_Journal of World-Systems Research_, 1995, Volume 1, Number 7
http://jwsr.ucr.edu/
THE EVOLUTION OF GLOBAL POLITICS
George Modelski
Department of Political Science
University of Washington
SEATTLE WA 98195 USA
e-mail: modelski@u.washington.edu
Copyright (c) 1995 George Modelski
[Page 1]
ABSTRACT
The rise and decline of world powers has attracted much
scholarly attention in recent years. The theory of long cycles
answers parsimoniously the question: why, in the past half
millennium, have Portugal, the Dutch Republic, Britain (twice), and
the United States risen to global leadership while others failed to
do so? This accounts for the success, or failure, of individual
states, but to explain the entire sequence we need to employ an
evolutionary paradigm that proposes that each of these long cycles
is one mechanism in a spectrum of global evolutionary processes.
The leadership succession is an intermediate stage in the evolution
of global politics whose next likely major phase, reaching a high
point later in the 21st century, will be the gradual absorption of
the informal role of global leadership, when embedded in a
democratic community, into a network of more formal positions
within an emerging global organization of a federalist character.
The conditions of that process can now be specified.
[Page 2]
INTRODUCTION
The rise and decline of global powers has in recent years
drawn considerable attention among students of world politics and
society. Work has focussed on two questions: why do some states
rise to a unique position of global leadership while others fail?
And why is that those powers that have risen so successfully
ultimately also tend to decline?
It is argued in this paper that these two questions can
now be answered parsimoniously within the framework of the theory
of long cycles of global politics. The first part of the paper
proposes such an answer, and illustrates it with the help of
critical examples.
But the rise and decline of world powers is not all there
is to structural world politics, or to the theory of long cycles.
As every student of these subjects is uneasily aware, there is
more here than the coming and going of mighty states. The global
political system today is radically different from what it was a
thousand years ago - at which time it arguably did not exist at all
- and it also is probably quite different from what it will become,
say, one or two centuries into the future.
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It is different not only because it is obviously more complex,
but it is also different in a patterned way that suggests higher
performance and greater efficacy, in other words, cumulative
learning, but also greater dangers. That is why an explanation of
structural change in world politics, while focussing on the
fortunes of global leadership, must set its sights higher, and show
not only how and why individual states rise and decline, but also
what the entire picture adds up to. A structural analysis of world
politics must describe, therefore, a basic process whose principal
mechanism in recent centuries has indeed been the rise and fall of
world powers, but one that has itself been embedded in a larger
movement: the evolution of the global polity.
Our work suggests that global leadership succession is an
intermediate stage of an evolutionary process that went through
several instances of global leadership, but one whose likely next
major phase will be the gradual absorption of the informal role of
global leadership, embedded in a democratic community, into a wider
network of more formal positions with global responsibilities.
Thus it is for us to show in this paper how, on a
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canvass of a thousand years, the trajectory of world politics
shines as a thrust away from failed efforts to establish world
empire, through increasingly intricate exercises in global
leadership, towards more and more democratic forms of global
organization that are mostly yet to be invented.
I. EXPLAINING RISE AND DECLINE
The Propositions
A premise of this paper is the "existence", in the past
half millennium of global politics, of a role of leadership
exercised by a succession of nation-states. While the precise
characteristics of this phenomenon remain a matter of debate, the
basic fact of a series of leading powers is increasingly taken for
granted. The list of states constituting this sequence differs in
particulars, but as William Thompson has argued at some length
(1988:Ch.2, esp.31-34), the similarities of position on this matter
are greater than the differences. Scholars of diverse
orientations, including Robert Gilpin (1981), Immanuel Wallerstein
(1984), Paul Kennedy (1987), and Joshua Goldstein (1988) each
present such a list, and all lists agree that the United States is
the most recent case in point, and Britain the second most recent
and relevant.
The variant of this approach which we explore in this paper
is the theory of long cycles, successive treatments of which
include, but are not limited to, Modelski 1978, 1987, 1990a, and
Modelski & Thompson 1988, and for comparative analysis, in
particular Thompson 1988. In our approach, a long cycle of global
politics marks the rise or decline of one world power. As shown in
Table 1, the powers which were successively selected by that
process for a global leadership role included Portugal, the Dutch
Republic, Britain, and the United States, with challengers being
Spain, France, and Germany. The challengers shown in Table 1 are
those leading the losing coalition in the next global war; that is
Spain, shown with Portugal, leads the "opposition" in the
"macrodecision" phase, shown as starting after 1580. The data
arrayed in this table simplify the historical descriptions
presented in Modelski (1990:15), yet they have been staples of
work in this field for the last decade.
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Table 1: Periodic Table of Long Cycles
(learning mode)
=================================================================
Phases
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Agenda- Coalition- Macro- Execution Leadership
setting building decision Opposition
-----------------------------------------------------------------
starting in
-----------------------------------------------------------------
West-European era
1430 1460 1494 1516 Portugal
Spain
1540 1560 1580 1609 Dutch Rep.
France
1640 1660 1688 1714 Britain I
France
1740 1763 1792 1815 Britain II
Germany
Post-West-European era
1850 1873 1914 1945 United States
1973 2000 2026 2050
--------------------------------------------------------------
Source: after Modelski 1990a:15
=================================================================
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Continuing our discussion of Table 1, we note that each line
(or row), comprised of four phases, represents the "learning" long
cycle attributable to one world power. It details the steps
by which that state rose (or achieved selection) to that position.
Thus, the first line shows that Portugal reached the global
leadership position by 1516, following a process that started
in about 1430 and whose other major steps may be dated as 1460
and 1494. While Portugal features in this account as a world
power, Spain is shown emerging as the next global challenger -
that is, as one that will be particularly active throughout the
next cycle (shown on the next line).
Each line in Table 1 stands for one cycle and traces the
"rise" (or selection) of a world power. This makes the table a
representation of the learning model of the long cycle; the
alternative, "leadership" model also consists of four stages or
phases, but this model starts with global war, and world power, and
focuses upon symptoms of "decline" via "delegitimation" and
"deconcentration".
Such "decline" may or may not occur in the next
cycle. Britain is shown to have experienced two learning cycles,
and nothing in this presentation allows us to prejudge whether one
term, or two terms, constitute the "normal" tenure of the office of
global leadership. We can say, however, that the first four rows
of Table 1 form one bloc of four cycles, in as much as these
four lines share at least one important commonality: each and every
one has a West European, oceanic base. With the advent of the
United States we observe a shift away from Western Europe. That
is why the table labels the earlier bloc the West European era of
global politics, as distinct from a "post-West European" era which
is shown to have begun in 1850 and become serious after 1945.
The term "post-West European" is a provisional one, intended to
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highlight an important shift of emphasis in the direction of a
globally-oriented "basing mode", but leaving open the possibility
that, in the future, a more extended experience will allow the
choosing of a more precise designation.
Given the "existence" of such a leadership role, how do
we explain the observed facts of "rise," that is the selection of
some and the failed challenges of the others? For purposes of
this analysis, we prefer the term selection because it brings out
the point that global leadership is a position that is sanctioned
by a systemic, collective process, and is not merely a matter of
individual effort and national power or superior productive
potential. The reference to "learning" also makes it clear that we
have here a role whose elements need to be acquired via an extended
learning process.
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The theory therefore proposes that:
(1) A nation-state accedes to global leadership by
a. successfully undergoing a four-phased process of
selection (or learning) consisting of Agenda-setting,
Coalition-building, Macrodecision, and Execution; and
b. acquiring or exhibiting the qualifications needed for
selection to that position, namely politico-strategic
organization for global reach, lead economy, open
society, and responsiveness to global problems.
It is a corollary of the first proposition that:
(2) Challengers do not accede to global leadership because they
a. fail to complete the selection process, and lose in the
Macrodecision phase in particular; or because they
b. lack the necessary qualifications for that position, as
set out under (1b).
Propositions (1) and (2) might be thought of as constituting
a "recipe" for global leadership: each gives us both the
"instructions" and the "ingredients" necessary for producing
(or failing to produce) the right "menu" of policies for structural
change in the global system. We might also think of the
instructions as furnishing the "program" and the ingredients, or as
furnishing the "data" required for implementing that program.
To extend these analogies, we might recall that the
genome (one set of chromosomes with the genes they contain) might
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also be thought of as a program: as the instructions for building
an organism (Wesson 1991:144). The genome is not a blueprint,
a scaled-down model of an organism, but rather a code or a
set of instructions (such as those found in a cookery book) for
carrying out a sequence of activities. Furthermore, a crucial
characteristic of a recipe is its irreversibility (Dawkins 1988:295
ff). That is why the selection process is not a blueprint of
world order, but only a specification of steps by which a search
for a better order might be conducted.
An ambiguity inheres in this notion of a program for an
evolutionary process. It might mean a set of rules devised
and acted upon by participants, and inferred by observers, but it
might also be a regularity that inheres in that same process. A
similar problem attaches to the notion of calendars that, via
astronomy, were once the principal programs organizing the
emergence of civilization. A calendar might be thought of as a
program that orders a temporal sequence and tells us how to act in
relation to it; or else it might also be the elucidation of a
natural order governed by the motions of the planets around
the sun. That is how the long cycle could also be regarded as a
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calendar of world politics.
We notice, finally, that the theory also allows us to
differentiate among the winners and losers in the global leadership
stakes of the past half-millennium. Those that "decline" and fail
to make it to a second term are those that have "failed" in their
second bid, for reasons specified in propositions (1) and (2),
that is, for disobeying the instructions and neglecting to bring
together the necessary ingredients. In other words, we do not
need separate theories of rise and decline; a good theory of
"rise" has implicit in it a theory of decline. The problem of
continuance of global leadership is identical with that of
re-selection.
Let us now examine in some more detail these two
propositions.
Selection
A basic observational datum for our study is the long
cycle: a century-long stream or time-line of political events at
the global level linking the strategies or fortunes of a number
of prominent actors, states and others that compete for global
leadership. The fact of competition makes it plain that
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these actors engage in "selection," that is, in a process of
collective choice. Selection is a mechanism by which a choice is
made among candidates for an office, and the policies they propose.
Elections compose, of course, one class of selection processes,
though there are others as well.
Suffice it to say that, at the global level and in the
experience of modern times, some nation-states have competed for
the largely informal position of global leadership in major armed
conflicts that we call global wars, and have acceded to that
position by winning those wars and playing a leading role in the
winning coalition. We can regard those wars as "macrodecisions"
because they rendered collective decisions that proved to be, for
a time, binding for the whole of the global system. Just as
election campaigns and electoral contests punctuate the political
life of a nation, so have global wars lent organization to the
politics of the global system, and to each long cycle.
