact.
It also gave each side the excuse to spend a lot more on their military,
which w a s actually beneficial economically in the short run, if not in the
longer run.
Of course, Asia w a s a bit left out in these arrangements, and the Chinese
Communists had no intention of being left out. So they marched on Shang-
hai, contra Stalin's wishes. In the United States, the right said that the
United States lost China, but actually it w a s the Soviet U n i o n that lost
China, and that turned out to be more important in the long run. Then
came the Korean War. Whatever the real story about w h o started what
and w h e n , it seems clear, again in retrospect, that neither the United States
nor the Soviet U n i o n wanted to start such a war. After a long and nasty
involvement, in which the United States lost lives but the Soviet Union did
not, the war ended with a truce more or less at the starting point, a result
very similar to that of the Berlin Blockade. Once again, this war gave the
needed excuse for the United States to bolster enormously the Japanese
economy and to sign a defense pact. So East Asia, from a U.S.-Soviet view-
point, w a s in on the Yalta arrangement. China n o w de facto accepted it as
well after the Q u e m o y - M a t s u imbroglio in 1 9 5 5 .
The American century was a geopolitical reality in which the other so-
called superpower, the U.S.S.R., had a role, a voice, but not really the
power to do anything but strut around in its cage, until the cage imploded
in 1 9 8 9 . With this implosion, however, the underlying political justification
for U.S. hegemony disappeared as well, and the geopolitics of the world-
system changed, a subject to which we shall return.
Let us turn to the second great happening of the twentieth century, the
exact opposite of U.S. hegemonythe slow but steady pushback by the
non-Western world of Pan-European dominance. The height of the "ex-
pansion of Europe" w a s actually circa 1 9 0 0 , a full century ago. It w a s then
xxxvi The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon?

that W.E.B. Du Bois w a s proclaiming that "the problem of the twentieth

century w a s the problem of the color line." No one believed him at the
time, but he w a s absolutely right. Even before World War I, there were a
number of so-called revolutions that should have made analysts take notice:
M e x i c o , Afghanistan, Persia, China, and, not least, the Japanese defeat of
Russia in 1 9 0 5 . There w a s already then a Pan-*extra-Western world mutual
cheering society such that these events were noticed far and wide and served
to encourage further action against Pan-European dominance.
Indeed, I believe we should think of the Russian Revolution not as a
proletarian revolution, which it clearly w a s not, but as the most successful
and spectacular of the efforts to push back Pan-European dominance. To
be sure, many Russians insisted that they were Europeans, and the Bolshe-
viks were on that side of the long-standing debate in Russia between West-
ernizers and Slavophiles. But this only points to the central ambivalence of
the movements to push back Pan-European dominance. They were de-
manding separation and integration at the same time, both in the name of
equality. In any case, the Bolsheviks realized, after the non-occurrence of
the fabled German revolution, that their survival and world role were
linked to the world anti-imperialist struggle. This w a s the meaning of the
Baku Congress in 1 9 2 0 .
In the p o s t - 1 9 4 5 period, decolonization became the order of the day.
This w a s in part intelligent and timely withdrawal by the colonizing p o w -
ers. But this w i s d o m on their part w a s very largely the result of some heroic
struggles by national liberation movements across three continents. The
three that had the greatest geopolitical impact were Vietnam, Algeria, and
Cuba. In none of these cases can it be argued that these movements were
agents of the Soviet Union. Quite the opposite. These movements essentially
were defying the Yalta arrangements and imposing another set of priorities
in the geopolitical arena, one to which both the Soviet U n i o n and the
United States had to bend, eventually.
If we compare 2 0 0 0 and 1 9 0 0 , we see the degree to which the anti-
imperialist struggle w a s magnificently successful and yet changed many
fewer of the realities of the world-system than its participants had hoped,
intended, and expected it to d o . In 2 0 0 0 , there were no significant formal
colonies left. We have an African Secretary-General of the United N a t i o n s
(UN). Formal, a v o w e d racism has become taboo rhetoric. On the o t h e i
hand, we k n o w the degree to which neo-colonialism (in Nkrumah's n o w
forgotten but apt phrase) is rampant. An African m a y be secretary-general
of the U N , but an American heads the more important World Bank, and
a Western European the International Monetary Fund. While the rhetoric
of racism is t a b o o , the reality is as great as ever, and everyone understands
the unavowed code words that permit it to operate.
Indeed, the very success of the antisystemic movements has been the
major cause of their undoing. In the late nineteenth century, the various
The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon? xxxvii

antisystemic movements, all politically weak, evolved their strategy for so-
cial transformation, the famous two-step plan: first, mobilize to achieve
state power in each state; then use state power to transform society. This
was the strategy adopted by the Marxists in the name of the workers'
movement. This w a s the strategy adopted by the political nationalists. This
was even the strategy adopted by the w o m e n ' s movements as well as move-
ments of so-called minorities insofar as they concentrated on suffrage and
other political rights. In 1 9 0 0 , this strategy seemed the only plausible road
for these movements, and probably it was. It certainly seemed to be a
difficult road. By the 1 9 6 0 s , the mobilizations had achieved step one all
over the world. The antisystemic movements were in power, or at least
partial power, almost everywhere. Step t w o , transforming society, could
n o w be undertaken, and its results could be assessed. The militants and the
masses ultimately found the results to be so far b e l o w their expectations
that they came to vent their disillusionment u p o n the movements them-
selves and their leaders, first in the 1 9 6 8 world revolution and then in the
follow-up of the next three decades.
The t w o twentieth-century trends became conjoined in the last decades
of the century. The collapse of the Communisms in 1 9 8 9 - 1 9 9 1 w a s the
climax of the process of disillusionment that had surfaced in 1 9 6 8 . It w a s ,
however, also and simultaneously the knell of U.S. global power, removing
its political underpinnings in t w o w a y s . On the one hand, it ended the
political justification for a continuing subordination to U.S. leadership of
its t w o main economic rivals, a n o w revitalized Western Europe and Japan.
On the other hand, it ended the constraints that the antisystemic move-
ments had placed on mass political activity, which they had been chan-
neling and in reality largely depoliticizing. So, we can say that, in 2 0 0 0 by
comparison with 1 9 0 0 , the Pan-European world w a s actually much weaker
geopolitically and culturally, but the rest of the world had spent the am-
munition that it had mobilized and w a s wallowing in economic and polit-
ical distress without the certainty that it had once had, that history w a s on
its side. Hence, darkness at n o o n for both the Pan-European world and the
rest of the world, after a long period (especially 1 9 4 5 - 1 9 7 0 ) of bright sun
at midnight.
In this story that I am telling, I have not mentioned the Nazi/fascist
onslaught in the interwar years or the so-called ethnic purifications that we
have been undergoing of late or the Gulag horrors of the Communist re-
gimes (but, of course, also of many other regimes). Are they not important?
Yes, of course, in the sense that horrendous suffering is always important
and always morally repugnant. But h o w do we assess, first, the causes of
these horrors and, second, the trajectory? The dominant centrist myth is
that these horrors were caused by ideological presumption and collective
social deviance from the moderate, steady path laid out for the world-
system by those w h o had the most power in it. Auschwitz is said to have
xxxviii The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon?

been the result of irrational racism, Gulags the consequence of arrogant

imposition (and expectation) of Utopias, ethnic purification the result of
atavistic, culturally ingrained xenophobias.
Even without looking at the details, this is an implausible form of anal-
ysis. Auschwitz, Gulags, and ethnic purification all occurred within the
framework of a historical social system, the capitalist world-economy. We
have to ask w h a t it is about this system that produced such phenomena
and allowed them to flourish in the twentieth century in ways and to a
degree that hadn't occurred before. We live in a system in which there has
been a continuing class struggle. We live in a system that has involved the
steady polarization of the populationseconomically, politically, socially,
and n o w even demographically. We live in a system that has built racism
and sexism into its structures from the outset. And, of course, we live in a
system that has structured the very antisystemic movements that have chal-
lenged the legitimacy and viability of the system itself.
O n e of the w a y s in which 1 9 0 0 w a s different from 1 8 0 0 , a fortiori from
1 7 0 0 or 1 6 0 0 , is that the stakes of the global casino had become much
higher. Winning and losing had greater consequences for the combatants,
both because the possibility of mobility (upward and downward) for in-
dividuals and collectivities w a s ever greater and because the gap w a s ever
greater and growing steadily at a geometric, not arithmetic pace. I shall not
attempt here an explication of the particulars of any of these phenomena.
I wish merely to insist that the explanation must be found in the functioning
of the system and not in some supposed deviance from its proper function-
ing. I wish also to insist that, however terrible these happenings were for
all those w h o suffered from them, they mattered less to the historical ev-
olution of the modern world-system than the t w o central realities of the
twentieth century, the rise and beginning of the decline of U.S. hegemony
and the spectacular political reassertion of the extra-European world,
which changed less than everyone had supposed it w o u l d .
If one compares the twentieth-century capitalist world-economy w i t h the
nineteenth-century capitalist world-economy, there is really one remarkable
difference. The nineteenth century w a s the century of progress, in which
the capitalist system seemed at last to be bearing its technological fruits
and its potential for capital accumulation. It w a s the century in which the
n e w ascendant geoculture of liberalism seemed to sweep away the last cuK
tural vestiges of the Ancien Regime. It w a s the century in which the citizen
w a s at last enthroned as the bearer of sovereignty. It w a s the century of
Fax Britannica in the core zones (or at least people were deluded into
ignoring the occasional ruptures) and of the final imperial conquests in the
extra-European zones. It w a s the period in which to be bourgeois, White,
male, Christian, and skilled w a s proof of civilization and guaranteed prog-
ress. This is w h y the outbreak of World War I in 1 9 1 4 was such a cultural
shock within the Pan-European zones.
The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon?

The twentieth century, as we said at the outset, w a s a rollercoaster. On

the one hand, the technological advances in all fields outstripped the antic-
ipation of the nineteenth century by far. We lived amid a Jules Verne fan-
tasy, and we were promised far more in the next 30 years. So had capital
accumulation, even if we subtract all the capital stock destroyed in the
multiple conflagrations. The democratization of the world also proceeded
apace, in the sense that the demands of full citizenship were taken up by
all and sundry and went far beyond the imaginations of even the most
daring nineteenth-century advocates. So there we were, bright sun at mid-
night.
Yet, as we all k n o w , in the year 2 0 0 0 , we were surrounded by fear,
confusion, desperate scrambling again by all and sundry. We were dis-
couraged by the horrors of the twentieth century. We were discouraged
even more by the failures: the failure of the United States to fulfill the world
liberal Utopia that its ideologists had been constantly promising and the
failure of the antisystemic movements to create the n e w society that they
had constantly promised, at least until very recently, les lendemains qui
chantent. It is as though the incredible and ever-faster growth of the cap-
italist system had gotten out of hand and created cancers metastasizing all
over the place.
We are face-to-face with uncertainty. It is all very well for Prigogine to
tell us that uncertainty is the central reality of the universe, not merely of
our present historical situation. We still do not like it, and we find it very
hard to handlepsychologically and politicallyand yet we must. We find
ourselves in the terminal phase of a historical system, an age of transition,
1
as I have argued elsewhere. We must turn to our intellectual, moral, and
hence political duties in an age of transition. The first in line is the search
for lucidity about where we are. Rosa Luxemburg said already at the be-
ginning of the twentieth century that "the most revolutionary thing one
2
can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening."
Once we've done that, we must discuss with our friends, with our allies,
with all those w h o seem to w a n t a more democratic and egalitarian world
what kinds of n e w structures we might want, at least in broad outline, and
what kinds of strategies we might use in the very intense, but inevitably
confused, struggle of a major historical transition. We have to conduct such
a discussion without hierarchy, with much openness, and with a certain
amount of humility, but, on the other hand, with some clarity about min-
imal standards of inclusiveness and some insistence on a long-term histor-
ical view.
This will not be easy. Such discussion is, of course, already going on,
but not enough. We need to add our voices, both in scholarly arenas and
in more public arenas. We must be serious. We must be committed. We
must be coolheaded. We must be imaginative. No small order. But as Hillel
said 2 , 0 0 0 years ago, "If not I, w h o ? If not n o w , when?"
xl The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon?

NOTES

1. See Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, coords., The Age of Tran-
sition: Trajectory of the World-System, 1945-2025 (London: Zed Books, 1996).
See also Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics, or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-
first Century (New York: New Press, 1998).
2. "Wie Lasalle sagte, ist und bleibt die revolutionarste Tat, immer das laut zu
sagen, was ist."
 Parti

Global Processes, Power Relations,

and Antisystemic Movements
xl The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon?

NOTES
1. See Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, coords., The Age of Tran-
sition: Trajectory of the World-System, 1945-2025 (London: Zed Books, 1996).
See also Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics, or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-
first Century (New York: New Press, 1998).
2. "Wie Lasalle sagte, ist und bleibt die revolutionarste Tat, immer das laut zu
sagen, was ist."
 Parti

Global Processes, Power Relations,

and Antisystemic Movements
 Chapter 1

Globalization and the National Security

State Corporate Complex (NSSCC) in
the Long Twentieth Century
Thomas Ehrlich Reifer

INTRODUCTION

Through a focus on the American establishment and its overseas allies in

the context of class struggles, wars, and revolutionary upheavals, globali-
zation is analyzed in this chapter as part of the rise, demise, and recon-
struction of the capitalist world market in the long twentieth century
1
(Arrighi 1 9 9 4 ) . Late-nineteenth-century globalization and the turn toward
militarized overseas expansion by the Anglo-American establishment, based
on state-corporate management of the economy with markets guaranteed
by arms spending, provided the model for the creation of U.S. hegemony
on the enlarged social foundations of the N e w Deal world order. An anal-
ysis of h o w the geopolitical economy of U.S. militarization helped usher in
both the rise and demise of the N e w Deal world order is used to address
key debates in historical sociology.

POLANYI'S D O U B L E M O V E M E N T : A GEOPOLITICAL
ECONOMY

Karl Polanyi's (1944) enduring achievement was his rooting of the col-
lapse of nineteenth-century civilization in the double movement of the ex-
pansion of the self-regulating market and countermovements for the
self-protection of society. The hallmark of economic liberalismthen as
todaywas the belief in the self-regulating market mechanism. The leaders
of the countermovement, in contrast, embraced various forms of social
imperialism, restrictive associations, cartels, and/or state intervention as
mechanisms of self-protection against the unregulated market mechanism.
4 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

For those w h o embraced the metaphysical powers of self-regulating mar-

kets, their truths seemed self-evident. After all, had not England spurred
the vast material expansion of the world-economy and brought relative
peace to postwar Europe? Indeed, the entwining of England's world-empire
and empire of haute finance assured Britain the control over the balance
of power and world market that underlay its hegemony. N o t surprisingly,
the core base of support for Britain's liberal internationalism lay in the
Anglo-American cosmopolitan financial houses forming the axis of the
transatlantic circuit of money capital fueling U.S. industrialization from
railroads to the rise of heavy industry.
In contrast to the initial material basis of economic liberalism in cos-
mopolitan financial capitalism, support for the countermovements of eco-
nomic nationalism and state interventionism came from the variants of
late-nineteenth-century corporate capitalism grouped around the produc-
tive capital concept. Of course, cosmopolitan high finance and corporate
capitalism often developed historically along more flexible and increasingly
synthetic, if contradictory, lines than these ideotypical models suggest. Nev-
ertheless, one can ascertain different vantage points or concepts of control
of major capital groups and states associated with particular locations in
the geopolitical economy (van der PijI 1984).
Moreover, starting in the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, the
full development of material expansions gave way to periods of financial
capitalism, with the growing power of Anglo-American investment bankers
and corporate lawyers signaling the "rise [of] a class of pecuniary experts
whose business is the strategic management of the interstitial relations of
the system" (Veblen 1904: 20). Separate firms and "separate states had to
compete for mobile capital, which dictated to them the conditions under
which it would assist them to power" (Weber 1961: 2 4 7 - 2 4 9 ) . As accu-
mulation flowed beyond the bounds of profitable investment in peaceful
trade and production, mobile capital took flight toward zones with the
highest rates of profit and lowest protection costs, fueling inter-state and
inter-enterprise competition and more pure forms of financial speculation.
This pivotal role of money capital in the restructuring of the capitalist
world-system during hegemonic transitions does not merely express pro-
cesses of cyclical recurrence. Instead, each major phase of world-systemic
capitalist development brought into existence new socioeconomic forces
and ever larger military-industrial complexes, heightening contradictions
with existing social relations of production on a world scale until these
relations were burst asunder. The Great Depressions of 1 8 7 3 - 1 8 9 6 and of
the early twentieth century dramatically illustrated these contradictions, as
the social relations of production on a world scale were overturned, further
expanding the scope and reach of the capitalist world-system.
The TimeSpace compression of the world-system that came with the
spread of railways, the telegraph, and mechanized transport allowed new
Globalization and the National Security State Corporate Complex 5

states to mobilize their vast geographic and industrial resources to compete

with England on the world stage. As economic depression and protection-
ism spread, power elites responded by incorporating workers into projects
for militarized expansion into overseas markets as antidotes to worker un-
rest and excess surplus capital and productive capacity. The obverse side
of this expansion of financial activity was the reciprocal stimulus of military
industrialization and haute finance as part of the larger changing spatial
configuration of the inter-state system and restructuring of the global land-
scape of capital accumulation that accompany hegemonic transitions.
Karl Polanyi (1944) and indeed John Hobson (1905) both derived their
model of high finance and its supranational character from England. H o b -
son chronicled the role of finance in imperialism and militarism, whereas
Polanyi underscored its instrumental role in Europe's 100 years' peace. As
Giovanni Arrighi (1983) has explicated, these divergent assessments re-
flected a contradiction at the heart of high finance itself between its su-
pranational character as a speculative intermediary on the money market
and its wholesale dependence on state politico-military power to ensure the
protection of its overseas investments as well as new opportunities for fi-
nancial intermediation and speculation. Thus, when British hegemony was
young, high finance retained the relatively peaceful characteristics in Europe
underscored by Polanyi.
In Hobson's (1905) contrasting model of financial capitalism, high fi-
nance mobilizes the excess liquidity on the money market for state loans
and expansionist militarism. Hobson's model more accurately captures the
tendencies of finance during autumns of what Arrighi (1994) calls "sys-
temic cycles of accumulation" (SCA) and the hegemonic structures of which
they are a part. These periods are characterized by financial expansions and
intensified inter-state competition, including for mobile capital (cf. Arrighi
1983: 1 1 4 - 1 2 5 ) . In contrast to both models of financial capitalism pre-
sented by H o b s o n and Polanyi, Rudolf Hilferding's description of the fu-
sion of heavy industry and banking capital in Germany formed the basis
for Marxist theories of finance or state monopoly capitalism (see Arrighi
1983, 1994: 1 6 2 - 1 6 3 , 1 4 9 - 1 5 0 ) .
As indicated by these models, the resurgence of high finance and heavy
industry found expression in very different ways across the globe. In par-
ticular, Anglo-American capital market-based financial systems stood in
stark contrast to the universal banking models and thus provided for very
2
different expansive tendencies (see Zysman 1 9 8 3 ) . The United States com-
bined elements of both types of systems. N e w Deal reforms provided for
the full emergence of U.S. multinational firms and their associated com-
mercial banks, separated from investment banks. The unique geohistory of
the Anglo-Saxon countries and the importance of mobile capital in hege-
monic successions explain the cyclical resurgence of Anglo-American high
finance and the fact that the "weight and efficiency of the US and the UK
6 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

financial market are not comparable to those of any other country" (Stein-
herr 1998: 21).

T H E WASP ESTABLISHMENT A N D T H E MAKING OF T H E

AMERICAN C E N T U R Y
At the turn of the century, the overlapping power networks of Anglo-
American elites thus found expression in the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
(WASP) establishment's embrace of White supremacy and growing anti-
German sentiment. The hope for a Pax Anglo-Americana through a reunion
of the English-speaking race became increasingly prominent in the thinking
of leading members of the Anglo-American establishment. From the 1870s
on, powerful British imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes, and acolytes W. T.
Stead and Alfred Milner (often in league with England's towering Joseph
Chamberlain), trumpeted the necessity of Anglo-Saxon unity, as did Amer-
ica's Eastern establishment. The imperial drive of Rhodes, Milner, and the
neo-imperialist groups working for Anglo-Saxon unity and social reform
that they inspired personified the structural trends underlying Ludwig De-
3
hio's (1962) geohistory of the modern world-system. Dehio (1962) elo-
quently described the ways in which hegemonic powers were forced to call
in the Eastern and Western counterweights against Continental challengers.
N o w the Western counterweights called into play included all the WASP,
English-speaking peoples w h o were among the prime beneficiaries of the
ongoing financial expansion.
The domestic and international prerequisites for the consolidation of an
Anglo-American WASP establishment came into being during this time. In
1 8 9 9 Joseph Chamberlain called for an alliance of Anglo-Saxon and Teu-
tonic nations. This call was already being taken up in the United States and
United Kingdom, where an Anglo-American League, composed of over
1,000 leading members of the Anglo-American establishment, was formed
to strengthen Anglo-Saxon solidarity so as to support U.S. efforts to con-
quer Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam in its war with Spain.
After World War I, industrial capital groups in England and the United
Statesthe vanguard of Polanyi's movements for self-protectionand el-
ements of high finance became increasingly pro-German, forming an
important part of the material basis of so-called appeasement (see van der
Fiji, 1984; Hersh 1992; Reifer 2000).
On the plane of haute finance, the House of Morgan's incorporation of
key members of the English establishment ensured Britain's turn to it to
finance hundreds of millions of bond flotations needed for the conquest of
South Africa during the Boer War (Kynaston 1 9 9 5 : 1 9 0 ) . U.S. participation
in the Boer War loans saw the transatlantic migration of financial power
from London to N e w York and the ascendancy of the House of Morgan
within London-based haute finance. This, in turn, helped seal the Anglo-
Globalization and the National Security State Corporate Complex 7

American alliance of World War I, not to mention the House's role as the
key intermediary between U.S. war production, finance, and the allies (see
kynaston 1995: 2 7 0 - 2 7 1 ; see also Tansill 1938). This was the second ma-
ior act in this ongoing transfer of world money and power from England
to the United States.
Moreover, the military setbacks and humiliations that Britain endured in
us ultimately victorious war, the English equivalent of the U.S. Civil or
''ietnam War, played a major role in launching the war preparedness move-
ment in England and the dominions, led by disciples of Rhodes and Milner
who went on to form the Round Table movement (Reifer 2000). Here,
\nglo-Saxon elites, through their quasi-Cobdenite peace societies, the in-
-srnational arbitration movement that emanated from them, and the war
preparedness movement into which they flowed, redoubled their efforts to
create a Peace of the Anglo-Saxons, as one social imperialist war prepar-
.dness tract was titled.
This Anglo-American liberal civilian militarism, led by the Wall Street-
city of London, Oxbridge-Ivy League establishment, allied industrialists,
ind warrior-statesmen, was part and parcel of the globalization of Anglo-
Vmerican business and military power coming with the turn toward over-
seas imperialism in the late nineteenth century. In the United States, upper
classes led the way in these efforts, forming the Plattsburg national pre-
paredness movementin which businessmen's camps trained tens of
thousands of the corporate upper class and employees for warand the
National Security League (NSL) in 1 9 1 3 - 1 9 1 4 . As with the House of Mor-
gan-sponsored Navy League, Plattsburg and the National Security League
were modeled after and coordinated with their counterparts in England and
the British dominions. The war preparedness movement, which helped suc-
cessfully pressure the United States into entering the war, was a true awak-
ening for the country's emerging corporate power elite.
This movement was led by the WASP establishment, both old money
and corporate lawyers, investment bankers, and allied industrialists from
the new multinationals. These men brought the corporate consolidation of
finance and industry at century's turn, replete with repression of workers
at home and the expansion of American military power and business en-
terprises abroad. The movement was run in part out of America's private
clubs, notably the Harvard, Yale, and Bankers' Clubs of N e w York City,
as was the war preparedness drive before World War II. The effort was,
above all, a House of Morgan operation, allied with Teddy Roosevelt Re-
publicans, former steel/naval producer Andrew Carnegie, and men from his
sndowment, including those U.S. legalists w h o laid the foundations for U.S.
hegemony after World War II (Reifer 2 0 0 0 ) .
Leading members of the Anglo-American establishment, such as corpo-
rate counsels Richard Olney and Philander Knox, famous for their repres-
sion of the Debs and Homestead/Carnegie Steel rebellions and the dollar
8 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

diplomacy, participated in the war preparedness movement. The t w o hon-

orary presidents of the NSL were America's leading corporate lawyers and
former heads of the bar, Joseph Choate, President Roosevelt's ambassador
to England, and Elihu Root, his former secretary of war and state and
godfather of the U.S. establishment. Elihu Root Jr. and law partner Gren-
ville Clark, both from what became a top Wall Street law firm, organized
the Plattsburg businessmen's training camp, heading up efforts to secure
conscription in World War I and going on to pass a peacetime draft with
other NSL alumni before U.S. entry into World War II (Reifer 2 0 0 0 ) . Lead-
ing the World War I effort was former Roosevelt secretary of state, U.S.
4
Steel director, and onetime House of Morgan partner Robert Bacon.
Executive, national, and working committee members of the NSL rep-
resented the top echelon of the U.S. establishment, virtually all interrelated
and connected through business, social, and extended blood kinship ties,
including to leading members of the British-based Round Table movement,
as well as the larger English establishment. Indeed, Fernand Braudel's anal-
ysis of the tax framers/financiers of Louis XrV in France w h o composed
the Ferine generale can be tellingly applied, with minor modifications, to
the core participants of the National Security League. Braudel (1982: 5 3 8 -
541) notes that the judicial inquiry revealed a mere

200 to 300 individuals, of whom the 74 richest called the tune. As usual, there was
a small group at the top. These people were all interrelated or connected in various
ways, by marriage or business association, to each othereffectively forming lob-
bies. .. . like a mighty clan, with a network of marriages and old or new blood ties.
To my mind, this is simply one more example of the iron law of minority control,
that structural concentration of capitalist activity, (emphasis added)

Leading men of the NSL, Plattsburg, and a related Yale Naval Aviation
unit financed by Morgan partners, some never before revealed, include tow-
ering figures of the U.S. Stimsonian establishment. Among the most famous
were Elihu Root; Henry Stimson; Wild Bill Donovan, founder of the East
Coast Ivy League Wall Street-dominated Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); and future Stimson aides Robert
Lovett, John J. McCloythe latter once nicknamed chairman of the U.S.
establishmentand Harvey Bundy, father of William and McGeorge,
prominent Cold War statesmen and key architects of the Vietnam War.

These men helped establish a distinguished network connecting Wall Street, Wash-
ington, worthy foundations, and proper clubs. "The New York financial and legal
community," former JFK aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in 1965, "was the heart
of the American Establishment. Its household deities were Henry L. Stimson and
Elihu Root; its present leaders, Robert A. Lovett and John J. McCloy; its front
organizations, the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie foundations and the Council on
Globalization and the National Security State Corporate Complex 9

Foreign Relations." (Isaacson and Thomas 1986: 28-29, 47-48; see also Domhoff
1990)

One could also add the National Security League, as the war prepared-
ness movement and war effort helped consolidate the embryonic U.S.
-nilitary-industrial multinational corporate complex that became the
foundation of American world hegemony. In fact, along with representa-
tives of old money, America's vertically integrated multinational firms and
che corporate lawyers and bankers representing them provided the m e n
notably, officersfor the war preparedness movement (Reifer 2 0 0 0 ) . This
story thus ties together the making of U.S. financial and corporate capital-
ism with the long reign of the Open Shop in American industry inaugurated
by the epochal defeat of American labor at Homestead in 1 8 9 2 and the
Debs rebellion of 1 8 9 4 - 1 8 9 5 , to U.S. naval-led overseas imperialism and
the full-blown emergence of the Eastern establishment.
This process of class, state, and business enterprise formation culminat-
ing in World War I adumbrated the full-blown National Security State
Corporate Complex (NSSCC)denoting the fusion of private corporate
power with public state bureaucracywhich was reborn during World
War II and consolidated during the Cold War (cf. Brinkley 1995). In this
period, from the late nineteenth century to World War I, power elites pi-
oneered a model of capitalist self-protection from the market system
through state-corporate militarization and overseas expansion. The great
leap forward in inter-state political-economic-military cooperation of this
period also helped create an international upper-class network.

ANGLO-AMERICAN CAPITAL, THE AXIS POWERS, A N D

THE RISE OF T H E N E W DEAL W O R L D ORDER

In the 1920s, there was no vast expansion of the NSSCC based on mas-
sive public spending and overseas aid. Instead, the privatized foreign policy
of Anglo-American high finance based on Wall Street and the city of Lon-
don prevailed. Anglo-American elites funneled liquidity into the rationali-
zation of German industry and to varying extents the militarized material
expansions of the future Axis powers, Italy, Japan, and Germany. Along
with related industrial investment and cartel agreements, this helped lay the
foundations for the world armament race in the wake of the Great De-
pression. All this eventually provided the stimulus for a new material ex-
pansion of the world-economy (Reifer 2 0 0 0 ) . In the United States,
military-led industrial rationalization and inter-state warfare laid the ma-
terial basis for the democratization of both citizen-soldiers and shop-floor
citizens: "Military discipline meant the triumph of democracy because the
community wished and was compelled to secure the co-operation of the
non-aristocratic masses and hence put arms, and along with arms, political
10 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

power into their hands. In addition, the money power plays its role" (We-
ber 1 9 6 1 : 2 3 0 - 2 3 2 ) .
The rationalization of industry and recomposition of labor during the
wartime and interwar periods, including the campaign to Americanize the
immigrant led by groups such as the National Security League, helped pave
the way for the rise of the tens of millions of second-generation ethnic
immigrants w h o composed the mass of the Congress of Industrial Organ-
izations (CIO) (see Reifer 2 0 0 0 ) . The fortunes of these ethnic groups grew
as the speculative excesses of the "WASP ascendancy" helped usher in its
relative decline during the early years of the N e w Deal (though it would
make a massive comeback when called back to service during World War
II) (Alsop 1992). In conjunction with mass protest and the rise of non-
WASP elites allied with WASP establishment sectors close to productive
capital, this provided the social base of the N e w Deal coalition (cf. Fraser
1991). What is especially interesting here is the overlap between ethnic
power networks and sectors of the economy. Also revealing is the WASP
establishment split between the old power structure and those forces seek-
ing a new dominant social bloc based on the rise of industrially based
corporate capitalism, with increased state regulation, that incorporated the
new immigrant workers as well (Baltzell 1964; Jenkins and Brents 1989).
During the 1920s the WASP establishment grouped around Wall Street,
notably, the House of Morgan investment bank, dominated the capital
markets, infrastructural investments, and heavy industry. Non-WASP eth-
nic groupsGerman-Jews and Catholic groups, such as the Irish and Ital-
ianswere left to invest in the newer, riskier, albeit more dynamic sectors
of the economy such as consumer goods, retail/wholesale trade, entertain-
ment, and communications, as well as the new industries of the rapidly
industrializing Sun Belt. All these sectors would benefit from the distribu-
tion of income in favor of workers and consumers (Baltzell 1964: 2 0 7 - 2 0 8 ,
2 5 2 - 2 5 9 ; Fraser 1991: ch. 10). These groups allied with tens of millions
of second-generation immigrants w h o formed the CIO, versus the old-stock
immigrants w h o made up the more conservative American Federation of
Labor (AFL).
Over time, these non-WASP unions and elite groupsincluding future
Jewish Supreme Court justices like Brandeis and Frankfurter (the latter a
Stimson associate), as well as a host of influential engineerswould ally
more or less openly with newly independent capital groups in industry that
had escaped Morgan control, notably, the Rockefellers, w h o later became
the standard-bearers of liberal Republicanism. These groups coalesced dur-
ing the N e w Deal period and broke the stranglehold of the old WASP
establishment on the commanding heights of the corporate economy. A
host of N e w Deal reforms and congressional investigations provided for
the dismantling of investment banking control over the capital markets,
 Globalization and the National Security State Corporate Complex 11

unleashing America's technologically advanced, industrially based multi-

nationals and their commercial banks (Davis 1986: 165).
subsequently, the rapid growth of the working class and material pro-
duction stimulated by inter-state militarization facilitated the steady rise of
industrial capital within the overall profit distribution process at the ex-
pense of the cosmopolitan financial bourgeoisie, especially after the
depression-era attack on the heavy-industries securities bloc grouped
around the House of Morgan (see van der Pijl 1984). In addition, the re-
militarization of the world-system led to the rise of internally generated
^rporate funds that allowed industry to become self-financing and thus to
displace the powerful influence of financiers (cf. Arrighi 1983: 1 2 6 - 1 5 2 ) .
\> noted by the leading U.S. historian of investment banking, Vincent Ca-
rosso (1970: 395), from the time of the N e w Deal, public finance and state-
^bsidized industrynotably in the wartime periodgrew by leaps and
; bounds. This allowed the U.S. government, through the provision of tens
billions in liquidity from public agencies, to largely take over, through
;
; the power of the public purse, the economic functions heretofore provided
hv investment bankers, while stimulating the rapid industrialization of the
Sunbelt region as well.
This militarization of the world-system had dramatic effects. The chang-
'. mg balance of public versus private power and capital versus labor allowed
for the relative subordination of money to productive-industrial capital dur-
g World War II and the early period of the Cold War (van der Pijl 1984).
\t the same time, war provided for the reentry of the Ivy League Wall
' Street establishmentwith its legions of corporate lawyers, investment
l> bankers, and allied industrialistsinto the state, paving the way for the
V-\\ Deal's wartime transformation and partial liquidation. Corporate
v.ontrol was n o w firmly ensconced within federal agencies running foreign
dicy and the war economy, laying the postwar basis for core capital dom-
inance of those departments in charge of foreign affairs, the military, and
acroeconomic policy (Davis 1986: 165; Brinkley 1995).
With the reentry of the Wall Street Stimsonian establishmentnow in-
v: easingly serving the needs of industrial capitalinto the highest reaches
of the War/Defense, State Departments, as well as the OSS and CIA, these
agencies quickly came to form the heart of the NSSCC. Here, the need of
state elites to mobilize the resources of those w h o owned and ran the econ-
><ny allowed U.S. corporate-dollar-a-year men to take over wartime ad-
ministration, just as England's capitalist gentry took over public
administration "without compensation in the interest of their o w n social
power" (cf. Weber 1946: 93; see also Domhoff 1990: chs. 5 - 6 ) . World
War II thus saw the rebirth of the NSSCC, as it experienced an exponential
resurgence, with the vast majority of wartime contracts going to the 100
largest firms, with industrial concentration rising exponentially, as 5 0 0 , 0 0 0
12 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

businesses disappeared from 1941 to 1943 (van der Pijl 1984: 1 1 4 - 1 1 5 ;

Fraser 1991: 4 8 1 - 4 8 2 , 6 4 9 , n. 83; Brinkley 1995: 1 9 2 - 2 0 0 ) .
As U.S. planners confronted the dilemma of reconstructing the capitalist
world-economy, they sought to accommodate the growing social power
of labor at home and abroad by incorporating workers into a project for
the global expansion of corporate capital. Power elites faced the massive
obstacle, however, of a nationalistic Congress mostly dominated by south-
ern Democrats and right-wing, fiscally conservative, Asia-first Republicans.
This very structure was part of the legacy of the defeat of Reconstruction,
the exclusion of Blacks from the N e w Deal coalition, and U.S. labor's
fateful alliance with the southern segment of the U.S. ruling class in the
Democratic Party (Domhoff 1990: ch. 4; see also Davis 1986). Only anti-
Communism enabled U.S. planners to get Congress to release funds, os-
tensibly for purely military purposes but really central for rebuilding the
world-economy and ensuring the long-term profit potential of U.S. trans-
national firms and classes within the networks of U.S. global military al-
liances (Borden 1984).
This consolidated the alliance of southern reaction and the NSSCC, help-
ing to ensure the failure of labor's Operation Dixie to organize the South
(Davis 1986: 1 9 3 - 1 9 5 ) . Persons of color and w o m e n were thus largely
excluded from or stigmatized within the gendered and racialized "warfare-
welfare state" (O'Connor 1973). This bifurcated structure of the U.S. ruling
class thus consolidated a "trifurcated" warfare-welfare state (Campbell
1997: 107). Instead of universalistic programs, entitlements such as veter-
ans' benefits, the watershed GI Bill of Rights, and low-interest loans went
to male citizen-soldiers. Social Security went for shop-floor citizens, initially
largely White males, w h o also benefited from militarily subsidized private
welfare states tied to firms, courtesy in part of the permanent war economy.
Second-class, means-tested benefits, stigmatized as welfare, went to the
most oppressednotably, women, persons of color, and the poor. This
engendered resentment and scapegoating from White men that paved the
way for the breakup of the N e w Deal coalition, the rise of the N e w Right,
and the demise of the N e w Deal world order (see Gordon 1994; cf. Davis
1986).
By 1947, leaders of the World War I preparedness alumni and larger
Stimsonian establishment had finally formalized the National Security State
(cf. Mills 1956: 2 8 8 - 2 9 7 ) . The full emergence of the NSSCC came only
after the outbreak of the Korean War later that June and the crisis of
America's effort at rollback that triggered China's entry into the conflict.
This was what finally brought about the increase of U.S. military spending
from $ 1 0 to $ 5 0 billion, as earlier envisaged by corporate lawyers and
investment bankers such as secretary of state Dean Acheson and his aide
Paul Nitze, in their official policy paper (NSC 68), drafted in the spring of
1950.
Globalization and the National Security State Corporate Complex 13

This militarized material expansion of the world-economy, carried out

through publicly funded Cold War "international military Keynesianism"
(Borden 1984), which rebuilt the regional workshops of Europe and Asia,
contrasted dramatically with the privately funded, English-led material ex-
pansion of the 1 0 0 years' peace. Allies were enmeshed into Cold War
power networks of the U.S. NSSCC as "semi-sovereign states." The obverse
side of this was a global policy of U.S. counterrevolutionary violence,
backed up by troops and nuclear weapons to preserve a global open door
for corporate capital, a formula that led to Vietnam (Domhoff 1990: chs.
5-6). Simultaneously, the Cold War provided the military, "tax-led" Sun-
belt industrialization that allowed capital to exit the N e w Deal at home,
even before the transnational expansion of capital abroad (Davis 1986:
194-195).

I HE RESURGENCE OF A N G L O - A M E R I C A N FINANCE,
HE RISE OF T H E N E W RIGHT, A N D T H E DEMISE OF
THE N E W DEAL W O R L D ORDER

U.S. policy culminated in the fiscal crisis of its warfare-welfare state, first
detonated by the policy of guns and butter during the Vietnam War. The
most forceful expression of this was the increasing contradiction between
the short-term profit interests of U.S. multinationals and the power pursuits
of the U.S. state. President Nixon's grand design aimed to lessen these
contradictions. N i x o n moved to an offshore naval-air strategy, propped up
by the U.S. exchange of protection for petrodollars through Middle Eastern
alliances and support for increased oil prices. This struck a blow at the
hurodollar market by sucking up hundreds of billions of petrodollars
including in Europe and Japanand funneling them to Western oil, arms,
-ind banking firms, as well as U.S. Treasury securities. The United States
also released itself from its balance of payment obligations through the
abandonment of fixed exchange rates. While this strategy, including seign-
iorage privilegesthe right to mint the coin of the realmlowered the
costs of and propped up U.S. power, it vastly increased the financialization
oi the world-economy, the globalization of its organizational structures,
and the militarization of the United States. This further undermined the
material base of the N e w Deal world order (see Arrighi 1994: 2 9 8 - 3 2 4 ;
Nitzan and Bichler 1995; Bichler and Nitzan, 1996; Spiro 1999). Particu-
larly important here were oil price increases and militarization providing
windfalls for the energy-rich Sunbelt, which provided much of the money
and shock troops for the N e w Right (see Davis 1986: 1 5 7 - 2 5 5 ) .
This exchange of U.S. protection for petrodollars cast the Middle East
region in a role similar to India's in Britain's Free Trade Imperialism. This
allayed the contradictions of U.S. hegemony in both the military and the
monetary realms, albeit at a cost of deepening its militarization and fin-
14 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

ancialization. The new freedom of the realm coined by the United States
was short-lived. The U.S. regional surrogate strategy fell apart with the
Iranian revolution, the Afghanistan invasion, and the second oil shock, as
gold prices rose wildly while the dollar plummeted. Facing this, U.S. power
elites in the Eastern establishment and Sunbelt-based N e w Right changed
strategy (see Davis 1986: part two).
Just as the old, exclusive WASP establishment reaped the fruits of the
inflated capital values of a bygone era in the 1920s, so, too, did the rise of
a broad-based N e w Right aim to valorize the accumulated gains of cor-
porate capital and the broad propertied strata. This coalition included the
more privileged segments of the White ethnic working classes and middle
strata, arrayed against workers of color, labor, and the poor (see Davis
1986: 1 5 7 - 2 5 5 , 302). Crucial in the strategy of this new dominant social
bloc were Reagan's military Keynesianism and the opportunities for finan-
cial accumulation that its regressive financing allowed.
Once again, as in the late nineteenth century, the accumulation of excess
liquidity on the money market beyond the bounds of profitable investment
in trade and production was mobilized by the great financial houses to fund
state loans and inter-state militarization (cf. Hobson 1905). As the power
of money capital waxed while U.S. military power waned, Anglo-American
elites gravitated toward this new strategy (see Reifer 2 0 0 0 ) , for what better
than to mobilize this power in offshore financial marketsvia the city of
London, Wall Street, Japan-led East Asia, and the Gulf statesto pay for
military Keynesianism regressively, increasing capital gains and shoring up
Anglo-American global military, corporate, and financial power? Here, so-
cioeconomic changes ensured that militarization, rather than expanding the
N e w Deal's social base through taxation on corporate profits and the rich,
would now usher in its global demise.
As the leveraged buyout and downsizing movement led by investment
bankers and corporate lawyers got under way in Wall Street, the Reagan
administration, to pay for U.S. remilitarization, initiated a "leveraged buy-
out of the country . . . financed" through borrowing, threatening to bank-
rupt the citizenry unless N e w Deal social programs and policies were
sacrificed to fund the NSSCC (Smith 1993: 19). The vast expansion of
money capital was greatly fueled by Reagan's deregulation, tax cuts, and
regressive financing of the U.S. deficit, especially from the issuance and
rollover of some $13.5 trillion in marketable securities by the federal gov-
ernment from 1981 to 1 9 9 0 (Smith 1993: 87). The result was that the
foreign exchange and international bond markets, notably in U.S. Treasury
securities, blossomed to become the largest and most integrated part of
global capital markets, with equity markets close behind (cf. Sassen 1996:
4 0 - 4 4 ) . "US institutions . . . benefited from the fact that the US government
securities marketdominated by US housesis the only truly global mar-
Globalization and the National Security State Corporate Complex IS

ket, in which the trading book can remain open for 24 hours by being
passed around the globe" (Steinherr 1998: 61).
Here, N e w Deal reformssuch as the n o w repealed Glass-Steagall Act
that dealt blows to financial concentration increased the competitiveness
and institutional innovation in U.S. finance, from the rise of multitriliion-
dollar investors such as the insurance, pension, and mutual fund industries,
to the growth of derivatives. These innovations, coming with the decline
in relationship-based finance and the growing commoditization of finance
especially through disintermediation from the banking systemplayed ma-
jor roles in the ongoing financial expansion and resurgence of U.S. high
finance (Steinherr 1998: 3 7 - 6 8 , 2 1 6 - 2 2 3 ) . Glass-Steagall's separation of
commercial and investment banking increased the crisis facing N e w York's
money-center commercial banks, with their closer ties to industrial firms
through lending, enhancing the competitiveness of the U.S. investment
banks as a countervailing force to their power (Steinherr 1998: 40).
In fact, it was the rise in interest rates to finance the Vietnam War that
ushered in the "money-market mutual fund revolution" and commoditi-
zation of finance by driving savers from banks to the money market (Stein-
herr 1998: 4 0 , 383). This, in turn, stimulated competitive innovation in the
U.S. financial sector as a whole, notably with risk management through
derivatives, whose notional or face value n o w tops $ 9 2 trillion (Schlesinger
2000: A l ) . Critical to this financial revolution are money-center banks
seeking new market shares in the face of disintermediation from the bank-
ing system, the commoditization of finance, and the rise of institutional
investors, whose over $ 2 0 trillion in assets makes them major players in
global stock markets, the worldwide capitalization of which stood at $ 2 2
trillion in 1997 (Steinherr 1998: 5 3 - 5 7 , 70 n. 16, 2 1 6 - 2 2 3 , 340).
The rise of institutional investors and decline in relationship-based bank-
ing also increased support among power elites for an aggressive foreign
policy that would simultaneously restore U.S. military and financial power,
upholding the dollar's value and the profitable exchange of petrodollar
payments for protection so important for the community of interests be-
tween the state, finance, oil, aerospace, and related firms at the center of
the NSSCC (cf. Hulbert 1982). As Wall Street Journal economics editor
Alfred Malabre noted, "The one great strength of the dollar is, that unlike
the yen, unlike the d-mark, it is backed by thermonuclear weapons"
Kwitny Report, n.d.; see Spiro 1999).
The growth of U.S. interests in the Middle East was reflected in the
-
composition and policies of the U.S. executive. Reagan's treasury secretary
and chief of staff D o n Regan formerly headed Merrill Lynch, which led the
rise of the mutual funds industry and had close ties to the Shah's Iran (Bill
1988: 360). Merrill Lynch also owned White Weld, a global investment
firm helping the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) manage its $ 1 0 0
billion portfolio and inflow of 4 5 0 million petrodollars a day (Bichler and
16 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

Nitzan 1996: 631). The firm's SAMA portfolio was managed by David C.
Mulford, who became the Treasury's assistant secretary and undersecretary
of international affairs in the Reagan and Bush administrations (see Spiro
1999: ch. 5). Former representatives of oil, finance and arms firmstied
via interlocking directorates and institutional shareholdings with U.S.
banks holding an average of 1 8 . 0 1 % stock in six of the major aerospace
producers, four times more than their average Fortune 5 0 0 holdingswere
well represented in these administrations (Hulbert 1982: 8 9 - 9 2 ; Bichler and
Nitzan 1996: 6 2 2 - 6 3 2 ) . N o t e the similarities here to German bank-
industry relations (cf. Steinherr 1998).
Falling oil prices in 1 9 9 0 and threats to U.S. client states in the Middle
East thus endangered the state-corporate alliance constituting the NSSCC,
including U.S. banks like Chase Manhattan (now J. P. Morgan Chase) and
Citicorp (cf. Spiro 1999). These firms, then on the brink of insolvency, were
rescued only by rising oil prices during the war, injections of Gulf capital
to purchase large chunks of these firms thereafter, and the Fed's lowering
of interest rates (Seib and Waldman 1992: A l ; Barron's April 13, 1998,
A 3 - A 4 ) . When Iraq invaded Kuwait, as the United States had spent trillions
of borrowed dollars on the military, which helped usher in the Soviet
Empire's collapse without an actual war, thus depriving the NSSCC of a
1
much-needed enemy, President Bush's predisposition was to put this ca-
pability to good use in war.
In embracing the warrior-statesman ethic, Bush was compared with his
own and indeed Henry Stimson's hero, Theodore Roosevelt. In fact, Bush
had followed Stimson into the same exclusive prep schoolacceptance into
which, as C. Wright Mills (1956: 6 1 - 7 0 ) correctly noted, determined en-
trance into the exclusive private clubs and societies of Ivy League univer-
sities and hence the nation. Here, in June 1940, the very month that
Stimson became secretary of war, the 16-year-old future president re-
sponded to the call of the elder soldier-statesman as Stimson led the effort
for U.S. involvement. In fact, Stimson was on hand to school the young
man into the ways of power as Bush enteredas did his son, President
George W. Bush, w h o followed him into Andover and Yalethe Yale se-
cret society for sons of (and new entrants into) the ruling class, Skull and
Bones. As Evan Thomas noted in "The Code of the WASP Warrior" (1990:
33):

If President Bush has seemed willing, even eager to confront Saddam Hussein, he
is doing no more than Colonel Stimson would expect of him. . . . There is a warrior
ethic that runs deep in the values of the old WASP establishment.... Henry Stim-
son was George Bush's hero. "Bush had this special kind of respect for Stimson
because he was a combination of all the things his family stood for," says a close
friend. "You are self-reliant and you fight wars for your country." The President's
role model was especially avid about fighting wars.. . . During the Cuban missile
Ghtbalization and the National Security State Corporate Complex 17

crisis in 1962 John Kennedy's national-security adviser McGeorge Bundy sought

the advice of Robert Lovett, a former Secretary of Defense and fellow Yale man.
''Mac," responded Lovett, "I think the best service we can perform for the President
is to approach this as Colonel Stimson would." The tight knit establishment of
Bundy, Lovett and Stimson was the world that George Bush grew up in. His father
was Lovett's business partner on Wall Street. Prescott Bushlike Stimson, Bundy
and Lovettwas a member of Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society.

1 lie Gulf War was where the turn-of-the-century making of American

militarism was reaffirmed for a new century. After the U.S. victory, a pa-
rade in June 1 9 9 1 , Operation Welcome H o m e , was held in N e w York City
to v l u t e veterans of the war. Up in the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate,
Meagher, and Flom, there is an advertisement from Merrill Lynch cele-
r
bra ing the parade, autographed for the firm's senior partner, Joseph Flom,
cos.hair of the event, by Norman Schwarzkopf (Caplan 1993: 3 - 5 ) . Skad-
den pioneered the legal side of the leveraged buyout merger wave of the
l^SiK, emerging as Wall Street's premier global law firmthe richest in
the worldand the lead representative of corporate America (Caplan 1993:

Skadden's role in the celebration of U.S. power was in line with the
usions of George Bush, Henry Stimson, and Elihu Root. In fact, Skadden's
lim age went back to the original law firm of Elihu Root Jr., son of the
godfather of the U.S. establishment and his law partner Grenville Clark,
t\\ o of the most important leaders of the World War I war preparedness
movement. Skadden's t w o original founding partners had both been mem-
bers of the Root and Clark firm, and it was from this firm that Skadden
giit its original corporate clients (Caplan 1993: 15). These densely woven
power networks reflect the class formation of the U.S. establishment and
the structural imperatives of the NSSCC that they constructed to secure
I .s world power, including through U.S.-dominated supranational insti-
tutions such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the
\\ i'rid Trade Organization (WTO), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
\ VTO), the United Nations (UN), and Bretton W o o d s .

CONCLUSIONS

I he centrality of corporate lawyers and investment bankers in the Amer-

is.ui century analyzed here derives from their structural role serving the
legal and financial needs of the corporate community and their intermedi-
ation between private corporate power and public state bureaucracy, no-
tably, in war making, state making, and capital accumulation. Along with
engaging in pure financial speculation, investment bankers and corporate
! us pers handling their legal work specialize in raising money on the capital
markets for industry as well as for state making and war making, in both
18 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

their public and private capacities. Their role in serving and arbitrating
between the broad needs of capital, the state, and the citizenry facilitates
the taking into account of diverse interests. This corporate group is thus
perfectly suited to serve as the bourgeoisie's "organic intellectuals," rep-
resenting the general interests of capital, reflective of its changing social
base and power relations, while helping to provide for the relative auton-
omy of the state as well (Tocqueville 1945, vol. 1: 2 8 2 - 2 9 7 ; see Mills 1956:
288).
The geopolitical economy presented here provides the real missing link
between state and capital, capital accumulation, social classes, and geo-
politics, as well as structure and agency, that has haunted historical soci-
ology. Corporate lawyers, investment bankers, and allied industrialists
played key roles in America's wars, from World War I to the present,
through groups like the NSL and the Cold War Committee on the Present
Danger (Sanders 1983; Boies 1994). At the close of each century, inter-
state and inter-enterprise competition for mobile capital and ensuing mili-
tarized financial expansions ensured the resurgence of high finance and the
power of Anglo-American investment bankers and corporate lawyers in
entwined processes of war making, state making, and capital accumulation.
At the heart of this was what became the Wall Street-Federal Reserve-
Treasury-Bretton W o o d s nexus, which alternately during various phases of
systemic cycles of accumulation provided for the subordination of money
capital to productive expansion or for the vast growth of money capital
combined with supply-side economics or the end of expansionary fiscal
policies. In the 1980s, the hegemony of U.S.-dominated global financial
markets and military power was ushered in through this nexus and the
larger NSSCC of which it was a part (cf. Gowan 1999).
Trillions of dollars that could have gone for social investment and a
down payment on a global N e w Deal were instead spent on regressively
financed militarization, which has driven budget cuts to education, health,
and human services across the world. Projections of an endless U.S. hegem-
ony, bereft of growing contradictions and instability, are thus shortsighted,
for the social foundations of U.S. hegemony were based on the promissory
note of a social pact between capital and labor in the core and Third World
development that constituted the social foundations of the U.S.-led world-
system, which after the militarized financial expansion of the 1980s, is n o w
revealed as a broken promise.

NOTES
1. Thanks to Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Tom Dobrzeniecki, Suzzanne Ochoa,
and Jesse Reifer for helpful suggestions on this chapter. For additional evidence on
the themes presented here, see Reifer (2000).
2. Industrially based, German-led Continental Europe and trade- and industry-
Globalization and the National Security State Corporate Complex 19

based, Japan-led East Asia exemplified the universal banking model (albeit with
quasi-state control and administered prices in the latter) (Zysman 1983).
3. These groups included the National Civic Federation, the Round Table, Chat-
ham House, and the Council on Foreign Relations, the latter two being funded by
England's wealthiest men and firms and the House of Morgan, as well as the Car-
negie and Rockefeller Foundations.
4. Bacon's name is chiseled in stone along with Theodore Roosevelt's on the
wall of Harvard University, both of them friends from the class of 1880a stone's
throw away, incidentally, from the Lamont Library, sponsored by and named after
one of J. P. Morgan's chief partners, Thomas Lamont, typical of the close relation-
ship between Ivy League East Coast universities and Wall Street.

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 Chapter 2

Bucking the System: The TimeSpace

of Antisystemic Movements
Richard E. Lee

INTRODUCTION

It has been an extraordinarily fruitful quarter century for historical social

science or, more aptly, inquiry into questions of long-term, large-scale so-
cial change from the world-systems perspective, but it has been, and con-
tinues to be, an uphill struggle. Criticism has come both from the
nomothetic camp of universalizing producers of generalities associated with
comparable regularities and from the idiographic camp of equally univer-
salizing compilers of particularisms associated with irrepeatable singulari-
ties. The one has alleged that world-systems analysis did not, and does not,
produce a body of theory for verification, at least in the form of a set of
fa'sifiable propositions, and therefore could not, and does not, predict fu-
ture change or offer guidance for policy. The other has charged that world-
systems analysis simply put forward another grand narrative and thereby
' sentenced the future to its o w n closed teleology.
Both are backhanded compliments to a perspective that takes as its cen-
tral premise that the modern world does not consist of a society in the
abstract or of related but essentially autonomous societies. As drafted in
1982,

the arena in which social action takes place and social change occurs is . . . a definite
"world," a spatio-temporal whole, whose spatial scope is coextensive with the el-
ementary division of labor among its constituent regions or parts and whose tem-
poral scope extends for as long as the elementary division of labor continually
reproduces the "world" as a social whole. (Hopkins, Wallerstein, et al. 1982: 42)
22 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

It has been among the great strengths of the world-systems perspective to

begin to formalize the propositions appropriate to the study of long-term,
large-scale social change that flow from this premise and to generate a
research agenda in consequence.

F R O M "SYSTEM" TO HISTORICAL SOCIAL SYSTEMS

Before exploring h o w this formalization impinges on the way that we

conceptualize antisystemic movements, I want to look at some of the ideas
that were in the air that purported to represent a gestalt shift in perception,
description, and explanation of the world, beginning in earnest after 1945.
At this time an ensemble of new approaches to scientific inquiry was elab-
orated in opposition, especially, to the reigning positivism and in one way
or another conceived as appropriate to the study of organized complexity.
Organized complexity was an arena that had proven particularly resistant
to the application of the analytic method, that is, to the development of
mathematical models or equations expressing general laws in which all
contributing causal factors appeared as variables.
The situation, however, constituted a dilemma. On the one hand, the
analytic method had given the world the suspension bridge and the sky-
scraper, radar, and the jet plane, along with the ballistic missile and the A-
bomb, and many continued to believe in a world of ultimate mathematical
predictability. On the other hand, the very success of science revealed the
limits of its organizing worldview. Its controlling Welanschauung assured
science, equated by and large with physics, its place at the privileged pole
of authority and legitimacy in the structures of knowledge by ruling out
those problems that did not lend themselves to solution through analysis.
According to Warren Weaver (1948), it was in the middle ground of or-
ganized complexity, between simple problems of classical physics with few
variables and disorganized complexity with many variables amenable to
description by statistical methods, where problem solving would have to
depend on approaching systems as organic wholes. Weaver predicted that
during the late twentieth century this latter activity, based on computers
and interdisciplinary research, would constitute the third great advance of
science.
Perhaps the most inclusive expression of the issues involved came with
the elaboration of General System Theory (GST) over the t w o decades after
1945. Exemplary in the work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the domain of
GST may be specified as those general aspects, correspondences and iso-
morphisms, or rigorous analogies that are common to systems in general.
In its overall bearings, GST was explicit in its claims to cut across disci-
plinary lines, cultural and ideological frontiers, the nomothetic-idiographic
or quantitative-qualitative divide, and even the descriptive-normative or
Bucking the System: The TimeSpace of Antisystemic Movements 23

scientific-humanistic distinction; it was "apt to bridge the opposition of

C. P. Snow's 'Two Cultures' " (von Bertalanffy 1968: xxiii).
Although physics was certainly impacted by the systems approach, the
success of mechanics in predicting, and therefore controlling, physical phe-
nomena was undoubtedly responsible for the enduring supremacy of the
billiard-ball model of autonomous units, at least until very recently.
However, despite the quest for the legitimacy accorded to "science" ex-
pressed as quantification in the nomothetic social sciences, it was painfully
apparent that there exist no analogues of the laws of motion, for instance,
in the living world, not to speak of the human world. Thus, beyond biol-
ogy, which begins with the concept of "organism," it was in the behavioral
sciences and to some extent in economics and philosophy that what came
to be described as a new worldview found particular resonance, if not
uniform application. This far-reaching scientific reorientation entailed a
shift in the emphasis in inquiry to questions of organization and configu-
rational wholes, precisely those "wholes" that had been eschewed as meta-
physical by the logical positivists, over the analytic, mechanistic, and
one-way summative causality of classical science and its primary units of
discrete elements or events. Indeed, GST seemed especially appropriate to
describing and understanding the irreducible experience of the phenomenal
world of social relations. The notion of systemic wholes constituting units
of analysis was embraced at the microlevel in the way, for instance, sym-
bolic interactionism regarded the act as an organized, self-correcting whole,
rather than a response to stimuli, relief from tension, or "accomplishment
of symbolized intent" (Shibutani 1968: 3 3 0 - 3 3 3 ) .
Scattered through the work of von Bertalanffy from the 1940s through
the 1960s were statements suggestive of the possibility of applying GST to
the "sciences of man" at the macro level. His views deserve to be quoted
at length. For instance, on history, he wrote that "[h]istory is not a process
in an amorphous humanity, or in Homo sapiens as a zoological species.
Rather it is borne by entities or great systems, called high cultures or civ-
ilizations . . . each presenting a sort of life cycle" (1968: 2 0 0 ) . This reflec-
tion included the world of contemporary social relations. He noted t w o
factors

in which our civilization obviously is unique in comparison to those that have

perished in the past. One is the technological development... . The other factor is
the global nature of our civilization. Previous ones were limited by geographical
boundaries, and comprised only limited groups of human beings. Our civilization
comprises the whole planet... . These are indeed singularities which explode the
cyclic scheme of history and seem to place our civilization at a different level from
previous ones. (1968: 204)

The consequences of this perspective in terms of structural form and mode

of reproduction prefigure in many ways the world-systems perspective.
24 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

[Organization of biological wholes [and on analogy befitting GST, social wholes;

R. E. Lee] is built up by differentiation of an original whole which segregates into
parts. . .. Such transition towards higher order presupposes a supply of energy, and
energy is delivered continuously into the system only if the latter is an open system.
.. . [PJarts become fixed with regard to a certain action. Therefore, progressive
segregation also means progressive mechanization. . . . Progressive segregation is of-
ten connected with progressive centralization, the expression of which is the time-
dependent evolution of a leading p a r t . . . . At the same time, the principle of
progressive centralization is that of progressive individualization.... [where] "in-
dividual" stands for "indivisible." (1968: 69-72)

At the macrolevel of production and distribution and decision making

and coercion, however, the specification of the appropriate unit(s) remained
problematic. Indeed, in what was perhaps the arena in which the new
thinking had its greatest success, both GST and cybernetics were adapted
early on to, and became extraordinarily influential in, the study of insti-
tutional organization and management, that is, relatively small, ostensibly
isolated systems. Anatol Rapoport, one of the pioneers of GST, recently
commented on the consequences:

I am disturbed by increased preoccupation with applying insights developed in the

general systems paradigm to consulting work, where the chief discernible aim is to
make a corporate client more viable and more prosperous, which essentially means
more competitive with more potential for growth. And growth is, after all, the only
clearly discernible ultimate goal common to all profit-making corporations. It is
also the only discernible goal of a malignant tumor. Even more disturbing is the
application of insights of system theory to military organizations. (Rapoport 1998:
16)

In the English-speaking world during the quarter century following 1945,

a particular style of inquiry, theorized as structural-functionalism and op-
erationalized through quantitative techniques and survey data, defined the
parameters of authoritative social research, especially in the nomothetic
social sciences: sociology, political science, and economics. From the begin-
ning the focus was on "systems analysis," but the methodology was inher-
ently comparative. This always implied multiple units of analysis, and it
was nowhere more apparent than in the macro-arena, where attempts were
being made to explain differential development on a world scale.
Modernization theory joined policy planners (with their eyes on the East-
West struggle) with social scientists (absorbed with explaining inequality).
With explicit reference to GST, social structures and institutions were con-
ceptualized as performing functions in systems where a "society" was a
self-sufficient social system. Nonetheless, "societies" were ultimately
associated with the state; time was transmuted into a function of autono-
mous society/state units simultaneously positioned at different points on a
Mucking the System: The TimeSpace of Antisystemic Movements 25

single, reputed, temporal hierarchy of development; and intentional action

modifying social structures was postulated as a primary mechanism of
change and "progress." Societies were considered "mutually interconnected
wholes . . . equilibrated units which have a tendency toward inertia and
which change through the persistent or serious disturbance of any part of
their equilibrium . . . 'systems' in the technical sense of the term" (Eckstein
1963: 27), and there was a clear bias against, nay explicit rejection of, the
move so suggestive in von Bertalanffy. As Robert Chin argued:

Why elaborate the system model into an intersystem model? Cannot we get the
~'me effect by talking about "subsystems" of a larger system? [One reason is so
that] the external change-agent, or the change-agent built into an organization, as
a helper with planned change does not completely become a part of the client-
system .. . the intersystem model leads us to examine the interdependent dynamics
sof interaction both within and between the units. We object to the premature and
unnecessary assumption that the units always form a single system. (Chin 1966
[1961]: 13)

It was as a critique of modernization theory and the way that it concealed

rather than revealed the working of the world that world-systems analysis
was born. Modernization theory failed, empirically, on its o w n terms (Ei-
senstadt 1973: 4243): fulfilling the political imperative of institutionalizing
liberalism and representative democracy, the cultural imperative of implant-
ing meritocracy and entrepreneurialism, and the economic imperative of
scratching together enough capital for economic "take-off," simply did not
produce the results anticipated. The seeds of failure were in the methods
of analysis; the units were not autonomous and comparable, but all were
formed historically and relationally in the drive for capitalist accumulation
u i thin a single system.
For the world-systems perspective, the relevant unit of analysis of long-
term, large-scale social change is the "historical system." It was argued that
historical systems were not amorphous, ill-defined "civilizations" but
constituted a typology of large-scale, long-lasting structures with clear
bounding, criteria that included world-empires, world-economies, and mini-
systems. The modern world-system or capitalist world-economy is such a
historical system. It is systemic; it possesses continuities in its relational
patternsin other words, its structures remained qualitatively recognizable
over the long term. It is historical; it has exhibited irreversible change over
the long termin other words, it came into existence at a specific time and
place, underwent a spatio-temporal development that rendered it at all
times and places different, and ostensibly will eventually cease to exist.
Alone among historical social systems, it expanded to cover the entire globe
and incorporated all other previously autonomous systems. It was, then,
an "open system" whose expansion to incorporate new pools of low-cost
26 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

labor represented an intake of "energy," in the form of labor power, to

overcome the entropy of its accumulation processescapital corresponding
to congealed labor. The consequences of this formalization of the model
were, first, that the modern world-system constituted a single unit of anal-
ysis. Second, the elements of the modern world-system, including the cat-
egories through which social scientists, and activists, sought to understand
it, were not preexisting, timeless entities but constituted by the evolution
of its relational structure. Third, since it was simultaneously systemic and
historical, the nomothetic-idiographic controversy was rendered moot. Fi-
nally, its evolution was predicated on the contradictions inherent in the
production and reproduction of its multiple structures over time, its pro-
cesses and their articulation, that defined both the limits and the possibil-
ities of human endeavor. These considerations bring us n o w to the question
of antisystemic movements.

BUCKING T H E SYSTEM

The world-systems literature on antisystemic movements does have a lo-

cus classicusthe set of articles published under the title Antisystemic
Movements by Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein (1989). Although the ar-
gument is complex, in simplest terms the authors distinguish antisystemic
movements engaged in vertical class struggle from horizontal competition
of elites. What I would like to do here is explore the articulation of actor-
oriented struggles with the processes producing and reproducing the always
recognizable but always and everywhere different structures of historical
capitalism, especially as we attempt to understand the problems and pos-
sibilities of contemporary movements.
Antisystemic Movements seems to suggest that the struggles of the early
history of the modern world-system were a continuation of previous modes
of resistance: "Opposition to oppression is coterminous with the existence
of hierarchical social systems. . . . In the early history of the capitalist
world-economy, the situation remained more or less the same as it had
always been in this regard. Rebellions were many, scattered, discrete, mo-
mentary, and only partially efficacious at best" (Arrighi, Hopkins, and
Wallerstein 1989: 2 9 - 3 0 ) . However, descriptive similarities may be mis-
leading. If oppression in class terms equates with exploitation, then organ-
ized, intentional, goal-directed resistance to exploitation at the point of
production of surplus value might take the form of a slave revolt, peasant
uprising, spontaneous strike or long-term union activity, or even individual
contract negotiation depending on where on the commodity chain and
when over the historical development of the modern world-system it takes
place. There is always a component of such activity that is related to the
axial division of labor and the secular processes assuring its production and
reproduction. Thus, such disturbances are consititutive of a new set of so-
Bucking the System: The TimeSpace of Antisystemic Movements 27

aal relations. The TimeSpace, then, is that of the structures of the modern
world-system, the duration of which is the long term, the past 5 0 0 years.*
One strategy of early resistance was the concerted effort to maintain
customary forms of remuneration. In the core, this equated with resistance
to proletarianization. For instance, the "right of the worker to appropriate
certain amount" of timber from English shipyards, which was then sold
or used as fuel or in housing and furniture, had been a prescriptive right
since 1634 and thereafter a source of constant bargaining and interven-
tion. In 1 7 7 1 , "chip women" rioted when denied access to the yards in
Portsmouth. This appropriation amounted to an enormous loss to capital
(perhaps only a sixth of the lumber that entered the yards left afloat),
but workers consistently opposed the abolishment of the perquisite in ex-
change for higher wages (Linebaugh 1992: 3 7 8 - 3 8 2 ) . In the periphery,
resistance could take the form of maintaining informal and likewise anti-
proletarianization arrangements. For example, each new and particularly
rich silver strike in the Spanish Empire "inspired mining enterpreneurs to
attempt to monopolize benefits for themselves by eliminating established
forms of mine laborers' direct appropriation." In Potosi, although the in-
troduction of the amalgam process reduced the skilled miners, yanaconas,
to the status of salaried workers, an underground economy of kajchas,
' men w h o took advantage of the interruption of the work routine to grab
for themselves any ore they could find in the mines," and trapiches, "small,
rudimentary installations for refining ore by hand," that exploited tailings
or even the mines themselves at night or on weekends, formed a substantial
sector of the local economy. Indeed, besides the lack of an effective militia,
the fact that kajcha production contributed so greatly to total output goes
r
it in explaining their survival, and it was only in the 1880s that "it became
possible to speak of a proletarianization in the mining industry" (Tandeter
1993: 85, 9 8 - 1 1 4 ) .
Besides efforts to hold on to surplus and large-scale insurrections (it took
fc0,000 troops to put down the Tupac Amaru revolt, which, nonetheless
spelled the end of the reparto de mercanciascoerced distribution of
There are five kinds of TimeSpace as conceptualized by Immanuel Wallerstein (1988,1993).
Each TimeSpace associates the substantive objects that are being described with Fernand Brau-
del's conception of multiple social times. Episodic-geopolitical TimeSpace refers to the short
term of events. Cyclico-ideological TimeSpace refers to the alternating rhythms of cyclical
: me and ideological space. Structural TimeSpace encompasses the whole of the past five cen-
turies, from the "Transition from Eeudalism to Capitalism" through the late twentieth century.
TTie substantive objects of structural TimeSpace are those fundamental relational constituents
of human reality that can be recognized over the entire period, but not before. Eternal
TimeSpace corresponds to what Braudel called the time of the sages. It is associated with the
eneralizations of nomothetic social science, which are said to be true "across time and space."
!
' o: these, Immanuel Wallerstein adds the TimeSpace of transformation, the period through
1
;hieh we are presently living, when even small-scale, value-driven human agency or moral
. hoice may have transformative consequences for human social relations.
28 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

goodssystem), resistance to the processes of accumulation also took the

form of the "exit" strategy mentioned in Antisystemic Movements. Slave
uprisings and the persistent runaway problem in the context of abundant
free land and weak militias produced numerous Maroon communities in
the Caribbean. Although these communities did, of course, strike tenuous
cohabitation arrangements with the plantocracy and colonial administra-
tions, often serving themselves as militias and returning runaway slaves,
they did represent capital losses and were, as well, a constant drain in terms
of harassment and raids on plantations.
The ongoing passive resistance, countless insurrections, rebellions, and
revolts realized by the interconnected Atlantic working class of slaves, ex-
slaves, indentured laborers, and impressed sailors over the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries eventually had an impact and generated a response at
the systemic level. This agitation was distinguished by the growing appeal
to universal human rights with which this "motley crew" underpinned the
legitimacy of their aspirations and actions. On the one hand, these were
struggles for the "freedom of a proletarianmobility and money" (Line-
baugh and Rediker 1990: 244); on the other hand, these were the cries for
freedom and justice eventually expressed in the ideals of the French Rev-
olution. Indeed, the French Revolution marks the beginning of the period
when direct, coerced labor-force control was becoming ideologically unten-
able and increasingly costly due to the cumulative weight of resistance. But
"justice" in the core was an argument against proletarianization; "justice"
in the periphery was increasingly an appeal for that "double freedom." The
French Revolution did inspire similar upheavals, such as in Haiti, but if the
universal values that it espoused had actually been implemented at the level
of the world-system, it would have meant the end of capital accumulation.
Internally, in fact, the trajectory of the Vendee in France"the substitution
of direct for indirect local rule" (Tilly 1976: xii)heralded the rise of the
centralized nation-state that would constitute the major structural response
to the long-term opposition to exploitation (i.e., the rising cost of coerced
labor) and would determine a mutation in forms of resistance after 1 8 4 8 .

Here it becomes clear how observation, feedback, and action, whether

undertaken by the autonomous actor homo economicus or more or less
organized groups, do not alone account for historical development. But,
then, neither is that historical development "given" in a set of determinative
initial conditions or "structure." Change is a product of the articulation of
such action and system-level processes and their contradictions and is sub-
ject to differing interpretations according to the social duration of the con-
text in which it is analytically located. Resistance to exploitation at the
point of expropriation of surplus value did not end in the nineteenth cen-
tury; it has continued to the present, that is, over the entire lifetime of the
system itself. Nonetheless, during the nineteenth century, the preceding 3 0 0
years of dynamic interaction between the processes of state formation as-
Bucking the System: The TimeSpace of Antisystemic Movements 29

suring the development of the multiple and separate foci of decision making
and coercion that guaranteed the survival of the axial division of labor and
the resistance to exploitation that it engendered produced a new set of
phenomenal forms that these processes would take.
The invention of the nation-state on the heels of the French Revolution
addressed the problem of the cost of maintaining the division of labor in
response to widespread resistance. The construction of (particularist)
nations/peoples on which it was based responded to the costly and poten-
tially lethal (to capital) agitation for freedom and equality ratified and
institutionalized in the (universalist) declarations of the French Revolution.
The newly redefined unit excluded from participation large groups based
on socially constructed categories of race, ethnicity, and gender, whose
biological and cultural attributes, it was argued, disqualified them, and
installed the nation-state (and its limited criteria for full citizenship) as the
preferred locus of struggle.
As Robert Paquette notes, although Eugene Genovese's assertion that the
1791 slave revolt in Saint Domingue "marked the integration of slave re-
volts into the Age of Democratic Revolution, a decisive shift away from
restorationist revolts directed at withdrawal from the prevailing social ar-
rangements, to revolts directed at a fundamental liberal-democratic restruc-
turing of society" has been controversial (1988: 26), by the time of La
Escalera in Cuba the transformation in the focus, implications, and deri-
vations of slave revolts was clear. Significantly, in "1843 and 1 8 4 4 colored
rebels were sounding different from the past; they were acting different.
Normally antagonistic ethnic groups had n o w suppressed their differences.
Talk of natural rights, citizenship, and liberty came from their lips," and
the whole was played out in a thoroughly international context (264).
Here the TimeSpace is that of the ideologies and the duration, the me-
dium term of the past two centuries. From this perspective it makes little
sense to differentiate between a nineteenth or a twentieth century; the social
duration of the period that came to an end with 1968 and 1989 began
symbolically with Saint Domingue and the Vendee. Although the struggle
for control over the production and appropriation of surplus continued
through passive resistance, work slowdowns, strikes, and so on, what we
now call the labor movement increasingly organized vis-a-vis the state to
agitate for its intervention, in terms of minimum wages, the establishment
of the length of the working day, unemployment and retirement insurance,
Jiild labor practices, and the regulation of working conditions. Such agi-
tation again took place in articulation with the unfolding of the processes
i ' J accumulationin Britain, from the "hungry 'forties," the declining well-
being of working people caused a real concern for the reproduction of labor
power.
In the core, excluded groups fought for the political rights that could be
translated into influence over the direction that state intervention would
30 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

take, as well as direct access to goods and services. Class struggle was more
and more redirected and reformulated as citizenship movements. Such was
the goal of w o m e n but also of the unfranchised commercial and working
classes in quest of the vote. In the periphery, full citizenship in the inter-
state system was sought by nationalist movements. To be antisystemic in-
creasingly meant resisting the exclusions of liberal universalism: from
Seneca Falls and the Chartists to Selma, Bandung, and the year of Africa.
In the wake of 1968, a shift in the strategic orientation of social move-
ments has taken place. Over the long term, movements have organized
locally to resist exploitation; over the nineteenth century and most of the
twentieth century, organization and action took a new form, an explicitly
political form, based on adhesion to a group excluded from full citizenship
rights agitating for a voice in the affairs of an interventionist state. The
decline of the "old," state-oriented nationalist and class-based movements
was a result of the realization of their failure to deliver on promises of
progress and paralleled the collapse of the East-West confrontation and
the renewed awareness of the North-South split. The perception of an em-
pirically disappearing "working class" gave rise to a corollary search for
new agents of social transformation. The result has been a retargeting of
action away from the nation-state and the emergence and intensification of
the activities of "new" movements, for instance, those founded in ecology/
environmental concerns or those originating in issues of race and ethnicity
or gender that challenged reductionism and externalist objectivity and con-
tested essentialist, non-relational thinking.
If, on the one hand, we consider that much of the program of the First
N e w Left in the mid-1950s seemed to have little lasting impact and that
many of what appeared to be the successes of the movements of the late
1960s have to a large extent been rolled back, we are in the ephemeral
event-world of post-1945, geopolitical TimeSpace. If, on the other hand,
we survey contemporary movements in the context of systemic crisis and
transition, (i.e., the timespace of transformation), we may, analytically, dis-
tinguish among resistance to expropriation associated with the processes of
accumulation of the world-economy, pressures for inclusion brought to
bear at the level of the nation-states associated with the politics of liber-
alism, and those challenges to the premises of inequality associated with
the structures of knowledge that began to emerge in the 1950s and 1960s.
This means not asking what we should dopresupposing a linear,
nineteenth-century modelbut rather looking for those changes that struc-
tural pressures are already bringing about that we need to recognize and
take into consideration in interpreting future possibilities.

CONCLUSIONS

After 1945 the success of science increasingly led to the formation of an

"other" science, holistically inclined and process-oriented. The movement
Bucking the System: The TimeSpace of Antisystemic Movements 31

was only partially reproduced in the social sciences until the political cli-
mate of the 1960s created the circumstances for the development of the
world-systems approach. GST advocated one form of teleological thinking:

Finality can be spoken of also in the sense -of dependence on the future. . ..
[H]appenings can, in fact, be considered and described as being determined not by
actual conditions, but also by the final state to be reached. . .. [T]he directness of
the process towards a final state is not a process differing from causality, but an-
other expression of it. (von Bertalanffy 1968: 76-77)

From contemporary complexity studies, too, comes a new formulation of

causation: according to Ilya Prigogine, "what we do today depends on our
image of the future, rather than the future depending on what we do today"
(Prigogine in Snell and Yevtushenko 1992: 28). Immanuel Wallerstein sug-
gests that during this crucial period of struggle "there are two large ques-
tions before us: what kind of world do we in fact want; and by what means,
or paths, are we most likely to get there." In answer to these questions, he
asserts that we must make a "serious assessment of historical alternatives"
by exercising "our judgment regarding the substantive rationality of pos-
sible alternative historical systems . . . in terms of the end of certainty, the
possibility but the non-inevitability of progress" (Wallerstein 1998: 65).
"Bucking the system" from the analyst's point of view, then, suggests
sorting resistance by structural duration and spatial differentiation rather
than, for instance, participant attributes. This allows us to imagine realistic
possibilities for the future in the TimeSpace of transformation, the transi-
tion that has already begun with the exhaustion of the processes reproduc-
ing the relations of production and distribution, coercion and decision
making and that we can n o w recognize in the realm of knowledge for-
mation (Lee 1999, 2001) that have guaranteed accumulation over the long
term.

