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Nancho: Long before systems theory became academically trendy, you were analyzing history in terms of dynamic international
relationships. What is the "world system" as you conceive it and how does this perspective give us a new understanding of the world?
Now that system came into existence in the 16th century, was
relatively successful, and by its internal dynamic expanded to cover
the entire world, managing to achieve that by the end of
the 19th century. That is the system in which we still live today.
You have also analyzed political evolution in terms of three
modern periods. What does this analysis signify for our immediate future?
So for two centuries, we've been trying - the powers-that-be within
the system - have been trying to reconcile this popular demand for
democracy with the maintenance of this unequal system. This has
taken a number of forms including the sort of dominant ideology of
liberalism which was based on the idea of rational reform - holding
out the promise to people that eventually, over time, the situation
would equalize. This was an unfulfillable promise, but it was a
promise that held the structure in place for a long, long time.
In the last 10 to 20 years the belief in the likelihood that further
action at the level of each state by the coming to power of
movements that were basically reformist - sometimes calling
themselves revolutionary, but basically reformist - would in fact
transform the system slowly has been lost. And the system today is
in a critical period because it has lost this fundamental political
base which kept popular discontent within check.
So how do you see this discontent
manifesting itself on the world stage in the immediate future?
This has some positive
aspects, but it also has some negative aspects as each group pulls
in within its own frontiers and fights strongly with state-like
means against other groups for what they see as turf and receding
economic possibilities. This takes the form of crime, disorders - it
also takes worse forms. But this is very dangerous to the stability
of the system. In addition, the system has accumulated enormous
problems over the last five hundred years and let me just illustrate
two of them.
A system based on the unending accumulation of capital needs to
provide the possibility, in some industries at least, of enormous
profit levels. These enormous profit levels have historically been
based on the possibility of getting cheap labor and on the
possibility of what the economists call externalizing costs. Cheap
labor is a recurring difficulty for the system because laborers tend
over time to organize themselves in various ways, make demands on
capital, and achieve some of those demands. So the way the system
has operated to keep an eternal supply of cheap labor has been to
expand constantly the pool of laborers, reaching into new areas to
pull people into the system as the old laborers have increased their
price, their wage levels. This pool has basically been the rural
populations of the world. And we are moving quite rapidly to the
de-ruralization of the world. We are moving to the exhaustion of
that pool. That's one problem.
The second problem is that large enterprises have never paid the
entire costs of their production. They have externalized costs,
meaning that governments have paid for part of the costs through
infrastructure that the governments have built on their behalf and
thus many taxpayers have in effect paid for it. But more
importantly, governments have not forced enterprises to bear the
costs of, generically, waste and pollution and the use of natural
resources. Now that's all very well and good as long there is a
seemingly unending supply of space into which waste can be dumped in
one form or another, and resources that can be utilized. But in fact
that is the ecological problem of our age. We have come to the
exhaustion point for a number of natural resources. We have used
up a lot of the space for waste and pollution. This is all
renewable. It's not a technological problem. We
can renew our resources, we can clean up the waste and pollution.
But the cost of that is absolutely enormous, and the question is
going to be who is going to bear the costs? And that is the major
problem of governments and corporations today, and either the one or
the other has to bear the costs. And if the corporations bear the
costs, they won't make their profits and there will be an enormous
profit squeeze. And if the governments try to bear the costs,
they'll find they can't meet the other demands of the population for
health, education, welfare, etc. and will lose their entire
legitimacy. So this is not a really very soluble problem.
So this is the basis of the upcoming struggle you
foresee?
What role do you foresee or would
you like to see Japan playing in the system in the near to mid-term
future?
Lastly how would you advise young people who are preparing
themselves to enter this world to best gird their loins for the
coming age?
Immanual Wallerstein: Well, there have been many world systems -
the modern world system got started in the 16th century, largely
in Europe and the Americas. It took the form of what I call a
capitalist world economy. It was a single, integrated division of
labor across a wide stretch of territory based on capitalist
principles, that is, putting as the primary objective the unending
accumulation of capital. Within that structure or that space emerged
an interstate system composed of so-called sovereign states, which
were not in fact truly sovereign, but largely so. And
the structure was basically a hierarchical one in which the states
had uneven amounts of power, and was based on a core/periphery
relationship of exchange of products, of high profit products versus
low profit products which enabled a flow of surplus to go from
peripheral areas to the core.
IW: Well, I, I think the important the thing to see about the
succession of periods within the history of the world system was an
early period when the system was beginning for the first three
centuries in which it laid in place all the major structures except
what one might call the over-arching cultural structure of the
system - or what I call its geo-culture - which only comes into
existence following the French Revolution. The French Revolution is
very important, not so much for France actually, for France it made
relatively little difference - but for the world system as a whole
because it set in place a new set of beliefs which gained widespread
currency - and two, in particular: one, that political change was a
normal and not an exceptional phenomenon and should be so regarded
by everyone. And two, that sovereignty lay in something called "the
people" rather than in a sovereign. Now these were very dangerous
ideas because they implied essentially a fully democratic system -
and the capitalist world economy, far from being fully democratic,
was not democratic at all, because it was a system based on
inequality and hierarchy.
IW: Well, one of the major manifestations will of course be -- and in fact
already is -- the loss or the decline in the legitimacy of the separate
states. Actually, the states have been growing stronger over the
past five hundred years quite steadily as they've gained more and
more power through more and more efficacious bureaucracy and more
and more public support, as people felt that the states were the
mechanism for the reform of their lives. But as the states begin to
fall apart because they lose this faith, people get frightened.
Security is unsure, their futures are unsure. People are turning to
alternatives. They are turning to groups of various kinds - ethnic
and religious and other groups of all kinds.
IW: I think so, yes. I think the issue is that the system as a
system has worked very well for 500 years, but some of the bases on
which it has worked have disappeared, and it will no longer be able
to work as before. We will have to create a new kind of system. The question
is what new kind of system is the world going to create. That will
be a big battle because generically - and I have to leave it there -
generically there are two possibilities. We can create another kind
of inegalitarian system, quite different from capitalism, but
nonetheless as inegalitarian - and I don't exactly know what form
that would take. Or we can create a relatively egalitarian system,
and I am not sure what form that would take, but that is, in fact,
the crucial political, cultural, social battle of the next 25 to 50
years.
IW: Well, Japan of course is one of the powerful nations of the world
today, and it is one of the leading centers of capital accumulation.
Anything that goes on in Japan will have a big impact on this
collective decision-making of the world. But I don't think Japan has
a role different than the one I would attribute to the United States
or to Western Europe. These are the powerful countries. These are the
privileged countries. These are the countries that have to be aware
that the system is crumbling around them, and the people within that
country have to decide in some sense whether they are going to come
to terms with a more egalitarian world or whether they are going to
struggle for another inegalitarian one, and hope that they'll still
be on top.
IW: Well, what they will need is both clarity and intellectual
courage more than anything else, and that's all I can advise -
clarity and intellectual courage.
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