That is why the long cycle is a political selection
process. Analytically, or more generically, it can also be
described as a four-phased "learning" process (Modelski 1987:99 ff,
1990). It is a learning rather than a routine process
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because it involves coping and adapting to global problems for
which there are no routine solutions. Such structural challenges
include major threats to global security, general problems of
global system organization, and specific political questions
arising out of the selection process such as: where is the next
global leadership and challenge coming from? That is, global
problems might be classified as negative or positive (threats or
opportunities), those arising specifically out of the functioning
of global politics, and others that concern wider structures
(including the economy).
Who are the participants in structural global politics?
In the political sphere, the principal participants are the global
powers and their leaders, including the "incumbent" world power
and its actual and potential challengers, and for some purposes,
their forces of global reach; as well as global organizations (to
the degree that they might exist, such as the United Nations).
And, at the interface of politics and other global processes:
national, regional and global coalitions and parties that exert
influence on global issues; agents of the global economic order
such as world banks and global corporations; and instruments of
world opinion such as the media, or epistemic communities.
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In a simplified analysis, and for the earlier cases, we shall
not go too far astray if we focus our attention on the strategies
of actors most closely linked to the current world power: its
leaders, their politico-strategic forces, the coalitions they
manage, their economic agents, and their opinion leaders. The
more we move forward in time, however, the more important it
becomes to enlarge the range of strategies and to include world
organizations.
Participants in global politics cope with major structural
problems by "learning" new strategies. A useful way to
analyze that process is to conceptualize it as regularly passing
through four generation-long phases: those of Agenda-setting,
Coalition-building, Macrodecision, and Execution (the ACME
process). Four such phases constitute one cycle, as shown by Table
1. The phases lay bare the procedural structure of the long cycle
as a political learning process: they make it explicit that
problem resolution requires, in the first place, information, and
an exploration of alternative courses of action.
That is followed by the coalescence of coalition around
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prominent leaders, and certain prominent alternatives, some of
which are bound to offend vested interests. The coalitions are
then likely to square off in sustained conflict, but one of them
will prevail through a collective choice process. Once a decision
has been reached, all that remains is implementation. Claimants
to global leadership all participate in this process, but do so
with special intensity in the phase of macrodecision. They
activate and lead the coalitions that, via a global trial of
strength (in past cases, a global war), validate the set of
policies that will be carried to fruition during "execution".
Let us now review these four phases in some more detail.
Agenda-setting is analytically the most elusive yet
practically the most unsettling of the four phases of global
political change; it also is quite crucial to understanding of what
follows in the cycle. Adding to that interest is the fact that our
own most recent experience of world politics (1973-2000) has been
prominently colored by it.
Agenda-setting follows upon the close of the phase of
execution in the preceding cycle, and is crucially shaped by that
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circumstance: the closing of the old agenda and the ensuing
delegitimation of some features of the old order and of its
leadership. Thus by 1850 it was becoming clear that France was no
longer a significant threat to European and global security, and
that the Vienna order of 1815 was in need of drastic
reconstruction. The Industrial Revolution launched by Britain in
the previous century was firmly established, and other economies
were about to move into the van. Britain's position in Europe
weakened significantly and the question of succession started to
arise, at first only in European but then also in global terms.
As old agendas fade away, new problems rise to prominence.
When long-standing security problems disappear, new ones rise to
command attention, especially those linked to competition for
global leadership positions that might soon be vacated. Such
problems in the past tended to be resolved by global wars. However,
when important global problems are resolved that very success
generates new problems. Thus the spread of the Industrial
Revolution raised issues of economic and social organization
centered on capitalism; it also created the resources that made
possible an incredible spurt in knowledge generation, in the
natural and also in the social sciences. Understanding the new
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world created by the Industrial Revolution became an urgent global
problem.
Who might be the chief participants in this phase? We
would look for them primarily among opinion-makers, especially
those cultivating an expertise that responds to emerging global
problems; but it might also be political leaders who formulate such
problems with greatest visibility. After mid-nineteenth century,
they might be John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Fernand
Lesseps, or Richard Cobden; among political leaders, Abraham
Lincoln, Napoleon II, or Otto von Bismarck.
For global agenda-setting, issues come alive with particular
saliency in media networks, in epistemic communities, during
meetings and assemblies, and in inter-governmental settings.
After 1973, the United Nations has increasingly served as a forum
for raising and debating such global problems as those of the
environment, food, desertification, and others. Agenda-setting is
the phase par excellence for airing problems and reviewing policy
proposals that ought to find a place on the global agenda, but it
is not necessarily one in which complete agendas descend ready-made
from on high; more likely they remain subject to continuous debate
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and revision. Agendas remain crucial to global politics throughout
the course of the entire long cycle, but it is our contention that
they undergo dramatic change and experience the first and most
thorough of many debates in the phase of agenda-setting.
Coalition-building follows upon agenda-setting in a natural
progression. The rising awareness of new global problems and the
fading of old ones sets in motion a reshuffling of established
coalitions, and the construction of new alliances around a new set
of issues.
This coalitioning is the flip side of "deconcentration"
that is now in progress. Over time the high degree of power
concentration and the dominant position of the world power that
characterized the global political system at the close of the last
global war has now waned; global concentration is lost as
multipolarity rises and as the weight of other powers, especially
of challengers on land, increases. The previously effortless
superiority of the world power gives way to a condition
of low global concentrations that favor flexibility of alignments
and the reconstruction of alliance systems [1].
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In other words, as might be expected, a lower ratio
of power concentration (including economic power concentration) in
the appropriately titled phase of 'deconcentration' creates
conditions promoting realignment and encouraging coalitioning.
Most generally such coalitioning takes the form of an alignment for
and against maintaining global order, while responding innovatively
to global problems.
A classic case of the formation of such new alliance
systems is the case of European and global realignments after 1873.
That phase began with the coming together of the Triple Alliance
of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, that was begun by Bismarck
in 1879, in response to which the Triple Entente of France,
Russia, and Britain was built between 1890 and 1907. At the same
time the Anglo-American "special relationship" crystallized after
1900, during the Spanish-American war, albeit quite informally.
These were linkages that focussed on the rising power of Germany,
and the impending changes in global leadership, but they also
reflected differing approaches to other global problems.
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The agents of coalition-building are both political
leaders and diplomats, and it would be a mistake to regard the
process as exclusively or predominantly confined to the
international or diplomatic level. Lasting political alignments
take root and assume shape in an emerging global community and
represent concern for common problems that reflect underlying value
commitments. World parties play an important role here, at the
interface of world politics and community. In the earlier cases,
cultural and religious factors came to the fore; in the second
British cycle the cultivation of a trading community proved to be
significant [2]. More recently ideological factors, including
adherence to democratic norms and practices, played a significant
role. In all such cases global alignments were closely linked to
national party alignments and regional orientations.
Macrodecision is the culmination of coalition-building.
Analytically speaking this should be regarded as the time when
actors in the global political system, arrayed in at least two
major coalitions, choose among the rival agendas by deciding upon
the composition of leadership for the next "term of office". In
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the past several cycles this has meant a generation-long period of
global warfare, at the conclusion of which new global leadership
emerged. But there is no reason why in the future this process
could not assume a different form, as new procedures (yet to be
invented) will be devised for coming to a macrodecision without any
resort to large-scale violence; such new forms will in effect
serve as substitutes for the entirely primitive method of
world-wide warfare of potentially-catastrophic consequences.
There are reasons to believe that within a democratic community
such substitutes can in fact be constructed.
A good example of "macrodecision" is the global war
period bracketed by World Wars I and II (1914-1945). It comprised
two instances of major warfare, including sustained hostilities at
sea, in which the identities of the major contenders, and of the
rival coalitions and their agendas, remained virtually unchanged.
It also comprised related warfare in the so-called "inter-war"
period, such as the Sino-Japanese war, the Italian-Ethiopian wars,
and the Spanish civil war. And furthermore, it was punctuated by
a world-wide "Great Depression" (a structural crisis in the global
economy paralleling a structural crisis in global politics) whose
ravages only added to an impression of pervasive disorder and
universal havoc. Out of this turmoil the United States emerged
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in a clear leadership position by 1945-47.
The principal actors of "macrodecision" are global leaders of
a politico-strategic bent. In World War II, Franklin Roosevelt and
Winston Churchill were key examples. They assembled the global war
coalitions, defined war aims, and marshalled forces for victory via
sustained campaigns of global scope. They have been aided by
military leaders (naval, army and airforce), some of whom (such as
Marshall, or Eisenhower) rose to political prominence in the
aftermath of war; the interests of military and naval organizations
assumed paramount importance in such periods. It is an open
question how precisely this politico-strategic role might evolve in
the coming century, or if substitutes might be devised for the
"global war" form of macrodecision.
Execution rounds off macrodecision, and the entire sequence;
it is the quintessential "post-war" period. This phase has also
been called that of "world power" because that is when the weight
and influence of global leadership is at its peak. More precisely,
it is a period of "honeymoon", because global leadership continues
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beyond the phase of execution but at a lesser degree of intensity
and effectiveness.
Effectiveness is in part a function of power concentration.
War victory leaves the world power commanding a lion's share of
military and economic power in the global system. A glance back at
the data in Note 1 confirms this point, and shows that in every
execution phase to date the world power has enjoyed a healthy
monopoly of seapower (50 per cent or over seapower concentration
ratios). That meant unchallenged control over naval communications,
and a powerful assist to installing and "locking-in" the post-war
order. However, monopoly also ultimately leads to complacency, to
"resting on one's laurels."
But the world power is not just powerful; as the "executor"
of the agenda that the global war coalition carried in the
macrodecision phase, and whose implementation is attempted in
the post-war settlement, it also has legitimacy. The essential
functions of "execution" reside in the creation of an improved
institutional structure for the gradually evolving global system.
Additions to formal international organizations that have
incrementally occurred each century after 1609 include the Concert
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of Europe in 1815 and the United Nations, which incorporated a
growing family of after 1945.
In relation to the global economy there is, in each post-war
settlement, an increment of consolidation and in the direction of
freer (though not totally free) trade. In the phase of execution,
the activities of large corporations and banks have oftentimes
been crucial; witness the Dutch East Indies Company after 1609,
the English East India Co. after 1714, the Rothschild banks after
1815, and US multinationals after 1945.
An "executor" conception of global leadership carries a
restrictive rather than an expansive definition of
responsibilities. It is not to be conceived as the role of "world
policeman," if seen as conferring an all-round duty of responding
to every breach of the peace by an authorized and paid agent of a
world organization. Rather it is one of more specialized concern
for the safety of the essentials of the global order, and
especially that of global communications that are its
infrastructure. Earlier world powers did not act as all-round
"keepers of the peace," but rather as the guardians of the sinews
of global order: shipping lanes, freedom of the seas, suppression
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of piracy or the slave trade. This essentially voluntary duty,
while responsive to allied concerns, was of a selective kind, even
in periods of maximum effectiveness. It is likely to become more
generalized only in response to greater global organization.