REFERENCES
Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1989. Anti-
systemic Movements. London: Verso.
Bertalanffy, Ludwig von. 1968. General System Theory: Foundations, Develop-
ment, Applications. New York: George Braziller.
Chin, Robert. 1966 [1961]. "The Utility of System Models and Developmental
Models." In Jason L. Flnkle and Richard W. Gable, eds., Political Devel-
opment and Social Change. New York: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 7-19.
Eckstein, Harry. 1963. "A Perspective on Comparative Politics, Past and Present."
In Harry Eckstein and David E. Apter, eds., Comparative Politics: A Reader.
Glencoe, IL: Free Press, pp. 3-32.
Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah. 1973. "Varieties of Political Development: The Theoret-
ical Challenge." In Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt and Stein Rokkan, eds., Building
32 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

States and Nations: Models and Data Resources. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage,
pp. 41-72.
Hopkins, Terence K., Immanuel Wallerstein, et al. 1982. "Patterns of Development
of the Modern World-System." In Terence K. Hopkins, Immanuel Waller-
stein, et al., World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology. Beverly
Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 41-82.
Lee, Richard E. 1999. "The 'Cultural Aspect' of the Modern World-System: Social
Movements and the Structures of Knowledge." Paper presented at the Polit-
ical Economy of the World-System (PEWS) 23rd Annual Conference, "Ine-
quality and Social Movements," University of Maryland, 26-27 March.
. 2001. "After History? The Last Frontier of Historical Capitalism." Pro-
tosoziologie 15: 87-104 (special issue, edited by Gerhard Preyer and Mathias
Bos: "On a Sociology of BorderlinesSocial Process in Time of Globaliza-
tion").
Linebaugh, Peter. 1992. The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eigh-
teenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. 1990. "The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors,
Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century." journal
of Historical Sociology 3(3) (September): 225-252.
Paquette, Robert L. 1988. Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Es-
calera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Rapoport, Anatol. 1998. "The Organismic Direction in General System Theory."
Paper delivered at the 5th European School of Systems Science, Centre in-
terfacultaire d'etudes systemiques, Universite de Neuchatel, Switzerland, Sep-
tember 7-11.
Shibutani, Tamotsu. 1968. "A Cybernetic Approach to Motivation." In Walter
Buckley, ed., Modem Systems Research for the Behaviorial Scientist. Chi-
cago: Aldine, pp. 330-336.
Snell, Marilyn Berlin, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. 1992. "Beyond Being and Becom-
ing." New Perspectives Quarterly 9(2) (Spring): 22-28.
Tandeter, Enrique. 1993. Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosi.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Tilly, Charles. 1976. The Vendee. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1988. "The Inventions of TimeSpace Realities: Towards an
Understanding of Our Historical Systems." Geography 73(4) (October):
289-297.
. 1993. "The TimeSpace of World-Systems Analysis: A Philosophical Essay."
Historical Geography 23(1 & 2): 5-22.
. 1998. Utopistics, or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century. New
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Weaver, Warren. 1948. "Science and Complexity." American Scientist 36(4): 536-
544.
 Chapter 3

Some Initial Empirical Observations

on Inequality in the World-Economy
(1870-2000)
Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz, Angela Stack,
David Consiglio, and Timothy Patrick Moron

World-systems analysis provides a strong interpretation of trends in the

distribution of income between nations since the nineteenth century: world
income inequalities have been high since as far back as data are available
and remained at high levels throughout the twentieth century. However,
trends over the past 20 years differ depending on whether income data are
adjusted for purchasing power parities (PPPs): unadjusted income data sug-
gest a significant rise in inequalities over the 1980s and 1990s, while PPP-
adjusted data suggest a decline in such inequality. We explain this differ-
ence by arguing that PPP adjustments underestimate income inequalities
and by examining the crucial role of China in shaping recent trends. We
link rising inequalities to the state-centered strategies of growth that pre-
vailed in the twentieth century.

TRENDS IN INEQUALITY

There is considerable debate on changes in the distribution of income

between nations. For some, including most advocates of the world-systems
perspective, the world-economy has been characterized by a high level of
inequalities since its very origins (e.g., Kuznets 1966, 1 9 7 1 ; Landes 1969;
Wallerstein 1996; and even.the earlier contributions by Maddison 1983),
so the income gap between poor and wealthy nations preceded the Indus-
trial Revolution. Others argue that the gap in income between poor and
rich nations was not very pronounced in the nineteenth century but grew
very rapidly after the late nineteenth century (Bairoch 1977, 1979, 1 9 8 1 ,
1993; Frank 1998; Hanson 1988, 1 9 9 1 ; Heston and Summers 1980; Hik-
34 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

ino and Amsden 1994; and the more recent work of Maddison 1 9 9 4 , 1 9 9 5 ;
1
and Pritchett 1 9 9 7 ) .
A precise evaluation of the trends in question is difficult: there are strong
disagreements over what kinds of data are more appropriate to the task at
hand, and the relevant data are scarce. Each of these issues merits more
discussion.

PPPs or GNPPCs?

Using sources on income changes available for individual countries,

scholars such as Maddison (1995) have constructed indices of real eco-
nomic growth for a number of countries. Overall, such indices are relatively
complete and available for most of today's high-income countries but are
considerably more incomplete in coverage for most low- and middle-
income nations. Despite these problems, authors such as Maddison have
been able to extend these indices to China, India, and the Soviet Union,
providing good coverage (at least in relation to population shares) of a
relatively broad spectrum of the world-economy. By merging them with the
benchmark values of contemporary income data, these indices have been
used to reconstruct historical changes in absolute levels of income. How-
ever, there are significant debates over whether contemporary income data
should be adjusted by PPPs.
The basic premise of the PPP project is that to accurately compare the
real product of countries, observers must adjust the relevant data to take
2
into account the variance in the purchasing power of different currencies.
Advocates of PPP adjustments observe that exchange rate (FX)-based data
3
are affected by (1) exchange rate distortions and (2) national differences
shaping the price of trade goods (due to tariffs, taxes), particularly non-
tradables (especially services). Due to these distortions, "nominal exchange
rates do not always reflect international differences in relative prices"
(World Bank 1999: 2 3 4 ) . In contrast, PPPs are intended to provide a real
price ratio for a defined basket of goods and services in different countries,
so that existing data production and income can be adjusted to establish a
"full worldwide national accounts system that permits real interspatial as
well as intertemporal comparisons" (Kravis n.d.). The general outcome of
a PPP adjustment is to increase the relative level of income of poorer
nations vis-a-vis wealthier ones.
These methodological procedures, however, generate t w o important
problems for the study of the issue in question. First, while PPPs serve to
better capture differences in the relative welfare of the population of
wealthy and poor countries, they do not necessarily provide a better rela-
tional indicator of command over world resources, when this might be, in
fact, the key issue in question. Precisely because PPPs are designed to adjust
income to their purchasing power within particular nations (so as to gain
inequality in the World-Economy 35

a better assessment of welfare conditions), they provide a much less useful

indicator of the relative ability of populations to command the resources
of each other.
i But while the use of income data adjusted by PPPs to study income gaps
for any particular year has the effect of reducing the margin of observed
inequalities, its use in a historical reconstruction of income gaps has a far
more pernicious effect. Because contemporary PPP adjustments are far
more significant for poorer rather than wealthier nations, and because the
rates of economic growth of poor nations have been far slower since the
nineteenth century, the combination of existing indices of national rates of
income growth with contemporary income data adjusted by PPPs as bench-
mark values introduces a serious distortion into historical series. That is,
following such methodological procedures, the relative weight of the PPP
adjustment becomes increasingly significant as it is projected back in time.
We can illustrate this point by comparing the historical patterns of world
inequalities that are derived from t w o alternative sources of data on income
inequality: gross domestic product (GDP) at current dollars and GDP in
Geary-Khamis dollars (a form of PPPs). In the following discussion, the
income indices and population data are derived from Maddison (1995),
and so are the GDP data in Geary-Khamis dollars. The GDP data in current
dollars have been drawn from the World Bank (1996). Since the number
of countries covered by the data increases over time, we provide calcula-
tions for different sets of countries, showing that all these sets show similar
patterns in the trends observed. Throughout this chapter, we use Maddi-
son's indices of economic growth and population, but we contrast the re-
sults obtained by using t w o different sets of national product data
Maddison's GDP in Geary-Khamis dollars and the World Bank's GDP in
current dollars) as benchmark values.
As indicated earlier, the effect of using PPPs to adjust national income
data for any given year is to reduce apparent gaps in wealth. Hence, while
the Gross Domestic Product Per Capita (GDPPC) of the United States in
1 9 9 0 was 75.5 times greater than China's in current dollars, the PPP ad-
justment has the effect of reducing the gap by 8 9 . 3 % , to a ratio of 8.1.
Insofar as our concern is to assess gaps in the relative control that popu-
lations of different nations have over each other's labor and products, this
would itself be a source of concern in the measurement of world inequal-
ities. But a more serious problem emerges when indices of income levels
are combined with contemporary income data adjusted with PPPs or their
equivalent. In a sense, the PPP adjustment can be conceived as an economic
surplus that is added to the income of poor countries. In the case of China
discussed above, for example, the PPP adjustment adds a surplus of $2,388
(or 765.4%) to this country's per capita income in current dollars. Given
differences in the overall rates of growth of poor nations (growing very
slowly) and wealthy nations (growing very rapidly), when such adjusted
36 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

data are used as benchmark values for historical series on income levels,
the relative weight of the PPP adjustment becomes considerably larger as
we move back in time. Thus, in the case of China discussed above, the
"surplus" added to China's income through the PPP adjustment amounted
to 1 0 . 1 % of the per capita income in current dollars of the United States
in 1990, but by 1820, when combined with the indices of national pro-
duction levels, this surplus grows to 3 7 . 7 % . Thus, the per capita GDP of
the United States in 1 8 2 0 was 23.1 times greater than China's without the
PPP adjustment, but the introduction of the latter correction reduces the
ratio to 2.5, so the t w o incomes have been brought considerably closer to
parity.
The significant impact of the PPP adjustment can be highlighted further
by focusing on patterns of change in the distribution of world income.
Extending our discussion in the paragraph above, the PPP adjustment can
be portrayed as a surplus that is added to total world production. Thus,
in 1990, the PPP adjustment adds 8.2% to the total income per capita
produced in the world. Given differential rates of growth between poor
and wealthy nations, however, the combination of contemporary income
data adjusted by PPPs with historical series on national income results in
the addition of an ever-growing surplus to world production. Thus, while
the PPP adjustment increases world income production by 8.2% in 1 9 9 0 ,
by 1820 it increases such production by the considerably higher figure of
42.2%.
Of course, we might find reasons to expect that such an increase in the
relative importance of nontradable economic activities (as captured by PPPs
or their equivalent) might indeed have taken place through the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. If this were indeed the case, however, we would
surely need to adjust the relative presence of such activities in poor and
wealthy regions of the world-economy (e.g., in the United States or much
of Europe, nontradable activities can be expected to have played a much
greater role in 1 8 2 0 than in 1990). Regardless of the potential of intro-
ducing such adjustments, however, the point is that the bias introduced by
the PPPs adjustment has been untheorized.

Trends: The Alternative Data

Beyond these debates, data are scarce. For example, the systematic col-
lection of data on gross national product (GNP) or GDP (themselves limited
indicators of the type of information that would be required for an ade-
quate assessment of world income distribution) began only in the 1950s,
and while observers have calculated historical data for the vast majority of
today's core countries, most peripheral and semi-peripheral countries gen-
erally lack such historical estimates.
However, Maddison (1995) provides data on population and GDP for
Inequality in the 'World-Economy 37

24 countries between 1 8 2 0 and 1990, and these data can be used to con-
struct Gini coefficients as a measure of world income inequalities (for more
details on the methodological procedure, see Korzeniewicz and Moran
1997). While the sample is relatively small in terms of the number of coun-
tries, it does include a vast proportion of the world's population (65.7%
in 1990), as the countries in question include China, India, some of the
countries that for much of the twentieth century came to compose the
Soviet Union, and several of today's wealthier countries (including Japan).
Furthermore, Gini coefficients calculated for broader sets of nations as their
relevant data become available over time are virtually identical to the re-
sults obtained with this particular sample (and even the magnitude of over-
all inequality is not drastically altered by the particular sample chosen for
the evaluation).
We analyze Maddison's data using t w o alternative benchmarks: GNPPC
and GNPPC adjusted by PPPs. Additionally, we provide adjusted PPP es-
timates. The formula used to generate these adjusted PPP estimates is the
result of a regression equation that predicts the natural logarithm of PPP
per capita with the natural log of GNP per capita (Atlas method) and the
square of the natural log of GNP per capita (Atlas method). It is based on
data provided by the World Bank in 1 9 8 5 . The data are restricted to the
54 countries in which original PPP data were collected in that year. The
values used in the regression models were scaled to constant 1992 dollars.
Several models were tested for predictive power. The model finally selected
predicted approximately 9 7 % of the variance in the dependent variable. It
should be noted that this model has stronger predictive powers than the
regression model used by the World Bank to extrapolate to countries not
sampled for PPPs. Using the equation as a formula, PPP estimates (in 1 9 9 2
dollars) were generated for all years.
The twentieth-century trends revealed by such an exercise are interesting.
Income inequalities between poor and wealthy nations appear highly pro-
nounced from the very beginning of the period under consideration. Indeed,
the overall trend of world income inequalities is characterized by consid-
erable stability in its overall magnitude. Such stability is not surprising from
a world-systems perspective,- indeed, as indicated earlier, others have made
the empirical observation before, and in fact such an argument has been
an underlying premise of such a perspective from its very origins.
At the same time, the data indicate interesting fluctuations over time.
Most salient among these fluctuations is a slight decline in inequality be-
tween nations during the expansion of the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries. Other studies have called attention to this apparent
convergence, albeit focusing on a more narrow set of nations. For example,
Baumol (1994: 64) indicates that most industrialized nations experienced
considerable convergence between 1870 and 1 9 2 9 (although the United
States continued to move considerably ahead of the pack). According to
38 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

our data, inequality between nations increased over the 1 9 3 0 s - 1 9 7 0 s , pe-

riod. Overall, world inequality rose through the interwar period. However,
the later years of the Great Depression and the onset of World War II
appear to have had a dampening effect on world inequalities. This was
followed by a significant and rapid increase in inequalities between nations
immediately after World War II. This increase has also been observed in
studies focusing on the distribution of income among industrialized nations.
Although noting data problems, Baumol (1994: 64) indicates that the pe-
riod around the Great Depression and World War II was "an era of di-
vergence so sharp that it may have offset the bulk of the convergence
achieved during the preceding 50 or 60 years."
Finally, inequalities between nations became significantly more pro-
4
nounced after the early 1970s and over the past few decades. We have
examined this increase in greater detail elsewhere (see Korzeniewicz and
Moran 1997). From a comparative perspective, this increase surpasses the
one experienced around World War II, and by the mid-1990s world ine-
qualities were at their highest recorded level over the past t w o centuries.

T h e China Question

There are significant differences in the t w o sets of data on trends over

recent decades. While GNPPC-based data indicate an increase in world
income inequalities, PPP-based data suggest a significant reduction. H o w
can we explain this discrepancy?
China remains problematic, and it is a particularly salient issue because
the country accounts for a large share of the world's population. For the
most part, most studies have used a rough PPP-based GNPPC estimate for
1975 China ( 1 2 . 3 % of the United States) developed by Kravis (1981: 61),
w h o indicated that his estimates were "based on a much smaller [than the
International Companion Project] number of price comparisons gathered
informally by price-collecting amateurs and on a breakdown of final ex-
penditures on GDP that involves a great deal of plain guessing." Another
estimate was offered by Ruon and Kai (1995: 29), w h o nonetheless warned
that their "study should . . . be considered a very preliminary comparison,"
providing only "possible orders of magnitude within which China's dollar
per capita GDP might be." Their o w n estimates of China's GDPPC fell
from $ 1 , 0 4 4 to $ 7 7 0 when assuming doctors in China to have half the
productivity as those in the United States (Ruon and Kai 1995: 31). Ob-
viously, applying a similar adjustment to education and/or government
workers would produce an even more substantial relative decline. The
problem with China persists in the more recent benchmark study: according
to World Bank coordinators of the project, the 1995 preliminary estimates
are still in use. The China data in the World Bank, for example, are based
on a limited price survey (covering only the prosperous regions of Guang-
inequality in the World-Economy 39

dong and Shanghai). The PPP estimates of income in China have been
5
challenged in academic studies and in the popular media.
China has had a changing impact on world income distribution. Up until
the 1980s, it tended to reduce world income inequalities through popula-
tion growth. Since the 1980s, it does so through growth in income.

INTERNATIONAL POLICY REGIMES

During the period between the 1930s and the late 1960s, the key feature
explaining trends in inequality involves the adoption of new models of
development centered around the state. Such models varied in their precise
featuresas these changed over time and among different zones of the
world-economy. In general, the main characteristics of these models of de-
velopment were a more active role for the state in regulating market
activities so as to ensure effective demand and/or industrialization; greater
intervention of the state in securing welfare for populations; and a growing
consensus around the need to adopt democratic procedures for the organ-
ization of political rule. Each of these characteristics was central to what
other authors have called a "developmentalist illusion," whereby national
development through industrialization held the promise of progress
6
through international mobility.
This is clear in regard to the very size and reach of the state. The state
formation literature establishes that there was an immense growth of Eur-
opean states in the nineteenth century, as manifested in rapidly increasing
state size, state scope, and bureaucratization (Ardant 1975; Flora 1983;
7
Mann 1993; Skocpol 1 9 7 9 ) . However, comparing state size across time
and space reveals an immense divergence in state growth between core,
semi-peripheral, and peripheral countries from around 1900.
Based on historical state expenditure data provided by Mitchell (1993)
and historical GDP data made available by Maddison (1995), it is possible
to reconstruct per capita state expenditure in constant 1 9 9 2 U.S. dollars
8
across time and space for a significant number of countries. In 1913, per
:apita state expenditure in the semi-periphery was 1 9 . 1 % of that in core
countries. In 1929 this share declined to 1 7 . 9 % , and in 1 9 5 0 to 1 3 . 2 % .
Then it increased again to 1 6 . 3 % in 1 9 6 0 , only to decline again to a low
of 13.9% in 1 9 8 5 . The overall trend thus was one of divergence between
:ore and semi-peripheral state size. For the periphery, we cannot trace the
trend back as far. Yet, we see a similar pattern, at a much lower level, since
1950. In 1950, per capita state expenditure in the periphery was 1.6% of
that in core countries. This share increased to 1.8% in 1 9 6 0 and even to
9
2.1% in 1965 and declined again to 1.5% in 1 9 8 5 . Thus, there is a trend
of divergence between core and periphery since 1950 as well.
World-economic information on social expenditures are less forthcom-
ing, as comprehensive World Bank data on social expenditure are available
40 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

10
going back only to the 1 9 7 0 s . Nevertheless, it is possible to show the
same patterns of divergence. Whereas in 1 9 7 2 , social expenditure in the
semi-periphery was at a level of 7.6% of social expenditure in the core,
this share declined to 6.7% in 1 9 9 5 . In the periphery, social expenditure
in 1 9 7 2 amounted to . 9 3 % of social expenditure in the core, and it declined
even more, to . 8 3 % in 1995. Hence, even though expenditure in per capita
terms was on the rise everywhere, semi-peripheral and peripheral countries
were not able to narrow the gap that existed between these countries and
the corequite the opposite.
Beyond the quantitative information, a large secondary literature deals
with the relative weakness of the reach of the state in peripheral areas.
Munro (1996: 132), for example, notes that in Africa "states have found
their capacity as claimants limited by the strategic negotiating strength of
social groups which have remained substantially outside of the authorita-
tive reach of the state." Likewise, Boone (1994) argues in her analysis of
postcolonial Africa that rulers in the region have often used state power in
ways that compromise, rather than promote, economic growth and locates
this weakening of state capacity with respect to economic agency in the
limited autonomy of the state from societally based forms of power (see
also Cooper 1996).
Beyond state size, a similar observation can be made regarding the un-
even development of democracy. Indeed, democracy was contested relent-
lessly throughout this period, particularly, but not only, in peripheral and
semi-peripheral areas of the world-economy. In some cases, particularly in
the core, challenges to the liberal-democratic state (e.g., fascism, Nazism)
were eliminated early in the period under consideration. In other cases,
particularly in peripheral and semi-peripheral areas, other challenges (e.g.,
Communism, military rule) continued to prevail throughout the period and
indeed appeared to have become the norm by the late 1960s (Korzeniewicz
and Awbrey 1992). By the early 1970s, with very few exceptions, democ-
racy appeared to be restricted to core areas in the world-economy.
Finally, we should note that there was a very uneven capacity of states
13
in generating strategies of development resulting in high rates of g r o w t h .
The 1950s was a significant exception, explaining the relative stability of
between-country inequalities observed during these years. Indeed, these
years were characterized by the greatest degree of convergence in rates of
economic growth (as indicated by the l o w coefficients of variation), virtu-
ally every strategy of development (including those deployed in Eastern
Europe and Latin America) appeared to generate some degree of success,
and the growth experienced by Southern Europe helped sustain the promise
of international mobility. Gradually, however, most peripheral and semi-
peripheral areas (particularly Africa and Latin America) began to drift to-
ward the pattern of economic stagnation that would eventually prevail
during the next period.
Inequality in the World-Economy 41

The uneven distribution in the strength of welfare states, democracy, and

the relative effectiveness of states in promoting high rates of economic
growth had three direct consequences in relation to world inequality. First,
in relation to within-country inequalities, this uneven distribution shaped
different rates of decline in such inequalities. Some areas, particularly in
the core of the world-economy, experienced rather steep declines in in-
12
equality. Some regions of the world-economy, such as Latin America, that
had already developed high levels of within-country inequality around the
turn of the century were characterized by minimal declines in such in-
equalities, particularly insofar as state-centered arrangement failed to re-
move key obstacles faced by the poor (such as the lack of access to
13
education in rural and poor urban areas).
Second, this uneven distribution led to a considerable increase in
between-country inequality. States in the semi-periphery and particularly in
the periphery are simply not able to fulfill the welfare functions that are
14
tiucial in order to develop "social capital" and support innovation. This
was translated into a lack of economic growth toward the 1970s and a
prowing sense that this lack of economic growth was driving the "crisis of
the state" in the developing world (see McMichael 1995; Sassen 1996).
An additional dimension of the impact of state-centered strategies of
growth on inequality involves shifts in migration patterns. Stricter state
boundaries and the institutionalization of immigration and citizenship laws
in core countries contributed to the renewed rise in between-country in-
equality after 1913 by limiting labor mobility and thus the bargaining
power of labor in semi-peripheral labor markets. Apart from the sheer
racism in determining immigration quotas for different ethnic groups, the
restriction on immigration was a critical factor in reversing the dynamic of
global inequality. We should also note that rising world inequality is a
driving force for migration, as it becomes translated as a larger gap between
poor and wealthy countries, and migration holds the promise of providing
a quick bridge for overcoming the gap.

CONCLUSIONS
The actors that came to constitute the basis of state-centered strategies
of growth (e.g., labor movements, nationalists) originally sought to trans-
form the very basis of inequality. As indicated by Wallerstein (1995: 2 6 1 ) ,
by 1 9 4 5 - 1 9 6 8 , "The so-called Old Left in its three historic variantsCom-
munists, Social-Democrats, 'and national liberation movementsachieved
state power, each variant in different geographical zones," but were unable
to alter the fundamental dynamics of world income inequalities.
What would constitute a promising set of reforms aimed at reducing
world income inequalities? Along the lines of the argument in this chapter,
two areas of reform would substantially reduce world income inequalities:
42 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

first, a massive transfer of resources from wealthy to poor countries, de-

signed to enhance world welfare by dramatically increasing the resources
available in poor areas for nutrition, health, and education and second, the
elimination of restrictions to labor mobility, designed to enhance the bar-
gaining power of the poor by opening up the markets that would truly
make a difference in the lives of the poor. Both measures are almost uni-
maginable goals. They imply a significant reformulation of sovereignty and
citizenship, and significant forces in both wealthy and poor countries would
resist such transformations.
The alternative road, and the most likely scenario, is one of a continuing
rise in income inequalities for much of the world, accompanied by the
uneven welfare of wealthy and poor nations and, as always, with some
exceptions that could prove less or more significant (e.g., China).

NOTES
1. This latter position on patterns of world inequality has been facilitated by
the relative ease with which alternative theoretical perspectives can explain such
findings by emphasizing the uneven effect of the Industrial Revolution (Bairoch
1981; Bates 1988; Bornschier 1980; Chase-Dunn 1975; Dos Santos 1970; Frank
1998; Maddison 1983, 1995; North 1990; Olson 1982; Weede 1986).
2. We should note that PPP-based income data do not provide an indicator of
welfare. Gilbert and Kravis (1954: 74) themselves observed that in making PPP
adjustments, "if one country has more government employees per capita than an-
other, this ratio will affect the real product comparison in favor of the former
country. It does not tell us, however, whether the higher level of government em-
ployees results in more services rendered to the population, or simply in a more
wasteful use of manpower," and also, "real product comparisons are not concerned
with the relative state of happiness of the populations of two countries, or their
relative welfare in some quasi-philosophical sense. It is only concerned with the
relative quantities of goods and services flowing to the two populations" (76). In
a recent article, Heston and Summers (1980) suggest that an indicator of welfare
can be constructed by dropping investment from their Real Gross Domestic Product
(RGDP) calculations.
3. Many PPP studies illustrate the relevance of such adjustments by calling
attention to the inordinate growth of Japan's GDP (relative to that of the United
States) in the 1980s suggested by FX-based data but corrected by PPP adjustments
(see, e.g., Ahmad 1997; United Nations 1992).
4. Periods of economic contraction in the world-economy are not necessarily
characterized by a reduction of inequalities in the distribution of wealth between
countries. As indicated later, indicators of convergence are most pronounced during
the periods of greatest economic growth.
5. For example, see "Survey China" (Supplement) The Economist, March 18,
1995, p. 4.
6. These hopes were of importance. As indicated by Tawney (1952: 29), "in-
justices survive, not merely because the rich exploit the poor, but because, in their
hearts, too many of the poor admire the rich."
 Inequality in the World-Economy 43

7. Mann (1993) indicates that while state expenditure as a percentage of GNP

- was stagnant or actually decreased throughout the nineteenth century in several
countries (e.g., from 35% in 1760 to 5% in 1900 in Prussia-Germany; from 19%
- in 1800 to 9% in 1900 for Great Britain), administrative capacity nevertheless
increased tremendously during the same period of time, as the relative decline in
state expenditure was due to a decrease of military expenditure (and state expen-
diture for civil purposes actually increased in this time). By 1900, according to
Mann (1993: 375), the major part of government expenses was for civil functions:
:}his percentage increase in civilian expensesfrom about 25% in the 1760s to
- about 75 percent in the 1900sindicates a . .. sea change in the scope of the mod-
' ern state, [a change] without parallel in history."
8. Between 1970 and 1995, for example, we can observe a convergence of
state: expenditure as a percentage of GNP across core, semi-periphery, and pe-
riphery.
9. Per capita state expenditure in core countries amounted to $204 in 1890,
rising to $575 in 1913, $748 in 1929, $1,399 in 1950, and $1,969 in 1960 and
reached $6,182 in 1985. For semi-peripheral countries, reliable data start with
13, when per capita government expenditure amounted to $110. From there it
se to $134 in 1929, $184 in 1950, and $322 in 1960 and reached $862 in 1985.
For peripheral countries, the Mitchell data start only after World War II. In 1950,
per capita state expenditure came to $23, rising to $36 in 1960 and to $92 in 1985.
10. Social expenditure includes current and capital expenditure for education,
health, social security, housing, and community amenities. Source: World Bank,
ft mid Development Report, various years.
11. Of course, economic growth and the effectiveness of states were related.
Increases in between-country inequality (such as between 1929 and 1950) were
accompanied by growing gaps in the relative size of states across zones in the world-
economy (e.g., state size in the semi-periphery declined from 17.9% of core state
size in 1929 to 13.2% in 1950). Increasing divergence in state size from 1929 to
1950 thus might have played a critical role in shaping patterns of inequality. On
the other hand, declines in between-country inequality were accompanied by greater
...imparative state expansion in the semi-periphery and periphery (compare the an-
p,, nual percentage increase after the 1950s). After 1960 (1965 for the periphery),
however, when state size in semi-periphery and periphery lost again relative to
nger state growth in the core, between-country inequality started to increase
dramatically.
12. This was not limited to core nations. For example, land reform and the
/ impact of war in destroying accumulated wealth led to more egalitarian distribution
of income in East Asia (Williamson 1991: 97).
13. We should also note that migration from rural to urban areas in some of
these nations is likely to have accentuated urban inequality (by increasing the supply
of unskilled workers) and to have been accompanied by growing prejudice and
racism (particularly, but not only, against indigenous people).
14. Abramovitz (1994: 98-99) emphasizes the role of World War II in (1) cre-
ating opportunities for investments in capital stocks; (2) allowing for continued
growth of human capital; and (3) allowing for institutional innovation, thereby
f- promoting some convergence but finally coming to an end in its short-term effect
and therefore again promoting divergence.
44 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

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 Chapter 4

Transnationalism, Power, and Hegemony:

Review of Alternative Perspectives and Their
Implications for World-Systems Analysis

Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez

INTRODUCTION

This chapter offers a critical review of h o w the interplay between trans-

nationalism, power relations, and hegemonic practices is theorized by dif-
ferent perspectives. Comprehensiveness, in the sense of including every
.ingle from which the relationships explored have been theorized, was not
attempted. Rather, the chapter broaches major perspectives and key con-
ceptual and theoretical issues. This analysis indicates that even though the
concepts of transnationalism and transnational relations tend to vary across
disciplines, authors often trespass disciplinary ambits when exploring the
link between transnationalism and power relations. To be sure, there is a
trend that favors the juxtaposition of several perspectives to improve our
understanding of the link in question. Arguably, such juxtapositions rep-
resent the vanguard in the contestation of orthodox assumptions on the
role of nationhood, statehood, territoriality, and citizenship in shaping
power relations.
It should be noted that world-systems analysis does not deal with trans-
nationalism based on a definitive research line but with an array of prob-
lems that target transnational processes and practices. As such, important
angles of the link between transnationalism and hegemony either tend to
be obliterated or are dealt with as mere epiphenomena. The way in which
world-systems analysis has problematized the antisystemic character of in-
ternational migration is a compelling example. However, it is also argued
that the potential value of world-systems analysis in the study of transna-
tionalism and power relations transcends the "middleman" role as mere
provider of a holistic umbrella and a comprehensive historical framework.
48 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

This chapter shows that at least three interrelated research lines within the
world-systems perspective are ready for the incorporation of insights on
the imbrications between transnationalism and power stemming from other
approaches and decant their o w n insights on the issue. They are the study
of antisystemic movements, global commodity chains, and households.
Drawing from different perspectives reviewed in this chapter, transna-
tionalism is regarded here as an intermediate subprocess of the world-
system characterized by the unprecedented development of social networks,
regular transactions, social positioning strategies, and relations of domi-
nation that span borders. One of the most salient characteristics of this
process is that it includes an array of actors (governmental and nongov-
ernmental) with multiple involvements in more than one society and em-
bodies critical vehicles (e.g., production networks, social movements, class
interaction, household and entrepreneurial strategies, advocacy networks,
and even state designs) through which power relations and hegemonic prac-
tices are realized and contested beyond the confines of the nation-state. In
this respect, transnationalism represents a critical world-system process and
the study of transnational relations an avenue to explore at close range the
interface among certain processes shaping power relations and hegemonic
practices that otherwise would appear as remotely or mechanically articu-
lated.

HISTORICAL C O N T E X T OF T R A N S N A T I O N A L STUDIES

An adequate grasp of the causes leading to the "boom" in the literature

on transnationalism and power relations requires an understanding of the
specific social context out of which such momentum emerged. First, the
growing emphasis on transnational issues in several disciplines is contem-
poraneous with important transformations in the division of labor, social
relations of production, and technological paradigms shaping the world-
economy. Such transformations encompass strategies of accumulation, the
international division of labor, and the consolidation of what Manuel Cas-
1
tells (2000) calls the "information technology paradigm," along with var-
iations in the regulatory role of the state in the expansion of capitalism.
They have led, on the one hand, to the hierarchical segmentation of labor
(as Castells clarifies, more as a result of the political choices of government
and corporate agents than technological changes per se) and, on the other,
the integration of work processes and concentration of capital (Castells
2 0 0 0 ; Sassen 1996). These dynamics have been part and parcel of the re-
organization of production processes around networks of production that
span borders. The development of the "network enterprise" and more spe-
cifically "strategic networks" (those operating in key industries and making
possible oligopolistic forms of concentration in such industries) has become
the central axis in such dynamics (Castells 2 0 0 0 ) .
'transnationalism, Power, and Hegemony 49

Authors concerned with this type of networking and its overall impact
on transnationalism tend to focus on issues such as the new modalities of
he relationships between states and multinationals, and the articulation
jetween strategic and non-strategic networks under conditions of globali-
;ation and how they shape state/multinationals, capital/labor, and inter-
>tate relations. Consequently, when either theorizing or implicitly dealing
vith relations of domination and subordination, they bring to the forefront
he dialectics between power/property and sovereignty/power. Saskia Sas-
;en's (1996) notion of "economic citizenship," which refers to the state's
ncreasing dependability on and accountability to multinational enterprises,
iupranational economic entities, and transnational legal regimes that em-
>ower global firms vis-a-vis nation-states, represents a theoretical high
point in this tradition. Castells (2000: 152), w h o is more limited than Sas-
;en in his articulation of the phenomenon of transnationalism, yet more
systematic in his approach to relations of domination, builds upon Nicole
Biggart to argue that the new forms of organizational arrangements
wrought about by the changes in production processes, technological par-
idigms, and the forms and extension of the (transnational) networks as-
iociated with them have created "new ideational bases for institutionalized
mthority relations." Yet instead of focusing on agency, Castells' contagious
:
ascination is with the changing "social morphology" that lies at the foun-
dations of such bases, which helps explain his (sometimes explicit) reluc-
:ance to elaborate on the issue of transnationalism:

While the networking form of social organization has existed in other times and
spaces, the new information technology paradigm provides the material basis for
rs pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure. Furthermore, I would
argue that this networking logic induces a social determination of a higher level
ban that of the specific social interests expressed through the networks: the power
ii flows takes precedence over the flows of power. Presence or absence in the net-
work and the dynamics of each network vis-a-vis others are critical sources of
lamination and change in our society: a society that, therefore, we may properly
all the network society, characterized by the preeminence of social morphology
sver social action. (Castells 2000: 469)

There are other approaches that focus on transnationalism and power

relations by privileging class analysis and the study of the role of agency
n the formation of transnational networks that support both capital and
counter-hegemonic projects. I will refer to them in more detail later. It
suffices now to say that they incorporate alternative approaches to the is-
sues of power and hegemony.
While the above perspectives privilege the study of (transnational) "stra-
:egic networks" and those in control of major transnational flows, forms
af economic transnationalism and their link to power relations are also
50 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

approached by focusing specifically on transnational networks sustained by

actors, such as small transnational entrepreneurs, w h o face a more limited
structure of options compared to corporate and other elite groups. The
study of transnational relations sustained by migrants is at the core of this
perspective. As is widely recognized, systematic relations and regular trans-
actions developed by migrants between the sending and the receiving so-
ciety are hardly a historical novelty. However, widespread participation in
cross-border mobility, the unprecedented intensity of the flows, the multi-
stranded forms of activities in which migrants tend to engage in the sending
and receiving societies, and in some cases their normative character convey
specificity to current patterns compared to previous ones (Basch, Schiller,
and Szanton Blanc 1994; Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt 1999; Vertovec
1999). Works following these approaches agree that while current forms
of transnationalism that are directly traceable to international migration
have been propelled by new transportation and communication technolo-
gies, they ultimately mark "a new type of migrant experience, reflecting an
increased and more pervasive global penetration of capital" (Basch et al.
1994: 24). T w o approaches within the tradition that focuses on transna-
tionalism related to the migratory experience merit special attention
because of their efforts toward conceptual clarification. One is notably in-
fluenced by the economic sociology of migration and political sociology,
and emphasizes h o w transnational economic and political entrepreneurship
help to meet the challenges of globalization through the creation of trans-
national social fields (Itzigsohn 2 0 0 0 ; Portes and Guarnizo 1990; Portes et
al. 1999). The other has a direct lineage to anthropological studies (cf.
Basch et al. 1994; Georges 1990; Kearney 1995b; Ong 1999; Smith and
Guarnizo 1998; Szanton Blanc, Schiller, and Basch 1995) and tends to
illustrate h o w loyalties, norms, and values (that until recently gravitated
toward the community and national milieus) are altered by global flows
and trends and the role of migrants (transmigrants) in this process. The
latter pays special attention to class and gender relations, the formation of
identities, and the development of translocal power regimes and "scattered
hegemonies" related to the emergence of transnational social fields.

The peak in the study of transnationalism is contemporaneous as well

with the aftermath of formal mass decolonization and the emergence of
new flows of capital, migrants, images, and ideologies between former col-
onies and their former metropolises, and between the United States and the
periphery and semi-periphery. In this context, theorization on transnational
relations, power relations, and hegemonic practices has particularly bene-
fited from the cross-fertilization of several perspectives that deal with trans-
national power regimes of the "postcolonial" era (cf. subaltern studies,
cultural studies, postmodern approaches, feminist perspectives, and the co-
loniality of power conceptualization). Those w h o have combined some of
 transnationalism, Power, and Hegemony 51

these perspectives through the high road of theory (cf. Mignolo 2 0 0 0 ; Ong
1999; Spivak 1999) have enriched the analyses of the imbrications between
transnationalism and the configuration of power regimes and hegemonic
practices that are embedded in racial/cultural/sexist constructions informed
by the colonial experience. Transnationalism, according to these authors,
rither reinforces or challenges power relations through the mobility of peo-
ple, images, symbols, and ideologies between "North" and "South" and
across the imaginary borders of "the West" and "the Rest." Despite their
differences in approaches and methodologies, these works shed light on the
role of transnational practices in shaping what Ong (1999: 280) summa-
rizes as the "conjunctures of labor relations and cultural systems, high-tech
operations and indigenous values"; what Mignolo, following Silvia Rivera
2
Cusicanqui, views as "diachronic contradictions between modernity and
coloniality"; and what Spivak rationalizes as "the cultural self-
3
representation of the 'First World.' "
Transnational studies' peak has also emerged in a time of "turbulence in
world politics," understood as the increasing complexity, dynamism, and
uncertainty of the parameters of world politics as manifested in power re-
4
lations (Rosenau 1 9 9 0 ) , or more narrowly, in what Giovanni Arrighi
5
\1994) calls "systemic chaos." Current changes in the parameters of world
politics include the organization of action around transnational clusters that
'Seek to resist labor exploitation, commodification, racism, and sexism,
among other strongholds of hegemonic practices. Such changes include prac-
tices of different degrees of radicalization, from advocacy networks to social
^movements, and tend to rely on "groupism" or "the construction of defen-
sive groups, each of which asserts an identity around which it builds soli-
darity and struggles to survive alongside and against other such groups"
'.Wallerstein 1995: 6, 7). This has been a time also of a new "conservative
revolution" that attempts to neutralize organized resistance while it "tries
to write off progressive thought and action as archaic" (Bourdieu 1998: 35).
In this vein it should be noted that renewed conservatism relies on the con-
ceptual apparatuses of mainstream paradigms (such as realism, moderniza-
tion, and neo-classical economics) while it also incorporates notions from
challenging perspectives that are used to reinforce what van der Pijl (1998),
following Bode, calls "comprehensive concepts of control," such as the neo-
liberal dogma. To be sure, the first signals pointing to the widespread use of
the notions of transnationalism and transnational relations can be traced to
a growing dissatisfaction with mainstream paradigms, a trend noticeable in
International Relations (IR) since the late 1960s. However, equally impor-
ts'it has been the manipulation of these notions by mainstream approaches
that evoke transnationalism with the purpose of legitimating renewed forms
, adopted by the relationship between the corporate elites and the state and
t(- bolster ideas, such as that labor is increasingly irrelevant for the creation
52 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

6
of wealth. Thus, the notions of "transnationalism" and "transnational re-
lations" have become contested terrains themselves while gradually moving
to a prominent position in the episteme of power.
Theorization on transnationalism has also been affected by the p( isoii
transnational experiences of intellectuals exploring this topic. In this case,
these intellectuals become exceptional participant-observers. It has been ex-
tensively documented that the migration experiences of an important num
ber of intellectuals engaged in such studiesmore specifically, their*
prolonged binational experienceshave significantly influenced the con
ceptual apparatuses that we use for making sense of transnational ism
Such a knowledge-praxis symbiosis shapes the complexity of transnational
practices, namely, intellectual and political ones, by further facilitating "tli.
spatial confrontation between different concepts of history" (Mignolo
2 0 0 0 : 67). Their practices belong to an era in which "electronic mediation
and mass migration" have put "both viewers and images . . . in sinuiln
neous circulation," and, consequently, "[njeither images nor viewers (in-
cluding intellectuals dealing with transnationalism] fit into circuits or
audiences that are easily bound within local, national, or regional s
(Appadurai 1996: 4). For others, "border thinking" (Mignolo, 2000) is
generated in a borderland; a "literal, figurative, material, and militarized'
borderland in the case of the Chicano/a production (Saldivar, 1997).

B E Y O N D REALISM: T R A N S N A T I O N A L I S M A N D POWER
I N I N T E R N A T I O N A L RELATIONS

The fundamentals of realism, the mainstream paradigm in International

Relations, have been summarized as follows: "(1) states (or city states)
are the key units of action; (2) they seek power, either as an end or as a
means to other ends; and (3) they behave in ways that are, by and large,
rational, and therefore, comprehensible to outsiders in rational k i m s
(Keohane 1986: 7). Since the 1960s, scholars of different theoretical per-
suasions have challenged realism on the ground that it neglects the pivotal
role played by actors whose social networks and exchanges are not di
rectly traceable to inter-state relations. Some critics even tried to reorient
the axiomatic basis of the discipline through the development of a new
theoretical perspective. "Interdependence," "international regimes," and
"transnational relations" (special issue of International Organizations
1971) became powerful concepts in a growing number of studies that
focused on the aims, strategies, and forms of organization of nongovern-
mental actors. By the end of the 1970s, the study of transnational rela-
tions occupied a preferential place in IR debates: "The study of
international relations from a transnational perspective is hardly new.
What is rather new is the widespread and systematic scholarly interest in
transnational studies" (Grieves 1979: vii). Of particular force were studies
 ,"sn.itionalism, Power, and Hegemony 53

it focused on the challenges that transnational corporations posed to

,te authority and sovereignty. Other transnational actors, such as relig-
is groups, cartels, advocacy groups, and terrorist groups, were increas-
;ly studied as well. The relations developed by these actors were of
:erest insofar as they were perceived to be problematic for the state and
: inter-state system, in general, and alternative to inter-governmental
ations, in particular. For some, a transnationalist view or a transna-
tional perspective was in the making in IR, whose core was the study of
'isnational relations, formally defined as "contacts, coalitions, and in-
actions across state boundaries that are not controlled by the central
ceign policy organs of governments" (Nye and Keohane 1981: ix).
From this perspective, transnationalism was defined as "the processes
lereby international relations conducted by governments have been sup-
:mented by relations among private individuals, groups, and societies that
n and do have important consequences for the course of events" (Rose-
nau 1980: 1). Further conceptual developments would emphasize the reg-
ar character of transnational relations while leaving more room for the
elusion of some forms of governmental agency as long as they implied a
gh degree of autonomy from governmental agendas and courses of action.
More recently, transnational relations have been defined as "regular trans-
.tions across national boundaries when at least one actor is a non-state
ent or does not operate on behalf of a national government or an inter-
ivernmental organization" (Risse-Kappen 1995: 3). Scholars increasingly
> nverged on t w o basic ideas: (1) nongovernmental actors can be and are
ghly influential in international relations; and (2) there is a sort of "blur-
ig of boundaries between international and domestic areas" (Keckec and
> tkink 1998: 199; Keohane and N y e 1989). In addition, Joseph N y e and
abert Keohane claimed that "transnational" did not mean "geocentric"
ice agents involved in transnational practices still tended to rely on strong
is with at least one nation-state (Nye and Keohane 1981: vxii). Other
sciplinary perspectives would bring this issue to our attention by concep-
tualizing transnational relations as regular practices that "are anchored in
id transcend one or more nation-states" (Kearney 1995: 548). Another
iportant clarification made in early studies was that transnational rela-
>ns did not necessarily imply physical mobility across state boundaries
Sye and Keohane 1981), which has become more apparent after the wide-
~read use of the Internet for political mobilization.
\s the transnational practices themselves and studies on transnational
lations further evolved throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a growing num-
- T of issues were incorporated into the analysis. Studies of the link between
msnationalism and power from the IR perspective started targeting also
e development of hegemonies and counter-hegemonic practices based on
nder, labor/capital, and ethnic relations and other forms of dominance/
bordination that included a multiplicity of networks and hierarchical sys-
54 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

terns in which transnational actions were embedded. For example, drawing

from IR and sociological studies on social networks, Margaret Keckec and
Kathryn Sikkink (1998) approach the issue of transnationalism through the
study of "transnational advocacy networks," generally understood as the
networking and exchanges among individuals and groups that share prin-
cipled ideas, values, and common discourses, around which they develop
an agenda to advance a cause. Jackie Smith, Charles Chatfield, and Ron
Pagnucco (1998) focus on transnational social movements. Yet, they dem
onstrate that while social movements generally share the goal of promoting
institutional and policy changes, they may come into being also through
divergent paths; some, for example, emerge as the result of couimr
hegemonic grassroots efforts, while others may be promoted as part of state
designs through overt or covert operations. In either case, they argue that
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) usually play an important mk,
either by genuinely representing people usually excluded from governance
or as a facade for transnational hegemonic designs intended to neutralize
contention, while in any event they tend to alter institutional arrangements
or policy making through direct intervention in the structures of civil so-
cieties (Smith, Chatfield, and Pagnucco 1998).
By focusing on the use of formal institutional arrangements and the
Eastern European scenario, Mathew Evangelista (1995) illustrates how
transnational actors w h o operated mainly through international oi ioni-
zations ("policy entrepreneurs") impacted policy making in nation il M.
curity issues in the former Soviet Union. It also has been argued that the
modus operandi and potential impact of transnational social movements:
that alter power relations are subject to the institutional structures of the
corresponding states of the milieus where they tend to operate. In her
analysis about the Eastern European experience, Patricia Chilton (1995)
argues that while "transnational activities alone were not a sufficient ton
dition for the events of 1989 to unfold, they were a necessary condition;
particularly in those cases in which domestic civil societies were under-
developed" (Chilton 1995: 2 2 6 ) . She further demonstrates that there were
significant differences between transnational social movements that o p u -
ated in Eastern Europe and those that operated in Western Europe, and
that such differences were marked by the respective institutional contexts.
Other works (Lowenthal and Burgess 1993) have dealt with transnational
political involvement but employ the formation of ethnicity though im-
migration as their analytical axis. They bring to the forefront the issues
of empowerment of subordinate groups via transboundary political in-
volvement, transnational identity formation, and the "deterritorialized"
practices of subordinate states to mobilize constituencies among the di-
8
asporas. The study of transnationalism has also been influenced by the
theory of politics as a collective good and its application to foreign policy
analysis.
mnsnationalism, Power, and Hegemony 55

Despite their emphasis on different types of agency and processes, these

orks share a concern for the policy impact of transnational relations. In
:neral, they also share both a policy orientation and a theoretical interest
how state power and domestic structures shape transnationalism, either
f propelling or by constraining it, and h o w transnational actors circum-
:nt or challenge state authority. A basic assumption is that the primary
mdition for the emergence of transnational relations is the existence of a
orld divided into nation-states and its corollary that "power" understood
; "state power" shapes and is shaped by transnational relations in im-
9
ortant w a y s . In more recent writings, James Rosenau (cf. 1990) has fur-
rer argued that the dynamics between state authority and transnational
ractices take place within the complex context of a dual world: the "state-
ntric world" (or the world divided into "nation-states") and the "multi-
;ntric world," which includes a system of relations that has "evolved in-
ependently of the one in which states function," that is, "a world in which
:tions and reactions originate with a multiplicity of actors at diverse sys-
m levels, all of which are motivatedand many of which are a b l e t o
>aintain the integrity of their subsystems and resist absorption by the sys-
:ms of which they are part" (97). Based on this dual representation, he
istinguishes several groups of transnational actors that are influential in
mild politics and state policy making: individuals, collectivities, move-
tents. As these actors gain importance in world politics, Rosenau argues,
?e move from international politics to "post-international politics," which
e describes as the growing integration of economic processes and "the
agmentation of the world polity into numerous and competitive units"
10
?7). He challenges the idea that hegemons are necessary for the stability
f the system (hegemonic stability theory), arguing that "while the struc-
ires of the state-centric world permit the emergence of hegemonic lead-
rship, the multi-centric world is too decentralized to support the hierarchy
irough which hegemons predominate" (97). "Considerable stress," he ar-
ues, eventually leads to "a process of 'catching up' due to the strength-
ning of the authority of various subgroups at the expense of both the
ollectivities and the state system of which they are part" ( 8 9 - 9 0 ) . By
catching up," Rosenau intends the restoration of equilibrium ("structural
rrangement") in the international system, which is possible and necessary,
ccording to him, as "actions in world politics are unlikely to be totally
mdom because, if they violate the underlying order, counteractions will
e evoked and systemic structures thereby imposed" (56). Thus, ultimately,
ansnational relations are positive even if they challenge the status quo
isofar as they lead to the restoration of equilibrium via the renovation of
11
le system. Despite the relevance of Rosenau's theorization on transna-
onalism for a better understanding of the nexus between transnational
elations and power relations, his overall conclusion does not depart from
le Kantian optimism, so pervasive in liberal approaches to IR. Arguably,
56 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movement

the same criticism that has been applied to political realists in terms of ho\
they envision the future applies in this case. Eventually, from this perspec
tive, transnationalism will lead to a world in which the economic, political
technological, and cultural realms of social life will be unproblematic.

CRITICAL I N T E R N A T I O N A L RELATIONS T H E O R Y ,
POLITICAL E C O N O M Y , A N D ALTERNATIVE
INSTITUTIONALIST PERSPECTIVES

A branch of IR challenges realism on the grounds of ahistoricism. I

criticizes realism for presenting the state as "an unproblematic unity: ai
entity whose existence, boundaries, identifying structures, constituencies
legitimations, interests and capacities to make self-regarding decisions can
be treated as given, independent of transnational class and human interests
and undisputed (except, perhaps, by other states)" (Ashley 1986: 268)
Representatives of this perspective also criticize "the problem-solving ap
proach," which permeates much of the "multi-centric" perspective (o
"pluralism" in general) as it "tacitly assumes the permanency of existinj
structures" and tends to provide "a kind of programmed method for deal
ing with them" (Cox 1986: 2 4 4 ) . Conversely, these alternative perspective-
claim to "envisage the possibility of structural transformation which i
served by the historicist approach" (244). For them, a major problem o
both realism and neorealism (or structural realism) is the adoption of ahis
torical notions of "power" and "hegemony." Following Gramsci, Rober
C o x emphasizes:

Indeed, in the neorealist discourse, the term "hegemony" is reduced to the singl
dimension of dominance, e.g., a physical capabilities relationship among states. Tb
Gramscian meaning of hegemony . . . joins the ideological and intersubjective ele
ment to the brute power relationship. In a hegemonic order, the dominant powe
makes certain concessions or compromises to secure the acquiescence of lesser pow
ers to an order that can be expressed in terms of a general interest. It is important
in appraising a hegemonic order, to know both (a) that it functions mainly b;
consent in accordance with universalistic principles, and (b) that it rests upon i
certain structure of power to maintain that structure. The consensual element dis
tinguishes hegemonic from nonhegemonic world orders. It also tends to mystify th<
power relations upon which the order ultimately rests. (Cox 1986: 246-247)

State-centric views of power are also criticized for relying on forces be

yond social interaction, which C o x calls the "fetishism of power." Keeping
the bond that Gramsci's conceptualization of hegemony has with the na
tional milieu and his central idea that hegemonic practices contrary to di
rect domination are exercised through consent, these approaches emphasize
 Transnationalism, Power, and Hegemony 57

the systems of hegemonies that express themselves in the course of inter-

national relations as organically linked to concrete social formations yet
overflowing state boundaries: "Social forces are not to be thought of as
existing exclusively within states. Particular social forces may overflow state
boundaries, and world structures can be described in terms of social forces
just as they can be described as a configuration of state power" (Cox 1986:
225). These approaches raise questions about which transnational mecha-
nisms are used to maintain hegemony at a particular historical juncture,
and as Cox (1981: 230) asks, "what social forces and/or forms of state
have been generated within it, which could oppose and ultimately bring
out a transformation of the structure?"
some authors have further advanced these arguments, bringing the
Mardst theme of class factions to the forefront. For example, William
Robinson (2000: 6) argues that ongoing transformations of capitalism are
ng to the formation of "a new form of state," the "transnational
-.1 ire." According to him, "[t]he class practices of a new global ruling class,
>ecoming ' c o n d e n s e d ' . . . in an emergent T N S [transnational state]."
s model, the transnational state "comprises those institutions and prac-
"vOs in global society that maintain, defend, and advance the emergent
heeemony of a global bourgeoisie and its project of constructing a new
i\ capitalist bloc." The transnational state is defined as "a particular
tellation of class forces and relations bound up with capitalist global-
)n and the rise of a transnational capitalist class, embodied in a diverse
set of political institutions. These institutions are transformed national
s plus diverse international institutions that serve to institutionalize the
domination of this class as the hegemonic fraction of capital worldwide"
Robinson 2 0 0 0 : 6). Thus, what some tend to see as an erosion of state
authority resulting from widespread transnational practices is perceived
this perspective as its reinforcement, albeit under new forms. Robin-
son argues that "supranational" organizations and forums not only play a
key role in shaping the performance and legitimization of hegemonic func-
tions of the transnational ruling class but also "are gradually supplanting
rnt.onal institutions in policy development and global management and
- administration of the global economy" (Robinson 2 0 0 0 : 6). They include
^.>:iomic forums (the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the
\\ .ii Id Trade Organization), supranational political forums (the Group of
7, the Group of 2 2 , the European Union, the United Nations), as well as
"regional groupings" (Association of Southeast Asian Nations, North
1 2
\merican Free Trade Agreement) (Robinson 2 0 0 0 : 6 ) . The dynamics be-
tween "descendant national fractions of dominant groups and ascendant
transnational fractions" are regarded as increasingly important, and cleav-
ages between these t w o factions as significantly shaping class re-
i.. .ommodation and conflict in "the South" while reinforcing the capacity
of the global ruling elites to act transnationally. Under these circumstances,

1
58 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

the transnational state is envisioned as a crucial space of contestation where'

mobilization and the capacity to place demands must meet. The latent as-*-
sumption in such analysis is that "[o]nly when the space in which economy
and politics interact is extended to cover entire historical eras and larger-
than national complexes of states and society, can the cohesion underlying
such interaction be defined in terms of the rise and decline of social classes" ;
(van der Pijl 1998: 3). *
Leslie Sklair (2001) points to the existence of a transnational capitalist'
class (TCC), but for her the issue of whether it is acting as a dominant,
class requires specification of the spheres in which this development has
been possible and the actors involved: "There is no transnational dominant f
class that acts in secret to impose its will over every facet of life for everyone.
in the world and with complete success. However, the T C C acts like &\
transnational dominant class in some spheres, with a great measure of suc-
cess" (5-6). Sklair coincides with Robinson (2000) and Sassen (1996) in
that actors "who o w n and control most significant economic resources
(principally through transnational corporations)" (295) have the ability t o '
impose their will upon other actors like no other group. Yet she goes
to specify that those running the transnational capitalist class need other
groups to successfully accomplish their ends; based on this, she includes \
members of the supporting groups as part of the transnational class:

[T]hose who run the TCS'[transnational corporations] cannot achieve their ends
alone. They require help from other groups, notably globalizing bureaucrats, pol-;
iticians and professionals, consumerist elites and institutions in which they operate,
to carry out their work effectively. Together, all these people constitute a transna-
tional capitalist class. They are a class in that they are defined in terms of their
relationship to the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and they are*
a capitalist class in that they own and/or control, individually or collectively, the
major forms of capital. (296)

Concerning counter-hegemonic practices, she suggests that they need to

focus on "the development of social movements that target capitalism
through its three main institutional supports, the T N C s , the transnational!!
capitalist class, and the culture-ideology of consumerism" (297). Other in-
stitutionalises focus on alternative transnational networks employed for the
development of counter-hegemonic strategies. Peter Evans (2000) refers to
three types of transnational networks that shape power relations. The first
type is the transnational advocacy network, the second is the transnational
labor/consumer network, and the third, transnational labor movements de-
manding the globalization of core labor standards and the right to organize
(231). According to Evans, transnational advocacy networks empower lo-
cal groups and demands, while the other t w o types of networks target the
core of global strategies, redirecting them by employing their o w n means
and needs for legitimation: "Part of the profitability of globalization derives
hansnationalism, Power, and Hegemony 59

from its ability to connect consumers in rich nations with workers forced
tu accept a definition of subsistence that is unimaginably miserable from
the point of view of those w h o enjoy their products. Yet this same con-
nection creates possibilities for counter-hegemonic globalization" (233).
\\ ith regard to transnational movements advancing the cause of labor stan-
dards, he argues: "There is no logical reason why the absence of 'core labor
standards'the right to organize, prohibitions on child laborin a partic-
ular country should not be considered a trade-related basis for unfair com-
petition in the same way that absence of intellectual property rights is
considered a trade-related violation of the rules of fair competition." (236).
Building upon Gramsci, he argues that the potential success of transna-
tu al projects to produce counter-hegemonic effects is based precisely on
13
institutional needs to create consensus. An alternative, albeit still nation-
bound approach to this issue is found in Erick O. Wright's conceptuali-
zation of "real Utopian models" or "models that address questions of in-
stitutional coherence and workability, yet also embody genuinely
emancipatory values and visions" (Wright 2 0 0 0 : 144). Although Wright
focuses on the issue of egalitarianism while some institutionalists have more
broad agendas in mind, they both share the idea that Utopian thinking and
political intervention are not opposite realms: "Given the deep uncertainty
.'.'.out the future, keeping alive in our radical egalitarian imagination an
artay of normatively attractive, coherent proposals is of immense impor-
tance" (155). From this perspective, the success of counter-hegemonic ef-
forts and emancipatory attempts requires becoming aware of both the
relations of the state with domestic and supranational organizations con-
trolled by capital as well as the complexity of the state apparatus "domes-
14
tically."

MIGRATION A N D T R A N S N A T I O N A L I S M

According to Michael Kearney (1995), anthropology's concern with cul-

ture, identity, and forms of social organization and its traditional interest
in local communities have made this discipline particularly sensitive to the
study of the growing number of people and communities engaged in trans-
national practices in time of "globalization" and h o w they impact power
15
relations. Indeed, by placing their research at the fringes of social con-
structivism, cultural history, and holistic approaches, such as world-systems
1
lalysis, and armed with ethnographic methods, anthropologists have
captured transnationalism as an important dimension of the migration ex-
perience. In their work on migration and transnationalism, Linda Basch,
\ i n a Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc (1994) take issue with the
widely accepted notion that international migration necessarily evokes ei-
ther permanent relocation and rupture or passage: "[I]t has become in-
creasingly obvious that our present conceptions of 'immigrant' and
60 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

'migrant,' anchored in the circumstances of earlier historic moments, no

longer suffice. Today, immigrants develop networks, activities, patterns of
living, and ideologies that span their home and the host society" (4). Their
concept of "transmigrants," which they define as "[ijmmigrants w h o de-
velop and maintain multiple relationsfamilial, economic, social, organi-
zational, religious, and politicalthat span borders" (7), tries to capture
the main actor of transnationalism from this perspective. They specifically
focus on transmigrants moving between periphery and core countries and
engage themes such as gender and class relations, cultural differences, and
conflicts related to nation-building projects informed by the colonial/im-
perial legacy. Power and empowerment are regarded as linked to identity
formation and multiple avenues of resistance but are also seen as framed
1
by the colonial legacy. *
Works on this line are particularly concerned with h o w the migrants
participate in cultural and political projects of nation building; h o w identity
formation is shaped by dual economic, political, and cultural experiences;
and h o w transmigrants become special targets of hegemonic narratives and
practices when their o w n practices conflict with the jurisdictional power of
at least t w o states. They illustrate also how migrants can inform hegemonic
designs; that is, transmigrants can also act as "active agents in the process
of hegemonic construction" (Basch et al. 1994: 29). They document how
the colonial legacy informs such dynamics through "the gradation of race
and color" inherited from colonialism and h o w "the layered intertwining
of color, class, and culture" makes the hegemonic constructs of both the
sending and receiving societies more complex (ch. 4). From this perspective^
transnationalism is defined as "the process by which immigrants forge and
sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of
origin and settlement" (7). The concept is explicitly meant "to emphasize
that many immigrants today build 'social fields' that cross geographic, cul-
17
tural, and political borders" ( 7 ) . Gramsci's distinction between direct
command exercised by means of coercion and hegemonic practices that
permeate the civil society is also influential in these authors, particularly in
their analyses of nation-building projects vis-a-vis transnational agency.
An alternative approach frames the link between diasporic transnation-
alism and power, situating Foucault's legacy in a center stage. Particularly
influential is Ong's (1999: 19) reframing of this link through an explicit
combination of the Marxist (juridico-legal) and Foucauldian (state power
and culture) approaches to power, from which she decants the notions of
"alternative modernities" and "flexible citizenship." The notion of "alter-
native modernities" is employed to overcome what she perceives to be a
simplifying historical binarism in postcolonial studies: "Globalization in
Asia . . . has induced both national and transnational forms of nationalism
that not only reject Western hegemony but seek, in panreligious civiliza-
tional discourses, to promote the ascendancy of the East" (18). Here she
Transnationalism, Power, and Hegemony 61

emphasizes "the horizontal and relational nature of contemporary eco-

nomic, social, and cultural processes that stream across space" and "their
c-nbededness in differently configured regimes of power" (4). Such a com-
plexity, Ong argues, is neglected by "a top-down model whereby the global
i> macro-political economic and the local is situated, culturally creative,
ind resistant" (4). Foucault's insights on the culture of power are used to
enphasize flexibility, maneuvering, and positioning as elements of the
18
transnational practices. Ong specifically makes the case for what she calls
"flexible citizenship" or a strategy "to both circumvent and benefit from
different nation-states regimes" in the search for economic options under
conditions of globalization: "New strategies of flexible accumulation have
promoted a flexible attitude toward citizenship" (Ong 1999: 17). She uses
this notion to specifically "describe the practices of refugees and business
migrants w h o work in one location while their families are lodged in 'safe
havens' elsewhere" (214). She further argues that this phenomenon has a
counterpart in the flexible management of the issue of sovereignty on the
part of state authorities, specifically in the case of the "post-developmental
\sian states" that resort to "graduated sovereignty as a way to make their
societies more attractive to global capital" (243). Discontent with macro-
approaches to the dialectics of sovereignty and power (which, as seen be-
fore, prevail in the study of "strategic [transnational] networks"), she
argues that "[r]ather than accepting claims about the end of sovereignty,
we need to explore mutations in the ways in which localized political and
social organizations set the terms and are constitutive of a domain of social
existence" (215). Foucault's formulation on "biopolitics" is present in
Ong's claim of the fruitfulness of current "attempts to understand new
modes of biopolitical regimes that n o w discipline, regulate, and 'civilize'
peoples in varied contexts of the late twentieth century" and the functions
19
of discourse as a mechanism of control ("discursive praxis"). In general,
foucault's emphasis on the observation of relations of dominance and sub-
ordination in everyday life and his conceptualization of power as open-
ended process have been influential in the approach to diasporic
transnationalism. According to Foucault himself,

[p]ower comes from below: that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing op-
position between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a
general matrixnot such duality extending from the top down and reacting on
rre and more limited groups to the very depths of the social body. One must
suppose rather that the manifold relationships of force that take shape and come
into play in the machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institu-
ttans, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social
20
redy as a whole.

Formally, the notion of "transnationalism from below," employed in

some works (cf. Guarnizo and Smith 1999: 6) "to discern h o w this process
 62 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

affects power relations, cultural constructions, economic interactions, and,

more generally, social organization at the level of the locality" seems to
reflect the influence of this tradition. Yet, the link transmigration-hegemony
(and counter-hegemony) is conceptualized this time through a dichotomy
that departs from Foucalut's mode of capturing the complexity of the re-
lations of dominance and subordination as manifested in everyday life.
"Transnationalism from below" is meant to emphasize a situation of sub-
ordination and to call attention to the empowering potential of counter-
hegemonic practices and acts of resistance of groups that are faced with
the constraints of dominance as exercised by other individuals or groups.
"Transnationalism from above" usually refers to agency stemming from
the dominant groups in specific systems of dominance. The analytical strait-
jacket imposed by such dichotomy is implicitly acknowledged by their
users: "by definition these categories are contextual and relational" (29)
and further criticized by Sarah Mahler (1999), w h o points to the difficulty
in trying to trace whether transnational activities sponsored by the political
elites of underdeveloped countries that try to use their diasporas as a base
for legitimacy and fund-raising reflect forms of transnationalism from
"above" or from "below." For her, the distinction in question does not
allow the analyst to grasp the modes of insertion of individuals into com-
plex hierarchical systems, more apparent among transmigrants whose prac-
tices lead to scenarios in which (sometimes simultaneously) they represent
the oppressors and, at others times, the oppressed. Correspondingly, she
argues that such a distinction proves to be a weak analytical tool for iden-
tifying w h o reproduces power relations and w h o challenges them.

It should also be noted that the use of the transnationalism "from below"
and "from above" in migration studies might lead to reinforcement of the
false impression that international migration is a form of transnationalism
"from below" by definition, which ultimately relies on an essentialized cat-
egory of migrant. Such illusion completely vanishes when we examine
transnationalism and systems of hegemonies that are directly traceable to
the migration experience in light of transnational class formation and dy-
namics and modes of incorporation. Drawing from the global-city per-
spective, the world-systems perspective, and works on the symbolic value
of migrations for the state, Ramon Grosfoguel (1995) assertively argues
that the migration process and migrants' symbolic value can be successfully
used for geopolitical ends on the part of the dominant state. If we shift the
focus from the "global" to the "translocal" and incorporate the issue of
transnational class formation, the symbolic and political functions of some
groups of migrants emerge as an important dimension of the power schema
as well, but from another rationale (I refer to this point in more detail
later). However, studies that approach transnationalism through migration
as a mediating instance have demonstrated great sensibility to the analysis
Transnationalism, Power, and Hegemony 63

i if various forms of realization and contestation of hegemonic projects and

power regimes through the complex intertwining of gender, class, and eth-
nicity in processes associated with global capitalist expansion and trans-
national cultural flows. Regardless of their formal adoption or not of the
dichotomy in question, they have shed light on problems such as h o w trans-
national strategies either serve or challenge nationalist projects and shape
competing identities, the emergence of institutional arrangements among
groups with significant transnational political involvement, the empowering
force of certain transnational strategies among subaltern groups, and the
rnportance of the representation of the subject within the context of trans-
national relations that embody dominance and subordination. These and
*ther works focusing on migration and transnationalism have also shed
light on emerging functions and strategies of state apparatuses related to
transnational practices, such as government efforts to court transnational
actors to capitalize on their political and symbolic value, accumulation
strategies, and financial flows. The development of voluntary associations
through which transmigrants channel resources across borders, the insti-
tutional arrangements made for that purpose, and their empowering po-
tential also occupy a central stage in these approaches (cf. Drainville 1999;
ltzigsohn 2 0 0 0 ; Kyle 2 0 0 0 ; Levitt 2 0 0 1 ; Mahler 1999; Ong 1999; Portes
1997; Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt 1999; Smith 1997; Smith and
Guarnizo 1999; Szanton Blanc et al. 1995).
The importance of cultural codes in the development of transnational
networks gains greater centrality in approaches to transnational relations
that juxtapose urban studies with anthropology and feminist theory. Such
effort has led to the proposition of the "transnational urbanism" research
field:

[t]he spatial dispersal of cultural production and reception throughput such mech-
anisms such as transnational migrant networks, globalization of the media of mass
communication, and the forging of transnational political connections, has opened
up a new social space for conducting urban research. This new space is a translocal,
multi-sited, spatially reconfigured world of cross-cutting social networks "from be-
iow" as well as "in between," formed by social actors engaged in reterritorialized
politics of place making. (Smith 2001: 17)

How transnational grassroots social movements come into being, h o w

everyday life is "orchestrated" through transnational networks developed
by transnational actors, including political activists, and h o w different
transnational political actors "interact with actors, networks, and struc-
tures of power that are more locally and nationally based" (4, 1 7 - 1 8 ) are
issues of great centrality from this perspective. There have been other prop-
ositions to develop new fields related to transnational studies based on the
64 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements!

cross-fertilization of perspectives. Some see the development of "transna-

tional feminist cultural studies" (Kaplan and Grewal 1999) as a potential
ground for the coordination of Marxism, poststructuralism, and feminism
as a counter-trend against "liberal versions of feminism" that try to "man-
age diversity" through "multiculturalism." From this perspective, dis-
courses on "international" movements, "global" feminism, and "global
sisterhoods" are criticized not only as reifiers of an essentialized category
of w o m a n and, at best, simplistic readings of the strategies involved in ilv
process of "Othering," but also as reifiers of the nation-state: "Critically
reading the spaces between w o m a n and nation as not only structured by
patriarchy, we can begin to grasp the supra and transnational aspects of
cultures of identity" (Alarcon, Kaplan, and Moallen 1999: 13).
Approaches with a great sensitivity for gender have made inroads in the
study of transnational relations from other quarters as well. Particularly
influential in migration studies (although it is widely acknowledged tin:
gender, contrary to class, has been insufficiently dealt with) have been the
identification of forms of domination mediated by different expectations,
for example, concerning strategies for the education of children involving
territorial mobility and transnational entrepreneurship, and differential ac-
21
cess to symbolic and material resources between w o m e n and m e n . Other
studies have called attention to the role of transmigrants in challenging the
sign of the gender/power equation in the country of origin by importing
radical critiques that question gender roles and forms of sexism (Szanton
Blanc et al. 1995). Sociological, anthropological, and feminist studit-. hm
also influenced IR. Jan Pettman (1996) reminds us that gender approaches
in IR tend to focus on transnational practices that shape or are shaped by
gender identity and citizenship and on gendered exploitation (a more recent
topic includes the use of w o m e n in the growing transnational sex market)
(Pettman 1996; UN 2 0 0 0 ) . According to her, it is through feminist analyses
that w o m e n become "more visible" in international political economy, by
focusing on "women's everyday lives and choices, or the lack of them"
(Pettman 1996: 160). The cornerstone of gender accounts of international
political economy, Pettman argues, relies on a better understanding of "the
sexual division of labor."

T R A N S N A T I O N A L I S M A N D POWER: N E W RESEARCH
AVENUES FOR WORLD-SYSTEMS ANALYSIS

The previous mapping of alternative approaches to transnationalism,

power, and hegemony has shown that this is a complex relationship. More
importantly, it shows that its problematization requires transcending the
nation-state frontier through a multifaceted dialogue among approaches
that have targeted transnationalism from a progressive standpoint. Below
I argue that three mainstream areas within world-systems analysis, the
 ransnationalism, Power, and Hegemony 65

:udy of the antisystemic potential of international migrations, the global

smmodity chains conceptualization, and the study of the household as a
lajor institution of the world-economy, would notably benefit from such
dialogue.

Antisystemic Movements

Antisystemic movements, a major theme in world-systems analysis, could

enefit substantially from the incorporation of insights from some of the
perspectives explored in this chapter. The way in which world-systems
nalysis problematizes the antisystemic potential of international migration,
~>r example, tends to rely on an essentialist concept of the migrant. An
veremphasis on immigration as rupture, on immigrants as a homogeneous
.roup, and power as state capabilities prevents the problematization of h o w
ifferent transnational networks and practices developed by different mi-
grants are affected by and alter different power regimes and forms of he-
gemony, and eventually shape the antisystemic potential of the process of
nternational migration. Immigration, like other phenomena strongly inter-
wined with power relations and the configuration of hegemonies (such as
arty and ethnic politics, class formation, capital/labor relations, and the
irganizatipn of grassroots movements), has a transnational dimension that
atroduces varying degrees of complexity into the analysis of their anti-
ystemic potential.
When confronted with the question of whether immigrants affect the
-lability of the political system in core societies, immigration is presented
s "the option of individual resistance by physical relocation" (Wallerstein
995: 23). From this angle, migration is rationalized as a cumulative pro-
cess that would eventually change "the structure of social life in the North"
nd undermine political stability there (23). As such a potential outcome
s perceived as a threat by dominant groups that advocate "the basic unit"
rf the "host" society (cultural, ethnic, and linguistic supremacy of the dom-
ciant group [Zolberg 1989]) they try to impose barriers against the political
ategration of the newcomers. This reactive succession, Wallerstein con-
ends, is potentially explosive politically, "surely not a recipe for social
>eace" (Wallerstein 1995: 2 3 ) .
This argument sheds light on an important dimension in the relation
retween migration and power relations as manifested in core nation-states.
The study of migration from the IR and political sciences perspectives has
ed to the identification of some ways through which immigrants can ac-
ually represent a threat to political stability in receiving countries, or be
>erceived as such. They include, among others, the drive of a specific im-
nigrant group to overthrow the political regime in their country of origin
vith strategies that threaten the bilateral relations or the security of the
eceiving society; when migrants directly risk the security of the receiving
66 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movement

country, for example, through their import and application of fundamen

talist ideologies and terrorist practices; when they are perceived as a cul-
tural threat and are denied citizenship rights; and when they are perceived
as a social or economic threat (Werner 1 9 9 2 - 1 9 9 3 ) . In sum, migrants" ca-
pacity to influence both the politics of migration and the migration of pol
itics is necessarily politically problematic. A hyperbolization of the "threat"
argument, however, might lead to unfounded conclusions about mass mi-
gration as an antisystemic force based on the cumulative character of the
process in the center, an argument that in less careful hands may lead to
the idea that migration is antisystemic "by definition." A close-ran* ob
servation of the multiplicity of functions of migrants in the world-system
derived from their multiple forms of articulations with labor and capita!
circuits and geopolitical designs renders problematic any overgeneralizatio ,
concerning supposedly irreversible cleavages that they may create in forms
of political control in the center because of either direct or indirect political
involvement. I use the example of Miami, a global city with both imir"-
grants and riots, to illustrate this point. The beginning of the 1980s was
clouded by unexpected mass migration (over 1 2 0 , 0 0 0 Cubans arrived in
boats and other vessels in less than three months, and hundreds of I laiti.Mi
"boat people" tried to reach Miami shores, some successfully), the nation-
wide surge of anti-immigrant feelings, and a devastating riot after a 33-
year-old Black insurance agent died from injuries after a police L I I . I S I
Today, the ethnic tensions and their material and symbolic foundations
have escalated to an unprecedented level in Miami. Tensions increasingly
involve Anglos, African Americans, and Cuban Americans, w h o currently
occupy important power positions. Yet, there is a flip side to this c o i n
Immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean in Miami since the
1960s, the urban and business expansion in the city, and the growing in-
ternationalization of its economy during the same period are contempo-
raneous processes that have been propelled by both economic restructuring
and turbulence in the U.S. neighboring periphery. Under such circum-
stances, it is hard to sustain that immigration has been fundamentally prob-
lematic for Miami. Latin American and Caribbean transnational elites pl.u
an important role in bridging the corporate sector in Miami and the elite>
of their societies of origin. The transnational elite linked to the area through
the migration experience has been instrumental for the regional promotion
of global capitalism. This effect may, in the long term, counterbalance what
are perceived today as "setbacks" in the efforts to assimilate, discipline,
and "civilize" immigrants. Transnational entrepreneurs have acted as ad-
vanced students and proselytes of the dogmas and ideologies upon which
global capitalism erects the foundations of legitimacy, which has been in-
strumental in the unfolding of Miami as a sort of "school" similar to "the
Chicago school." Contrary to the latter, however, "the Miami school" do,^
not use sophisticated econometric models for its goals; it has been more
rransnationalism, Power, and Hegemony 67

pragmatic in its approach. In this sense it is possible to argue, following

Robinson's and Sklair's analyses on the formation of a transnational cap-
italist class, that Miami has become a regional training and empowering
center for the transnational ruling class. International migration has been
instrumental in the current unfolding of such consequences.
Ultimately, the transnational dimension introduces a level of complexity
that we need to take into account when studying the antisystemic potential
or international migrations. The logical and historical problems of consid-
ering migration as antisystemic, without problematizing the processes and
the actors involved in their complexities, become apparent only when we
acknowledge that migrants are not just "the tired and the poor," that they
not only relocate but also trans-locate, and that their political situatedness
a.id agency are affected by their o w n transnational practices and other
transnational processes. As demonstrated by current research on transna-
tionalism, transnational social fields have become strategic research sites
lor understanding the political consequences of international migrations,
more specifically, the possible derivations of the migrants' counter-
hegemonic strategies, their involvement in hegemonic projects, and actions
inflicted against them by different interest groups or the state.
Other evidence, such as demographic trends, should also be taken into
consideration when analyzing the functions of international migration in
cere areas. A recent report by the Population Division of the United
Marions (UN 2000) suggests that "replacement migration" offers an alter-
native for the declining and rapidly aging population trends to be experi-
enced mostly by core societies in the next 50 years. The report includes the
United States, Germany, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Repub-
lic of Korea, and the Russian Federation. After the analysis of five possible
population scenarios that combine fertility, mortality, aging, working-age
copulation trends, international migration, and general population trends
tor the next 50 years, the report concludes: "The new challenges being
brought about by declining and aging populations will require objective,
t borough and comprehensive reassessments of many established economic,
social, and political policies and programmes" (4), and includes as one of
.ts five recommendations, "policies and programs related to international
migration, in particular replacement migration, and the integration of large
numbers of recent immigrants and their descendants" (4).
International migration has always created tensions and conflicts in core
societies, which was particularly true, as illustrated by Wallerstein (1980),
r during the period of the Industrial Revolution. By the same token, it is hard
to think of a phenomenon contributing more than international migration
to the worldwide expansion of capitalism, which has also been documented
in historical analysis, including the world-systems perspective. It is precisely
the "modern resonance" (Wallerstein) with which such paradox manifests
that ought to be explained in the first place. When the displacement of
 68 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

populations is used for a relatively prolonged period of time for advancing

foreign-policy agendas; as part of the mechanisms implemented to maintain
political stability in the periphery (cf. the use of "migration" as an "escape
valve"); or as a fast track to capital accumulation via labor exploitation,
business expansion, and demographic equilibrium in the center, interna-
tional migration acquires a normative dimension. The normative dimension
of the process manifests in the expectations of capitalists, state represen-
tatives, and the migrants themselves. This is what is happening with im-
migration from Latin America. As such, the process gradually deprives the
sending countries of well-trained, experienced, and highly motivated indi-
viduals. Such consequences, when combined with other dynamics that also
reflect and reinforce not only the structural incapacity to develop but also
the continuous impoverishment of vast segments of the population, are
indeed not a recipe for social peace in the world-system. The question re-
mains whether the participation of migrants and other actors in transna-
tional hegemonic projects, such as in the diffusion of the ideologies of
consumerism and competitiveness, and the myth of the superiority of the
"West," is diverting the antisystemic potential of such trends. Ultimately,
it is important to be more sensitive to both types of transmigrants and types
of anti-hegemonic projects when analyzing the antisystemic potential of
international migration.