Production of global order has in recent years been
taken as the basic output of global leadership, the claim being
that 'order in world politics is typically created by a single
dominant power' and that 'the maintenance of order requires
continued hegemony.' Order, in this context, has meant peace and
a liberal economy. In our perspective this is too expansive a view,
and the expression "typically" needs qualification, since the
proposition generalizes only from the most recent British and
American cases. Global leadership has in fact "traditionally"
consisted of carrying out a program of action, executed via a
post-war settlement. Such a settlement could be said to have
helped to mould "an order", but did not create order as such, and
represented only one step in the evolution of the global system.
Past the phase of execution a new agenda began to emerge,
but though the legitimacy of global leadership was coming into
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question order never completely dissolved, even in times of global
war.
The "post-war" period of the twentieth century (1945-1973) is
a good example of "execution." The security threat presented by
German-Japanese expansion was thwarted, and the two
states found gradual inclusion into an emerging democratic
community. That same community-in-becoming defined its
membership more sharply by contrasting itself with a Soviet bloc
that for four decades offered a non-democratic alternative but
which ultimately broke up. That same community finally served as
the basis for the information and knowledge revolution that is ever
more tightly weaving the world together.
This completes our account of the four phases of the
"selection" process that constitutes, in effect, the program and
calendar that aspiring candidates for global leadership would be
well advised to follow. What about the "ingredients" that the
candidates need to bring to that process?
Necessary Conditions
We recall that, earlier on, four "ingredients" were
declared necessary for the "production" of global leadership:
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1. politico-strategic organization for global reach;
2. lead economy;
3. open society, and
4. responsiveness to global problems [3].
These are the "necessary and sufficient" properties of a
nation-state, whose presence in adequate amounts is needed to
achieve global leadership. It is, moreover, asserted
that all four are "necessary" in that all four must be present, and
that, furthermore, such a conjunction suffices to achieve it.
The present formulation is a more generalized, if also
a more succinct list of the "factors of leadership" that were
outlined in chapter nine of Long cycles of World Politics (Modelski
1987:220-233). It differs from the earlier statement in that it
puts "insularity," previously shown as a separate factor, under
preconditions favoring an organization of global reach, and treats
"responsiveness to global problems" as a distinct condition; in the
earlier treatment that latter point was discussed under "Pressures
from New Problems" (ib.:231-3).
Table 2 sets out the necessary conditions of global leadership
in a systematic form. We shall now discuss them in greater detail.
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Table 2: Necessary Conditions for Global Leadership
================================================================
Organization Lead economy Open society Responsiveness
for global to global
reach problems
================================================================
(1) Why a necessary condition
Wins global Funds global Animates Global leadership
wars, keeps programs,serves coalitions, serves global
post-war as role model role model of problems, leads
settlement of economy society world opinion
(2) Organizational basis
Oceanic Lead Democratic Strong,active
navy, industries, potential; media
space fiscal strength party system
(3) Predisposing conditions
Insularity Market Democratic Free speech
economy experience experience
(4) Sources of commitment to global action
Global World trade Alliances State-of-the
interests world knowledge
(5) Most relevant phase of the long cycle
Global war Execution Coalition- Agenda-
building setting
Characteristics of challengers
Large army Large economy Closed, Weak,ethno-
controlled centric media
society
================================================================
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Politico-strategic organization for global reach is what wins
global wars. In all the past five such wars , strong oceanic
navies, rather than large armies, were the necessary conditions of
victory and of attaining global leadership. Without superiority
on the sea, armies alone could not have been deployed where and
when needed. At the end of each global war, the "incoming" world
power could therefore be shown to be commanding the world's
greatest navy. In between "macrodecisions", global reach forces
deterred global war, that is, protected the global status quo. An
early, yet insufficiently well known example of such an
organization was the navy of the King of Portugal in the l5th and
16th centuries.
A focus on oceanic naval forces makes it possible to sort
out states with a serious stake in world affairs. Over the past
half millennium, about four states have had, on the average, a
significant stake of this sort at any one time, for a total of nine
altogether, with another half-dozen in a regional role (Modelski &
Thompson 1988). Nor is this situation much different in the
1990s, when over one half of the world's nuclear warheads
are deployed at sea. Even though the membership of the United
[Page 30]
Nations has reached 180, only one or two of the member states
(the United States, and maybe Russia) qualify as having oceanic
navies, and maybe only another two or three could play the role of
aspirants (China, or a future "Europe" including France, and
Britain).
That is why what matters at the global level is not
military power in general, and armies in particular - though the
latter do matter greatly, especially at the regional level - but
the availability of globally-mobile forces. In the past these
have meant navies, and today and in the near future they mean
navies allied to air, space and information power.
Navies are "observables": warships are a form of military
hardware that is measurable and therefore, for our purposes,
exceedingly useful as indicators of global purpose. But the use
of that indicator is not intended to imply that fleets in and of
themselves are all that matters to organization for global reach,
for they are only one crucial component. Obviously, they must be
combined with other elements of military political power, as well
as with diplomacy and good intelligence, and they must be well-led.
For it is political leadership at the highest level (via its
decision-making processes) that combines these forces with the
[Page 31]
inputs of resources from economy, society, and culture to create
the conditions that lead to the attainment of global leadership.
We might add that insularity represents a set of physical
conditions which in the past have been conducive to developing a
strong navy and a commitment to an oceanic role. It has also
conferred on aspirants to global leadership an important measure of
"surplus security," hence relative invulnerability, aiding in the
effective deployment of forces at the global level. Insularity is
still with us (in as much as the United States might be regarded as
virtually a continental-sized island), and will continue to be a
useful attribute of forces of global reach, even if the technical
conditions affecting it might change. But there is no need to
regard it as one of the four "necessary conditions" of our
analysis.
In the past five hundred years, global reach as the necessary
condition of global reach was given practical embodiment in
oceanic navies. These were employed to deny the use of the sea
for trade and other purposes during times of major war.
[Page 32]
In the future global reach might increasingly take the form
of space power, specifically the power to deny the use of near
space to one's opponents, that is to their ability to operate
communication, navigation, weather, and intelligence satellites for
purposes of conventional and/or nuclear warfare. A monopoly of
space power could be technically possible in the 21st century [4].
Maintaining a lead economy is the second basic condition of
global leadership. In order that an economy aids in the
"production" of leadership it must, of course, be an economy that
is fiscally sound, of some weight and substance, and also a growing
one at that, for only a substantial and a growing economy can be
expected to fund the budgets that make it possible to mount forces
of global reach. But the size of the national product alone does
not suffice as a claim to leadership, and 'preponderance of
material resources' is not a defining element of such an economy.
A large but stagnant economy cannot support world-wide enterprises.
An economy will only be a reliably growing one if it is an economy
that nurtures and brings forth leading industrial sectors.
We refer here to globally-significant sectors of the economy,
[Page 33]
that is, to lead industries. These are the industries that in a
given time span and at certain locations radiate innovative impact
upon the world economy. That impact travels via international
trade, and gives new shape and meaning to global transactions. It
also constitutes by itself an additional claim to leadership.
Classic instances were the cotton and steam industries which
launched the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, and gave
Britain commercial supremacy in the 19th. The location of future
lead industries, if it can be reliably determined, is a leading
indicator of world power and global leadership to be.
"Open society" is a term designed to spotlight democratic
experience, and is intended as shorthand for freedom, openness, and
democracy potential. We know that democracy, as a phenomenon of
the modern era, takes off only in mid-19th century. That means
that the West European era of global politics, one on which much of
the substance of this analysis (and much of the conventional wisdom
of the study of International Relations) are based, does not
really offer us clear examples of democratic communities serving as
the basis for global leadership. It is also the reason why the
[Page 34]
democratic experience features marginally, if at all, in historical
accounts of world politics. Even Britain, with a liberal society
and a parliamentary regime since 1688, did not acquire true
democratic credentials until well past the most creative periods of
its global involvement. Yet it is also worth stressing that all
those acceding to leadership in that era belong to what in
retrospect might be called the democratic lineage, that is, the
lineage from which a more fully-formed type of democracy
descended. They exhibited features of society that qualified them
as belonging to that lineage on account of democratic potential
because, relative to their competitors, they offered a superior
promise of forwarding developments in the direction of greater
freedom at home and openness abroad. As we look forward to the
future, moreover, from Britain onward, it is not just democratic
potential but also past democratic experience that more and more
becomes a determining condition.
Conceived in this way, why is it that a free, open, and
democratic society is needed to produce global leadership? We
answer this question on two levels: at the empirical level we
observe that all the cases listed in Table 1 under "leadership"
[Page 35]
are cases of democratic potential, or of democratic experience,
superior to that of the challengers [5]. At the general level
we argue that a free and open society provides a superior support
framework for the evolution of cooperation, and provides the
seedbed for strategies that in turn serve as the foundation for
global leadership. Robert Axelrod (1984) has shown how
cooperation can start in clusters and thrive with rules that are
"nice," provocable, forgiving, and clear.
Open/democratic societies provide the optimum conditions
for the emergence and clustering of such strategies in the form of
coalitions at national and global levels. By regularizing and
stabilizing decision-making processes they allow for the
differentiated growth of cooperative strategies; by fostering
debate and protecting human rights they offer the context for the
emergence of variety, hence creativity and innovation; and by
civilizing conflict they make more likely the growth of "nice"
strategies that are oriented to solving global problems and that,
when successful, tend to cluster and enlarge the area of
cooperation. That is why democratic alliances have generally been
more productive and more enduring.
[Page 36]
In more concrete terms this means that a society aspiring to
global leadership will value pluralism and possess a developed
system of public organizations, including a well-functioning
multiparty system and a rich network of private associations and
interest groups. The combination and recombination of these
elements produces the coalitions that contend over global problems
and that, nationally and globally, are essential elements of the
process we are studying, especially so in the phase of
coalition-building. In coming decades these will serve as the
building blocs of the global democratic community within which
global war will become an anachronism, and problems will be
resolved by democratic procedures.
Responsiveness to global problems is a necessary condition
because global leadership is precisely the business of attending to
urgent global problems. Global leadership is not a matter of
asserting or flaunting power, nor is it the matter of exercising
world dominion. It is an arrangement for marrying the interests of
one nation-state with problems of the global system that are of
pervasive currency and wide concern. Such a nation-state will
likely be predisposed to develop such interests, be it on account
of previous politico-strategic involvement, trading links,
[Page 37]
established alliances, or because knowledge of world-wide
conditions is available. Such a nation-state also will tend to
view its own national interests as closely linked with wider, more
inclusive concerns that can become the basis for global action.