Commodity Chains

Within world-systems analysis, the global commodity chains (GCCs)

conceptualization plays a central role due to its immediacy to the unit of
analysis: "My o w n unit of analysis is based on the measurable social reality
of interdependent productive activities, what may be called 'an effective
division of labor' or, in code language, an ' e c o n o m y ' . . . a world-economy
is constituted by a cross-cutting network of interlinked productive processes
which we may call 'commodity chains' " (Wallerstein 1991 [1984]: 2). The
commodity chain is conceptualized as "a network of labor and production
processes whose end result is a finished commodity" (Hopkins and Wall-
erstein 1986: 159). The global commodity chains conceptualization shares
some common ground with some of the approaches to transnationalism
examined before. One is its reliance on network analysis of a phenomenon
(the commodity chain) that is transnational. Network analysis is crucial
because the "interorganizational networks clustered around one commod-
ity or product, linking households, enterprises, and states to one another
within the world-economy," are regarded as the constitutive elements of
the global commodity chain (Gereffi, Korzeniewicz, and Korzeniewicz
1994: 2). The second is its emphasis on global production systems and the
social embeddedness of transnational production systems. Last, but not
least, the commodity chain conceptualization ventures a methodological
I\msnationalism, Power, and Hegemony 69

escape from both the "global" and the "local" without abandoning them;
but rather trying to capture their mutual conditioning: "The paradigm that
(rCCs embody is a network-centered and historical approach that probes
above and below the level of the nation state to better analyze structure
and change in the world-economy" (2).
However, the GCCs conceptualization has not yet problematized the is-
sue of the social embeddedness of production and distribution systems in
alt its complexity, nor has it targeted, systematically, the relationship be-
tween systems of production and power relations beyond the nation-state
>\ stem frontier. This may be due to the fact that while the GCCs concep-
tualization sets the grounds for the analysis of complex power regimes that
shape the organizational foundations of production processes, the concep-
tual apparatus that it uses to capture power relations is still inadequate. A
better understanding of the social embeddedness of production processes
nd networks of production and, ultimately, the understanding of h o w
power regimes framed by gender, class, and ethnic relations shape the
mechanisms through which wealth is accumulated and distributed through-
out the nodes of the chains requires a theorization of the link between
power regimes and production systems on a more complex ground. It re-
quires transcending the state-centered approach to hegemony and power,
which still permeates the GCCs paradigm, and prevents a more complex
incorporation of different transnational actors. Such inquiry is theoretically
compatible with world-systems analysis: "When one is dealing with a com-
plex, continuously evolving, large-scale historical system, concepts that are
used as shorthand descriptions for structural patterns are useful only to the
degree that one clearly lays out their purpose, circumscribes their applica-
bility, and specifies the theoretical framework they purpose and advance"
Wallerstein 1 9 9 1 : 37). The concept of hegemony, for example, is meant
to capture the dynamics of the rivalry among "great powers" but does not
say much about, for example, h o w relations of dominance and subordi-
nation shape the formation of "backward and forward linkages" corre-
sponding to production processes of the chains and the different instances
(households, firms, formal and informal arrangements) through which such
relations manifest. A critical incorporation of some insights stemming from
works dealing with transnational entrepreneurship and strategies of accu-
mulation and social repositioning would help refine the concept of hegem-
ony and the understanding of relations of domination for a better
applicability by the GCCs approach.

Householding

"Householding" refers to "the multiple processes by which [members of

a household] pool income, allocate tasks, and make collective decisions"
(Wallerstein and Smith 1992: 13). The notion has been advanced as part
70 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

of world-systems analysts' current efforts toward the empirical research of

the household as a major institution of the world-economy. In their iden-
tification and explanation of the five forms through which income can be
generated: "wages, market sales (or profit), rent, transfer, and 'subsistence'
(or direct labor input)" (7), world-systems analysis neglects h o w these
forms operate transnationally. The growing body of literature on trans-
national entrepreneurship and remittances, highly influenced by anthro-
pological research and the "new economics of migration" (with which
world-systems analysis shares the assumption that households are income-
maximizing and risk-minimizing units) points to the important role of
cross-border mobility and transborder arrangements for the economic re-
production of migrant households. The study of the household as an
institution of the world-economy should not neglect, for example, the rapid
de facto (and de jure in some cases) dollarization of a growing number of
economies in Latin America, a region with significant levels of emigration
to the United States that has become highly dependent on the U.S. labor
market through their dependence on family remittances since the early
1990s. Mexico, El Salvador, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua,
Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, and we may want to add some South Amer-
ican economies, constitute a case in point. Both the role of family remit-
tances in income pooling and the shaping of different roles and expectations
based on gender, class, and even generational gaps need to be incorporated
into the analysis of householding, together with the study of the growing
engagement of migrant households in transnational economic entrepre-
neurship.

Ultimately, we can no longer overlook the insights stemming from studies

on transnationalism that shed light on issues that are crucial to understand
the processes and phenomena that are at the core of the wcurld-systems
perspective. Such processes include but are not limited to the social em-
beddedness of transnational productive activities and the role of power
relations in constituting such embeddedness; the ambits and dimensions of
resistance associated with transnational strategies of domination; old and
new modalities of gendered practices and exploitation; and most of the
processes associated with "householding." To be sure, "[i]n theorizing
transnationalism we need to build on the global perspective of world sys-
tems theory as well as on the writings of those whose subsequent critiques
and clarifications . . . have enhanced the broad generality of this theory
with a more particularistic historiography" (Basch et al. 1994: 11). But the
background function frequently adjudicated to world-systems analysis in
the study of transnationalism does not suffice any longer, at least not from
the world-systems perspective.
The writings of Immanuel Wallerstein and Terence Hopkins set the foun-
dations for the understanding of the world-system as a complex totality.
mnsnationalism, Power, and Hegemony 71

oday, contrary to early predictions stemming from critical quarters,

rorld-systems analysis is proving to be a flexible framework and a fertile
round for conceptual and analytical innovation. A dialogue with perspec-
tves on the links between transnationalism and power relations seems to
ie a promising path.

NfOTES
I am grateful to Karen McGovern for her editorial reading of an earlier version
f this chapter.
1. Such dynamics, Castells points out, have nor led to a new mode of production
mtinstead have produced a shift in capitalism's "mode of development," from indus-
tialism to informationalism. Castells defines the mode of development as the tech-
lological arrangements through which labor transforms matter, and therefore, it
ilays a decisive role in shaping "the quality and the level of the surplus." While, in
he industrial mode of development, energy sources functioned as the pivotal source
o increase productivity, the informational economy is based on "knowledge-based
ffoductivity": "the source of productivity lies in the technology of knowledge gen-
ration, information processing, and symbol communication" (Castells 2000: 17).
2. Rivera Cusicanqui, "Sendas y Senderos de la Ciencia Social Andina," Au-
odeterminacion: Analisis historico politico y teoria social 10 (1992): 83-108 (cited
n Mignolo 2000: 50).
3. For an analysis of Spivak's methodological approach to the study of trans-
national relations, see Kaplan and Grewal (1999).
4. The notion of parameter is a key one in Rosenau's schema. They "constitute
he basic rules and arrangements whereby social systems function, they are bound
o be the focus of turbulence when the continuities they represent are subjected to
severe strain" (Rosenau 1990: 81).
5. "Rosenau's 'turbulence' broadly corresponds to the systemic chaos which in
our interpretative scheme constitutes a recurrent condition of the modern inter-state
ystem" (Arrighi 1999: 79).
6. In reality, labor's centrality in the process of value making has been enlarged
issder current conditions of accumulation. Castells reminds us that "never before
was labor so central to the process of value-making." For a more detailed analysis,
ee Castells (2000).
7. For references to this link, see Appadurai (1996); Szanton Blanc et al. (1995);
Mignolo (2000); Spivak (1999).
8. Ethnicity, a central theme in sociology and anthropology, yet one that was
neglected in IR during the "Soviet studies" era, has acquired a high profile during
he post-Cold War era as the idea of nation-states as made up of a predominant
thnicity is being further challenged: "The conventional concept of nation-state fits
inly one-fourth of the members of the global system" (Nielsson (no date), cited in
Rosenau 1990: 407).
9. For a detailed analysis, see Krasner (1995).
10. The transition toward post-international politics, he argues, is turbulent due
o the presence of important parametric changes that manifest themselves along the
72 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements!:

following dimensions: changes in political orientation, loyalties, and compliance hab-

its (individual level); changes in formal alliances, legal conventions, and the rules of
governance (structural level); and changes in authority relations, for example, class
relations "in national systems" and balance-of-power and dependency patterns "in
international systems" (relational level) (Rosenau 1990: 89). In sum, in contesting
fundamental assumptions of realism, Rosenau invites us to search for what he calls
"the organizing principles and structures that emulate state actions" (1990: 89).
11. "The bifurcation of world politics appears to be a structural arrangement
worth defending. It has the potential for a creative reconciliation of all the great
antitheses of politicsthe conflicts between order and freedom, between the will
of majorities and the autonomy of minorities, between individual needs and collec-
tive welfare, between technological innovation and cultural integrity, and between
change and continuity" (Rosenau 1990: 461).
12. The idea of the formation of supranational elite constellations in the world-
system has been crucial in neo-Marxist political economy and political science
(Dreifuss and Smith 1983; Furtado 1982; Petras and Brill 1986; Robinson 1992).
Political scientists Rene Dreifuss and William Smith re-create the transnational ver-
sion of the Gramscian theme of the historic bloc as a ruling coalition and a social
base and rely on the notion of "transnational organic elites." In essence, they argue
that transnational elites who were increasingly compelled to operate "through po-
litical and ideological organization" or political "height commands" tended to de-
velop (and sponsor the development of) "sophisticated" transnational "power
structures" used for the fulfillment of their common goals. Eventually, they argued;
these forms of organization also make it possible for transnational elites to become
"organized and prepared? for the challenges posed by capitalist crisis and resistance
from subaltern groups. Organic transnational elites have the capacity of addressing
their interests through a series of organizations and sponsorship programs and by
means of close collaboration among themselves, elitist research centers, and political
action groups (Dreifuss and Smith 1983).
13. "If far-sighted transnational economic elites want to construct the instru-
ments of global governance that they themselves need to bring the necessary sta-
bility and predictability to global markets, they may have no choice but to ally with
groups that want to use global governance to institutionalize social rights and im-
prove well-being. To do otherwise is to risk having the entire project founder on
the fact that globalization is not a project that generates political loyalty from either
more conservative national elites or ordinary citizens" (Evans 2000: 240).
14. For example, Pierre Bourdieu (1998) invites us to turn to the progressive
forces within the state apparatus or what he calls "the left hand of the state."
"The set of agents of the so-called spending ministers which are the trace, within
the state, of the social struggles of the past. They are opposed to the right hand of
the state, the technocrats of the Ministry of Finance, the public and private banks
and the ministerial cabinets. A number of social struggles that we are now seeing
(and will see) express the revolt of the minor state nobility against the senior state
nobility" (Bourdieu 1998: 2).
15. "Given cultural anthropology's commitment to study of local communities,
globalization has implications for its theory and methods. Also, given the national
character of anthropology . . . globalization entails certain displacements of the pro-
duction of anthropological knowledge from its historic national institutional and
ransnationalism, Power, and Hegemony 73

Aural contexts to other sites. Globalization mediated by migration, commerce,

aaununication technology, finance, tourism, etc. entails a reorganization of the
lpolar imagery of space and time of modern world view, which is also expressed
1 modern anthropological theory" (Kearney 1995: 548).
16. "The creation of a public West Indian or Vincentian and Grenadian identity
I New York did not receive its sole impetus from the new role immigrants were
He to play in the nation building process of the politically independent micro-
tates of the Caribbean. Nor were these identities constructed solely as a reflection
f the pride and self-confidence these immigrants derived from the global reposi-
loning of their home nations as independent states. Closely intertwined with the
Kreasing transnationalism of Vincentian and Grenadian voluntary organizations,
bese public expressions of identity also were linked to the hegemonic contention
round race and ethnicity that began to take place in the United States in the mid
o late 1960s" (Basch et al. 1994: 114).
17. As the authors acknowledge that several studies on migrants' transnational
tractices anteceded theirs (Appardurai and Breckenridge 1988; Georges 1990;
Kearney 1991). However, their merit was to theorize systematically on the different
Intensions of transnationalism from the migration studies perspective and to de-
slop a conceptual apparatus that has proven useful and inspiring among scholars
baling with international migration.
18. "[W]hile mobility and flexibility have long been part of the repertoire of
raman behavior, under transnationalism the new links between flexibility and the
Bgics of displacement, on the one hand, and capital accumulation, on the other,
tave given new valence to such strategies of maneuvering and positioning. Flexi-
rility, migration, and relocations, instead of being coerced or resisted, have become
wactices to strive for rather than stability (Ong 1999: 19).
19. Such influence is explicitly acknowledged by Ong: "Foucault has argued that
spparently neutral discourses use rationalizations and categories (such as nature,
ace, culture, etc.) as truth claims that also operate as practices of regulation and
sontrol. In these transnational imaginaries [that emphasize the 'economic peculiarity
)f the Chinese'!, Chinese race, culture, and economic activities have become natu-
alized as inseparable or even the same phenomena, which are then deployed as
naturalizing powers' " (Ong 1999: 68); and is also present in Basch et al.'s (1994)
inalysis of state efforts to control the diasporas through the construction of deter-
itorialized nation-states.
20. Truth in Power (interview with Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino),
:ited by Alex Honneth in The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical
hcial Theory. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, pp. 155-156.
21. For a brief summary of how gender is dealt with within this perspective, see
vlahler 1999: 83.

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V and Aging Populations? New York: United Nations, Population Division,
Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
van der Pijl. 1998. Transnational Classes and International Relations. London:
Routledge.
78 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements')

Vertovec, Steven. 1999. "Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism." Ethnic

and Racial Studies 22(2): 447-462.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1980. The Modem World-System II: Mercantilism and thi
Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750. New York: '<
Academic Press. ;
. 1991. The Politics of the World-Economy: The States, the Movements, and '
the Civilizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 3
. 1995. After Liberalism. New York: New Press.
Wallerstein, Immanuel, and Joan Smith. 1992. Creating and Transforming House-
holds: The Constraints of the World-Economy (Studies in Modern Capital- ;
ism). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. \
Weiner, Myron. 1992/1993. "Security, Stability and International Migration." In- \
ternational Security 17: 91-126.
Wright, Erik O. 2000. "Reducing Income and Wealth Inequality: Real Utopian
Proposals." Contemporary Sociology 29(1) (January): 143-156.
Zolberg, Aristide R. 1989. "The New Waves: Migration Theory for a Changing .
World." International Migration Review 23 (Fall): 403^430. \

I
'i

i
i
 Chapter 5

Mass Migration in the World-System: An

Antisystemic Movement in the Long Run?
Eric Mielants

Until recently, world-systems analysis has looked upon migration primarily

as a massive incorporation of low-wage labor by core countries (Boswell
and Jorjani 1988: 1 6 9 - 1 7 1 ; Bolaria and Bolaria 1997: 11). This is under-
standable, since legislation on immigration has been traditionally heavily
influenced by labor requirements of capitalist enterprises (Petras 1980:
164). However, over a long period of time the continuing immigration flow
from the periphery to the core may undermine several fundamental aspects
inherent to the stability of the world-system, such as the maintenance of
the inter-state system and the idea of progress (embedded in liberal ideol-
ogy). The objective of this chapter is to explore Petras' (1981: 48) hypoth-
esis that the existence and legitimacy of the inter-state system are challenged
because of the constant influx of legal and illegal labor that moves across
national barriers toward the more flourishing centers of capital accumula-
tion and to evaluate the possibility of a systemic crisis within the world-
economy due to inherent pressures generated by mass migration in the
twenty-first century.

WELFARE STATES, BORDER PATROLS, A N D

ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES

It has been claimed that this-structural process eventually may deliver a

fatal blow to the welfare states within core regions (Goodin 1992: 11).
Historically, it is certainly accurate that the creation of the welfare state in
the core was intrinsically linked with the creation of ever-higher barriers
against the free circulation of labor and migration flows in general. Indeed,
unions and their socialist political affiliations had on this aspectdespite
80 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

their internationalist rhetoricalways been more nationalist than interna-

tionalist (Lucassen 1 9 9 1 : 1 5 8 - 1 7 3 ) . This is not so surprising since welfare
states (existing in the core) simply had to keep their borders closed to mass
immigration in order to construct and maintain a welfare state in the inter-
1
state system (Freeman 1986: 5 2 ) . In addition, the notion of citizenship,
popularized in the aftermath of the French Revolution, is by definition an
attribution of legitimacy to human entitlements and rights within a specific
territorial unit (a nation-state) of the world-system (Halfmann 1998: 5 2 3 -
524). A gradual undermining of the (welfare) state within the core, caused
2
by, among other things, massive (il)Iegal immigration, may very well con-
tribute to weakening the entire system (cf. Wallerstein 1999: 5 7 - 7 5 ) . Al-
though the demographic "explosion" in the periphery certainly increases
the potential of mass migration to the core in the near future (Hoffmann-
3
N o w o t n y 1997: 96; Rasmussen 1997: 1 0 6 ) , the demise of liberalism and
hope of steady progress through stages of national development are prob-
ably equally important in "triggering" a structural process of international
mass migration out of the periphery (Wallerstein 1995a) as the Malthusian
variable itself. Especially after the Kondratieff-B phase set in c. 1 9 7 3 , cre-
ating a world-economic downturn, the myths of "stay-at-home develop-
ment" (Martin 1992) and possibilities for universal takeoff have been
painfully exposed in the officially decolonized periphery. Due to the ever-
widening gap between the core and the periphery and the increasing avail-
ability of information on this realityquite a remarkable phenomenon
(Rasmussen 1997: 1 2 5 - 1 2 6 ; Baldwin and Martin 1999: 24), citizens living
in the periphery will no longer be misguided with misleading hopes about
the prospects of a nation-state that is located at the bottom of the hierar-
chically structured, worldwide division of labor. Essentially, "the only re-
alistic long-term hope for reduction of international migration is
broad-based, sustainable development in the less-developed countries, en-
abling economic growth [there] to keep pace with growth in the population
and labor force" (Castles and Miller 1998: 2 9 1 ) . Yet, as the lure of mod-
ernization and developmentalist theories has steadily diminished since the
1970s, increasing disbelief in the feasibility of liberalism and reformism in
the periphery may ultimately lead to gradually increasing and uncontrol-
4
lable out-migration toward the centers of capital accumulation. Yet in-
creasing mass migration from the periphery and semi-periphery to the core,
since the majority of it is bound to be illegal, challenges not only the welfare
state, which has been devised to "take care" of some happy few in the
capitalist world-economy, but concurrently, the political legitimacy of its
5
very existence. As Wallerstein (1979: 2 9 1 - 2 9 2 ) has argued, capitalists
need the state (and the inter-state system) in order to keep the ceaseless
accumulation of capital continuing. Both the inter-state system and the
capitalist world-economy have one single, integrated logic (Chase-Dunn
1981; Burch 1994: 57). It therefore remains very doubtful to what extent
Vfass Migration in the World-System 81

the contemporary world-economic system can continue to operate without

he existence of an inter-state system with clearly defined territorial bound-
aries. What is less reflected upon, however, is to what extent the demise of
he welfare state and the inter-state system will also trigger other antisys-
emic movements to emerge. It follows that recent outbursts of xenophobia
>nd the electorally successful extreme right are specific and internal to the
core" and are reactions to the nation-state's fundamental inability to cope
rith the formidable global pressures of mass migration and capital real-
6
acation simultaneously (cf. Martin and Schumann 1996).
Interestingly, these far-right reactions manifest themselves more clearly
within major urban areas and "world-cities," which are the main socio-
economic link between international corporations as well as a major ethnic-
>.ultural base for many immigrant households at the same time. Since there
exists a strong correlation between voting for the far-right by "natives,"
>n one hand, and their coexistence with an increasing number of immi-
rants ("ethnic minorities") in an urban area, on the other hand (e.g.,
Bijlsma and Koopmans 1996: 181), the prospect of ever-more first- and
econd-generation immigrants living in a world-city as well as a constant
icrease of illegal immigrants there do not appear very promising as far as
7
ocial stability and peaceful coexistence are concerned. At the same time,
vhea more immigrants migrate to world-cities, more governments are
lownsizing their versions of the welfare state, while intervening less on
>ehalf of its poorest citizens, among w h o m immigrant ethnic minorities are
verrepresented. This trimming of the welfare state is, in turn, inherent in
he pressures operating within the world-economy (Martin and Schumann
996), which induce states to a competitive race to the bottom (Greider
1997). However, what started as a systemic movement (the incorporation
if labor from the periphery to the core on demand of certain sectors and
rms within the core) may transform itself in an antisystemic movement
n a global scale because of the contradictions that operate in the capitalist
system. Mass migration may become as important an antisystemic pressure
m the inter-state system as the ecological factor. Indeed, it is often ne-
lected that the t w o are interlinked since increasing ecological crisesa
esult of the logic inherent in the modern world-economy (e.g., Ponting
1993)are likely to cause a major impact on mass migration in the near
uture (Ghosh 1998: 4 8 - 5 0 ; cf. also King and Oberg 1993).
In the twenty-first century one of the most important causes of interna-
lonal mass migration as well as the creation of increasing numbers of
internally displaced" refugees is likely to be related to a variety of envi-
onmental crises in the periphery (Stoett 1999: 75). Just one example is
provided by Salt (1989: 4 5 2 ) , w h o estimates that in 40 years about 4 0 0
lillion Bangladeshis will likely be pressing on land that is only 15 feet
bove sea level. However, if present trends of global warming continue,
lost of it will no longer be above sea level. Where will most of those people
82 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movemen

migrate to? As multiple ecological crises (environmental degradation, di

sertification, deforestation, soil erosion, salinity, and other effects of glob;
warming) cause more migrations to occur (Myers 1 9 9 3 ; Lohrmann 1996
the core will undoubtedly attempt to keep these growing numbers of "e<
8
ological refugees" located somewhere within the periphery. Whether th
will be an easy matter to accomplish is far from evident (cf. King an
Knights 1994), although since it is clear that those w h o apply for political
asylum face an increasingly uphill battle to remain legally in core countries
(e.g., Kahn 1996), it seems extremely unlikely that "ecological refugees"
will have an easy case to make even when the ecological crises have been
caused by pollution from the core. Indeed, it is quite blatant that the United
Nations (UN) and the core countries that supervise it do not want to rec-
ognize the need of economic or environmental refugees on the same level
as that of political refugees. The growing number of refugees in the pe-
riphery constitutes an ever-increasing level of expenditures for the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (Zolberg 1989: 416;
Rogers 1992: 1115), which will result in a curtailment of any substantial
efforts or initiatives to assist internally displaced people or ecological ref-
ugees, since its main task "in an increasingly bifurcated world appears more
and more to be a protector of Western borders shrouded in a cloak of
humanitarianism" (Stoett 1999: 92). Although it is certainly correct that
even in the near future "the poorest countries of the world will continue
to bear a disproportionate share of the refugee burden" (Wood 1999: 166;
cf. Weiner 1994) and that, to follow up on the above-mentioned example,
it is therefore very unlikely that millions of Bangladeshis will be able to
find refuge somewhere in the core, the increasing turmoil within the pe-
riphery and semi-periphery due to "ecological" mass migrations may cause
serious spillover effects affecting the stability in the core as well. As Africa
has been written off by most capitalist firms due to incessant turmoil there,
one can raise the question to what extent they will be able to "write off"
9
large areas of Asia and Latin America as well.

THE CONSEQUENCE OF CONTEMPORARY MIGRATION

POLICY IN T H E CORE

Although the quest for ever more ceaseless capitalist accumulation will
continue to demand a certain influx of immigrants in the core if re-
allocation of production does not occur despite the relative high cost of
regulated labor there (cf. Burgers and Engbersen 1995: 2 3 1 ) , which ex-
plains why some (illegal) immigration to the core will always be favored
by some entrepreneurs in certain sectors (Jahn and Straubhaar 1999: 37),
most citizens of core countries will force their governments to decrease
constant and increasing immigration in what they perceive as "their" ter-
ritory. However, the desired policy to diminish mass migration from the
 M 9S: Migration in the World-System 83

pi nphery to the core is quite impossible to implement efficiently with ef-

tccTue results (van Amersfoort and Penninx 1994). Restrictive policies do,
^.nirse, have very serious and dangerous implications for the journey to
10
tl e core, but once arrived there, the main result of legal restrictions is
thir they only perpetuate the majority of immigrants into illegality inside
1 1
t! core (Vandepitte et al. 1994: ch. 4 ) , which causes an even greater
t

competition on the bottom of the labor market since illegal immigrants

cannot have access to social welfare, have no political rights, and cannot
u lionize.
-\ first consequence of all the above is that the increase of "migration
. >^:s" ironically decreases the odds of repatriation, which is, after all, so
:sired by governments within the core, thus converting (potential and at
times actually existing) circular movements of people into unidirectional
(Massey and Espinosa 1997; Lorey 1999: 167; Passel 1999: 105). A
t.'nd consequence is that while the expanding informal economy within
the core is mostly beneficial to some capitalist entrepreneurs, it undermines
t^e very principles on which the welfare state has been constructed; for
t \ underpaid, illegal immigrant having a "junk job" in the black market,
possibilities exist that the state not only loses out on missed income taxes
it also has to provide for the unemployment benefits of legal residents
ithin the core w h o could have done the job (Burgers and Engbersen 1995:
12
2 J2-235).
\ o t everyone in the periphery or semi-periphery will migrate to the core.
\ any variables are at play in the decision-making process on a microlevel
.g., individual skills), a mesolevel (e.g., household networks), or a macro-
rel (eigi, the historical contextual contingency of the relation between
n itmn-states in the core and (former colonial) nation-states in the periphery
13
id semi-periphery) (Faist 2 0 0 0 : 3 1 ) . "What does seem clear is that as
ore and more (illegal) immigrants move from the South to the North (or
-aiso from the East to the West in the case of Western Europe) (Massey et
' "98: 133), pressures on the inter-state system will increase (Wallerstein
L
' ' s b : 161). Traditional efforts of nation-states to control borders and
. itimine the numbers and types of people w h o enter and remain in their
ritory are no longer effective (Bigo 1998), and a decline in sovereignty
he result (Cornelius, Martin, and Hollifield 1994; Richmond 1 9 9 4 : 2 1 6 -
_ 7). Once again, this is important since the sovereignty of nation-states
hich is a sine qua non for the continued existence of the inter-state sys-
m) is a fundamental pillar of the capitalist world-economy (Wallerstein
. 199: 5 7 - 7 5 ) . Theoretically, ever-increasing "migrations of poverty"
juehenno 1995: 25) from the periphery to the core can be interpreted as
symptom of crisis in the world-system (Vandepitte et al. 1994: 147). The
n amber of people massively migrating is greater than it has ever been (Wei-
:r 1997: 97), and the widening demographic and socioeconomic gap be-
veen the haves and have-nots in this world (Sorensen 1996: 93) can only
84 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movemer

increase the potentiality of more migration to the core as the total migra
population constitutes today only circa 2% of the entire world populatic
14
(Faist 1997: 1 8 7 ) .
As "exclusive territoriality" is being destabilized by economic globa
zation and mass migration (Sassen 1996), the legitimacy of the nation-sta
is undermined in the long run. This, in turn, can provoke the upsurge
ls
the far r i g h t , which as a movement may create instability in the inte
state system. Again, following the logic of capitalist accumulation in ti
world-economy, some entrepreneurs in the core (e.g., in agribusiness)
favor continuing to exploit (illegal) immigrants since they offer them ti
16
possibility to make more profit and weaken the welfare state. Howev<
although migration remains essential for capital in the form of the consta
re-creation of a surplus labor pool and the constitution of a policy that ci
foster divisions in the working class in the core, mass migration itself, <
a global scale, is "posing an increasing threat to the stability of the gloh
capitalist system" (Standing 1 9 8 1 : 202) in the long run.
This does not imply that mass migration itself is per se economical
detrimental to a specific "receiving" country in the core at a specific tir
17
(Salt 1 9 9 3 ) . Indeed, experts of the United Nations Population Divisi<
estimated in 1999 that by the year 2 0 2 5 Europe may need 135 million new
immigrants to maintain its active population. But what is important to no
is that highly educated people will be especially welcomed by core coun-
tries, not relatively poorly educated family members, asylum seeke
ugees, and illegal immigrants (Salt 1992). If the policy of attracting high
educated people from the periphery is implemented by the core as a pi
manent strategy, this will result not only in an even more prominent for
of brain drainexposing yet again the myth of Third World dru-lo
menteuphemized as "enhanced skilled labor transfers" (White 1993: 6.
18 1
of the "best and the brightest" (Moore 1994: 1 4 3 ) , but also in gro'
political tensions due to the existent practices of racialization in core con
tries (Wallerstein 1995c: 2 6 - 2 7 ) as more "foreign workers" are gradual
transforming themselves into "minority workers" (Gimenez 1988: 40)
In 1993 approximately 3 million illegal immigrants resided in Weste.
Europe, "with new immigrants entering the region at the rate of 1-2 millic
a year" (Altamirano 1999: 4 5 4 ) . This is most likely only the beginning sine,
the polarizing logic of the world-economy will induce ever-increasing nm
bers of (illegal) immigrants to move from the periphery to the semi-pei iphe
19
and from the semi-periphery to the c o r e , thus challenging the existen
of the inter-state system as more and more immigrants within the core u
the arguments of liberalism to make their o w n justified claim to equal righ
(which diminishes the rate of profit for capitalists). As immigrants keep <
moving in the highly stratified world-economy, using ingenious strategi
of relying on various affiliations and networks to overcome the barrii.
created by core states to prevent them from coming (cf. Massey and Espi-
 Mass Migration in the World-System 85

nnsa 1997), their fight to get "legalized" and get the same (political, eco-
nomical, and social) rights as other citizens in the core implies a double
squeeze on the sovereignty and financial burden of various core states. This
is especially challenging to the democratic institutions that are maintained
b\ core countries, as those w h o favor the protection of popular sovereignty
for various reasons (e.g., to bring about a redistribution of wealth within
a nation-state) are increasingly confronted with "global egalitarians" (Wei-
ner 1996: 176), that is, those w h o are concerned by global inequalities and
the' exploitation of (illegal) immigrants within core countries (cf. Van Parijs
20
1 9 9 2 : 1 6 3 - 1 6 4 ) . After having lured immigrants directly to the core in the
uoi Id-economic upturn of 1 9 4 5 - 1 9 7 3 , while hoping that they would be
nothing more than a reserve labor army that would return to the periphery
whenever the economic upturn would end (King 1996: 48; Obdeijn 1998:
130), capitalist firms from core countries have been indirectly inducing
more immigrants to move from the periphery and semi-periphery to the
cote in the Kondratieff B-period (from 1973 onward). This indirect lure
: ITI sught about by the fact that multinationals increasingly re-allocate
themselves outside the core, where (labor) costs are (temporarily) cheaper,
and exploit young laborers there only to dismiss them after a few years
.when they become "too expensive" after unionization sets in. This "eco-
r.onnc redundancy" converts these (uprooted) laborers thereafter into "a
:ead\ pool for future migration" (Portes 1996: 165; Graham 2 0 0 0 : 188).
leral countries have become slowly "remolded by the twin processes
-of corporate globalization and immigrant transnationalization" (Portes
19%: 164). Thus, the exploitation of young laborers in the periphery in-
Jiu.es them to migrate to the core, while, once arrived there, the
abo\ e-mentioned (chain) migration networks are likely to facilitate ever-
ncire immigration in the near future (Boyd 1989: 641). Indeed, existent
immigrant networks, despite all the pressures enacted by the core states to
curb immigration, are crucial to explain continuing migration processes to
21
various core z o n e s .
Despite the attempts of core states to clamp d o w n on mass immigration
, during the process of decolonization and downturn in the capitalist world-
economy (c. 1973), it seems that due to the above-mentioned networks
migration to the core has "developed a momentum that allows it to func-
t i o n independently of originating forces and policies aimed at controlling
it" (Gurak and Caces 1992: 159; cf. Simmons and Guengant 1992: 113).
Essentially, mass migration in the late twentieth century has to be inter-
preted in the context of a structural framework that reflects the interde-
pendency (power) relations between core, semi-periphery, and periphery as
they constitute an essential background of why (and how) families in the
|semi-) periphery decide to attempt to migrate to the core. An indication
of the enormous pressures brought on core nation-states by the phenome-
non of mass migration from the periphery and semi-periphery is indicated
86 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements:

22
by the general tightening of immigration laws and control (Vandepitte,
et al. 1994: 137; Burgers and Engbersen 1995: 225), the experimentation
23
with various re-migration policies, and the increasing problems of core
24
states to transform themselves in genuine multi-cultural societies.
Only the proposition to push through the transferability of social rights*
between states for immigrants (Baubock 1993: 45), resulting in universal-
izing entitlements and a "globalization of the welfare system" (Halfmann
1998: 528), would be an alternative strategy by core countries to deal withs
massive out-migration from the periphery, but by doing so, one would push
liberalism and its notions of progress and universal rights into practice and
change the very nature of the capitalist world-system. Last but not least,
from a liberal ideological point of view, it is difficult to construct more
barriers against immigrants; individual human rights, including the freedom
of movementas in the freedom of movement for capital, goods, technol-
ogy, and knowledge (Lim 1992: 139; Vernez 1996: 6) and the right for the
pursuit of happinesscan hardly be claimed for the capitalist entrepreneur
alone (Emmer and Obdeijn 1998: 12). The "very different regimes for the
circulation of capital and the circulation of people" (Sassen 1998: 66).
with the exception of wealthy entrepreneurs and tourists (Bauman 1998:
89)may very well not be defensible in the long run. A continuing policy
of exclusion and protectionism, which may "save" the core by maintaining
a world order of "global apartheid" (Richmond 1994; Alexander 1996).
is, after all, completely the opposite of liberal ideology, which is still de-
fended by most parties in power, whether they are mainstream Christian
democrats or social democrats.
The principle of the nation-state that claims that the world is divided in
sovereign states and that only those w h o are citizens are entitled to certain
rights (politically as well asthough less overtlysocioeconomically) im-
plies that "foreign citizens, permanently residing in a state are excluded
from democratic participation and processes" (Sorensen 1996: 61). It fol-
lows that the political realm of a nation-state in the world-economy is
constructed in favor of its o w n electorate and not in favor of people from
the "outside" w h o seem to threaten its institutions. Immigrants' demands
for suffrage or legalization will continue an uphill battle in core countries,
as they most likely will attempt to restrict more migrants from coming and
impose more draconian measures to implement their immigration policies
(e.g., Mitchell 1994), but again, any success will be only minimal at best
25 ;
(e.g., Singer and Massey 1998: 5 8 5 ) .

CONCLUSION

The rapid population growth in the periphery and semi-periphery

opposed to the core) and the processes inherent to the capitalist world-
economy (in which multinationals exploit cheap labor in the periphen.
only to pull out to other peripheral locations the moment wages rise some
 lass Migration in the "World-System 87

hat) produce masses of workers in the periphery w h o are without jobs

ad who have high expectations that cannot be fulfilled locally (Lim 1992:
35, 145). At the same time, a growing number of ecological refugees,
while being primarily an immediate disaster to countries located in the
eriphery, may threaten the stability in the inter-state system as a whole.
- nice core states are militarily, economically, and technologically stronger
ian peripheral ones, the desperate masses of the latter constitute the
reatest threat toand arouse the greatest fear ofcore states in the
-orld-economy (King 1998: 125). Instead of looking at international mass
ligration as a threat, one should recognize it first and foremost as "an
<pression of spatial inequality" (King 1996: 54) that could bring the sys-
:m fundamentally into disequilibrium in the long run.
At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the increasing signifi-
. luce of the far right, with a racial anti-meritocratic agenda, as a possible
ntisystemic movement in itself, instead of treating it as nothing more than
n accidental outburst in national elections or a pure local phenomenon
within a nation-state in a period of economic recession. Far-right move-
lents have their o w n sinister agenda, which is, after all, not necessarily
inged upon the ceaseless accumulation of capital.
As we proceed further into the twenty-first century, the "receiving" coun-
tries in the core will be less hospitable and tolerant to (illegally) arriving
nmigrants from the semi-periphery and the periphery, while peripheral
nd semi-peripheral countries are likely to increase their opposition to the
;hizophrenic new world order, which demands more open borders for
capital and goods but ever-tightened borders for human beings (Andreas
.000). Indeed, as true convergence in socioeconomic conditions between
r>re countries, on one hand, and peripheral countries, on the other hand,
; very unlikely to occur in the near future (Coleman 1997: 144; Kohler
998, 1999; Mansouri-Guilani 1998: 11; Kohler and Tausch forthcom-
26
ig); non-core countries increasingly become dependent on the revenues
:ceived from (illegal) immigrants working in core countries w h o send
27
loney back home (e.g., Lorey 1999: 164165) since the countries from
?hich they originated are structurally incapable of creating enough jobs
3r their o w n population (Hammar and Tamas 1997: 6; Martin 1997: 20).
Once governments of peripheral and semi-peripheral countries finally de-
ide to officially promote and support the (international) migration of all
icir "excess populations" to the core (cf. van Hulst 1995: 86; Levy 1999:
_20), the end of developmentalist ideology and the crisis of capitalism are
kely to unfold simultaneously, at an ever-faster pace.

\OTES
1. Welfare regimes are, after all, "built upon the foundation of nation-states
which then] develop internal distributions of political power" (Baubock 1993: 44).
2. There is no agreement among scholars to what extent mass migration of
 4
88 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements-}

(unskilled) workers affects "native" workers or (on an aggregate level) the "receiv- ;

ing" country in a negative way. For the argument that mass migration does exactly^
this, cf. Borjas (1998: 121-144) and Beck (1998: 156-158). For a refutation of'
these claims, cf. the discussion in DeFreitas (1998: 341-349). However, what isj
important in my argument here is not so much the impact of the current number!
of immigrants on a specific receiving welfare state at present but the potential im->
pact of mass migration from the periphery to the core on a much larger scale kl
the near future.
1
3. Not only will the number of socioeconomically deprived people increase
quite rapidly in the periphery (Mansouri-Guilani 1998: 9; Obdeijn 1998: 136), but
the fact that an ever-increasing percentage of the population will be very young in;
the first half of the twenty-first century only increases the possibility of migration,'?
as young people are more likely to be willing to migrate than older ones (Plane'
1992).
4. It is quite clear that the decolonization movements of the periphery hoped -
to copy the prosperity of the core to their own nation-state by way of reformism-?
embedded in either a Marxist or liberal state-reformist ideology. Now that this ^
alternative has ceased to exist, mass migration becomes worldwide one of the most^j
significant hopes to improve one's socioeconomic situation. The fact that the re-1
maining colonial islands in the Caribbean refused to become independent (from t i t ;
core) during the 1990s when urged to construct their own nation-state is quite
symbolic of the disbelief in the possibility of socioeconomic development in the'
periphery (cf. Grosfoguel 1997). A good example to illustrate this is the Indiaa -
Ocean Republic of the Comoros. This country of 600,000 people, composed of the *
islands of Grand Comore, Moheli, and Anjouan, located north of Madagascar,
voted overwhelmingly for independence (95%) from France in 1975. The sole ex-
ception was the neighboring island Mayotte, which voted to remain a colony. By
1997 living conditions had become so bad on the Comoros that on the islands of
Anjouan and Moheli revolts broke out (against the government on Grand Comore)
with the explicit purpose of returning under French sovereignty. After all, since
independence the standard of living on Mayotte had improved, whereas in the|
Comoros it had declined (Aldrich and Connell 1998: 228-232). When the govern-
ment sent in troops in September 1997 to suppress the revolt with the aid of Ga-,
bonese and Senegalese mercenaries, the troops were repulsed from the island of'
Anjouan, where French flags were raised as July 14 was proposed to be once
the "fete nationale." The French government, however, politely refused to ci
a re-annexation of the islands. This impasse led the population of Anjouan to con- -
sider independence from the Comoros, which resulted in even more civil warfare ^
on the island since pro-French groups refused to accept this option.
5. "The control of frontier transit is among the greatest powers the state* , K -
tually exercise in the inter-state system" (Wallerstein 1991: 79). This app
course, for both products in a commodity chain that sustains core-periphery rela-,
tions as well as human beings. Since mass migration can only be discouraged at
best, the credibility of the nation-state itself is now painfully at stake (Vernez 1996:"
7-8).
6. Some examples are Switzerland, Austria, France, Belgium, and Italy, but also '
Sweden. The absence of a successful racist party in national elections does, of
 M.j-j Migration in the 'World-System 89

sparse, not imply that no racism or racist attacks against immigrants exist in a
souctv (e.g., England, the Netherlands, or Spain).
j 7. Especially world-cities may become the main magnets of South-North mi-
gration;; "The big cities in the West are apparently destined to be 'host cities' for
l | e people of the developing world. Immigration is turning the big cities in the West
into . economic bridge to the Third World" (Lipshitz 1998: 195-196).
S Indeed, refugees attempting to flee to the United States have beenif not
.isrurned to their country of originincreasingly "relocated" somewhere in the pe-
r%)herv; itself (such as in Guantanamo on Cuba) or to other islands and bases,
jfjiecording to Stoett (1999: 76) it is very likely that "the South could well be left
|bunch to its own devices to deal with the coming environmental crisis. It is fairly
iJiife to predict that the North will offer only minimal assistance."
lor the implications of limited ecological space related to migration and
* onomic development, see Amankwaa (1995), Hugo (1996), and Hermele
f!9v- 155-158).
1 0 . Since core countries have started to impose heavy fines on any business that
> insible for bringing illegal immigrants into their territory (Rasmussen 1997:
<cp6), anincreasing number of stowaways on ships sailing to the core are now being
metviL'-sly dumped in the ocean by crews who do not want to risk getting a pay
Mil because of these fines (Reuters 1996). The ship McRuby is only one recent and
a-How 'kid example (Vidal and Corthouts 1999). Equally dangerous are the practices
"tij :i'.!"jc smugglers who just dump their human cargo in the Mediterranean the
-moment the coast guard comes in sight (Salt and Stein 1997: 82).
'. 11 The presence of more illegal immigrants became a hot issue in the 1990s all
O v e i m c core (Spencer 1992; Cornelius et al. 1994; Morita and Sassen 1994; Gro-
CBii ik and Bocker 1995). The majority of scholars are exceedingly pessimistic
<huut i oe efficiency of "yet more authoritarian tools to enforce ever more restrictive
1
-tnir ".! ition policies to halt immigration from the South" (Findlay 1996: 50). Van-
dep'tri et al. (1994: 139) and Rogers (1992: 1122) estimate that of all asylum
M who are denied legal residence in Europe, on average 70% of all asylum
<ppik.rEions in Europe are not recognized (Rogers 1992: 1122), 5 to 10% are
Rp..r ted, 10 to 15% voluntarily return, and 75 to 80% disappear into illegality
in tn. :ore. Not surprisingly, this increases the "criminalization of migration" (den
< & . e r 1^95: 102-104; Engbersen and van der Leun 1998: 216-217) in most core
< o u n r i i c s . An indication of this process is the fact that "the great growth area of
nuc on studies in Europe and the U.S. is about how to control, reduce, and
ehn " ite immigration in developed countries" (Sutcliffe 1998: 331). As a result
flttci national migration becomes for most politicians and academics a security con-
cern rather than a humanitarian issue (Waever et al. 1993; Vernez 1996; Abiri
7
20 ' 2 ; Tsardanidis and Guerra 2000).
i i . Of course, most of the jobs that illegal immigrants are prepared to do are
j&bs that citizens of core countries would not want to do in the first place (e.g.,
C smpani 1999). Unemployment figures in receiving countries are only marginally
i Jetted by current immigration levels (e.g., Friedberg and Hunt 1995; Stalker 2000:
'>. \\ oter-Ebmer and Zweimuller 2000). There exists no zero-sum game of who
gets the job. Nevertheless, the presence of large groups of immigrants is likely to
* shaken the bargaining power of labor as a whole by preserving a specially un-
derprivileged class of workers who can easily be super-exploited" (Sutcliffe 1998:
90 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Moveme;

334). But my main point is that the costs of the welfare state in the core are gr<
ually driven up by (1) having to patrol the borders more frequently, (2) increasi
investments in very expensive repatriation procedures, and (3) increasingly missi
out on income taxes from legal jobs. This negative spiral of increasing border ]
trols, repatriations, less state income, and more violent processes of racializati
and discrimination seems unavoidable in the centers of global capital accumulate
In addition, one should not forget that there has never been a political or soc
consensus in core countries that immigrant laborers, welcomedor rather tol
atedunder the more benign auspices of an economic upturn (1947-1973), woi
be entitled to become de facto or de jure permanent residents, let alone citizf
during the succeeding economic downturn (Freeman 1995). Not only was the p
manent settlement of "guest workers" (as the term itself indicated) from periphe
countries (Morocco, Turkey, Algeria, etc.) a highly controversial issue, but the f;
that they not only remained after the 1973 economic downturn set in but sent!
their wives, children, and other (to-be) family members (Layton-Henry 1990: 16
created an enormous political backlash in the form of a surge in far-right an
immigrant groups and parties in the post-1980 core countries (cf. Betz 1994: 1(
Betz and Immerfall 1998), which suggests that mass migration from the peripht
to the core may beat least in the short run"more a social and political than
economic problem for the countries concerned" (Collinson 2000: 307). Nevertl
less, despite a proliferation of discriminatory practices and xenophobic outbur
against immigrants, "even unemployment and a marginal existence in Western I
rope will be viewed as preferable to conditions of economic and personal insecur
and helplessness that are increasingly evident in many parts of the Third Worl
(Waever et al. 1993: 152).
13. Because of these contingencies, rooted in power relations manifested witl
the world-economy, it follows that people who decide to migrate from, for examp
Surinam and the Netherlands Antilles are more likely to migrate toward the Net
erlands than to another core country. As this example illustrates, it is clear tl
international mass migration is thus not so much a question of geographical d
tance or the desire of an ideal-typical "homo ecohomicus" to migrate from a
region in the periphery to any wealthy region in the core. Ultimately, the migrati
process itself has to be analyzed in the historical context of the postcolonial worl
system, on one hand and the existing immigrant networks within it, on the ott
hand, since these are the crucially important variables in denning the parameti
of the framework in which most households have to make decisions regarding th<
strategies of international mobility (Cammaert 1986; Garson 1988; Rex 1999:15
155).
14. This often-quoted figure does, of course, not include various kinds of rei
gees who are displaced within a specific nation-state (cf. Martin, Lowell, and Tayl
2000:155). Nor does it take into account the fact that some regions in the periphe
export many more people than others. Caribbean states such as St. Kitts and Nev
Grenada, and Belize, for example, "send 1 to 2 percent of their citizens to the U
each year, transferring all of their population growth in North American citie
(Mittelman 2000: 60).
15. So far there is no consensus among world-system scholars about to wt
extent far-right fascist and neo-fascist movements have been "pro-systemic" or "a
tisystemic." In my opinion they were and are antisystemic. Antisystemic does,
 Mass Migration in the World-System 91

course, not necessarily imply that they are ethically "sound" movements, just that
tky oppose the system and its logic. In a sense racist ideology can be so important
that fascists may relegate capitalist accumulation to a secondary position and at
seme point even obstruct it in order to maintain their racial hierarchical position
in a society.
16. Permanent forms of discrimination and racism within the core are (contrary
to <\ lat modernization theorists argue) structurally preventing immigrants from
"catching up" and integrating, since the incorporation of (illegal) immigrants within
lie flexible, informal (service) economy of core countries is a structural need. In
other words, immigrants can fulfill their socioeconomic function in the core only
if they are discriminated against (Vandepitte et al. 1994: 148) and are trapped in
"a situation in which [they] are incorporated into certain areas of society (above
all the labor market) but denied access to others (such as welfare systems, citizen-
snip and political participation)" (Castles 1995: 295). This discrimination of im-
migrants also promotes growing awareness in (and polarization around) ethnic
, identities while (legal and illegal) immigration increases, which, in turn, feeds upon
already existing racism in the core. The inter-state system, based on territorial
boundaries of nation-states (and, ipso facto, the inclusion of some and exclusion
of certain rights to others) and its ideological legitimacy (nationalism), is in itself a
condition for the perpetuation of racism and discrimination as long as it continues
i.\ist (Balibar 1991: 37-67). Even when immigrants have become "citizens" on
' paper, they are, because of their color of skin or perceived static cultural differences,
' still considered "foreigners" by the majority of the public opinion within a nation-
, state (e.g., Baud 1992: 318) and used as scapegoats (Leitner 1995: 268-269). For
an interesting conceptual differentiation between legally resident immigrants ("den-
k'tis") and illegal and more marginalized immigrants (margizens), cf. Martiniello
,<1994).
17. Especially in the United States it is likely that the current number of immi-
grants is not detrimental to the well-being of its economy at least at the federal
level (DeFreitas 1998: 355). But this is probably due to the fact that access to what
- ii left of the welfare state is becoming more difficult for (even legal) immigrants. In
countries where the welfare state is much more institutionalized (as in Western
'' 'Europe), it is logical that a massive increase of immigrants in a short period of time
* would challenge the existing societal structures in a much more profound way.
18. The assumed negative effects of brain drain on "developing" countries are
'even for the left in the core) often used as an excuse to restrict immigration to the
core to unprecedented levels. This argument unfortunately "blames the failures of
^'attderdevelopment for emigration of skilled people rather than the other way
* around" (Sutcliffe 1998: 332). For a study of brain drain in a world-system per-
spective, cf. Cheng and Yang 1998.
19. "International migration is thus a collective phenomenon which arises as
I part of the social relations between the less developed and more developed parts
f of the economy" (Waever et al. 1993: 150). Most potential immigrants in the pe-
riphery simply do not have the means to migrate to the core. It is therefore likely
irthat they can obtain easier access to the semi-periphery than to the core (e.g., guest
. workers in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) countries),
while it is logical that most people moving to the core do so from the semi-
j? periphery. In Poland, for example, about 2.5% to 5% of the population was al-
92 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

ready working illegally in Germany during the year 1989, whereas soon after at:
least circa 50,000 illegal workers (from Russia, China, and even Vietnam) migrated
to Poland, "attracted by $100 monthly wages that are convertible in hard currency.'
.. . Poles [in turn] refuse these jobs because they pay what the Polish unemployment:
insurance system provides in benefits and, if Poles want to do these jobs, they can
migrate freely to most of Western Europe" (Martin 1992: 1007-1008).
20. On the specific challenges that this creates for existing strategies of labor
unions in the core, cf. Martens (1999). The question remains, as Martens admits
(1999: 226), to what extent unions and their political affiliations in core countries:
will show solidarity with (potential) immigrants from the periphery since most peo-
ple in the core are, after all, (indirect) benefactors of "transfer value" (Kohler
1999b). The dilemma can be summarized in the question: If mass migration can
imperil the right to economic security of people in the receiving (core) country,
whose (human) rights have priority? The rights of those already residing in the core
or the (human) rights of (potential) immigrants? The answer to this question is:
likely to depend on whether one takes "our own country" or "our planet" as the
unit of analysis (Sutcliffe 1998: 335).
21. The continuing trend of declining transportation costs should also not be
underestimated (Lakeman 1999: 141).
22. As Sutcliffe (1998: 330) points out: "All European states now tighten their
immigration laws and worsen their treatment of immigrants more or less continu-
ously in a process of competitive devaluation [as] all wish to avoid the perception
among potential asylum seekers that their regime is 'softer' than that of any other
country." This is quite blatant in Britain (Lyall 2000), but one recent example of
the introduction of more control mechanisms to prevent immigration to the core
in a "softer" welfare state is the introduction of a compulsory identification card
in the Netherlands (Albeda et al. 1989: 92-93), while immigration on the basis of
family-reunification has been made more difficult (Sprangers 1995: 30).
23. This is also the case in the Netherlands, which is generally considered one
of the most tolerant core states vis-a-vis immigration. Already from 1985 onward,
the Dutch government financially stimulated the return of unemployed elderly im-
migrants to the periphery (Aksoycan-de Bever 1987: 44-47). Several educational,
job-related projects organized by the Dutch government within major emigration
countries such as Morocco, Turkey, and even the Dutch Antilles in order to lure
immigrants back to their place of origin (Sociaal Economische Raad 1991: 69-70)
have also been launched but obtained only extremely limited success (Molle and
Zandvliet 1994: 89).
24. The irritation that immigrants bring about is well illustrated by the policies
recommended by a former state secretary in the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
Orstram M0ller (2000: 98): "[immigrants] cannot demand special rules instituted
for them. Nor should their behavior challenge the cultural identity of the country
they themselves have chosen as their new home . .. cultural minorities must show
that they want to be members of societynot to disrupt society or behave contrary
to its existing rules . . . experience also shows it is not a good idea to provide too
much cushion for immigrants/refugees. It may sound harsh, but apparently they
integrate faster and with better results by having access to only limited help and
assistance. They must feel that they will solve their problems largely by themselves,
Mass Migration in the World-System 93

and in this way build self-confidence [which will improve] the probability of achiev-
ing a homogenous society."
25. Soft measures, propagated by more liberal states such as the Netherlands,
advocate the usage of negative "infomercials" in the colonial territories. As migra-
tion from the Dutch Caribbean to the Netherlands has become the most pressing
issue of the Dutch presence on the islands (Posthumus 1990: 209; Mantel 1998),
the Dutch have spent in the last years over $1 million in the tiny Dutch Antilles
alone, not for investments or "developmental aid" but merely on information cam-
paigns with the explicit purpose to dissuade Antilleans from migrating to the Neth-
erlands (van Hulst 1995: 109). The fear of increasing immigration from its
remaining colonial possessions in the Caribbean is not unwarranted: thousands of
illegal immigrants from the periphery manage to move toward the colonial Carib-
bean semi-periphery (Oostindie 1996: 207), and it is quite likely that from there
many are able to move on to the core (Delaet 2000: 113), as a move from the
periphery to the colonial semi-periphery often just "represents the first stage of
migration to the metropole" (Connell and Aldrich 1991: 199).
26. According to the UN's latest Human Development Report, "the total wealth
of the top 358 'global billionaires' equals the combined incomes of the 2.3 billion
poorest people (45% of the world's population)" (Bauman 1998: 70).
27. It is estimated that in countries such as the Philippines, Morocco, Turkey,
11 Salvador, Pakistan, Syria, Tunisia, Honduras, or Mexico the remittances of for-
eign workers are very important to their economies (Choucri 1986; Hamilton and
Chinchilla 1996: 216; Vandaele 1999: 93; Stalker 2000: 80-82), as in some cases
they surpass by far the flow of direct foreign investment (Patnaik and Chandrasek-
har 1998: 361) or even their national budgets (Menjivar et al. 1998: 99). Martin
(1997: 23) estimates that worldwide remittances of immigrants residing in industrial
countries to their countries of origin were at least $75 billion per year, which
outweighs the amount of official development assistance to "developing" countries.
It is therefore logical that they will become increasingly involved in the treatment
of their subjects abroad, defend their rights, and even increasingly promote migra-
tion to the core as a policy (van Hulst 1995: 86).

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 Chapter 6

Twentieth-Century Antisystemic
Historical Processes and U.S.
Hegemony: Free Trade Imperialism,
National Economic Development,
and Free Enterprise Imperialism
Satoshi Ikeda

INTRODUCTION

I he twentieth century stands out as a century in which the capitalist world-

system was fundamentally challenged. Oppressed people achieved numer-
ous successes in challenging and transforming the world-systemic structure
of oppression. Examples include political independence in the peripheral
/one, civil rights movements of the racial minority in the United States,
' women's movements for gender equality in the core zone, and workers'
movements for an improvement in working conditions, job security, and
better wages. Even though the success of many antisystemic movements is
evident when we look back at the century, prosystemic countermovements
*, have been equally successful in overcoming the success of antisystemic
movements. At the end of the century the capitalist world-system remains
; intact, and its structure of oppression and exploitation functions with only
limited vestiges of resistance. The major ideological challenger, Marxism,
appears to have lost appeal after the fall of socialist states.
In order to reveal the basic characteristics of the world-system as we
entered the twenty-first century, this chapter attempts an evaluation of the
twentieth century by juxtaposing antisystemic movements of the oppressed
ind prosystemic response of the oppressor. Specifically, I focus on three
najor antisystemic processes.of the twentieth century: intracore rivalry,
eolonial independence movements, and socialist movements. The main pro-
v systemic response was offered by the United States, the hegemonic power
\ of the capitalist world-system after World War II. This chapter, in sunl-
it mary, argues that contradictions within British free trade imperialism pre-
p c e d the way for three major antisystemic historical processes of the
104 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements,

twentieth century. After intracore rivalry was settled through two world
wars, successful socialist and independence movements forced the United
States to accept national economic development both in the core and pe-
riphery, postponing the earlier design of free enterprise imperialism ex-
pressed by the Open Door policy and Wilson's Fourteen Points statement.
Successful national economic development in Western Europe and Japan,
however, undermined U.S. hegemony. The measures taken by the United
States to counter this trend put an end to national economic development,
and free enterprise imperialism was established in the form of neoliberal
globalization under U.S. hegemony in the 1990s.
"Antisystemic movement" is a concept used by world-system researchers
to express movements of the oppressed to counter the oppressor (Arrighi,
Hopkins, and Wallerstein 1989; Silver, Arrighi, and Dubofsky 1995; Tay-
lor 1997). This concept bridges the notions of structure, agency, and pro-
cess. In this chapter, I use "antisystemic historical process" (or antisystemic
process) as a concept that expands and complements the concept of anti-
systemic movement. The working definition proposed here is a historical
process that is in contradiction with the reproduction of the existing ac-
cumulation mechanism and political, economic, and ideological power re-
lations in the capitalist world-system. This modified concept allows us to
discuss contradictory processes that may not involve clear movement of the
oppressed. Also employed in this chapter is the concept of prosystemic
historical processes that are concordant with the reproduction of the exist-
ing accumulation mechanism and power relations in the system.
In addition to the interplay of prosystemic and antisystemic historical
processes, the following exploration employs a conceptual dichotomy of
transformative process vis-a-vis reproductive process. A "structure" is a
collection of reproductive processes involving those agencies promoting the
existing power relations and those agencies opposing them, as well as social
relations of exploitation/accumulation and subordination/subjugation. A
transformative process emerges as a result of contradiction in reproductive
process (or structure). For example, antisystemic processes emerge when
prosystemic reproductive processes undermine the very condition that al-
lows systemic reproduction. I expect that this dialectical interpretation is
useful not only for historical examination but also for the exploration of
emerging processes.

N I N E T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y S T R U C T U R E OF
A C C U M U L A T I O N U N D E R BRITISH FREE T R A D E
IMPERIALISM

Arrighi calls the structure of world-systemic accumulation under British

hegemony "free trade imperialism" (Arrighi 1994: 4 7 - 5 8 ) . This term was
used earlier by Gallagher and Robinson (1953), w h o argued that British
intisystemic Historical Processes and U.S. Hegemony 105

imperialism preferred a hands-off free trade approach rather than employ-

1
ing formal colonial rule. Arrighi used the term "free trade imperialism" to
designate the world-systemic order under the British hegemony, including
the British-dominated inter-state system and the global financial order cen-
tered in London based on the gold standard. While these aspects are crit-
ically connected to the nineteenth-century structure of accumulation, I
think that it is also important to focus on commodity chain and labor
processes in the "free trade imperialism" of the nineteenth century. This
aspect would help us identify the structural contradictions that produced
the major twentieth-century antisystemic historical processes.
The glory of British imperial power in the nineteenth century, as com-
monly understood, depended on the superior manufacturing and military
capability that the British acquired through the Industrial Revolution.
While industrial superiority exemplified by the textile factory and shipyard
was a key for British success in imperialist expansion, the nineteenth-
century accumulation process was not complete without world-system-wide
networks of production and consumption. One could, for example,
examine the commodity chain and labor process involving cotton yarn and
textile, because it was this commodity whose "free trade" served as the
primary driving force of nineteenth-century British imperialist expansion.
Although low-waged female and child workers in Britain manufactured
cotton yarn and cloths under harsh working conditions, its material input,
raw cotton, was imported from the American South and the British over-
seas territories. R a w cotton was produced by either slaves or colonized
peoples, and this implies that the forms of labor in the upstream of the
commodity chain of cotton manufacturing involved slave labor and other
non-proletarian forms of labor. In terms of historical processes, the British
Industrial Revolution in cotton manufacturing accompanied the transfor-
mation of the people of India from cotton manufacturers into raw cotton
producers, as well as the mobilization of slaves from Africa and plantations
in the Caribbean islands and South America for cotton cultivation in the
American South (e.g., Harnetty 1972: ch. 3; Mann 1968: Book III). In other
words, the British cotton industry was dependent on the supply of raw
material from the periphery, and the British Empire "peripheralized" the
American South and India by transforming them into cotton-growing
regions.
At the other end of the commodity chain of cotton manufacturing existed
the "absorber" of cotton products. Manufactured cotton products (yarn
and piece goods) were an important source of foreign exchange earnings
to the British. Viewing the same phenomenon of export from the angle of
effective demand, one can argue that the British lacked sufficient effective
demand within its imperial home market partly due to l o w wages. That is,
the export of these products was necessary since the domestic economy was
not expanding as rapidly as the industry. British export of cotton products
106 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

has been understood as the indicator of British strength, but as the follow-
ing examination of available statistics suggests, British accumulation was
heavily dependent on exports of cotton products to the periphery.
Total production of cotton yarn and piece goods (cloth) markedly in-
creased in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century. Raw cotton con-
sumption measured in weight, which is a good measure of output assuming
that material loss is negligible, increased by 27.5 times, from 5 9 4 million
pounds in the first decade of the nineteenth century ( 1 8 0 0 - 1 8 0 9 ) to 16,357
million pounds in the last decade ( 1 8 9 0 - 1 8 9 9 ) . Such an increase in pro-
duction was accompanied by a yet larger increase in exports. Total U K
export of cotton yarn and piece goods measured in weight increased 4 1 -
times, from 2 7 4 million pounds in the first decade to 11,348 million pounds
in the last decade. Dependence on exports measured by the ratio of cotton
goods exported to raw cotton consumption gradually increased for the Brit-
:
ish cotton industry from 4 6 . 1 % in the first decade to 7 5 . 7 % in the 1 8 8 0 s .
For the entire nineteenth century, more than two-thirds (68.8%) of B r m ^
cotton products were exported. As the scale of the British cotton industry
expanded, the British Empire expanded "free trading" markets in Asia
through formal and informal colonization. The process of the development
of British cotton industries, therefore, accompanied colonization/peripher-
alization of Asian peoples and countries through forced "open trade" and
through the destruction of local cotton manufacturing.
By drawing lessons from the cotton industry's example, it may be pos-
sible to generalize about the nineteenth-century structure of accumulatior
as follows. It depended on cheap raw materials from the periphery, low
waged workers in the core, and markets in the periphery. Raw material
(e.g., raw cotton) was produced by slave/semi-salve workers in periphery
plantation/mining areas and processed into industrial products (e.g., cotton
yarn and cloth) by low-paid workers in the core under harsh working and
living conditions.

CONTRADICTIONS OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY

STRUCTURE OF A C C U M U L A T I O N , T W E N T I E T H -
C E N T U R Y ANTISYSTEMIC HISTORICAL PROCESS, A N D
T H E U.S. H E G E M O N Y

Structurally, British free trade imperialism depended on the exploitation

of workers in the core and colonized people in the periphery. As the degree
of exploitation of these people deepened, there emerged t w o major anti-
systemic historical processes of the twentieth century. They were a socialist
movement (proletarian class struggle) in the core and a colonial indtpm
dence movement (anti-imperialist struggle) in the periphery, although these
3
t w o were closely intertwined ideologically and in practice. Class exploi-
tation deepened through increasingly violent business cycles and monopoh
intisystemic Historical Processes and U.S. Hegemony 107

ormation toward the end of the nineteenth century (McCormick 1989:

8), and there emerged active socialist/Communist labor movements in the
ore. Also, even though resistance and rebellion in the earlier time were
oppressed, colonial independence movements were brewing in the periph-
:ry zone toward the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the
ise of the core states that were competing against the British gradually
eroded British hegemony in global trade and accumulation, resulting in the
ntensification of intracore rivalry or inter-imperialist struggle. These three
najor antisystemic historical processes were closely intertwined, but let us
ecus on intracore rivalry as an introduction to the design of U.S. hege-
nonic world order in the early twentieth century.
When the rivalry among the imperialist powers is told as a history of the
econd half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth
:entury, the focus is usually placed on the rivalry between Germany and
he United States-United Kingdom alliance. However, an examination of
intracore rivalry in this period from the perspective of the cotton commod-
Lain proves that the major challenger to British hegemony was the
d States. U.S. history was a history of a competing empire that deep-
the contradiction of British free trade imperialism,
begin with, the U.S. Revolutionary War of the late eighteenth century
n'-i only meant a loss of tax revenue for the British Empire but also the
;ence of a rival for British control of the Americas. W. A. Williams
cterizes the birth of the United States as an imperial anticolonialist
"The vigorous expansionism manifested in the Monroe Doctrine was
o n \ the continuation and maturation of an attitude held by the Revolu-
y generation. Americans thought of themselves as an empire at the
c of their national existenceas part of the assertive self-consciousness
i culminated in the American Revolution" (Williams 1959: 21). An-
nialism was directed toward the British Empire for the emancipation
nericans themselves, but American imperialism was, from the early
:enth-century, directed toward British control in North, Central, and
" America as expressed in 1823 in the Monroe Doctrine.
die the United States expanded its influence over the Americas in the
n l.teenth century at the expense of British commercial activities and Span-
)litical control, the rivalry between the United States and the British
. . . . ^ l e manifested itself through the American Civil War. In light of the
iotton commodity chain, it is clear that this was the war between the British
ind North American cotton manufacturers over the supply of raw cotton,
iimilar to the instance of American independence, the British lost the war
ind had to seek the source of raw cotton in other parts of the world.
Other imperialist powers joined the United States in the second half of
he nineteenth century, and intensified competition over raw material and
narkets deepened the structural contradiction of the nineteenth-century
sructure of accumulation. As the entire world population and territories
108 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movemenb

were incorporated in the second half of the nineteenth century, the foun
dation of the nineteenth-century accumulation structure (i.e., colonial sub-
jugation, core worker exploitation, and the rise of rivals to the British)!
pushed forth the three antisystemic historical processes of the twentieth
century.
As the world-economic crisis deepened toward the end of the nineteenth,
century, U.S. political leaders designed its diplomatic policy along the line,
of anticolonial imperialism. McCormick summarizes Brooks Adams' heg-,'
emonic design as follows:

By 1900, American leaders were moving away from the nationalistic ideology
tariff protectionism and overseas imperialism. The ruling Republican Party moved'
to embrace a different ideology of tariff reciprocity and the Open Door policy. Its
the Dingley tariff of 1897 and the Open Door notes of 1899-1900, Adams v \
the glimmer of a transformation from defensive nationalism to expansive internals,
tionalism, to the ebullient notion that American economic supremacy was bes
served by an unlimited global market rather than a restricted national and coloruail
market. (McCormick 1989: 19)

It is important to note that McCormick's assertion that "American jeadc*

were moving away" from overseas imperialism was contradicting U.S. co-
lonial expansion in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific islands;
in the early twentieth century. In particular, the U.S. military killed more
than 2 0 0 , 0 0 0 Philippine people to suppress the independence movement in;
1901 (Karnow 1989: 18). While there was no hesitation on the part of t'-e
Americans to colonize peripheries, U.S. policy toward rival core states was?
the Open Door policy for the creation of an "unlimited global market."
The Open Door policy embodied a design of world order that has heg-s
emonic appeal. The policy pointed out that imperial competition was cost-,,
inefficient due to the resistance of colonized people and that resulting?,
monopoly prohibits competition for efficiency improvement. In contrast/
"the free market competition of an Open Door c o n t e x t . . . would discipline
them [capitalists] to make all their operations, foreign and domestic alike,
more efficient and profitable" (McCormick 1989: 19). This hegemonic de-
sign manifested in the Open Door policy was further polished by U.S. Pres-s
idem Wilson's classic Fourteen Points statement of early 1 9 1 8 . McCormick
summarizes:

Wilson's classic Fourteen Points statement of early 1918 was perhaps the quintes-
sential expression of the newly dominant American world view. Renouncing bal-
ance of power politics, that handmaiden of autarkic nationalism, Wilson called for
freedom of the seas, free trade ("the removal, so far as possible, of all economic
barriers"), a global open door ("an equality of trade conditions among all the
nations"), arms reductions, political self-determination, and a gradual end to co-
lonialism. (McCormick 1989: 22)
Antisystemic Historical Processes and U.S. Hegemony 109

V>iien we look back at the Fourteen Points statement after more than 80
\ears, it is clear that the U.S. Open Door policy provided an early version
ot what Arrighi called the system of free enterprise (Arrighi 1994: 5 8 - 7 4 ) .
Ideologically, it is called the Washington Consensus (Stiglitz 1998) of the
J
1 9 0 s that serves as the basis of a neoliberal globalization process imposed
hy the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), and the
\\ iirld Trade Organization (WTO). But the world-system went through an
e\entful century before establishing the U.S. hegemonic design of the early
decades of the twentieth century. With this in mind, the next section ex-
amines the interplay of antisystemic historical processes and a prosystemic
resoonse of U.S. hegemony.