Analytically, responsiveness to global problems might be
regarded as a mode of responding to world opinion. It provides
legitimacy for international action; that is, it offers a
justification in terms of which national action may also be
regarded as having been undertaken in the service of broader
interests. That is how the King of Portugal, for example, explained
his expeditions to the East as producing "discoveries" that
rebounded to the benefit of all.
More specifically, such responsiveness provides the basis for
coalition-building. Cooperation occurs because certain strategies
are seen to serve interests which are wider than those of any one
nation; global problems provide the most general of such
platforms. In the wars of the Great Alliance against Louis XIV, for
instance, the concept of balance of power served as the principle
expressing the interest of all Europe in a "balancing" arrangement
[Page 38]
which limited the power of the Sun King.
Our argument therefore also implicitly asserts that global
leadership is capable of producing public goods for the global
system. These are goods or services that can benefit a public
wider than that of the acting nation, including at the limit all
of humanity. Peace and a liberal trading order are often cited as
examples of such benign goods, but on the negative side there are
also those who argue that "hegemony" produces such "bads" as war
and exploitation.
The theory of collective goods (as formulated by Mancur
Olson, cf. Abrams 1980, Ch.8) has helped clarify the logic of
collective action and elucidate the concept of public goods
("goods which cannot provide benefits to one individual without
simultaneously providing benefits to others"). It argues that
such goods are provided more easily in small ("privileged") groups
than in large groups that are likely to be beset by "free riding"
problems. But it also points out that most public goods are not
"pure," are subject to "crowding" (when their benefits are reduced
by the consumption of others), and to exclusionary practices.
We observe that in past experiences of global leadership,
[Page 39]
"privileged" groups have been the rule. That is, the direct
benefits of the provision of collective goods, such as those
resulting from the discoveries, were subject to appropriation by
the monopolies of the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns, which
practiced wholesale exclusion; or at the close of global wars, by
the winning coalitions. The broader benefits have only become
apparent over the longer run, so that it is only in the 20th
century, as the relevant groups have grown larger (opening up new
organizational questions), that the problem of free riders has
become more salient.
That is why our analysis avoids reference to such broad
concepts as peace or the liberal order for characterizing the
entire process, and focusses attention instead on circumscribed
global problems that helped define the individual cycles. It
implies neither the "benign" nor the "malign" version of the
selection process, but seeks to match the benefits of particular
policies against the costs they might have entailed.
Responsiveness is a function of the availability of
mechanisms that translate a potentially inarticulate world
opinion into agendas of global problems. Such is the function
[Page 40]
of actual or potential global political leadership. Effective
parliamentary bodies, and other assemblies often perform such
functions well. For instance, in the 19th century the British
Parliament, on some occasions, came close to serving as a organ
of world opinion, and in the second half of the 20th century the
Congress of the United States on occasion acts in a similar
fashion. Such bodies function best when they interface closely with
world-wide media and other cultural-educational networks; political
definitions of problems are thereby filtered to the general
public world-wide, and world opinion percolates up to the political
bodies. Free media and open scholarly and epistemic communities
perform such services better than weak or ethnocentric ones.
Ideologies might be regarded as standardized definitions
of global problems that are associated with definite action
programs. They formulate competing solutions to persistent global
problems, and they provide a common orientation to the future
across domains and regions. Thus, Marxism might be thought of as
having articulated one set of responses to problems created by the
Industrial Revolution. Modern democracy, meanwhile, could be seen
[Page 41]
as having risen in the context of the information revolution.
Ideologies therefore come and go; over long periods they reflect
fluctuations in world opinion.
In earlier times world opinion, that is, opinion relevant
to the definition of global problems, had a rather narrow basis and
was confined to some people in a few countries. Over the
centuries, however, the social base of that opinion has widened
steadily. The information revolution of the past century has
significantly expanded it, making it now technically possible to
conduct world public opinion polls. At the limit, the base of
world opinion is coextensive with the human race.
Non-Selection of Challengers
The long cycle has produced global leadership, but it has
also simultaneously produced a parallel but contrasting result:
the phenomenon of "challenger." The structural process of global
politics effects not only the rise and decline of world powers, but
also the opposition, the tension, and the conflicts that attend
upon the rise and defeat of challengers. Such circumstances, it
must be noted, have so far tended to culminate in global war.
The non-selection of challengers is as much a part of the
[Page 42]
long cycle as is the selection for global leadership, and is
subject to the same conditions outlined above. The sequence of
phases is quite similar, except that it begins one phase earlier
than we have observed in respect of world powers and it also ends
sooner, with the defeat of the challenge in the phase of
macrodecision. The set of necessary conditions is the same as well,
except that they all appear, as it were, under the opposite signs,
as when the society that would be expected to be open turns out to
be closed or the economy turns out to be merely large but not of
the leading kind (cf. Table 2, last line).
Phase movement of the challengers takes shape in the "E" phase
of the long cycle, one in which the incoming world power "executes"
its mandate by implementing the agenda of global problems. But
the position then established does not confer total control or
world dominion, and an alternative focus of influence naturally
emerges. Either the winning coalition, having served its purpose,
dissolves or splits (as after 1814-5), or else the defeated
challenger remains as a potential center of the opposition (as
after 1714). Certainly, as indicated in Table 1, we can see
[Page 43]
that the ascent into global leadership moves in step with the
coalescence of political and economic forces that, further down
the road, might mount a challenge. This is a situation that cannot
be regarded as unexpected, since power and its exercise do not
remain unopposed or unanswered for long.
But the process takes a while to unfold. It moves first
into the phase of agenda-setting, in which the legitimacy of global
leadership begins to weaken and debate is opened anew about
world visions. Again, this is not a debate in which one agenda
crystallizes and to which all parties can instantly subscribe.
Rather, we see a variety of agendas and issues, variously
prioritized; we also see expansionists seeking traditional
conquests, fundamentalists resisting all change, and monopoly
interests strenuously defending their prerogatives. Gradually the
debate evolves to the phase of coalition-building, during which the
issues cluster into two or more opposed alliances. Aspiring
challengers move toward the peak of their military power on land
(cf. data in note 1), and tend to become the focus of one such
alliance. Such alliances also form likely rallying points for
movements of forcible expansion and the opponents of evolutionary
[Page 44]
change. The strength of that alliance will then be tested in the
phase of macrodecision, via global war or some other form of
collective decision-making, in which the challengers have so far
been regularly defeated. It is as though the challengers were
working on a set of negative instructions, assuring the defeat of
their policies.
Characteristics of challengers mirror the process by which the
opposition first takes shape and is then resolved in global war.
We have already noted above, in Table 3 (see also Modelski
1987:225-7), the set of conditions that match those required for
global leadership but in an opposite direction, on all four
dimensions.
We notice, first of all, that the challengers we have
considered were all regionally-based in Western Europe - which is
another reason why that particular sequence of long cycles is a
West European one. At their peak they laid claim to regional
leadership, cast, however, in an imperial mode. As we look at
"necessary conditions," we note that the challengers' economies
were above all large, reliant on natural resources (such as
agriculture and mining), and made up a significant portion of
[Page 45]
regional or even global output. At their own respective
times Spain, France, Germany, and even the Soviet Union had
substantial populations that could be mobilized for large
collective undertakings. But they were not lead economies
oriented to world interactions, and in the field of innovation and
new industrial sectors they were regularly outclassed by those who
emerged successfully from the test of "macrodecision."
A large economy relies less on foreign trade, offers less to
potential coalition partners, and tends to be linked to
ethnocentric orientations which lead to the pursuit of national
interests which are narrowly conceived and zealously pursued. Nor
is it conducive to the acquisition of knowledge about global
conditions. All of these elements, which are exacerbated in closed
societies, translate into a slender basis for building coalitions.
For such reasons, despite their wealth and power the Spain of
Philip II (1560-1580) and the France of Louis XIV (1660-1688) each
had basically only one regional base, and they each had trouble
attracting significant allies world-wide. Similarly, Germany,
being relatively less open than either Britain or the United
States, became boxed into a continental system of alliances that
turned out to be untenable but impossible to break out of after
[Page 46]
1914. The Soviet Union was even more isolated within its Iron
Curtain.
Last but not least is the structure of the military
organization, which in the case of challengers tended toward
reliance on a powerful army (rather than navy) and on lightening
land campaigns at the regional level. All the challengers were, in
their time, the leading European military powers on land, even as
they also participated in naval competitions at the global level.
But in global wars they were shut out of the oceans, and the loss
of global links fatally undermined their plans and skewed the
contests against them.
The overall symmetry of these relationships is quite
impressive. The positive qualities of successful candidates for
global leadership contrast markedly with those of the failed
challengers. What might puzzle those who reflect upon the folly
of repeated global wars is the persistence of challenges based
on flawed recipes, through at least four cases. Is it not time
for challengers to abandon this false trail and, once and for all,
to try a new path?
[Page 47]
Time and Space Dimensions
The long cycle of global politics, in its learning mode,
has now been shown to be the process by which one state has risen
to global leadership. That process is explained as the product of
(1) a four-phased selection process, and (2) the co-action of four
necessary conditions. It must be pointed out, however, that the
phased process and the necessary conditions are two ways of looking
at the same phenomenon. They report on the same condition but
from two different vantage points, and they yield two different
perspectives.
The relationship is, in fact, reciprocal. The four phases
represent successive optimizations of each of the necessary
conditions. Macrodecision (global war) represents that phase in
the process in which the forces of global reach exert their most
decisive influence and experience their fullest realization. In
turn, the four necessary conditions are the factors that explain
successful performance in each of the four cycle phases.
Schematically, the relationship might be represented as follows:
[Page 48]
Phase of Agenda-setting optimizes Responsiveness to
global problems
Coalition-building " Open society
Macrodecision " Forces of global reach
Execution " Lead economy.
The first of these perspectives, that of the four-phase
selection process, is temporal (or diachronic), meaning that it is
oriented to the time dimension. The second is spatial, in that it
has to do with the distribution of "production resources" in space,
and may therefore yield, at different points in time, different
(synchronic) snapshots of such distributions.
More precisely, we might ask: why conceptualize four phases
and four conditions? This is because we conceive the selection
process as unfolding in four dimensions: three spatial
(left-right, up-down, forward-backward) and one temporal (time).
The processes we are examining can be located and fully described
on all relevant scales by reference to these dimensions. These
dimensions can also be roughly identified with the economic,
political, social, and cultural aspects of social time-space.
The long cycle is a model of long-term political development
[Page 49]
that represents a form of "symbolic synthesis" that is obviously
fact-oriented, because it is governed by observables in social
processes. But it is also a higher-level synthesis, as compared
with historical narratives and in that respect is more economical
with facts (Elias 1992:190).
Comparison with Kennedy
Paul Kennedy's (1987) work, while a sustained narrative
account of the "Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" in the past
half-millennium, does not present a full statement of the
analytical
model of the process that is being described (see also Modelski
1990b). But such a model might nevertheless be extracted from it,
for purposes of highlighting the key features of this approach as
compared with the "symbolic synthesis" outlined in the present
account.
Table 3 effects a comparison of these two models of "rise
and fall" under the categories so far emphasized in this
presentation: those of the temporal selection process, and those
of spatial, necessary conditions. Kennedy's account (1987:esp. at
pp. xxi-xxiv) puts major emphasis on the two factors of military
and economic power, and on their interaction; he presents full
[Page 50]
narratives of major wars, especially those he calls "coalition
wars," but he generally neglects "softer" factors such as open
society, and global problems. Nor does he, in our opinion, focus
sharply enough upon issues of global competitiveness.
Table 3: Two models of "rise and decline"
=================================================================
Long cycles "Rise and Fall of the Great
(learning model) Powers 1500-2000"
(Kennedy 1987)
=================================================================
Explanation of
"selection" to global leadership "rise and fall" of Hapsburg
of Portugal, Dutch Republic,Britain, Spain, Britain, United
United States; "non-selection" of States.
Spain, France, Germany.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Selection process
consists of four phases of not explicit, but lays
Agenda-setting, Coalition- stress on coalition wars
building, Macrodecision
Execution:
Ag -> Co -> Ma -> Ex
period: ll0 years non-periodic
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Necessary conditions
Global reach potential Military power (M)
inc. insularity Sustained economic growth Lead
economy (E), inc. fiscal health
Open society
Responsiveness to global problems
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Interaction (co-evolutionary) effects
Global politics co-evolves Economy interacts with
with global economy, community, military power:
and opinion. E+ --> M+ --> E- --> M-
(adaptation model)
===============================================================
[Page 51]
Kennedy does, however, offer a model of politico-economic
interaction that goes some way toward lending a distinctive dynamic
to the process. He proposes that "rise" begins with uneven
economic growth in one economy (E+), and that this generates
military capacity (M+). The joint action of these two factors
explains the rise of a great power. But the exertion of military
power drains resources and drive from the economy (E-), and
dwindling economic strength in turn saps military power (M-),
inducing decline. This is an "adaptation" type model that
comprehensively covers both "rise" and "decline"; it implies four
very general phases, but its periodicity is unspecified and there
is no discussion of testing (which we would not really expect in a
historical narrative anyway). We observe as well that this model
focuses most of its attention on an adaptive interplay of economics
and politics. Our own model, on the other hand, focuses on the
[Page 52]
phasing of the political process, but considers "interactive" (or
co-evolutionary) effects in a more complex formulation (cf. Part II
of this study).
We have now accounted for the rise of particular powers
to global leadership, but neither our account nor that of
Kennedy deals with the question of succession or lineage. Why is
it that these powers, in both accounts, constitute a meaningful
sequence and not just a random assortment of powerful states? In
order to answer this question we must extend the time horizon of
our discussion backward by another half millennium, and consider
more fully the context within which the selection process has
operated. On both of these counts we broaden our analysis beyond
the framework utilized by Kennedy and most other students of this
subject to date.
[Page 53]
II. THE EVOLUTION OF GLOBAL POLITICS
The Need for Broader Explanations
We have now essayed an explanation as to how and why four
global powers, on a total of five occasions, prevailed over their
opponents an maintained a period of global leadership. While
arguably neat and tidy, this explanation is inadequate because it
tackles only a part of the problem, and does not come to terms with
broader questions that need to be asked if the process as a
whole is to make sense. These inadequacies might be summarized as
follows:
A thorough-going inquiry must go beyond individual long
cycles that are marked by the influence of one single power, and
pose questions about the nature of the entire process. Why is it
that, since about 1500 but not before, most of these events have
centered upon Western Europe? Why is it that the long cycle has
been punctuated by a series of four major, global wars? Why is
it that there seems to be a liberal bias inherent in this long
cycle, in that the winners of these wars, and those attaining
global leadership, might all be regarded as members of a liberal
lineage that showed democratic potential?
[Page 54]
More basically, the piecemeal, one-case-at-a-time explanation
implies "perpetual motion", the circulation of powers in an
endless coming and going of major states struggling to rise on an
unending treadmill. It raises the problem of demarcation: why does
that "rise and fall" begin in 1500, and how long into the future
might it continue? While there might be good reasons to think that
a larger and more basic process is at work here, it is not entirely
obvious that it must always take the form of "rise and fall of the
great powers."
The issue is joined most immediately over the question of
when that process might be said to have commenced. Conventionally
that beginning is set at about the year 1500, a date that, for the
past two centuries in European historiography, has been regarded as
marking the divide between modern and pre-modern times. This is
how Kennedy (1987:3) explains his decision to start his account at
that point. Gilpin (1981:Ch.3) gives no precise dates but he,
too, adopts about the same time frame when he distinguishes between
the pre-modern pattern of the "cycles of empires," and the modern
world whose characteristic features are the nation-state and the
world market. For Wallerstein, the onset of the capitalist world
[Page 55]
economy dates to the "long" sixteenth century, starting about 1450.
And Goldstein's long cycles start ca.1500, though some attention is
also paid to Venice.
For those who choose to depict the operation of the global
system, this is a wholly satisfactory procedure. World-wide
communications on a routine basis, regular oceanic exchange and
trade, let alone global political structures simply did not exist
before 1500. An inventory of sea power in global politics would
have to start at that time as well, because before it no navies
could be found that maintained a global network of fleets and base.
On the descriptive level, that was all that could be done.
But those who search for causal explanations would find
this procedure unsatisfactory. For even if we agreed that a date
close to 1500 (and the sailings of Columbus to the Americas and of
Vasco da Gama to India) marked the birth of the global system,
including the global political system, the question remained how
much earlier should we go if we wanted to determine the inception
(or conception?) of that system. For in order that a global oceanic
[Page 56]
system be launched, certain necessary technological, social,
political and economic preconditions would have to be satisfied.
For instance, ocean-going ships and navigational aids such as the
compass would have to be developed.
An excellent answer to these question was in fact given
by William McNeill (1983), whose account of global political and
military changes in the modern era begins with Sung China ca. 1000.
His reasoning is supported by contemporary scholarship that has
come to view this period of Chinese history, "China's greatest
age," as the start of modernity in the global context. In
other words, in order to give an adequate explanation of the
process that ca. 1500 gave birth to the global system, we need to
start in China some five centuries earlier.
We reach the same conclusion if we reason, deductively,
about world system history. We agree with Frank (1991) that the
entire process needs to be viewed as a whole, since it has
exhibited significant uniformities ever since its inception in the
Middle East some 5000 years ago. But it would also be wrong to
regard that process as wholly uniform, for we must recognize within
[Page 57]
it certain major eras or phases. In that vein, we follow
conventional designations fairly closely if we distinguish the
ancient (or archaic) age (-3000 - -1000) from the classical one
(-1000 - +1000), and view the modern age as starting at about 1000
(Modelski 1991). It is at that point that the world system might
be postulated to have begun emerging as a global system (at the
same time as a system of nation-states), in a process whose full
unfolding is yet to be completed.
Eras of the Global System
Combining such empirical and theoretical considerations with
the picture presented in Table 1, we arrive at a three-part
classification of "eras of the global system," each of which is
some 450-500 years in length:
1. Eurasian transition; starting ca.930;
2. West European, starting ca. 1420, and
3. Post-West European, starting ca. 1850.
We call the first of these eras "Eurasian," because that
is where the center of gravity of the world system for the previous
one or two millennia had been. During this era, the Eurasian Silk
Roads served as the backbone of the world system's communication
network. The subsequent shift away from that system took some
[Page 58]
doing. The first thrust toward modern organization on a large
scale took off in Sung China in the 10th century, and continued
with the successive development of a number of globally-significant
innovations. But in the 13th century, the experience and the
resources of, at first North, and then South, China were captured
by the Mongols who used them in an attempt to construct a world
empire. For a time the rule of the Mongols extended from Eastern
Europe, to Syria, to the Sea of Japan, and to the South China Sea,
incorporating over 40 per cent of the world population (a
proportion higher than that attained by any empire before or
since). Mongol cavalry armies dominated the center of the world's
landmass and threatened the continental fringes in Europe, Egypt,
India, Southeast Asia, and Japan. It was the first truly
Eurasian social and political system, with Renaissance Italy
forming no more than an outlying part of it.
From a global perspective, the defining feature of the
Eurasian transition era was the Mongol bid for world empire. But
that was not all there was to it. The most important feature of
that bid was its catastrophic failure, the utter collapse of the
[Page 59]
Mongolian design into devastation, disruption, and epidemic
disease. The attempt to build a global political structure on the
basis of imperial models of the classical era failed so completely
that world system development was pushed in a new direction [6].
But there was more to the Eurasian transition than the
failure of the Mongols. This positive aspect is captured by the
term "Renaissance," which has been applied by historians to both
the Chinese and the Italian periods of this era. For instance,
Jacques Gernet has called the Sung dynasty the time of "Chinese
Renaissance," while the same term has of course been used in
reference to the Italian developments of the later Middle Ages.
Both were strikingly innovative periods of high growth, urban
vitality, and artistic excellence. But it was, in fact, the empire
of the Mongols which served to diffuse the experience of the first
to the second; they spawned influences still felt today.
This pattern of negative and positive development may be
observed in the two subsequent eras of the global system. A
recurring feature of the West European era has been attempts at
universal dominion, in response to which "balance-of-power"
[Page 60]
coalitions were organized under global leadership that marked
entire periods of this era. These times also gave rise to
colonial empires, including the large British colonial holdings at
the turn of the 20th century. But these were also times of
vigorous competition, marked by feats of exploration and
technological innovation, great economic expansion, and rapid
population growth. In the post-West European era, whose shape
we are only now beginning to discern, these tensions continue,
though arguably in a more attenuated form.
The labels we attached to the eras of the global system
refer to locations in space. We are thus arguing that the bulk of
innovative activity in those periods was concentrated in one or
another zone of the world system, that is, in the "active zone" of
that particular period. But these eras might also be understood as
phases in the evolution of the global system, which may be
schematically represented as follows:
The Evolution of Global Politics
Defining problem
930-1420 Preconditions Failure of world empire
1200-1400
1420-1850 Global nucleus Balance of power in Europe
after 1713
1850-(2300) Global organization Shape of world organization
ca. 2100
(2300) - Consolidation Stability of world
organization
[Page 61]
We propose, in other words, that the major project of the
formation of a global political structure is a learning problem
that cannot be completed suddenly or without preparation. We also
propose that the four major stages of that process can be roughly
characterized as cultural (technological), social, political, and
economic, and that they together might take more than a millennium
to evolve.