SUCCESS OF SOCIALIST A N D INDEPENDENCE

MOVEMENTS A N D N A T I O N A L E C O N O M I C
DFVELOPMENT

Three major antisystemic historical processes (socialist movement, pe-

npheral independence movement, and intracore rivalry) made the twentieth
century a turbulent and violent century. Limits and contradictions of free
trade imperialism discussed in the previous section promoted these pro-
cesses, but what unfolded in the twentieth century was not an immediate
takeover of the world-system by U.S. hegemony, nor was it immediate im-
plementation of U.S. hegemonic design of free enterprise imperialism. Suc-
cessful independence and socialist movements prepared the period of
national economic development both in the core and periphery, and the
U.S. response to such success prepared the path toward globalization, al-
though this path was taken as a result of unexpected consequences of mis-
conceived policies.
From the viewpoint of the emerging U.S. hegemony, it took t w o world
wars to dismantle colonial empires. At the end of World War II, the United
States was the only major power whose economy and military were
strengthened by the war. Colonial empires were dismantled either as a re-
sult of defeat (Germany and Japan) or as a result of a successful colonial
^dependence movement (Britain and France). As the Bretton W o o d s sys-
tem of liberal international order was established, the world-system ap-
peared to be heading toward global "free trade," at least among the core
states. Intracore rivalry that took the form of imperialist competition was
"overcome" under U.S. hegemonic leadership. However, successful inde-
pendence movements and socialist movements forced a detour.
1'irst, socialist movement gave birth to the Soviet Union. This first suc-
cessful "proletarian" revolution not only threatened the legitimacy of bour-
geois ideology but also gave the independence movement the choice of a
socialist path (China). Successful political independence of the people in
the periphery was followed by their aspiration to "develop" their economy,
110 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movement

but socialist development from the viewpoint of the U.S. ruling class wa
as dreadful as older imperialist empires since it meant the end of investmer
and trade opportunities for American business. U.S. foreign policy again!
socialist states and socialist-independence movements involved overt an
covert intervention to lead independence movements toward a liberal pat
and to "contain" Communist expansion (Reifer and Sudler 1996). How
ever, the policy of Communist containment was a reaction to successfi
antisystemic processes, and such a policy was not enough to contain sc
cialist aspiration of the workers in the core. Thus, the core states initiate
measures to "co-opt" workers in the core, and these measures partly solve
the contradiction of the nineteenth-century structure of accumulation
Co-optation of American workers involved changes in corporate labc
practices and government policies. After radical labor movements ths
sought proletarian revolution were violently suppressed around the turn c
the twentieth century, American labor unions took the probusiness strateg
to secure employment, improve working conditions, and raise wages (Fui
feld 1966). Also, the federal government expanded its involvement in mat
roeconomic management, leading to the formation of a "welfare" stat
(Ashford 1986; Teeple 2 0 0 0 ) . These developments were aptly analyzed b
the French Regulationists using the term "Fordist regime of accumulation
(Boyer 1990). While this "co-optation" policy was abandoned later in th
process of neoliberal globalization, this policy worked to alleviate the cor
tradiction of the nineteenth-century structure of accumulation in the post-
World War II period. ,
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, inter-imperialist competitio
intensified, business fluctuation was amplified, and recession was pn
longed, and the workers and the colonized people became increasingK ui
ruly. Twentieth-century worker "co-optation" offered a solution to two c
the three fundamental "dependencies" of the nineteenth-century structui
of accumulation (i.e., worker exploitation in the core and reliance on mai
kets in the periphery). With increasing wages paid to American worker:
the working class was integrated into the capitalist system as the source c
4
effective demand. Counter-business cyclical policy expanded the role c
the government as the source of effective demand and the regulator of cred
supply. Therefore, the Fordist regime, Keynesian intervention, and welfai
state formation emancipated to a significant degree the core states fror
their dependency on markets in the periphery while replacing the socialis
dream of radical workers with the American dream of middle-class lifestyk
The third form of "dependency" of the nineteenth-century structure c
accumulation entailed a reliance on humans, natural resources, and indus
trial raw materials in the periphery. Mobilization of peripheral resources i
a constant feature of the capitalist world-system from its beginning, an
the U.S. government engaged in various policies to secure American acces
to natural resource and raw materials in the independent peripheral coun-
" ntisystemic Historical Processes and U.S. Hegemony 111

tries. This task, however, proved difficult to achieve due to successful so-
i Wist and independence movements, as well as the re-emergence of regional
historical processes previously suppressed under European imperialism. The
I I.S. approach to the resource-rich peripheral countries included direct mil-
itary engagement (Guatemala), covert operation (Chile), and bribery
through development and military financing (Iran and Indonesia). If mili-
tary engagement was a "stick," national economic development was used
as a "carrot" by the United States to keep peripheral countries open to U.S.
business.
The idea of national economic development was not necessarily in con-
tradiction with the system of free enterprise as long as U.S. enterprise could
operate freely within a given national border. State intervention in eco-
nomic management, however, was used to promote "national" enterprises
that challenged U.S. corporations, especially in Western Europe and Japan.
Resource nationalism of the petroleum-producing countries ended up
threatening access to resources for U.S. enterprises. Even though the project
A "national" economic development was somewhat contradictory to the
earlier design of world-economy, the United States accepted this strategy
as a countermeasure against Communist expansion.
National economic development was successful in Western Europe and
Japan, and the limits and contradictions of the nineteenth-century structure
of accumulation were overcome in these core states along the line of Ford-
>m, Keynesianism, and welfare state policy in the United States. While
revolutionary movements were effectively suppressed, the workers of these
^ore states were also "co-opted" to absorb products mass-produced by the
1 aylorist plants. Capitalist enterprises in these countries re-emerged as
powerful accumulators under the auspices of state protection and promo-
tion, taking advantage of the supply of peripheral natural resources needed
for economic growth secured by the neocolonial U.S. hegemony. Success
on the part of the West European countries and Japan, however, brought
i relative decline of the U.S. economy as an unintended consequence. In-
deed, the emergence of powerful enterprises elsewhere had the effect of
eroding the U.S. corporate advantage (Ikeda 1996).
Such challenges to U.S. hegemony also emerged in peripheral countries.
The failure of the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and its high finan-
cial cost gave the impression to leaders of the "Second and Third World"
countries that U.S. hegemony was in decline. Third World countries at-
tempted to negotiate "terms of trade" improvements through the United
Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in the 1970s.
In the process of post-independence national economic development, these
countries deepened their structural dependence on the First World through
the policy of import-substitution industrialization (ISI). In the 1960s, the
.-nee of their traditional exports, mainly agricultural products and miner-
jK. dropped as the world supply of these commodities increased. Demand
112 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements J
4
for an improvement in terms of trade was expressed through UNCTAD $
and other forums; however, it was successful only in the case of petroleum
Middle Eastern petroleum-producing countries used the oil embargo as i
a weapon to change the core countries' support for Israel in 1973 and J
eventually managed to increase their control over world oil prices. The *
success of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) sig-
naled a victory against the United States over the control of the world
petroleum supply. In the environment of global stagflation (stagnation and $
inflation existing simultaneously), many developing countries attempted to i
pursue further national economic development by taking in oil dollars at '
l o w interest rates in the form of short-term syndicated loans. These loans /
were provided by the core banks operating in a Eurodollar market based
on the agreement to roll over the loans so that they work just like long- j
term loans, provided the borrower keeps paying the interest. While many J
countries used the money for the further pursuit of the ISI policy, the so- ?
called newly industrializing countries emulated the successful Taiwanese
policy of export oriented industrialization (EOI).
Even though the project of national economic development was in full
swing in the 1970s in the periphery, contradictions and different develop- j
ment experiences plagued the project. First, the scope and degree of de- *
pendency on the part of the periphery widened and deepened. Under 1
ISI policy, the peripheral state became dependent on the core countries in
terms of finance (unilateral and multilateral aid and loans), technology,
capital goods, and intermediate goods. As private loans were introduced, ;
financial dependency deepened, and the EOI policy created a dependency ?
on markets in the industrialized North. Also, the Third World countries i
became polarized into oil producers, newly industrializing countries (NICs),
and those seriously affected by global stagflation and uncontrolled popu
lation expansion. Despite divergent trajectories within the periphery, thi
dream of national economic development still gleamed in the 1970s.
At the opposite end of such rosy prospects for national economic devel
opment and the promising future of 1970s Communism lay a weakenet
U.S. hegemony. Its industrial superiority was eroded, for instance, by th<
rising imports of Japanese automobiles. The weakened U.S. financial po
sition resulted in dollar-gold non-convertibility and substantial devaluation
of the U.S. dollar once the fixed exchange w a s abandoned. U.S. political
leadership in the inter-state system was also compromised by U.S. defea
in Vietnam, the OPEC oil embargo, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
and the Iranian revolution and subsequent hostage crisis. In the process
the stage was set for a U.S. hegemonic rollback that prepared an end tc
the state-socialist experiment, national economic development, and the ris<
of Japan, Germany, and other core and semi-peripheral states.
Antisystemic Historical Processes and U.S. Hegemony 113

U.S. HEGEMONIC RESPONSE A N D T H E E N D OF

NATIONAL E C O N O M I C DEVELOPMENT

The U.S. response to the erosion of its hegemonic position can be divided
into two stages (i.e., a passive response in the 1970s and an active one in
the 1980s). These responses led to the establishment of the world-economic
order envisioned by U.S. leaders in the early twentieth century. Instead of
being a result of sound analysis and rational policy choice, however, this
U.S. hegemonic reassertion appears to be a consequence of misconceived
theoretical understanding of economy and often irrational policy selection.
The superior position that the United States enjoyed in international
trade and finance started to erode in the 1960s as U.S. engagement in the
Vietnam War deepened (leading to rising trade deficits) and the European
Economic Community and Japan achieved economic development under
U.S. auspices. The foundation of postwar international economic order (the
Bretton W o o d s system) was the convertibility of the U.S. dollar with gold,
commitment to fixed exchange rates, the control of short-term international
liquidity by the IMF, and long-term development funds by the World Bank.
As the U.S. balance of trade turned to deep red, the U.S. government was
pressured by European governments to pay gold in the exchange of the
I S. dollar. The U.S. response was to abandon the commitment of dollar-
gold convertibility (Nixon declaration in 1971). Mounting downward pres-
sure on the value of the U.S. dollar made it impossible to maintain a fixed
exchange rate among major currencies, and another pillar of the Bretton
Woods system was abandoned in 1 9 7 3 .
These measures were the first round of global financial liberalization, and
thiv were followed by subsequent rounds of banking deregulation, lifting
of foreign exchange control, elimination of the boundaries among financial
strvice industries, and so on. These measures were gradually introduced in
the 1970s as a response to growing Eurodollar markets such that the U.S.
dollar would come back to the United States to ease the U.S. balance-of-
r.nments problem. These financial deregulation measures were a "passive"
response in the sense that they were directed toward the U.S. economy. But
these financial liberalization measures prepared the way for the emergence
or what Susan Strange (1986) called "casino capitalism," where an econ-
omy is driven by unregulated financial speculation.
As the slogan of a "strong America" indicates, the policy of the admin-
istration of Presidents Reagan and Bush between 1981 and 1 9 9 2 can be
considered an "active" response to a decline in U.S. hegemony. However,
rhetoric and actual policy were often in contradiction. For example, a
strong dollar was one of the policy goals, but this invited a flood of Jap-
anese and European products into the U.S. market, undermining American
"strength" in various industries. Also, smaller government was advocated
114 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements'.

to restore fiscal health of the U.S. economy, but tax cuts for the rich and
increased military expenditure inflated the government's budget deficit.
American corporations that were competing with foreign companies de-*
manded protection, and this came in the form of trade restriction in spite
of the rhetoric of free trade. Despite the discrepancy between the rhetoric
and actual policy, the Reagan-Bush governments put an end toeven if
largely unintendedthe erosion of U.S. economic hegemony vis-a-vis Japan
and West European countries.
The major challenger of U.S. economic hegemony in the 1980s was Ja-
pan, as indicated by the number of scholastic and popular publications
warning the Americans of the current and future threat of Japanese power
(their harbinger was Vogel 1979). Those American corporations that were
adversely affected by the Japanese exports managed to erect protectionist
walls such as the "voluntary" export restraint in automobiles. However,
such a measure simply gave the Japanese corporations a windfall profit
from higher unit prices, and Japanese foreign direct investment (FDI) in the
United States eroded the share of American corporations in the meantime.
The U.S. government imposed yen appreciation onto Japan in the Plaza
Accord of 1985, expecting that a stronger yen would deter Japanese in-
dustrial exports to the United States. Although Japanese trade surplus kept
increasing despite yen appreciation, this policy put an end to "the rise of
Japan" through unintended consequences. This yen appreciation took place
when global financial deregulation was proceeding with the emergence of
computer-electronics networks. A stronger yen under such a condition
translated into rapid appreciation of Japanese assets, and the bubble econ-
omy ensued. The lack of understanding of the Japanese economy in the
global context led to lax monetary policy by the Japanese government in
the late 1980s until the discount rate was suddenly raised in 1989 for fear
of inflation (Miyazaki 1992).
Post-bubble-burst recession still plagues the Japanese economy, and there
does not exist any idea among the leading Japanese economists about why
expansionary policy has no effect at all. In a sense, this sorry situation of
the Japanese economy was an unintended consequence of the Reagan-Bush
policy. What happened as a result of yen appreciation and Japanese bilat-
eral trade surplus was the deep entrapment of the Japanese economy by
the U.S. economy. This occurred as a result of the Japanese purchase of
U.S. government bonds and corporate stocks. The Japanese economy heav- >
ily depended upon export, especially to the United States, and in order to
keep exporting, the Americans had to have purchasing power. The Japanese
provided Americans much-needed purchasing power by running capital ac- ;
count deficits. The accumulated Japanese holding of U.S. dollar-
denominated assets depreciated substantially in terms of the Japanese yen
after the Plaza Accord in 1985. In the post-bubble-burst era of the 1990s,
intisystemic Historical Processes and U.S. Hegemony 115

he Japanese economy stagnated with depressed consumer demand, slump-

ag private investment, and sluggish export performance.
The West European economies, just as in the case of Japan, became
ictims of the unintended consequence of the Reagan-Bush policy. Under
he U.S. policy of Communist containment, the West European countries
njoyed national and regional economic development in the postwar pe-
iod. The Reagan-Bush military buildup in the 1980s, however, ended the
"old War, which served as the foundation of West European prosperity,
"his development gave the Western Europeans a double squeeze. First, the
nemy's disappearance changed U.S. policy from "protection" to "a de-
oand for a level playing field," and the cost of "protection" was shifted
o the Europeans. Second, the West Europeans were burdened by the enor-
nous deadweight of former socialist countries. Slow economic growth un-
ter conditions of a disappearing welfare state in the 1980s had already
pnerated the problem of unemployment and underemployment. The Eur-
ipean Union, with the burden of absorbing a large pool of unemployed
.nd unemployable people, was sinking. The bleak prospect of the European
Jnion prevented the British from merging its currency with the Euro, and
his, in turn, dragged the recovery of European economy since financial
urplus escaped the region and was wasted in global speculation.
The end of peripheral national economic development started, ironically,
is a result of the successful Third World resource nationalism. The first
najor oil price increase of 1973 expanded private bank loans to Third
J?orld countries. The second major oil price increase in 1979 brought
tbout a change in U.S. monetary policy. Fearing the erosion of confidence
n money as a result of inflation, the U.S. government raised the discount
ate, which, in turn, raised the short-term lending rate sharply. The interest
>ayment obligation of the debtor countries suddenly rose, and with the
lifficulty of earning income from long-term investment in a recession, many
Third World governments faced mushrooming debt. The Mexican debt cri-
IS of 1982 was just the beginning of the many other debt crises throughout
he 1980s and 1990s, and the end result was the structural adjustment
>rogram (SAP) of the IMF. Under the IMF conditionality, Third World
countries lost economic sovereignty in monetary, fiscal, trade, and indus-
rial management. The dream of national economic development was re-
>laced by the harsh reality of global competition. The IMF imposed high
nterest, currency devaluation, welfare reduction, liberalization, deregula-
ion, and privatization on the "structurally adjusted" countries, and their
utional enterprises were integrated into the global corporate networks
ontrolled by the core enterprises.
116 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Moveme

COMPLETION OF FREE ENTERPRISE IMPERIALISM:

STOCK-TAKING A T T H E E N D O F T H E T W E N T I E T H
CENTURY

The transformative process leading to the end of national economic i

velopment was the process of establishing free enterprise imperialism. C
of the ideological foundations of free enterprise imperialism is the m
classical economic theory that argues that free enterprise activities, f
trade, and free market provide the most efficient resource allocation. T
theory is based on numerous utterly unrealistic assumptions, such as perfect
information, absence of monopoly or existence of perfect competition, a
rational consumers and ignores the issues of income distribution, environ-,,
ment, and long-term health of the economy. In spite of such theoretical
dysfunction, the ideology of neoliberal globalization (or neoliberal global-
ism [Laxer 2000]) is dominating the policymakers and advisers, and the
people all over the world are increasingly driven to the game of global
competition.
H o w can we describe the structure of accumulation under neoliberal
globalism? In the framework of national economic development, core
workers were co-opted and integrated into the system as the absorbers of
commodities, while accessibility to natural resources was maintained by the
covert and overt U.S. intervention in the periphery. The nation-states also
engaged in macroeconomic management through fiscal and monetary pol-
icies and offered welfare to their national enterprises and citizens in varying
degrees. This structure of accumulation theorized as Fordism, Keynesian-
ism, and welfare statism was dismantled in the process of U.S. hegemonic
response in the 1970s onward (Teeple 2 0 0 0 ) .
Rapid economic growth of the world-economy in the 1950s and 1960s
brought the Fordist structure of accumulation to the limit of over-
expansion. Economic growth raised demand for labor and resources; this,
in turn, raised the wages and resource prices; and this placed negative pres-
sures on the rate and size of profit. The scope of the Fordist wage bonanza
was expanded to include racial minorities and women, largely in the wake
of successful civil rights and women's movements in the 1970s, but the
final blow to Fordism was struck by the oil price increase in 1 9 7 3 , and the
world-economy entered the Kondratieff B-phase. The response of the core
ruling class included the relocation of manufacturing plants to low-wage
countries, corporate downsizing, the elimination of the welfare state, and
tax cuts for the wealthy. Once the policy of worker co-optation served as
the basis of national economic development. From the 1980s on, the United
States dismantled the national economic development project of its own
together with those in the rest of the world.
The United States stripped economic sovereignty from peripheral nation-
states through IMF SAPs and from non-U. S. core states through deregu-
 Antisystemic Historical Processes and U.S. Hegemony 117
I
lation, liberalization, and privatization. The structure of accumulation in
the age of neoliberal globalization has the following characteristics. First,
die peripheral states suffer from accumulated debt, and they are under U.S.
control through the SAPs imposed by the IMF and World Bank. Total debt
of the developing countries ballooned from $1,635 billion in 1 9 9 2 to
$2,317 billion in 1 9 9 7 (a 5.9% annual increase over the five years). A
preliminary debt figure for all developing countries combined in 1998 was
1-2,465 billion, 3 7 . 3 % of their total gross national product. Out of 137
developing countries, 72 countries have debt exceeding 5 0 % of their re-
spective GDP in 1997, and total debt is greater than GDP for 25 countries.
Developing countries' total amount of debt service in 1997 was $ 3 0 5 . 2
billion, 17% of their total export (World Bank 1999: 14). In the capitalist
world-system as it entered the twenty-first century, the peripheral states
^recame debt-slaves of the global investors. The "imperialist" aspect of U.S.
free enterprise imperialism comes from the fact that no peripheral country
can escape from global financial-slavery (Bullard, Bello, and Malhotra
1998; Jomo 1998). The United States managed to force Vietnam to inherit
,tke old loans that the United States provided to the government of South
Vietnam before its disappearance (Chossudovsky 1998: ch. 8). The suc-
cessful Communist-independent movement in Vietnam could not even
*grant Vietnam the freedom of being a debt-free country.
Second, core states other than the United States became the hostage of
U.S.-centered accumulation structure. This development was an unexpected
consequence of the successful national economic development strategy on
^'the part of those countries. In particular, those core countries that have
succeeded in carving out U.S. market shares, such as Japan and Canada,
.became excessively dependent on the U.S. economy. The situation is similar
" for those semi-peripheral countries that pursued the EOI policy aimed at
the U.S. market, such as South Korea, Mexico, and Brazil. The difference
between the core countries like Japan and semi-peripheral countries like
..Mexico is that Japan, for example, is a net creditor vis-a-vis the United
' States while Mexico is a net debtor. However, both of them share the same
fate that they are dependent on the United States. In order for the Japanese
economy to keep afloat, it has to sell products to the United States, and in
order to sell products to the Americans, the Japanese need to keep lending
money to the United States.
Third, in the last decade of the twentieth century, the United States
demerged as the only country that enjoyed growth while the rest were stag-
nating or deflating. Even though their GDP figures in terms of local cur-
rencies might have indicated a positive growth, most countries in the world
experienced shrinkage of their income when measured in U.S. dollars due
to exchange rate devaluation and debt servicing. In the "dollarized" world-
economy where the U.S. dollar is the only "secure" currency that holds
k value, U.S. dollar-denominated assets became the only secure container of
218 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements*

investment. The bourgeoisie of the non-U.S. countries shifted their assets?

to the United States in the 1990s, and the total assets held by the foreigners^
in the United States increased from about 5 0 % of U.S. GDP in 1994, tdl
7 8 % in 1 9 9 7 (OECD 1999: 37). '_
Global surplus flows into the United States partly because the UniteA-
States is the safest container of investment and partly because of the U.S,,
interest policy. Every time Alan Greenspan indicated a rise in interest rate"
in the 1990s, U.S. markets absorbed more money from abroad. His policy
is intended to counter inflation, but inflation has long been dead. Unin-,
tended consequences of this misguided policy are a strengthened dollar and -
higher return on investment in the United States, which, in turn, weakens*
non-U.S. financial markets and other currencies. A capital inflow into the?
United States pushes the price of assets in the United States, and this, in
turn, gives a capital gain to those w h o o w n these assets. Such capital gain
was the fastest growing source of effective demand in the world-economy
in the 1990s. The U.S. household that owned financial assets, together with
wealthy people outside the United States, kept buying products and services
from all over the world at bargain prices thanks to the IMF SAPs, which
devalued the currencies of the peripheral countries and expanded exports.
This is the mechanism of surplus transfer from the non-U.S. core, semi-
periphery, and periphery to the United States, and this is a result of suc-
cessful "financial" beggar-thy-neighbor policy.
Fourth, free enterprise imperialism has united the bourgeoisie of the^
world. Financial liberalization and global computer-electronics networks
enabled investors from all over the world to participate in global casino'
capitalism. Those core residents w h o have investments in bank accounts or
mutual, pension, or hedge funds are n o w the stakeholders in the game of
legally sanctioned global gambling. In contrast, those workers of the world
without savings are divided and conquered. The poor are entrapped in their
nation-state, and they are forced to pay interest on the national debt with-
out the possibility of ever escaping to a core country. Within the core zone,
their skills and educational credentials segment the workers, and competi-
tion for success is intensifying as the spread between the top and bottom
is stretching.
What was the end-of-the-century evaluation of twentieth-century anti-
systemic historical processes? First, socialist movements had mobilized
workers to achieve success both in the core in the form of welfare static
and in the periphery in the form of socialist states. However, both of the-.,
achievements were destroyed. The workers in the core were thrown into *
harsher game of competition, and the socialist semi-periphery is taking a
path of re-peripheralization (Soederberg 1999).
Second, the independence movement of the colonized people achieved
success in the form of political independence. However, the exploiratiw
 ithystemic Historical Processes and U.S. Hegemony 119

nature of the zonal structure of the world-system remained constant

throughout the twentieth century. The people of the periphery escaped
trom colonial "political" subordination only to find themselves in economic
dependency on the core in terms of finance, capital and intermediate goods,
:hnology, and market under the national economic development project.
1
ider the SAPs, the peripheral states lost economic sovereignty to the
global ruling institution composed of the United States, the G7 forum, the
IF, and the World Bank, and the role of the postcolonial "independent"
ite is that of slave driver, debt collector, and prison guard. In order to
aintain legitimacy in the eyes of international creditors, the peripheral
states, including those that were socialist before, collect tax from the public
to pay debt, invite foreign companies or send their workers abroad to earn
foreign exchange, and keep their workers from escaping into the core.
1 hird, intracore rivalry appeared to be overcome by U.S. hegemony at
e end of World War II. However, the rivalry continued in the form of
nr-onal economic development and national enterprise promotion well
to the 1980s. In the 1990s the United States destroyed "national" econ-
nies of the non-U.S. core countries through liberalization, deregulation,
id privatization. As a result, their "national" enterprises are integrated
to the global network of monopoly capital, and the non-U.S. core states
rcame junior partners of the United States in global governance.
What does the report card of the twentieth century say about the ad-
incement of democracy? The answer is mixed. Women's political partic-
ipation expanded and numerous dictatorships ended in the 1980s and
1990s in the periphery and semi-periphery. However, democracy among
. countries remains a dream where the permanent members of the Se-
itrity Council can veto any majority resolution of the UN General Assem-
:y. The colonial independence movement failed to achieve democracy
rtong nation-states. Also, the socialist movement appears to have created
tctatorship instead of democracy. After the fall of state socialism, former
t ommunist Party officials successfully transformed themselves into the rul-
ig class of post-socialist "democratic" states where democratic political
participation appears to make no difference. As free enterprise imperialism
as established in the 1990s, "dollarcracy," the rule of money in national
yd international politics, replaced democracy. In particular, the vote in
te two principal institutions of free trade imperialism, the IMF and World
Bank, is distributed based on monetary contribution, making them de facto
i instrument for the United States to manage peripheral states. Another
aperialist institution, the W T O tribunal of trade dispute, is not even ac-
wntable to any constituency. Reality-challenged neo-classical economists
e appointed as the judges by the core states, and they can remove any
w protecting workers, women, children, and environment in any country
such a law is deemed to be a trade-hindrance.
120 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements

C O N C L U S I O N , O R N O T YET C O N C L U D E D ?

Under neoliberal globalization policies pushed by the United States, with

endorsement coming from business interests all over the world, the U.S.
hegemonic design developed in the early twentieth century (i.e., free enter-
prise imperialism), was established finally in the last decade of the twentieth
century. In the accumulation structure of the twenty-first century, majoi
corporations of the core countries are forming the global networks of cor-
porate activities, including finance, research and design, production, distri-
bution, marketing, and accounting. While corporations are shedding
"nationality," the national border is serving as a prison wall for the work-
ers of the periphery. They are forced to compete within and across the
country without union protection, and the peripheral nation state is re-
duced to a prison guard that squeezes citizens to pay interest on debt and
keeps underpaid workers from entering the core illegally. The bourgeoisie
of the world have united, but the workers are segmented and competing
with each other.
The above conclusion, however, does not mean that the structure oi
accumulation under free enterprise imperialism is free from contradiction:
nor does it indicate the absence of antisystemic historical processes. The
major contradictions of the structure of accumulation in the beginning of
the twenty-first century (or neoliberal global economy) include the follow-
ing: the rule of short-term financial speculation, the mechanism of debt-
dependent demand creation (Rowbotham 1998), and inter- and intra-zonal
income and wealth polarization (Braun 1997). It appears today that people
are willingly participating in the game of musical chairs called global com-
petition. Everybody is running around the globe believing that he or she
can get a chair when the music stops. The fact is that the number of chairs
of capitalistic success is limited, and this may be the reason that economists
keep singing the song of neo-classical economics over and over so that no
one realizes the impossibility of success for all.
I would like to end this chapter with a reminder of the potential of the
unfinished antisystemic movements (i.e., socialist movements and inde-
pendence movements). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the
structure of oppression remains more or less the same as the structure that
existed 100 years ago. The majority of workers are propertyless and op-
pressed, and contradiction of class exploitation is real. Also, the majority
of the population in the periphery remains oppressed and exploited, and
national liberation movements continue in many parts of the world. The
twentieth century marked the beginning of the successful antisystemic
movements, but the antisystemic movements of the twentieth century are
not yet concluded.
In order to identify the contour of emerging antisystemic movements in
the twenty-first century, let us examine the list of the 100 most significant
Anttsystemic Historical Processes and U.S. Hegemony 121

events of the twentieth century reported in Nation ("The Nation's Cen-

tury" 2000). The list starts with the 1 9 0 2 U.S. suppression of the Philippine
independence movement. Out of 100, 14 events related to workers' move-
ments, including the founding of Industrial Workers of the World in 1905
and the October Revolution in 1917. Nation also lists the victory of team-
sters in the United Parcel strike in 1995 as the event that reversed the streak
of union defeats. The list is concluded by 2 events in 1999 that are indic-
ative of the contradiction of the twenty-first-century structure of accumu-
lation and potential direction for antisystemic movements. The first of the
1999 events was that protest at the W T O meeting in Seattle by unions,
environmentalists, and religious, political, student activists symbolized
spreading international opposition to corporate globalization. The second
\\ as that census figures revealed that benefits of years of economic growth
and a booming stock market have accrued mainly to the richest 5% of the
population, producing one of the highest levels of inequality of income and
wealth in American history. Income and wealth polarization, environmen-
tal degradation, and human rights abuses on a global scale are creating a
united opposition to neoliberal globalism, and the battle of Seattle contin-
ues on the streets of Washington, the heartland of American imperialism
and the home of neoliberal institutions. Antisystemic movements are far
from being dead, and the oppressed people will continue until the system
i>r oppression is dismantled.

NOTES
1. For this and other aspects of the debate on British imperialism, see Turner
il976).
I. These were calculated from figures in Robson (1957: 331-333, table A.l).
3. For world-system studies on worker movements, see Silver (1995a, 1995b).
4. Note that only the male white workers earned the "family" wages.

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 Part II

Women's Studies, Feminist Theory,

and World-Systems Analysis
 Chapter 7

Commodity Chains and Gendered

Exploitation: Rescuing Women from the
Periphery of World-Systems Thought
Wilma A. Dunaway

THE STATE OF T H E FIELD

By analyzing research and theoretical foci in three major publication ven-

ues, we can judge h o w much attention the world-systems perspective has
1
been paying to w o m e n . After 25 years, w o m e n are only a faint ghost in
the world-systems perspective. In the first 20 volumes of Review, less than
5% (16) of the articles deal with gendered exploitation, women, or house-
holds. In the first five volumes of the Journal of World-System Research,
less than 4% of the articles address women's issues. By 1 9 9 9 , PEWS had
published 21 annual monographs; yet less than 5% of the articles in those
volumes integrated w o m e n or gender inequities. Another indicator of
women's invisibility is that relevant terms about gender or household are
listed in only t w o of the indexes of these PEWS annuals. Overall, women,
households, and gender inequities were investigated by less than 5% of all
the studies that appear in the three major venues of world-systems publi-
cation. In short, women's problems still lie far out at the distant periphery
of the field.
Our track record is even worse than these statistics reveal. Even in re-
starch that claims to focus on households, we have made less than a min-
imalist effort to connect the capitalist restructuring of women's everyday
lives with other transformations that occur in the world-system. In the
articles that focus on households, for example, fewer than 5 0 % actually
include the terms "women," "female," or "gender inequity." Even when
A orld-systems analysts address issues that are central to women's lives, they
have forgotten the suppression and exploitation of females almost entirely.
In a majority of the studies of agricultural households that appear in these
128 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

three publication venues, the words "women" or "female" rarely appear,

and there is very limited analysis of gender differences among agricultural
laborers or households. This oversight occurs in the face of the historical
reality that w o m e n have always constituted a large segment of the agricul-
tural labor force and is a conceptual error that is common in the main-
stream literature against which we purport to argue. We have managed to
talk about plantations, peasant households, the informal sector, and labor
unrest without ever mentioning w o m e n or gender disparities. Our analysis
of commodity chains (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986, 1994; Gereffi and;
Korzeniewicz 1994) leaves readers with the impression that no households;
and no w o m e n exist in the nodes or the networks that constitute those
complex mechanisms. W o m e n have rarely made the pages when we have;
constructed explanations of incorporation or the emergence of a capitalist
labor force (Wallerstein and Martin 1979; Hopkins and Wallerstein 1987).
There is a trend toward the rapid entry of peripheral w o m e n into wage
labor jobs and a worldwide trend toward deepening feminization of pov-
erty (United Nations 1999). Still, impacts on w o m e n were not examined
in a recent analysis (Smith and Borocz 1995) of the global transformations
of the late twentieth century. Like women, the environment has received'
inadequate attention in world-systems analyses; but those aligned with the
perspective have shown a commitment to correct that deficiency through
the blossoming of publications in recent years. However, w o m e n are also-
missing from these recent world-systems analyses of ecological degradation.

Even when the role of w o m e n should come automatically to our minds

as we think and write about topics, we have left them out. Despite the vast
literature about the unpaid labor of w o m e n as a primary mechanism in the
maintenance of laborer households, the tendency in world-systems analyses,
is to speak about the reproduction of laborer households as though these
entities are ungendered. Even though there have been groundbreaking anal-
yses (e.g., Ward, 1 9 8 2 , 1985) of h o w the world-economy structures the
interconnected cycles of high child mortality and high fertility, most world-
systems analysts forget the biological reproductive role of women. We have
also analyzed the household economy, subsistence production, and handi-
crafts productionthe very domestic domains of womenwithout ac-
knowledging the inputs of females, often without mentioning women at all.,
Trends over the last three decades show that peripheral girls suffer a higher
incidence of chronic hunger than males (United Nations 1999); still, world-'
systems analysts have examined malnutrition in poor countries without
seeing the gender inequities in the food supply. World-systems anal}-*.*
have been guilty of an enormous condescension toward w o m e n , for que-,
tions about females, households, and sexism are routinely ignored b\ rl\
perspective's writers. In addition, world-systems analysts have tended w
disregard the work of radical feminists, even when those writers embrace
a world-systems conceptualization of capitalism (e.g., Mies 1 9 8 2 ; Mies,'
Commodity Chains and Gendered Exploitation 129

Bennhold-Thomsen, and von Werlhof 1988) or employ very similar con-

cepts (e.g., Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Beneria and Roldan 1987;
lleh 1994). To use a metaphor from Dorothy Smith, the world-systems
>erspective has not yet reached the level of "add w o m e n and stir" that
haracterized so many disciplines in the 1980s. What is the real danger of
his void? The gender blindness of the world-systems perspective sends the
solitical message to w o m e n all over the world that we do not consider the
iroblems of their lives worth knowing or worth telling (Bulbeck 1992).
Through this intellectual and political blunder, we have, by default, relin-
quished w o m e n to the enemy. In the same time period that the world-
tystems perspective has been ignoring gender inequality, the precapitalist
levelopment paradigms have discovered w o m e n and are attempting to co-
>pt them all over the world. By making the intellectual choices that we
lave about gender, we convince female scholars and activists that world-
ystems analysis is irrelevant to their concerns. In effect, then, we have
lisconnected our research agenda and our praxis from more than half the
vorld's population and from a majority of the wretched of the earth.
What have been our successes in the analysis of women's exploitation?
Wallerstein (1983) has played a pivotal role in laying the groundwork for
three constructs that hold promise for the analysis of gender inequality:
tousehold, semiproletariat, and commodity chain. However, most world-
systems analysts either ignore these crucial ideas or utilize them in ways
hat exclude questions about women. I am convinced that these three im-
portant concepts offer us the tools that we need to rescue w o m e n from the
periphery of world-systems thought. Consequently, this chapter suggests
:he kinds of theoretical issues that we need to raise if we are to engender
world-systems analyses. Second, I specify the conceptual blunders that
jause us to overlook the gendered implications of the structural transfor-
mations that we study. Third, I propose a synthesis of ideas from radical
eminism with the world-systems notions of the semiproletarianized house-
hold and the commodity chain. Along the way, I direct your attention to
najor global trends of gender inequality at the end of the twentieth century.

ENGENDERING T H E C O N C E P T OF H O U S E H O L D S

According to Wallerstein, the capitalist world-system has structured a

controlling mechanism by which the demands of workers for increased
.ompensation can be restrained. That mechanism is the semiproletarian
lousehold, which is n o w the dominant mode worldwide. "In such house-
holds, the wages paid to those members engaging in wage-labor activities
:an be reduced below the level of household reproduction because the
lousehold supplements this income with its other income-generating activ-
t i e s . . . , the totality of which bring in a greater income per hour of work
han does wage-labor" (Wallerstein 1995: 5-6). Despite the centrality of
130 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Anak)

this concept in Wailerstein's work, the semiproletarian household has or

rarely been recognized as a central element in the research agendas
world-systems analysts. Even in the theoretical groundwork of Wallerstt
and several research panels at the Fernand Braudel Center (Smith, W;
lerstein, and Evers 1984; Smith and Wallerstein 1992), the tendency of t
perspective has been to conceptualize households as though they are a
gendered entities in which w o m e n play pivotal roles. In the three won
systems publication venues, only seven of the articles that investigate hou:
holds actually analyze w o m e n and/or gender inequality. The typical patte
has been that world-systems analysts explore household transformati
without ever employing the terms "women" or "gender inequality". I
cause the perspective has virtually erased gender from households, it
essential that we rethink world-systems notions. According to Smith a
Wallerstein ( 1 9 9 2 : 1 9 - 2 1 ) , three structural forces determine the boundar
and internal dynamics of households: (1) the cycles and trends of the wor
economy, (2) state machinery, and (3) ethnicity/culture/subculture. Why c
gender disappear in this unrealistic fashion? Obviously, we need to rethi
1
this concept so that we do not make w o m e n invisible in this manner. If
are to engender the household, we must begin with a re-examination
income pooling. Smith and Wallerstein ( 1 9 9 2 : 1 5 ) have defined a househc
as "a unit that pools income for purposes of reproduction," and they ha
linked this notion to the semi-proletarianization of women. "Stagnatic
in the world-economy create pressures on small household structures ro
enlarge boundaries and to self-exploit m o r e . . . . For a wage worker in
semi-proletarian household is more able to accept a low real wage sir
this worker may be able to assume that, via self-exploitation, other co:
pensating forms of income will be available" (Smith and Wallerstein 19S
1 5 - 1 6 ) . To subsidize the l o w and unstable wages of its members, t
household pools four types of nonwage income: market sales, rent, trans:
payments, and subsistence.

As Wallerstein (1983) has argued, most of the world's households s

1
quire only a minority of their survival needs from wages. It is imperati
therefore, that we select terminology that reflects our knowledge of t
historical fact that nonwage and unpaid labor is the pivotal thesis of t
world-systems model of households (Smith, Wallerstein, and Evers 19S -
Smith and Wallerstein 1992). In contradiction to that central idea, the tei
income pooling implies the aggregation of money and items to which
market price has been assigned. I prefer to think of households as resom
pooling units in order to encompass all sorts of women's economic a;
non-material activities that are not implied by the list of four types
nonwage income (Smith and Wallerstein 1992). For example, the list of
five categories of income offered by Smith and Wallerstein (1992) does not^
alert researchers to take into account inputs like garbage-picking, fuelwoodj
gathering, or water collection. Households are not just producers and con-
Commodity Chains and Gendered Exploitation 131

.timers. They are also units of reproduction; they are decision-making and
resource-allocating units; they are sometimes economic enterprises that pro-
duce market commodities; they are arenas that transmit culture and ethnic
heritage; and they are units that support and/or organize antisystemic re-
sistance (Ulshofer 1983: 192; Dunaway 1995, 1997, 2001). Furthermore,
households pool many resources that are not material. For example, the
first resource that a woman brings to her household is her o w n body, which
naturally reproduces human life, feeds infants, and is the object of sexual
gratification. N o r does the notion of income pooling call attention to the
non-material resources brought to households by women, such as caregiv-
2
ingor specialized eco-medical knowledge (Mies et al. 1 9 8 8 ) .
The third conceptual weakness is that the world-systems approach masks
the power struggles and inequities within households. Indeed, the tendency
of world-systems analysts has been to beg off this issue. After laying con-
siderable groundwork about the external processes that shape households,
Wallerstein and Martin (1979: 202) apologetically commented: "What re-
main much less known are the actual dimensions of the reorganization of
internal household dynamics." In the early 1990s, after several radical stud-
ies of household inequities had appeared (e.g., Beneria and Roldan 1987),
writers of the second world-systems monograph on households (Smith and
Wallerstein 1992: 12) were still excusing their failure to address "the in-
ternal structure of the households, and h o w power and goods are distrib-
uted internally." In short, the perspective admits that resource allocation is
.nequitable (McGuire, Smith, and Martin 1986: 7 6 - 7 7 ) , but we have not
prioritized that household reality in our theory or our research. Because it
ignores such inequities, the perspective has transformed w o m e n into ap-
pendages of households, thereby effectively erasing them from the world-
system (Vellenga 1985: 316). We need to stop depicting households as
though they are ungendered monoliths. To do that, we must assess the true
extent to which capitalism exploits the nonwaged labor of women. We
cannot make such an inquiry unless we decompose household pooling strat-
egies and recognize internal inequities (Beneria and Roldan 1987: 1 3 5 -
L36).

ENGENDERING T H E C O N C E P T O F C O M M O D I T Y
CHAINS

In addition to the semiproletarian household, world-systems analysis has

advanced the concept of commodity chain. Hopkins and Wallerstein (1986:
159) envisioned a commodity chain to be "a network of labor and pro-
duction processes whose end result is a finished commodity," every box or
node in the chain representing "a particular, quite specific production pro-
cess." World-systems analysts have identified input acquisition, manufac-
turing, distribution, marketing, and consumption as the sequential stages
132 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

of a commodity chain (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994: 2, 51). Hopkins

and Wallerstein (1986: 162) stress that there are four properties for each
node of a commodity chain: (1) the relations of production within the node,
(2) organization of production, (3) the node's geographical location within
the chain, and (4) flows between the node, between other nodes of the
chain, and with other commodity chains. A single commodity chain usually
exploits several forms of waged and nonwaged labor. At the world-market
level, "the uneven exchange of these commodities between nations . . . con-
stitutes the very essences of global inequality" (Korzeniewicz and Martin
1994: 83). Thus, commodity chains are the key structural mechanisms of
unequal exchange. They are the chains of the capitalist world-system in
three senses: they derive from the system; they link together the diverse
local economies of the system; and they entrap and exploit its entire pop-
ulation, almost no household excepted.
I believe the commodity chain to be one of the most promising tools
through which world-systems analysis can integrate w o m e n and house-
holds. By examining commodity chains, we can do the type of research that
Braudel (1981: 28) loved; we can simultaneously overlay the double register
of history: the global and the local. For Braudel (1981: 2 9 , 559), history
was the unveiling of "a succession of landscapes" consisting of t w o major
levels of human existence: (1) the realm of major historical events and (2)
"the ground floor and the first story" of history that lay in "images of daily
life." Braudel (1979: 16, 2 8 - 2 9 ) believed that the task of the historian is
to reveal the dialectical interplay between the upper and lower levels, but
he complained that the lower level is too often ignored, so that everyday
life has been "the great absentee in history" (Braudel 1979: 16).
Everyday life is also the "great absentee" from most commodity chain
analyses. In some ways, our mechanistic applications of the model have
done the work of mainstream economists better than they do it themselves.
When a commodity chain is delineated in terms of "the production process
itself" (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986), it documents the construction or
creation of a market product, overlooking far too many human and eco-
logical aspects. In other words, it becomes an analysis that emphasizes
things rather than human beings, exactly opposite to the historical ap-
proach urged by Braudel (1972, vol. 1: 353). What do we miss when we
turn the analytic lens upon the commodity itself? First, a narrow emphasis
upon those waged and nonwaged laborers w h o are involved directly in
manufacture of the commodity can ignore three types of hidden laborer
inputs. There can be direct and indirect flows into the production process
from subsistence sectors, from the informal economy, and from illegal sec-
tors (Dunaway 1995). Second, the focus upon a particular commodity may
unintentionally hide from view those laborers and resources in the inter-
connected local and distant commodity chains that supply the foodstuffs,
Commodity Chains and Gendered Exploitation 133

raw materials, and consumer goods to provision the production process

(Dunaway 1996).
Third, commodity chain analysts have not recognized the pivotal role of
households or of the females in those households. Consider Wallerstein's
(1995: 6-7) description, for example:

Commodity chains have been the integument of capitalist production processes

from the o u t s e t . . . . It is not hard to demonstrate that almost every item that is
marketed by enterprises is constructed from components (which are in turn con-
structed from components), utilizing machinery (constructed in turn from compo-
nents . . . ) and manpower (sustained by food production constructed from
components . . . ), the totality of which are produced in geographically dispersed
areas.

Hopkins and Wallerstein (1994: 50) have emphasized that commodity

chains "reproduce a basic order that permits the endless accumulation of
capital." Then they prioritize the research question that they consider to
be most crucial: "If one thinks of the entire chain as having a total amount
of surplus value that has been appropriated, what is the division of this
surplus value among the boxes of the chain?" What is missing? While the
inequitable accumulation of capital at the world level is an important ele-
ment of commodity chain analysis, it is only half of Braudel's (1981: 28)
"double register" of history. At the macrostructural level, a commodity
chain is indeed the global mechanism that ensures the inequitable division
of surplus among the core, semi-periphery, and periphery (Korzeniewicz
and Martin 1994). Long before those expropriations can occur, however,
the commodity chain structures the maximal exploitation of underpaid and
unpaid labor. If we are to engender the commodity chain, we must also
investigate h o w and by w h o m that surplus is produced at every node of
the network. To accomplish this task, we must enter through the doorway
of the household. Beyond this portal we find the forgotten w o m a n , and we
find her working longer hours than men to contribute surpluses that do
not appear in the account books of the capitalist enterprise or in the gov-
ernment's tally of the gross national product (Waring 1988).
According to Polanyi (1957: 4 3 - 5 5 ) , the economy is submerged in the
total social structure. In contrast, world-systems analysts have disembedded
the commodity chain from its social underpinnings and from its ecological
surroundings. Why have we forgotten that commodity chains are embed-
ded in households and that'the survival of those households rests inequi-
tably on the shoulders of women? I am convinced that we lose the
conceptual power of the commodity chain and the semi-proletarianized
household, unless we turn the conceptual lens a different direction. A com-
modity chain is more than a long string of spatial points at which me-
chanical processes occur to generate a marketable product. We need to
134 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

re-embed commodity chains in the everyday lives of the laborer households ,

at every node in the chain. We must think of the commodity chain first !
and foremost as an interconnected network of nodes at which human la-
borers and natural resources are (1) directly exploited and/or (2) indirectly :>
exploited (3) to permit surplus extraction by a few.
Because they embed the commodity chain in material and mechanistic :
inputs, Hopkins and Wallerstein ( 1 9 8 6 , 1 9 9 4 ) have de-emphasized the ver\
concept that Wallerstein (1983, 1995) identifies as central to the world-
system: the semiproletarian household. Indeed, they ignore the reality that '
every node of every commodity chain is embedded in the gendered relations
of households. A commodity chain investigation should not focus solely on
the material aspects of the commodity itself. Indeed, it is clear that Wal-
lerstein (1983: 32) knows that commodity chain analysis should be about
the agenda of documenting the exploitation of semiproletarianized houst
holds, for he tells us in Historical Capitalism that commodity chains create
and transform the household structures that permit the survival of low-
paid workers. Consequently, the theoretical model of commodity chains
needs to be extended to encompass these five key research questions that
it did not originally address:

1. How does the commodity chain transform and reshape households through sur-
plus extraction and unequal exchange?
2. To what degree do households and women subsidize the production process
through nonwage inputs?
3. To what degree does the commodity chain externalize material, political, social
and ecological costs to households and to women?
4. To what degree do households and women at lower nodes of the commodity
chain subsidize households, laborers, or consumers at higher nodes?
5. To what degree does the commodity chain structure gender inequality within
and among the households that constitute its entire labor force?

A commodity chain is a much more powerful conceptual tool when it is

viewed as successive layers of unequal exchanges. Indeed, every exchange
within a commodity chain is unequal, for there is a polarized distribution
of the means of production (including natural resources) not only between
nodes but also within every single node. If we turn our theoretical lens in
this direction, we can utilize the commodity chain to make visible "the
basic inequality of partners that underlies the capitalistic process" and that
permeates every aspect of social life (Braudel 1979: 6 2 - 6 3 ) . World-systems
analyses have not only failed to integrate the labor and ecological contri-
butions of households but have also ignored the unequal exchanges that
occur within households themselves. Used more effectively, the commodity
chain approach can demonstrate that every node of the production pro-
Commodity Chains and Gendered Exploitation 135

Jessand every household that contributes labor and resources to that

nodeis a microcosm of the structural inequities of the capitalist
world-system. "Men are simultaneously agents for capital and for them-
sehes, keeping w o m e n intimidated and pliable" (Salleh 1994: 114). Con-
sul lently, women and girls contribute more labor power to household
survival than males; but they receive an inequitable share of the total pool
pi resources (Mies et al. 1988). Moreover, we would be able to see resis-
itance against capitalist oppression as a process that is not monolithic.
Within non-Western households, w o m e n and men frequently conflict over
the allocation of ecological resources. When capitalist incorporation creates
ntw wage and trade opportunities for males, those economic activities quite
often threaten the ecological resources from which w o m e n produce house-
hold sustenance and trade commodities (Shiva 1988; Dunaway 1997).

WOMEN'S H I D D E N INPUTS I N T O C O M M O D I T Y CHAINS

- As it incorporates new zones of the globe, capitalism embraces t w o di-

alectical labor recruitment mechanisms. Some household members are pro-
letarianized into wage laborers w h o produce capitalist commodities, but
women's labor is concentrated into semiproletarianized activities that are
(Only partially remunerated (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1987). Women's in-
puts into commodity chains occur at three levels. Historically, women have
heen wage laborers just as long as there has been capitalism (Dunaway
1995); and the late twentieth century is characterized by t w o varied trends.
In the core, most w o m e n are employed outside their homes; and that wage
labor has altered household patterns and contributed to the high divorce
rates. Nearly half of all wage-earning w o m e n work different hours from
those of their spouses or partners, and two-fifths of all U.S. working women
3
head their o w n households. At the periphery, w o m e n are increasingly en-
tering the wage labor force (Ward 1990), but these poor women much
more often subsidize commodity chains through low-paid, nonwage direct
inputs (such as industrial homework) into the production process (Beneria
and Roldan 1987). Historically, w o m e n have completed piece-rate labor
through cottage industries and putting-out systems. Their household-based
labor generates market commodities or informal sector inputs into the ex-
port production process, but their labor has typically remained socially
invisible, and they have received below-market prices for those contribu-
tions (Mies 1982). In tenant and sharecropping households, women's labor
remains hidden behind that of-adult males w h o execute contracts for the
entire household with landholders (Mies et al. 1988; Dunaway 1995). In
the late twentieth century, these forms of nonwage labor were still common
all over the world (Mies 1 9 8 2 ; N a s h and Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Beneria
and Roldan 1987; Ward 1990). In the core, there is a trend toward home-
based workers who utilize computers and subcontracting systems in which
136 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

women are paid by task completion, thereby cutting the costs incurred by
employers for wages and employee benefits (Hayashi 1998). In peripheral
regions, w o m e n engage in industrial homework and make other types of
household-based inputs into commodity chains, including the collection ol
ecological resources and the retrieval of recyclable items from the garbage.
In the late twentieth century, textile commodity chains were increasingly
decentralized into putting-out systems in which household-based women
finished commodities on a piece-rate basis (Mies 1982).
In addition to their direct wage and nonwage inputs, w o m e n and h o u s e
holds subsidize the commodity chain through several forms of invisible
labor and hardship. Destruction of precapitalist modes of production leads
to a new sexual division of labor organized into semiproletarianized h o u s i
holds (Smith, Wallerstein, and Evers 1984). In order to keep the waged
labor force

at a relatively low level of pay (by the existing standards of the world-economy),
they had to be located in household structures in which the work on this new
"export-oriented activity" formed only a small part of the lifetime revenues...
this case, other household activities which brought in revenues in multiple forms
could "subsidize" the remuneration for the "export-oriented activity," thereby
keeping the labor costs very low. (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1987: 777)

Consequently, the world-system transforms w o m e n into "the last link in a

chain of exploitation, permitting by their unpaid labour the reproduction"
of the workforce and the unrewarded subsidization of male-dominated la
bor (Mies et al. 1988: 29). What, then, are the hidden inputs of women
4
and households into capitalist commodity chains? Households subsidize
at three levels the commodity chains in which those laborers are siiuaud
First, the biological reality of women's lives is sexual and reproducuu
thus, mothers make their first subsidy to capitalism through the bearing
and raising of successive generations of laborers. Despite its dependency
upon this natural female contribution, however, capitalism has externalized
laborer reproduction outside the realm of the economic. Thus, capitalism
devalues women's child-raising as "a nuisance to the production unit" (Sen
1980: 82). Second, the household is the site in which w o m e n undertake
unpaid labor for those members w h o are waged laborers. By keepinu pi o
duction costs lower, women's hidden inputs subsidize the production pro
cess throughout the commodity chain, thereby keeping consumer prices
lower and profits higher. To generate family survival requirements, women
engage in "shadow work" outside those formal capitalist structuics in
which labor is remunerated (von Werlhof 1985).

What the housewife produces in the family are not simply use-values but the com
modify "labor-power" which the husband then can sell as a "free" wage laborer
Commodity Chains and Gendered Exploitation 137

m the market.. . the productivity of the housewife is the condition for the pro-
ductivity of the (male) wage laborer. The nuclear family, organized and protected
by the state, is the social factory where this commodity "labor-power" is produced.
Hence, the housewife and her labour are not outside of surplus value production,
but constitute the very foundation upon which this process can get started. The
housewife and her labour are, in other words, the basis of the process of capital
accumulation. (Mies 1986: 31)

Historically, the world-system has fed parasitically on "an army of

nonwage-laborers, w h o are responsible for the (re)production of the nec-
essary preconditions for wage-labor"(von Werlhof 1980: 41). This army of
nonwage-laborers consists mostly of w o m e n (Pelizzon 1999). During the
late twentieth century, when the world-economy was experiencing inten-
sified globalization, there were pressures on poor households to enlarge
their boundaries and to self-exploit more (Nelson and Smith 1999). Thus,
household nonwaged activities are actually increasing (Smith and Waller-
stein, 1992: 9 - 1 6 ) , and most of that labor is done by females (Hayashi
1998; Pelizzon 1999). Women's work is dominant in food production and
processing, in responsibility for fuel, water, health care, child-raising, san-
itation, and the entire range of so-called basic needs (Sen 1980). To accom-
plish that labor, most of the world's w o m e n draw heavily upon natural
resources. In this way, the economic contributions of w o m e n remain struc-
turally invisible; and the capitalist shifts to the worker's household and to
the ecosystem a large portion of the actual costs of labor subsistence.
There is a third, more deeply hidden way in which w o m e n subsidize the
commodity chains in which their households are situated. The subsistence
inputs of w o m e n and households at one node may subsidize other nodes
of the commodity chain. In effect, the commodity chain structures a net-
work in which consumer and laborer households at higher nodes actually
exploit households and w o m e n at lower nodes. Let me provide a historical
example from my o w n research and then an example from the late twen-
tieth century. In the mountain South, small Appalachian plantations re-
quired slaves to generate half or more of their foodstuffs and all their shoes
and clothing. That household subsistence production, primarily generated
by women, made it possible for Appalachian masters to maximize their
profits. Appalachian slave households reproduced, fed, and clothed the sur-
plus laborers exported by their owners. Through their forced migrations,
those surplus slaves provided direct labor to produce the cotton that was
exported to the world-economy. By externalizing to slave households the
costs of their o w n reproduction and maintenance, mountain masters ex-
ported large quantities of food and clothing to provision the slaves w h o
produced lower South cotton. As a direct result of their hidden inputs into
the cotton commodity chain, Appalachian slave households experienced
chronic malnutrition, broken families, dangerously high fertility rates, and
138 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis:

higher mortality rates. While mountain slave households subsisted on 7 0 %

of the needed survival nutrients, the lower South slaves w h o consumed
Appalachian surpluses were better fed and clothed and rarely were required
to produce their own survival needs, and the w o m e n were pregnant only
half as often. As a result, black Appalachian w o m e n died at a rate twice
as high as that experienced by lower South slave men, and mountain slave
children were three times more likely to die than lower South slave children
(Dunaway 2 0 0 1 : ch. 9).

W O M E N A N D T H E EXTERNALIZED COSTS O F
C O M M O D I T Y CHAINS

In addition to the failure of commodity chain analyses to investigate the

hidden nonwage and unpaid inputs of w o m e n and households, there is
another fundamental conceptual problem. Commodity chains have largely
been constructed around the acquisition and organization of material in-
puts (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994: 2), a methodological decision that
ignores the tendency of capitalists to externalize costs as much as possible
(Wallerstein 1999). To maximize profits, capitalists must exploit as many
"costless" social and natural conditions as possible. To put it differently,
the capitalist mode of production structures and reshapes households in
ways that minimize production costs by allowing extensive use of condi-
tions external to the production process. Thus, capitalists shift to society,
to the culture, to the ecosystem, and to human laborers most of the real
costs of commodity production. "Externalized costs are unseen and unpaid
bills that are additional components of unequal exchange. They are part
and parcel of normal capitalism, and they are to be found at every node/
link of every commodity chain" (Wallerstein 1995).
Thus, semi-proletarianized households subsidize commodity chains
through their absorption of production costs that are externalized by cap-
italists. Capitalism not only shifts to w o m e n the costs of reproducing the
labor force and of subsidizing wage-earners but also externalizes to women
and girls greater costs and risks than are shifted to males. Because the
inequalities are so stark, it is easy to be fooled into thinking that all pe-
ripheral men, women, and children experience the same degrees of immis-
eration. However, the world-system has structured "a modern form of
patriarchal relations, in which w o m e n experience a social reality very dif-
ferent from their brothers in capital or labor" (Salleh 1994: 1 0 8 - 1 0 9 ) .
Consequently, peripheral men and w o m e n do not experience the same de-
grees of exclusion and poverty. To treat all peripheral households as though
there are no gender differences in the experience of inequality is to ignore
the worst effects of the world-system itself. Because w o m e n experience two
levels of resource inequality (outside and within the household) and because
capitalism increases female subordination (outside and within the house-
 ammodity Chains and Gendered Exploitation 139

)ld), poverty is disproportionately felt by the world's w o m e n (Smith, Col-

is, Hopkins, and Muhammad 1988: 28). Global trends of the late
.'entieth century demonstrate their double exploitation. In every part of
e world, women control very little of the wealth, even though they work
nger hours than men. More than 7 0 % of the world's illiterate adults are
omen. The world-system is currently structuring a vast international sex
industry, and girls are targeted as the human resources to be exploited
Uies 1986: 1 3 7 - 1 4 2 ) . In addition to these health and ecological risks,
tpitalism externalizes to w o m e n the negative side effects of cultural change
id disruption. Domestic violence increases dramatically as manufacturing
id extractive industries enter new zones, and females are almost always
le victims. The world-system has always structured the absence of males
om poor households (Mies 1986), so there is an increasing trend toward
ftauale-headed households and feminization of poverty all over the world
limited Nations 1999). Global ecological stresses pose different crises for
sople according to their ethnic group, social class, sex, or age (Merchant
'''2). Women are disproportionately endangered by the ecological deg-
tdation that accompanies capitalist development, and they are the house-
'id members w h o must contribute the labor needed to care for those made
I by environmental risks or resource depletion (Warren 1997: 8-9).
.Vorldwide, resource scarcities impact w o m e n much more severely than
sen (Shiva 1988: 9). Water scarcity, desertification, deforestation, land
egradation, and coastal pollution are forms of resource depletion that pose
jecial hardships for women. Malnutrition is the most fundamental act of
-.Mronmental sexism that is inflicted by the capitalist world-system upon
women and girls. Half of all Third World children die before age 10. Fe-
lales are disproportionately represented among those deaths because poor
unifies allocate more of their scarce food resources and safe water to boys
kited Nations 1999). Capitalism also externalizes to females the costs
!ig., the nutritional battering of children) associated with high fertility
rates that follow high child mortality in about one-third of all peripheral
suntries (Ward 1985; Scheper-Hughes 1991).
The modern world-system has institutionalized the cultural devaluation
f the work of w o m e n and girls. "Sexism was the relegation of w o m e n to
le realm of non-productive labor, doubly humiliating in that the actual
ibor required of them was if anything intensified, and in that productive
ibor became in the capitalist world-economy, for the first time in human
istory, the basis for the legitimation of privilege" (Wallerstein 1983: 103).
lonsequently, institutionalized sexism makes possible reproduction of the
workforce at the most profitable levels for capitalists. Gender discrimina-
on provides a built-in training mechanism for the workforce, ensuring that
large part of the socialization in occupational tasks will be done within
* framework of households and not at the expense of employers (Wal-
rstein 1984: 177). Consequently, integration into capitalist commodity
140 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analys

chains brings destructive economic results for women. Historically and cu

rently, women have been targeted for the dirtiest, most backbreaking a
pects of the capitalist production process (Dunaway 1995), whi
higher-skilled, higher-paying artisan jobs have been reserved for mat
(Hayashi 1998; Pelizzon 1999). In the face of capitalist expansion, Tbii
World w o m e n lose artisan jobs and local markets to imports and to cor
mercialized agriculture (Mies et al. 1988). Multinational corporations coi
trol the commodity chains that are initiating these economic changes, at
these global conglomerates are externalizing major ecological costs to p
ripheral women. Females are entering the labor forces of multinational co
porations faster than adult males, and this is a trend expected to contini
in the twenty-first century. To keep production costs low, multinationals'^
are breaking the bodies of Third World girls and young w o m e n at an J
alarming rate. By eliminating safety equipment and sanitary working con- ,|
ditions, corporations externalize to w o m e n and children the health costs of'I
industrial injuries and disabilities, work-related diseases, and the higher 1
incidence of birth defects and mother mortality due to exposure to chem-^
icals and industrial waste. Yet most of these w o m e n live in countries with j
grossly inadequate medical systems (Barndt 1999; Madeley 1999).
Over the historical existence of the modern world-system, capitalism has-^
gradually reached deeper and deeper into the everyday lives of households. J
Because they remain more semi-proletarianized than men, w o m e n are more 1
intensively and more extensively exploited by capitalist commodity chains. \
When we take into account all paid, underpaid, and unpaid labor, it is
clear that capitalism captures more of women's work time and extracts 1
from them greater indirect subsidies than from males. What does capitalism $
extract from w o m e n that it does not take from men? In order to transformi
households into units that reproduce laborers and consumers, capitalism J
has commodified human reproduction; and it has reshaped and deformi
child raising and parenting (Mies et al. 1988). In every historical era, ti
modern world-system has restructured households, repeatedly breaking +

families whose members (most often adult males) were removed by labi
migrations (Boss 1 9 9 3 ; Dunaway 2 0 0 1 ) . Capitalist commodity chains con
pete with households for limited ecological resources; and females contrii
ute much more unpaid labor to those commodity chains than men (B< nci t
and Roldan 1987: 1 0 2 - 1 0 3 ; Wallerstein 1995: 5 - 6 ) .
Because it accumulates greater profits off the backs of women, the worli
system does not seek to transform females into wage laborers. The sysi.
profits at maximal levels by semi-proletarianizing w o m e n and by shiftir.
to w o m e n and households most of the costs of commodity productioi
(Hopkins and Wallerstein 1987; Shiva 1988). While w o m e n are semipn
letarianized, they are also semi-domesticatednot able, then, to functic
predominantly within or outside their households. On the one hand, th<
Commodity Chains and Gendered Exploitation 141

are identified socially as housewives. On the other hand, they are "fully
integrated in a world market oriented production system." According to
Mies (1981: 4 9 3 ) , "the social definition of w o m e n as housewives serves
mainly the purpose of obscuring the true production relations and to con-
solidate their exploitation, ideologically and politically."

^*-inen are not simply "left behind" while men monopolize the new and more
productive areas of the economy; they are in fact deliberately "defined back" into
the role of housewives. Only if women remain outside the formal sector and are
socially defined as housewives can the double exploitation of their labor go on.
Not only the big exporters, but also the husbands . . . are benefiting as non-
producers from [women's] ongoing subsistence production. The integration of
women .. . into a world system of capital accumulation has not and will not trans-
f.M ni them into free wage-labourers. It is precisely this facttheir not being free
wage-labourers, but housewiveswhich makes capital accumulation possible.
(Mies 1981: 500)

Clearly, females reproduce the world-system in ways that men cannot,

yet capitalists remunerate them at much lower levels than males. If capi-
talists compensated w o m e n for all their externalized costs and unpaid la-
bor, prices would be driven up so high that most commodities would not
he competitive in the world-economy. Thus, the modern world-system has
'restructured gender into forms that permit maximal extraction of surpluses
from households for the benefit of capitalist production. "It was exactly
tfiis (re)creation that gave the developments of world-capitalism its specific
character and, along with historical dimensions, the fuel that would even-
tually and constantly (re)create world capitalism" (Smith 1 9 9 3 : 14).

CONCLUSIONS

Marginalization of gender issues by this perspective parallels the struc-

tural position of w o m e n in the world-system. At the ultimate periphery live
women and girls in semi-proletarianized households; and they constitute a
majority of the world's poor. Moreover, there are t w o bare essentials with-
out which the world-system cannot exist: (1) the reproductive capacity of
the ecosystem to supply natural resources and (2) the reproductive capacity
tit women to supply the human laborers and consumers w h o make the
system profitable. Those t w o realities alone should be enough to convince
us all that we must bring w o m e n and households much more fully into the
core research agenda of world-systems analysis. Failure to prioritize women
, represents the greatest intellectual and political blunder of the world-
^systems perspective. There can be no effective world-systems analysis or
praxis so long as w o m e n and households are introduced as an afterthought
or ignored completely. Gender:
142 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

is not just another variable to be thrown into analyses, but is an integral component
of the world-systems evolution. Focusing on gender points to new theoretical in-
sights into the factors that shape group consciousness, into subtle forms of resis-
tance to oppression, into the ways capital exploits extant cultural values, and into
ways micro and macro social processes are linked. (Day and Hall 1991: 4)

Concepts like commodity chain and semiproletarianized household lay

an important foundation for us to integrate the vantage points of women,
but the perspective has not yet done that. With some revision, commodity
chain research can be utilized to merge macrostructural trends with the
microlevel, where we may discover the everyday lives on which the complex
global system feeds. As Wallerstein (1986: 15) has pointed out, work
systems analysis was born as a moral and a political protest against the
exploitation and inhumanity of the present world order. I am simply chal
lenging proponents of the perspective to remember that political agenda
and, thereby, to write morality tales that are more inclusive of a majority
of the wretched of the earth. For every visible node in a commodity chain,
there are many invisible links to households that are grounded in the Mipct
exploited labor of w o m e n and girls. If, then, we engender commodit)
chains, we will discover that the tentacles of the world-system are entwined
around the bodies of women. Every diagram of a commodity chain should
remind us that consumers at the end point are devouring the lives and labor
of multitudes w h o subsist off the invisible and unrewarded inputs of s i m i -
proletarianized women. As we descend the nodes of the commodity chain
diagram, with every link we should call Her name, not the brand name of
a product, for every link is embedded in the foundation that we call
Woman.

NOTES
I would like to thank Donald Clelland for his critical comments and biblioj^r lph
ical assistance on several drafts of this chapter.
1. I analyzed the content of Review, volumes 1 through 20, the Journal of
World-System Research, volumes 1 through 5 (nos. 1-3), and the monograp
have been published as PEWS annuals. For a complete list of the PEWS annuals
see this site on-line: http://csf.colorado.edu/wsn/jwsr.htm.
2. While not viewed as "politically correct" by many U.S. feminists, this argu
ment reflects the real, everyday roles of the vast majority of the world's v.onitn
Globally, most women are indeed mothers and housewives who expect to bear and
to raise children as their primary role in households. In addition, most of t\
world's women still provide non-material resources to households, such as emo-
tional support, spiritual resilience, and caregiving to household members.
3. American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFl-
CIO) study released 9 March 2000; see www.workingfamilies.com.
Commodity Chains and Gendered Exploitation 143

4. Using Acrobat Reader, you can access this information on-line at http://
fbox.vt.edu/W/wdunaway/figures.pdf.

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 Chapter 8

Revisioning Social Change: Situated

Knowledge and Unit of Analysis in
the Modern World-System
Nancy Forsythe

I\ PRODUCTION

' lile the study of long-term, large-scale social change appears at odds with
tinist analysis, analysis that tries to capture women's lived experience,
apparent difficulties between them are not inevitable; rather, they stem
m how we conceive women, on the one hand, and long-term, large-scale
:ial change, on the other. To produce knowledge about long-term, large-
le social change that corresponds to the prescriptions of women's
vements for research respecting embodiment and multiplicity requires
it we examine preconceptions about the status of both the knower and
known in the research process. This project benefits from the integra-
n of feminist analysis and world-systems analysis. Both feminist analysis
i world-systems analysis have, to varying extents, attempted to rethink
se two parts of the process of producing knowledge, though each has
gely specialized in one. For feminist analysis, the focus has been pri-
rily on the knower and has taken the form of various permutations of
: idea of standpoint. For example, both women's standpoint (Hartsock
33) and the black feminist standpoint (Collins 1991) refer to a position
m which to perceive the world in ways different from those of dominant
:ial science, as well as from one another. For world-systems analysis, the
us has been primarily on the known, on interrogating assumptions about
particular and the contextual, defined in opposition to the long term
i the large scale, as ways to meet the intellectual demands of embodi-
nt and multiplicity. The arguments that I make in favor of the study of
ig-term, large-scale social change are not made in opposition to feminist
dysis. On the contrary, in what follows here I suggest that the world-
148 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Anafy

systems study of long-term, large-scale social change is helpful in advancii .

our understanding and politics of embodiment and multiplicity. Worl
systems analysis does not assume that the long term and the large sea
have any meaning whatsoever outside of their constructions as the spati
and temporal boundaries of a conceptual objectthe study of long-ten
large-scale social change, then, must begin with the clarification of unit i
analysis: what do we study, and when and where do we find it? The ki
task in world-systems analysis is establishing, rather than assuming, tl
meaning of, and then the relationality among, the conceptual, spatial, at
temporal dimensions of the topic at hand. From the perspective of women
movements, feminist-situated knowledge focuses on analysis of the rel
tionality among body, social status, and science as integral components i
the process of social change. My understanding of this relationality sugges"
analysis of a TimeSpace roughly corresponding to Wallerstein's m o d e
world-system and so suggests that the study of long-term, large-scale soci
change is appropriate and useful for women's movements. Furthermore, a
feminist world-systems analysis of that relationality links the feminist in-
sistence that "the personal is political" to long-term, large-scale social'j
change and, in doing so, resolves the paradoxical reading of woman/
women's differences or sex/gender.
The chapter begins with examination of the paradoxical reading of the '- t

sex/gender system that dominates feminist analysis today. In light of recent

insights in feminist analysis, I suggest that it is not the relationship of sex
to gender that is in need of explanation but the relationality of body to J
social statusand, further, that both "body" and social status must be |
interpreted as historically and socially located. The following section of the '\
chapter interprets world-systems analysis in light of feminist issues and fem-
inist epistemology, a task made simple by the very feminist-friendly meth-
odologies for the study of social change found in the work of Wallerste'-
and Hopkins. The chapter concludes with Wallerstein's discussion of ut
pistics and political vision focused on the middle-run, again, interpretatioi
of political strategy very sympathetic to feminist concerns.

W H A T D O W E M E A N W H E N W E SAY "SEX/GENDER
SYSTEM"?

Based on the slogans "the personal is political" and "women's empow-

erment" (as opposed to armed/class struggle and revolution), feminis
made visible the power and politics hidden in interactions with very sms
space and time dimensions: in everyday life, family, interpersonal relatioi
ships, sexuality, and so on. This has meant, mistakenly I think, the di
placement of its perceived opposite, long-term, large-scale social chang
Based on appraisal of the limited successes of masculinist movements:
pursuing peace, justice, and freedom through mass movements, bureai
"kevtsioning Social Change 149

cratic organizations, state-centered strategies, and "universal" political sub-

jects, women's movements have moved, rightly so, in another direction.
My difficulty with the current state of affairs in gender studies lies in the
extent to which this focus on "the personal is political" and "women's
empowerment" is read to be different from, or opposed to, the study of
long-term, large-scale social change. To distinguish the t w o is problematic.
We can best k n o w if the focus of women's movements on the body, social
status (intersectionality), and science leads in the direction of large-scale,
long-term social change, developing research strategies and methodologies
to assess change, if we examine long-term, large-scale space-time dimen-
sions.
The difficulty with the view from experience is that it has led to an
untenable situation in which gender difference and women's claims against
power are misconceived as a paradox. T w o recent and popular books dem-
onstrate this: Judith Lorber's The Paradoxes of Gender and Joan Scott's
Only Paradoxes to Offer. Each poses problems with the analysis and pol-
itics of gender difference in terms of paradox, though each draws on dif-
ferent meanings of the term. For Lorber, paradox occurs insofar as the
difference between sex and gender appears unbelievable or incredible given
the ubiquity of gender difference in human societies; for Scott, paradox
occurs because one or the other of t w o mutually dependent meanings of
woman must be false: that which penalized w o m e n as the weaker sex or
that which w o m e n embraced in collective action.

The book is called Paradoxes of Gender because, when examined

closely, much of what we take for granted about gender and its causes
and effects either does not hold up or can be explained differently.
(Lorber 1994: 5)

A second major paradox is the origin of gender and, especially, gender

inequality. Because gender is ubiquitous in human society, the belief
has been that it must be genetic or physiological and that gender ine-
quality is ultimately based on procreative differences. (Lorber 1994: 6)

[I]n order to protest women's exclusion, they had to act on behalf of

women and so invoked the very difference they sought to deny. .. .
Either position attributes fixed and opposing identities to women and
men, implicitly endorsing the premise that there can be an authoritative
definition for sexual difference. . . . The intensity of feminist politics
of feminist actions and antifeminist reactionsfollows from the un-
decidability of sexual difference. So does the paradoxical quality of
feminist claims for rights. (Scott 1996: x)

But the paradox of gender is not inevitable, that is, it is not a condition
of gender difference in the "real world"; it arises because, in the cases of
ISO Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Ai.ah

both Scott and Lorber, the paradoxical pairing is of t w o conceptual i

gories, the first invoking a universal condition or category that ser\es r.-
ground the contrast with the second, with difference, change, variation; the;
latter terms, corresponding to women's differences, are read as cases of the!
universal condition. For Scott, the universal term is "woman"; for Lorber,
1
"sex." For example, using Scott's "woman," the universal term is shown
to be false on the basis of women's differences (or, in the nineteenth cen-
tury, the biological condition is contradicted by women's experience,
women's self-defined capacity to learn, to reason, to vote, etc.). The un -
versal term appears false in contrast to the particular case, and so the p.v.i-
ing is paradoxical. In Lorber's analysis, the case of gender difference!
appears incredible on the basis of the ubiquity of sex differences. But
readings of the paired terms depend on the apparent incompatibility <
universal condition and its "case."
The paradoxical reading of the difference between woman/women's dif-
ferences is a function of the spatial/temporal/conceptual bounding of
category "woman." "Woman" here represents a universal category or con-
dition, one with no spatial or temporal boundaries; women's differences,
or intersectionahty, refer, on the other hand, to particularizations of
universal cases of the condition. The same is true of the distinction bctwcu:
sex and gender; the distinction is purportedly that sex refers to a conditio-.
like w o m a n , that does not change, whereas gender, like intersectionaliu.
refers to change, difference, variation. The paradox fades when the sp.nu
and temporal boundaries of "woman" in Scott's case and "sex" in LnrheiV
casewhich woman? which sex?are made explicit and when analysis <*
the bounding of categories forms the basis for the analysis of sex and
der, or w o m e n and intersectionality.
I would argue that the reading of the universal/particular pairing is ltscl-
the source of the paradox; without invocation of a universal term and its
particular case, there is no paradox. In part, the paradox arises from
feminist interest in rejecting a biologically defined meaning of "woman"
and the preferred elaborations of the intersection of gender with otlu
forms of social difference. Historicity is imparted to the "case" of inti-i-sc-
tionality, but the universal term "woman" (or "gender") remains a 1 ran-,
historical condition. This is typical of current use of the "sex/gender
system" model of feminist analysis, which similarly invokes the uni\crv-.'.
term by specifying gender as a particular case of sex; the use of paradox
by the authors cited above falls also into this paradigm, re-invigorati ng ilk
paradoxical reading of the universal and its case.
Yet, the sex-gender relationship need not be either contradictory or
credible. The paradox lies not in the pairing of sex and gender or wonwr
and women's differences per se but in the bringing together of oth
distinct social dynamics and distinct social practices in the analysis of
women's differencesone dynamic of race and its practices, with a separate j

A
Revisioning Social Change 151

dynamic of gender and its practices and another dynamic of class and its
oracticeseach modeled (theorized) separately and ahistorically such that
when and where "women" begins and other social differences take over in
demarcating women's experience are murky. The impetus behind the study
of women's differences was generated in the insight that w o m e n do not
ive gender here and race there and class there but experience all simulta-
neously; yet the analysis of that intersectionality depends on a methodology
.n which discrete social dynamics are conceived as generalizations from
many cases, and cases are then interpreted as the embodiment of many
(discrete) models of social dynamics. The very overgeneralization that fem-
inist analysis seeks to avoid in the analysis of "women," it reproduces in
the analysis of race, class, gender, and so on.
As long as gender difference is conceived as a social dynamic as inde-
pendentconceptually, spatially and temporallyof the other forms of
social difference that produce cases of w o m a n , the paradox persists. The
paradox is the result of defining w o m a n separate from those things that
generate women's differences; in this case, w o m a n is both separate from
other forms of social difference and not separate. This is contradictory,
paradoxical. However, the root of the paradox lies not in the real world
hut in the analysis of "women"; it is a problem not of ontology but of the
methodology that governs analysis of the relationship of the "women" to
the teal world (or to women's experience). Are "women" a transhistorical
category, shaped by things other than gender? Is the only alternative to
dissolve the meaningfulness of the term altogether into women's differ-
ences? Is there a middle way?
The dilemma posed by the tension between these t w o readings of
"women" has consumed feminist analysis in the debate over essentialism
or difference in the last decade; the various ways in which each meaning
yields some important data about women's lives have been considered, and
scholars have sought reason to choose one or the other as the better rep-
resentation of women's lived experience. Following in the tradition of re-
jecting biologically defined essentialist readings of w o m a n , most feminist
scholars have turned to the study of intersectionality in "the local" or in
"context." This does not, however, displace the universal term; it simply
sidesteps the issue of what we mean when we say "women" by apparently
qualifying the term with differences spelled out by other forms of social
differentiation.
The assumption that women's experience is better represented in analysis
of difference, of "the local" and "context," too often fails to think through
what is meant by the local and context. In fact, these terms become sub-
stitutes for the analysis of other forms of social differentiationfor race,
:lass, world-economic position, and so on. The difficulty with creating gen-
eralizations is found less in the size of the unit of analysis (the modern
world-system, Buenos Aires, March 1957) than in the modeling of distinct
152 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis-

units of analysis (race, class, etc.) such that the relationship between the
units is incidental to understanding the unit itself; the relationship between
the units is added after the fact; the units are related in cases, or contexts.
For example, "the local" is often meant to imply differences among women
by world-economic position: "textile-producing indigenous w o m e n in Gua-
temala in 1 9 9 9 " indicates a locality within which to understand these
women, a locality in which their real lived experience is supposedly better
represented than in analyses with larger time and space dimensions. Cer-
tainly, in the age of globalization, we understand that addressing the time
and space of that locality means bringing to bear on the analysis processes
:
that transcend the locality itself. But, does "women" transcend the l o c a l i n
Or are those processes and relations situating the local in time and space
different from the process of gender differentiation? Typically, in the mil
ysis of gender difference, what distinguishes sex from gender or woman
from women's differences are things other than gender, to which women
is added after the fact; w o m e n simply are, and are on the basis of a mean-;
ingful (universal, non-differentiated) category, "women"; the category is
then differentiated, or made social and historical, by processes of social
change distinct from women, that is, world-economic position, year, race/
ethnicity, labor force participation in the case illustrated here. The context
or the local is modeled separately from whatever we mean when we use
the term "women"; the construction of those concepts designating the local
is too often left vague; and analysis of gender is added as a set of obser-
vations about w o m e n in the context.

Does this analysis represent the real experience of these women, in con-
trast to categorizations such as "women in 1 9 9 9 " or "women in the United
States" or "women in developing countries"? I think not; I argue instead
that "woman" itself and the process of gender differentiation of which it
is an indicator are historical, such that they transcend the local and are
formative of the world-systemic processes shaping "textile-producing
w o m e n in Guatemala in 1999." But analyzing "women" as world-systemic
requires giving up many of our assumptions about what w o m e n are and
h o w to analyze social change from the perspective enabled by the category.
All readings of w o m e n or gender difference, even those that purport to
relate to a "context" or a "community," are actually abstractions from
experience and therefore partialities (Hopkins 1982a), not giving us a pic-
ture of women's lived experience but situated knowledge about it; a par-;
ticular analysis of the experience of a community of women, no matter
h o w small, is nothing more than a choice of which parts (conceptual, tem-
poral, spatial) of the story to tell. The analysis is always partial. In avoiding
overgeneralizations metanarratives, and stereotypessize doesn't nnttei
we get no closer to knowing what w o m e n really are by narrowing the
spatial and temporal dimensions of our study; what matters is why the
spatial and temporal dimensions are chosen, which, in turn, must be spec--
 visiomng Social Change 1S3

zd in relationship to the people, practice/event, or process under consid-

ation. When and where are the processes and relations shaping the
ople, practice/event, or process located? Knowing what w o m e n are as a
cial category requires that we move on t w o fronts simultaneously, one
ai lalytical and one spatial-temporal: what is it that we are looking for, and
aere and when do we find it?
From the perspective of feminist embodiment and the study of multi-
tcity, the terms "woman" and "sex" are more usefully situated each as
historical object, knowable (only) through socially, temporally, and spa-
ti illy located sites and practices, rather than as a universal condition or
tegory. My interest here is in thinking through what happens to the study
women and women's differences when neither term is assumed to be a
liversal condition, when both terms are interpreted as historical and so-
illy located: when w o m a n , not w o m e n , is a term the meaning of which
anges through time. The relationality between sex/gender, woman/
omen, then, is that between t w o historical terms that may, however, have
fferent spatial and temporal dimensions. Defining conceptual subjects
r
oman or sex) as spatially and temporally located units of analysis is one
the trademarks of world-systems analysis. In the next section of the
. lapter I turn to the particular methodologies of world-systems analysis
that accommodate the study of relationality between historically and so-
illy located conceptual subjects; world-systems analysis overlaps consid-
ably with feminist analysis in much of its approach to knowledge
oduction, and I mine the rich potential in their interaction for enhancing
e study of w o m e n and women's differences. Nevertheless, examining the
historical and social location of the conceptual subject includes not only
locating its time and space but also clarifying what the conceptual subject
To enrich the study of that which women's movements fix our attention
n , it is worthwhile exploring the basis of Lorber's and Scott's pairing
universal/particular in the very model of gender studies that has fueled
development of the field from its inception.
In their naming of the "personal is political" and of the body as a site
power and social change, women's movements contested a category of
entity in which women's social status is given in their bodily difference
om men. The sex/gender system was originally conceived by Rubin (1975)
a way to distinguish a universal condition (bodily difference from men)
/from its culturally specific manifestations and so to problematize the rela-
' jnship of biology to women's varying social roles. The power of this
lalysis has been formidable; it has enabled the development of the field
gender studies. Yet it is limited in its capacity to keep pace with the
insights of women's movements inso far as it relies for its logical consis-
ncy on the universal term.