In this larger scheme of things, we might then see the
Eurasian transition as one in which the preconditions of later
developments were laid out: both negatively, in that imperial
designs were ruled out, and positively, because innovations of
global significance were diffused world-wide and the building of
large-scale political and economic organizations was initiated in
several areas. The West European era was one during which a few
nation-states provided a regional nucleus for global organization
that may not have emerged otherwise; states in this region took
advantage of earlier innovations, and undertook their own
initiatives, to lay down world-spanning webs of economic, political
and social connections which had their center in Western
Europe. In the post-West European era we move beyond this nucleus,
[Page 62]
towards an organization of increasing density, and towards and
increasingly oceanic global basing mode. This is a process that
took off in the l9th century, gained force after 1945, is now
gathering new momentum, but is likely to continue for the next two
or three centuries. Beyond that a phase of consolidation, probably
reaching out into space, will prospectively give it yet greater
definition.
Long Cycles as Mechanisms of the Global Polity Process
Each (500-year) era of the global system process might
also be regarded as one period of global politics. We might also
say, as we have just seen, that the global system process defines,
in broad terms, the program for global politics of its era.
More specifically, each period of the global political
process might also be shown to comprise four long cycles, such as
those we have examined in earlier parts of this study. On that
account, each 120-year long cycle constitutes one phase of the
global political process, that is, the process by which global
political organization is constructed.
We have already seen, in Table 1, a series of five
[Page 63]
completed cycles. We can now complete that table with four more
cycles in the era of "preconditions," shown in Table 4. We
find that this era was launched with a surge of activity centered
on the Northern Sung, and was followed by another that was
characteristically "Southern Sung". The third cycle was propelled
by the Mongols, who moved the center of global political activity
to the Mediterranean, showing a "Genoan" and a "Venetian" cycle.
In about 1420 the Portuguese initiated the process by which the
nucleus of the global system emerged, and by 1850, with the
take-off of the U.S. cycle, we see the beginnings of global
organization. Table 4 sets out the full schedule of ten long
cycles, viewed as phases of the global political process; it
presents a fully theoretical interpretation of this process.
Table 4: Global Polity Process (Long Cycles)
================================================================
Agenda- Coalition- Macro- Execution
setting building decision
(global problems) (global war)
================================================================
EURASIAN TRANSITION period (preconditions)
----------------------------------------------------------------
930 960 990 1020 LC1
Information Sung War with Northern Sung
founded Liao
-------------------------------------------------
1060 1090 1120 1160 LC2
Global system Reformers: War with Southern Sung
base conservatives Chin
-------------------------------------------------
1190 1220 1250 1280 LC3
World Mongol Pisa routed Genoa
empire? confederation Fall of S. Sung Mongol wld.emp.
-------------------------------------------------
1300 1320 1350 1385 LC4
Organization Galley fleet Genoa routed Venice
of marit.trade network Mongol collapse Timur+1405
----------------------------------------------------------------
WEST EUROPEAN period (global nucleus)
----------------------------------------------------------------
1430 1460 1494 1516 LC5
Discovery Burgundian Wars of Italy Portugal
connection & Italian Ocean Spain
--------------------------------------------------
1540 1560 1580 1609 LC6
Integration Calvinist Dutch-Spanish Dutch Republic
international wars France
--------------------------------------------------
1640 1660 1688 1714 LC7
Political Anglo-Dutch Wars of Britain I
framework alliance Grand Alliance France
--------------------------------------------------
1740 1763 1792 1815 LC8
Industrial Trading Wars of Britain II
Revolution community Napoleon Germany
----------------------------------------------------------------
POST-WEST EUROPEAN period (global organization)
----------------------------------------------------------------
1850 1873 1914 1945 LC9
Knowledge Anglo-American World Wars USA
revolution sp.relationship I & II
--------------------------------------------------
1973 2000 2026 2050 LC10
Community Democratic (global war
transition substitute)
--------------------------------------------------
2080 LC11
Political framework
================================================================
[Page 66]
The phase structure of every long cycle is the same,
throughout the table. As in the West European era, major wars
also punctuate the four Eurasian transition cycles. These might
even be called proto-global wars, on several grounds. The forces
engaged in these conflicts were powerful, in fact they were the
largest in the world at the time, and the central campaigns of the
Mongol era shaped the world's military history for two centuries
and brought about a temporary consolidation of the core of the
Eurasian continent. What is more, just as in the later cases, sea
power played an important part in them as well.
Table 4 also contains significant information under the
heading of Agenda-Setting, where each entry shows the global
problems which were central to the shaping of that particular long
cycle. In that sense, the global problems orient a century-
long sequence of global politics. For instance, in LC3 the
series of events is shaped by a preeminently political problem,
that is, by an energetic drive for world empire. While that
drive
attained considerable success, it never reached the stage of
a consolidated world empire because it soon dissolved into
autonomous units. The energy quickly dissipated, and the real
winners turned out to be the Italian republics. We might argue
that the result was a negative learning experience, a lesson about
the irrelevance, if not the impossibility of constructing a world
empire as a lasting structure of world organization.
[Page 67]
The problems that appear under "agenda-setting" derive in
part from the working of the global polity process. They
"program" each long cycle so that it can serve as a mechanism
by which a global political structure might emerge. Specifically,
referring again to Table 4, we would argue that the West
European era was one of the formation of the global nucleus, that
network of linkages around which cooperative structures gradually
began to form in the world system.
We would argue further that, in order for such a nucleus
to be constituted, four major learning tasks would need to be
accomplished in sequence. Fist, an informational phase, that of
oceanic discoveries wherein the broad outlines and the dimensions
of the problem would be mapped out. In the second phase of
integration, in which competing nuclear coalitions first faced off
with rival designs, the initial elements of that nucleus would be
brought together from one of these coalitions. In the third
phase, the political framework of that nucleus achieves definition,
via a competitive balance-of-power system of nation-states that
rejected world empire. In the fourth, the industrial revolution
served to create an economic basis for the global system to be.
[Page 68]
In this way, one thing led to another since the solution to one
set of problems opened up opportunities for tackling the next.
That is how the long cycle served as the instrument for
the construction of a nucleus around which global organization is
emerging in the current era, and that is moreover how we can
demonstrate the existence of global problems. For the model
predicts that global problems acquire saliency in the phase of
agenda-setting. Specifically, to return to our example, we
would expect "world opinion" to begin placing "discoveries" on
the global agenda between 1430-1460, and start acting upon that
agenda soon after. In other words, the existence of global
problems postulated by the model can also be verified by historical
evidence.
These arguments tend to support the position that long
cycles in global politics are more than a mere churning of great
states, the rise and fall of global powers. If they were, such
cycles would be meaningless or worse for the world at large, or
even for the players themselves. According to our argument,
though, these processes possess a wider meaning and inhabit a more
expansive universe, that of the construction of the global polity
[Page 69]
via the stages of preconditions, nucleus, and organization. That
is what gives them long-range significance and accounts for the
success of some and the failures of others. For it is those whose
efforts contribute to the creation of a global order that have a
good chance to garner broad support, and hence have better odds for
success.
From Leadership to Organization
Most importantly, Table 5 allows us to demonstrate what
we might mean by the theme of this study, the transition from
global leadership to organization.
Strictly speaking, that transition begins with the
inception of global organization. That is, before about 1000
humans had not the means and largely no desire to organize the
entire planet, and had not evolved specialized organization for
those purposes. It is true that some of the great conquerors such
as Darius or Alexander, or the more powerful emperors of the Han
or T'ang dynasties, might have had the aspirations to rule over all
"four corners" of the 'civilized' world, but their practice always
fell short of these aspirations because their means proved
[Page 70]
inadequate the task.
The situation started to change when our table begins, about
1000. In Sung China population growth, economic expansion, and
urbanization created the conditions under which the basic
pre-conditions of global organization first emerged: a national
market economy, gunpowder and firearms, a "learning society"
founded on printing, and oceanic navigation based on the compass;
all that combined with the concept of Mandate of Heaven to rule
over the civilized world. The Sung exercised that mandate in a
rather mild manner; it was the Mongols who, first organized
by Genghiz Khan - a name that means Universal Ruler - translated
that mandate into a drive to conquer Eurasia, and who, under Kublai
Khan, the victor over the Southern Sung, came close to attaining
that goal by projecting on an almost global scale the methods of
organization devised by the empires of the classical period. But
they failed to innovate and their system of order proved to be
surprisingly short-lived. Timur's attempt to reassemble the
conquests of the Mongols failed even more decisively (1405).
The Mongols collapsed after about 1350, but it would be unwise
to dismiss theirs, and Timur's, failed experiment in world order
[Page 71]
as irrelevant to the study of world politics, for the
remnants of that empire have been with us until quite recently.
Russia, a dependency of the Mongol empire, established its national
identity by defeating the Golden Horde and reaching out to the
Pacific coast (1550-1650). The Ottomans, another earlier
dependency of the Mongols, lasted until the 20th century. The
Mughals, who descended from Timur, ruled India until the British
displaced them in the mid-19th century. China was slow to recover
from the Mongol conquest and was, until 1911, ruled by the Manchus
(descendants of the Jurchen tribes who founded the Chin Empire
destroyed by the Mongols in 1234, and whose language belongs to the
Altaic group, of which the other sub-groups are Turkic and
Mongolian).
The Mongol empire failed as an attempt at global organization
on an inner-continental basis. Its failure brought forth an
alternative form, one based on oceanic linkages, which we call
global leadership. Applying methods first developed on a
relatively small scale in the Mediterranean by the Genoese and
the Venetians, a set of newly-emerging nations, the Portuguese,
the Dutch and the British, projected these methods precociously
[Page 72]
from rather narrow West European bases onto a planetary scale.
From these small beginnings, a nucleus of global organization
gradually arose around certain major nation-states. Global
leadership found its most recent manifestation in the position of
the United States in the 20th century.
The nucleus of global organization first began to accrete on
a regional basis in Renaissance Italy after 1420, as part of the
alliances centered on Venice, and from the sixteenth century
onward, in Europe, around global leadership and its coalition wars.