The focus on multiplicity and embodiment in more recent feminist anal-

is suggests instead that it is not only a generalized, universal relationship
154 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Ana,

of the body to social status that women's movements contest but a paj
ular, historical bounding of the relationship of the body to social sta
That particular, historical bounding of the relationship contested
women's movements includes, on the one hand, the designation of the bun
1
as a site of scientifically codified and institutionalized truths about the i -
tinction between the biological and the social and, on the other han<.
clearly delineated complex of social statuses, namely, race, class, gen
nation, and sexuality. In other words, women's movements have speci
their unit of analysis as that in which the body, world-systemic social s
uses, and science come together. This has several revolutionary implicati
for the study of social change.
First of all, the contestation initiated through feminist focus on the b
challenged political economy, the analysis of social change in which be
kinship were not interesting or significant moments in the process. In c
trast, recent developments in feminist thinking have offered the possib:
of "woman" and "man" being formative of social structure, society, ir
tutional arrangements, and so on; they form "the social" in the sense I
change in the social is defined through their transformation. Woman
this case, is not a universal or a given shaped by the social, but instea
is a historical object through which the social is known. Rather than
ontological condition, "woman" is a heuristic and political tool.
Second, this tool makes possible inquiry into the historical variability o
the relationality between the body and social status. Like w o m a n , that
relationality is made historical through this insight; that is, the relatiniul.
of body to social status is negotiated in socially, spatially, and temporaliv
located sites and practices. Political economy is one of those sites; its reru \
to acknowledge the body and kinship as formative moments in the J~>I in-
duction of what was intended by "the social" can be accounted for b\ tk
process of gender differentiation; in other words, gender difference
significant in the production of what was meant by the social in politica
economy and h o w social change was analyzed in the field. However, po
litical economy was shaped on the basis of preexisting contestations ou
the meaning and practice of gender difference; for example, "the social'
or, for Adam Smith, "the economic," was an elaboration of a structuii? i
knowledge (Wallerstein 1996) initiated in the transition from lineage-based
strategies of fixing status and wealth to those of the modern world-s> S U T
Finally, we are led to ask, When and where did the relationality contested
by women's movements take shape? If the terms are granted hist<uji.-it..
,n
then asking when and where becomes an integral moment in the f o r n u t u
of the terms. While I do not go into this in much depth here, I suggest
the historical relationality of the body to social status that women's rami-
ments contest today is that which begins to take shape in European niii
icine and natural philosophy around the twelfth to fourteenth cenl LH IL-.
it is a relationality that forms and conforms to the structure of knov. led-.*
Revisioning Social Change 155

that solidifies in the following centuries; it is not entirely of European or-

igin, and, with the expansion of world-systemic strategies of accumulation
and territorialism (Arrighi 1994), the relationality of the body to social
.tatus is quickly interpreted in terms of differences ranking various
member-groups/peoples of the species; that is, the process of gender differ-
entiation was simultaneously "intersecting" with other forms of social
differentiation in the formation of science at this early date.
The "discovery" of gender difference in the 1970s is the discovery that
that relationship is historically and socially variable. But this discovery
surely raised more questions than it answered; it highlighted the difficulties
in an entire epistemology for which the body is the original, ahistorical
materiality or empirical certainty, the epistemology through which both the
modern world-system and knowledge of it (science) were built. This epis-
temology is not fully displaced by the "sex/gender system," or the paradox
cf gender; both fail to interrogate the universality of body and sex. As a
result, they re-invigorate the epistemology such that the analysis of gender
. ifference is paradoxical, contradictory, or incredible.
Of course, the body varies, both in evolution, a process that we do not
consider here, and in h o w it is conceived as a location of social status. That
the body has a given ontology is not universally shared by all cultures; its
status, ontologically and epistemologically, must be accounted for as a cul-
tural artifact. This changes significantly h o w we analyze the ways in which
the body and social status come together in the process of gender differ-
entiation and intersectionality; moreover, it changes what we mean when
we say "woman." Gender differentiation in this case refers not to biology
>r social status but to different, historically bounded relationalities between
them, one for w o m e n and one for men. The relationality between the body
nd social status is not logical, philosophical, or theoretical; it is historical
and socially located. In feminist perspective, that relationality becomes the
..*nter piece of a unit of analysis through which to study long-term, large-
scale social change.

METHODOLOGY

H o w do you tell the story of long-term, large-scale social change without

creating a metanarrative, overgeneralizations, or origin stories? On the
other hand, however, h o w do you respond to the demands of post-1968
perspectives on knowledge production (embodiment, multiplicity) without
resorting to idealism or a naive skepticism about the "real world"? The
key to avoiding these difficulties is not, in the first case, in reducing their
space and time dimensions to something that approximates the experience
of the individual, a familiar move within feminist analysis or, in the second
case, abandoning all faith in the possibility of collective agreements about
the real world. Rather, one avoids the t w o extremes of positivist episte-
156 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

mology by focusing the methodology around problematizing and then ac-

counting for the relationship between the ontological and epistemological
statuses of the unit of analysis. The "real world" is not absent or missing;
it simply fails to present itself to us as any given unit of analysis, so that
h o w we study it must be accounted for by the researcher in the process of
creating knowledge. In doing so, the researcher situates herself in the on-
going relations of power of which she is also the observer, the scientist.
The debate over the status of the real world is not about its ontological
condition per se but about h o w we are to k n o w it, about the relationship
between its ontological and epistemological statuses in our knowledge
claims and our position as interested parties in the production of knowl-
edge. It entails a critical perspective on both the unit of analysis and situ-
ated knowledge.
Producing knowledge under these conditions entails beginning with the
"question most in need of interpretation" (Hopkins 1982a), accounting for
your choice of question, and clarifying the unit of analysis appropriate to
the study of your question. In other words, the research process entails
forming both the unit of analysis and the subject position/situated knowl-
edge from which to produce knowledge claims. It entails choosing how to
situate the relationship between the ontology and the epistemology of your
unit of analysis and doing so in acknowledgment of the position of all
scholars as participants in the social relations, in the power relations that
we study. No moment in the process of producing knowledge is outside of,
or irrelevant to, the power relations inherent in the production of know'
edge. This is a methodology not only for responding to the interests of
women's movements but for advancing the study of long-term, large-scale
social change in light of post-1968 demands on knowledge production.
To clarify the complementary nature of my project and that of feminist
analysis, I turn to the world-systems focus on the centrality of unit of anal-
ysis for the interested project of producing knowledge about social change;
situating formation of the unit of analysis as an essentially interested
moment in the production of knowledge is entirely sympathetic to, and
helpful in creating, knowledge from the perspective of the feminist concep-
tion of situated knowledge (Haraway 1 9 8 8 , 1997). The attention to unit
of analysis highlights the analyst's choice of what to study, including the
spatial and temporal boundaries that are part of clarifying the set of things
coexisting in time and space that form the conceptual subject and, finally,
the necessary sociology of social inquiry that locates the producer of knowl-
edge herself and clarifies her work as a strategic political intervention onto
ongoing relations of power and social change.
While, for many of us, world-systems analysis is the study of the \\ orld
economy, its cycles, trends, and patterns of inequality, there are also a
number of conceptual and methodological insights intrinsic to world-
systems analysis that contribute substantially to the study of gender differ-
Revisioning Social Change 157

ence and intersectionality as it has been elaborated by feminist analysis. Up

to now, the work that has been produced in world-systems studies on the
impact of economic cycles, trends, and world-economic position on
women's status has taught us much that we need to k n o w about the dif-
ferentiated relationships of w o m e n and men to world-economic processes.
However, we are only n o w beginning to see the rich potential for the
broader production of feminist situated knowledge in the core assumptions
about knowledge production in world-systems analysis.
World-systems analysis is a useful ally in this project, focused as it is on
the self-conscious construction of the relationalities among spatial/tempo-
ral/conceptual boundaries. The paradigmatic innovation of world-systems
analysis is grounded in its attention to unit of analysis, that is, to proble-
matizing the relationship between the ontological and epistemological stat-
uses of the unit of analysis. World-systems methodology took shape
through interrogating the assumptions that put nation-states at the center
of analysis; within world-systems analysis, nation-states are perceived as
conceptual as well as "real world" objectsthat is, historical objects pro-
duced as much by social scientists as by "real world" developments to
indicate a set of dynamics of social change that assumed the primacy of
the nation-state as the site of those dynamics. It is worth repeating here
that the problem faced within a world-systems methodology is not that of
a choice between a materialist or an idealist perspective on the status of
the unit of analysis but rather to clarify the choices of both unit of analysis
and situated knowledge in the production of knowledge.
The limits to thinking from the perspective of nation-states had been met
by the time that Wallerstein and Hopkins began to think heuristically about
which unit of analysis, that is, which set of spatial/temporal/conceptual
boundaries, responded best to the questions and concerns of antisystemic
movements in the post-World War II period in general and the post-1968
period in particular. The choice of the modern world-system was consistent
with their interest, in the 1960s, in perceiving social change from the sit-
uated position of the periphery of the world-economy, Africa in particular.
Those processes of social change that situated Africa in the 1960s were
long-term and large-scale, and world-systems analysis took shape as the
study of large-scale and long-term social change.
In raising the issue of the unit of analysis, Hopkins and Wallerstein
(1982) challenged the practice of thinking of different spatio-temporal lo-
cations (family, intrapersonal, production process, nation, global) as being
of different types (primitive, modern, race, gender, class), some in one sys-
tem and some in another system, each comprehended by distinct laws or
dynamics. Instead, responding in the 1960s to a generalized critique of the
scientific enterprise of carving the world up and studying its parts indepen-
dently, a critique that was prominent in both the "social" and "natural"
sciences, Wallerstein and Hopkins critically examined political economy
158 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

itself and conceived world-systems analysis as the study of the relations

between diverse spatio-temporal locations, or of parts of a whole. In Hop-
kins' analogy, the focus shifts here from the "end points" to the relations
between end points, and analysis is conducted of the relations themselves.
This can be expanded to include the study of the relationality between the
various dynamics operating among and between those diverse locations; in
feminist language, this refers to intersectionality, to the coming together of
conventional, independently conceived social dynamicsrace, class, gen-
der, for examplein locating women's experience. The focus in world-
systems analysis is not on w o m e n but on the relations between and among
w o m e n and men.
No moment or space in the ambit of the processes linking those parts,
they argued, could adequately or usefully be thought of as existing outside
them; in fact, the important task, the political task, was to comprehend the
relationality itself, to understand h o w the differences that set scholars to
conceiving parts as independent units in the first place constituted t w o sides
of the same coin, meaningful only in their relationship to one another.
World-systems analysis demonstrated that class and nation or world-
economy and inter-state system were never independent constructs that
happened, in particular "empirical" cases, to intersect with one another;
on the contrary, Hopkins and Wallerstein's modern world-system is con-
ceived first and foremost as the intersection of the t w o in a single Time-
Space. There is a single unit of analysis, they argued, and even though
things may appear as far too different to be called the same, nevertheless,
their injunction was to comprehend the diversity in terms of relationality.
This idea of a unit of analysis as a location of relationalities, the intersectioa
of things conceived originally as different from one another, is certainly
amenable to a feminist conception. "I think the perspective that we are
trying to develop premises a multilevel, complex system of social action
that is comprehensive and singular not only in scopeand so forms a spa-
tial 'world' with its o w n changing geopolitical boundariesbut also in
timeand so forms a temporal world with its o w n irreversible sequences
and non-arbitrary periodicities" (Hopkins 1982b: 148).
From its inception, world-systems analysis proposed that the relation;
between diverse spatio-temporal parts forms the question most in need of
interpretation in the study of social change in the contemporary pencil
Establishing the TimeSpace boundaries of that relationality, rather rlir-
those of the end pointsthe boundaries that united the end points in .-.
single unit of analysiswas the most strategic analytical intervention into
ongoing processes of power and social change. From an initial quest im.
one moves back and forth between the conceptual subject and its Tinn-
Space to form a unit of analysis; within that unit of analysis, ascertaining
continuities and discontinuities and h o w diverse spatio-tempi
conceptual parts change in relationship to one another is the goal.
hvisioning Social Change 159

But, of course, the modern world-system is, for all intents and purposes,
afkite in its relationalities and therefore difficult to study, and world-
ystems analysts had made the point that the very "materiality" of the
ration-state, which had sustained belief in, and development of, the social
sciences for t w o centuries, was in question. H o w would you go about pro-
ducing knowledge under such conditions? Wallerstein, interested as he was
in. the world-economic position, undertook the study of the relations among
ration-states in the world-economy, his interested unit of analysis, begin-
ning the heady task of ordering the parts of a world-economy; the first task
was to discern the spatial and temporal boundaries of the relations ordering
the parts and examining their patterning (cycles and trends). Hopkins de-
veloped the methodology that clarified the process of producing knowledge
ibout social change under such circumstances, when the typical and nor-
mative unit of analysis was unsatisfactory, when, in turn, unit of analysis
itself became a contested term, and your choice of what to study (which
relations?, which parts?) as well as the spatial and temporal boundaries of
your interested unit of analysis were perceived as an intervention in ongoing
relations of power.
For Hopkins and Wallerstein, knowledge production responsive to these
*laims revolved around t w o assertions: on the one hand, that all knowledge
claims were abstractions from a complex, holistic world of relationalities
md were therefore partial (the corollary of this was that knowledge pro-
duction was a collective endeavor) and, on the other hand, that all knowl-
edge claims were historically and socially situated such that knowledge
production itself required a "sociology of social inquiry" as an integral
3
moment in its production (1982: 3 3 ) .
Hopkins used the term "abstraction" to differentiate the knowledge
laims of world-systems analysis from the process of concept formation
typical of the covering law paradigm (1982b: 1 5 4 - 1 5 5 ) which gives us
'generalizations" from "cases." An abstraction, for Hopkins (1982b), is
he result of recognizing the partiality of all knowledge claims, selecting a
Sece of the story to tell (relationalities), designating the unit of analysis
the space-time-conceptual dimensions) appropriate to its analysis, and
making yourself accountable for the selections in terms of situated knowl-
edge. Though the space-time dimensions may be extensive, as in the case
jf claims about long-term, large-scale social change, nevertheless, the claim
s partial; it is contrasted with the more complex, holistic concrete, though
:
or Hopkins (1982b: 146), "[c]oncrete here is a level of conceptualization,
t is not the 'real world.' " Neither abstract nor concrete refers to the "real
Korld" (more on this below); rather, their interdependence is relative, tak-
sg the form of more and less partial/holistic. Abstractions, in the Hopkins'
sense, are the best we can hope for in terms of truth or certainty; however,
whatever they cause us to lose in terms of faith in materiality and progress,
hey compensate for with multiplicity in both knowers and known. In other
160 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analyse

words, it is not only the unit of analysis which must be specified as part
of the research project itself, but the researcher creates, or positions, herself
as part of the process as she clarifies h o w her (partial) analysis stands is
the relationality between abstract and concrete, between part and whole.
Which part of the story she tells and h o w it "fits" in relationship to other
possible parts are critical moments in terms of reproducing or challenging
the power inherent in knowledge production.
Taking the virtually infinite mass of social practices that constitute the
modern world-system and organizing them for the purposes of producing
knowledge about social change and thus intervening in the reproduction
or transformation of power relations require that you fix boundaries, tem-
porally, spatially, and conceptually. That process of fixing boundariesof
knowing what question to askis for Hopkins (1982b: 1 5 3 - 1 5 4 ) by far
the most difficult moment in the process of producing knowledge; the em-
pirical, quantitative, or qualitative study of those things (people, processes,
relations) indicated by your choice of question and unit of analysis is the
easier part; and the political work is virtually done by the time the question
is formed, the unit of analysis chosen, and the "sociology of social inquiry"
acknowledged. Debate over methodology, for Hopkins, was less about the
relative strengths and weaknesses of qualitative or quantitative research
strategies than about contestations over the rules governing the relations
between researcher and researched. In his analysis, those rules clearly im-
plicated the researcher in the formation of the subject matter of social
change, its conceptual boundaries, its space-time dimensions, and its place
in ongoing relations of power.

FEMINIST SITUATED KNOWLEDGE

For Wallerstein and Hopkins, all knowledge production requires ;

allel sociology of knowledge in which the analyst is accountable for
1
part in ongoing relations of power. In this, feminist analysis and
systems analysis share strategic territory. The feminist concept of s]tu.'!ti\:
knowledge is, similarly to world-systems analysis, about fixing the bound-
aries of an otherwise fluid multiplicity. Situated knowledge, H a r j w u
(1988, 1997) insists, is partial, as it and all knowledge claims must W
insofar as they are historical objects, spatially, temporally, and socially lu
cated. Situated knowledge in Haraway's reading appears to cover both the
researcher and the researched as both historically and socially located,
much feminist analysis fails to sufficiently interrogate the researched as a
politically interested choice of boundaries. Situated knowledge, as I use the
term, entails not only that we choose social locations, subject positions, o:
communities from/about which to think and to study social change but
that we clarify simultaneously that the "real world" does not in any sense
present itself as a given unit of analysis. In fact, situated knowledge is
 oning Social Change 161

Minply about community, social location, or subject position but about the
..nii w.e of unit of analysis as a set of conceptual, spatial, and temporal
daries. It is, in Hopkins' terms, an abstraction; it follows on the des-
ion of a community, which will always be, to feminist thinking, mul-
and overlapping, stabilized for the purposes of strategic politics but
ately bounded not by its status in the "real" world but by scholars or
sts bent on political intervention. "Feminist embodiment" itself is an
action and is a partial reading of women, of feminist or women's
lunity. The fact of the matter is not simply that feminist embodiment
ices partial knowledge but that any statement from the perspective of
hrnr.i list embodiment is itself only partial knowledge of feminist embodi-
, For feminists, situated knowledge includes analysis of the relation-
among body, social status, and science as integral components of the
:ss of social change.
1 Lira way wants to k n o w "how to have simultaneously an account of
il historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing sub-
. - a critical practice for recognizing our o w n 'semiotic technologies' for
m.iMtig meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of
iP world" (1988: 579). In this desire, she finds good company in
f-systems analysis.

mts of a "real" world do not, then, depend on a logic of "discovery" but on

r-charged social relation of "conversation." The world neither speaks itself
isappears in favor of a master decoder. The codes of the world are not still,
ig to be read. In some critical sense that is crudely hinted at by the clumsy
>ry of the social or of agency, the world encountered in knowledge projects
active entity. Insofar as a scientific account has been able to engage this di-
on of the world as an object of knowledge, faithful knowledge can be imag-
snd can make claims on us. But no particular doctrine of representation or
ing or discovery guarantees anything. (Haraway 1988: 593)

e active agency that Haraway seeks is, I suggest, the result of the
onality between the knower and the known, of the knownthe "real"
1locating the knower, w h o creates knowledge of the known in the
of a partial, situated inquiry into a heuristically chosen, temporally
ipatially specified unit of analysis (no temporal or logical priority is
ded in that formulation). Both the knower and the known are created/
-formed in the process (Haraway 1988: 593). This interaction between
nalyst and the real world suggests to me the agency that Haraway
imends. But it depends on- the active production of both the analyst
md that which she analyzes, on situated knowledge about a socially and
listorically located unit of analysis. For feminists, the unit of analysis ap-
propriate to the study of social change has at its center the body, and the
sistorical body must be located spatially and temporally, in particular prac-
ices; but that unit of analysis is less "the truth" about social change than
262 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

a heuristic tool for responding to women's movements as agencies of social

change. Feminist situated knowledge about social change is always partial:
its virtue is heuristically, not logically, derived. The world-systems pairing
of abstract/concrete, displacing universal/particular (or case), allows us to
make a claim about stability (in knowers or known) without prec luJin_
either the ontological status of the subject in the real world or its variability
through time, space, and social location. That process of generating both
knower and known is characteristic of the epistemology and ethics of
world-systems analysis.
Referring to another way of thinking about the dilemmas posed by the
opposition of realism and relativism, dilemmas inherent in opposii
account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and
knowing subjects . . . and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful account-,
of a 'real' world," Wallerstein discussed the pairing of idiographic and
1
nomothetic analyses of social change: "Since this is an inextricable logic
dilemma, the solution must be sought on heuristic grounds. World-systems
analysis offers the heuristic value of the via media between transhistoi w \
generalization and particularistic narrations" (1991: 244). Or, for our pui
poses, the via media between w o m a n and women's differences. Wallerstein
argues that "the only epistemology that is plausible lies in the swampv
middle ground of the concept of a historical system. That is to say, our
knowledge is about structures that reproduce themselves while they con-
stantly change and consequently never reproduce themselves" (1991: 271 >
The fluidity in units of analysis and the certainty that knowledge produc-
tion about long-term, large-scale social change is useful and possible mark
Wallerstein's contributions to our collective epistemology in the post I %s
period.
Yet, world-systems analysis is so much identified with the study of the
world-economy and with very economistic interpretations of social < h in
that I think it is worth stopping here to address this explicitly. Is the w m 1J
system designated by Wallerstein as a world-economy identified through
Kondratieff cycles and secular economic trendsor Arrighi's cycles of ac
cumulation and periods of hegemonythe only or the real world-system?
I think not. The power of world-systems analysis lies in its claim for the
heuristic, strategic status of the relationality between the knowing subject
and the unit of analysis, embodied in the hard work of producing it: which
4
relationalities? which space-time dimensions? w h y ? No single one of those
questions is adequate for producing knowledge in either Haraway's or
Hopkins' and Wallerstein's view; only the relationality among them an-
5
swers to the criterion of "objectivity."
The outcome of this attention to the active construction of both what is
to be studied and w h o is to study it is a multiplicity in both what is to be
studied and w h o is to study it; the political need to chose one subject and
one analysis is unsatisfactory in both cases. As both knower and known
Revisioning Social Change 163

are interpreted in their relationality as temporally, spatially, and socially

located phenomena, it is no longer the case that our choices are limited to
a contest between, on the one hand, one coherent body of knowledge,
represented in the "objective" world, and, on the other hand, no knowledge
at all; rather, it becomes possible to imagine multiple research agendas
corresponding to multiple dimensions of power. Thinking about debates
current in feminist analysis, however, it is important to keep in mind that
this perspective does not preclude the study of long-term, large-scale social
change.
Given that all knowledge claims are partial and incomplete, such that
knowledge production is a collective endeavor, the only relevant question
about a world-systemic reading of the relationality of body to social status
is, Is it useful for understanding power and social change from the per-
spective of women's movements? Women's movements have trained our
attention on the body and organized the study of social change around it,
including change in states and economies; women's movements have trans-
formed the analysis and practice of social change. One of the most impor-
tant consequences of locating situated knowledgeknower and k n o w n
in time and space is the clarification of the fundamental shift in antisystemic
strategies that accompanies feminist analysis of social change, of the ways
in which previous forms of resistancemovements of class and nation
were simultaneously systemic and antisystemic. As I examine in more detail
in the conclusion of the chapter, this has sustained the feminist insistence
on multiplicity and the dispersed nature of power, insofar as women's
movements do not pretend that they occupy innocent positions within the
web of power relations. Moreover, as women's movements and feminist
analysis expand the field in which power is vested and can be challenged,
there are new and enlarged opportunities to challenge not only gender hi-
erarchy but the forms of domination and exploitation familiar to political
economy as well. To repeat myself, women's movements are concerned not
only with issues of gender difference but with social change in the broadest
sense. The study of long-term, large-scale social change, then, is appropriate
for feminist analysis and is possible, even avoiding the pitfalls of meta-
narrative, origin stories, and overgeneralizations, from a world-systems per-
spective.

THE P A R A D O X OF GENDER REVISITED

Returning to the paradox of gender, posing the problem as that of the

universal condition of w o m a n and its "cases" of intersectionality, or sex
and its "cases" of gender, is challenged by a feminist world-systems per-
spective. The typical reading of the sex/gender system follows, in Hopkins'
words,
164 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

the movement in a relation of logical inclusion, from abstract concept via successive
additions of specifics or attributes to the concrete, the "real indicators"; from the
concrete via the dropping of these attributes, to the abstract. That is one sense of
the movement.
There is a very different form of the movement which is analogous not to
inclusion-relations but to part-whole relations.. . .
In this case, the part (a theoretical process) is the abstract, the whole is the
concrete. Concrete here is a level of conceptualization, it is not the "real world."
. . . [transformations of social relations . . . seem to me very abstract "parts" (the-
oretical processes) which have to be brought into successive relations with other
"parts" (other theoretical processes) in order to move toward the concrete. That is
still a conceptualization (or an interpretation-sketch); but, then, in the fullness of
the whole so formed, one "interprets" observational statements; or, alternately, one
"measures" selected and partial "outcomes" of the complex of processes. (1982b:
147)

Neither side of the dichotomous pairing, sex/gender, is either universal

or truer to the real world as lived by women; neither sex nor gender refers
to the "real world"; likewise, neither w o m e n nor intersectionality refers to
the "real world." N o n e is synonymous with "women's lived experience"
(see Scott 1 9 9 2 on use of the term "experience" in gender studies). Many
feminist scholars prefer to think in terms of intersectionality and of gender
as enabling that perspective, but, as argued earlier, these terms are murky
as long as they depend on their pairing with the universal term and are
interpreted as "cases" of that "condition." In world-systems analysis, the
universal terms are re-conceptualized in terms of socio-historical processes
(of gender differentiation in our case), as subjects with historicity, and the
pairing of the t w o terms becomes an interdependence, a relationality, tak-
ing shape as more and less partial/holistic. Neither is stable, correct, or real;
they are meaningful in their relationality and must be specified as such with
each use. Partiality in knowledge production does not automatically pre-
clude a world-systemic perspective, if for no other reason than that the
world-systemic perspective, no matter h o w "big," is itself always partial.
The choice of spatial and temporal boundaries has on analytical compo-
nentthat is, you can use evidence to evaluate whether or not there is a
congruence between the conceptual subject and the space-time boundaries
of its analysisbut the choice is also just that, a choice, one that must also
be comprehended heuristically.
The modern world-system is a useful tool insofar as it is a strategic "stop-
ping point" (Collins 1991) between the transhistorical generalization of the
universal "woman" and particularistic narrations of women's differences.
In fact, one could make a claim for the study of "woman" as a set of
genetic-anatomical relationalities, but what for? That is, the inadvisability
6
of studying w o m a n as bodily-difference-from-men comes not from the fact
that you couldn't designate the unit of analysis but from clarifying for
Revisioning Social Change 165

which strategic purposes this would produce useful knowledge. In the cur-
rent context, where the biological is still largely considered a unit of anal-
ysis distinct from "the social" and is still largely held to refer to a distinct
set of processes and "laws," biological interpretations of gender difference
tend to reinforce gender inequality and to name those w h o would fit into
neither (male nor female) set of genetic-anatomical relationalities as "de-
viant." On the other side of the debate, the current context is witness to
preferences for analysis of w o m e n in TimeSpaces smaller than that of the
modern world-system, but the argument is the same: neither is the true and
real expression of women's lived experience. One cannot dismiss world-
systems analysis because it is not faithful to women's experience; one can
dismiss it only because it is not useful.
The relevant parts of analysis, the relationality among which it is then
useful to understand, are those attributable to women's movements, better
put (if clinical-sounding), to my abstraction of women's movements in the
post-1968 period. Women's movements challenge both the relationality of
the body and social status in which women's bodily difference from men
is elided with social status, and its practice in science and in the institutional
arrangements of the modern world-system; this relationality of body-social
status as well as science and institutional arrangements are historical ob-
jects, as is their conjuncture, and the origins of this conjuncture can be
located in the TimeSpace of the modern world-system. In fact, it is as the
TimeSpace of the conjuncture of transformations in body, social status (in-
tersectionality), and science, natural and social, that the modern world-
system makes sense to me and makes sense to me as the unit of analysis
relevant to the study of social change from the perspective of women's
movements. My concern is to comprehend the impact of women's move-
ments on social change. In this formulation of situated knowledge, I find
the basis for developing assessments of social change from the perspective
of women's movements.
Nonetheless, to speak of the world-systemic experience of w o m e n in the
abstract, as a feature of the world-system as a whole, does give only a
partial reading of the experience of "woman," as well as of any of the
particular intersectionalities that constitute that world-systemic experience.
In the first case, the relationality between the world-systemic reading and
that of "woman" at the level of the species is useful in that it imparts a
historicity to the category that is not obvious in its reading as biologically
defined. In the second case, the relationality between the abstracted world-
systemic reading and that of intersectionalities is useful in that it imparts
spatiality and temporality and hence conceptual clarity to the study of in-
tersectionality.
The abstracted world-systemic reading of "women" does not tell us
much at all about the life of any w o m a n , and it does not tell us everything
about any particular group/community of women. It does tell us about
166 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

which practices or locations of gender differentiation matter for distinguish-

ing the modern world-system from other historical systems/societies and so
tells us h o w gender differentiation matters in the formation and tran^o
mation of power in the modern world-system, especially those aspi a w i
power that women's movements bring to the fore. It tells us as well how
to locate "the particular" and "the contextual" within the TimeSpace of
the historical system. It is in this sense helpful in indicating not only stra-
tegic sites of geopolitical intervention but also linkages between contexts
and localities that are out of sight in less world-systemic analyses.
The abstract conception of gender differentiation as a world-historical
process is negotiated through its dauntingly diverse, particular intersections
with other forms of social differentiation, and it is only on the basis of the
vast amount of material brought to light by the study of w o m e n and their
diversity that we can even begin to lay out what we should study, its pat-
terning, and its historicity. The world-systems analysis of gender dirh-Hi'-
tiation and of intersection draws on an inter-disciplinary wealth of data
and analysis of w o m e n and gender. But if "when" and "where" are reduced
to questions about the country/city/village and the year in which a com-
munity/event/practice is located, they miss the extent to which "women"
itself is a spatio-temporal category marked by transitions, especially the
transition in the relationality of the body to social status.
My characterization of women's movements focuses on their centcii'ii:
of intellectual and activist strategies around the spatial-temporal body and
their insistence upon the multiplicity in, as well as within, subject positions
and political agendas; this is the corollary of all that was intended by the
slogans "the personal is political" and "empowerment." The clarity with
which women's movements perceive the simultaneity of privilege and op-
pression in each of us and in each community affects deeply h o w we think
about power; it raises issues of personal as well as community accounta-
bility, of emotionality as a political strategy, and of multiplicity as objec-
tivity. Apprehension of the absence of "innocent" positions (Haraway
1997) sets women's movements apart from previous forms of opposition
and expands exponentially the capacity to resist. Getting these arenas of
experience onto the political agenda was the first task of women's move-
ments. N o w , the task is to assess h o w social change occurs in these loca-
tions and to comprehend the pace and direction of social change through
them.

NOTES
1. Lorber's (1994) interpretation of "gender as an institution" is, in many ways,
a source of inspiration for my interpretation of gender difference. Lorber's argument
that gender is a social technology for meeting human needs, however, refers to too
long a time span to be of strategic use in understanding what women's movements
Revisioning Social Change 167

are interested in today. (This contrasts, of course, with the too-short span of time
indicated by the analysis of most feminists in their preference for "the local" and
"context." This is considered below.) In fact, Lorber's institutional perspective
on gender reproduces the universality of the term "sex," if not its directly biological
reading, insofar as it suggests that gender is shaped by other circumstances, for
example, the development of states and markets/capitalist production. Gender is
simply there and then is shaped by historical circumstance. Although intended as
such, this is not a satisfactory response to the political economy exclusion of women
and gender from the analysis of the institutional arrangements of capitalism.
2. Of course, the formation of these as sites of knowledge production about the
body and social status owed much to the influence of Arabic-speaking scholars who
had indigenous texts on the body as well as classic texts of Aristotle, Galen, and
so on, both of which they shared with European physicians and natural philoso-
as. See Dussel (1995); Forsythe (1999). Of course, the relations forming the
modern world-system were not one-way; as Stoler (1989, 1995) has ably demon-
s' Jted, these relations were mutually constitutive of both core and periphery, of
se economic," "the social," and "the biological" simultaneously.
i. "[A] 'sociology' of social inquiry is needed in the empirical study of modern
social change. It is needed, however, not as still another subfield of study (whose
'boundaries' would merely legitimate ignorance of what is beyond them), but as an
integral part of the method informing our research and, as far as possible, being
consciously developed and used in the conduct of our studies and in our commen-
taries on each other's work. Thus, the whole of the usual discussion of reliability
aether predicated of observers, instruments or their products) has to be recast
and from the outset firmly grounded in understandings of the relational settings in
which (really through which) observations are made" (Hopkins 1982b: 33).
4. But using world-systems analysis for the purposes of women's movements
entails that we consider why world-systems analysis has not generated more atten-
tion to the study of gender difference. In my estimation, this reluctance stems not
from a lack of interest in gender and women but from the limitations of a materialist
or institutionalist analysis, from the limitations of not extending far enough its
critique of political economy in making new ground to stand on. The assumption
that there are distinct aspects of experience and of analysis, one material/objective
and one ideological/subjective, is integral to the historical social sciences; at the
" ae time, undermining this distinction is a crucial step in thinking from the per-
spective of women's movements. World-systems analysis has confined its scope to
the economic and the political"the material" in social scienceeven as it has
studied these in innovative ways. Gender issues are simply not central to telling
iat version of the story of social change; they simply don't matter.
i. On objectivity, Haraway writes: "At root, objectivity is about crafting com-
parative knowledge: How may a community name things to be stable and to be
like each other?" (1988: 597 n. 5.) and "Here is the promise of objectivity: a sci-
entific knower seeks the subject position, not of identity, but of objectivity, that is,
partial connection" (1988: 586). In the Gulbenkian Commission Report (Wal-
lerstein 1996): "We feel that to insist the social sciences move in the direction of
mclusiveness (in terms of recruitment of personnel, an openness to multiple cultural
experiences, the scope of legitimate matters of study) is to further the possibility of
more objective knowledge" (93).
168 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

6. I recognize that designating "woman" as a set of genetic-anatomical relation-

alities that differentiate women from men is problematic for leaving out people who
would fall into neither category defined this way. Nevertheless, one could, and some
do, define the category this way.

REFERENCES
Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the
Origins of Our Times. London: Verso.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1991. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness
and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.
Dussel, Enrique. 1995. The Invention of the Americas. New York: Continuum.
. 1996. The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor and the
Philosophy of Liberation. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Forsythe, Nancy. 1999. "Making Ground to Stand On: Gender Difference in the
Formation of Science." Unpublished manuscript.
Godelier, Maurice, Thomas R. Trautmann, and Franklin E. Tjon Sie Fat, eds. 1998.
Transformations of Kinship. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies 14(3): 575-599.
. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse.
New York: Routledge.
Hartsock, Nancy. 1983. "The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a
Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism." In Sandra Harding and Merrill
Hintikka, eds., Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology,
Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 283-310.
Hopkins, Terence K. 1982a. "The Study of the Capitalist World-Economy: Some
Introductory Considerations." In Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wal-
lerstein, eds., World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology. Beverly
Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 9-38.
. 1982b. "World-Systems Analysis: Methodological Issues." In Terence K.
Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., World-Systems Analysis: Theory
and Methodology. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 145-158.
Hopkins, Terence K., and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds. 1982. World-Systems Anal-
ysis: Theory and Methodology. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Lorber, Judith. 1994. The Paradoxes of Gender. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Rubin, Gayle. 1975. "The Traffic in Women: The 'Political Economy' of Sex." In
Rayna Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York:
Monthly Review, pp. 157-210.
Scott, Joan. 1992. "Experience." In Judith Butler and Joan Scott, eds., Feminists
Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge, pp. 22-40.
. 1996. Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminism and the Rights of Man.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Stoler, Ann. 1989. "Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual
Morality in 20th Century Colonial Cultures." American Anthropologist 16:
634-659.
Revisioning Social Change 169

. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality

and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1991. Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth
Century Paradigms. Cambridge: Polity Press.
. 1995. After Liberalism. New York: New Press.
. 1998. Utopistics, or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century. New
York: New Press.
. 1996. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on
the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
 Chapter 9

Intersecting and Contesting

Positions: Postcolonial, Feminist, and
World-Systems Theories
Shelley Feldman

INTRODUCTION

World-systems theory is credited with a range of insights that have pushed

ferward new and creative ways to think about historical capitalism, from
new trade regimes and commodity chains to aid and food regimes. As well,
world-systems theory anchors important understandings of processes of in-
ternationalization from the international division of labor to particular ar-
ticulations of capital accumulation and mobility across place. It also
provides a framework for interpreting inter-state relations, the formation
f nation-states, and the conditions for new forms of global inequality and
exchange. Less attention, however, is devoted by world-systems analysts to
sustained engagements with contemporary theories, such as postcolonial
and feminist theories, and the advancements that they promise for theory-
building. To encourage this dialogue, I use this chapter to identify as well
as deepen areas of engagement between world-systems analysts and those
employing contemporary feminist and various post-theories. The primary
question animating the discussion to follow is: H o w do contributions from
feminism, poststructuralism, and postcolonial theory offer a refinement of
our understanding of contemporary global capitalism?
Important to point out before we begin is that each of these theoretical
contributions is fraught with contradictory and complex interpretations.
Each contribution differs not only in h o w it shapes empirical analyses but
also in the often contradictory ways in which its practitioners interpret and
deploy its basic assumptions. I thus make every effort to specify the par-
ticular way in which I call upon the contributions of each framework to
make an epistemic or theoretical claim. I also attempt to differentiate be-
172 "Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysts^

tween the methodological and conceptual arguments that appear un<

rubric of world-systems analyses and their appropriation by various
titioners of the approach. The discussion to follow, then, is offered to pso- j
vide a window on debates in contemporary theory, including how different \
theoretical interventions may overlap in particular and interesting ways.i
In very broad strokes I examine the issues of holism, developmentalis-n. 1
unit of analysis, and the role of actors and forms of mobilization a
agency. Each of these concepts is central to world-systems theory. I the
turn to a discussion of women, gender, and feminism as deployed by world
systems theorists. Here I focus in particular on the contributions of Nancy
1
Forsythe (1998) and Kathryn Ward (1993) to highlight h o w women/gen-;
der/feminism is deployed to animate the world-systems approach.
I begin by engaging a conversation between postcolonial and world-J
system theory to explore both their proximate and distinctive theoretica
contributions. A dialogue across these theoretical divides may open afresl
an appreciation for the insights that were offered in initial renderings o
the world-systems approach in its direct challenge to modernization theory,.
As importantly, the significant contrasts between world-systems and van-*
ous strands of post-theories may offer us a way to examine relationship
elided in the imaginary of the world-systems framework as it is sometimesj
employed. |
My intent in this discussion is not to displace world-systems theory witii,
a version of postcolonial or feminist theory but to interrogate what >.on- -
temporary theoretical contributions both share with and offer as critique^
of world-system analyses. In other words, I wish to query the world-systemsj
approach in order to trouble the surety of its distinctive claims and re-
engage in its refinement, particularly of the contemporary formation that!
David Harvey (1989) recognizes as incorporating the "rise of postmodern-
ist cultural forms, the emergence of more flexible modes of capital accu-
mulation, and a new round of 'time-space compression' in the organization;
of capitalism." Such a conversation also reminds us that ignoring new epis-
-
temological insights can result in stifling our o w n growth and appreciation '
for what they offer in thinking anew old issues, relationships, and ideas.

T H E WORLD-SYSTEMS FRAME

It is difficult to summarize the rich epistemic terrain that is embra^a

under the rubric of world-systems theory. For this chapter, h o w
number of key assumptions animate the conversation between theories that j
are identified as "post," whether of modernism, structuralism, colonialism^
or feminism, and those that signal the underlying premises of world- systems 1
theory. Given the centrality for world-systems theory of the themes of ho>,
lism, the unit of analysis, the hierarchization of nation-states, and rw
determinacy of capital accumulation, I deploy them as the backdrop v '
 Postcolonial, Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 173

engage the contributions of postcolonial theory. I briefly summarize these

. assumptions to indicate the frame around which much of the post-critique
j, is o'ganized.
f Vi taring against both modernization theory and dependency theory,
:re nation-states are reified social entities as well as sites of action and
| change, the world-systems paradigm moves away from considering nation-
states as "relatively independent units whose level of development is deter-
, mined by the presence or absence of particular conditionseither the at-
tributes of individuals or those of the autonomous nation-state. Instead,
nation-states are assumed to be subunits whose political structures are con-
tained within a larger economic structure that is incorporated into a his-
s torically unique network of societies" (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1967: 39).
- The holism identified by Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein
i%7) is emphasized as well by Robert Bach more than a decade later,
|s\vhere he argues that capitalism arose only once; it was a "world" system
from its inception and theoretically "global" in its projected scope (Bach
't 1980: 295). This foundational claim, the notion of a single system, situates
fCthe distinctiveness of the world-systems approach: "If there is one thing
distinguishes a world-system perspective from any other, it is its
; insistence that the unit of analysis is a worW-system defined in terms of
heconomic processes and links, and not any units defined in terms of jurid-
f itai. political, cultural, geological, etc., criteria" (Hopkins and Wallerstein
u
' l : 123; emphasis in original). Hopkins restates this one year later:

; 1 think the perspective we are trying to develop premises a multi-level, complex

system of social action that is comprehensive and singular not only in scopeand
| so forms a spatial "world" within its own changing geopolitical boundariesbut
Iso in timeand so forms a temporal world with its own irreversible sequences
and onarbitrary periodicities. (Hopkins 1978: 203; emphasis in original)

Almost t w o decades later Wallerstein emphasizes the boundedness of sys-

c frameworks, arguing:

iXTihe optimal method is to pursue analysis within systemic frameworks, long

fcnough in time and large enough in space to contain governing "logic" which
'mine" the largest part of sequential reality, while simultaneously recognizing
and taking into account that these systemic frameworks have beginnings and ends
are therefore not to be conceived of as "eternal" phenomena. (Wallerstein
c: 244)

\~ Highlighting the bounded character of the capitalist world economy and

! singularity of the processes which constitute it," Bach (1980: 295)
confirms the understanding that the world-system depends upon a notion
tolism as well as a particular view of determinism where the whole
174 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysm

consists of singular processes that form and reform the relations that e\
press its systemic patterns or structures. While dependent occurrences may
be identified, nothing can be understood outside of the world-systemic
whole. Or, as Wallerstein states so clearly in a 1993 contribution: "\K
'world-system' is not a system 'in the world' or 'of the world.' It is a i -
'that is the world.' Hence the hyphen, since 'world' is not an attribute of
the system. Rather the t w o words together constitute a single concept.''
and this single concept frames the unit of analysis, the world-system I'
lerstein 1993: 2 9 4 - 2 9 5 ) .
This focus on the whole has important consequences for the elcminw
assumed to constitute its component parts and for understandin
2
nations and/or states are incorporated into a global network of exc liana.
For example, the hierarchical organization of nation-states is assui
be a function of the dynamism of capitalism, of unequal wage levels across
place, and of the need for a mediatory space, a regulatory role, for a -
periphery that signals potential mobility among states (Wallerstein 19~4,
1979). Given this functionalist impulse, the three distinct and autonomous"
categories of core, semi-periphery, and periphery provide a concrete man-
ifestation of capitalist processes of accumulation within as well as i. -
specific sites.
By way of signaling my critique, I point to a number of problems that
attend to this functionalist impulse. First, given both the singularity ot ac-
cumulation processes and the determinacy of "sequential reality,
rather self-evident that the incorporation of nation-states is neither random
nor flexible. Rather, processes of incorporation correspond to a reification
of the categories constituting the world system, processes that lend them-
selves to a number of secondary consequences, including the tendency to
3 :
homogenize places similarly situated within the world-system. Such ho-
mogenization underestimates the diverse and diversely articulated relationss
within and among the core, semi-periphery, and periphery and is embler-
atic of research that includes a focus on commodity chains and emergent
U
contradictions and conflicts in the world-economy (Chase-Dunn 19S .
1996; Gereffi 1989; Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994). Second, since powei
differences are animated through the needs of core countries, the i
peripheral and peripheral countries are shaped only tangentially by regional
and locally constituted political, cultural, and military factors. This <
phasis on the needs of core countries shapes interpretations of the glob:',
division of labor and tends toward what Folker Froebel, Jurgen Heinnch-.
and Otto Kreye (1980) offer as a new international division of labor w he e
transnational companies seek cheap, often female labor in search of cor-
porate profit.
Complementing the claim for holism and its import for an understanding:
of the unit of analysis, as well as for interpreting relations among the coie,
periphery, and semi-periphery, is Wallerstein's argument for the detcrnr-
Postcolonial, Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 175

nacy of capital as a global process of accumulation: "It is my view . . . that

no historical system that ever existed before can be plausibly seen as op-
erating on the principle of structural priority to the ceaseless accumulation
of capital" (Wallerstein 1993: 2 9 3 ; emphasis in original). The commitment
to the primacy of capitalist processes as the driving force of history and of
its position in determining our social, cultural, political, and juridical
worldas well as our experiences as participants in this worldis the
focus of the greatest disagreement between world-systems theorists and
their post-critics. This disagreement, I should say at the outset, frames ar-
guments about foundationalism and economic determinism, the t w o ten-
sions that most animate the debate between Marxist inspired world-systems
theory and their post-perspective antagonists, postmodernism, postcolonial
4
theory, and various iterations of feminist theory.

POST-INTERVENTIONS A N D T H O U G H T S

I focus on the interventions offered by postcolonial criticism rather than

specific poststructuralist or postmodernist insights because as an approach
5
it appears to trouble the assumptions of world-systems most baldly. To
borrow a notion from David Scott (1996), postcolonial theory offers a
';conceptual space that many of us were finding useful to think in, think
about; a space opened up we would argue, by Edward Said (most partic-
ularly in Orientalism" and suggested by Talal Asad's insights in his
Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973) even earlier. Postcolonial
6
theory, like world-systems theory, challenges developmentalist history but
is distinguished from the latter by its commitment to dismantle the center-
margin binarism of imperial discourse. These challenges position the post-
colonial project in the colony and draw attention to specificities of race,
gender, and ethnic/tribal difference as well as to interpretations of the na-
tion, nationalism, and anticolonial struggle. These themes frame the dis-
cussion to follow.
Roots of postcolonial theory can be linked to a critique of bourgeois and
Marxist historiographies offered by the Subaltern Studies Group, an intel-
lectual collective that emerged in India in the early 1980s. The early work
of the group, like that of world-systems theorists, focused on concrete his-
torical research, and its early proponents, unlike some of their postcolonial
counterparts, retained a broad Marxist horizon while criticizing the lack
of attention to the role of popular, usually peasant rebellions and the grow-
ing disillusionment with the organized Left. Ranajit Guha (1982, 1 9 8 3 ,
1989), the group's leading intellectual visionary, challenged the "history
7
from above" explanation of anticolonial success. Drawing centrally on
Gramsci, he challenged as well interpretations that emphasized economic
pressures to the exclusion of movements from below and the significance
of action, consciousness, and culture. Such a perspective has been critical
176 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis;:

to interpretations of movements from below as they take cognizance of

kinship networks and territoriality as constituting forms of horizontal af-
filiation and mass mobilization. According to Dipesh Chakrabarty (1998),
Guha's reinterpretationor, perhaps more appropriately, rejectionof the
category of the "pre-political," "fundamentally pluralizes the history of
power in global modernity and separates it from a universal history of
8
capital" (1998: 9 ) .
But here, too, one must note the controversial relationship between the
Subaltern Studies project and the postcolonial intervention. For one, many
in the Subaltern Group neither contest the nationalist project nor suffi
ciently problematize gender and ethnicity. Postcolonial theory, in conn ist
stresses the multiplicity of social constituencies, thus challenging the ho-
mogeneity of the nationalist project, and generally offers a more compli-
cated meaning to the question of subalternity. The postcolonial feminist
position, too, posits that difference makes all the difference and so d< bunk-,
the totalizing way that patriarchy is often deployed, particularly in mtci-
rogations of nationalism, citizenship, and colonialism (Mani 1989; Sangari
9
and Vaid 1 9 8 9 ) . While many constructive critiques of Marxism draw on
these challenges, others argue that multiplicity leads to fragmentation and
tends to obscure the global operations of capital and global imbalances of
10
power (Dirlik 1 9 9 7 ) .
Postcolonial theory intersects with postmodernism in its rejection of the
hegemony of Western Enlightenment and its focus on rationalism, individ-
ual autonomy, historical evolution, and normative political theorizing. In
its stead it argues that the Enlightenment is a privileged discourse that
denies and silences dissident voices. This critique exposes the implications
of "ideological projects in the making of forms of knowledge still dominant
in the present" (Scott 1996). As a critique of Eurocentrism, it provides a
frame to contest capitalism's homogenization of the contemporary world
and, in so doing, the post-tradition privileges the categories of the hetero-
geneous, multiple, hybrid, and plural, as well as of the particular, the local,
11
and the national (in a skeptical w a y ) . In rejecting this master narrative,
postcolonialism rejects as well the global march of progress through what
Kwame Anthony Appiah refers to as the monism of capital (Appiah 1991)
and what David Scott (1996) refers to as "the affirmation of institutional
frameworks that embody normative political values and objectives." In
short, as a form of interrogation, the postcolonial challenge offers a coun-
terspace in which to construct alternative histories of the present (Scott
1996).
For many of its proponents postcolonial theory offers a point of depir
ture that positions cultural production in the fields of transnational eco-
nomic relations and diasporic identity constructions (Grewal and Kaplan
1994). This means situating economic relations within a complex social
process or project. It thus requires asking, rather than asserting, h o w eui
'ostcolonial, Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 177

lomic relations constitute particular social engagements and outcomes. As

Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan argue, "(b)ecause transnational eco-
lomic structures affect everyone in the global economy, we need categories
of differentiation and analysis that acknowledge our structurally asymmet-
rical links and refuse to construct exotic authors and subjects" (Grewal and
Kaplan 1994: 15). In this rendering, capitalism contributes to framing,
ather than determining, new subjectivities and identities. For others, post-
rolonial theory erases the notion of primacy to focus instead on a critique
of foundationalism and a challenge to the monism of capital (Appiah 1 9 9 1 ;
'rakash 1990).
Distinctive about the perspective of postcolonialism is the displacement
af Western ideas about, or mystifications of, non-Western cultures. This is
sased on a deconstruction of binarisms that create the "other" only in
relation to the West, a point that is in stark contrast to the world-systems
12
jerspective that pivots on the needs and the power of the c o r e . This means
:he refusal among many postcolonial theorists to position the West as the
ens from which to analyze and explain processes of accumulation and
:hange. As Gyan Prakash reminds us in his discussion of India from a post-
Orientalist perspective, we must move beyond the East-West binary and
13
:xplore what is concealed when issues are posed as India versus Britain.
in this formulation, India and Britain are mutually constitutive socio-
political spaces that can be explained only in reference to each other. Such
i position leads, in turn, to refusing to homogenize the East/Third World
io as to avoid "flattenfing] heterogeneities, mask[ing] contradictions, and
:lid[ing] differences" (Shohat 1992: 101).
A focus on difference, on heterogeneity, is crucial as well to the feminist
project, which draws on postcolonial theory to query the assumption of a
shared, homogeneous woman's experiencea global feminismto offer
nstead ways to rethink the binaries of First and Third World w o m e n (Al-
:xander and Mohanty 1997; Mohanty 1988; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres
1991; Ong 1994). Important, too, in displacing Western ideas about non-
Western cultures and about the ways in which difference is understood is
research by feminists w h o highlight differences within place by inserting
:he significance of race, ethnicity, and sexuality against the normative West-
ern, White w o m a n (Caraway 1 9 9 1 ; Collins 1 9 8 6 , 1990; hooks 1 9 8 4 ,
1990). These postperspective challengesof the binarism of East and West,
ihe centrality of the core in movements of change, and the normativity of
:he Western, White, middle-class womansimultaneously challenge the
primacy accorded capital accumulation and the singularity and unidirec-
:ionality of processes of change in world-systems analyses.
The critiques offered in many postperspectives, in other words, resist the
equation often made in world-systems theory between development, mo-
dernity, and the West and instead take as their point of departure the as-
sumption that difference and heterogeneity matter. Recognizing difference,
178 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

however, is not invoked from the point of view of a struggle for sameiie^.
which is the position of the developmentalist project where the West serves
as the mark and direction of a linear path to progress. N o r is difl erence
invoked to express the move from the pre-political to the liberal duno
cratic. Rather, difference in the post-tradition represents plurality, nor-
homogeneity, complementarity, and contradiction that do not depend 01
a presumption of radical relativism. The postcolonial critique thus shares
few of the assumptions of world-systems theory even as it recognizes that:
world-systems theory poses a significant challenge to structural function-
alism and modernization theory, helps to reframe the discourse of depen-
dency and unequal exchange, and provides an important context for
rethinking processes of globalization. Said differently, even as world
systems theory directs our attention to the "role" of the "other" as nei.
essary for processes of accumulation, it remains embedded in a "West and
the rest" syndrome, concretized not only in its reification of the categories
core, semi-periphery, and periphery but in the lens that it employs to in-
terpret social processes.
Framed in this way, while being attentive to the importance of local,
historically nuanced studies in place and time, the world-systems approach
has done so through the lens of an Enlightenment paradigm centered on
the West and on the dominance of and domination by capitalist processes
of accumulation. Mapping the dynamic asymmetries of the global capitalist
economy, world-systems analysts locate "the rest" as a consequence of the
West that leads to an occlusion of the practices and decisions of their pop
ular classes. Such a critique parallels feminist theorists w h o challenge claim-
that derive from unfixed, unlocatable neutral people and places. Perhaps
an opportunity is offered by Wallerstein, w h o , in a recent contribution,
made explicit the decentering of Europe within contemporary processes of
capitalist accumulation and identified processes of remapping through a
notion of geoculture (1991b). But even decentering Europe does not au-
tomatically lead to a recognition of power or particular location-specihi.
struggles as determinant of change, nor does it readily leave unchallenged
the critique of determinacy raised by postcolonial theory.
The lack of serious engagement with the post-traditions also recalls Wa!
lerstein's emphasis on "governing 'logics' which 'determine' the largest pan
of a sequential reality" (Wallerstein 1991: 2 4 4 ; emphasis added). From a
postcolonial perspective the epistemic grounding of the terms logics, deter-
minate, and sequential can only refer to what Butler (1992) argues are
contingent foundations that are interpreted within a context of partiality
and multiplicity. Similarly, Prakash replaces the idea of a determinate and
sequential logic by a reading of place from its o w n positioning and histoi
ical specificity rather than through its relationship to and determinacy by
capitalism, the West, and the world capitalist system.
From a world-systems perspective, however, the only way to read the
ostcolonial, Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 179

ational-particular is as a relation to "case." Yet, as Hopkins warns us, as

\ in direct conversation, any given interpretation of case is always medi-
ted, "in all of its respects," through a process of incorporation in a sys-
-;mic framework that provides the lens and the perspective from which it
an be assessed. As he makes plaintively clear,

pven] the singularity of the modern world-system as a complex of spatio-temporal

rocesses (social relations), it should be evident that the study of cases is funda-
jentally inappropriate. . . [f]or at base the practice presumes a degree
pantitative) and a kind (qualitative) of repetition that the construct"modern
lorld system"flatly rules out. To focus on certain seemingly similar conditions
t various places at various times; to abstract those conditions from their place-
me settings; and to inquire, abstractly, into the causes or consequences of the
wtditions is to proceed precisely in the one way clearly ruled out of court by the
rorld-system or world-historical perspective on social c h a n g e . . . . It is the a priori
limination of each case's distinctiveness that the world-system's approach rules
at, not the claim that there are comparabilities or similarities. (Hopkins 1978:
14
-12-213).

The very possibility of "each case's distinctiveness" is the point of de-

larture for what Gyan Prakash signals as the need for a radical rethinking
nd reformulation of forms of knowledge and social identities authored
and authorized by colonialism and Western domination. Only by identi-
ying and incorporating the distinctiveness of each case, of subaltern voices
u their multiplicity, can one illuminate h o w the actions and activities of
gents and of their particular histories shape and influence h o w we consti-
ute the process of history making. This, according to Prakash, would sug-
.sst a more complex interpretation than does a vision that assumes that
such actions are mere reflections of processes of capitalist accumulation or,
s Hopkins and Wallerstein argue, a response to the logic and domination
il processes of accumulation.
It is important to emphasize that the postcolonial perspective does not
gnore capitalist processes of accumulation. Rather, postcolonial theory
akes the position that these processes have no foundational status or, per-
taps more appropriately stated, are not sole determinants in the under-
t a k i n g and unfolding of history. This is undoubtedly a charitable reading
if postcolonialism, but my point is to emphasize the possible contribution
if postcolonial theory in assisting us in moving beyond a unicausal claim,
lere it is useful to distinguish Dirlik's critique of postcolonialism from a
lightly different reading. Dirlik makes his claim this way:

he complicity of "postcolonial" in hegemony lies in postcolonialism's diversion

attention from contemporary problems of social, political, and cultural domi-
ahon and its obfuscation of its own relationship to what is but a condition of its
180 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

emergence: a global capitalism that, however fragmented in appearance, serv

ertheless as the structuring principle of global relations. (Dirlik 1997: 503)

Other postcolonial thinkers appreciate the importance of capital as o-\

structuring principle but argue against a single structuring principle,
movement of capital, and processes of accumulation (cf. Grewal and Kap-
lan 1994).
Differences between postcolonialism and world-systems theory also
on postcolonial theory's move beyond a critique of anticolonial nationalist
narratives that inscribe Europe as an object of critique and toward a dis-
cursive analysis addressing decentered multiplicities of power relations. -\
focus on decentered multiplicities is exemplified by a recursive appreciano'i
of the ways in which race, gender, and ethnicity structure forms of i >
mulation.
But within postcolonial renderings, others recognize that displacing cap-
italism by colonialism does not necessarily recognize multiplicity. As Ani\
McClintock reminds us, "the singularity of the term effects a recentcnr.j
of global history around the single rubric of European time. Colonialis:-
returns at the moment of its disappearance" (McClintock 1992: 86). >ct.
Ela Shohat (1992) provides a way to imagine retaining the colonial
rience as a point of departure, if only to avoid erasing that experience hum
the neocolonial present. She suggests that the term postcolonial "ihcir.i-
tize(s) issues emerging from colonial relations and their aftermath . . . i
mark a contemporary state, situation, condition or epoch." Drawing c n
Appiah (1991), Shohat suggests that "post-colonial implies both a
beyond anti-colonial nationalist theory as well as a movement bejond a
specific point in history, that of colonialism and Third World nationj'isr
struggles" (1992: 101). Such a reading embraces a neocolonial present as
a socially constituted, experience-guided social practice.
In Shohat's reading, postcoloniality is not a universal claim, nor can it
be understood simply as a matter of the past, as such a view would o h s a r e
colonialism's enduring economic, political, and cultural "deformative-
traces" in the present. The postcolonial experience thus can sustain,:
for that generation for w h o m the colonial experience can be a focal point
for political mobilization, a contingent political positioning against new
relations of imperial and neocolonial domination, a view, I would argue,
that recenters agency in the construction of social processes.
Neither is such a reading meant to presume a transhistoricity, as I
too, would lead to what O'Hanlon and Washbrook (1992), as well a-
Dirlik (1997: 514), argue is a "self-referential universalizing historicisrp
that reintroduces an unexamined totality by the back door." Shohat's co"-
cern with deformative-traces, by contrast, is grounded in a notion of con-
tingency, not as "a repudiation of the subject, but, rather (as) a wa\ i>-
interrogating its construction as a pregiven or foundationalist premisi'
Postcolonial, Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 181

utler 1992: 9). Let me amplify. First, the postcolonial point of departure
n be useful in questioning the social binarisms/categories that shape both
orld-systems theory and practice. Second, postcolonial theory can help us
read against the grain of the hegemonic story in order to complicate that
ading as well as to offer alternative interpretations. Third, it directs our
tention to power relations and, while implying a passage, emphasizes "a
petition with difference, a regeneration of colonialism through other
eans . . . [designating] broad relations of geo-economic hegemony" (Sho-
rt 1992: 107). In this articulation there is no call for the erasure of cap-
ilist accumulation as a critical force of change or for the inversion of
lations between "the rest and the West." Rather, it is a call to understand
aw processes of accumulation are enabled, and work through, geopoliti-
il, hegemonic relations that cannot be ignored or considered subsidiary
understanding their operations and sustainability. It is a call for a re-
vive, embedded, constructivist understanding of state forms and institu-
Dnal relations.
As is perhaps self-evident, I employ the term "postcolonial" in two ways.
One way is as a vehicle for social mobilization and as a call for attention
the significance of multiplicity, subjectivity, and culture as tools of ex-
anation. This challenges the "monism of capital." A second way is as an
terpretation of a particular kind of periodization, a contingent foundation
at is circumscribed, situated, and locatable. This latter emphasis can, in
ime ways, be said to parallel the conjunctural moments of world-systems
leory, which, as Wallerstein notes, include both the cyclical rhythms of
e system, which can be described conceptually, and the patterns of inter-
1 transformation, the secular trends of the system, which will eventually
ing about the demise of the system that we describe sequentially (Wal-
rstein 1991c: 2 4 4 - 2 4 6 ) .
I also am reminded here of Dirlik's claim that the contemporary junc-
rean increasingly globalizing capitalism that makes boundaries more
3rous and people more mobilehas made possible the intervention of-
red by postcolonial critics. But a number of important points are at stake
ne as we read world-systems theory against the grain of postcolonial
sights. First, Hopkins imagined the fetishization of categories early on,
it his concern seems to have been buried, if not removed, from many uses
:
the terms "core" and "periphery" as commonly deployed in research
day. It is suggestive to remind ourselves of Hopkins' early insight:

ijnfortunately, the end-terms "core" and "periphery" all too often become them-
kes respective foci of attention, categories in their own right, as it were. And the
lation which joined the terms slips into the background, sometimes out of sight
itirely... hence the relational categories also drop from sight, and we are left
ith only the categories, which, as a result, are now mere classificatory terms,
:ither grounded theoretically nor productive analytically. (Hopkins 1978: 207)
382 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analyst^

A resonant voice is that of Shohat, w h o similarly addresses the problem

of reification and binarisms within postcolonial thinking:

[CJultural syncretisms generated by the First/Third worlds intersection, [are] issues

less adequately addressed by Third World nationalist and world systems discoursed
.. . The "beyond" of post-colonial theory . . . seems most meaningful when placed
in relation to Third World nationalist discourse and would be more precise
articulated as "post-First/Third world theory," or "post-anti-colonial critique," as
a movement beyond a relatively binaristic, fixed and stable mapping of power re-
lations between "colonizer/colonized and center/periphery" . . . a going beyond aril
commenting upon a certain intellectual movement with neo-colonialism providing
a politically more active mode of engagement. (Shohat 1992: 107-108)

The problems of reification have consequences as well for two genres oi

the post, the relationship between theories of an era and the practices thai
constitute that era. Here Shohat (1992: 101) stresses the distinction be-
tween "disciplinary advances characteristic of intellectual history, and ..
the strict chronologies of history tout court," a point similarly made "j
debates among world-systems theorists. For world-systems theorists, the
perspective is interpreted both as a theory of the world-system and as a
mode of inquiry. As Wallerstein notes,

World-systems analysis is not a theory about the social world, or about part of i^
It is a protest against the ways in which social scientific inquiry was structured f
all of us at its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century.... It is on the
basis of scientific claims, that is, on the basis of claims related to the possibilities
of systematic knowledge about social reality, that world-systems analyses challenges
the prevailing mode of inquiry. (Wallerstein 1991c: 237)

These claims have been critical for encouraging the imaginary of glob
alization in its contemporary guise, but they have left relatively untouched
the claims of informed political practice. By political practice I refer spe-
cifically to the process of political engagement as "determined by. .
[one's] collective relationship to the world economy . . . [whereby] class
analysis is perfectly capable of accounting for the political position o f . . i
workers [and] . . . their structural position and interests in the world econ
omy" (Wallerstein 1979: 24). Such an understanding gives inadequate at-
tention to questions of agency, subjectivity, and identity and offers insight
into why Forsythe ends her discussion about w o m e n and gender whcie N . \
does, by posing, but not theorizing, empowerment. However, before tuin
ing to the issue of political empowerment, it is important to further elaf>
orate the issue of political practice.
Surely one cannot credit postcolonial theory with providing an adequate
challenge to the absence of political agency in world-systems theory. In fact;
a common argument is that postcolonial theory and its adherents carry
Postcolonial, Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 183

responsibility for a process of depoliticization, what Scott, borrowing from

Ffayden White, argues is the privileging of the "responsibility to otherness"
over the "responsibility to act" (Scott 1996). It is noteworthy, too, that
postcolonial/postmodern/poststructuralist/feminist interventions, in draw-
ing attention to questions of identity and highlighting the significance of
subjectivities and experience, can inform both social theory and mobilizing
practices. In other words, the post-tradition has highlighted the importance
of cultural practices, not only high culture but also the situated, daily rou-
tines of social life. In so doing they provide an important connection to
social action, connections, I would argue, that can be drawn upon to mo-
bilize constituencies, however contingently, for social engagement.
Shohat offers an interesting way to connect a revisioning of history with
strategies of mobilization. For Shohat, the language of the past, the legacy
of a Third World discourse, need not be narrowly construed as a category
of political economy but as a "convenient label for the imperialized for-
mations, including those of the First World" (Shohat 1992: 111). As such,
it can provide a vehicle for identifying shared interests or what Caraway
(1991) refers to as crossover politics, a strategy to mobilize across differ-
encewhether of constituency, space, or time. Mobilizing for collective
action, in other words, depends on negotiating with the past rather than
letishizing it (Mufti and Shohat 1997: 4). In this way, using the term "Third
World" provisionally, politically, and contingently "contains a common
project of linked resistances to neo/colonialism . . . [and can become] a term
of empowerment" (Shohat 1992: 111).
Framed in this way, the notions of intersectionality and causality as ar-
ticulated by Hopkins can be reimagined whereby gender, caste, sexuality,
,and ethnic relations are not viewed as derivative of accumulation practices.
Instead, as feminist theory might pose it, gender constitutes processes of
accumulation and change by working in the dynamic of globalization and
in the ways in which nationalism is thought and supported, as well as
fought. Gender is also a constituent element in h o w transnational econo-
mies are formed and h o w religious fundamentalisms are formulated and
realized. In short, gender differentiation not only is a consequence of par-
ticular economic relations but actually contributes to their structuring.

WOMEN/GENDER/FEMINISM: I N T E R R O G A T I N G
FORSYTHE A N D W A R D

Two themes frame the discussion between postcolonial contributions and

world-systems theory that are particularly suggestive for the debate on gen-
der within world-systems theory. The first theme is embodied in Forsythe's
{1998) discussion of world-systems and social theory in relation to gender
and feminist theory where she recognizes Hopkins' attention to the episte-
mic claims of world-systems theory. A second theme is implicated in Ward's
184 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

(1993) attempt to rework world-systems theory to include gender. Her

pragmatic deployment of world-systems theory shows h o w some s< hoi u s
"operationalize" the theoretical terrain of the approach. In this section I
examine the contributions of Forsythe and Ward as a way to identih
sources of ambiguity in their analyses of gender in relation to processes of
accumulation.
In a paper honoring Terence Hopkins, Ann Forsythe rehearses a number
of issues discussed in the early elaboration of world-systems analyses. This
was a welcome return to the theoretical underpinnings of world S W I P ' S
theory, since it opened a space to address the rich epistemological terrai-i
that framed challenges to modernization theory and to gender ind d c u l
15
opment analyses. Forsythe's point of departure engages t w o issues of con-
cern to feminist analyses: to distinguish between the category of women
and gender and to engage the debate over essentialism. She argues that
these issues can best be elucidated by, in the first case, engaging with Hop-
kins' discussion of the study of "cases" and the covering law pnradi^rri
and, in the second case, elaborating Hopkins' relational nature of in-
formation (1998: 112). Her approach opens a dialogue between feminist
theory and the early methodological contributions of Hopkins and Waller-
stein. But her conclusion forecloses such a dialogue by homogenizing and
then summarily dismissing a quarter century of feminist-inspired debate.
As she argues, there is little in the contributions of feminist theory, from
Juliet Mitchell (1970) to Judith Butler (1990), that has not previously been
resolved by the insights of early world-systems theorists.
First, there has never been a sustained dialogue between world-systems
analysts and feminists, a point best explained by the shared view anions;
world-systems analysts that there is little need to think about feminist the-
ory at all since "what we can theorize is the historical system, not g e n d c .
that is, gender only in relation to other social differences in ike in!d
system" (Forsythe 1998: 122; emphasis added). Thus, from a theoretical
and epistemological point of departure there is little need to look bewuid
the world-systems framework to understand gender and gender relations.
q
While the Joan Smith, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Hans Dieter Evers \ 1 8 4
volume Households and the World Economy and a follow-up, Creatwi
and Transforming Households (Smith and Wallerstein 1992) were indeed
critical in putting gender on the map of world-systems theory, it is note-
worthy that neither prior nor subsequent discussion focused on the episte
16
mic questions raised by feminist theory. For example, there has been
relatively limited exploration of the relationship between productive and
unproductive labor or of the domestic labor debate, t w o debates central to
Marxist and socialist feminist analyses since the 1970s. As well, sustained
analysis of gender differentiation is relatively absent from researchers em-
17
ploying a world-systems perspective. Here one can cite research in thi
w o m e n in development (WID) and gender and development (GAD) ti.ii.ii
 istcolonial, Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 185

an, each of which has not found a home in a world-systems perspective.

I his seems to be the case, even though both the WID and G A D approaches
tare with a world-systems perspective a claim of universalism and a com-
itment to understanding h o w patriarchy is embodied in all social for-
ations. Moreover, both WID and GAD approaches begin from the sexual
vision of labor as an unproblematic category and situate patriarchy
ithin this frame. Exemplifying this tradition is the contribution of Gita
Sen and Caren Grown (1987: 2 4 , 87) and their commitment to develop-
ment and equity grounded in the claims of "a more just and equitable
international order."
Viond, given the incredulity toward metanarratives held by postmodern-
and postcolonial-inspired feminist research, it is hard to support the con-
tention that feminist theory has not posed, at the very least, a healthy
skepticism toward a world-system approach that insists "that social action
takes place at the level of a world-system as a social whole." Surprisingly,
world-systems and feminist theory share a position that seeks its explana-
tion in the grounded experience of lived relations, "not 'society' in the
abstract, but a definite 'world,' a spatio-temporal whole" (Hopkins and
\\ fl.-rstein 1977: 1 1 2 , in Bach 1980: 2 8 9 ) . Yet, this is a nominal sharing
at best, since within world-systems analysis there is no need either to im-
plode the relationships of economic, political, and ideological processes that
attend to race and ethnic difference. There is no need, in other words, to
icthiorize class only to differentiate class relations and gender differentia-
tion and identify their varied raced and ethnicized expressions.
I hird, recent scholarship is increasingly attentive to the question of dif-
ference that is premised on a decentered notion of women, thereby ques-
tioning the consequences of normativizing White, middle-class, Western
wncn. In analyses of global industrialization this leads to, among other
things, an emphasis on the contradictory relations between factory em-
- o\inent, households, states, and female employees, a view that supplants
le mechanistic narrative of women's subsumption to the logic of capital
xumulation (Mohanty et al. 1 9 9 1 ; Ong 1987). These approaches explain
lobalization not merely as a search for cheap, docile, female wage labor,
5 argued by Frobel et al. (1980), or as an expression of the continuity
etween patriarchal households and the patriarchal workplace but as con-
adictory relations corresponding to the demand for labor and for em-
loyment in transforming the articulation of re(production).
The challenge posed by difference also exposes the weakness of an all-
iclusive metanarrative that either grants determinacy to a single systemic
ilation (e.g., capital or patriarchy) or ignores the political and practical
leaning of difference. Such a position leads either to the subsumption of
snder difference to capitalist needs or to silencing the voices of the sub-
tern that preclude the possibility of offering a way to understand h o w
ifferences matter. Empirical research that refuses the epistemic challenge
186 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

offered by an understanding of differenceas distinct from gender <

entiationyields, at its best, a view of the differential impact of deulop-
ment processes on a heterogeneous population of women. In some i
this stimulates a rethinking of the categories of work and home that lie].--
to identify h o w women's labor is elided in much of the earlier research on
w o m e n and work (Dixon 1 9 8 2 ; Dixon and Anker 1988). Interestingb.
those engaged in this rethinking do not work within a world-systems Iramc-
work.
Fourth, and perhaps most provocative about Forsythe's contribution, -
her discussion of universalism in the context of a theorization of th
tionship between "the subject and the objective/structural/social i.
without precluding the invariability or the independence of either" .
sythe 1998: 120). Perhaps the problem here is the meaning of in<
dence. Surely, if one were to employ Butler's notion of a contmgeir
foundation, it would be possible to make historically specific, conrc\iu.<!
claims that do not depend upon a transhistorical metanarrative. But for
Forsythe, the concern is with an understanding of relationality, a poi
I, too, find important in the interpretation of social process. >ct
remains disturbing is her subsequent point, which I quote at length her.:

[Wjorld systems offers us the opportunity to articulate the relationship between

gender differentiation and other kinds of social differentiation as processes of a
world-historical system. As parts of a single historical system, the relationship be-
tween gender and other social differences is "built in." The primary intellectual, or
theoretical, question concerns the unit of analysis of which each analytically discrete
process of differentiation is a partbut only a partand in which the relationships
among processes of differentiation adhere . .. the histories of both transformations
within each discrete process of differentiation, as well as transformations in the
intersections among processes of social differentiation. (Forsythe 1998: 117; em-
phasis added)

The notion of discrete processes of differentiation has led world-systems

theorists, as well as Marxists, to employ a dual-systems approach to the
study of capitalism and patriarchy, an approach that views these two fon:K
of exploitation as interrelated but distinct (cf. Eisenstein 1979; Harima-"
1981). As such, relations of exploitation and domination are not a .
tualized as mutually constitutive processes but as "analytically distm..:
ones." Although Forsythe agrees with many interpretations of patriarch}
as a set of social relations that have a long history and wide reach
argues that world-systems theory's greatest significance is that it allows r,-.
to see what is truly unique about the development of gender relations m
the contemporary capitalist world-system (Forsythe 1998: 121; en
in original). While this specification is interesting, there is the tendency to
Postcolonial, Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 187

displace difference within time and space with difference across time, con-
flating a theorization of difference with patterns of gender differentiation.
Postcolonial insights and their challenge to structuralism help us move
beyond the discreteness of patriarchy and capitalism and of dual systems
theory generally by directing our attention to context-specific relations of
difference as mutually constitutive social processes. This need not challenge
the claim that patriarchies are entangled with various modes of social or-
dering but suggests that they need to be differently explained in their in-
terrelatedness. To borrow a notion from Butler (1992: 5), we must
challenge the foundational status of a class or gender and question h o w
the paradigms that we employ may actually "serve to subordinate and erase
that which they seek to explain." This point differs from one that gives any
category a transhistorical significance. Surely, Wallerstein has made it pat-
ently clear that the world-system refers to a specific time and differs in
important ways from other economic networks or world-economies, and
Forsythe is clearly attentive to this specificity. Nevertheless, she leaves un-
questioned the epistemic framing of the relationship between patriarchy
and modes of accumulation. The latter is a project that differs from de-
scribing the historical and spatial specificities of gender and capitalist re-
lations and h o w these articulate or disarticulate within states, nations, and
regions or as a phenomenon of an international division of labor. It re-
quires, instead, questioning the particular circumstances under which labor
and processes of accumulation are the foundation of interpretation.
Forsythe also takes issue with the use of the term "context," a concept
often used by writers in the post-traditions to emphasize the particular and
the "local." As she argues, the emphasis on "context becomes a substitute
for analyzing theoretically and historically the complex organizations of
social differences" (Forsythe 1998: 115). Emblematic of this position, she
argues, is Linda Nicholson's (1990: 5) appreciation of postmodernism as a
perspective that "offers feminism some useful ideas about method, partic-
ularly wariness toward generalizations which transcend the boundaries of
culture and region" (Forsythe 1998: 116). For Forsythe, however, Nich-
olson's contribution is woefully inadequate for it leaves unanswered the
question of the boundaries of culture and region. What seems evident from
Forsythe's critique is her resistance to grant similar closure to the world-
system as a bounded, fixed, structured totality, a particular historical con-
text.
Finally, the absence of a sustained engagement between world-systems
and feminist theory has occluded a reading of feminist theory as a concern
sot solely with gender differentiation or gender inequality but as a theo-
retical intervention that begins from women's lives and offers one a social
theory. Or, as Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford argue, "[fjeminist
epistemology consists . . . in attention to epistemological concerns arising
188 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

out of feminist projects, which prompt reflection on the nature of knowl-

edge and our methods for attaining it"(Lennon and Whitford 1994: 13j
Ward's research is differently ambitious in engaging world-systems the-
ory and gender analyses and is framed in a completely different register.
She examines "the possibilities for reconceptualizing world-system theory
to include gender, and to consider some of the extensions or modifications
of world-system theory, in particular, issues of incorporation, the i ok u'
the informal sector, and the connections between women's formal and in-
formal labor and housework" (Ward 1993: 43). Her argument rests on the
premise that w o m e n have been left out of the world-system: "[M]uch of
the world's population is only tenuously connected with the world-system
through some vague articulation of subcontracting, marriage, and o i x i
sional waged labor"(Ward 1993: 58; emphasis added). Such an argument,
it seems to me, misses the holism that is an underlying assumption of the
world-systems approach, even as it identifies the need to specify the diverse
ways in which women's labor is incorporated into the world-system.
Ward, in fact, conflates women with gender and gender relations, a point
o r n e n a r e t n e
made clear b y Forsythe: " [ W ] unit; gender differentiation te-
fers to the relations between the units, the relations forming the
units"(Forsythe 1998: 118). Moreover, Ward fails to recognize how pro
cesses of accumulation already embody both women's and men's unpaid
labor. She fails, in other words, to distinguish between the absence ot \ ir
ious forms of labor in processes of social reproduction and the particular
character of women's labor in social reproduction whereby subsistence pro-
duction crucially depends upon the often-hidden labor of women and chil-
dren, or, more correctly, upon the labor of the entire producing unit for
its reproduction. Women are therefore always and already included in
world-systemic processes of capitalist development and thus already in-
cluded, if hidden, in world-systems analysis. Moreover, there is hardly
anything "vague" about "the articulation of subcontracting, marriage, and
occasional wage labor." Quite the contrary, the systematic ways in which
this articulation operates which has been central to studies of gender and
of women in the world-economy (Frobel et al. 1980). Moreover, to em-
phasize the vague articulation is to miss the very basis of Hopkins' and
Forsythe's important recognition of the determinacy of the world-system
in the shaping of particular forms of difference.
The volumes edited by Smith et al. (1984) and Smith and Wallerstein
(1992), for instance, focus on the household in a world-system, while fin
Ward and others exploring questions about the gender division of liboi
this division is viewed as a consequence of the world-system or as undu
estimated or overlooked sites of work (the household) and employment (the
informal sector). In each of these cases, there is a reification of particular
social categories of reproduction and production or nonwaged and waged
work. Using households or gender differentiation as a point of departure,
Postcolonial, Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 189

in other words, fails to query the epistemic status of such concepts as pro-
ductive or reproductive work. It also leaves unattended the assertion that
wage labor (relations of capitalist accumulation) is the primary determinant
of processes of change.
For Ward, then, the focus is on the hidden contributions of w o m e n to
processes of capitalist change and h o w recognizing their exclusion calls into
question the mode of inquiry offered by world-systems theory. However,
for Ward, the empirical concern of better accounting for women's work in
the household and in the informal sector sufficiently modifies the world-
systems approach to allow for more robust analyses that enable the mar-
riage between feminist concerns and world-systems theory. Such a
conclusion, starkly stated, fails to recognize how women's hidden and un-
paid labor is actually constituted by the very epistemic foundations that
animate the world-system approach. Said differently, Ward's analysis illus-
trates the disjuncture between those engaged in theory building and those
who seek a comprehensive recognition of the various types of work and of
people embodied in processes of global accumulation.