The focus of diplomatic constellations soon became the Dutch
Republic, and then Britain (the two soon known as the "maritime
powers"), as well as the states that successively fought them,
Spain, France, and Germany, and the counter-coalitions they
attempted to rally. The high points of diplomatic organization were
the major peace settlements: the Truce of Antwerp (1609), the Peace
of Westphalia (1648), the Peace of Utrecht (1713-4), and the
Congress of Vienna (1814-5). It was as part of the post-Napoleonic
settlement that a committee of the Great Powers that came to be
known as the Concert of Europe was empowered, on British
initiative, to deal with crises that might arise from that
[Page 73]
settlement. The remainder of the world system largely remained a
British preserve.
Since that time, the nucleus of world organization
(nuclear because based principally on global leadership and its
European allies) has been subject to slow but steady expansion.
After 1850, the Ottoman Empire joined the European system, and
China and Japan were "opened" to the world; at the turn of the
20th century, the Hague Peace Conferences demonstrated the
practicality of international conferences of universal scope, and
so did the League of Nations in the interval between the two World
Wars. The United Nations, established in 1945 on the initiative
of the United States and with British cooperation comprised, in
the Security Council, the primary nuclear element of a committee of
the Great Powers. However, in the General Assembly it also
acquired a more universal component, designed to be representative
of all the world's national governments. So far the United
Nations has not become the center piece of post-West European
global politics. Instead, since 1945 the global political process
has revolved primarily around the leadership of the United States,
its initiatives (or lack of initiatives), and its coalitions and
counter-coalitions.
[Page 74]
That is why, at the turn of the 21st century, we have
advanced only partially toward the goal of improved global
organization. Table 4 suggests that such progress, while
continuing, will necessarily be slow. For, implied in our model
of the global political process is a time table for the post-West
European era. If we are correct in this analysis, that era should
comprise four long cycles. Of these the first, now complete, is
best characterized as having produced a new knowledge-basis for
global politics. Science and technology have taken off since
1850, so that the technical basis for world organization is now in
place, both in the positive sense of communication and information
and also in the possibilities of destruction of previously
unimaginable scope.
We are currently in the second cycle of that era, one
whose principal global problem centers on "integration," that is,
on laying the social foundations of global organization. We can
now see that any lasting foundation of "civil society" is likely to
be provided by an emerging global democratic community. It
is from within such a community which might emerge alternatives
[Page 75]
to global war, those arrangements that on previous
several occasions functioned as rather primitive selection
mechanisms for global leadership. These are major tasks whose
solutions might not be arrived at for several more decades. It is
only then, perhaps a century from now as a third cycle plays itself
out, that global organization might acquire a full political
framework of a federalist character which will be able to replace
the forms of global leadership to which we have become accustomed.
According to this analysis, therefore, the structure of global
politics of the coming century will continue to give a prominent,
though not exclusive, place to global leadership. Global
organization will be a mixture of leadership that is, or is not,
supplied by the world power in the form that is by now
"traditional", and of elements of universal organization in a
federalist mode that are more recent, more tentative, and subject
to evolutionary change. We might surmise that to the latter
would increasingly gravitate the administration of routine tasks,
while global leadership, acting through international institutions
or ad hoc coalitions, will remain indispensable for resolving
priority global problems.
[Page 76]
How does this analysis square with Robert Keohane's
(1984:14) question: "How can cooperation take place in world
politics in the absence of hegemony?" Two premises which lie
behind this question include 1) the definition of hegemony as
"preponderance of material resources," and 2) the observation that
the "post-hegemonic era" had already begun at his time of writing.
The answer to this question is: "Through improved (that is,
non-hegemonic) international regimes."
Our initial answer questions the premises of Keohane's
position by noting, first of all, that unlike his use of the term
"hegemony" our concept of leadership does not require a
"preponderance of material resources" but rather an economy with
global leading sectors; it also calls for politico-strategic
capacity for global reach, community organization, and
responsiveness to global problems. In these broader terms, it is
not obvious that the post-l945 term of US leadership has now ended;
indeed our analysis argues that it has not.
What is more, we need to distinguish between routine
tasks of global organization and those problems that call for
structural change and innovation. Once created, international
[Page 77]
regimes administer routine problems. We regard routine
cooperation even among egoists as non-surprising and as little in
need of explanation as is some standard or minimum amount of
conflict. Leadership, on the other hand, concerns crises and
thus requires innovative responses which call for learning
capabilities. The global system will continue to experience
crises, and new global problems in response to which leadership of
a "traditional" kind will continue to be called for. But such
leadership is also likely to materialize in the context of an
emerging democratic community that will temper it, and of an
increasingly well-informed world opinion that will scrutinize it
ever more closely.
In short our answer is: Routine cooperation will continue
even in periods of waning leadership (that is in phases of
delegitimation, and deconcentration), but leadership will be
needed for projects that will demand structural change in the 21st
century.
We therefore postulate that the global political process
will continue on its time path, following the same temporal
structure that we outlined in considerable detail in the
first part of this study. What we might expect to change
[Page 78]
is the specification of the necessary conditions of that process.
While remaining defined by our four basic categories, the content
of these conditions changes with the eras of global politics. We
have summarized in Table 5 the conditions likely to characterize
the era of "global organization," contrasting them with conditions
appropriate to "world empire" (the Mongol version), and global
leadership. We observe that a distinct global political structure
corresponds to each period of global politics.
Table 5: Necessary Conditions for Global Political Structure
---------------------------------------------------------------
World Global World
empire leadership organization
--------------------------------------------------------------
Principal unit of organization
Tribal Nation-state Federalist
Necessary conditions
Politico- Cavalry, for Navy, for Limited rapid
strategic continental global reach, reaction forces,
reach in global war earth monitoring
Economic Tribute Lead economy Autonomous tax
base,
global corporations
Social Stratified Open society Democratic community
Global By ruling World power Interactive media,
problem clan public world opinion
base opinion
----------------------------------------------------------------
[Page 79]
The third column of Table 5 specifies the conditions
necessary for the emergence of full-fledged "world organization"
of a kind sufficient to dispense with global leadership. These
include: federalist-type organs of collective decision-making that
might emerge as substitutes for global war, limited military forces
(including space capability for monitoring conditions on earth), an
autonomous revenue-raising system, a democratic community, and
grassroots-level mechanisms to facilitate responses to global
problems.
It also follows from our analysis that such conditions must be
brought into being through a learning process composed of a number
of phases, in which problems such as consolidating substitute
mechanisms for global war will be resolved. Unless and until such
conditions are satisfied, real global organization will not be
possible and strong doses of global leadership of the traditional
kind will still be needed.
[Page 80]
An Evolutionary Model
The model offered here is an evolutionary process model
of global politics. This is, however, not the place to fully
elaborate the theoretical ramifications of an evolutionary approach
[7]. At present, suffice it to say that such a model would rest
upon the following core propositions:
1. Evolution, including social evolution, is a pattern of the
universe.
2. Evolutionary processes necessarily occur in favorable
conditions.
3. Evolutionary processes involve the mechanisms of variation,
cooperation, selection, and reinforcement.
4. Evolutionary processes coevolve with other evolutionary
processes.
All we wish to argue at this point is that evolutionary
biology and the theoretical social sciences are "equivalent,
albeit different examples of the use of one and the same general
theoretical calculus (or model), the theoretical structure of which
remains the same" (Schmid 1987:82; italics in original). There
are, of course, important differences between biological organisms
and societies, and this suggests the need to keep the two realms
basically distinct. But the successes of the biological sciences
give us an incentive to pursue what has been called the
[Page 81]
"evolutionary analogy" with respect to social organization.
The forms of organization that have been addressed in
this paper are persisting populations of global political
strategies (or policies). Those strategies persist when they
successfully reproduce themselves. By "persistence" or
reproduction we mean the transmission of a program, code, or
set of generating rules to the next generation of strategies. We
regard forms of global organization, such as empire or global
leadership, as tight clusters (or populations) of strategies that
are subject to evolutionary processes.
We then proceed from the fact of global political evolution.
By extending the reach of our analysis further into the past, and
forward into the future, we have established that global political
structures have experienced substantial change. For we cannot fail
to have noticed that in the past millennium, (a) global
organization
has changed extensively, from a condition of low connectivity and
minimal structure to one of considerable connectivity and
substantial structure today. Moreover, that development has been
not merely one of change but has also shown (b) directionality
[Page 82]
(rather than randomness) in that, as just argued, the change might
be said to have embodied a search for improved forms of
organization appropriate to an expanding population. It has also
traced an orderly path in space, and exhibited a temporal
structure. Furthermore, it has been evolutionary in the sense of
being (c) a "natural" process of trial and error, one that could be
seen as if the unfolding of a process of evolution which does not
require the postulation of a grand design or purposeful intention.
To show directionality or "naturalness" we need not
embrace determinism or assume "progress," as in evolutionism.
We postulate only that the evolutionary process unfolds in
accordance with an inner logic and/or sequential structure, in that
each phase creates the conditions for the next phase which itself
must respond to new conditions in the environment. We have no
reason to believe that, merely because global politics have moved
toward more complex forms of organization, it has therefore become
"better". To make such an argument other external criteria would
have to be invoked. On the other hand, that process requires no
special motivation other than "search for a better life", or, as
[Page 83]
Adam Smith put it in his attempt to account for what prompts
humanity to save, the ever-present "desire for bettering our
condition."
We also assume "sensitive dependence on initial conditions;"
the beginning forms have an important effect on the course of
development, in that they help cumulate the results of earlier
changes. This is a basic reason why it is necessary to carefully
examine the temporal path of structural change that we also
describe as path-dependent [8].
Even though we need not invoke the postulate of progress,
we do not believe that evolution is a random process, a matter of
lucky accident, or "manna from heaven". Rather we assume that in
the presence of certain specifiable conditions, in particular those
of information, openness, variety, and complexity of interaction,
political evolution will indeed occur. That is why we have paid
such attention to specifying these kinds of conditions with care.
Conditions favoring political evolution are those in which
evolutionary mechanisms operate most successfully. The first of
these mechanisms is Darwinian "variation". Over time, some global
political strategies will be reproduced in a routine fashion by
[Page 84]
copying; but others will undergo change, by mutation or
combination. Additionally, new ones will be proposed as
innovations for policy agendas in response to demands for the
solution of global problems. Such combinations and recombinations
are more probable in free societies, hence are not as random as
mutations are thought to be in Darwinian biology. These are the
sources of variation in the population of strategies.
The political and social environment of this population
of strategies, including specific institutions, should then be
regarded as comprising a selective factor or mechanism that helps
to determine which parts of the program will persist, and
which policies shall be sustituted for by new programs. In global
politics this has been most directly the mechanism of
macrodecision, which in the past five centuries assumed the form of
global war but which might evolve new forms in the future. In
global economics, on the other hand, the competititve environment
of the world market has served as the basic mechanism of selection.