CONCLUSIONS

In this chapter I have drawn attention to the need for a more direct and
likely more fruitful exchange between world-systems and postcolonial the-
ory. My purpose was to stimulate an appreciation of the early epistemic
contributions of a world-systems approach, particularly their intersections
w ith other challenges to the developmentalist paradigm, including postco-
lonial and feminist theory. I was initially motivated by Forsythe's conclud-
18
ing comments on empowerment, which directs our focus to notions of
agency and context specificity, t w o central themes in postcolonial and fem-
inist theory. As Tania Modleski (1986: 136) argued more than a decade
ago, "[T]he ultimate goal of feminist criticism and theory is female em-
powerment." This echoes Wallerstein's point noted earlier: "[WJorld
systems-analysis is not a theory about the social world, or about part of it
. . . [but] a protest against the ways in which social scientific inquiry was
structured for all of us at its inception"(Wallerstein 1991c: 2 3 7 ) .
19
Ironically, while the concept of empowerment remains woefully under-
theorized in world-systems analyses, perhaps because social agency is gen-
erally viewed as responsive rather than proactive, development practitioners
have quickly appropriated it. Incorporated into the developmentalist
model, empowerment has become a call for w o m e n to be more indepen-
dent, as entrepreneurs and responsible childbearers. As entrepreneurs,
women are encouraged to be creditworthy and, through the market, take
individual responsibility for their subsistence. As childbearers they are to
be responsible, individual decision makers regarding their fertility. This call
for individual responsibility in the service of subsistence clearly signals
190 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analys,

women's already central role in processes of accumulation and in the new

neoliberal project. My point here is to signal the need for a robust theo-
rization of empowerment. Such a theorization may offer a way to
rogate processes of capital accumulation that are embedded within spcaris
relations of power and difference and that arise not as consequences or
increased differentiation but as contingent upon the very relations that (ho
presume are its outcome.
I also have tried to signal the importance that postcolonial theory gives
to the notion of power and h o w our forms of interpretation are crucial !\
bound up with power. This means, among other things, recognizing how
world-systems theory represents particular, rather than universalist, claims
claims that continue to be tied to a developmentalist understanding of p i o u -
ress. This is consistent with the modernist, evolutionary project wherein
nations are ranked in a global hierarchy of states whose achievement is
envisioned as improved participation in the global marketplace. In the
world-system, semi-peripheral states mark difference within this hierarchy
signal the logic of positioning, and provide the political space and <
for mobility within the world-system. The reification of these states and
the hierarchical system that it frames elides the interests that constitute i t a
naming. It elides, in other words, the politics of the paradigm itself and its
place within the modernist project.
Finally, while it is interesting to note that world-systems and de\elop-.
ment theories, particularly their contemporary iterations, concern cumula-
tion, movement, and crossing borders and focus on transnational capital
and migrating labor, they simultaneously fix on spatial metaphors that in
elude periphery, region, nation, state, and world-system. These theories alsc
embrace social categories such as class and gender, a commitment to
lism, and a hierarchical, evolutionary view of social organization and di
velopment. Examining these metaphors, categories, and exchanges in
relation to theories of post-feminism, structuralism, modernism, and c o l o
nialism, I argue, provides fertile terrain for focusing on the assumptions
underlying globalist perspectives that sustain a view of the local as sites ol
the diverse effects of capitalist expansion rather than as constituent pro-
cesses that make change possible. This requires exploring the epistemic
status of paradigmatic claims and how they prefigure certain understand-
ings of capitalist accumulation, a challenge that depends upon moving be-
yond the deployment of a world-systems perspective on processes oi
accumulation to a questioning of the episteme within which the perspective
operates. Such a move would benefit from a return to the early theorization
of world-systems theory whereby empirically based, historically grounded
research was attentive to self-conscious reflexivity, a reflexivity that began
by questioning previously fixed social categories and the naturalization ol
particular social processes.
Postcolonial, Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 191

VOTES
1. I am indebted to Nancy Forsythe, whose provocative piece encouraged me
to revisit the early contributions of Hopkins and Wallerstein. Notable in this section
is the absence of a robust exchange among feminists and world-systems theorists.
2. I am consciously ignoring the burgeoning literature on the place of the
nation-state in the discussion of globalization in light of changing articulations of
contemporary capitalism.
3. Criticizing world-systems theorists for reifying the concepts of core, semi-
periphery, and periphery should not be conflated with my appreciation for Wall-
erstein's (1979: 4) important critique of Rostow's reading of British history into a
set of universal "stages."
4. One could readily argue that the emphasis on holism, unit of analysis, and
the ceaseless accumulation of capital embodies both a determinism and a call for
historical specificity. I hesitate to underestimate the crucial import of specificity in
the Wallersteinian argument. However, it also is important to disentangle the com-
mitment to historical specificity from the determinacy of accumulation, especially
*hen theorized as a determinant of all aspects of the social world that enable its
realization.
5. I use the term "criticism" to focus on an intellectual position rather than on
those critics who constitute the movement. To be sure, a large body of literature
already indicates the limitations of the postcolonial intervention or suggests cau-
tionary engagement with it (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1995; McClintock 1992;
Shohat 1992). Some see it as the self-congratulatory voice of well-placed Third
World intellectuals in the U.S. academy whose claims are assumed to build on
already existing critiques of structuralist and positivist science. For others, the chal-
lenge to late capitalist forms of production is grounded in their location in contem-
porary global capitalism that has "much to do with their resonance with the
i mceptual needs presented by transformations in global relationships due to
changes within the capitalist world economy" (Dirlik 1997: 502-503). Also, see
Buote 5.
6. Relationships among the post-theories might more appropriately be seen as
controversial, especially with regard to the notion of determinacy and materiality.
However understood, it is crucial for analysts to be attentive to the intimate con-
nections between the postmodernist and poststructuralist project, even if these con-
nections are neither straightforward nor direct.
7. See his Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography (1989) for an
(elaboration of this position.
8. For a critical reading and commentary of subaltern studies, particularly its
essentializing qualities and links to Western academic circles, see Sarkar (1997). See
also Spivak (1985), Chakrabarty. (1992), and Das (1989) for an internal critique
of the subaltern project.
9. See, in particular, the problematic work of Chatterjee (1993).
10. Caution also focuses on the fear of either romanticizing the precolonial past
or recognizing that it could not be recovered or re-presented by postcolonial schol-
ars since it has already been reworked by the colonial encounter (Appiah 1991;
Spivak 1988). I agree with Hutcheon (1995: 135), who argues that "the entire post-
192 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis-

colonial project usually posits precisely the impossibility of. .. [the past] . . . being
uncontaminated."
11. See, for example, Shohat 1992; Prakash 1990, 1996; Scott 1996.
12. While it is clear that in the world-systems framework the system as a whole'
is the point of departure, the assumption remains that the core and the unequal
distribution of power that resides within the core as the source and direction of
change define the prospects for change. Thus, although struggle can redefine rela-
tions of power, power as a relation that is potently driven outside the core remains
sadly undertheorized within the world-system paradigm.
13. It is worth noting that it is difficult for some to imagine a specialist of the-
British Empire whose point of departure is South Asia, a position that is boths
obvious and possible if one were starting from the assumptions offered by Prakash
(1990, 1992). See, as well, Said (1978) and the debate that followed in response
his seminal contribution.
14. This generally leads to particular cases being a site of the differential effects'
of capitalist relations. For an important commentary on "cases," see McMichaef
(1990). Here, too, one ought to resist a reading of Hopkins that interprets the "a
priori elimination of each case's distinctiveness" as a rejection of particular histo-
ries. ?
15. Against debates between world-system analysts and their critics over the past
two decades, Forsythe's contribution reveals how far discussion about world-
systems or, today, about globalization has shifted since the late 1970s, when the.
epistemic concerns of the emergent approach were outlined, contested, and clarified.
16. I make this claim to distinguish between scholarship by world-system theo-
rists about world-systems theory and their contributions to the broader field of:
sociology. The latter has drawn attention to the epistemic questions raised by fern-;
inist and postmodern theory, while the former seems more equivocal on the role
of rethinking epistemic claims (Wallerstein 1991a, 2000). I want to thank Immanuel
Wallerstein for reminding me of his contribution Open the Social Sciences and far j

alerting me to his The Heritage of Sociology: The Promise of Social Science, both;;
of which signal the contributions of contemporary theory to a rethinking of soci-
ology as culture and discipline. My appreciation of Walllerstein's attention to epi-
stemic concerns within the broad field of sociology is especially significant given;
;
the response of, for example, Joan Huber, who, as president of the American So- '
ciological Association, viewed the intellectual claims of feminists, postmodernists,
and poststructuralists as the cause for the decline in the significance of sociology
as an academic discipline worthy of administrative support. Surely, Huber was*
speaking narrowly of sociology as a discipline and the institutional consequences
of challenges to the authority of university and college admininistrators. Nonethe-
less, her unwillingness to recognize the efforts of scholars both inside and outside
the discipline, particularly in response to the post-1968 period, has contributed to-
keeping the discipline more provincial than most, crippling the efforts and impor-
tance of research kept on the margins of the field (see also Mouzelis 1995).
17. This claim is not to ignore those who argue for a world-system but to dif-
ferentiate these from research that begins within the framework of world-systems
theory, such as that of Ward (1984) or the extensive work by Moghadam , 1 W .
1991, 1993).
18. Forsythe concludes that mobilizing for women's empowerment may
Postcolonial, Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 193

the end of male domination. This conclusion elides the questions raised by Ward
or presumes their resolution. However, such a conclusion fails to attend to the
meanings of empowerment as either an indicator of the end of male domination or
capitalist exploitation. Identifying the varied meanings of empowerment can suggest
potential sources of epistemic engagement across theoretical divides and signal new
nodes of contingent determinacy.
19. Here I want to distinguish between antisystemic movements that are critical
for forms of change and emancipation and analyses that focus on subjectivities and
identities in the process of empowerment, whereby the latter become a contributing
force for the realization of movements of opposition.

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 Chapter 10

Writing on Gender in World-Systems

Perspective
Sheila Pelizzon

INTRODUCTION

Neither post-1968 feminist theory nor women's history has been adequate
to explain the position of inequality of w o m e n in the world today. Indeed,
it might even be said that women's studies has suffered from a variety of
problems that have not only failed to clarify the causes of female subor-
dination in the world today but served to obfuscate these causes and,
therefore, made the cause of female equality vulnerable to political attack
from the new right, allowed the reproduction of inequality to continue with
relatively minor shifts, and made the whole problem seemingly incapable
of real solution. From the start, second-wave feminist theory has rooted
itself in various forms of partial analysis deriving either from the biological
with a subset in psychology) or from the economistic. This was partially
in reaction to the liberal agendafull employment for achieving equality
(Elson and Pearson 1984: 18)and partially in reaction to conflicts be-
tween Marxists and feminists, expressed as street confrontations in Lon-
don, Paris, parts of the United States (Mitchell 1971: 8 4 - 9 0 ; Marks and
de Courtivron 1981), and elsewhere. In addition, various feminist writings
had shown that whatever else they may have done, actual existing social-
isms had not liberated women (Rowbotham 1973; Scott 1974). Therefore,
historical or political economic answers were shunned. Yet since the dis-
idvantaging of w o m e n was pervasive throughout society, universalist
causes were sought. Psycho-biotogical answers became the order of the day.
Biological approaches have perforce emphasized ahistoricity. Female sub-
ordination was attributed variously to the generational reproductive ca-
pacity of w o m e n (Firestone 1970); an ahistorical notion of patriarchy"a
200 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analy-.*

birthright priority whereby males rule females" (Millet 1970: 25); a notion
of a "sex-gender" system (Rubin 1975), which, although based on studies
of present-day Amazonians and N e w Guineans, was said to derive from
prehistoric times. Primordiality became a dominant theme. Juliet Mitchell's
Women's Estate (1971), located the source of patriarchy and women's sub-
ordination in the "family" and the home, which were presumed to be pri-
mordial. The theme was refined by Choderow (1978), w h o assumed that
the fact that w o m e n were primarily child-care providers accounted for
"male need to assert authority." Again, social divisions of labor v u u
sumed to be ahistorical. During the 1980s the radical feminists focused on
sexuality as the cause of women's subordination (Dworkin 1 9 8 1 ; Mc
Kinnon 1982) or essentialisma notion that women were innately and
inherently different from men (Gilligan 1982). But essentialism did nothing
more than consolidateand provide a rationale forthe status quo.
The concept of patriarchy was given wider scope by Marxist-feminists
such as Heidi Hartmann (1979) and Michele Barrett (1980) in attempting
to reconcile intellectual clashes between feminists and orthodox Marxists.
The result was a "dual-systems" theory, according to which capitalism e\
ploited w o m e n in the workplace, but patriarchy exploited (oppressed;
w o m e n in the home. The Marxist/feminists did not specifically attribute
patriarchy to biological causes, but they did insist that it was ages-old,
existed parallel to other social formations, and "changed itself in order to
preserve itself" from society to society and historically over time (Eisenstein
1981). This conceptualization ignored the fact that it is peopleu-uilh
eliteswho change social systems, usually to preserve some advantage for
themselves. The concept of patriarchy became pervasive in women's studies
and acquired the status of a metaphysic in terms of which the causes of
women's subordination, the means by which it has been historicalh
brought about, and the effects of such subordination are collapsed into the
same thing.
Feminist historians have tried to synthesize themselves implicitly or ex-
plicitly with feminist theory. Some women's historians have tended to look
at the very distant past (in Braudel's [1972] terms, the "time of the s u ^
in a search for origins of female subordination, for example, Rosalind Miles
(1989) and Gerda Lerner (1986). Others have tended to look at much ninn
recent trends such as the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth i
tury as the cataclysmic change that triggered women's secondary status
(Pinchbeck 1930). Other women's histories (too numerous to mention)
have constituted case studies of w o m e n in particular times and/or places
These paralleled conventional social history but failed to relate the history
of w o m e n to larger social processes (Scott 1996). Their particularism in
space, time, and subject matter deprives women's history of a sense of
movement. Maryanne Kowaleski and Judith Bennett (1989) are examples
of this genre. After the mid-1980s the women's studies theoretical canon
Writing on Gender in World-Systems Perspective 201

exploded and collapsed around quarrels of race, identity, and class. Si-
multaneously, the incorporation of women's studies into universities di-
vorced the women's movement from real politics. This happened in a
number of places, for example, the West (Whelehan 1995: 1 2 8 - 1 3 0 ) and
India and Pakistan (Khan 1999).
Thus, until the mid-1980s the women's studies canon consisted of a num-
ber of contradictory writings that failed to provide any convincing expla-
nation of female subordination. Their fundamental organizing ideas
reproduction, patriarchy, and sexualitysuggested a timeless universality
to female subordination. Where did that leave us? If it is necessary to k n o w
the nature of the beast in order to defeat it, this was inadequate. Timeless-
ness implies an impossibility ofor futility inattempting to eradicate
women's subordination. Yet to ascribe the origins of women's secondary
status to a too recent past, for example, the nineteenth century, is to un-
derestimate the depths of the problem, the nature of the beast, and the
degree of difficulty in affecting change. Therefore, to fight women's sub-
ordinate social standing effectively, it is necessary to locate its temporal
boundaries correctly. Furthermore, the unit of analysis needs to be cor-
rected. Feminist theories have seemed to attribute the main locus of female
subordination to the home, the workplace, or individual psyches, even to
communities or nation-states. But women's subordination is not limited to
any of these. Rather, it is today found throughout the entire world; it per-
meates all social domains and institutions. H o w did this situation arise,
and how could it best be explained intellectually as a basis for dealing with
it politically?

GENDER A N D WORLD-SYSTEMS ANALYSIS

World-systems analysis is the answer to a great many of these problems,

even though it is not beyond criticism in its approach to issues of gender.
In spite of noting reasons for racial and sexual discriminationnamely, the
creation of a cheap labor pool, social reproduction that was provided
cheaply or gratis to capital, social policing (Wallerstein 1983: 1 0 3 )
through the 1980s the general world-systems approach toward the issue of
gender was one of benign neglect. This was true even in the face of certain
empirical works that should have tipped off world-systems analysts to a
structural notion of women's subordination. These were of two kinds: (1)
works that strongly suggested a general drop in the social standing of
women that was temporally cdterminal with the beginning of capitalism as
a world-system (Power 1975; Casey 1976; Clark 1 9 8 2 ; Kelly 1984; Herlihy
1990). Maria Mies (1986) specifically said that the subordination of
women began with capitalismin a process that she referred to as "house-
wifization," which she claimed was enforced through witch-hunting; and
(2) works that showed that, on the periphery, declines in women's status
202 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

had been brought about as part of the process of colonization (Etienne

1980; Leacock 1980; Comaroff and Comaroff 1989).
I suggest t w o reasons for the failure of world-systems to address gender.
One is that world-systems analysis had from the first concerned itself with
spatial hierarchies and polarizations (e.g., town versus country, the u>rc-
periphery-semi-periphery relationship) and h o w this governed the status of
people from these areas. Race, class, and a hierarchalization of nation-states
fitted well with this schemata. Gender or sexism did not or did not si
to.
A second reason is that practitioners of world-systems analysis empha
sized households as basic institutions ofand their role inthe world-
economy as labor-reproducing and -cheapening devices (Smith and
Wallerstein 1992). This study of households pinpointed the association in
both core and periphery of w o m e n with unpaid household labor or sub
sistence work and said that such work, while unpaid, was a necessary basis
for the functioning of the rest of the system. Thus, practitioners of world
systems perspective debunked a sexist notion of what constituted "work"-
subsistence work, whatever it consisted of, was defined as "work" I.is op
r
posed to non-work). This was something achieved neither by feminists im
by political economists. Yet it might be argued that by defining househo'Js
as "income-pooling units," the inequality in income and social stanc
household members along lines of age and sex became masked.
Despite these criticisms, world-systems is, in the end, a very sensible jp-
proach, as it avoids the limitations and pitfalls of either conventional po-
litical economy (a limitation of analysis to state-capital-labor rdationsi or
grosso tnodo, women's studies (an ahistorical focus on people earning r\v>
X chromosomes). World-systems analysis provides three things much
needed by feminist analysis. First, methodologically, it rejects the dichot-
omy between theory and empirical data, combining historical data whh an
analytical framework in such a way that history and theory become one
Second, it provides temporal and geographic boundaries that challenge the
notion of universality of women' subordination. Third, world-systems anji
ysis carries within it a notion of structuressocially created institutions
that are necessary and germane to the system and are reproduced over xmw.
I suggest that gendering is one of these structures.
I have used the term "gendering" to denote not simply a sexual d
of labor or misogynist ideology tfut a socially created division that carrcJ
a notion of hierarchy that transcended all social domains and cla: -
people. While there are problems with this term, its meaning is still undet-
debate (Glenn 1999: 4). Thus, its usage is open. A look at the Latin root
of the word (genus, meaning "type" or "kind") or at the related word
"genre" suggests that "gender" carries a connotation of something heng
sorted. In the modern world-system w o m e n and, by extension, the work
that they do are classified as inferior, not only physically or social!} but
Writing on Gender in World-Systems Perspective 203

intellectually as well. They, together with children, the elderly, poor people,
people of the periphery, non-Whites, animals, and nature in general, have
been genderedthat is to say, sortedas unreliable, incompetent, weak,
fearful, inadequate, in need of control, and, therefore, legitimately exploit-
able and unworthy of reward. Conversely, (White) men have generally been
gendered as the opposite of these characteristicssmart, strong, capable
and they and the work that they do have been generally deemed worthy
of reward, albeit in varying degrees. Thus, gendering means, hypothetically
in the first instance, the subordination of all w o m e n to all men. This has
had a number of implications for the political economy of capitalism. But
by extension gendering means the epistemological subordination of all the
ather groups to (White) men. The question is, W h o did this type of sorting,
when did it start, and why?

EMPIRICAL D A T A

\ comparison of three temporalitiesfeudalism, the later Middle Ages,

and the modern world-systemshows quite clearly that what I have char-
acterized as gendering became present in the social time of capitalism,
rather than deriving from an earlier tradition (e.g., feudalism). Therefore,
: i mnot be said to be universal or even "Western." Gayle Rubin once said
that capitalism was "heir to a long tradition in which w o m e n do not inherit
. . do not lead . . . and do not talk to God" (Rubin 1 9 9 7 [1975]: 31). It
would be interesting to k n o w from whence she thought this tradition was
inherited, because, according to this definition, feudalism was not gendered.
In the feudal system sex was not in itself a marker for membership in a
low-status group. To parody Gayle Rubin, women of the nobility were
heiresses to a tradition in which they did inherit, and they did leadpo-
litically and militarily; and they did talk to God (almost incessantly in some
cases). My sense is that feudalism ended as a viable historical system
around 1250, although feudal institutions dragged on under the weight of
their own inertia into the later Middle Ages.
The later Middle Ages (for which there is more information on ordinary
people as opposed to nobles), which ran from about 1 2 5 0 to 1450, was a
turbulent period marked by lack of social structures, the inability of elites
to extract surplus, and rebellions of all kindspeasants against lords, ur-
ban workers against masters and urban bourgeoisie, minor nobility and
minor clergy against the greater lords and clergy, heretical movements di-
rected against the acquisition of wealthand by egalitarian social theories,
hi ill of these rebellions women, as well as men, were key players in ways
large and small. Some of the most influential heretics were women, while
women were active in peasant rebellions and wars well into the sixteenth
.century. Yet it may have been in the small ways that w o m e n were more
damaging to the ability of elites to extract surplus. For example, by insisting
204 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysi,

on, and manipulating, customary widows' rights in land or bearing childrei

out of wedlock, peasant women undercut the power of lords to contro
landholdings, collect rents, or extract entry fines, death and inheritam 1 tees
and labor services. Furthermore, it is worth noting that while customs \ it
ied from region to region, city to city, and even village to village, in Westen
Europe overall, ordinary w o m e n had relative equality with men in term
of wages, access to occupations, making contracts, rights in land and in
heritance, heads of households, and so on. (This does not apply to Italy
which had been capitalist since the twelfth century.) The point was that ii
this situation elites had a hard time enforcing hierarchy, wage discipline,
land boundaries, and economic dependency and extracting surplus througl
customary taxes.
Suppose we read the modern capitalist world-system as (unfortunately
a successful attempt on the part of elites at all levels to contain rebellions
silence heretics, regain and maximize their economic advantages over non
elites, and restore hierarchy (i.e., create "order"). Gendering was a key t(
doing this. How? It is important to realize that gendering was not institute<
all at once. Rather, its constitutive elements were introduced in spurts ove:
the course of a 200-year period running from about 1 4 5 0 to 1 6 4 0 . o
Braudel's "long" sixteenth century. These changes, hardly present at thi
beginning of this period, were well institutionalized by its end.
Gendering had three constitutive parts or aspects. These were:

1. An economic disadvantaging of women vis-a-vis men. Over time and with in

creasing intensity, women were forced out of, and debarred from, practicing
professions, crafts, and trade, and limited to a few low-status, poorb paid O I .
cupations such as servant or market woman. This involved direct juridical in
tervention by authorities at all levels, from urban authorities who were oftei
1
also heads of guilds, to those who ran the state.
2. A denial of public space to women. This included, but was not limited to, thi
creation of a domestic ideology, according to which marriage and children wen
the only suitable occupations for women. Husbands, on the other hand, becami
supervisors. Although the domestic ideology originated with Protestant clems
it was adopted by the Catholics as well and enforced juridically through thi
state, which came eventually to be its main proponent (Flandrin, 1976; Ozment
1983).
3. A social creation of women as intellectually weak, morally loose, fearful, 11/\
of inherendy unsound judgment, andlike the natural worlddisorderly, gen
erally unreliable, and in need of control. Men, conversely, were ideologicall;
created as strong, intelligent, and generally reliable. They were supposed to dc
the controlling. This epistemology extended to children, the elderly, non-Whitei
of either sex, peoples of the periphery, peasants, the poor, animals, and nature
These were the "feminized." Through the "moral crisis" of witch-hunting, thesi
notions of the danger of the feminized "Other" and the need for hierarchy anc
Writing on Gender in World-Systems Perspective 205

authority to keep order were invented, circulated, and reinforced. The episte-
mological aspects of gender were reproduced by all social actors (intellectuals,
elites at all levels, and, above all, the state, the judiciary, and, of course, men)
and through all social domains (the economic, religious, political, intellectual,
juridical, artistic, etc.).

We should n o w step back and look at the political-economic functions

of gendering. In the first place, gendering was very successful in easing the
risk of social disorder. The state got an unpaid police force via the privi-
leging of men. Through a kind of unwritten social contract, men had a
right toexercise livelihood but also a dutyin their roles as "heads of
households"to exercise authority over the behavior of women and chil-
dren. This was patriarchynot something ancient but invented by the state
(Danzelot 1979). Social order was maintained, and rebellions were avoided,
.is half the population was given economic advantages and supervisory au-
thority over the other half.
The domestic ideology made men into "little bosses." This defused social
unrest. In the sixteenth century changes in productive arrangements meant
that most journeymen would never become masters (Nef 1962: 7, 1 5 - 1 8 ;
Kamen 1984). The fact that men were masters in the home alleviated the
ting of the fact that they would always be wage earners, gave men a stake
in the new status quo, and neutralized tendencies toward the kind of social
rebellions that had taken place in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. At
rhe same time social tensions were displaced onto the household and pro-
moted polarization between the sexes and between children and adults.
Witch-hunting was a major way in which a policy of social polarization
v as brought into the countryside. While it is a complicated story and too
long to detail here, the spread of rumors ofand creation of fears about
w itchcraft broke peasant solidarity against new impositions by landlords
Woch 1966: 1 8 0 - 8 1 ; Robisheaux 1989: 36, 5 0 - 6 6 ) . The creation of such
I moral crisis allowed public authorities at all levels to justify their inter-
ventions into, and rigorous regulation of, ordinary people's lives at the
community level. Witch-hunting even gave peasant elites a chance to show
their defense of a new social order, support of a notion of the virtue of
hierarchy, and thereby their identification with dominant values and
thereby to enhance their o w n social power (Muchembled 1985: 2 5 5 , 2 6 8 -
269). "Divide and rule" is an old story. At the same time, nature was
reconstructed as feminine, therefore, disorderly and in need of taming and
control. This, in turn, meant that the earth was justifiably exploitable for
the benefit of man. This fit in well with the new economic ideas of the
sixteenth century, but it turned the old idea of nature as a bountiful mother
upside down (Merchant 1980: 140).
206 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analy

GENDERING A N D T H E POLITICAL E C O N O M Y O F
CAPITALISM

The legal and economic disadvantaging of w o m e n via the juridical po\\\r

of state, city, and local rural authorities gave employers a ready-made chcv.'
labor force whose work in social reproduction was justifiably obtained
gratis or nearly so, as raw materials were provided by nature. Indeed, it
was discounted as "work." Where women or children engaged in paid
labor, their work was considered inferior, worthy of minimal reward. Their
"proper place"the homeprovided a locus to which they could be forc-
ibly retired when their services were no longer required, without a social
outcry being raised. Inherent in the state-sponsored role of men as authority
figures in the home was a notion that men had the right to supervise do-
mestic economic activities of other family members. They did supervise i:.
specifically, the spinning that their wives undertook on the putting-out s\ >-
tern. Marriage gave men reproductive services gratismeals prepared,
laundry done, houses cleaned, property cared for. This stretched wages and
allowed employers to pay lower wages, thus lowering the costs to capital
of reproducing the direct wage earner.
These were immediate benefits to capital, but there were some lont, term
f
ones as well. All wages fell in the sixteenth century, while the costs o
foodstuffs rose. Lowered real wages meant that households were re-lam e'i
impoverished, even more so to the extent that women's earnings were e\e"
lower than men's. Biicher (1968: 308) has commented that domestic won
was the mother of all trades. This leads to the suspicion that for capitalist
to profit, it was necessary to ensure that laborers' or artisans' househok:
never become competitors in even small ways. Low incomes meant tha
most households would never be able to acquire the means of production
The discrediting of the goods produced by w o m e n as "homemade" als<
points to this conclusion. Biicher (1968: 3 3 3 , 335) also pointed out tli.i
choice of occupation is limited by available financial means. Female ecu
nomic marginalization meant that each household was dependent on a sin
gle wage. Even with supplementary incomes of w o m e n and children, thi
likelihood that parents from such a household would be able to set up thei
children in a non-proletarian livelihood was slim.
Closing w o m e n out of masterships and thus reducing the numbers o
masterships in total made more capital available for capitalists. This ma;
seem an outrageous suggestion at first glance. Yet let us suppose that a
any given time period there is a finite amount of investment capital j \ . u '
able for setting up business. By excluding w o m e n from masterships, thi
number of competitors for such capital was cut in half, while the remaining
competitors each had the chance of acquiring twice as much capital as hi
would previously have been able to do.
It must be remembered that, according to the same principle, in an}
Writing on Gender in World-Systems Perspective 207

competitive situation with a finite number of prizes, the chances of any

individual player's winning a prize are proportionately reduced by the num-
ber of players competing. M e n benefited from the exclusion of w o m e n from
the public domain, inasmuch as the competition for jobs or livelihoods was
cut in half. Men acquired strong occupational identities and a "right" to
livelihood. By contrast, w o m e n were given the status of dependentsper-
manent childrenand consigned to a subsistence sector. W o m e n had al-
w,a)s worked in this sector, to be sure, but until the sixteenth century,
subsistence had not been so immutably identified with women (either sex
had performed such tasks), nor had subsistence carried any stigma. From
the sixteenth century onward, subsistence activities were socially down-
graded because they were unremunerated.

METHODOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

I would like n o w to mention what I see as one methodological impli-

cation of this study. For some years there has been a quarrel between
world-systems analysts and exponents of political economy. Specifically,
this involves a contention around whether structures of the world-system
or more local relations between labor, capital, and the state are more useful
for understanding social and economic changes. My guess is that this is a
pointless academic quarrel. For example, if we look again at the reasons
for the establishment of gendering, we discover that the motivations for it
lie in changes at the level of the world-economy. The attacks on guilds or
. i instruction of women as a cheap labor force for what are termed mer-
chant capitalist producersa phenomenon that could be seen at a series of
localeswould not have happened in the first place without the incorpo-
ration of what became peripheral economic zones in the world-economy.
Likewise, one cannot think of the production of woolen or linen textiles
for a world market without noticing that this could be done only by cheap-
ening labor on a local level, and one may imagine that this was so because
the costs of production for long-distance trade required that capitalists
spend money on transportation rather than wages. Likewise, guild produc-
tion was attacked because it represented competition. Thus, the world-
vconomy was involved with and influenced the relation between women,
men, guilds, judiciaries, and all kinds of authorities up to and including
kings and the relation between capital, labor, and the state. The point is
that ideally each methodology (political economy or world-systems analy-
sis) enhances the other, but local changes are determined by changes at the
world level, rather than the reverse.
V similar critique can be made of the women's studies approach. On its
m a , gendering makes no sensewhy would such a system be imposed
unless it served some key functions? By studying gender in the world-
systems context, it is possible to understand that gendering has upheld the
208 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis

modern world-system and its central raison d'etre of accumulation and,

inversely, expropriation, as well as key elements of social control such as
the destruction of class solidarity and neutralization of class struggle. Thus,
it has contributed to the creation and continuance of the world-system. At
the same time the real focus has got to be on the world-system, because
gendering is only a partalbeit a very important partof the social struc-
turing of that system.
There is a political message here as well. In all of these activities, those
w h o ran state structuresgovernmentswere heavily involved. This
should tip off anyone interested in egalitarian social change to be wary of
relying on the state. From a proequality standpoint, the history of the state
as an institution is not a good one, and again, the nature of any beast is
known by its history. It also suggests that egalitarian social changetrue
change, that is, not just reform, which by its nature is limitedinvolves a
change of the whole system. It is not possible to fight for the "liberation"
and equality of w o m e n without simultaneously fighting for the end to all
hierarchical relationships.
Gendering was spread throughout the world over the course of five cen-
turies through incorporation of new territories and peoples into the world-
economy and via colonization and imperialism. Thus, whatever the relative
status of w o m e n to men had been in any of the incorporated areas previous
to incorporation, it is likely that over time and on a world scale the social
status of w o m e n has fallen. Gendering is n o w a world-scale phenomenon.
It has proven to be effective as a social control device. It may be hypoth-
esized that while it has been increasingly with us for the last 5 0 0 years, it
has been reinstituted by elites whenever there is a shock to the system
the French Revolution or the world revolution of 1 9 6 8 . Since the nine-
teenth century, however, gendering has been reproduced by the helping
professionsteachers, psychiatrists, the medical profession, the press,
development experts, and so on. More recently, religion has reasserted its
role in enforcing gendering, perhaps taking over from the socially discred-
ited state.
What next? On the one hand, there may be less gendering of persons
with t w o X chromosomesthere are some w o m e n w h o have entered the
professions, government, and so on, but not on the same scale in numbers
as men. The women's movement cannot be said to have been a great suc-
cess: thirty years after the women's movement was revived on a world-
scale, w o m e n still do not have pay parity with men or control over
generational reproduction. What may be happening, in fact, is that even as
some female people get made "honorary men," the majority of the world's
population becomes ever more feminized and subsistence activities ever
more disdained. On the other hand, if, as Wallerstein has noted in various
places, the world-system is entering its final crisis, there may be hope: if
gendering is linked to capitalism, then it is logical to suppose that it may
Writing on Gender in World-Systems Perspective 209

end if capitalism ends. The question is h o w we can best construct a social

system that is politically, economically, and socially egalitarian and that
does not oppress and exploit people or divide them by race, class, gender,
age, orin the case of the natural worldspecies.

CONCLUSIONS
By studying gender in world-systems perspective, world-systems analysis
gained a new structure that explains a lot about ways that eliteswhether
the state and its agents, local elites, or capitalistskeep social control and
why households as we k n o w them were formed in the first place. (Histor-
ically, they were not the first choice of urban workers or peasants.) Political
economy could have gained more complete insights into the relationship
between state, capital, and labor. Even the orthodox Marxists would have
gained new insight into the class struggle. By focusing onand thus in a
sense privilegingthe male worker's role in the class struggle, the Marxists
continued a version of a systemic tradition begun in the sixteenth century.
Finally, feminists could have seen that patriarchy has been part of a struc-
tural component of capitalism, not a holdover from a remote past. Yet by
paying more attention to the history of ideas, they could have seen where
the notion of an "age-old" patriarchy came from. Most importantly, the
oppression of w o m e n was not something handed d o w n from time imme-
morial but a socially created reality. That means it can be socially disman-
tled, too.
Meanwhile, feminists keep trying to invent a new canon, even a series
of new canons, while attacking the old ones. This is because women's stud-
ies keeps trying to invent itself as a new social science discipline. In this it
will probably succeed, because such a line of action supports the current
university structure. By contrast, world-systems analysis attacks the old
canons while not attempting to set up new ones, because its practitioners
make no claim to being a separate discipline. Rather world-systems advo-
cates the collapsing of discipline boundaries. Politically and intellectually,
this makes sense, but it scares proponents of the status quo.

NOTE
1. For a cataloging of this process for German cities, see Merry Weisner, Work-
ing Women in Renaissance Germany (1986). There is no single source for describ-
ing this process in the rest of Western Europe, but such sources as Natalie Zemon
Davis' "Women in the Crafts hi Sixteenth Century Lyon" (1982) are useful.

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 Part in

The Aftermath of the Colonial

System, Coloniality, and the Geopolitics
of Knowledge
 Chapter 11

The Genesis of the Development

Framework: The End of Laissez-Faire,
the Eclipse of Colonial Empires, and the
Structure of U.S. Hegemony

Fouad Makki

Of all the notions that conjure up the Third World, none are more per-
vasive and yet more elusive than "development". Everyone has some sense
of its meaning, but few have contemplated its overall significance or made
a serious effort to historicize and decipher it. An evocation of the concept
is likely to bring to mind odd snatches and memories of collective endeavor
to overcome hunger, disease, poverty, and inequality. The captivating desire
of its widely diffused meaning was "human liberation from poverty and
want, from oppression, from violence, from the drudgery of monotonous
and stultifying work" (Bienefeld 1 9 9 1 : 3).
In the new historical epoch that we n o w appear to have entered, in which
a whole set of conventional beliefs about the Third World and development
have been put into doubt, a critical examination of the historical, political,
and intellectual premises of development has become a necessity. There are,
of course, countless studies of development, and if this topic merits new
attention, it is certainly not because it has previously been ignored but
rather because the ways in which it has been considered important have
generally taken the development framework itself for granted. This familiar
terrain of scholarship does not begin to explain where the development
framework came from. H o w did it end up taking the form that it did? Why
did development assume great importance in some periods, little or none
in others? What are the dynamics through which it is changing? If answers
to these questions are to be proposed, and if we are to grasp the present
significance of the development framework, it is necessary to look back at
the context in which it was originally conceived.
The concept of development was hardly new in the postwar period, and
governments have long intervened to enhance state power and to foster
216 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

economic and social change (Cowen and Shenton 1996; Esteva 1992). But
developmentalism was more than just state intervention in the economy. It
represented a historically specific power-knowledge nexus that emerged at
a particular conjuncture and within a delimited constellation. In what fol-
lows I illustrate that this nexuswhat I call the "development frame-
work"acquired its particular epochal salience following the interwar
period of profound crisis in the world-system and that it represented a
dramatic alteration in the nature of the relationship between metropole and
colony. It was articulated and consolidated at the crossroads of three
world-historical processes. The first was the formation of "national econ-
omies" following the Great Depression and the swift collapse of the notion
of a "self-regulating market," on the one hand, and the nationalist upsurge
attending the disintegration of the Central and East European dynastic em-
pires on the other. The second was the crisis of European overseas colonial
empires under challenge from anticolonial movements, and the complex
process of decolonization that ensued. Finally, there was the consolidation
of U.S. hegemony following the t w o world wars and the parallel ideological
polarization of the world-system around the United States and the Soviet
Union. Each process has its o w n history and dynamic, and the temporal
simultaneity of these interconnected but separate trajectories does not pre-:
suppose any necessary functional compatibility. Their convergence in the
postwar period was rather a matter of historical contingency. But trai ersiiie,
all three temporal strata was a fundamental shift in global power relations
Examining the development framework along these lines requires an un-
derstanding of the spatially uneven and temporally distinct rhythms ot i n -
tersecting historical processes, as well as a more contextualized attention
to the myriad contests over political and social issues within particular
regions or colonies. Such an approach provides one plausible vantage point
from which to survey the wider socio-historical dynamics of developmtiii
making it possible to envisage a more searching reassessment of the as-
sumptions that shape current approaches to the global dynamics between
1
power and plenty.

T H E E N D O F LAISSEZ-FAIRE A N D T H E F O R M A T I O N O F
" N A T I O N A L ECONOMIES"

The period from 1815 to 1 9 3 0 has retroactively been dubbed the age of
British hegemony. Within Britain, it was born of a pragmatic recognition
that England could no longer be agriculturally self-sufficient. It represented
a move away from the protectionist position embodied in the 1815 Corn
Laws, toward an acceptance of an economic and foreign policy based upon
manufactures and free trade. Within Europe, it was underscored by the
Settlement of Vienna (1815) following the Napoleonic Wars and the defeat
'he Genesis of the Development Framework 217

f Britain's main rival, France. The War of the Spanish Succession, allying
.ngland and Holland against the threat of French hegemony, transformed
le relationship of forces between the three, and Britain emerged from it
2
s the world's premier commercial and naval power. From a global per-
pective, Britain's overseas expansion and plunder sealed this supremacy of
r>ritish industry and navy over its continental European as well as extra-
3
.uropean rivals.
Britain's status as the "workshop of the world" and the premier naval
ower inaugurated the era of free-trade imperialism, allowing Britain to
ose as a laissez-faire state for the remainder of the nineteenth century. The
nposition of the gold standard as the pivot of a liberalized world trade
ubordinated mercantilist policy to currency stability, forcing states to in-
;rnalize the exigencies of world commerce through budgetary priorities,
aissez-faire remained hegemonic for the better part of a century and found
itellectual prop in the work of classical economists such as Adam Smith,
smith maintained that the pursuit of rational self-interest would lead to a
eneral division of labor as individual producers seek to try to make use
f the specialized productive capacities of other producers. In the aggregate,
ais rational self-pursuit would lead to specialized production for exchange,
dnch would, in turn, bring about lower-cost production through the gains
rom trade and stimulate a generalized increase in productivity. All of this
rould augment the wealth of nations and lead them through a progression
f stages from agriculture to industry to commerce.
The subsequent insulation of economic thought from political theory
onceived by Alfred Marshall at the end of the nineteenth century and the
dvent of Marginalism marked the birth of an economic science seemingly
:ee from political or sociological variables. Conventional equilibrium tile-
ry professed to represent a pure logic of the market, and it was clear that
lis classical paradigm and its optimism of economic growth were formu-
lted as a critique of mercantilism and any system of a "national" economy:
[E]conomic theory was thus elaborated uniquely on the basis of individual
nits of enterprisepersons or firmsrationally maximizing their gains
nd minimizing their losses in a market which had no specific spatial ex-
:nsion. At the limit it was, and could not but be, the world market" (Hobs-
awm 1990: 26).
Laissez-faire was only one, albeit dominant, doctrine. Alternative pro-
:ctionist conceptions were also present, particularly in the countries of so-
alled late-industrializers. In the United States, the federalist Alexander
lamilton advocated protectionism and a strong national government. The
imerican debates, in turn, inspired Friedrich List, for w h o m protectionism
fas not a goal in itself but a temporary policy that would allow a country
) build a strong economy through industrialization and "prepare its entry
lto the universal society of the future" (Hobsbawm 1990: 30). But for
mch of the nineteenth century these ideas remained in a subordinate po-
218 The Aftermath of the Colonial Systi :

sition, gaining a broader audience only during the interwar years with the
collapse of both the self-regulating market and the polyglot dynastic em-
pires (Cowen and Shenton 1996: 1 1 6 - 1 7 2 ) .
The late nineteenth century marked the high point of Britain's unparal-
leled dominance in the world market. Thereafter, transformations in the
relative strength of the United States, Germany, and Japan in the
economy deepened the competitive pressures on British free-trade police*,
eventually precipitating a crisis that manifested itself politically in World
War I and economically in the Great Depression. The most immediate
causes of the Great Depression were located in the United States. Under
pressure from the farm lobby, the U.S. Congress tightened its commercial
policy and passed the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which brought in one of
the largest duty increases in international trade history. This provoked
widespread retaliation and a wave of protectionism that led to a massh e
contraction of international trade. By the third quarter of 1932 the trade
of European countries had fallen to below 4 0 % of its 1929 level (Van de'
Wee and Buyst 1989: 2 3 9 - 2 5 9 ) .
The crisis revealed that there was no lender of last resort, and in 1931,
amid competitive devaluations, both Britain and the United States i b m
doned the gold standard. The world-economy fractured into rival currency
blocs, and a whole battery of restrictions on trade was initiated to shield
domestic economies from external influences. Any prospect of gene
operation to revive the world-economy ended at the 1933 World Economy
Conference, when the United States announced that it was going to ensure
the restoration of equilibrium in its domestic economy before w o n urn:
about stability in the international order. The "snapping of the golden
thread," as Polanyi called it, decisively buried the unified, British led
nineteenth-century world-system (Polanyi 1944: 23). Protectionism became:
rampant, the pursuit of stable currencies was abandoned, and "world < ap
italism retreated into the igloos of its nation-state economies and their as-
sociated empires" (Hobsbawm 1990: 132).
The ensuing depression decisively changed the political and economic
context, convincing many politicians and their economic advisers that the
pure logic of the market could no longer be relied on to ensure stabilin
L
and growth. It was a "canyon which henceforth made a return to I > 11
not merely impossible, but unthinkable. Old-fashioned liberalism was dead
or doomed" (Hobsbawm 1994: 107). Unprecedented levels of debt, n u t
production, and a rapid rise in unemployment followed the abandoning of
the gold standard, which was the linchpin of the self-regulating market
The economic crises, together with the intensification of nationalisms fol-
lowing the dissolution of the Ottoman, Habsburg, Hohonzollern, and Ro
manov empires, created a new context within which to re-imagine the
relationship between state and economy.
The world crisis likewise brought about shifts in the political alliances
The Genesis of the Development Framework 219

that ruled states in parts of Latin America and the Middle East. The severe
shrinkage of world trade to one-third of its pre-crisis level impelled a social
recomposition of the ruling elites, as neither merchants nor exporting ag-
riculturists could continue to occupy the privileged status that they had
previously enjoyed. The depression and the war cleared the ground for an
alliance between nationalist elites and local industrialists around policies
designed to promote "national economies." Once freed from the sanction
of the world market, these elites were able to subsume foreign trade under
national political priorities. In Latin America in particular, various populist
regimes promoted a strategy of import-substitution through the production
of consumer goods for the domestic market. This strategy led to "rapid
industrialization, and infant industries demanded protection against pri-
marily Yankee competition" (Kolko 1988: 36; see also Keyder 1995).
Conceptually, too, as the system of monetary representation fell apart,
and the social orders that it underpinned lost their coherence, the notion
of the economy as a self-contained and internally dynamic totality, separate
from other economies and subject to state intervention, started to crystal-
.ize. Keynes realized that in these post-laissez-faire conditions, neo-classical
categories needed to be recast. In his General Theory (1973) the abstraction
of the market, which was the normative construct of pre-Keynesian eco-
nomics, was replaced with the "economic system as a whole," a system
whose limits corresponded to specific geopolitical boundaries. These con-
ceptual shifts found their anchor in a new role for the state, as the parallel
development of state planning in its Leninist, fascist, and Keynesian forms
all represented novel attempts to delimit specifically national spheres of the
economy.
As part of their enhanced role in the economy, states were also critical
in devising various instruments and controls for measuring and representing
economic processes. A series of aggregates (production, employment, in-
vestment, and consumption) and averages (interest rate, price level, and
real wages) gave the idea of the economy an expressive totality whose un-
specified referent was the nation-state. Around the same time, Simon Kuz-
nets systematized a method for estimating the national income, while
econometrics attempted to create mathematical representations of the "na-
tional economy." The subsequent elaboration and generalization of what
came to be called the gross national product (GNP) of each economy made
it possible to represent the size, structure, and growth of this new, self-
enclosed entity "(Mitchell 1995). These developments provided the concep-
tual apparatus through which the economy was envisioned as a spatially
bounded structure subject to national "regulation" and "management."
Whereas laissez-faire had been a mechanism for taking the state cognitively
out of the economy, twentieth-century nationalisms were constituting the
nation-state as its prime mover.
The next step was the emergence of growth theory outside the old equi-
220 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

librium framework, and it is within this subdisciplinary field that devel-

4
opment economics first emerged. In post-depression Latin America, the
structuralist economists housed in the Economic Commission for Latin
America (ECLA) and headed by Raul Prebisch, were one of the first group
of economists to focus on "development." The ECLA thesis, which was
also shared by other economists such as Mihail Manoilescu and Paul
Rosenstein-Rodan, stressed the unequal nature of trade between an indus-
trial, hegemonic center and an agrarian, dependent periphery. In order to
transform and rectify this structural disadvantage, these economists advo-
cated import-substitution industrialization (Prebisch 1984: 1 7 5 - 1 9 1 ) .
In much of the rest of the periphery, most countries were still held as
colonial possessions by a handful of imperial powers, and the inter-state
system was not primarily one of nation-states but a system of empires. So
what really impelled development and the notion of a national economy
was the end of empire in Africa and Asia, which for the first time made
the nation-state the prevailing norm of the inter-state system.

T H E DECLINE OF EMPIRE: F R O M "CIVILIZING MISSION"

T O DEVELOPMENTALISM

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European ex-

pansion and colonization of the rest of the world were justified by reference
to the superiority of Western civilization vis-a-vis the rest of the world. The
ideology of the civilizing mission had underpinned colonial rule up to the
mid-twentieth century, when it fell into disrepute. A combination of polit-
ical self-affirmation by the colonized as well as the experience of two world
wars broke the self-congratulatory spell of this Eurocentric world order.
Nineteenth-century moral certainties of imperial mission never recovered
from the shell shock that they received on the battlefields of Europe and in
the urban and rural revolts of the colonies. If Europeans were the most
civilized and conscientious beings ever to grace this earth, h o w then to
explain the carnage of the world wars, not to speak of the colonization
and domination of large numbers of this planet's peoples and the destruc-
tion of their indigenous cultures and ecology by these very same Europeans?
With this blow to the self-confidence of the civilizing mission, science
and technological k n o w - h o w became the "measure of man," providing the
5
key ingredients for late colonial hegemony (Adas 1 9 8 9 ) . The masten m e t
nature, which was the essence of the Western scientific ethos, became the
new key to the mastery of empire. Because science and technology were
viewed as neutral, they could be advanced with confidence, quite unlike
the ethnocentric ideologies of cultural chauvinism or racial superiority.
Based on Enlightenment ideals of progress, they offered a seemingly more
plausible basis for assertions of imperial hegemony and opened the door
to subsequent theories of modernization.
The Genesis of the Development Framework 221

The initial systematic push for the expansion of colonial economies was
proposed in the context of a crisis of empire and had as its aim the alle-
viation of the metropole's war debts and the creation of a stable political
and ideological framework for continued imperial rule. The European
world had entered the 1930s depression only a decade after relative peace.
More than 60 million men were involved in the armed conflict of World
War I, and when the armistice was signed in November 1918, Europe had
to deal with severe population losses, extensive devastation, financial and
political disorganization, and a serious reduction in civilian output. This
new situation altered the terms within which economic transformations in
the colonies were framed, and France and Britain tried to make the idea of
social and economic development the key to a renewal of the imperial
mission.
Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard have convincingly argued that in
this new geopolitical configuration, hegemonic knowledge was recast so as
to make "sense" of the new global order. The opposition between "civi-
lized" and "primitive," which had been intrinsic to justifying colonization
at the height of imperial incorporation, was no longer viable. The formerly
colonized had to be brought out of the dialectics of difference of colonial
rule, into a universalizing discourse. "Development" was in this respect
crucial in reconfiguring the global identity of ex-colonies in a way that was
incorporative and universalistic yet still hierarchical. It not only defined the
terms in which colonial exploitation and relative inequality were under-
stood but also provided the promise of a future beyond colonialism. Unlike
the ideology of the "civilizing mission," development appealed to and was
seized by nationalist leaders w h o saw in it a project that only a government
that had rid itself of colonialism could accomplish (Cooper and Packard
1997: 1-44).
Analogous circumstances in Britain and France were leading to more or
less similar proposals and commitments of metropolitan public funds, cul-
minating in the British Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940 and
the French Fonds d'Investissement et Developpement Econotnique et Social
des Territoires d'Outre-Mer of 1946. Large-scale investments in raw ma-
terials production were made in the context of an extension of capitalist
production and the role of the colonial state in the economy. Colonial
administrations were urged to enlarge commodity production and tie co-
lonial output and trade more directly to metropolitan interests. As Lord
Hailey pointed out, this represented "the translation into the Colonial
sphere o f . . . a new concept which had come to be increasingly accepted
in domestic politics, the doctrine, namely, that active state intervention was
a necessary lever to the amelioration of social conditions" (Wilson 1994:
6
149).
But the project of development in a colonial context proved to be un-
realizable. Sapped by grandiose and costly plans and social conflicts that
222 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

seemed to be fostered by the very policies intended to avert them, colonial

development had created expectations that it could not meet. Top-heavy
and cumbersome, these projects were often premised on a distorted view
of colonial backwardness. Ultimately, many of the projects failed, helping
to underscore the anticolonial contention that only a society that had rid
itself of colonialism could complete the project of modernity. As H. S.
Wilson points out:

The disasters of British and French efforts at state-induced colonial development

during the late 1940s and early 1950s forced them to reassess their policies. Their
prestige as imperial rulers was damaged in the eyes of their own metropolitan:
publics and their colonial officials . .. and, not least, their African subjects for
whom the myth of the white man's wisdom was weakened by such crass ineptitude.
(Wilson 1994: 152)

The need to find a new political and material basis for continued colonial
rule, which had served as an impetus for the turn to economic development
and the changing role of the colonial state that it signified, helped to focus
social conflicts directly on the state itself. After a slight recovery following
the depression years, there was an upsurge of labor mobilization in the
colonies, particularly in the urban centers. In Africa alone there were gen-
eral strikes in Mombassa in 1 9 3 9 and 1947, mine strikes in the copper Kit
in 1938 and 1940, a general strike in Nigeria in 1945, riots in the Gold
Coast in 1948, strike waves in Dakar in 1 9 3 6 - 1 9 3 7 and again in 1 9 4 5 -
1 9 4 6 , and the French West African railway strike of 1 9 4 7 - 1 9 4 8 . These
strikes were reverberations of a movement that began in the Caribbean
when a series of riots hit the oil fields of Trinidad and the plantations J I V
urban areas of Jamaica. The struggles in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and
Malaysia further accentuated the overall crisis of empire.
The wave of strikes and political revolts came as a shock to imperial
officials, w h o saw it as a threat to the wartime empire. Deepening civil
conflict and serious challenges to colonial rule forced them to recognize the
need to increase living standards in order to mollify labor and improve
productivity. Organized urban and rural workers were well positioned n>
take advantage of imperial interests in a stable environment for accumu-
lation to push for their o w n demands. They did so in terms of the concep-
tual scheme that officials were themselves trying to expound: if workers in
the colonies were supposed to behave like industrial workers in the mi tin
poles, they should be paid as such. Such demands successfully turned the
universalizing discourse back against the colonial state itself, making enti-
tlement claims for better wages and social benefits that were commensurate
with those in the metropole. In the case of the French Empire, the attempt
to re-imagine empire by promoting a policy of "assimilation" and welcom-
ing the colonies into the Union Francaise witnessed a similar dialectic ol
The Genesis of the Development Framework 223

appropriation and subversion. During the 1 9 4 4 Brazzaville Conference,

universalized imperial assertions were turned into claims for universal cit-
izenship rights, demands that soon exposed the limitations of colonial
claims to inclusivity. For, with the exception of a handful of tiny islands
such as Martinique and Guadeloupe, full citizenship rights were never se-
7
riously on offer for the rest of the colonized w o r l d .
The developmentalist rationale for late colonial rule brought to the fore
the underlying contradictions in the entire imperial project. The focus on
social and economic development legitimated the European standard of
living as a reference point for the aspirations of the colonized. At the same
time, the emphasis on applying the universal laws of social science left less
and less room for the colonial representatives of European civilization,
whose claim to authority was based on ethnocentric notions that they em-
bodied "civilization" in their very being.
In the end, under attack from labor and nationalist movements across
Africa and Asia, imperial certainty in the function of empire was shaken,
and officials retreated and sought ways of disengagement. A pragmatic turn
toward designing policies within the framework of particular colonial states
was an expression of this retreat. The British colonial doctrine of indirect
rule can be seen in this context as an attempt to confine Africans within
primarily "local" and "traditional" space. As Cooper points out, it repre-
sented an attempt "to break away from making the relevant unit be the
empire, and the concept that all workersand perhaps all citizens or sub-
jectsfrom Wales to Kiambu, from the Touraine to the Niger Bend, were
part of the same polity and had claim on the same basis to imperial re-
8
sources" (Cooper 1996: 4 7 1 ) . Unwittingly and paradoxically, the inclu-
^ionary and exclusionary dynamics of colonial imaginings had provided
nationalist movements with the political and conceptual framework with
which to eventually mobilize and bring down the colonial state. Rather
than the awakening of any ethical consciousness, it was these contradictory
pressures that decisively ended the colonial empires.

DEVELOPMENT A N D T H E STRUCTURE O F U.S.

HEGEMONY

Coming to the rescue of a Europe on the brink of being overrun by

fascism or later by an ascendant Soviet Union, the United States was in a
unique position to impose its vision of the new world order on the old
colonial powers. World War I had already revealed the real relationship of
forces between the various imperialist powers, and the entente w o n the war
primarily because of U.S. intervention against German hegemonic ambi-
tions. A similar pattern was to be repeated following World War II when
lingland escaped defeat, again thanks to its pact with the United States.
The demonstration of U.S. power in war, combined with the devastating
224 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

blow administered to the British-led world-economy by the world depres-

sion, signaled the unmistakable emergence of American hegemony. This
hegemony was based on the overwhelming preponderance of the Unitec
States in world manufacturing output. It was codified in the monetary ordei
created at Bretton W o o d s and found expression in a political and military
dominance whose instruments were the North Atlantic Treaty Organiza-
tion (NATO), the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), and the
Japanese Security Pact.
The emerging postwar reorganization of political space was hencefortf
premised on an informal imperial structure. As early as the discussions
surrounding the August 1941 Atlantic Charter and despite the resistance
of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, the United States reaffirmec
the old Wllsonian doctrine of the right of all peoples to choose their forrr
of government. Nationalist calls for self-government in the colonies gainec
renewed impetus from this shift in the locus of global hegemony. By May
1 9 4 2 , U.S. planners had concluded that "the British Empire . . . will nevei
reappear and that the United States may have to take its place" and thai
in the context of growing anticolonial struggles it was necessary to ' \ u o i i
l
conventional forms of imperialism" (Shoup and Minter 1980: 146, 14 >
!
The United States believed that its o w n history as the first " ex-colony'
uniquely equipped it to advance the project of global decolonization anc
modernization:

Just as the decline of Europe's global hegemony opened the way for the emergence
of the United States as the premier world power, the Europeans' doubts about then
civilizing mission strengthened the Americans' growing conviction that they knevs
best how to reform "backward" societies that were racked by poverty, natural
calamities, and social unrest. (Adas 1989: 402)

As if to underscore this changed perspective, Harry S. Truman in

nounced his often-quoted concept of a "fair deal" for the entire world at
his Inaugural Address as president of the United States in January 1949
"The old imperialismexploitation for foreign profithas no place in out
plans. What we envisage is a program of development based on the con
9
cepts of democratic fair dealing" (McMichael 1996: 3 0 ) .
The Bandung Conference of 1955 marked the emergence of a bloc oi
Third World states whose attainment of political independence was coupled
10
with expectations of rapid economic development. The expansion of the
inter-state system and the new centrality of the development concept be-
came defining aspects of the dynamics of American hegemony. Starting in
the war years but acquiring a new momentum soon after, an international
regulatory frameworkthe United Nations, the Organization of American
States, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Bank, and
the International Monetary Fundreplaced the autarkic empires that had
The Genesis of the Development Framework 225

dominated the interwar geopolitical landscape. Postwar imperial relations,

while respecting the formal equality of sovereign states, could n o w be con-
cealed behind the facade of these supranational organizations (Corbridge,
Thrift, and Martin 1994).
The particular structure of the world-economy under U.S. hegemony
helped cement the shift toward national developmentalism. Defined by a
hierarchy of interacting national systems, the world-economy was unified
under the sovereignty of the dollar and the monetary order created at Bret-
ton Woods. The United States had successfully internalized the global di-
vision of labor that once typified the relationship between metropolitan
Europe and its colonial extension, characterized as it was by a vertical
11
division of labor between industry and agriculture. At the same time, the
U.S. economy's relatively l o w level of export specialization and a gigantic
domestic market as well as the increased postwar autonomy of national
financial systems ensured a relative desynchronization of business cycles.
This gave national states some autonomy from the fluctuations of the dol-
lar, allowing governments to determine domestic interest rates and fix the
exchange rate of their national currency. National indicative planning was
therefore seen as a natural extension of this structure. Ultimately, the shift
in the locus of hegemony from the United Kingdom to the United States
represented more than a change in the identity of the hegemonic power. It
amounted to a transformation in the historical character of the system itself
(Aglietta 1982: 5 - 4 1 ; Arrighi 1994: 2 8 0 - 2 9 5 ; Mjeset 1990: 2 1 - 4 8 ) .
In an era of decolonization and Cold War, the political challenge that
the United States faced was h o w to hold the world market together at a
time when the Soviet Union and China (and, later on, Cuba) offered alter-
natives to the capitalist transformation of the Third World. Marshall aid
had secured the decisive short-term resources that enabled governing coa-
litions in Western Europe to recover economically and to surmount strong
12
challenges from local Communist parties. The perceived success of the
Marshall Plan, in turn, became a sort of model for later ideas about "aid"
to the Third World (Packenham 1973). The promotion of developmental-
ism by the United States was not just fortuitous: "The idea of moderniza-
tion proved congenial to American policy makers, so much so in fact that
'development' and 'modernization' came to be viewed as long-range solu-
tions to the threats of Communism in the Third World" (Tipps 1973: 2 1 0 ) .
In this context of Cold War, modernization theory proper was articulated.
For some of its exponents, modernization theory was an explicit alternative
to revolutionary Communism. Rostow's "non-Communist manifesto" was
the best-known instance of this, but other leading modernization theorists
Gabriel Almond, Edward Shills, Lucien Pye, and Samuel Huntington
were also closely connected to the American state and its preoccupation
with combating Communism (Gendzier 1985).
In its classical formulation modernization theory had t w o principal com-
226 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

ponents: "tradition" and "modernity." Modernization implied a linear

movement from one to the other, and political and social change became
little more than a sequence of successful or unsuccessful adjustments to the
inexorable forces of modernity. Modernization was also a relational pro-
cess at the level of the world-system, in which synchronic comparisons
between different kinds of society were ordered diachronically to produce
both a temporal and spatial scale of development in which the particular
present of some societies was privileged as representing the future of others.
Here, of course, the privileged histories were those of the pioneers in the
industrialization process. England and the United States became the nor-
mative models of attempts to sketch universal routes to modernity. In this
grand narrative, history since the French and Industrial Revolutions was to
be understood as the resolving of an overarching logic of societal ration-
alization and secularization. It was a process advanced by modern industry
and government and was transmitted to "traditional" societies through the
impact of empire and the world market. In this narrative, Western capitalist
societies were represented as having evolved the paradigmatic institutions
to ensure progress, contain social conflict, andin Durkheimian terms
13
surmount the problem of a n o m i e .
The collaboration between academe and centers of power helped rein-
force and institutionalize the new modernization paradigm. But it is im-
portant to point out here that by the 1960s, as signs of crisis loomed, the
assumptions of modernization theory were challenged by successive intel-
lectual and political projects: dependency school, world-systems, and modes
of production analyses. Theoretically, it was a time of expanding horizons
and large ambitions, and innovative work inspired research centers and
graduate programs. By the 1970s "development studies" had achieved an
established position in most universities. But these critical perspectives, for-
mative though they were, did not impinge substantially upon the way that
development projects were conceived or implemented (Alavi and Shanin
1980; Hettne 1990; Leys 1996).

DEVELOPMENTALISM A N D T H E POSTWAR B O O M

The stable framework provided by Pax Americana enabled a historically

unprecedented expansion of the world-economy. The long interwar down-
swing gave way to a postwar boom, founded initially on reconstruction of
fixed capital and then on the generalization of neo-Fordism. This was the
golden age of affluence that allowed modernization theory to become the
reigning orthodoxy. In the developed countries, gross domestic product
(GDP) and labor productivity grew almost twice as fast as in any previous
period since 1 8 2 0 , and there was a rapid acceleration in the rate of growth
of the capital stock. The growth in the volume of postwar trade was eight
times faster than in the period 1 9 1 3 - 1 9 5 0 and twice as great as in the
The Genesis of the Development Framework 227

century from 1 8 2 0 . Globally, output of manufactures more than quadru-

pled between the early 1950s and the 1970s, and world trade in manufac-
1 4
tures grew eightfold (Glynn, Hughes, Lipietz, and Singh 1 9 9 1 : 4 1 - 4 2 ) .
Politically, the catastrophe of World War II worked to fire popular mobi-
lizations behind strong ideals of democratic citizenship and social justice,
so that with the exception of the Iberian fascist states, the post-1945 period
was the first moment of generalized parliamentary democracy in West Eur-
opean history.
In the postcolonial world, the first decades after decolonization witnessed
a significant, if very uneven, rise in income and enlarged provision of social
services and education. As a consequence, poverty was for the first time
regarded as a consequence of policy rather than an inevitable dictate of
nature. The most visible effect of these transformations was the rapid rise
in urbanization and concomitant drastic reduction of the agrarian popu-
lation. Similarly, there was an unprecedented expansion of literacy and the
presence of an educated middle class as a palpable demographic phenom-
enon. Before World War II, "three of the largest, most developed and most
educated countriesGermany, France and Britainwith a total popula-
tion of 150 million, then contained no more than 1 5 0 , 0 0 0 university stu-
dents. In the 1980s, Ecuador alone contained more than twice as many"
15
(Hobsbawm 1992: 5 6 ) .
The long postwar boom was never a linear advance, and for many in
the Third World prosperity remained a remote dream. The era of the Cold
War in the north was simultaneously one of hot wars in the southcov-
ering the Korean War, the Vietnam War, three Middle East wars, and some
40-odd civil wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Even economic
growth was less comprehensive than is often assumed. Politically, while the
moment of independence set in motion mass mobilizations, over time a
closure occurred as parasitic military and bureaucratic layers short-circuited
the initial period of democratic effervescence. The rhetoric of development
that had emerged in the late colonial era was n o w used to interpose state
power to protect entrenched privileges and relations of erstwhile dominance
(Bayart 1993; Mamdani 1996).
The onset of the long recession in the early 1970s saw the breakdown
of Fordist accumulation, throwing the development framework into crisis.
As stagflation set in, and unemployment started to mount in the industri-
alized countries, the prices of primary products plummeted. At the same
time, the ruin of primary producers had disastrous effects on the level of
employment and manufactured exports that had partly been geared to the
postcolonial world. The international economy sank into a synchronized
recession. The one exception to the secular decline in raw material prices
was the major increase in the price of crude oil, and the petrodollars from
this windfall were n o w recirculated as loans to Third World states. The
loans were used to finance increasing import bills for industrial technology,
228 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

equipment goods, and food. The result was a rapid surge in accumulated
Third World debt, and Mexico's declaration in 1 9 8 0 that it could no longer
make its debt payments signaled that developmentalism had entered a pe-
riod of abrupt and terminal decline. It marked the end of the "development
regime" and the establishment, via the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-
16
imposed structural adjustment programs, of the "debt regime."
The landslide since the 1970s was clearly not uniform. The vibrancy of
the East Asian economies during the long downturn should caution against
too generic an image of decline. Although there is much debate over the
reasons for the exceptional performance of the East Asian states, both the
Cold War on whose front lines they were positioned, as well as the trans-
formations initiated by Japanese colonialism and sustained by the dirigiste
postcolonial states, all have their place in any balanced account. Deliberate
policies aimed at fostering pragmatic distortions of the market and the
imposition of high but flexible tariffs make it clear, however, that their
success had very little to do with neoliberalism and with prescriptions for
1 7
unregulated markets (Amsden 1990: 5 - 3 1 ) .

CONCLUSION: NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION AS POST-

DEVELOPMENTALISM

The early 1970s marked a watershed between the golden age of sustained
growth and the stagnation that followed, altering many of the coordinates
within which development was conceived but outside which it could not
survive. The vanquishing of the Soviet Union put an end to the Cold War,
and with itat least for nowother alternatives to the purism of the mar-
ket. While decolonization remains a permanent gain, its meaning is increas-
ingly constricted by the power of transnational institutions that place
national sovereignty under an ever-tightening grip. For over t w o decades
n o w the developing world has been subjected to a global tributary regime
and draconian austerity measures that have resulted in the slashing of pro-
grams once viewed as emblematic of development. The resultant social dis-
location and widespread misery have done much to erode the legitimacy of
national states that had made the promise of development a constitutive
element of their legitimacy.
Even in the most optimistic view, this picture leaves little or no room for
development theory as it used to be conceived. The seemingly unbridgeable
gulf between rich and poor nations has undermined inherited narratives
about progress and modernity at a global level. The sharp increase in global
inequality has belied the presupposition of converging paths in a single
modernizing process of societal change. Over the debris of developmental-
ism, neoliberalism masquerading as "globalization" has become dominant.
Born in the aftermath of World War II, neoliberalism was a reaction to the
The Genesis of the Development Framework 229

expansion of the welfare state and Keynesian economic management. Its

founding doctrine was Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which
argued that state intervention represented a mortal threat to the optimal
operation of the market and to individual freedom itself. In a call that has
since become the reigning credo of neoliberalism, Hayek, himself a disciple
of Ludwig von Mises, argued for a return to the night watchman state
(Anderson 1999: 4 7 - 5 9 ) .
But in the context of the long postwar expansion, when counter-cyclical
demand management could simultaneously boost the rate of profit and
raise real living standards by expanding domestic consumption through
state expenditures, neoliberal ideas had fallen on deaf ears. N o t until the
end of the expansionary dynamic in the world-economy and the emergence
of conservative regimes across key core states did neoliberalism and the
turn to monetarism emerge hegemonic. The embracing of liberal ideas of
laissez-faire in the capitals of the West was combined with a sharpened
increase in the discourse of "globalization." Along with actual processes of
transnationalizationwhether in terms of flows of finance and communi-
cation or of labor mobility and commodity marketsits effect has been to
transform the postwar conception of the world-economy as consisting of
autonomous nation-states with powers of economic and political regula-
18
tion.
Viewed over the "short twentieth century," national developmentalism
thus appears as a brief interlude between two transnational ages. The high
tide was probably reached in the mid-1970s. Thereafter, changes in the
economic and political climate undermined the assumptions upon which it
had been built. A clear alternative framework to that provided by the "de-
velopment framework" in the postwar period has not yet crystallized. One
potential alternative is represented by the cluster of locally specific and less
universalistic projects promoted by various social movements and non-
governmental organizations (Escobar 1995). In an era in which what is
small is considered beautiful, it might be tempting to be carried away by
these initiatives and visions of human-scale cooperatives or flexible small
businesses. But size is not a random economic variable. There are not only
large, state-run nationalized industries but even larger multinational com-
panies; and in this era of neoliberalism, there is also the immense power
of the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International
Monetary Fund. The most likely alternative candidate is "globalization."
Embracing under a single rubric economic, political, social, and cultural
processes, the notion of globalization is today being constructed as a new
framework within which to articulate inequalities of power and plenty
within the world order. But here again, the notion that the world market
represents the best means for allocating resources among nations, and that
development is a self-propelling process, does not possess the requisite
imaginative appeal.
230 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

If we are to draw lessons from the history of the "development frame-

work" for how we understand globalization today, we can start by dis-
lodging it from certain teleological assumptions. A singular linear process
of integration has not characterized the history of twentieth-century polit-
19
ical and economic organization. The age of empire was also one of glob-
alization in which in the non-West jobs were lost in manufacturing, and
rural populations were organized to produce raw materials for the indus-
20
tries in the W e s t . In certain respects, anticolonial nationalism and the
generalization of the nation-state system represented a movement against
globalization in the form of this colonial system of integration (Mitchell
1998: 4 1 7 - 4 2 4 ) .
Second, by taking at face value the discourse of globalization as an in-
evitable universal process propelled by its o w n interior logic, we give it a
coherence that it does not possess. The point here is not that there are no
tendencies of actual globalization, but that its naturalizing language con-
ceals the fact that globalization is also a conscious project driven by private
agencies of capital and multinational organizations such as the WTO.
Globalization does not necessarily have to take the form that it currently
does, and to counteract this tendency of attributing to it a relentless logic,
we need to highlight its contingent and contradictory history and its mul-
tiple points of fracture. The history of the development framework, with
the displacements and reversals of an earlier imperial process of globali-
zation that it represented, permits us to think more critically of this late-
twentieth-century process of globalization.
Throughout much of world history the market was a definite place, con-
trolled by specific spatial arrangements that grew out of the organization
of other kinds of social exchange. It was embedded in society. Only in the
course of the last few hundred years did the market progressively become
a placeless, timeless phenomenon coextensive with society itself. The cur-
rent neoliberal celebrations of this unconstrained market, together with the
renovation of once-exhausted theories of a Milton Friedman or a von
Hayek, have indeed beengiven the tragic history of the "self-regulating
market"a disquieting experience. For many, the dominance of this model
of free-market capitalism n o w appears as an immovable horizon. But is this
triumphalism likely to be a lasting affair? A world characterized by gro-
tesque inequality and a debt burden weighing down on the wretched of the
earth, with the attendant mass impoverishment that it implies, hardly sug-
gests that's likely. If anything, such a situation urgently demands globally
imaginative alternative social and political projects to the tyranny of the
hidden hand. Coordination or planning to re-embed the market in society
may, and in light of past experience should, take a different form in the
future. But all this is a very different matter from simply allowing ourselves
to be governed by capital unbound.
The Genesis of the Development Framework 231

NOTES
1. This chapter places the emergence of the institutional complex of "devel-
opment" at the intersection of these world-historical processes. Their imbrication
and actualization within any region or nation-state were, it ought to be emphasized,
highly variable. For two exemplifying but contrasting instances, see Cooper (1997b:
64-92); Ludden (1992: 27-87).
2. Perry Anderson maintains, "The combination of the Industrial Revolution
at home and the destruction after Waterloo of any barrier or competition to English
global hegemony overseas brought into being a quite new form of world economy,
in which British manufacturers possessed overwhelming preponderance amid gen-
eralized international free trade" (Anderson 1992: 137).
3. As Marx was to put it, "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the
extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population
of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the
conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins, are
all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production" (Marx
1976: 915). For a detailed discussion of the place of New World slavery in Britain's
rise to hegemony, see (Blackburn 1997: 510-580).
4. A sense of the expansion of "development economics" in the United States
is provided by David Landes, who notes, "I compared the volume of publication
of articles on growth and development theory in the Index of Economic Journals
of the American Economic Association: for the period 1925-1939, a little over one
page of citations; of 1940-49, a little over two pages; for 1950-54, over seven
pages; and the next quinquennium, sixteen p a g e s . . . . A new sub discipline had been
born" (Landes 1991: 23).
5. Michael Adas (1989) provides a careful consideration of this shift in imperial
ideology. Nevertheless, he locates the rise of scientific rationality as the legitimating
ethos of empire earlier than I do here. It is doubtful that racism and cultural es-
sentialism were effectively marginalized until the horrors of fascism brought their
consequences into the heart of Europe itself.
6. For British colonial policies with regard to "development" see Constantine
(1984) and Havinden and Meredith (1993); and for French policy see Canale (1982:
445-482).
7. The dynamics of colonial racism always worked against claims to a wider
and inclusive citizenship. For a magisterial discussion of these dynamics in the con-
text of the British and French Empires in Africa, one to which the above summary
discussion is indebted, see Cooper (1996).
8. African labor movements were also caught in an ideological trap, in this case
by the logic of nationalism. It became more difficult for them to assert that the
metropolitan standard for wages and benefits should apply to all workers. On the
ironies of this contrasting logic (framed in context of Africa), see Cooper (1997a:
406-435).
9. The Mexican intellectual Gustavo Esteva, commenting on Truman's new
doctrine, noted: "Underdevelopment began, then, on January 20, 1949. On that
day, two billion people became underdeveloped. In a real sense, from that time on,
they ceased being what they were, in all their diversity, and were transmogrified
232 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

into an inverted mirror of others' reality . . . a mirror that defines their identity . . .
simply in terms of a homogenizing and narrow minority" (Esteva 1992: 7).
10. The term "Third World" came into popular usage in the early 1950s. It was
coined by Georges Balandier and Alfred Sauvy to referin an analogy with the
Tiers-Etat of revolutionary Franceto the poor and populous areas of the world.
Its formulation partly expressed Western anxiety about the emergence of a "second
world" of Communist nations in Eastern Europe (Pletsch 1981: 565-590).
11. In his important study on the making of an Atlantic ruling class, Kees van
der Pilj has carefully documented that the American corporate and financial estab-
lishment exerted manifold pressure to redirect European economic development
away from cartelism and colonialism to auto-centered growth based on consumer-
durable consumption (van der Pijl 1985).
12. The European Recovery Programor Marshall Planwas a key element of
the strategic thinking of the United States. Between 1948 and 1952 the United States
had transferred $13 billionan estimated 4.5% of its gross national productto
Western Europe. Marshall aid was viewed as critical to the project of constructing
"a prosperous and stable European community secure against the dangers of Com-
munist subversion and able to join the United States in a multilateral system of
world trade" (Hogan 1987: 427).
13. There was also a Soviet version of modernization theory not surprisingly
privileging the Soviet Union itself as the alternative paradigm for "development"
and modernization. For some perceptive reflections in the context of the Soviet
Union's own periphery, see Kandiyoti (1996: 529-542). For the articulation of the
theory of "a non-capitalist road" to development, see Bellis (1988: 258-281).
14. Immanuel Wallerstein points out that "the absolute expansion of the world-
economyin population, in value produced, in accumulated wealthhas probably
been as great as in the entire period of 1500-1945" (Wallerstein 1991: 113).
15. Especially dramatic cases of urbanization are Colombia, where between
1951 and 1973 the rural population fell from 64% to 36.4% while the metropol-
itan population rose from 6.2% to 27.6%, and Paraguay, where the corresponding
figures for 1950-1972 were 65% and 22.9%, and 0% and 24%, respectively. Com-
menting on the bewildering pace of social transformation during this period, Eric
Hobsbawm notes, "Never before in history has ordinary human life, and the so-
cieties in which it takes place, been so radically transformed in so short a time: not
merely within a single life time, but within part of a lifetime" (Hobsbawm 1992:
55-64).
16. Numerous studies from different theoretical perspectives try to explain the
end of the postwar expansion and the subsequent downturn. For a few represen-
tative approaches see Arrighi (1994); Brenner (1998); Harvey (1989); Mandel
(1975); and Marglin and Schor (1990).
17. For an interesting discussion of the Japanese government's attempt to get the
World Bank to consider Japan's and, by extension, East Asia's actually existing
economic models and for the way in which the World Bank diluted the study that
was done in order to make it compatible with reigning neoliberal orthodoxies, see
the revealing essay by Robert Wade (1996: 3-37). For an argument on the long-
term, deep-seated structural causes of East Asian ascendancy, see Arrighi, Ikeda,
and Irwan (1993: 41-65).
18. Phil McMichael notes: "The world is on the threshold of a major transition
The Genesis of the Development Framework 233

in the political regulation of economic activity: from a primarily national to a pri-

marily global form of regulation. The current restructuring of states proceeds via
limitation of democratic politics, declining economic sovereignty, and the enlistment
of state administrations in the service of global circuits" (McMichael 1995: 37-38).
19. In some respects, the world-economy at the end of the 1980s was less inte-
grated than it had been at the beginning of the century (Glynn and Sutcliff 1992:
76-95).
20. The case of India is perhaps the most revealing: from the status of one of
the early modern world's leading manufacturing and merchandizing economies,
South Asia had, according to Bairoch, shrunk to possessing barely 1% of world
industrial output and trade by the middle of the twentieth century (Bairoch 1982:
269-334). See also the essay by Washbrook (1996: 167-191).

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 Chapter 12

The Convergence of World-Historical

Social Science, or Can There Be a Shared
Methodology for World-Systems Analysis,
Postcolonial Theory, and Subaltern Studies?

Santiago Castro-Gomez and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

LITERACY A N D COSMOPOLIS AS STATE-OF-GRACE

Scenes for a documentary:

First Image: Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari announces to
his people the fulfillment of a prophecy: "We have entered the first world."
Second Image: the same day an uprising is enacted by the indigenous
peoples of the Lacandona jungle. Subcomandante Marcos announces the
beginning of the "Fourth World War."
The contrast serves as a reminder: the angel of global capitalism, while
passing through earth before the plague in order to mark the doors of those
who would be spared, had left many behind.
Being "left behind," in solitude, has been one of the predominant meta-
phors used in Latin American writing to describe its status in the so-called
modern world order. This idea presupposes the acceptance of such an
order, that is: (1) The existence of a "world order," a higher, state-like
authority; and (2) The hope that one day we may become its citizens if we
are successful in coming to terms with modern Western ways, particularly
science and jurisprudence.
We would like to argue in this chapter that such a belief is ideological.
It is the product of an ideological discursive practice (Althusser 1998) that
we call, following Sylvia Scribner (1986), "literacy as state-of-grace." Such
an ideology is based upon a spurious philosophy of history that conceives
progress to be internal and necessary to the structure of the modern. We
contend that such an apparatus accounts for the persistence of colonial
238 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

difference in the transformation of the modern world-system. In order to

explain this assertion we emphasize, first, the centrality of the literacy ap-
paratus in modern/colonial management. Then we argue that a consider-
ation of such a construct as an ideological apparatus, in Althusser's sense,
may account for the transferential relationship that explains h o w individ-
uals in local positions enter in an imaginary relationship with the global
state-form. Through this process, we affirm, the global state-form acquires
its (imagined) "objectivity." Finally, we consider critically the alternative
strategies that may be used in order to transcend the global apparatus of
subjection and commodification. We argue, against Derridean critique, that
it is not enough to set up "the local" against "the global," for such micro-
resistance is always already being interpellated by the (global) state-form.
In contrast, we appeal to a consideration of the openness of the social field,
arguing that "bifurcations" (i.e., social struggle on a planetary scale) can
never be fully subsumed by processes of commodification and subjection
via ideology.

n
We follow Walter Mignolo's insight that a privileged way to understand
the persistence of colonial discourses and managerial apparatuses is to focus
on the power and functionality of literacy as both sign and vehicle of "civ-
ilization."
In doing so, we contend that literacy is central to the attempt to code
(material and cultural) space at the macropolitical level insofar as it allows
or disallows for categories of subjectivity: "civilized," "literate," "mod-
ern," or else, "barbarian," "savage," "backwards." The introduction of
Western patterns of law and knowledge constitutes entire populations into
a "subjected group" that receives its determination from other groups
"and is never opened to the finitude of its [own] existence" (Howard
1998: 114).
Put in another way, the question dealt with here is that of the notion of
"property" considered from a global perspective. Taken beyond its nar-
rower meaning as a principle for judiciary claims, "property" refers here
to the use and ownership of space as a power mechanism. We refer to
"property" in the latter sense, that is, as the power mechanism of the world
order. Thus, we are concerned with the question of the appropriation of
labor power, the conformation of citizenship as the key to insertion in the
world market, and the appropriation of land and resources. This consid-
eration leads us to explore the construction (through ideology) of several
interrelated subject positions and, via this operation of collective subjecti-
fication, to the consolidation of the nation-state system and the cosmopol-
itical system that we term the global state-market or state-form.
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 239

m
What follows from the latter is a consideration of the conformation of
the nation-state system and nation-state subjects as the main product and
agent of globalization, that is, the constitution of an abstract political
1
space through which capital can actualize its ever-expanding tendency, for
it is no more constrained by politically constituted communities or parceled
2
sovereignty. This implies the conversion, overcoming, or eradication of
constituted communities and the wholesale modification of existing con-
cepts of social action and change.
This is the problem referred to by Marx with the term "primitive accu-
mulation" (in which the concentrated force of the nation-state plays a cen-
tral role): the destruction of pre- or paracapitalist forms of rule and
production. In the contemporary world we keep witnessing violent pro-
cesses of primitive accumulation, but we also observe new social move-
ments becoming agents of such processes by falling prey to a mistake that
is also generalized in the vast majority of actual analyses of globalization
within critical social sciences, mainly, the supposition that the global and
the national (or any other analogically "localized," specific communities
such as "ethnic peoples," "women," or "inclusive communities") are in
conflict.
As Simon Bromley argues (1999: 2 8 4 ) , "this way of thinking has been
reinforced by the somewhat paradoxical fact that, while the major social
and political theories originating in the enlightenment were (implicitly at
least) of universal scope and applicability, most actual analysis assumed
that societies were nationally bounded."
Contrary to Simon Bromley, we believe that there is no paradox. Pe-
ripheral nationalism, performatively generated by ideological apparatuses
and imposed upon its agents, can be seen as yet another ideological effect
of the uses of literacy in a (post)colonial setting. Once ideology erases its
links with economic and political structures, it conveys a sense of tran-
scendence, so "the literate's individual life derives its meaning and signifi-
cance from intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual participation in the
accumulated creations and knowledge of humankind, made available
through the written word" (Scribner 1986: 32).
The point here is that there is no contradiction between "global" and
"specific" but overdetermination. This means that the specific is made to
work for the global in the sense that concrete processes of specification and
subjectification (social, economic, legal, territorial) achieved through dif-
3
ferent uses of literacy (described as "literacy as adaptation" and "literacy
4
as power" ) are transcended in and subsumed by "literacy as state-of-
grace." The latter is an ideological construct that nowadays has been
greatly enhanced by the pervasiveness of the mass media.
While being interpellated by the ideological apparatus of literacy, indi-
240 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

viduals become (imaginary) "citizens of the cosmopolis" (no more of their

specific community, their republic, or their nation). Sylvia Scribner has not
only presented us with three metaphors for the uses of literacy but also
provided us with a way to understand h o w the agency of social actors
subjected to colonial uses of literacy actually works from specific-
community construction toward an imaginary relationship with the cos-
mopolitical. This relationship is analogous to the transferential relationship
between nation-state building and the operation of the world-system under
conditions of globalization.
The lesson to be drawn from the emphasis given to the study of the uses
of literacy in (post)colonial settings, as developed by Walter Mignolo and
others through the concept of "geopolitics of knowledge," is a call for a
renewed sense of totality (in spite of postmodernism). There is a need for
a more complex horizon of "totality" that focuses on literacy as apparatus
of capture and relocation of social roles and agencies in the (imaginary)
global system.
Such an imaginary cosmopolis (whose "reality" is constituted by a net-
work of legal regulations, such as trade-related intellectual property rights,
ideological apparatuses, and state-like institutions) provides capitalism with
its actual face: virtual, pure, anonymous, omnipresent. It can be said of the
(global) state-form that although it is not present at any given place or
time, its non-presence is its omnipresence; like a ghost, it might not be here
or there, but it is nonetheless very real.

ZIGGY STARDUST A N D T H E SPECTERS OF M A R X

Talk of "ghosts" and "virtualism" evokes the imagery used by Jacques

Derrida in Specters of Marx (1994) and Terrell Carver in The Post-modern
Marx (1999) in order to refer to the spectral character of late capitalism
and the condition of justice under globalization.
Beyond metaphors, the point is that in postmodernity, while claiming
not to believe in great narratives, we might be living one. We live in literacy
as state-of-grace (we live in ideology, our topsy-turvy world of cosmopol-
itan images), an ideology that may be reinforced by our contemporary dis-
illusionment with foundational narratives. This point is related to the
problem faced by critical social sciences today: h o w to analyze spectral
capitalism (the ideology we live in) while remaining sensitive to the prob-
lematic of grounding forms of social criticism.
This problem appeared during the , 1st Symposium on the Re-
structuration of the Social Sciences in the Periphery, hosted by the Institute
of Social and Cultural Studies (PENSAR) in Bogota, Colombia (October
1999). The participants asked themselves: Given that we are "inside" (for
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 241

there is no outside of the capitalist world-system) but also "against" (for

we want to get out), where does the reason justifying confrontation or
critique come from?
We would like to rephrase this question as follows: How is it possible,
if at all, to reinvent the political under the present conditions of globali-
zation}
To "reinvent the political" means to "open up" the possibilities of po-
litical imagination in both theory and practice. To do so "under the present
conditions of globalization" means to take into account that we live in
Ideology, thus to account for the persistence of modern/colonial power
relations and knowledge discourses that function by erasing their links with
economic structures and power relations. They do so because their exercise
of power dwells, precisely, in their apparent disconnection with economy
and politics so that the global state-form appears as a specter, a virtual
reality that is never fully actualized, thus always deferring itself through
successive crises.
We propose that there are, under the present conditions, two sources
from which it becomes possible to open up the political: (1) by setting up
"the local" against "the global" or (2) by developing a practical critique
of global commodification and its cosmopolitical ideology; that is, that all
productions and subjectivities derive their meaning from their spiritual re-
lationship with the "universal" purposive experience (cognitive and histor-
ical) of humankind.
We n o w consider these alternatives.

n
The first alternative arises from the politicization (both in theory and in
practice) of a series of specific struggles related to issues of gender, race,
migration, and decolonization that have taken place from the end of the
1960s onward. For many critics, this is the privileged site for political rein-
vention in our times. Gayatri Spivak argues in this spirit:

One of the theaters of that agon [between capitalism and socialism] is global resis-
tance spelled out "as responses to local micro-problems . .. [that] gradually . . . be-
gan to relate . . . to macro-policies of economic development and the market
economy led linear development agencies and international financial institutions
like the World Bank." This is the theater where today's "native informants" col-
lectively attempt to make their own history as they act (in the most robust sense
of agency) a part they have not chosen, in a script that has as its task to keep them
silent and invisible. (Spivak 1999: 85)

The thrust of Spivak's argument comes, in part, from the side of the
"patriarchally defined subaltern woman." She argues that her labor has
242 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

been effectively socialized in the new international economic and political

order, and, thus, the specificity of her struggle can be set against the macro-
policies of international agencies. She also presents the struggle (agon) be-
tween capitalism and socialism (via a deconstructive reading of Marx) as
a field of differance constituted by an uneven push and pull between rights
and responsibilities.
This reference to the theater of today's global resistance as a "field of
differance" constituted by the responses to local micro-problems seems par-
ticularly interesting to the reinvention of the political today. That is so, for
the argument objects to the "end of history" thesis on the grounds that
there is an unlimited range of possible instances where the demands of
justice are, or should be, evoked. At the same time, her argument retains
a sense of anti-foundationalism and elaborates on the spectral character of
today's global system.
Her inspiration comes from Derrida's Specters of Marx. It argues that in
relating today's global capitalism and radical social critique (i.e., to give a
comprehensive account of justice), we must recognize that it is not possible
to bridge the gap between micro-problems and macro-policies by prejudg-
ing w h o the "others" that demand justice will be.
The question should always remain open (undecidable). Such openness
would provide us with a basis for developing critiques of unjust social
institutions. These would take the form of an endless process of deconstruc-
5
tive deferral in the name of "justice in general" in order to enact a critique
of the systems that maintain the global capitalist economy.
Whatever the advantages of this strategy to solve our problem, and there
are many, we argue that in the final analysis it shares a normative basis
for social criticism and the pursuit of justice with those strategies belonging
to the canteen family that constitute a great deal of mainstream critical
ideas in current social theory.
Minimalist ethics, the emphasis on the practical reasoning about formal
and procedural normative principles that would guarantee the peaceful co-
existence of cultural differences, and the theoretical support to worldwide
consolidation of liberal democracyall are features of late neo-Kantian
critical theory (that of Rawls and Habermas, in particular).
In spite of Derrida's reversal of the Kantian problematic (his strongly
ontological conception of autonomy), the neo-Kantians' insistence on a reg-
ulative ideal that serves as a criterion to judge future actions and Derrida's
insistence on an undecidable future as a criterion to judge a regulative ideal
are analogous. Both affirm the central role of a normatively founded act
of judgment. This is the central facet of the Kantian conception, and stress-
ing the spectral against the ontological, as Derrida does, is no challenge
(Mackenzie 1999: 7 3 - 7 9 ) . Derrida's spectral Marxism is, at best, "Glam
Marxism": too much makeup, too little challenge.
While accepting the act of judgment as epistemologically/ontologically
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 243

foundational, both Derrida and the neo-Kantians fail to acknowledge the

function that law performs in late capitalism: to translate every claim to
justice into the language of rights and then submit it to the highest nor-
mative instance. This ideological displacement turns the claimant, present
or not, into a subject of law subjected to law. It is, as literacy, an ISA
(ideological state apparatus).
Mackenzie argues that "by bolstering the Kantian idea that social criti-
cism presupposes normative judgments, however, Derrida fails to see that
it is precisely the act of judging the other that is the founding moment of
the tendency toward regulative cosmopolitanism" (Mackenzie 1999: 76).
The point is that a normatively determined conception of undecidability
(Derrida's justice) always confuses the act of social criticism with the act
of normative judgment so that, in the end, one is always forced to cede the
terrain of criticism to normative cosmopolitics and, thus, to cede the terrain
of criticism to ideological notions such as "tolerance" or "multicultural-
ism" and the universal pretensions of normative ideologies in law-politics
and economics.
The strategy of setting up the "local" against the "global" fails, therefore,
for it always calls upon the language of rights and/or normative judgment,
which ultimately actualize the uses of literacy and, through them, the
(post)colonialism of the global. As we have seen, this strategy might even
take the form of an analysis related to the anti-foundationalist stance of
French "high theory." Far from solving these problems, Derrida's concep-
tion of justice actually blinds us to the operation of the geopolitics of
knowledge and culture (the uses of literacy) in today's world-system.

THE EMPTY CENTER OF POLITICS

We propose that there is a second way of "opening up" the political

under the present conditions of globalization. It starts from Marx's account
of the global spread of capitalist society as increasingly transnational, al-
though uneven and conflict-ridden, and involving processes of "primitive
accumulation."
According to this account, the internal dynamic of the world market was
given by modern industry, which could develop fully on the basis of the
complete commodification of labor power, that is, the (re)subjectification
of native agents that presupposes the separation of agents from direct
means of subsistence and hence their dependence on the market. Externally,
the expansion of Western capitalism into its periphery generally demanded
what Rosa Luxembourg called "the struggle against the natural economy"
(Bromely 1999). Here we encounter the problematic of uneven and com-
bined development (competitive pressures are transmitted throughout the
state system), neocolonialism, and imperial rule, which are today the trade-
244 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

mark of postcolonialism, arising from the unification of global politics and

the spreading reach of the world market.
Such a problematic is taken up and developed by world-systems analysis
and dependency theory in agonical relationship with modernization theory.
These critical approaches object to modernization theory's abstract cultur-
alism and societal engineering, focus on systemic processes, and counter the
thesis of material and cultural convergence by showing uneven development
and growing inequality on a world-scale. They argued that it was wrong
indeed, a product of universalistic racist/sexist ideology itselfto assume
that the "backward" regions would repeat the stages of growth of the
"developed" world.
Unlike them, however, we consider it futile to locate resistance at the
level of the "specific" (national or identity politics), for this relocation can
be shown to be itself a feature of the operation of the system from the
outset.
Critiques of the use of endogenous models of change and the focus on
the world-system pioneered by Immanuel Wallerstein and Anibal Quijano,
among others, have enhanced our understanding of a historical tendency
that is materializing before our very eyes: the coming-of-age of a transna-
tional capitalist structure that is spectral in nature. That is, it has no subject
(no "capitalist" and therefore, no "proletarian" as understood by tradi-
tional Marxism), no center (therefore, no "periphery," as understood by
traditional dependency theory), no political ideology or ethics (neither "lib-
eral" nor "socialist"), no history (it presents itself as a natural object), and
no positive content (be this commodities, products, or even money).
It is in this sense that we talk about the "acquired objectivity" of world
capitalism. It can be accounted for in terms of the continual transferal of
agency from its involvement in specific-community building to the construc-
tion of an imaginary cosmopolis, via global ideological state apparatuses
such as the law and literacy as state-of-grace, which actualize (in real
agents) the always-expanding tendency of capitalism.
Therefore, we must stop the flow of value-creating activity that is redi-
rected from self-valorization to the construction of an abstract cosmopolis.
We argue that this can be achieved by pragmatically playing law and lit-
eracy against capital (thus, in the creation of new possibilitiesagents and
agenciesby the strategic movement between the two).

IS THERE A N Y B O D Y O U T THERE?

With the coming-of-age of global capitalism, we do not face the classical

opposition between the center and its peripheries (the colonized countries).
The process of production has broken its links with an original space or
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 245

an original people; space and people were represented in the nation-state,

a group identity, or a cultural ethos.
Today, neither the nation-state nor the group functions organically but
only as ways of coding, decoding, and recoding the activity of agents that
are now treated as merely another space or value-creative force that can be
colonized. The result is a process of colonization in which there are only
colonies and no colonizer countries as such, since the colonial character of
power acquires yet another form: it does not come from the (organic)
nation-state but from global and ideological state apparatuses, for instance,
the transnational cultural ISA, which we have called "literacy as state-of-
grace."
The term "self-colonization" (borrowed from Zizek 1999) might very
well provide a better description of the actual relationship between the
nation/state-form and the universe of capital in the era of global capitalism.
We think that examining (from a postcolonial perspective) the action of
global ISAs can illuminate this turn toward the self-referential character of
capitalism (where every agent is set to colonize himself or herself).
The use of the term "self-colonization" calls for a renewed perspective
from a real totality (the global state-form) in order to avoid t w o risks: (1)
the mere celebration of particularisms (gender, race, subculture) and (2) the
appeal to empty universals. These forms of ideological displacement are
current in trends of social theory based on discursive analysis, such as cul-
tural studies and the practical philosophy of multi-culturalism. These anal-
yses run the risk of becoming the ideal form of global capitalism.

n
Three consequences follow from the previous analysis:

1. Although the insight of postcolonialism points in the right direction (i.e., that
behind the neutrality of multi-cultural universalism lurks a Eurocentric subject),
it must be corrected in the following way: today's capitalism holds to a cultural
heritage that hides forms of exclusion according not only to race, gender, or
culture but mainly to the anonymity of capital. This suggests that the task for
a postcolonial enlightened "critical theory" is to account for the ways in which
society has been subsumed by the state-form. That is, we must understand the
way in which capital has become an anonymous global machine with no par-
ticular content before trying to unveil any particular content hidden behind the
universalistic claims of the center.
2. One must remain attentive to the possibility that, via "discursive theory," "post-
modernism," or "cultural studies," theory produced in the "centers" and cir-
culated toward the "peripheries" of the world-system might be operating today
in favor of the ideological effort to make capitalism invisible. This effort be-
comes patent in the renewed interest of certain critical discourses in the social
sciences in relocating the resistance of antisystemic movements within the nor-
246 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

mative space of postmodernity (i.e., the juridical), re-interpreting it as a struggle

for recognition in terms of "rights."
3. If the previous consideration is correct, then a better answer to our original
question (how to reinvent the political under globalization) takes the form of a
"suspension of the law." "Suspending the law" means to take seriously the
constitutive character of social antagonism and its implications, in terms of an
anti-foundationalist and anti-normative grounding of social criticism.

m
As Zizek (1999) argued recently, however, there are at least t w o forms
of suspending the law: one is characterized by the replacement of law by
socialized war-state or surveillance-state, under the assumption that dia-
logue, translation, and interpretation are absent or impossible. The other
opposes to such assumptions the openness and indeterminacy of the social,
the latter being non-coextensive with the empire of normativity.
This paves the way toward an examination of the ever-expanding char-
acter of social claims, which is opposed to the attempt of providing the
social signified (the social actors) with controlled signifiers, that is, a civil
identity and its analogues: fixed logos, a limited capacity to act, and non-
plastic structures.
In order to avoid normativism (as it reintroduces the cosmopolitanism
that Derrida and we seek to criticize), however, we should relocate (Der-
rida's) "undecidability" (the unlimited character of the claims and the
claimants to justice). The objective of this move is to be able to open up
the possibility of constructing a non-normative critique of the relationship
between capitalism, justice, and the law/literacy pair. This might be
achieved if we start from a realization that follows from our (postcolonial
analysis of the uses of law and literacy: that capitalism depends on reter-
ritorializing deterritorialized agency (labor-power) and deterritorialized
(speculative) wealth.
As we have seen, apparatuses such as law and literacy (as power and
as state-of-grace) elaborate locally uncoded agency, coding it (by giving to
it a meaning, an end, and a proper name) by referring (uncoded) agencv
to a "developmental" (mode of spatializing time). While doing so (while
subjectifying agents), these apparatuses determine (or code) the m i d a i r
mined life-activity (the life-producing activity) of such agents. Through tin-
process, value is produced. Capital grows as a resultant of appropiutins;
such value. What apparatuses like law and literacy do is actualize capital-
ism by actually connecting time and wealth in the form of organized life-
producing, value-producing activity (qualified agency, appropriated 1 lbot
power). To put it otherwise: time and agency are decoded flows, mi'
apparatuses of colonization such as those we have referred to throughou"
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 247

this chapter code and transfer such flows. In the process "the local" is made
to work for "the global."
Neither the local nor the global, however, is ever completely finalized
and determined. The process that we are describing here takes place in time,
and thus it is always bifurcating in new, unexpected ways. This movement
of continuous colonization and decolonization gives capitalism its critical
nature.
In its modern, world-systemic (postcolonial or imperial) form (that of
global law and literacy as state-of-grace), this movement takes the form of
a massive process of collective subjectification that occurs at every point of
the social field. Social subjection at a global scale means that there are
(global) subjects of capital (capitalists), and there are those subjected to
(global) capital (proletarians). We become subjects of and subjected to cap-
ital, but never at the same time and never at the same point of the social
field.
Importantly, processes of actualization of capital through subjectification
do not exhaust the flows of capital. This means that new flows emerge
outside the apparatuses of capture. Therefore, as Mackenzie (1999) sug-
gests, we can talk of the "ambiguous" nature of such apparatuses (law,
literacy) with respect to the general, global fluidity of capital. If so, then
we are allowed to criticize these models of realization/expression of capital,
or apparatuses, as trapped by the particularities of the present. The point
is that these apparatuses are the primary means of creating capitalist sub-
jects, and without these forms of actualizing capital the latter could not
function.
More importantly, law and literacy are only a partial approximation to
the bifurcating flows of capital. This is the "ambiguity" that accounts for
the impossibility of global law and literacy as state-of-grace ever to realize
their cosmopolitan drive toward a Kantian "perpetual peace" in the world-
system. Thus, our critiques are allowed to stress the inability of capitalism's
apparatuses to transcend undecidability.
While following Mackenzie's arguments, we have refrained from con-
ceiving undecidability as a moment of judgment in the name of normative
justice. Instead, we located it in the immanent bifurcation of capitalism.
The point is that global law and literacy as state-of-grace, being instruments
of self-colonization, are always subjected to criticism from the vantage
point of capital as an indeterminate series of flows, and capital (in its global
operation) is always under fire from the vantage point of law (power) and
literacy (knowledge). The possibility of critique arises in the strategic play
of one against the other. Social criticism does not require the celebration
of capitalism or the celebration of actual claims to be recognized (in the
language of rights) coming from particularistic social movements.
Social criticism comes from the creation of new possibilities via the stra-
tegic, bifurcating movement between capitalism and the demands of justice.
248 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

Thus, critique operates not at an ontological normative level but at the

level of pragmatics.
We may invoke the bifurcating features of capital as a way into creative
and critical experimentation in the face of social subjectification. We can
also take into account that because of the limits that global capitalism sets
to itself (produce, circulate, accumulate!), it can never be fully bifurcated
(i.e., sublated).
Thus, it is not only the apparatuses of global capitalism that are within
our critical remit but also the whole capitalistic operation that is also sus-
ceptible to critique from the perspective of critical thought. But such a
critical thought is strictly separated from normative judgment, for its source
is the (decodified) nature of the social field. The "repressed" conflicting
nature of the social field provides us with "real" criteria for criticism.
To sum up, there is no absolute right (no normative judgment) presiding
over the way in which some people (subjects of the state-form) subject
others (to the state-form).
Put in this way, the challenge of postcolonialism as a critical theory of
globalized society is to provide a negative answer to the question posited
at the dawn of the modern/colonial world-system: Is there any right that
legitimates the appropriation of one people by another?
This means that before unmasking "Occidentalism" (i.e., the judgment
of the other) in the center(s) and the peripheries, theoretical practice must
oppose global ideological state violence (the subjectification of the other),
be this epistemic or military. But it can do so only if there are real social
criteria (which can be opposed to the spectral, fixed, and idealistic character
of the state-form): these are provided by the ever-expanding nature of social
claims (critical experimentation).
Therefore, a postcolonial critical theory of world society must account
for anti-systemic practices that counter, from moving peripheries, moving
attempts to centralize control, that is, to provide controlled signifiers
(words, discourses, knowledges) for migrant signifieds.

NOTES
1. Which Marx saw as a new form of territoriality coterminous with the estab-
lishment of a civil society of independent individuals, in fact, the dissolution of civil
society into independent individuals, whose relationships depend on the law.
2. See Hardt and Negri (2000).
3. That is, the (individual) level of proficiency effectively necessary for effective
performance in a range of settings and customary activities.
4. That is the point where a community becomes aware of its needs and the
blockades that act against their efforts to satisfy them. Important here is the con-
cept's accent on group or community advancement.
5. See Derrida (1994).
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 249

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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a
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Zizek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology.
London: Verso.
 Chapter 13

Making "Africa" in Brazil: Old Trends

and New Opportunities
Livio Sansone

In Brazil, and Latin America more generally, "Africa" has been part and
parcel not only of the making of Black cultures, popular culture, and new
syncretic religious systems but also of the imagery associated with the mod-
ern nation and, in general, modernity and modernism (Rowe and Schelling
1991). Images, evocations, and (ab)uses of "Africa" have, therefore, re-
sulted from the interplay and struggle between White intellectuals and
Black leadership, popular and elite culture, political ideas developed in
Western Europe and the United States and their reinterpretation in Latin
America. In this tense field, with conflicting agents and agendas, "Africa"
has been endlessly re-created, deconstructed, and turned into a contested
icon, an icon used and abused by traditional as well as modern versions of
Black culture, popular or elite discourses on the nation and the people to
be created by melting in the N e w World, and, last but not least, progressive
and conservative politics. No wonder that both conformism and protest
have related to and created their o w n "Africa." Unfortunately, generally
speaking, in Brazil and perhaps throughout Latin America, elite/intellectual
and popular discourses on the African origin of society and culture have
rarely been compared. Most accounts are, in fact, based exclusively on the
former.
This chapter explores tentatively the uses of "Africa" across the last cen-
tury in highbrow culture and official discourse on the nationhood, as well
as popular versions thereof. After sketching out the historical developments
of such process from the eve of the abolition of slavery in 1888 to the
present, the chapter focuses on the period starting in the late 1 9 7 0 s
known as the period of the redemocratization of Brazil. Then, it analyzes
the role and discourses of a set of agents and agencies, the intellectuals, the
252 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

state, Black leadership, and popular Black culture. It also describes h o w

"Africa," that is, interpretations of things and traits held as being of Af-
rican origin, has been pivotal in the process of commoditization of Black
culturesthe production of what we can call "Black objects."
The main aim of this chapter is to argue that although the world-system
certainly brings about the internationalization of racism as well as of anti-
racism, a great degree of local and/or national variance can still be detected.
Often it is just a matter of pursuing such a variance, and one finds it.
"Nations," conceived as a particular and contingent configuration of ethnic
rules and symbols, do experience racism and create ethnicities in different
ways even though ethnic and racial icons, such as those relating to stereo-
typing and the making of "Black" and "White," are indeed increasingly
global. Before we proceed, however, we need to define the relative speci-
ficity of "Black" cultures and identities as to other forms of ethnic identi-
fication and cultural production.

LOCAL A N D GLOBAL IN T H E MAKING OF "WHITE"

A N D "BLACK"

Black culture can be defined as the specific subculture of the people of

African origin within a social system that stresses color, or descent from
color, as an important criterion for differentiating or segregating people.
Populations defined as Black in the N e w World and in the Caribbean di-
1
aspora in Europe have produced a variety of Black cultures and identi-
tiesin societies that are predominantly White and in societies in which
most of the population is defined as non-White, but a prevailing somatic
norm places those with features defined as African or Negroid at the bot-
2
tom or near it (cf. Whitten and Szwed 1970: 31 ) . In each situation certain
traits and objects are chosen to represent Black culture as a wholeto
objectify it by making it solid and material (Matory 1999; Wade 1999).
Even though the kinds of objects that are chosen vary from one race re-
lations system to another, often these objects have had to do with the body,
fashion, and demeanor, either as markers of stigma or as signs of mobility
and success. Of course, the process of commoditization of a "Black" culture
is a dynamic that is activated not only from without but also from within
the population of African origin. Black cultures and identities relate, on the
one hand, to the local system of race relations and, on the other hand, to
historical international similarities. These similarities derive from a com-
mon experience with enslavement, deportation, and the plantation society,
which laid the foundations for the internationalization of the Black con-
dition across different countries in the N e w World. In fact, the making of
new cultures centered on the experience of being of African origin in the
N e w World, rather than nation-bound, was a transnational phenomenon
by definition. More recently, a further boost to the internationalization of
Making "Africa" in Brazil 253

the Black condition has resulted from the move toward the globalization
of cultures and ethnicities. International similarities also concern the sub-
jective sphere. So, a specific binding force of Black culture, which brings
together people from different regions and nation-states, is the feeling of a
common past as slaves and underprivileged. Africa is used as a symbol bank
from which symbols are drawn in a creative way (Mintz and Price 1977).
Africa is important for another reason. The racialization of social rela-
tions and particular groups has been based on categories created through-
out a triangular exchange between Europe, the N e w World, and Africa.
This happened in t w o forms. First, notions such as tribe and ethnic group,
which were created within the colonial experience in the Americas, traveled
to Africa (Wallerstein 1991), informing the making of the Other, and later
bounced back on the Americas (Quijano 1992). Second, in the N e w World
the transformation of the African into a Negro/Black person went hand in
hand with a constant process of categorization, classification, and ranking
of things and peoples African in Europe and Africa itself. For example,
ideas of Negritude, Blackness, and Pan-Africanism that have been created
in the N e w World have always been inspired either by African intellectuals
and the struggle for independence in Africa or by images of what African
societies were prior to European colonization. These ideas, however, have
also drawn inspiration from scientific as well as not-so-scientific "White"
production on Africa. So, anti-racist and Black nationalist discourses also
drew upon heliocentric notions (by which ancient Egyptian civilization was
the absolute center from which other civilizations developed) and mono-
diffusionist notions of world-history as much as they are, nowadays, draw-
ing from the theorizing about the politics of identities in the social sciences
(see, among others, Gilroy 1 9 9 3 , 2 0 0 0 ) . Nonetheless, most historical ac-
counts of the nation building of single countries in the N e w and Old World
have been inclined to de-emphasize these international connections, flows,
and similarities.
In sum, Black cultures and identities are created and redefined through
a triangular exchange of symbols and ideas between Africa, the N e w
World, and the Black diaspora to Europe. This process of the making of
Black cultures has been creating the contours of a transnational, multilin-
gual, and multireligious culture area, the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993). This
is one more evidence that the globalization of racial ideas as well as anti-
racist thinking can be processes with a long history and that they have also
concerned peoples w h o , from a Eurocentric perspective, were often consid-
ered as being "without history" (Wolf 1983).

T H E SPECIFICITY OF BRAZIL

Brazil is the country that received the most slaves from Africa. Estimates
range from 3 to 15 million Africans deported to the Brazilian shores. The
254 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

slave trade started early and terminated later than in any other country in
the " N e w World." High mortality rates, the relatively low costs of slaves
at certain times in history, and the relative proximity to Africa are three
key reasons that Africa and Brazil have had many more exchanges than is
the case for the other largest slave societythe United States. All this soon
made Brazil the greatest concentration of descendants of Africans outside
Africa. The origin of the slaves in Brazil was and still is controversial. It is
commonly accepted that they came, mostly, from the Gulf of Guinea and
the region around the delta of the Congo River (Cortes de Oliveira 1997;
Miller 1997). The slaves were put to work in a variety of activities, first
on sugar plantations, later in mines, coffee plantations, and cattle raising.
Some slaves worked in domestic service, while others carried out a variety
of activities from fishing to peddling. A few managed to develop their o w n
economic activities and earn money in their spare time. That money was
often used for buying manumission, which, though tough to achieve, was
usually more easily obtained than in the United States.
I focus on the state of Bahia due to its singular importance in the making
of Black cultures and "Africa" in Brazil. The city of Salvador da Bahia and
its region are perhaps the largest urban concentration of Black population
in the N e w World. The region has known specific, "local" versions of Black
culture. The language spoken is, of course, Portuguese, which determines
a specific, relatively secondary position in the global flows of Black culture
within which the English-speaking world is hegemonic. In the past this state
and the region around its capital, Salvador (Reconcavo), if only for the
sheer size of the Black population, attracted the attention of travelers, who
depicted it in their accounts as the "Black Rome"the largest conglom-
erate of what were considered African cultural traits and traditions outside
of Africa. Later, starting from the turn of the century, Bahia took a central
place in the prehistory of ethnography of Afro-Brazilian culture through
the work of Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, Manuel Querino, and Manuel
Bomfim. From the 1930s it also took a pivotal position in the formation
of modern Afro-American anthropology (cf. Frazier 1942; Herskovits
1 9 4 1 , 1943; Ramos 1939). Inspired by the pursuit of "Africanisms" in the
N e w World, several anthropologists and sociologists (Bastide 1967; Her-
skovits 1 9 4 1 ; Pierson 1 9 4 2 ; Verger 1957, 1968) held Brazil, in particular
the coastal region of the state of Bahia, as one of the areas in which Black
culture had maintained African traits to a larger degree than elsewhere.
N o t for nothing, it was on the Bahian soil that the debate among sociol-
ogists and anthropologists about the origin of Black culture was started in
the 1930sis contemporary Black culture an African survival or a creative
adaptation to hardship and racism? In fact, Bahia has been historically
central not only in highbrow discourses but also in popular constructions
as regards "Africa" and Africanisms in Brazil.

In modern Brazil three periods can be identified in race relations, each

Making "Africa" in Brazil 255

of which corresponds with different levels of economic development and

integration of the Black population in the labor market.

THREE PERIODS IN M O D E R N RACE RELATIONS

Between the end of slavery in 1888 and the 1920s, industrial employment
was minimal, and, also because of mass immigration from Europe that, in
fact, came to substitute for the former slaves, generally speaking, the labor
market allowed for little social mobility for Blacks. Race relations were
determined by a society that was highly hierarchic, in terms of both color
and class (Bacelar 2 0 0 0 ) . Black people, w h o were the overwhelming ma-
jority of the lower class, "knew their o w n place," and the elite, which was
almost entirely White, could keep its ranks easily closed without feeling
threatened (Azevedo 1966).
The second period spans from the populist dictatorship of Getulio Vargas
in the 1930s to the end of the right-wing military regime in the late 1970s.
In the 1930s, for the first time on a large scale, opportunities were opened
for the Black population in the formal section of the labor market, mostly
in the public sector. The authoritarian and populist regime of Vargas lim-
ited immigration and favored the "national" labor force as part of its mod-
ernization project. A second important thrust to the integration of the Black
population came in the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, a
period characterized by populist government and later, from the military
coup of 1964, an authoritarian regime that promoted state-sponsored eco-
nomic growth within an import-substitution economy. N o w also industrial
jobs were open to Blacks. More Blacks than ever managed to get formal
jobs with chances of social mobility. From 1 9 6 4 to 1983 Brazil was run
by a military junta that repressed civil rights and discouraged Black organ-
ization. Nevertheless, the decade from the early 1970s to the early 1980s,
which corresponded to a slackening in military control, was a period of
growth and creativity for Black organizations and Black culture. The new
Black workers showed interest in Black pride and in Black organizations
(Agier 1990, 1992). There are t w o reasons for this. On the one hand,
through ascending social mobility a new generation of Black workers met
with color bars that had not been perceived thus far. On the other hand,
these Black workers had more money and time to spend for organized
community and leisure activities. N e w Black movements and all-Black car-
nival associations were formed. Black culture and religion acquired more
official recognition. N e w , powerful forms of Black culture were created.
The mass media labeled this process the "re-Africanization" of Bahia (Agier
1990, 1992; Bacelar 1989; Sansone 1993).

The third period spans from the redemocratization in the early 1980s to
the present. Over this period of time recession combined with democrati-
zation and fast "modernization" have led to a combination of new dreams
256 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

and frustrations. Many of the channels of social mobility that had been
very important for the former generation are not relevant anymore for the
younger generation. For example, the opportunities in old manual crafts
but also in heavy industry and even in some sections of public employment
have decreased, and the value of salaries has collapsed, contributing to
lower the formerly relatively high status of these jobs. In addition, new
forms of segregationusually subtler and never explicitly based on color
emerged in some of the burgeoning sectors of the labor market, such as
the luxury shopping malls, where the requirements of "good appearance"
and "good manners" in job applications tend to discriminate against the
darkest candidates (da Silva 1999; Guimaraes 1997). In the meantime,
other changes led to an increase of expectations as to living standard. In
Brazil as in many other Third World countries, mass school education to-
gether with mass media has contributed to a revolution of rising expecta-
tions. Another important factor is the opening up of the country to
commodities, ideas, sounds, and cultures from abroad. After centuries in
which only a small elite had access to international goods, Brazil is passing
from isolation to participation by gearing into the world-economy as an
important "emerging market," as this large Third World economy is now
often fashionably called. Once, because of the faulty import-substitution
policies, many commodities were not available; n o w imported commodities
are indeed for sale but are very exclusive and expensive for the over-
whelming majority of Black Brazilians.
N e w dreams also result from the increased acceptance of Black cultural
expressions from the side of the state and official culture. Also, the leisure
industry is more interested in Black culture than ever. More than ever be-
fore, Black culture is predominant in the images and discourses of official
and commercial Brazilianness (brasilidade) and, in Bahia, Bahianness
(baianidade).
The structure of the system of race relations and racial terminology as
well as the type of racism and Black ethnicity change throughout these
periods. Each period corresponds with a different strategy of the state and
other agencies, such as mass media, toward Afro-Brazilians, as well as with
different emphases in the national and intellectual discourses on the racial
texture of the nation. Each of these three periods corresponds to different
uses of "Africa."

TYPES OF RACISM A N D NEGRITUDE

Prior to abolition, images of slaverydominated by the combination of

brutality and miscegenation that seem to have characterized the Brazilian
slave systemimpressed a long series of foreign travelers w h o reported
about this tropical society with a mixture of disdain and seduction. The
African origin of so many of the slaves and ex-slaves is often reported as
Making "Africa" in Brazil 257

well as the "African atmosphere," which, in the eyes of the beholders,

patterned marketplaces, ports, music and dancing, food habits, and so
many other aspects of daily life. However, one can argue that in Brazil the
presence of people and culture traits of African descent becomes a "prob-
lem" for the state and policymakers only after the abolition of slavery.
During slavery the slave condition was even more important than physical
appearance; the population of African origin was divided into slave, man-
umitted, freeborn, and mulattos. Also important was the division between
African-born and Brazilian-born (crioulo)the former were usually given
the heavier tasks. With the abolition of slavery things started to change.
After slavery Brazil never knew legal racial segregation; physical appear-
ance rather than the African origin or the slave condition started to deter-
mine status.
Defining what was African in Brazilian society and making a "Black"
population were not any longer the foreign travelers w h o produced the
keynotes but a relatively new group of ensaistas (pre-scientific essay writers)
w h o were committed to building the new nation that followed the coup
that installed the republic in 1 8 8 9 . H o w to cope with "Africa" in Brazil
was a key question. Modernity was a must and had to be achieved either
by Whitening the population through massive White immigration from Eu-
rope or by generally improving the health condition of the native popula-
tion. It ended up being a bit of both, with none of the two approaches
3
really ever being hegemonic. However, in spite of the argument over the
place of the descendants of Africa in the new nation, both "scientific ra-
cism" and the dreams of incorporation of the Black population aimed at
biologic engineering: the making of a new Brazilian "race." African traits
had to be removed from street life and the marketplace. Brazilian cities had
to look "European"never mind that mortality was often worse than in
Africa. Health campaigns, for example, against yellow fever, were followed
by the "clearance" of "unhealthy regions"often those associated with
high concentrations of descendants of Africans. Informal economic activi-
ties, also associated with former African freemen, had to be banned from
the city centers. The practices of drumming (batuque) and of Afro-Brazilian
syncretic religions were either curbed or limitedit was only in the 1940s
that the obligation for candomble houses to register with the police was
4
lifted.

Yet, ironically, it was precisely when the African-born population had

shrunk to a small percentage of the total population that Black Brazilians
started to celebrate their Africa in an open and organized fashionnow a
powerful icon to be used to acquire status in the Brazilian context (Butler
1998). From the 1880s, the crowning of African kings and queens, tradi-
tionally a form to celebrate a sumptuous past and the "civilization" of
Africa in the face of present hardship at various moments during slavery,
became the core of pageants during carnival. Banned from official carnival
258 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

celebrations for their supposedly disorderly behaviorthat is, playing

drums loudlyin Rio and Salvador, Black citizens formed an association,
thanks to which they could negotiate a worthy place with the White "own-
ers" of the carnival (Fry, Carrara, and Martins-Costa 1988). In Salvador
the t w o main carnival associations that emphasized the greatness of Africa
were the Embaixada Africana (African Embassy) and the Pandegos da Af-
rica (the Merry Africans). To these Blacks, "Africa" within the carnival
was not disorder but rather the opposite, the orderly moving exhibition of
the magic and greatness of mythical African kingdoms (Querino 1955).
The last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the
twentieth century are also the period in which a few spiritual leaders of
candamble started to establish contact with Africa itself. They benefited
from the continuous trickle of contacts that always united Bahia to West
Africa during and, to a lesser extent, after the slave trade. The nuclei of
former Brazilian slaves w h o settled in the port cities of Dahomey (now,
Benin) and Nigeria (see da Cunha 1985; Verger 1968) buttressed this trans-
oceanic exchange. Tobacco and liquor were exchanged for cola nuts, holy
images and handicraft. According to Lorand Matory (1999), it is precisely
around the turn of the nineteenth century that the greatness of the Yoruba
people started to be celebrated internationally, as a proud and educated
people w h o withstood the pressure of colonialism and had a sophisticated
religion of their own. Such greatness soon reverberated to the whole Afro-
Latin world and, as we see later, apparently became the banner for those
w h o upheld the value of African purity in the Black cultures of the N e w
World.
As the purging of African traits from Brazilian culture as well as from
the "Brazilian race" was the keynote of the first period, the second period
was characterized by a combined process of incorporation of certain aspects
of Black culture into the national self-image together with their commod-
ization and commercialization. This went hand in hand with four interre-
lated trends:

1. The adoption of a myth of origin of the Brazilian population as part of the

official discourse on the nation. The "myth of the three races" (the Indian, the
African, and the Portuguese), which melted to create a new, potentially color-
blind "race," had already been celebrated over the last decades in poetry and
the fine arts. Now it became part and parcel of official cultural policies and of
the liturgy of the state (Damatta 1987).
2. The emergence of an organized Black political organization that attempted to
organize nationally, the Frente Negra, which emphasized universal measures in
favor of the "Brazilian of color" and nationalistic populism ("Brazilian-born
citizens first") whereas it de-emphasized any possible cultural difference of the
Black population from the restfor this purpose the recent past in Brazil was
much more relevant than a distant past in Africa, a continent that these Black
activists often described as "primitive."
Making "Africa" in Brazil 259

3. The so-called re-Africanization of Afro-Brazilian culture.

4. The destigmatization of Black culture in urban Bahia to the point that it became
part and parcel of the public image of the state of Bahia.

To the last t w o trends contributed the state and social scientistsboth

more powerful than in the first periodand insiders as well as outsiders.
These agents operated by identifying within the complexity of traits of
Afro-Brazilian culture those that were "pure," which supposedly expressed
the most sophisticated contribution of noble African cultures to the Bra-
zilian culture and nation. To these "pure" traits were opposed the suppos-
edly "less noble" and "impure" traits that either represented the "less
sophisticated" African cultures or had been corrupted by exaggerated syn-
cretism with a set of "negative forces" in Brazilian culture, such as the
malandro (hustler) mentality, the magic of the "civilized" indios, popular
Catholicism, and African as well as non-African black magic. In this di-
chotomy of African influences, the good ones were associated with what
were defined as the "Mina," "Nago," "Sudanese," and later "Yoruba"
cultures of the slaves deported from sub-Sahelian Western Africa. Accord-
ing to a long string of intellectuals, starting from the late nineteenth century
(Nina Rodrigues 1932), the slaves from this "sophisticated" part of Africa
were the overwhelming majority of the Africans in Bahia and in the other
parts of Brazil where "purer" forms of candomble emerged, such as the
state of Maranhao. Where the African religious system became, as it were,
bastardized, this had to do with the supposedly "Bantu" origin of the Af-
ricans. The "Bantus" were often described as uncouth and unskilled if com-
pared to the "Yoruba," that is, more prone to either submit to the masters
or combat them by the most infamous sort of black magic. Historical re-
search shows that the idea of the "Mina" slave as more civilized but also
more rebellious was present in the public opinion and among the slave
owners already around the end of the eighteenth century. The Male rebel-
lion in 1835 in Salvador, which was seen as a conspiracy led by Islamic
slaves (Reis 1986), certainly contributed to this reputation. However, it was
only after foreign travelers reported the "Yoruba" pride and fine traits in
their written accounts, which often became best-sellers in Brazil, that such
popular stereotypes gained status and became part of the self-image of the
new nation.

Modern research on the African origin of Afro-Brazilian culture started

with a number of important and first-rate anthropologists and historians,
like Ramos, Freyre, Tannenbaum, Carneiro, Herskovits, Pierson, Elkins,
Verger, and Bastide (see Gois Dantas 1988). In their analysis they usually
took off from those travelers' reports and the images (paintings and en-
5
gravings) that went with them and from a limited number of ethnographic
descriptions gathered around the turn of the century, mostly by Raymundo
Nina Rodrigues and Manuel Querino. Today we k n o w that both the for-
260 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

eign travelers and these ethnographers of the prehistory of Brazilian an-

thropology were rather impressionistic in their accounts (see, for a critical
perspective, Slenes 1995; Vogt and Fry 1996).
Interestingly, in those days the highlighting of the "Yoruba" and down-
playing of the "Bantu" were part and parcel of an eager attempt to give a
positive image of Black Brazil and particularly Afro-Bahia to the rest of the
world. In fact, as often happens in the case of academic writing about
phenomena related to ethnicity and nationalism (see Handler 1988), social
scientists and ethnic spokespeople, through different though converging
agendas, tend to give a similar and equally sympathetic image of the group
or community in question. This, then, is described as more cohesive, ho-
mogeneous, and integrated that it might be had the agenda of the observer
been different. Moreover, also the local and the federal governmental agen-
cieswith the Ministry of Culture of the Estado N o v o regime in the van-
guardcontributed to this process of bestowing of intellectual status and
primacy to the "Yoruba" by purging as much as possible what they held
as "impure" elements and promoting the other aspects of Black culture
that they held as "purer," dignifying, and civilized.
It is striking that these polar constructions as to the African presence in
Brazil certainly also fed on an internal polarity that is typical of all versions
of Black culture in the Afro-Latin or Afro-Catholic world of which I am
6
aware that between purity/resistance and manipulation/adjustment, the
t w o extremes in between which Black people have traditionally constructed
their survival strategies as well as the discourses about them.

A N E W STAGE

Starting from the early 1960s contacts with Africa increased a lot. On
the verge of decolonization, the Brazilian governmenteven the military
dictatorship, which began in 1964started to develop a policy of presence
in Africa. Even though Brazil did not take part in the movement of the
nonallied countries, it wanted to develop south-to-south exchanges, if only
as a way of gaining more international acceptance as a great nation. It was
in that context that t w o research institutes received support from the gov-
ernment, be it somewhat unsteadily: first, the Centre of African and Orien-
tal Studies of the Federal University of Bahia, which, also through its
journal Afro-Asia, had already been an important institutional reference in
the scientific reconstruction of "Africa" in Bahia and Brazil, and, later, in
1 9 7 4 , the Centre of Afro-Asian Studies of the private Candido Mendes
University, which also publishes a journal, Estudos Afro-Asidticos, and has
been fostering exchange with Africa, mostly in the field of economic and
social-anthropological research and training, especially with the former
Portuguese colonies.
The redemocratization of Brazil starting in the early 1980s brought a
Making "Africa" in Brazil 261

new ethnic wave and paved the way for the development of politics of
identity within a society that, thus far, had known a powerful universal
tradition, a tradition organized and defended by the state apparatuses but
also celebrated in art and popular culture through countless reinterpreta-
tions of the "myth of the three races."
N o w the agents in the process are different. The federal government,
affected by cuts in public spending and by the negative memories of its
centralized and censoring cultural policies, is losing ground. Local govern-
ments, on the other hand, gain more space, strengthened by decentraliza-
tion of power and new legislation. The state of Bahia includes in its 1988
constitution the teaching of African history in secondary education and
policies for promoting a multiethnic image in the advertising of govern-
mental agencies. Such new multi-culturalist measures create new demands
for information and symbols African, often in a prepackaged fashion con-
sisting of essentialized bits and pieces of African cultures and sweeping
generalizations on the nature of the "African people." These shortcomings
are common in multi-culturalist experiences but become more acute in a
country where public education has collapsed (Sansone 2002). Mass media
and tourism become more important in the making of a modern Black
culture. The role of social sciences changes. On the one hand, social sci-
entists are much more numerous than in the second period, and there start
to be a number of (mostly junior) Black researchers, on the other hand, as
individuals and professionals are less politically influential on account of
the popularization of the social sciences.
The cultural situation has changed, too. On the one hand, it is certainly
easier and more rewarding to "behave Black" and to show one's interest
in "Africa" than 30 years ago, if only because the acceptance of alternative
youth styles has increased (Araujo Pinho 1998)I was told that only one
generation ago dreadlocks would have been almost considered as a sign of
lunacy. Mass media have alsoat long laststarted to accept that Brazil
has a huge Black and brown population. In certain sections of society one
comes across even a sort of new Negrophilia, which creates a new space
for certain forms of estheticized Blackness. This time, however, this attitude
is not confined to the artistic vanguards and the intellectuals, as in p r e -
World War II Paris (Gendron 1990) but is rather the expression of a pop-
ular yearning for the exotic and the sensual associated with Black people.
It seems a contradiction because such yearning is produced within a society
on the periphery of the West that wants to be increasingly rational but was,
and in many aspects still is, seen as "exotic" and "tropical" by outsiders.
On the other hand, this period has seen the emergence of new Black polit-
ical movements that see it as a major task to disassemble the idea that
Brazil is a racial democracy. To these activists, Brazil, which knows a racial
system based on a color continuum, ought to be reinterpreted along a sharp
divide along color lines (negros vs. brancos, that is, Afro-Brazilians vs.
262 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

Whites). Moreover, the polarity of "Yoruba'VBantu" mentioned before is

n o w taken for granted by most Black activists, a large group of intellectuals
and academics, and even by the progressive wing of the Catholic Church,
which tries to incorporate the message of Black pride by incorporating in
its liturgy symbols associated with a great "African past." It is on these
shifting grounds that some Black activists and candomble spiritual leaders
have been struggling to de-syncretize the Afro-Brazilian religious system
purging any reference to popular Catholicism, Kardecism, and "black
magic." "Africa" has been central in claiming purity of a particular can-
domble house against its rival houses, which are usually described as "less
African-based." To some candomble houses, often those most visited by
intellectuals and anthropologists, regular journeys to Africa as well as
showing in public (magic) objects brought from Africa have become an
essential part of their status in the very competitive religious market in
which they operate (Capone 1998; Goncalves da Silva 1995; Prandi 1991).
Throughout the three periods mentioned before, what is actually held as
"African" in Brazil is mostly impressionistic. The vehicles and agents of
these processes have varied, though there has been a set of constants
throughout the periods we dealt with. Objects, lexicon, and music beat
have been defined as African rather than by careful research, which is still
scarce, often by superficial association and sameness, by pictorial obser-
vation. "Looking African" or "sounding African" is, in fact, what makes
things "African"so, a group of sturdy Black men toiling at the central
market of Salvador makes it an "African" market in the commentary to
the many photo-books for sale to tourists and traveling anthropologists
7
alike. In this process, a specific foreigner's gaze has certainly contributed
to the making of a particular kind of "Africa" in Brazil. A good case in
question was the way that Melville Herskovits identified certain cultural
traits or social habits as containing degrees of what he called Africanisms
and, in more recent times, the bias in favor of things Yoruba of the Bahia-
based French photographer and ethnographer Pierre Vergersomething
that reminds us of Ruth Benedict's preference for the Apollean Puebla peo-
ple over the rather Dyonisian Kwakiutl people. Another important factor
is the place of Bahia and Brazil more generally in the cultural flows across
the Black Atlantic. Bahia is, besides a tourist destination, one of the places
where (strong) tropical emotions come froma place that produces images
and sounds that reverberate, for example, in the world music circuitsbut
is marginal as to the commercialization and canning of global Black culture,
if only because it is part of the Portuguese-speaking world and lacks money
and know-how.

CONCLUSIONS

A first conclusion is that "Africa" in Brazil has been more the result of
the system of race relations than of the capacity of the Brazilian of African
Making "Africa" in Brazil 263

descent to retain traits of "African culture," what Melville Herskovits

(1941) called Africanisms, throughout centuries of hardship. Hence, rather
than to the retention of possible "Africanisms," attention ought to be paid
to the creative way that "Africa" is reinvented for political reasons.
A second conclusion is that in Brazil, as in many other contexts across
the Black Atlantic, an important aspect that distinguishes Black cultures
from most of the other ethnic cultures is a high degree of interdependence
of the former with Western urban culturewhich includes intellectual and
scientific discourses on "race," ethnicity, and the nation. This interdepen-
dence with Western urban culture and their central role in the global flows
of youth culture and the music industry also give to Black cultures and
ethnicities a special status in the world of interethnic relations. On the one
hand, this transnational and multiethnic origin of black cultures in the N e w
World has in many ways anticipated the new ethnicity of late modernity
and shows that not everything of the new ethnicities is really new! On the
other hand, in a world where the "value" of ethnic cultures and identities
is their distinctiveness as to Western urban culture, Black cultures do not
enjoy the official recognition of "established ethnic cultures" (e.g., a lan-
guage or immigrant minority in an industrialized country), and Black peo-
ple have more problems than most other ethnic minorities in defining
themselves as a culturally distinct or politically based community.
A third conclusion is that the case of Brazil and of the transatlantic fluxes
et refluxes of people, commodities, symbols, and ideas linking South Amer-
ica with North America, Europe, and Africathe Black Atlanticis evi-
dence that the icons have become more genuinely global than their shared
meaning. It also shows that there have been very powerful "localizing"
forces in the ways that things African have been classified and ranked.
In fact, "Black globalization" has had differential effects in different
regions, depending on the local structure of opportunities and on the gen-
eral position of the region in the global cultural flows. In general, this
process creates new opportunities but also new contradictions: there are
barriers that are falling and others that are coming upwhich in a world
of globalized expectation as to the quality of life and civil rights can lead
to new frustrations. This leads to the question of whether the globalization
of Blackness weakens or strengthens coloniality and how it affects the re-
lationship between center and periphery within the Black Atlantic. Changes
will certainly result from the fact that nowadays, more than ever, local
instances as to Black culture and ethnicity have global links that can over-
take the nation-state. Moreover, if it is true that Black cultures have been
historically constructed through an international exchange and have always
contained a number of "global" traits, it should not be surprising that
Black populations in different regions of the Black Atlantic are facing
present-day globalization in a position of being, in many ways, already well
equipped for the challenge posed by a growing pluralization of sources and
264 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

influences in cultural production and by the deterritorialization and frag-

mentation of previously relatively local identities.

NOTES
1. I refer to "Black culture" as a basic taxonomic concept that refers to a number
of common traits in the cultural production of Black populations in different con-
texts. "Black cultures" in plural refers instead to the local or subgroup variants of
the basic Black culture.
2. Recent historical research has made me aware that "Black cultures" started
to be formed in Africa prior to the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade,
throughout the early encounters with Catholic missionaries, or anyway along the
African coast, where the deportees often had to wait for years for their passage.
This process of the making of a Black culture in Africa itself has been documented
as to the invention of a Yoruba nation around the turn of the last century, which
soon inspired the offspring of Africans in Cuba and Brazil (Matory 1999), and to
South Equatorial Africa, where it certainly benefited from the proximity among
Bantu languages (Slenes 1995; Thornton 1998).
3. This is still a highly controversial point among historians; for an overview of
the debate, see Chor Maio and Santos (1996).
4. Candomble is the umbrella term that has over the last decades been used to
describe the Brazilian syncretic religious system of African origin.
5. I am grateful to the historian Carlos Eugenio Soares for this information.
6. Also in Haiti Black culture and the pantheon of voodoo deities have used a
polarity Guinepure and dignifiedversus Congoimpure and unworthy (Mon-
tilus 1993), which recalls the polarity "Yoruba"-"Bantu" in Brazil and Cuba.
7. In Salvador these photo-books are in such demand among tourists that they
are more expensive than in Rio or Sao Paulo.

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 Chapter 14

The Convergence of World-Historical Social

Science: "Border Thinking" as an Alternative
to the Classical Comparative Method
Khaldoun Subhi Samman

The world-historical sciences have witnessed major innovations in recent

decades. World-systems, subaltern, and postcolonial theories, just to men-
tion a few, have succeeded in founding institutes, research centers, and
whole departments at university centers. Yet, territorial feuds and clashes
that are aimed at exaggerating the difference of these perspectives have
offset such dramatic developments. The fundamentals that they all share
in the critiques of their respective disciplines hence go unnoticed. Instead,
we are forced to select from these so-called varying perspectives in our
individual projects without crossing the imaginary lines assumed to divide
them. This chapter is written as a response to such pressures. Indeed, what
I find most interesting here is what they all share. Diverse writers like Ed-
ward Said, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Partha Chatterjee, just to mention
a few, all share some very basic ideas that for too long have not been
systematically analyzed together. This chapter is intended to demonstrate
that what they do have in common far exceeds their differences. The com-
mon thread that ties the emerging world-historical field, I argue, is their
understanding of h o w one should study society, nation, and civilization.
That is, they all are attempting to overturn the traditional methods that
have dominated the social sciences over the past t w o centuries.
It may seem strange for many to place postcolonial and subaltern liter-
ature alongside world-systems analysis and mark them as belonging to the
same tradition. But this is precisely the objective of this chapter. In dem-
onstrating this point, I find useful Walter Mignolo's insistence on analyzing
borders as mutually produced through what he identifies as the "coloniality
1
of difference." This is an idea that, I argue, runs throughout much of the
emerging world-historical literature. From this vantage point, all of the
268 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

above share in the desire to dismantle the long-held and persistent notions
of the social sciences over the past t w o centuries: each society, nation, and
civilization is a unit to itself, "uncontaminated by the border matter he or
she describes." Moreover, the production of such subaltern knowledge, as
I show below, is a direct challenge to the formal comparative method and
is highly critical of any attempt to place social units side by side and rele-
gate them to an analysis of "compare and contrast." In all these cases we
are collectively "arguing from another logic," a location that "the canonical
thinkers of the Western Canon can no longer provide a starting point for
the epistemology that the colonial difference requires" (Mignolo 2000:
313).

THE ARGUMENT

Samuel P. Huntington, in the widely discussed article, "The Clash of

Civilizations," argues that "the most important conflicts of the future will
occur along the cultural fault lines separating . . . civilizations from one an-
other" (Huntington 1993: 25). He provides many reasons for this predic-
tion, stretching from the demise of ideologies to the rise of regionalism. But
his central thesis is that the civilization in the West is completely different
from the rest of the other seven civilizations: "Western ideas of individu-
alism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule
of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often
have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or
Orthodox cultures" (Huntington 2 0 0 0 : 40). Such fundamental differences
in a N e w World Order characterized by globalization, therefore, will result
in a future marked by the "Clash of Civilizations." The implication for the
West is, therefore, the "need to maintain the economic and military power
necessary to protect its interests in relation to these civilizations" (49). In
short, "they" have "their culture" and "we have ours," and in order to
protect "our way of life," we better be prepared to maintain an over-
whelming military superiority.
I suggest that the problem with Samuel Huntington's idea of the "clash
of civilizations" is essentially related to his dependence on the classical
comparative method. He is a living example of the product of the method
that was put in place in late-nineteenth-century Europe, namely, the model
of typing societies antithetically, such as Emile Durkheirn's notion of me-
chanical and organic societies and Ferdinand Tonnies' gemeinschaft and
gesellschaft or M a x Weber's ideal-type classification. Like Durkheim, Ton-
nies, and Weber, Samuel Huntington maintains that the people in his study
are bearers of distinctive cultures and of peculiar entities, characterizing
them in certain summary ways. His method is to make his subjects recog-
nizable as distinct entities and classify them as possessing a fixed essence,
a nation, a people, or a culture, as species that are formally comparable.
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 269

Like the classics, he assumes that a people or culture possesses distinctive

and fixed attributes and beliefs that can be neatly referred to in conceptual
models. But what clearly links Huntington to his predecessors is the notion
that such societies are all deeply different from "our" "Western" way of
life. He builds his analyses upon the basic sociological method of
nineteenth-century sociology: the idea that particular peoples have natures
that are racial, cultural, or social but, most importantly, distinctive to them
(Thomas 1994).
With the publication of Edward Said's major book Orientalism (1979),
there was a reaction to these types of previously dominant modes of
thought. But while such responses, as Nicholas Thomas (1994) argued re-
cently, have been exceptionally useful in exposing some of the racist as-
sumptions and expositions of major social theorists, they have mainly
fimited themselves to dealing with explicitly racist observations, where we
find "an array of stereotypes from monsters at the edges of maps and
women with sagging breasts to representations like the fanatical Arab ter-
rorist and the passive and beguiling w o m e n of tourism's Asia" (Thomas
1994). What is more interesting, however, is the underlying method that
such writings tend to carry along in their interpretive conclusions. Here I
am reminded of Edward Said's (1979) discussion of Edward Lane:

What interests me most as a scholar is not the gross political verity but the detail,
as indeed what interests us in someone like Lane or Flaubert or Renan is not the
(to him) indisputable truth that Occidentals are superior to Orientals, but the pro-
foundly worked over and modulated evidence of his detailed work within the very
wide space opened up by that truth. One need only remember that Lane's Manners
and Customs of the Modern Egyptians is a classic of historical and anthropological
observation because of its style, its enormously intelligent and brilliant details, not
because of its simple reflection of racial superiority, to understand what I am saying
2
here. (15)

More interesting and problematic is the approach that the social sciences
developed to explain social phenomena, one which I believe has helped to
foster the type of ideas that we find in Huntington and others. It is neither
Huntington's poor understanding of other civilizations nor his reductionist
view of Islam, Confucianism, or any of the seven civilizations that he listed
that I am interested in here. Rather, it is the methodology that he chose to
explain that phenomenon, a" methodology that to this day continues to
influence much of the social sciences: the classical comparative method.
It is a method that by its very structure channels thought into "us" and
"them" compartments. This is clearly the case with Samuel Huntington,
where his notions of civilizations, nations, cultures, and Islam are based on
constructing clear and definite markers between "ours" and "theirs," "their
way of life" and "our way of life." The sociologist is forced by the logic
270 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

of this method to differentiate and contrast between units as though they

were enclosed objects, frames that could be set side by side and compared
one to the other, clearly distinguishing what belongs "here" and what be-
longs "there."
Moreover, as William Roseberry has observed, the writer w h o accepts
this method is logically, if not stylistically, stuck with a project that styles
itself to drawing analytical boundaries around particular villages, regions,
or "cultures" and then treats those analytical entities as different by defi-
nition (Roseberry 1989: 13). His or her intellectual capacity to question
the idea of distinct cases is therefore limited in the sense that what one sees
when one looks at a given "society" is a worldview in which imaginary
lines define self-enclosed analytical entities. It is a worldview that from the
very start is overdetermined by that method. Indeed, the major methodo-
logical basis of today's social science, as we will see, is clearly still within
the confines of this comparative method.
My reading of the "Clash of Civilizations" thesis and other essays that
followed its publication inspired me to search for alternatives. Edward Said
is an excellent starting point. He posed a thesis that has proved essential
in my quest to think about phenomena in flexible and open-ended ways,
relationallyin terms of relations engendered and constructed, in terms of
intersects and overlaps, rather than in terms of solid, bounded, homoge-
neous entities. It is n o w becoming clear to me that through this type of
analysis we can explore alternative methods for studying difference and
overturn a method that has hindered the social sciences, one that will pro-
vide the vocabulary to invent new ways of thinking about the heterogeneity
and transformative nature of human arrangements. In contrast to the
"clash of civilizations" discourse, we need to demonstrate an alternative
view of the world. This chapter is an attempt to join in this very productive
rethinking.
The objective of this chapter is an attempt to answer the following ques-
tion: Is there an alternative method that we can adopt in studying "other"
societies, nations, and civilizations to the one that dominated the social
sciences over the past t w o centuries? I seek out authors w h o are creating
new ways to organize knowledge that make the older methodology of com-
partmentalizing populations into watertight containers obsolete. But before
we can introduce these writers, we have to first see what they are reacting
to. It is therefore necessary to review the evolution of the classical com-
parative method and the limits that it poses on world-historical social sci-
ence. To that end let us n o w turn.

T H E CLASSICAL COMPARATIVE M E T H O D

The purpose of M a x Weber's methodological reflections was to mend a

problem that was intrinsic to his o w n universe of discourse. As Kasler has
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 271

argued recently, Weber's methodology represents an immanent attempt to

bridge the gap that existed between his o w n individualistic epistemological
and methodological premises, on one hand, and the kind of intellectual
apparatus that he needed for the pursuit of his interest in substantive civ-
ilizational and historical analyses, on the other (Kasler 1 9 7 9 : 1 8 0 ) . Weber's
interpretive sociology, Kasler reminds us, had to "overcome the formidable
obstacle of constructing the apparatus of a science fit to study the grand
and historical problems without using the collectivistic notions and me-
chanical explanations that pervaded the social sciences of his time" (1979).
For this grand objective, Weber chose a cross-comparative method and
engaged in a massive study of major world civilizations and religions. When
we engage in a comparative study of world religions, Weber suggests that
we identify "[tjhose features peculiar to the individual religions" and then
highlight elements that are essential by bringing them "out strongly" (1946:
292). This idea of bringing out and exaggerating certain features of indi-
vidual religions is very important to Weber's comparative approach,
especially to the question of h o w we study the cultural concepts of alien
civilizations. In other words, we focus on the particular features, those
distinctive components that make the phenomenon under discussion unlike
any other. His ideal types are very important to this comparative process:
"The ideal-type . . . has only one function in an empirical investigation. Its
function is the comparison with the empirical reality in order to establish
its divergences or similarities, to describe them with the most unambigu-
ously intelligible concepts, and to understand and explain them causally"
(1949b: 43).
The task of making causal explanations is possible, he explains, because
comparing Islam, Hinduism, and Confucianism with Occidental history
provides us the opportunity to make contrasts from which we could deduce
causal explanations. These studies were primarily designed to highlight the
distinctiveness of the Western experience in its development of economic
capitalism. His studies of civilizations were thus an attempt to hold polit-
ical, social, and economic factors relatively constant on a world-historical
scale in order to suggest explanations for the differential impact of the
ethical prescriptions of world religions. By demonstrating that the absence
of certain conditions outside Europe failed to produce rational capitalism,
he felt that he had identified the causal nexus for the development of cap-
italism in Europe. The comparative method thus became very important
for Weber precisely because it provided a sort of laboratory for formulating
causal explanations. Since the cultural sciences do not have the luxury of
a real laboratory as do the natural sciences, the comparative method can
provide the alternative. The comparative method makes it possible to test
some broad hypotheses or theories by comparing "our" society with
"other" societies. We can demonstrate that the absence of one peculiar
feature in a given locale and its presence in the other cause a differentiated
272 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

trajectory for the two units. Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and his
scattered references to Islam were all devised as typologies in an effort to
demonstrate the uniqueness of the Western case. In other words, the re-
searcher is in the position to provide valid causal explanations as well as
the occasion to explain why something happened "here" and failed to oc-
cur "there."
The significance of this comparative method for a causal explanation of
a historical fact leads him to the following question: "In the event of the
exclusion of that fact from the complex of factors . . . , or in the event of
its modification in a certain direction, could the course of events . . . have
taken a direction in any way different in any features which would be
decisive for our interest?" (Weber 1949a: 56). Given his concern with dem-
onstrating the uniqueness of the West by comparing it with the Orient in
order to illustrate why capitalism prevailed only in the former, the answer
to this question most definitely is in the affirmative. He wanted to examine
not only how the economic ethics of the world religions differed from each
other but why in one case we see the production of a capitalist trajectory
and in all the others we see its hindrance. Since the economic ethic found
in the West was not to be seen anywhere else, we could be quite confident
that we have reached a causal explanation to the problem at hand. Thus,
the comparative method "enables us to make a clearer genetic comparison
of the historical uniqueness of European cultural development" (1949a:
156). It also "arouses our i n t e r e s t . . . as instances of cultural products, i.e.,
as means of forming concepts or as 'causes' " (1949a: 157).
By claiming that Westerners possessed a whole array of social and po-
litical practices that made them not only different from the rest of the world
but ultimately superior, this comparative method became significant in the
ideological struggles between East and West. From this point on, disciplines
like sociology would help to create an intellectual list of characteristics
perceived to be the sole possession of the West. A Westerner came to be
understood as the supreme perfection of everything progressive and modern
that all others need to emulate and make their own. In this way sociology
not only constructed an image of the non-Western population as "other,"
far removed from the West in all its makeup, but also, and perhaps more
significant, attempted to demonstrate to the West itself that "we" possess
features that justify why we hold power over the rest of humanity. In the
same way that an economist can show the West that "our" standard of
living is far greater than that of the rest of the world, the sociologist can
demonstrate that this is so because of the distinctive qualities that "we"
possess.
American sociology provided an important response to the Third World's
decisive entry into statehood. It was no longer possible to describe the
"other" as primitive, backward, or underdeveloped and leave it at that
(Said 1979). One could use such terminology only in moments of absolute
The Convergence of 'World-Historical Social Science 273

power, when empire meant that "they" were a people to be ruled over. But
this does not mean that in the American case the ontological construct was
made useless. On the contrary, it had to be an exaggerated version of it.
The concept of modernity had to be inflated, an idea pushed to its very
extreme. The sociologist in mid-twentieth-century America n o w had to in-
clude an additional step in the modern/nonmodern dichotomy: the "other"
was not inherently born to remain underdeveloped or primitive. He or she
could be made to become modern only by following the criteria established
by the West. Success could be his or hers if he or she followed the step-by-
step guide to modernity, and w h o is in the best position to provide this
self-help manual but those academics w h o have been studying the
uniqueness of the Occident?
In a time in which the West's ability to rule over the periphery was under
question, such an idea proved effective in dealing with a restless native
population, one that seemed to the West distant and hostile. By prescribing
ways that the natives could become like "us," the idea proposed a remedy
for overcoming this feeling of distance. It demanded a change in the char-
acter of the natives that would make the native less distant or alien (Said
1979). The native in the process would be remade from a hostile and exotic
Other to one w h o is familiar and non-threatening. In short, it was an idea
that promised to make what was distant and unfamiliar into something
that resembled "our own." Such an idea was sociology's greatest challenge
in a fragile political context in which the southern inhabitants of the world
were hostile to the Western powers' efforts to maintain distance through
colonization.
Thus, a new project emerged in the mid-twentieth century, especially for
sociology and modernization theory. What is required for the sociologist
is no longer simply the task of classifying and identifying the modern from
the n o n m o d e m or the uniqueness of the Occident per se. Rather, the so-
ciologist had to do something very different and become an activist w h o
attempted to make the nonmodern perform to the capacity achieved by his
or her Western counterparts. What the sociologist needed to demonstrate
to the non-European world is the power of Western civilization, its capacity
to evolve and change. Providing this information to the people of the new
nations, it is held, may help "them" find a way out of poverty, a way into
a new era in which their static and unchanging traditions could finally come
to an end. Such a project would have been ludicrous a half century earlier.
The question of making "them" in "our" image was subdued by the reality
of direct colonialism. The spreading of liberal ideals to include non-Western
peoples could have become a reality only with the success of national lib-
eration movements in taking state power.
With the help of Talcott Parsons, American sociology reintroduced the
works of Durkheim and Weber in the search for new ways to reclaim
authority over the Other. Parsons' n o w famous pattern variables played a
274 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

major role in this reconstruction. He accepted the dichotomous classifica-

tion of his predecessors in his forntation of pattern variables, and his stu-
dents attempted to apply them to the newly formed states of Asia, Africa,
the Middle East, and Latin America. Like his predecessors, Parsons was
interested in demonstrating that non-Western people were of a very differ-
ent species than his, that they were the exact opposite of the "Westerner."
But he also used this typology as a way to demonstrate that these differ-
ences could be overcome. The essential point here is that Parsons developed
the pattern variables not only for demonstrating the essential difference
between the t w o types but for transcending this dualism as well. Authors
like Lerner, McClelland, Apter, and Rostow were searching for those val-
ues, attitudes, and motives peculiar to modern societies that could provide
the non-European world with the appropriate ingredients to overcome their
archaic predicament. Associated with this concentration on cultural factors
is a tendency to treat so-called problems of development as primarily the
result of cultural and social elements that act as barriers to modernization,
characteristics that could nonetheless be changed in a short period of time.
The assumption is that a society's capacity for development is retarded by
certain archaic features of a social system that induces individuals to act in
a traditionalist manner, one that is particularistic and collectivist. These
types of characteristics, which Parsons believed existed in the newly inde-
pendent states of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, work
in such a way as to hamper development and growth. They are a sort of
a social disease that incapacitates these regions and negates any possibility
for progress.

As we can see, therefore, after World War II sociology reinvented and

in many ways exaggerated the classical sociologists' methodological con-
structs. They reworked Weber's and Durkheim's typologies and compara-
tive studies by introducing the idea of eradicating the archaic features of
the "other." In a sense, it was a cruder form of the comparative method
that emphasizes the strength of the West and the Orient's weakness. Such
strength and such weakness are intrinsic to the comparative method as they
are to any view that divides the world into large general divisions and units.
It is a form of knowledge that is constructed strategically to emphasize and
produce radical differences out of the flux of reality. When one uses the
comparative perspective, the result is usually to polarize the distinction
the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western (Said
1979). The conclusion almost always was that there are Westerners, and
there are Orientals. This is why the comparative method and the antithet-
ical typologies became a perfect fit over the last century.

ALTERNATIVES T O T H E CLASSICAL M E T H O D

This view of the world, however, is n o w coming under attack, and we

are beginning to see signs of an intellectual challenge that is attuned to a
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 275

more complex fragmentation of knowledge and a spirit of experimentation

that aims to explore ways of representing diversity in social life without
falling into the earlier notion of difference based on polarities. The writers
discussed in this section are exploring new ways to organize knowledge
that create the possibility for an epistemological break, one that is strongly
opposed to dividing the world into polarities. Those writers reviewed in
this section share the view that the difficulty with the earlier models is that
they fail to recognize that the attempt to create and construct these dualistic
typologies is, in any event, always constructed in the context of empire
building, a context that proved to be essential in the production of this
type of knowledge. Such explanations center on Europe alone and fail to
recognize that the cultural and ritual production that they describe needs
to be understood in the larger context of global history. In other words,
they fall short in their analysis because the production of their typologies
divides the world into separate and different units when in actuality the
units themselves were produced in the context of a much larger unit. They
are useful insofar as they refocus our attention on the interconnections
between the histories of North/South, East/West, primitive/modern, Prot-
estant/Islam and refuse the simple binary model that is so central to that
method.
World-system theorists have been in the forefront of this critique, re-
minding us not to take the concept of society or nation for granted. Im-
manuel Wallerstein and Eric Wolf both have popularized the notion that
seemingly separate societies are shaped and reshaped in the course of mu-
tual action and reaction, illustrating that the societies and cultures studied
by the social sciences as static entities were, in fact, produced and con-
structed in the course of capitalist expansion around the globe. What unites
these writers is their calling into question the way that we have conceptu-
alized the units of our inquiry by emphasizing that seemingly independent
societies were actually shaped by their relations of dependence upon the
core regions of the world-economy. In this sense world-systems theory is
forcing upon us a very important question: If we begin with the premise
that there has been more interaction across boundaries, more interpenetra-
tion than we have allowed for in much of our past discussions, then what
happens to the concept of society, nation, and civilization? To ask this
question, as they have, poses problems beyond which nothing short of a
paradigm shift in the profession will do. Moreover, what happens to the
comparative method? If we recognize that these societies and civilizations
have historically been interconnected, we also need to recognize that any
neat comparative experiment is highly suspicious.
This growing body of literature thus directly challenges the earlier
method of difference. Wallerstein, Wolf, and others within world-systems
theory are n o w raising the question of understanding social change and
cultural transformation as situated within interconnected spaces, for if one
begins with the premise that societies and nations have been hierarchically
276 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

interconnected in modern world history, instead of naturally disconnected,

then cultural and social change becomes not a matter of cultural contact
and articulation but of rethinking difference through connection. Given the
fact that societies, states, and nations were not a product of some natural
development in which they all came together to form a world of nations
but were producedand are n o w being reproducedby their interconnec-
tions, we can no longer depend on a method that by its very logic separates
and differentiates these units. Wallerstein is particularly explicit on this
theme. In his article (1974a: 33), "Modernization: Requiescat in Pace," he
provides a radically different model:

The last thing we need to do is to make comparative measurements of non-

comparable and non-autonomous entities when the social system in which we all
operate is for the first time in human history a single unit in which the entire game
is resumed in the internal relationships to be found within the capitalist world-
economy. (33)

Here Wallerstein is attempting to overturn one of the most basic assump-

tions in social theory: that the modern world consists of autonomous cul-
tures that can be isolated and studied separately from one another. What
Wallerstein proposes instead is for us to abandon "the idea altogether of
taking either the sovereign state or that vaguer concept, the national soci-
ety, as the unit of analysis. I decided that neither one was a social system
and that one could only speak of social change in social systems. The only
social system in this scheme was the world-system" (1974b: 7). Much of
the discourse of the social science was tied to identifying its unit of analysis
in terms of society, nation, civilization, units that for Wallerstein proved
inadequate. Tribe was another example of a category used widely in the
literature on Africa that made little sense:

It was a false perspective to take a unit like a "tribe" and seek to analyze its
operations without reference to the fact that, in a colonial situation, the governing
institutions of a "tribe," far from being "sovereign," were closely circumscribed by
the laws (and customs) of a larger entity of which they were an indissociable part,
the colony. (1974b: 5)

Every time that Wallerstein attempted to explain phenomena in a given

location in Africa, he found himself referring back to European history and
its colonial relationship to Africa. He could not explain one without the
other. At this point, faced with the problem of studying units within units,
he sought some "simplifying thrust" and discovered it when he came to
the conclusion that "the only social system in this scheme was the world-
system." In doing so, he emphasized the all-encompassing singularity of his
concept of the social system (i.e., the world-system, not local units like tribe
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 277

or nation) by arguing that the social system has to be investigated as a

3
totality (see Buell 1994: 1 2 4 ) .
World-systems analysis is therefore essential for our quest to counter the
more automatic and unreflective ways of thinking about "different cultures
and civilizations." To separate societies into units and classify them as dis-
tinct species is to divide the world into units that have historically been
produced relationally. World-systems theory is thus very useful for our
present project. It has led us to investigate h o w structural constraints of
the modern world-system not only shaped indigenous changes in commu-
nity and class but also preserved and froze traditional relations of power
and production. In this sense it forces us to reevaluate our earlier binary
way of thinking about difference. The notion that the world could be di-
vided along lines of polaritiesprimitive/modern, mechanical/organic, ge-
meinschaft/gesselschaft, particularistic/universalistic, Oriental/Occidental
limits our understanding of h o w historically this dualistic conceptualization
is itself produced by the powerful forces of differentiation within the world-
system. Eric Wolf continues this line of thinking. In his opening chapter to
his book Europe and the People without History (1982), Wolf devotes a
good portion of his text arguing that we need, once and for all, to drop
our habit of investigating social forms as indigenously produced and cul-
turally bounded units. Instead, Wolf insists that we view these units in their
actuality, in their interconnectionsarguing that "the more ethnohistory
we know, the more clearly 'their' history and 'our' history emerge as part
4
of the same history." The imagery that he uses to identify the earlier per-
spective is the "billiard ball" school of thought.