"Variation" and "selection" are the two Darwinian
mechanisms. To these may be added two others: cooperation, and
[Page 85]
reinforcement. Cooperation is distinctly non-Darwinian, but it
has been recognized more recently by those who see that evolution
is not only about competition, but is also about altruism, synergy,
and long-term collaboration as sources of advantages for survival.
Reinforcement is essential to learning because it rewards
successful solutions to social problems and it also cumulates the
bases of evolution.
This is the "hard core" (in the Lakatosian sense) of the
social evolutionary research program. It is actuated (with respect
to global politics) by the conception of the long cycle as a
phased and therefore also timed [9] evolutionary process that
consists of the sequential activation of the four sets of
mechanisms. To predict which particular cluster of policies will
prevail, we need additionally to specify a set of conditions
which are particularly favorable to the operation of these
mechanisms. Table 4 serves as a test of this evolutionary model.
But there is more to evolutionary theory. It asserts the
common descent of populations, and their common origin via a
branching process, forming an evolutionary tree."Co-evolution" is
a term referring to "diachronic changes in two or more inter
[Page 86]
acting objects or systems," and Lumsden and Wilson (1981:367) have
extended it to include the reciprocal effects of genetic and
cultural evolution. In populations of policies we might speak not
only of co-evolution of strategies in global politics and
economics, but also of policy lineages.
Our earlier analysis has determined a set of conditions
(shown in Table 2) that are "necessary" for selection to global
leadership, and that will determine the shape of global
organization. In the case of the politico-strategic organization,
the relevant process is of course endogenous; that organization
rises as part of the long cycle. But for the three other
conditions we need to have recourse to a set of processes that are
basically exogenous to the global political process. In Table 3
we show these as "interaction effects," because Kennedy lays so
much stress on the interaction of politico-military and economic
factors.
With respect to the lead economy, as just mentioned, we
need to consult developments in the global economic system and
inquire into the conditions that are likely to foster new global
[Page 87]
economic sectors in particular. Such "co-evolution of global
politics and economics" is examined in greater detail in Modelski
& Thompson (1995). Table 6 is a schematic representation of two
processes: long cycles that have been the principal subject of
this study, and K-waves, charting the rise and decline of leading
sectors of the global economy.
Table 6: The Co-Evolution of Global Politics and Economics
==============================================================
Long cycles K-waves
(world powers and antecedents) (global leading sectors)
==============================================================
GLOBAL POLITY PROCESS MARKET ECONOMY
Preconditions (Eurasian Sung transition (Chinese)
transition)
LC1 Northern Sung K1 Printing and paper
K2 National market
LC2 Southern Sung K3 Fiscal framework
K4 Maritime trade
Nautical-Commercial
Revolution (Italian)
LC3 Genoa K5 Champagne fairs
K6 Black Sea trade
LC4 Venice K7 Galley fleets
K8 Pepper
Global nucleus (West European) Framework of global
trade (Burgundian)
LC5 Portugal K9 Guinea gold
K10 Indian spices
LC6 Dutch Republic K11 Atlantic, Baltic trade
K12 Asian trade (VOC)
Industrial take-off
(British)
LC7 Britain I K13 Amerasian
K14 Amerasian
LC8 Britain II K15 Cotton, steam
K16 Rail
WORLD MARKET
Global organization (Post- Information age
West European)
LC9 United States K17 Steel, electrics
K18 Autos, electronics
LC10 K19 Information industries
================================================================
[Page 89]
These sectors have been both industrial and mercantile,
representing innovative spurts in economic and commercial
organization. Just as the long cycle is a mechanism propelling
the global political process, K-waves are the moving elements of
the global economy.
With respect to the effect of free and open societies, we need
to look into the rise and decline of social movements and the
prospects for the expansion of the global democratic community.
And concerning responsiveness to global problems, we need to review
the processes that shape global opinion.
So much for global structural processes. For an even
more complete picture, we need to consult developments at both
regional and national levels. All in all, a complex task. But
it might be rendered more tractable because we have taken the
"necessary conditions" as initial proxies for these more
wide-ranging ramifications.
Conclusion
Since the second half of the 19th century, two conceptions of
evolutionary theory have existed side by side: the Comte-Spencerian
view of social development, which emphasized stages of development
[Page 90]
that might be manifested in the history of humanity, and the
Darwinian model that clarified the causal mechanisms of evolution
to explain continuity and change in populations, but avoided the
temptation for quick explanations of socio-historical processes.
The Spencerian program fell into disuse, but in mid-20th century,
Darwinian theory experienced a strong revival and reinvigoration
through a "modern synthesis" (Huxley 1942,3rd ed.l974) that
followed the revolution in genetics and the discovery of DNA. This
theory, in turn, has been subject to much critical analysis
(Pollard 1984). Our model of global political evolution combines
these two conceptions.
Where does our model stand on some of the major themes and
debates that have characterized evolutionary thought? Hallpike
(1986:19ff) distinguishes four types of themes: whether
evolutionary processes are endogenous, or exogenous; whether the
theories to explain them are or should be structuralist or atomist;
whether they are materialist or idealist, and whether the processes
are deterministic or random (stochastic).
Briefly, we would argue that the global evolutionary process
can be studied, in the first instance, as an endogenous process.
[Page 91]
But it is also clear that each of its necessary conditions in turn
depends on other evolutionary processes that are exogenous to it
(for instance, the lead condition of the economy depends on the
development of global leading sectors within it). These other
processes are in turn nested in yet other exogenous processes (that
is, to continue the same example, in the evolution of the entire
world economy). The picture is complex indeed.
Our approach also is clearly structuralist, in that it
proposes that persisting clusters of strategies form emergent
global political macro-structures whose properties cannot be
deduced from the parts composing them. It focusses on
structural transformations as well. The concept of the long cycle
as a selection process propelled by a set of necessary conditions
makes it plain that both "ends" and "means", both idealist
(agendas, free societies) and materialist components
(politico-strategic, and economic power) are equally involved.
Finally, the model is neither deterministic, nor does it assume
randomness, but it rather favors directionality without projecting
a fixed content for it.
[page 92]
The directionality of evolutionary politics is that of
"organized complexity" (Davies 1984:239-240). The complex
organization of living organisms can be shown to arise
spontaneously given the existence of an ensemble, that is, a large
collection of similar systems. Complexity has been defined as the
ability to make transitions, that is to evolve. In our case, the
relevant collection is the population of strategies or policies,
past, present, and future. That way experiments will occur with
alternative strategies until, in favorable conditions, a useful
innovation comes along that is selected out and then cumulates
through amplification. The accumulation of countless innovations,
large and small, establishes systems as complex as modern market
economies or free democratic communities [10].
That is why we view this as an open-ended model that does
not posit a final goal or destination for the processes that it is
analyzing. All it does is postulate an evolutionary "inner
logic," that is, the requirement that the processes evince a
time-space structure that constrains them.
Notes
Paper read to the XIIIth World Congress of Sociology, Bielefeld,
Germany, July 18-23, 1994, revised. Earlier versions of this
paper were presented, in May-June 1993, at the Geneva Institute of
International Studies, the University of Zurich, and Leyden
University.
[Page 93]
1. This is illustrated below with respect to four previous cycles
of data on sea and land power concentrations, which is a good
indicator of the degree to which the world power, and the
challenger, respectively command forces of oceanic and continental
impact. For each world power the range of that index stretches
over the phases of Execution (EX) and Coalition-building (CO). A
high ratio, in excess of .500, means that over one half of the
capital warships in the global system were commanded by that world
power. In each case, the range shown for the EX phase is
consistently higher than the range for the CO phase. For each
challenger, the table shows the peak of an index of army
concentration in Western Europe, which usually falls close to
the end of the CO phase.
=================================================================
World power Phase Range of seapower
concentration ratios
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Portugal EX 1516-1540 .597 - .511
CO 1150-1580 .425 - .202
Dutch Republic EX 1609-1640 .557 - .476
CO 1660-1680 .335 - .260
Britain I EX 17l6-1740 .522 - .461
CO 1763-1792 .448 - .332
Britain II EX 1815-1850 .660 - .462
CO 1873-1914 .477 - .436
United States EX 1945-1973 1.0 - .713
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Challenger End of CO phase Observed peak of West
European power concentration
--------------------------------------------------------
Spain 1580 1560-64 .649
France I 1688 1690-94 .484
France II 1792 1800-04 .537
Germany 1914 1910-14 .366
1940-44 .486
---------------------------------------------------------
Sources: Modelski and Thompson 1988:110-112, for seapower
concentration ratios, and Rasler and Thompson (1994:Ch.2) for West
European army concentrations.
================================================================
[Page 94]
2. As shown by Daniel Whiteneck's (1993) research on the network
of British commercial treaties after 1750.
3. Or else we might say that global leadership is brought about
or "caused" by a "production function" constituted of these four
factors.
4. Department of Defence spokesmen now claim that "space control"
has become "as important to the USA as sea control capabilities are
to the exercise of maritime strategy" (SIPRI YEARBOOK 1991:58-60).
5. None of the other approaches to the rise and fall of world
powers include an analysis of the democratic experience.
6. The communist international system, ca.1950, comprised much the
same land area as the Mongol empire ca. l280.
7. Traditionally, the study of evolution is divided into two
areas, macroevolution and microevolution, that is, description
(whether evolution has occurred, and the theory of descent), and
explanation (the mechanisms of evolution) (see e.g. Ayala 1982;
Pollard 1984). For a full discussion see Modelski 1994.
[Page 95]
8. David (1988:18) describes processes whose outcomes are
path-dependent as those dynamic processes in which the position and
motion of the system, and its constituent sub-systems, are
"sensitive to initial conditions".
9. The fact of regularity of the long cycle, as of other global
processes may not, in and of itself, be altogether surprising.
According to Paul Davies (1984:241,57) "periodic motion, or
oscillation, is perhaps the most widespread example of order in
physics"; indeed "physical systems which display exponential
behavior are also likely to display periodic 'sinusoidal'
behavior". But it does pose the question as to the mechanism of
such regularity, and leads to the intriguing hypothesis of a
social-evolutionary clock. Such a clock might be stochastic in
character, governed by a constant probability of a certain amount
of mutation (innovation, that also might cluster in particular time
periods) (cf. accounts of evolutionary molecular clocks in
Dobzhansky et al. 1977:308-313, Ayala 1984). It could also be
metronomic, timing such change. Possibly some evolutionary
processes, such as the long cycle of global politics, might serve
to time others.
10. Robert Wesson reaches "beyond natural selection" to chaos
theory. He views (1991:144) the genome, whose essence is
self-organization, as an "attractor" : a "set of permitted states
of a system", that is, linked attractors at all levels of genetic
stability", that are latent patterns for making a structure. "The
genome is a plan (or a combination of many plans) for building an
organism; it is a pattern or a program".
[Page 96]
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