Initially, this perspective was concerned with describing the impact of the
capitalist world-economy on various domains of indigenous agrarian struc-
5
ture, household economy, and state making. A second wave of writers are
n o w turning their attention toward explaining h o w unique cultural config-
urations of everything from food, dress, and education to hygiene, archi-
tecture, and urbanism were given new meanings in the context of this
modern world-system. Partha Chatterjee (1986) provides an excellent ex-
ample of h o w the study of nationalism in the periphery can benefit greatly
from this kind of investigation. In his book he makes the argument that
the acceptance of an essential cultural difference between East and West
marks the formative stage of nationalist thinking in colonial situations. This
acceptance likewise underpins the inherent contradictions of such nation-
alist thought. That is, elite nationalist discourse perpetuates the presuppo-
sitions of colonial domination in the very act of challenging that
domination, for colonial domination rests on the Orientalist association of
the "West" with modernity and progress and the "East" with tradition and
"spirituality."

Nationalist texts were addressed both to the "people" who were said to constitute
the nation and to the colonial masters whose claim to rule nationalism questioned.
278 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

To both, nationalism sought to demonstrate the falsity of the colonial claim that
the backward peoples were culturally incapable of ruling themselves in the condi-
tions of the modern world. Nationalism denied the alleged inferiority of the colo-
nized people; it also asserted that a backward nation could "modernize" itself while
retaining its cultural identity. It thus produced a discourse in which, even as it
challenged the colonial claim to political domination, it also accepted the very in-
tellectual premises of "modernity" on which colonial domination was based. (1986:
30)

Nationalist thought, according to Chatterjee, rejects not this double asso-

ciation but rather the claim that the "backwardness" of the East is im-
mutable; it proposes instead to combine the material culture of the modern
West with the superior spiritual culture of the East. This union promises a
national culture distinct from, and superior to, the Western national cul-
ture. Nicholas Thomas has pursued a similar theme by trying to link col-
onization and kastom in his consideration of the emergence in Fiji of
kerekere, the practice of sharing and lending, as an identified and reified
marker of customary indigenous life. He presents this emergence as an
instance of "the process of naming and reifying customs and beliefs [thatj
takes place in a particularly marked and conspicuous fashion in the course
of colonial history" (Thomas 1992). He says that prior to the 1860s, which
is prior to intensive colonial intrusion, there is no evidence that kerekere
was a recognized custom that was taken to be a distinctive marker of Fijian
society. Rather, it became such over the course of the next few decades.
But what is important for us is Thomas' conclusion: the conceptions that
indigenous Pacific peoples have of themselves, conceptions that include no-
tions like kastom and the centrality of kerekere, are not simple reifications
of aspects of social life. Rather, they are reifications in context, and the
context is the encounter of the village and intruding colonial Western social
forms.
Eric Hirsch's analysis of the use of betel nut among the Fuyuge, an inland
society in Papua N e w Guinea, stretches this idea a step further by dem-
onstrating h o w the imagining of community and culture becomes reality in
the interrelations of cross-cultural meaning-making. Hirsch says that in
Papua N e w Guinea the chewing of betel nut was confined largely to coastal
areas during the early colonial period. However, in the past few decades it
has become more widespread. Part of the reason for this, he argues, is that
it has become identified as distinctively Melanesian in contrast to European,
for Europeans drink beer and disapprove of betel nut. Once this identifi-
cation emerges, peripheral societies inland, such as Fuyuge, are likely to
adopt betel nut in order to claim membership in Papua N e w Guinea centers
of power. In the process, the image of Melanesia as betel territory is rein-
forced and made more real (Hirsch 1990).
Some people doing work on European and American societies as well
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 279

and are finding similar tendencies occurring in the core. Ann Laura Stoler,
for instance, argues that our effort to rethink European cultural genealogies
has led us "to question whether the key symbols of modern western soci-
etiesliberalism, nationalism, state welfare, citizenship, culture, and 'Eu-
ropeanness' itselfwere not clarified among Europe's colonial exiles and
by those colonized classes caught in their pedagogic net in Asia, Africa and
Latin America, and only then brought 'home' " (1995: 16). These dis-
courses, Stoler continues, "do more than prescribe suitable behavior; they
locate h o w fundamentally bourgeois identity has been tied to notions of
being 'European' and being 'white' " (11).
Chatterjee, Nader, and others provide the social sciences with a needed
illustration of h o w these gender representations do not simply generate and
define the difference between "societies." Such representations serve to con-
struct a "national society" in which the identity of the community is itself
produced from the colonial and postcolonial encounter. Here, the notion
of society and "national culture" is itself a social construct. It is not an
essentialized category that is peculiar to a given society but one created out
of the power relations between core and periphery. Such authors, more-
over, explicitly critique what twentieth-century social science has been built
upon, namely, the idea that particular peoples have natures that may be
mainly racial, cultural, or social but, most importantly, are distinctive to
them.
The underlying assumption that unites Wallerstein, Wolf, Chatterjee, and
the authors w h o m we reviewed above is that they all share in common the
belief that populations are not formed in isolation, that their connections
with other populations and with the larger currents of world-history re-
quire attention. To ignore these connections is to treat societies and cultures
like "billiard balls"(Wolf 1982). They also share in the desire to undermine
the basic assumption of the social sciences, which since the nineteenth cen-
tury have assumed the existence of societies, civilizations, and nations as
possessing strict and rigid boundaries in which each unit is formally com-
parable. The canonical formulation that views the radical demarcation be-
tween modern and traditional cultures, Occidental and Oriental
civilizations, developed and underdeveloped societies becomes less precise.
The demarcation itself becomes significant only as a way of demonstrating
that these polarities were produced and constructed by a social system that
existed above and beyond any single unit.
It was in this context that Said's notion of Orientalism became the major
text that redefined many of the methodological underpinnings of the his-
torical social science as well as literary criticism in which a storm of works
with similar themes penetrated the intellectual scene. For Said, Orientalism
is a tendency to dichotomize the human continuum into we-they contrasts
and to essentialize the resultant "other"to speak of the Oriental mind,
6
for example, or even to generalize about "Islam" or "the Arabs." The
280 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

quotation marks that Said places around "other," "Islam," or "Arab," as

James Clifford (1988) has carefully argued, "may be understood to have
generated his entire study." The reasons for this lead us to what Said iden-
tifies as "the main intellectual issue raised by Orientalism. Can one divide
human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into
clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and sur-
vive the consequences humanly?" In thus dividing, he argues, we "limit
human encounter between different cultures, traditions and societies"
(1979: 46).
Said comes to the conclusion that all dichotomizing concepts are prob-
lematic. As James Clifford (1988: 273) rightly argues, it is at this level that
Said's critique of the discourse that he calls Orientalism becomes most sig-
nificant. Moreover, "if all essentializing modes of thought must also be
held in suspicion, then we should attempt to think of 'culture,' 'society,'
'nation,' not as organically unified or traditionally continuous but rather
as negotiated, present processes. From this standpoint," Clifford continues,
"Said's refusal to appeal to any authentic and especially traditional oriental
realities against the false stereotypes of Orientalism is a significant critique
of any attempt to build typological models of social reality" (1988: 273).
M o s t significant for our purposes is Said's overall objective to undermine
the Orientalist insistence on compartmentalizing units as discrete entities,
"that the notion that there are geographical spaces with indigenous, radi-
cally 'different' inhabitants w h o can be defined on the basis of some reli-
gion, culture or racial essence proper to that geographical space is . . . a
highly debatable idea" (1979: 322). This leads him to his most important
theoretical questions of his study:

How does one represent another culture? What is "another" culture? Is the notion
of a distinct culture (or race, or religion, or civilization) a useful one, or does it
always get involved either in self-congratulation (when one discusses one's own) or
hostility and aggression (when one discusses the "other")? . . . How do ideas ac-
quire authority, "normality," and even the status of "natural" truth? (1979: 325)

In asking such questions, Said is forcing us to pose an alternative episte-

mological system of inquiry. As Clifford remarked on this issue: "Having
asked them, one does well to avoid quick recourses to alternate realities.
Such entities would at least no longer be closely tied to the binary method
so paramount in modern social theory" (Clifford 1988: 2 7 4 ) . Instead of
viewing these societies as polarities, as of separate worlds, we need to un-
derstand that they are themselves constituted out of power relationships
and that any discussion of difference must be placed in the context of
empire.

In short, what is now before us nationally, and in the full imperial panorama, is
the deep, the profoundly perturbed and perturbing question of our relationship to
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 281

othersother cultures, other states, other histories, other experiences, traditions,

peoples, and destinies. The difficulty with the question is that there is no vantage
outside the actuality of relationships between cultures, between unequal imperial
and nonimperial powers, between different Others, a vantage that might allow one
the epistemological privilege of somehow judging, evaluating, and interpreting free
of the encumbering interests, emotions, and engagements of the ongoing relation-
ships themselves. When we consider the connections between the United States and
the rest of the world, we are so to speak of the connections, not outside and beyond
them. (Said 1989: 216-217)

In such studies, as Said points out, "little time is spent not so much in
'learning about other cultures'the phrase has an inane vagueness to it
but in studying the map of interactions, the actual and often productive
traffic occurring on a day-by-day, and even minute-by-minute basis among
states, societies, groups, identities" (1993: 20). In the end, we need to take
Said (1993: 1 4 - 1 5 ) up on his objective and make it our own:

My principal aim is not to separate but to connect, and I am interested in this for
the main philosophical and ideological reason that cultural forms are hybrid, mixed,
and impure, and the time has come in cultural analysis to reconnect their analysis
with their actuality... . Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous
things, cultures actually assume more "foreign" elements, alterities, differences,
than they consciously exclude. Who in India or Algeria today can confidently sep-
arate out the British or French component of the past from present actualities, and
who in Britain or France can draw a clear circle around British London or French
Paris that would exclude the impact of India and Algeria upon these two imperial
cities?

CONCLUSIONS

These new approaches are promising for the simple fact that they high-
light the connections between cultures and civilizations. The significance of
this type of approach to the future of social theory is fundamental if we
are to move away from the classical method in that it brings our attention
to the interdependence and continual reaction occurring between various
populations that we have tended to separate into watertight compartments.
In this way it can have a strong influence on the orientation of the mind.
It demonstrates that isolated or discrete cultures and civilizations in the
7
modern world, or earlier, are nowhere to be found. But its greatest utility
is that it also demonstrates the hmits of the comparative method. The latter
places a burden on research because by its very nature it creates the image
of neatly bounded, discrete cultures with clearly defined traditions. It limits
our ability to imagine an intertwined and overlapping view of cultures. The
very notion of cultural boundaries as simply self-referential, apparently
marking natural boundary lines, is one of the central premises that the
comparative approach is based on. It assumes by its very nature an onto-
282 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

logical difference between cultures and civilizations. Moreover, the com-

parative approach is weak and leaves us in a poor position to understand
diversity and difference precisely because it separates when, in fact, modern
world-history has demonstrated the interconnections of cultures and civi-
lizations.
The method itself, of course, is not the reason for the emergence of these
trends. Rather, the method was an ideological invention of the modern
world-system. It had to be created. H o w else would it have been possible
to explain Europe's rise to supremacy without first devising and inventing
an approach that makes the claim presentable? It was the only way of
explaining the rise of Europe in terms of some unique trait that it possessed.
It was a method that provided the means to claim that "we" possess these
specific features, and "they" do not. It thus becomes possible to explain
inequalities in terms of some inert features of a particular group. The
method makes it possible to explain distinctions and differences that oth-
erwise would have made little sense. It eliminates by its very logic the ca-
pacity to systematically explore the connections of wealth and development
of one group and the misery and impoverishment of another group. Thus,
we could write a history of what happened "there" and what happened
"here" without the slightest remark about the way that those t w o seemingly
separate histories are intricately tied to one another. In other words, it is
an approach that fits exceptionally well with those w h o are trying to blame
the victim and leave untouched all those others w h o hold real power.
At the center of this experience comes the staggering fact of increased
polarization between the rich and poor, ever since the sixteenth-century
European intellectuals began to take notice of the disparities between civ-
ilizations, nations, and cultures and established the long and continuous
discourse of "the rise of the West." Sociology was in this sense a more
developed expression of this discourse, one that devised a method by which
it could express the assumed superiority and distinctiveness of European
history in relation to "the rest" (Stuart Hall et al. 1996). Sociology thus
played a significant role in explaining the ever more apparent reality of a
world differentiated between the haves and have-nots.
Hence, it was only in the intellectual context of claiming that these units
are autonomous from one another, having their o w n trajectories and his-
tories, that the comparative approach emerged. In this sense, the method
itself was highly political in nature. By positing social units as distinct and
separable from other units and placing them in a comparative framework,
it eliminates any possibility for a critical investigation of the power relations
between populations. By constructing social units into types and essences
and characterizing them as separate and autonomous units that could be
set side by side and compared one to the other, it negates any critical
evaluation that has an interest in demonstrating the exploitative nature
between different groups (Roseberry 1992). In this way it functions to elim-
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 283

mate and erase the histories of colonial conquest. The disruptive forces
unleashed by the colonial experience and the consequence that it had on
the colonized are thus left unexplored. They are left unexplored not by
accident but by virtue of a type of analysis that divides histories into sep-
arate, self-enclosed individualities. As Charles Horton Cooley recognized a
long time ago, "Our life is all one human whole, and if we are to have any
real knowledge of it we must see it as such. If we cut it up it dies in the
8
process" (1964: x x i ) .
But as Walter Mignolo argued recently, "the good news is that we have
other choices" (Mignolo 2 0 0 0 : 8). We are beginning to see the emergence
of an alternative approach that breaks radically from this presentation.
Writers like Said and Wallerstein have made their greatest contributions by
demonstrating that what has been posited as separate units have, in fact,
been closely interconnected historically by power relations. They have ex-
plored the systematic connections between social units, demonstrating that
a particular way of life in one region of the globe is intricately tied in
complex ways to other regions and that we find in region after region
examples of intercultural exchanges. But most of all, these recent theorists
are valuable because they get beyond the violent polarities that sociologists
have continuously incorporated into their writings and in powerful ways
attempted to understand cultural and social forms for what they are: every-
thing but monolithic, clearly differentiated and precise, neatly bounded
units. In this way units like society, nation, and civilizations cannot be
understood as autonomous entities, conceivable independently from other
units. They also cannot be understood as externally "interacting" on one
another. As Derek Sayer reminds us in his discussion of Marx's categories
of wage labor and capital, "Each is what it is only by virtue of its relation
to the other, and must be conceptualized accordingly" (1987: 19).
Throughout it all is the belief that these radically different civilizations,
nations, and cultures have a common history, so their stories are best told
together. "It is obliging us to re-read," as Stuart Hall claims, "the very
binary form in which the colonial encounter has for so long itself been
represented. It obliges us to re-read the binaries as forms of transcultura-
tion, of cultural translation, destined to trouble the here/there cultural bi-
naries for ever" (1996: 26). I believe that this may offer us the opportunity
to "decolonize" knowledge itself.

NOTES
1. "Coloniality of difference" is a term that Mignolo appropriates from Qui-
jano's notion of "coloniality of power." See Anibal Quijano, "Coloniality of Power
and Democracy in Latin America," in Ana Maria Merlo (1993).
2. "The things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices,
historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its
fidelity to some great original" (Said 1979: 21) (emphasis added).
284 The Aftermath of the Colonial System

3. I'd like to thank the late Terence K. Hopkins for his lively discussions with
me on this theme.
4. Quoted in Buell (1994: 129).
5. Ann Laura Stoler (1992) makes a similar point.
6. See Clifford (1988) for this argument. I have relied heavily on Clifford's re-
view of Said in this section of the chapter.
7. This may also hold true for earlier periods as well. Janet Abu-Lughod, in her
book Before European Hegemony (1989), makes a convincing argument that there
was a world-system in the thirteenth century that linked the major civilizations of
the time into a common network of production and exchange.
8. I am attracted to Cooley's idea of the "Looking Glass Self" and would like
to borrow some of his terminology for my own project. Look at his Social Organ-
ization (1964), especially pp. 5, 36-37, 182, 184. "Each to each a looking-glass,
Reflects the other that doth pass."

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1250-1350. New York: Oxford University Press.
Buell, Frederick. 1994. National Culture and the New Global System. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Minneap-
olis: University of Minnesota Press.
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnogra-
phy, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cooley, Charles Horton. 1964. Social Organization. New York: Schocken Books.
Hall, Stuart. 1996. "When Was 'the Post-Colonial'? Thinking at the Limit." In Ian
Chambers and Lidia Curti, eds., The Post-Colonial Question: Common
Skies, Divided Horizons. London: Routledge, pp. 242-260.
Hall, Stuart, et al. (1996). Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. Lon-
don: Blackwell Press.
Hirsch, Eric. 1990. "From Bones to Betelnuts: Processes of Ritual Transformation
and the Development of 'National Culture' in Papua New Guinea." Man
25: 18-34.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72(3).
(Summer): 22-49.
. 2000. The Clash of Civilizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kasler, Dirk. 1979. Max Weber: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Merlo, Ana Maria. 1993. "Allez enfants, paria di Francia." II Manifesto 14.
Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. Local Histories? Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern
Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Roseberry, William. 1989. Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, His-
tory, and Political Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
. 1992: "The Challenge of Anthropology." Social Research 59(4) (Winter):
841-858.
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Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

. 1989. "Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors." Critical
Inquiry 15 (Winter): 205-225.
. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books.
Sayer, Derek. 1987. The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytic Foundations of
Historical Materialism. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 1992. "Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities
and the Boundaries of Rule." In Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and
Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 319-352.
. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Thomas, Nicholas. 1992. "Substantivization and Anthropological Discourse." In
James G. Carrier ed., History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology.
Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 64-85.
. 1994. Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Government, and Travel.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974a. The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge: Cam-
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. 1974b. The Modern World System. New York: Academic Press.
Weber, Max. 1946. "The Social Psychology of World Religion." In C. Wright
Mills, ed., From Max Weber. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 2 6 7 -
301.
. 1949a. "The Logics of the Cultural Sciences." In Max Weber, Methodology
of the Social Sciences. New York: Free Press, pp. 189-266.
. 1949b. "The Meaning of 'Ethical Neutrality' in Sociology and Economics."
In Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences. New York: Free Press,
pp. 1-47.
Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
 Index
Abstraction, 159, 161, 162. See also
Knowledge
Accumulation: and neoliberal globali-
zation, 117; nineteenth-century
structure of, 104, 105, 107, 108,
110; and postcolonialism, 177, 179-
80, 181; primitive, 239, 243; and
Wallerstein, 175
Acheson, Dean, 12
Adams, Brook, 108
Afghanistan, 112
Africa: and Brazil, 251-64; and coloni-
alism, 220, 222, 223, 253; and Eu-
rope, 253; and migration, 82; and
state, 40; as symbol, 253; and Wal-
lerstein, 276; and war, 227
Africans, 252
Agriculture, 127-28, 135, 216, 225,
227
Algeria, xxxvi
Althusser, Louis, 238
Americas, xii
Anglo-American League, 6
Anthropology, 59, 259-60. See also
Social science
Anti-imperialism, 106
Antisystemic historical process, 120;
defined, 104
Antisystemic movement, xxxvi-xxxvii,
21-31, 48, 65-68, 79-87, 103-21;
defined, 104. See also Social move-
ment; Women's movement
Apartheid, global, 86
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 176, 180
Arabs, xii, xiii
Arrighi, Giovanni, 5, 51, 104, 105,
109, 162
Asad, Talal, 175
Asia, xxxiii, 106, 220, 222, 223, 227,
228
Assimilation, 222
Atlantic Charter, 224
Autonomy, 176, 242, 276
Bach, Robert, 173-74
Bacon, Robert, 8
Bahia, 254, 255, 258, 261, 262
Baku Congress, xxxvi
Bandung Conference, 224
Bangladesh, 81, 82
Banker, investment, 4, 7, 11, 17-18
Bantu people, 259, 262
Barrett, Michele, 200
Basch, Linda, 59
Baumol, William J., 37
Benedict, Ruth, 262
288
Benefit, unemployment, 83
Bennett, Judith, 200
Berlin Blockade, xxxv
Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, 22, 23, 25
Biggart, Nicole, 49
Binarism, 177, 181, 182, 275, 277,
283
Biology, 153, 154, 165, 199-200. See
also Science
Black market, 83
Blackness, 253
Blacks, xiv; and Brazil, 252-53, 254,
255-56, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262,
263; and labor, 255-56; and New
Deal, 12
Blanc, Cristina Szanton, 59
Body, 148, 149, 153, 154, 155, 161,
164-65, 166, 252. See also Embodi-
ment
Boer War, 6
Boone, Catherine, 40
Border, xiii, xv, 83, 267
Boundary, 81, 156, 157, 158, 160
Boundedness, 173
Brain drain, 84
Brandeis, Louis, 10
Braudel, Fernand, 8, 132, 133
Brazil, 117, 251-64
Bretton Woods, 109, 113, 224, 225
Brezhnev Doctrine, xxxiv
Bromley, Simon, 239
Biicher, Karl, 206
Bundy, Harvey, 8
Bureaucracy, public state, 17
Bush, George H. W., 16, 113, 114
Bush, George W., 16
Butler, Judith, 178, 186, 187
Canada, 117
Candomble, 257, 258, 259, 262
Capital, 53; anonymity of, 245; bifur-
cating flows of, 247; determinacy of,
174-75; monism of, 176, 177, 181
Capitalism: and antisystemic historical
process, 104; casino, 113; and colo-
nialism, xii, xx; and coloniality, xxi;
and cosmopolis, 240; and develop-
ment, xxiii, xxvi; and dual-systems
Index
theory, 200; and economy, xxi; and
externalized costs, 138, 139; and
gendering, 206-8; and history, 175;
and holism, 173; and homogeniza-
tion, 176; and households, 129; and
inter-state system, 80; and law, 246;
and mass-murder, xxxviii; and mi-
gration, 67, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86-87;
and modernization theory, 25; and
National Security State Corporate
Complex, 9; and patriarchy, 186,
187, 209; and postcolonialism, 177,
179-80; and second modernity, xiii;
as self-referential, 245; spectral, 240;
success of, 103; and transnational-
ism, 57, 58; and Weber, 271, 272;
and women, 140-41, 201; and
world-economy, 275; and world-
system, 25-26; and world-systems
analysis, 171
Caribbean, 108, 222, 252
Carnegie, Andrew, 7
Carnival, 257-58
Carosso, Vincent, 11
Carver, Terrell, The Post-modern
Marx, 240
Castells, Manuel, 48
Catholic Church, 10, 262
Causality, 183, 271, 272
Causation, 31
Central America, xiii, 108. See also
Latin America
Central Intelligence Agency, 8, 11
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 176
Chamberlain, Joseph, 6
Change, 25, 147, 155, 161-62, 163,
165, 208
Chatfield, Charles, 54
Chatterjee, Partha, 277-78, 279
Chiapas, xxvi-xxvii
Children, 105, 128
Chilton, Patrick, 54
Chin, Robert, 25
China, 109, 225; and Communism,
xxxiii; and gross domestic product
per capita, 35-36; and income ine-
quality, 38-39; and Soviet Union,
xxxv
Index
Choate, Joseph, 8
Choderow, Nancy, 200
Christianity, xii. See also Religion
Citizenship: and class, 30; and coloni-
alism, 223; and conformity, 238;
and cosmopolis, 240; economic, 49;
and migration, 80; and Ong, 61
Civilization, xii, 25, 220, 238, 268,
' 270
Clark, Grenville, 8, 17
Class, xxxviii, 201; and citizenship, 30;
and development, xxvi; and elites,
26; and Great Britain, 106-7; and
oppression, 26; and transnational-
ism, 50, 57, 58; and United States,
xiv, 110; and vertical struggle, 26;
and women, 151, 154
Clifford, James, 280
Code, 161, 246
Cold War, xxxiii; end of, 115, 228;
and military, 13; and National Secu-
rity State Corporate Complex, 9;
and United States, 225; and world-
system, 11
Cold War Committee on the Present
Danger, 18
Colonialism: and accumulation, 108;
and Africa, 222, 253; and binarism,
283; and capitalism, xx; and Chat-
terjee, 277; and civilization, 220;
and coloniality, xix-xx; and compar-
ative method, 282, 283; and devel-
opment, 216; and difference, 221,
267; and economic dependency, 118
19; and economy, 220-23; and
Europe, xiv; and Fourteen Points,
108; global, xxi; and Great Britain,
105, 106; and hierarchy, 221; and
independence movements, 103, 104,
106, 107, 109-12; internal, xiv; and
Japan, 228; and knowledge, xii, 238;
and labor, xii, xx, 222; and law,
238; and literacy, 239-40, 245; and
migration, 60; and modernity, 2 3 7 -
38; and national society, 279; and
post-World War II period, xxxvi;
and science, 220; and technology,
220; and Thomas, 278; and transna-
289
tionalism, 60; and universalism, 221;
and wage, 222; and Wallerstein, 276;
and women, 202
Coloniality, xiv, xv, xix-xxi, xxii
Commodity: and Black cultures, 252;
and Brazil, 256; and labor co-
optation, 116
Commodity chain: and cotton, 107;
defined, 131-32; and Great Britain,
105-6; and transnationalism, 48, 6 8 -
69; and women, 128, 133, 134, 135-
41, 142
Communism, xxxii-xxxiii; and Great
Britain, 107; and income inequality,
41; and Marshall Plan, xxxv; and
modernization, 225; and United
States, 110, 111. See also Socialism
Communist Party, 119
Comparison. See Method, classical
comparative
Complexity, organized, 22
Concept, dichotomizing, 280. See also
Knowledge
Concrete, 159, 162. See also Abstrac-
tion; Knowledge
Congress of Industrial Organizations,
10
Connectedness, 279
Conservatism, 51-52
Containment, xxxiv
Context, 151, 152, 165, 166, 187
Cooley, Charles Horton, 283
Cooper, Frederick, 221
Core: and Hopkins, 181; and labor,
174; and migration, 79, 80, 82, 83,
85, 86, 87; and postcolonialism, 178;
and U.S. hegemony, 117
Corn Laws, 216
Corporation, 9, 17, 18, 53, 140
Cosmopolis, 240
Cost, externalized, 138, 139
Cotton, 105-6, 107
Covering law paradigm, 159, 184
Cox, Robert, 56-57
Cuba, xxvi, xxxvi, 29, 225
Culture: and development, 274; and
interconnectedness, 275-76, 277,
282; and modernization, 274; and
290
postcolonialism, 1 7 6 ; and race, xiv;
and Said, 2 8 0 - 8 1 ; and transnational-
ism, 5 1 , 6 0
Currency, 3 4 , 2 1 7
Cybernetics, 24
Debs rebellion, 9
Debt: alternatives to, 2 3 0 ; and free en-
terprise imperialism, 1 2 0 ; and neoli-
beral globalization, 1 1 7 ; and Third
World, 2 2 8
Decolonization, xiii, xix-xxii; and mi-
gration, 8 5 ; post-World War II,
xxxvi; and social change, 2 2 7 ; and
transnationalism, 5 0 , 2 2 8 ; and
United States, 2 2 4
Dehio, Ludwig, 6
Democracy: and Brazil, 2 5 5 , 2 6 0 - 6 1 ;
and development, 3 9 , 4 0 ; and migra-
tion, 8 5 ; success of, 1 1 9 ; and World
War n , 2 2 7
Dependency theory, 1 7 3 , 2 4 4 , 2 7 5
Depression, 4 , 5 , 3 8 , 2 1 8 - 1 9
Derivatives, growth of, 14
Derrida, Jacques, 2 3 8 ; Spectres of
Marx, 2 4 0 , 2 4 2 , 2 4 3
Determinism, 1 7 3 - 7 5 , 1 7 8
Developed world, 2 4 4
Developing world, 2 2 8
Development: and colonialism, 2 1 6 ,
2 2 1 - 2 3 ; and culture, 2 7 4 ; and de-
mocracy, 3 9 , 4 0 ; and Europe, 4 0 ,
1 0 4 ; and free enterprise imperialism,
1 1 6 ; and gender, 1 8 4 - 8 5 ; and indus-
try, 3 9 ; and Latin America, 4 0 , 4 1 ;
and migration, 8 0 , 8 7 ; myth of, xxii-
xxvii; and periphery, 1 1 5 ; and state,
3 9 - 4 1 ; theory of, 2 2 0 ; and Third
World, 1 1 2 , 1 1 5 , 2 2 4 - 2 5 ; and
United States, 1 0 9 - 1 2 , 2 2 4 - 2 5 ;
women in, 1 8 4 - 8 5
Developmentalism, 1 7 5 , 1 8 9 , 2 2 6 - 2 8 ,
229
Difference: and classical comparative
method, 2 7 0 , 2 7 5 ; and colonialism,
xv, 2 2 1 , 2 6 7 ; and feminism, 1 7 6 ,
1 7 7 ; and gender, 1 8 6 ; and global re-
sistance, 2 4 2 ; and postperspectives,
Index
1 7 7 - 7 8 ; and unit of analysis, 2 7 7 ;
and women, 1 5 0 - 5 1 , 1 5 2 , 1 7 7 , 1 8 5 -
86, 190
Differentiation: gender, 1 5 2 , 1 6 6 , 1 8 8 ;
and women, 1 9 0
Dirlik, Arif, 1 7 9 - 8 0 , 1 8 1
Discount rate, 1 1 5
Distribution, and commodity chains,
69
Diversity, 2 7 5
Dollar, 3 5 , 1 1 2 , 1 1 3 , 1 1 7 - 1 8
Dollarization, 70
Dollarocracy, 1 1 9
Domesticity, 2 0 4 , 2 0 5
Domination, 64
Donovan, Wild Bill, 8
Dualism, 2 7 5 . See also Binarism
Dual-systems theory, 1 8 6 , 1 8 7 , 2 0 0
Du Bois, W.E.B., xxxvi
Dulles, John Foster, xxxiv
Durkheim, Emile, 2 6 8 , 2 7 3 , 2 7 4
East, 2 7 7 , 2 7 8
East Asia, 2 2 8
ECLA. See Economic Commission for
Latin America
Ecology, 8 1 - 8 2 , 8 7 , 1 2 1 , 1 2 8 , 1 3 9
Economic Commission for Latin Amer-
ica, 2 2 0
Economics, 2 3 , 2 2 0
Economy, 1 4 1 , 2 1 5 - 3 0 ; and Brazil,
2 5 6 , 2 5 7 ; and capitalism, xxi; and
colonialism, 2 2 0 - 2 3 ; and develop-
ment, xxiii, xxv-xxvi; and gender,
1 8 3 ; and gendering, 2 0 6 - 8 ; and
households, 1 3 0 ; inequalities in, 3 3 -
4 2 ; and Japan, 1 1 4 - 1 5 ; and mass-
murder, xxxviii; and migration, 7 9 ,
8 0 , 8 1 , 8 3 , 8 4 , 8 5 ; and moderniza-
tion theory, 2 5 ; national, 2 1 9 ; nine-
teenth century versus twentieth
century, xxxviii-xxxix; political, 2 0 6 -
7; and Polanyi, 3 - 6 ; self-contained,
2 1 9 ; and self-regulating market, 3 - 4 ;
and society, 1 3 3 ; and Third World,
2 1 5 - 1 6 ; and transnationalism, 5 0 ;
and United States, xxxii, 3 - 1 8 , 1 0 3 -
2 1 ; and unit of analysis, 1 5 7 - 5 8 ;
Index
and Weber, 271, 272; world, 33-42,
130; and world-system, 25-26
Education, 84, 139, 261
Efficiency, 108
Egalitarianism, 59
Elite, 26, 66, 209
Embodiment, 147, 148, 153, 161. See
also Body
Empire. See Hegemony; Imperialism
Empowerment, 148, 149, 189
Enlightenment, 176, 178, 220
Entitlement, 86
Entrepreneur: and income-pooling, 70;
and migration, 84; and transnation-
alism, 50, 54, 66; and women, 189-
90
Environment, 81-82, 87, 121, 128,
139
EOI. See Export oriented industrializa-
tion
Epistemology: and classical compara-
tive method, 275; and feminism, 187-
88; and gender, 204-5; positivist,
155-56; and Said, 280; and unit of
analysis, 157; and women, 190; and
world-systems analysis, 162, 184.
See also Knowledge
Equilibrium theory, 217
Essentialism, 184, 200
Ethnic cleansing, xxxvii, xxxviii
Ethnicity, 53, 263. See also Race
Ethnic minority, 81
Eurocentrism, xi, xii, xv; and classical
comparative method, 275; and
postcolonialism, 176, 180, 245; and
sociology, 282
Europe, xiv; and Africa, 253; and
Black culture, 252; and Brazil, 257;
and Communism, xxxii-xxxiii; and
comparative method, 282; decenter-
ing of, 178; and development, 40,
104, 111; dominance of,"xxxv-xxxvi;
and Great Britain, 217; and internal
colonialism, xiv; and labor, xxi; and
migration, 84; and Stoler, 279; and
transnationalism, 54; and U.S. he-
gemony, 104, 114, 115; and Waller-
stein, 276
291
European Economic Community, 113
European Union, 115
Evangelista, Mathew, 54
Evans, Peter, 58
Evers, Hans Dieter, 184
Everyday life, 132. See also Experi-
ence, lived
Evolution: historical, 176; and world-
system, 26
Exchange rate, 34, 113
Expenditure: per capita, 39; social, 3 9 -
40
Experience, lived, 147, 148, 152, 164,
165, 185
Export, and Great Britain, 105-6. See
also Trade
Export oriented industrialization, 112
Feminism: and causality, 183; and dif-
ference, 176, 177; and embodiment,
161; and epistemology, 187-88; and
inequality, 199-200; and intersec-
tionality, 183; and labor, 185; and
Marxism, 200; and multiplicity, 163;
and postcolonialism, 178, 183-89;
and power, 163; and race, 177; and
relationality, 161, 165; and science,
161; and transnationalism, 64; and
unit of analysis, 161-62; and world-
systems analysis, 147-48, 153, 156-
57, 162, 171, 184, 202
Feudalism, 203
Fiji, 278
First World, 177
Fordism, 110, 111, 116, 226, 227
Forsythe, Nancy, 172, 182, 183, 184,
186, 187, 189
Forum, supranational, 57
Foucault, Michel, 60, 61, 62
Foundationalism, 175, 177
Fourteen Points, 104, 108-9
France, 217, 221, 222
Frankfurter, Felix, 10
Free enterprise, 109
Free trade. See Trade
French Regulationists, 110
French Revolution, 28, 29
French West Africa, 222
292
Friedman, Milton, 230
Fuyuge, 278
G7 forum, 119
Gallagher, John, 104
Gender: and biology, 165; and coloni-
alism, xx; and development, 184-85;
and difference, 186; and differentia-
tion, 152, 155, 166; and economy,
183; and epistemology, 204-5; and
hierarchy, 202; and history, 152,
153; and paradox, 149-51, 163-66;
and sex, 149; and transnationalism,
50, 53, 64; and women, 188; and
world-systems analysis, 184, 201-3.
See also Feminism; Sex/gender sys-
tem; Women
Gendering, 204, 205, 206-8; defined,
202-3
Generalization, 159, 224. See also
Knowledge
General System Theory, 22-23, 24, 31
Genovese, Eugene, 29
Geoculture, 178
German-Jews, 10
Germany, xxxi-xxxii, 9, 218
Globalism: and labor, 238; neoliberal,
116
Globalization, 3-18; and Black culture,
253, 263; and migration, 84, 85;
and nation-state, 239; nature of, 230;
and neoliberalism, 116, 117, 120,
228-29; and Ong, 60-61; opposition
to, 121; and politics, 241; and trans-
nationalism, 58-59, 60-61; and
United States, 109; and Washington
Consensus, 109; and welfare system,
86; and women, 185
Global versus local, 238, 241, 243,
247
Gold, 217, 218
Gold Coast, 222
Government: and Brazil, 255, 260, 261;
and gendering, 208; and self-
determination, 224; and transnation-
alism, 53
Gramsci, Antonio, xv, 56-57, 59, 60,
175
Index
Great Britain: and agriculture, 216;
and class, 106-7; and colonialism,
105, 106, 221; and commodity
chains, 105-6; and Communism,
107; and empire, 4; and Europe,
217; and European Union, 115; and
free trade, 103, 104-6, 107, 216;
and hegemony, xxxii, 216-17; and
industrialism, 105, 106; and inter-
state system, 105; and labor, 105-6,
107; and military, 7; and moderniza-
tion, 226; and periphery, 105, 106;
and protectionism, 216; rivals to,
107, 108; and shipyard timber, 27;
and slavery, 105, 106; and United
States, xxxi-xxxii, 4, 6-7, 8, 107,
218, 223
Great Depression, 4, 38, 218-19
Greenspan, Alan, 118
Grewal, Inderpal, 177
Grosfoguel, Ramon, 62
Gross domestic product, 35, 36-37
Gross domestic product per capita, 3 5 -
36
Gross national product, 36, 37, 219
Gross national product per capita, 37,
38
Group, 245
Groupism, 51
Growth, theory of, 219-20
GST. See General System Theory
Guha, Ranajit, 175, 176
Gulag, xxxvii, xxxviii
Gypsies, xiii
Haiti, 28
Hall, Stuart, 283
Hamilton, Alexander, 217
Haraway, Donna, xii, 160, 161
Hartmann, Heidi, 200
Harvey, David, 172
Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, 218
Hayek, Friedrich von, 230; The Road
to Serfdom, 229
Health, 128, 139, 140
Hegemony, and commodity chains, 69;
and Great Britain, 216-17; and mi-
gration, 60, 62, 63; and postcoloni-
Index
alism, 181; practices against, 58, 59,
62; and stability, 55; and transna-
tionalism, 53, 54, 55, 57, 60, 62, 63;
and United States, xxxi-xxxv, 3, 5-
9, 104, 106-9, 112, 113-15, 117,
120, 223-26
Herskovits, Melville, 262, 263
Heterogeneity, 177, 270
Heuristics, 161, 162, 164
Hierarchy, 202, 204, 221
Hilferding, Rudolf, 5
Hirsch, Eric, 278
Hispanics, xiii
Historical system, 25
Historiography: revisionist, xxxiii; and
Subaltern Studies Group, 175, 176
History: from above, 175; and Berta-
lanffy, 23; and body, 161; and capi-
talism, 175; developmentalist, 175;
double register of, 132; and evolu-
tion, 176; and gender, 152, 153; and
knowledge production, 159; and
purchasing power parities data, 34,
35; and Wallerstein, 162; and
women, 152, 153, 154, 165-66, 200
Hobson, John, 5
Holism, 22, 23, 24, 173-74, 188
Holland, 217
Holocaust, xxxvii-xxxviii
Homestead, 9
Homogenization, 174, 176, 177
Hopkins, Terence: and case, 179; and
commodity chains, 131, 132, 133,
134; and core, 181; and feminism,
183; and Forsythe, 184; and holism,
173; and knowledge production,
159, 160; and periphery, 181; and
postcolonialism, 179; and relational-
ity, 160; and sex/gender system, 1 6 3 -
64; and unit of analysis, 157-58
Household, 129-31; and agriculture,
135; female-headed, 139; and labor,
129, 135, 202; and men, 140; mi-
grant, 70; semiproletarian, 134, 136,
138, 142; and transnationalism, 48,
50; and women, 130, 131, 135, 136-
39, 140, 141, 202; and world-
systems analysis, 127, 128, 188-89
293
Householding, 69-71; denned, 69
House of Morgan, 6-7, 8, 10
Human rights, 121
Huntington, Samuel P., 268-69, 270
Idealism, 157
Ideal-type, 271
Identity, 60, 63, 176, 201, 206, 207,
245
Ideology, 237, 238, 240, 241, 243,
272. See also Knowledge
Idiographic perspective, 21, 26
Immigrant, 65-66. See also Migration
Imperialism: and classical comparative
method, 275; dynastic, 218; free en-
terprise, 116, 120; free trade, 217;
and Great Britain, 103, 104-6, 107;
and United States, xiii-xiv, 107,
108, 109. See also Hegemony
Import-substitution industrialization,
111, 112, 219, 220
Income: and households, 129; inequali-
ties in, 3342, 121; and tax, 83; and
world-systems analysis, 70
Income pooling, 70, 130, 131, 202
Independence, 1 0 3 , 1 0 4 , 1 0 6 , 1 0 7 , 1 0 9 -
12, 118-19, 120
Index, of real economic growth, 34
India, 222
Indians, xiv
Indonesia, 222
Industrialism: and Great Britain, 105,
106; and protectionism, 217; and
United States, 112
Industrialist, 7; allied, 11, 18
Industrialization: export oriented, 112;
import-substitution, 111, 112, 219,
220
Industrial Revolution, 105, 200
Industry: cottage, 135, 136-39, 140,
141; and development, 39; and la-
bor, 225; and military, 11; and
modernization, 227; and Sun Belt,
10
Inequality: alternatives to, 230; and
commodity chains, 132; and femi-
nism, 199-200; global, 228; and
women, 199-200
294
Institution: and power relations, 49;
study of, 24
Interconnectedness, 275-76, 277, 282,
283
International Monetary Fund, xxxvi;
and liquidity, 113; and neoliberal-
ism, 229; and periphery, 118, 119;
and regulation, 224-25; and sover-
eignty, 116, 117; and structural ad-
justment program, 115, 228; and
Washington Consensus, 109
International Relations, 51, 52-59, 64
Internet, 53
Intersectionality, 149, 151, 158, 163,
164, 183. See also Relationality
Inter-state system, 79, 80, 81, 83, 105
Interventionism, 4
IR. See International Relations
Iran, 112
Irish, xiv, 10
Israel, 112
Italians, 10
Italy, 9
Jamaica, 222
Japan: and colonialism, 228; and de-
velopment, 111; and Great Britain,
218; and Korean War, xxxv; and
military, 9; and United States, 104,
112, 113, 114-15, 117
Japanese Security Pact, 224
Jews, xii, xiii
Justice, 242, 243, 247
Kai, Chen, 38
Kant, Immanuel, 55-56, 242, 243
Kaplan, Caren, 177
Kasler, Dirk, 270-71
Kearney, Michael, 59
Keckec, Margaret, 54
Kennan, George, xxxiv
Keohane, Robert, 53
Keynes, John Maynard, 219
Keynesianism, 14, 110, 111, 116, 229
Kinship, 154, 176
Knowledge, xi-xix; and classical com-
parative method, 275; and colonial-
ism, 238; and multiplicity, 162;
Index
partiality of, 159; and power, 160,
161, 163, 216; production of, 153,
156, 159, 160; and relationality,
159, 162, 163, 164; and Said, 280;
situated, 152, 156, 159, 163; sociol-
ogy of, 160; subaltern, xv-xvi; sub-
jugated, xv; and transnationalism,
51; and unit of analysis, 157, 161;
and women, 147, 150, 152, 153,
154-55, 160-63, 166, 184, 190,
204-5. See also Ideology; Science
Knox, Philander, 7
Koestler, Arthur, xxxi
Korean War, xxxv, 12, 227
Kowaleski, Maryanne, 200
Kravis, Irving B., 38
Kuznets, Simon, 219
Labor: and accumulation, 108; and Af-
rica, 222; and agitation, 29; and ag-
riculture, 225; and Blacks, 255-56;
and children, 105; and colonialism,
xii, xx, 222; and commodity chains,
131, 132, 133, 134; and Commu-
nism, xxxiii; and co-optation, 110,
116; and core, 174; democratization
of, 9, 10; division of, 48, 64, 136,
185, 225; domestic, 184; and Eu-
rope, xxi; exploitation of, 110; and
feminism, 185; and free enterprise
imperialism, 120; and globalism,
238; and Great Britain, 105-6, 107;
and households, 129, 135, 202; and
industry, 225; and migration, 10,
66, 79, 80, 82, 85, 86-87; mobility
of, 42; nonwage, 130, 132, 137; and
oppression, 26-29; productive versus
unproductive, 184; sexual division
of, 48, 64, 136, 185; and transna-
tionalism, 48, 49, 51-52, 53, 59;
and United States, 110, 225; unpaid,
130, 188; and wage, 135; and
WASP establishment, 7; and women,
105, 127-28, 131, 135-41, 188-89,
200, 202, 204, 206, 207, 2 4 1 ^ 2 ;
and world-economy, 12; and world-
system, 26
Labor movement, 58
 Index
Laissez-faire, 216-20
Latin America: and Africa, 251; and
development, 40, 41, 220; and dol-
larization, 70; and Great Depression,
219; and United States, xiii-xiv, 108;
and war, 227; and world order, 237
Law: and capitalism, 246; and coloni-
alism, 238; global, 247; and migra-
, tion, 83, 85, 86; suspension of, 246
Lawyer, corporate, 4, 7, 11, 17-18
Lennon, Kathleen, 187-88
Lerner, Gerda, 200
Less-developed countries, 80
Liberalism, 3, 80, 84, 86. See also
Neoliberalism
List, Friedrich, 217
Literacy, 139, 227, 237, 238, 239-40,
245, 246, 247
Loan, short-term syndicated, 112
Location, 162
Logics, 178
Lorber, Judith, 153; The Paradoxes of
Gender, 149, 150
Lovett, Robert, 8
Luce, Henry, xxxi
Mackenzie, Iain, 243, 247
Maddison, Angus, 34, 35, 36-37
Mahler, Sarah, 62
Malaysia, 222
Malnutrition, 128, 139
Manufacture, 227
Marginalism, 217
Market: free, 108; and periphery, 110;
self-regulating, 3-4, 218; and soci-
ety, 230; and United States, 108
Marriage, 206
Marshall, Alfred, 217
Marshall Plan, xxxiv-xxxv, 225
Martin, William G., 131
Marx, Karl, 239, 243
Marxism, 209; and feminism, 200; and
Hilferding, 5; and migration, 60;
and success of capitalism, 103; and
transnationalism, 57, 60, 64
Master decoder, 161
Materialism, 157, 159
McClintock, Anne, 180
295
McCloy, John J., 8
McCormick, Thomas J., 108
McGuire, Randall H., 131
Media, xxi
Medicine, 154
Men, 140, 207
Mercantilism, 217
Merrill Lynch, 15
Metanarrative, 185
Method, classical comparative, 269-83
Mexico, 115, 117, 228
Miami, Florida, 66-67
Middle Ages, 203-4
Middle East, 13-14, 15-16, 112, 219,
227
Mies, Maria, 141, 201
Mignolo, Walter, xii, 51, 238, 240,
267, 283
Migration: as antisystemic, 79-87; and
capitalism, 67, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86-
87; and labor, 10, 79, 80, 82, 85,
86-87; replacement, 67; and
transnationalism, 50, 51, 52, 59-64,
65-68, 85
Miles, Rosalind, 200
Military: and Brazil, 255; and Cold
War, 13; and coloniality, xxi; and
Great Britain, 7; and high finance, 5;
and industry, 11; and Korean War,
12; and Reagan, 14; and United
States, 3, 7-8, 9, 108, 111, 115; and
world-system, 11
Milner, Alfred, 6
Mina, 259
Mises, Ludwig von, 229
Mitchell, Juliet, Women's Estate, 200
Mobility, 42, 53
Modernity: alternative, 60; and Brazil,
257; and Chatterjee, 278; and colo-
nialism, 237-38; and coloniality, xv,
xxii; first, xii, xiii; second, xiii, xiv;
and West, 272, 273
Modernization: and Brazil, 255-56;
and culture, 274; and Great Britain,
226; and industry, 227; and trade,
226-27; and United States, 224,
225, 226
296 Index

Modernization theory, 24, 25, 173, Newly industrializing countries, 112

244 New Right, 14
Modleski, Tania, 189 New World, 251, 252, 253
Monetarism, 229 Nicholson, Linda, 187
Money market, 15 Nigeria, 222
Monism, of capital, 176, 177, 181 Nitze, Paul, 12
Monroe Doctrine, 107 Nixon, Richard, 13
Movement, antisystemic. See Antisys- Nomothetic perspective, 21, 23, 24, 26
temic movement Normativity, 246
Mulford, David C, 16 North Atlantic Treaty Organization,
Multi-culturalism, 261 xxxv, 224
Multiplicity, 147, 148, 153, 160, 162, Nye, Joseph, 53
163, 166, 179, 180
Murphy, Craig, xxiii Objectivity, 238
Mutual funds, 15 Occidentalism, xi, xii-xiii
Occupation, 206, 207
Nationalism, xv, 4, 63, 176, 218, 2 7 7 - Office of Strategic Services, 8, 11
78 O'Hanlon, Rosalind, 180
National liberation movement, 41 Oil. See Petroleum
National Security League, 7, 9, 10, 18 Old Left, 41
National Security State Corporate Olney, Richard, 7
Complex, 3-18 Ong, Aihwa, 51, 60
National society, 279 Ontology, 151, 155, 157, 162. See
Nation-state: and globalization, 239; also Knowledge
and hierarchy, 174; incorporation Open Door policy, 104, 108, 109
of, 174; invention of, 29; and migra- Open Shop, 9
tion, 80, 83, 84, 86; and production, Oppression, opposition to, 26-29, 103
245; and transnationalism, 55; and Organization, supranational, 57
world-systems theory, 173 Organization of American States, 224
Natural philosophy, 154 Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Navy League, 7 Countries, 112
Nazism, xxxvii Orientalism, 279
Negritude, 253 Other, xi, xiii, xiv, xvi-xvii; and Af-
Negrophilia, 261 rica, 253; and binarism, 177; and
Neo-Fordism, 226 Said, 279, 281; and sociology, 272,
Neo-Kantianism, 242, 243 273
Neoliberalism, 228-29
Network: and advocacy, 54, 58; kin- Pacific Islands, 108
ship, 176; labor/consumer, 58; and Packard, Randall, 221
migration, 84; and transnationalism, Pagnucco, Ron, 54
48-49, 51, 58 Pan-Africanism, 253
New Deal: and Blacks, 12; and Na- Paquette, Robert, 29
tional Security State Corporate Com- Parsons, Talcott, 273-74
plex, 12; undermining of, 13; and Patriarchy, 138, 185, 186, 187, 200,
U.S. hegemony, 3, 5; and WASP es- 205, 209
tablishment, 10-11; and World War Pattern variable, 273-74
II, 11 Periodization, 181
New Left, 30 Periphery: dependency of, 112; and de-
Index
velopment, 115; and Great Britain,
105, 106; and Hopkins, 181; and
markets, 110; and migration, 79, 80,
82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87; and neoli-
beral globalization, 117; and postco-
lonialism, 178; and resources, 110-
11; and sovereignty, 116; and
world-systems analysis, 174
Petras, Elisabeth, 79
Petrodollars, 13, 15, 112, 227
Petroleum, 13, 111, 112, 115, 116,
227
Pettman, Jan, 64
Philippine Islands, 108, 121
Philosophy, 23
Plattsburg preparedness movement, 7,
8 householding, 70; of knowledge,
Plaza Accord, 114
Polanyi, Karl, 3-6, 133, 218
Political practice, 182
Politics: and balance of power, 108;
and Brazil, 258; engagement in, 182;
and gendering, 204; and globaliza-
tion, 241; and migration, 81; and
modernization theory, 25; personal,
148, 149, 153; and postcolonialism,
182-83; reinvention of, 241, 242,
243; and transnationalism, 50, 51,
54, 55; and women, 148, 149, 153,
154, 201
Portugal, xii
Positivism, 23, 155-56
Postcolonialism: and capitalism, 177;
and difference, 176; and Eurocen-
trism, 245; and feminism, 178, 1 8 3 -
89; and justice, 248; and literacy,
239, 240; and poverty, 227; and
transnationalism, 50; and world-
systems analysis, 171, 175-83
Postmodernism, 176, 187, 240, 2 4 5 -
46
Poststructuralism, 64, 171
Post-theories, 171
Poverty: alternatives to, 230; and mi-
gration, 81, 82, 83; and postcolonial
world, 227; and progress, 228; and
Third World, 227; and women, 128,
138-39
297
Power: and antisystemic historical
process, 104; coloniality of, xii, xv;
and feminism, 163; and gender dif-
ferentiation, 166; and interconnect-
edness, 283; and knowledge, 160,
161, 163, 216; and knowledge pro-
duction, 159; and migration, 65-66;
and property, 238; and transnation-
alism, 53; and women, 156, 166,
190
Prakash, Gyan, 177, 178, 179
Prebisch, Raul, 220
Prigogine, Ilya, 31
Primordiality, 200
Production: and commodity chains, 68,
69, 132; and Great Britain, 105; and
153, 156, 159, 160; and transna-
tionalism, 48
Progress, 25, 79, 237
Proletarian class struggle, 106
Proletarianization, 27, 28, 135
Property, 238
Prosystemic countermovement, 103
Prosystemic historical process, 104
Protectionism: and Great Britain, 216;
and Great Depression, 218; and in-
dustrialism, 217; and migration, 86;
and military, 5; and self-regulating
market, 3-4; and United States, 114,
217. See also Trade
Psychology, 199
Purchasing power parities, 33, 34-36,
38
Putting-out system, 135, 136
Quijano, Anibal, xii, xx-xxi, 244
Race, 201; and Brazil, 251-64; and co-
lonialism, xx; and culture, xiv; and
feminism, 177; and knowledge, xii;
and Latin America, xiii; and local
culture, 252; and migration, 87; and
science, xiv; and transnationalism,
51; and United States, xiv; and
women, 150, 151
Racism, xxxviii; internationalization
298
of, 252; and neo-colonialism, xxxvi;
and Said, 269
Radicalization, 84
Rapoport, Anatol, 24
Rationalism, 176. See also Knowledge
Rationalization, industrial, 9, 10
Reagan, Ronald, 14, 113, 114
Realism, 52, 56
Recession, 227
Reformism, 80
Refugee, 61, 82, 87
Regan, Donald, 15
Reification, 182
Relation, lived, 185. See also Experi-
ence, lived
Relationality: and feminism, 161, 165;
and Forsythe, 184, 186; and gender
differentiation, 155; and knowledge,
159, 162, 163, 164; and researcher,
160; and woman, 154; and world-
systems analysis, 148, 153, 156,
158, 277. See also Intersectionality
Relativism, 178
Religion, 10, 257, 258, 259, 262, 271,
272
Remittance, 70
Remuneration, 27
Reproduction, 129, 131, 136, 141
Researcher, 156, 160
Resistance, 26-31, 28, 242. See also
Antisystemic movement
Resources: appropriation of, 238; com-
mand of, 34-35; and households,
135; and periphery, 110-11; and
pooling, 130, 131; transfer of, 42;
and United States, 116; and women,
137
Rhodes, Cecil, 6
Rivalry, intracore, 103, 109
Robinson, Ronald, 104
Robinson, William, 57, 58, 67
Rockefeller family, 10
Rollback, xxxiv
Roosevelt, Theodore, 16
Root, Elihu, 8, 17
Root, Elihu, Jr., 8, 17
Roseberry, William, 270
Rosenau, James, 55-56
Index
Round Table movement, 7-8
Rubin, Gayle, 153, 203
Ruon, Ren, 38
Russia, xxxii, xxxvi. See also Soviet
Union
Said, Edward, 175, 270, 279-81; Ori-
entalism, 269
Salvador da Bahia, 254
SAMA. See Saudi Arabian Monetary
Agency
SAP. See Structural adjustment pro-
gram
Sassen, Saskia, 49, 58
Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, 1 5 -
16
Sayer, Derek, 283
Schiller, Nina Glick, 59
Science: and antisystemic movements,
30-31; behavioral versus natural, 23;
and Brazil, 257; and colonialism,
220; and feminism, 161; limits of,
22; and race, xiv; and racism, 257;
and women, 148, 149, 153, 154,
165, 199-200. See also Knowledge
Scott, David, 175, 183
Scott, Joan, 153; Only Paradoxes to
Offer, 149, 150
Scribner, Sylvia, 237, 240
Second World, 111
Segregation, 256, 257. See also Race;
Racism
Semi-periphery: and migration, 80, 82,
83, 84, 85, 86, 87; and postcolonial-
ism, 178; and world-systems theory,
174
Settlement of Vienna, 216
Sex/gender system, 148-55, 163-64
Sex industry, 139
Sexism, xxxviii, 51, 139
Sex/sexuality, xx, 136, 139, 149. See
also Gender
Shohat, Ela, 180, 182, 183
Sikkink, Kathryn, 54
Sklair, Leslie, 58, 67
Slavery: and Black culture, 252; and
Brazil, 251, 253, 254, 256, 257, 259;
and Great Britain, 105, 106; resis-
Index
tance to, 28; and Saint Domingue,
29; and women, 137-38
Smith, Adam, 217
Smith, Jackie, 54
Smith, Joan, 130, 184, 188
Snow, C. P., 23
Social embeddedness, 68, 69, 70
Socialism, xxvi; as antisystemic pro-
cess, 103, 104, 106, 107, 109-12;
and dictatorships, 119; failure of,
118; and migration, 79-80; potential
of, 120; and Soviet Union, xxxii;
and United States, 110; and women,
199
Social mobilization, 181, 183
Social movement, 30, 58, 63. See also
Antisystemic movement; Women's
movement
Social research, 24
Social science, 267-83; and Brazil, 2 5 9 -
60, 261; and quantification, 23; and
structural-functionalism, 24; tradi-
tional, 267, 268, 269, 270, 272, 273;
and transnationalism, 59; and world-
systems analysis, 31, 189, 279, 282
Society: and biology, 165; and change,
25, 147, 155, 159, 161-62, 163,
165, 208; and economy, 133; and
knowledge production, 159; and
market, 230; multi-cultural, 86; and
state, 24; and status, 148, 149, 153,
154, 155, 161, 165; and transna-
tionalism, 48, 49, 57; as wholes, 25
Sociology, 272, 273, 282. See also So-
cial science
South, American, 12
South Africa, 6
South America, xiii
Southeast Asia Treaty Organization,
224
South Korea, 117
Sovereignty: and migration, 83, 85, 86;
and Ong, 61; and peripheral
nations, 116; and U.S. hegemony,
225
Soviet Empire, 16
Soviet Union, xxxii; and Communism,
xxxiii; fall of, 228; and Marshall
299
Plan, xxxiv-xxxv; and socialism,
109; and transnationalism, 54; and
United States, 225; and Yalta, xxxiv.
See also Russia
Space, 156, 162
Spain, xii, 6, 27
Spivak, Gayatri, 51, 241^12
Stability: and currency, 217; and he-
gemony, 55
Stagflation, 226
State: and Africa, 40; and commodity
chains, 69; and development, 39-41;
and households, 130; and ideology,
243; and International Relations, 52;
and migration, 80; regulatory role
of, 48; and society, 24; and transna-
tionalism, 53, 55, 57-58, 63, 64; as
unproblematic unity, 56; warfare-
welfare, 13
Statistics, 22
Stead, W. T., 6
Stimson, Henry, 8, 11, 16
Stoler, Ann Laura, 279
Strange, Susan, 113
Structural adjustment program, 115,
116, 117, 118, 119
Structural-functionalism, 24
Subalternity, xv, 63, 176, 179
Subaltern Studies Group, 175, 176
Subjectification, 238, 239, 247, 248
Subject position, 156
Sun Belt, 10
Systemic framework, 173
Taiwan, 112
Technology, 48, 220
Teleology, 31
Territoriality, 84, 176
Textiles, 136
Third World: and Cold War, 225; and
Communism, 225; and debt, 228;
and development, 112, 115, 224-25;
and economy, 215-16; and migra-
tion, 84; and modernity, 272-73;
and poverty, 227; and trade, 111-12;
and women, 140, 177
Thomas, Nicholas, 269, 278
Time, 24-25, 156, 162
300
TimeSpace, 27, 29, 31, 148, 165
Tonnies, Ferdinand, 268
Trade: and Africa, 258; and Brazil,
258; free, 103, 104-6, 107, 109,
216, 217; and Great Britain, 103,
104-6, 107; and Great Depression,
219; and modernization, 226-27;
and price, 34; and Third World, 111
12; and United States, 111, 114; and
World Trade Organization, 119. See
also Economy; Protectionism
Transnationalism, 47-71, 176; and ac-
cumulation, 243; and Black culture,
252; and decolonization, 228;
defined, 53; and migration, 85; spec-
tral, 244
Truman, Harry S., 224
Tupac Amaru revolt, 27-28
Union: and migration, 79-80, 85; and
United States, 110
Union Francaise, 222
Unit, of analysis: and feminism, 156,
160, 161-62; and knowledge, 161;
and Said, 280; and Wallerstein, 276;
and women's studies, 201; and
world-economy, 275; and world-
system, 277; and world-systems
analysis, 173
United Nations, 82, 224-25
United Nations Conference on Trade
and Development, 111, 112
United States: and anticolonial imperi-
alism, 107, 108; and antisystemic
movements, 103-21; and Civil War,
107; and class, 110; and Commu-
nism, 110, 111; and development,
111, 224-25; and economy, xxxii, 3-
18, 103-21; and Germany, xxxi-
xxxii; and globalization, 109; and
Great Britain, xxxi-xxxii, 4, 6-7, 8,
107, 218, 223; and gross domestic
product per capita, 35-36; and he-
gemony, xxxi-xxxv, 3, 5-9, 104,
106-9, 112, 113-15, 117, 120, 2 2 3 -
26; and imperialism, xiii-xiv, 107,
108, 109; and industrialism, 112;
and Japan, 104, 114-15; and labor,
Index
110, 225; and Middle East, 13-14,
15-16; and military, 3, 7-8, 9, 108,
111, 115; and modernization, 225,
226; and oil, 112; and peripheral
nations, 116; and Philippine Islands,
108, 121; and protectionism, 217;
and resources, 116; and Revolution-
ary War, 107; and socialism, 110;
and trade, 111, 114; and unions,
110; and Vietnam, 117; and war
preparedness movement, 7; and wel-
fare state, 110, 111; and World War
II, 109; and Yalta, xxxiv
Universalism: and colonialism, 221;
and Eurocentrism, 245; and For-
sythe, 186; and women, 201; and
world-systems analysis, 21, 190. See
also Knowledge
Urban area, 81
Urbanization, 227, 263
Utopia, 59
Value, 246
Van der Fiji, Kees, 51
Vargas, Getulio, 255
Vendee, 28, 29
Verger, Pierre, 262
Vietnam, xxxvi, 117, 222
Vietnam War, 13, 14, 15, 111, 112,
113, 227
Violence, domestic, 139
Wage: and colonialism, 222; and com-
modity chains, 132, 133; and house-
holds, 129, 130; and labor, 135; and
women, 131, 135, 136-37, 206
Wallerstein, Immanuel: and accumula-
tion, 175; and Africa, 276; and clas-
sical comparative method, 276; and
colonialism, 276; and commodity
chains, 131, 132, 133, 134; and
connectedness, 279; and determinacy
of capital, 174-75; and Europe, 276;
and exploitation, 142; and feminism,
148; and Forsythe, 187; and future,
31; and gender, 184; and history,
162; and holism, 173, 174; and
households, 188; and immigrants, 65;
Index
and income inequality, 41; and inter-
state system, 80; and knowledge
production, 159, 160; "Moderniza-
tion: Requiescat in Pace," 276; and
periodization, 181; and postcolonial-
ism, 178, 179; and social sciences,
189; and transnationalism, 244; and
unit of analysis, 157-58, 276; and
women, 129-30, 131, 132; and
world-economy, 275; and world-
system, 276; and world-systems
analysis, 142, 182
Wall Street, 11
Ward, Kathryn B., 172, 183-84, 188-
89
War of the Spanish Succession, 217
War preparedness movement, 7-8, 9,
17
Warsaw Pact, xxxv
Washbrook, David, 180
Washington Consensus, 109
WASP establishment, 6
Weaver, Warren, 22
Weber, Max, 268, 270-72, 273, 274
Welfare, 18, 86
Welfare state: and migration, 79-80,
81, 83, 84; and neoliberalism, 229;
and United States, 110, 111, 116
West: and Brazil, 261, 263; and Chat-
terjee, 277, 278; and developmental-
ism, 178; domination of, 179; and
Huntington, 268, 269; and modern-
ity, 272, 273; and Other, 177; and
sociology, 272; and Weber, 271
Western Europe: and development,
111; and migration, 84; and trans-
nationalism, 54; and U.S. hegemony,
104, 114, 115. See also Europe
White, Hayden, 183
Whiteness, xiii-xiv
Whites: and Brazil, 251, 252, 255,
257, 258, 262; and National Secu-
rity State Corporate Complex, 12
White supremacy, 6
Whitford, Margaret, 187-88
Whole. See Holism
Williams, W. A., 107
Wilson, H. S., 222
301
Wilson, Woodrow, 104, 108, 224
Witch-hunting, 205
Wolf, Eric, 275, 279; Europe and the
People without History, 277
Women, 171-90, 199-209; and agri-
culture, 127-28, 135; and capital-
ism, 140-41, 201; category of, 150,
184; and citizenship, 30; and class,
151, 154; and colonialism, 202; and
commodity chains, 128, 133, 134,
135-41, 142; in development, 184-
85; and difference, 150-51, 152,
177, 185-86, 190; and differentia-
tion, 190; and embodiment, 147,
148, 153; and empowerment, 1 8 9 -
90; and entrepreneurs, 189-90; and
epistemology, 155-56, 190, 204-5;
and essentialism, 151; and external-
ized costs, 138, 139; and gender,
188; and globalization, 185; and
Great Britain, 105; and history, 152,
153, 154, 165-66, 199, 200; and
households, 130, 131, 135, 136-39,
140, 141, 202; and inequality, 199-
200; and knowledge, 147, 150, 152,
153, 154-55, 160-63, 166, 184,
190, 204-5; and labor, 105, 127-
28, 131, 135-41, 188-89, 200, 202,
204, 206, 207, 241-42; and multi-
plicity, 147, 148, 153; and National
Security State Corporate Complex,
12; and politics, 148, 149, 153, 154;
and poverty, 128, 138-39; and
power, 156, 190; and race, 150, 151;
and relationality, 148, 153, 154,
155; and reproduction, 136, 141;
and resources, 137; and science,
148, 149, 153, 154; semiproletarian,
140; and sex, 136, 139; and social
change, 147-66; and socialism, 199;
and Third World, 140; and Time-
Space, 148, 165; as tool, 154; and
transnationalism, 64; and universal-
ism, 201; and universal terms, 150,
153, 164; and wage, 131, 137, 206;
and world-system, 165; and world-
systems analysis, 127, 188-89. See
also Feminism; Gender
302
Women's movement, 165, 166, 201,
208. See also Antisystemic move-
ment; Social movement
Women's studies, 201, 202, 207, 209
World, real, 155, 156, 160, 161, 164
World Bank, xxxvi; and development,
113; and neoliberalism, 229; and
regulation, 224-25; and sovereignty,
117; and Washington Consensus,
109
World-city, 81
World Economic Conference, 218
World-system: character of, 25-26;
and Cold War, 11; denned, 173-74;
and Great Britain, 4-5; and military,
11; and relationality, 158; and Wal-
lerstein, 276; and women, 165
World-systems analysis, 31; and classi-
cal comparative method, 275-77;
criticism of, 21; ethics of, 162; fea-
tures of, 171-75; and feminism, 147-
48, 153, 156-57, 162, 184, 202;
Index
and gender, 184, 201-3; and house-
holds, 130, 188-89; and income, 70;
and modernization theory, 25, 244;
and postcolonialism, 171, 177-83,
189, 190; and transnationalism, 4 7 -
71; and unit of analysis, 157-58,
277; and Wallerstein, 182; and
women, 127, 128, 188-89
World Trade Organization, 109, 119,
121, 229, 230
World War I, 6, 7, 9, 17, 218, 221
World War II, xxxii, 9, 11, 38, 109,
223
Wright, Erick O., 59
Xenophobia, 81
Yalta, xxxiv
Yen, 114
Yoruba people, 258, 259, 262
Zapatistas, xxvi-xxvii
Zizek, Slavoj, 246
 About the Contributors

SANTIAGO CASTRO-GOMEZ is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of

Social Sciences at Universidad Javeriana (Bogota, Colombia) and Senior
Researcher at the Institute for Social and Cultural Studies (PENSAR) of the
same university. His books include La reestructuracion de las ciencias so-
ciales (editor, 2 0 0 0 ) , Pensar (en) los intesticios (coauthor, 1999), Teorias
sin disciplina (1998), and Critique of Latin American Reason (1996). He
is currently working on a genealogy of social sciences and humanities in
Colombia.

A N A MARGARITA CERVANTES-RODRIGUEZ is Assistant Professor in

the Department of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and research
affiliate in the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis at the University
at Albany, State University of N e w York. She has published on urban,
population, and migration issues, and has conducted research on popula-
tion and international migration in several countries. Her most recent work
is a book manuscript on U.S.-bound Nicaraguan and Cuban migration,
currently under review for publication.

DAVID CONSIGLIO is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology

at the University of Maryland. He also works as a statistical consultant at
the University of Maryland. His research interests include global economic
inequality and the sociological effects of technology use in education.

WILMA A. D U N A W A Y is Associate Professor of Sociology at Virginia

Tech. She is the author of The First American Frontier: Transition to Cap-
italism in Southern Appalachia and has completed t w o forthcoming books
304 About the Contributors

about the African-American slave family. Her work has appeared in the
Journal of World-System Research and Review.

SHELLEY FELDMAN is Associate Professor at the Department of Rural

Sociology at Cornell University. She has published in the areas of political
economy, feminist theory, and world-systems analysis. Some of her recent
publications include "Exploring Theories of Patriarchy: A Perspective from
Contemporary Bangladesh," Signs (July 2 0 0 1 ) ; "Feminist Interruptions:
The Silence of the East Bengal Voice in Stories of Partition," Interventions:
International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 1(2) (1999); and "Negotiating
Difference: Constructing Selves and Others in a Transnational Apparel
Manufacturing Firm," Sociological Quarterly 39(4) (November 1998).

N A N C Y FORSYTHE teaches in the Sociology Department at the Univer-

sity of Maryland at College Park and is a Research Associate there at the
Center on Population, Gender and Social Inequality. Her current research
analyzes long-term, large-scale social change from a post-1968 feminist per-
spective.

R A M O N GROSFOGUEL is Associate Professor in the Department of Eth-

nic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and Research Asso-
ciate of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University, State
University of N e w York and the Maison des Science de l'Homme in Paris.
He is the author of Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective
and coeditor of Puerto Rican Jam: Beyond Colonialist and Nationalist Dis-
courses. He has published extensively on Caribbean migration and the po-
litical economy of the world-system.

OSCAR GUARDIOLA-RTVERA is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence

and Cultural Analysis at the Faculty of Laws, Universidad Javeriana (Bo-
gota, Colombia). He is founder and former Director of the Institute for
Social and Cultural Studies (PENSAR) of the same university. His books
include Globalization & Law, Pensar (en) los intesticios (coauthor), Teoria
y practica de la critica postcolonial, Pensar a Foucault, and The Other War.
His research interests include globalization, transnational law and politics,
and the geopolitics of theory.

SATOSHIIKEDA has received Ph.D.'s in economics (Michigan) and soci-

ology (Binghamton University, State University of N e w York) and currently
teaches sociology of globalization at the University of Alberta. He is the
author of Trifurcating Miracle: Corporations, Workers, Bureaucrats, and
the Erosion of Japan's National Economy (2002). His research interests
include the historical sociology of Japan and East Asia and critical exami-
nation of neoliberal globalism.
About the Contributors

ROBERTO PATRICIO KORZENIEWICZ is Associate Professor of Soci-

ology and Associate Director of the Latin American Studies Center at the
University of Maryland at College Park. He is coeditor of Latin America
in the World-Economy (with William C. Smith) (Greenwood, 1996) and
Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (with Gary Gereffi) (Green-
w o o d , 1993).

RICHARD E. LEE is Senior Research Associate at the Fernand Braudel

Center and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, State
University of N e w York. His research and teaching focus primarily on the
structures of knowledge and the theory and methodology of historical social
science.

F O U A D MAKKI is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at

Binghamton University, State University of N e w York. He is currently fin-
ishing a dissertation on the formation of Eritrean national identity in the
context of the Italian and Ethiopian empires. He has published essays on
social theory, nationalism, and popular politics.

ERIC MIELANTS is Assistant Professor in Sociology at Western Kentucky

University and is a Research Associate of the Fernand Braudel Center at
Binghamton University, State University of N e w York. He is currently coau-
thoring a book on mass migration to and racism in the Netherlands.

T I M O T H Y PATRICK M O R A N is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at

the State University of N e w York at Stony Brook. His current research
interests focus on issues of global inequality, including the distribution of
income between and within nations, and the sociology of economic devel-
opment. He also writes on the methodology of quantitative cross-national
research. His most recent publications include "Measuring World Income
inequalities" (with Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz), American Journal of
Sociology 106 (July 2 0 0 0 ) , "WTO 101: Myths about the World Trade
Organization" (with J. Smith), Dissent (Spring 2 0 0 0 ) , "The Economy"
(with George Ritzer) in George Ritzer (ed.), Primis Complete Sociology
Database, Vol. 2 (2000), and "Versifying Your Reading List: Using Poetry
to Teach Inequality," Teaching Sociology 27 (1999).

SHEILA PELIZZON received her doctorate in sociology from Binghamton

University, State University of N e w York, in 1999. Her academic back-
ground includes both economics and anthropology. As a former research
associate at the Fernand Braudel Center, she published pieces on commod-
ity chains and Kondratieff cycles (1590 to 1 7 9 0 - 1 8 0 0 ) , and on trends in
inequality in world welfare as measured by health care, education, and food
consumption ( 1 9 4 5 - 1 9 9 0 ) .
306 About the Contributors

T H O M A S EHRLICH REIFER is Associate Director of the Institute for

Research on World-Systems at the University of California, Riverside,
where he is also affiliated with the Sociology Department. Dr. Reifer has
also been a Senior Research Associate at Focus on the Global South, Chu-
lalongkorn University, Thailand, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bos-
ton College. He has published extensively on globalization, militarization,
and social movements, most recently in Human Rights Forum.

K H A L D O U N SUBHI S A M M A N is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Val-

paraiso University, Indiana. He is presently doing research for an essay on
"Global Moral Panics and the US Counter-Terrorism Industry."

LIVIO SANSONE (Ph.D. in anthropology, University of Amsterdam) is

Academic Vice-Director of the Center for Afro-Asian Studies of the Can-
dido Mendes University in Rio de Janeiro. He also lectures on ethnic stud-
ies, globalization, and urban anthropology at the State University of Rio
de Janeiro. He has published widely on race relations and Black cultures in
Great Britain, the Netherlands, Suriname, and Brazil. His present research
focuses on race relations and Afro-Brazilians in the Military Police of the
State of Rio de Janeiro. Beginning in M a y 2 0 0 3 he will be Professor of
Anthropology at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil.

ANGELA STACH is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at

the University of Maryland at College Park. Her master's thesis, titled "A
World-Historical Analysis of State Growth in the 20th Century," examined
the question if "globalization" entails a process of "state decline," based
on an empirical analysis of the trajectory of public expenditure in the twen-
tieth century in different areas of the word-economy. Her research interests
include women's movements, transnational advocacy networks and inter-
national organizations, gender and development, and global income and
gender inequality. She is also teaching at the undergraduate level on race/
class/gender inequality from a global perspective.

IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN is Director of the Fernand Braudel Center

at Binghamton University, State University of N e w York and Senior Re-
search Scholar at Yale University. He is the author of The Modern World-
System and, most recently, of The End of the World As We Know It: Social
Science for the Twenty-first Century. He was President of the International
Sociological Association from 1 9 9 4 to 1998.
Studies in the Political Economy of the World-System
(Formerly published as Political Economy of the World-System Annuals)

Revolution in the World-System

edited by Terry Boswell
War in the World-System
edited by Robert K, Schaeffer
Semiperipheral States in the World-Economy
edited by William G. Martin
Cities in the World System
edited by Resat Kasaba
Pacific-Asia and the Future of the World-System
edited by Ravi Arvind Palat
Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism
edited by Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz
Food and Agrarian Orders in the World-Economy
edited by Philip McMichael
A New World Order? Global Transformations in the Late Twentieth Century
edited by David A. Smith and Jozsef Borocz
Latin America in the World-Economy
edited by Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz and William C. Smith
Space and Transport in the World-System
edited by Paul S. Ciccantell and Stephen G. Bunker
Ecology and the World-System
edited by Walter L. Goldfrank, David Goodman, and Andrew Szasz
Questioning Geopolitics: Political Projects in a Changing World-System
edited by Georgi M. Derluguian and Scott L. Greer