Volume 2, Number 15, 1996
THE RISE OF EAST ASIA AND THE WITHERING AWAY OF THE INTERSTATE SYSTEM
Giovanni Arrighi
Department of Sociology
Binghamton University
Binghamton, New York 13902-6000 USA
arrighi@binghamton.edu
Copyright 1996 by Giovanni Arrighi.
v.1/15/97
I
History continually messes up the neat conceptual frameworks
and the more or less elegant theoretical speculations with which
we endeavor to understand the past and forecast the future of the
world we live in. In recent years, two events stand out as
eminently subversive of the intellectual landscape: the sudden
demise of the USSR as one of the two main loci of world power and
the gradual rise of East Asia to epicenter of world-scale processes
of capital accumulation. Although each event has received
more than its due of scholarly attention, it is their joint
occurrence that has the most significant conceptual and theoretical
implications.
[Page 1]
World-systems studies are as likely to be revolutionized
by this joint occurrence as any other field of historical
inquiry. Thus, Andre Gunder Frank has claimed that
the recent demise of the 'socialist system,' and the
increasing wealth of many Asian countries provide a new
perspective on the origins and development of a world
economic system that spanned the globe. It is an
appropriate moment to critically reexamine the work of
Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, both of whom
have advanced the view that a world-economy emerged in
Western Europe by at least 1450, then spread outward
from Europe to encompass the rest of the world.
(1994: 259)
In the new perspective that Frank proposes, the formation
of a world-economic system encompassing Eurasia and parts of
Africa antedates 1450 by several millennia. Within this ancient
world economic system, Europe in the modern era did not "incorpo-
rate" Asia. Rather, after 1500 it used American silver to buy
its way into an Asian-dominated trading system. Even then,
"Europe's incursions into Asia... succeeded only after about
three centuries, when Ottoman, Moghul, and Qing rule was weakened
for other reasons. In the global economy, these and other
economies competed with each other until Europe won" (Frank 1994:
273, 275).
Frank does not spell out the dynamic of this "victory." He
nonetheless insists on two things. First, at the origins of the
victory there is "no dramatic, or even gradual, change to a
capitalist economy, and certainly none beginning in Europe in the
sixteenth century" (1994: 275). And second, the victory now
seems to have been very short-lived. "The contemporary economic
expansion in East Asia, beginning with Japan, then in the East
Asian NICs and now apparently also in coastal China, may spell
the beginnings of a return [to a world system] in which parts of
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Asia again play a leading role in the future as they did in the
not so distant past" (Gills and Frank 1994: 6-7).
Starting from altogether different premises, a group of
Japanese historians, most notably, Takeshi Hamashita and Heita
Kawakatsu, have recently advanced a reinterpretation of "modern-
ization" in East Asia that converges in key respects with Frank's
critique of established views of the formation and expansion of
the modern world system. Unlike Frank, Hamashita and Kawakatsu
focus on East Asian rather than world history. But like Frank,
they deny that the expanding European world-economy ever "incor-
porated" what they call the Sinocentric tribute-trade system of
East Asia.
In Hamashita's conceptualization, the several sea zones that
stretch from Northeast to Southeast Asia have constituted for at
least a millennium an integrated ensemble of regions, countries,
and cities held together by a tribute-trade system centered on
China. The regions, countries, and cities located along the
perimeter of each sea zone "are close enough to influence one
another, but are too far apart to assimilate or be assimilated."
The Sinocentric tribute-trade system provided them with a political-
economic framework of mutual integration that nonetheless was
loose enough to endow its peripheral components with considerable
autonomy vis-a-vis the Chinese center (Hamashita 1995: 5-8).
Within this system, tribute missions performed an "imperial
title-awarding" function that was both hierarchical and competi-
tive. Thus, Korea, Japan, the Ryukyus, Vietnam and Laos, among
others, all sent tribute missions to China. But the Ryukyus and
Korea sent missions also to Japan; and Vietnam required tribute
missions from Laos. Japan and Vietnam, therefore, were both
peripheral members of the Sinocentric system and competitors with
China in the exercise of the imperial title-awarding function
(Hamashita 1994: 92).
The system of tribute missions was intertwined and grew in
symbiosis with extensive trading networks. In fact, the rela-
tionship between trade and tribute was so close that "it is quite
[Page 3]
legitimate to view tribute exchange as a commercial transaction."
Even the Chinese court... acted as a party to business
transactions. The mode of payment was often Chinese currency,
whether paper money or silver. Seen from an economic
perspective, tribute was managed as an exchange between
seller and buyer, with the 'price' of commodities fixed.
Indeed, 'price' standards were determined, albeit loosely,
by market prices in Peking. Given the nature of this trans-
action, it can be shown that the foundation of the whole
complex tribute-trade formation was determined by the price
structure of China and that the tribute-trade zone formed an
integrated 'silver zone' in which silver was used as the
medium of trade settlement. The key to the functioning of
the tribute trade as a system was the huge [foreign] 'demand'
for [Chinese] commodities... and the difference between
prices inside and outside China. (Hamashita 1994: 96-7)
European expansion in Asia did not bring the Sinocentric
tribute-trade system to an end. It simply influenced its inner
dynamics, most notably, by strengthening the preexisting disposi-
tion of peripheral countries to seek better terms for their
exchanges with the center or even to replace China as the system's
center. But the formation of national identities among these
countries long preceded the European impact and was based on
their own understanding of Sinocentrism (Hamashita 1994: 94;
1995: 6, 8-9, 13). Thus, through its seclusion policy in the Edo
period (1603-1867) "Japan was trying to become a mini-China both
ideologically and materially." And Japanese industrialization
after the Meiji Restoration "was not so much a process of catching
up with the West, but more a result of centuries-long compe-
tition within Asia" (Kawakatsu 1995: 6-7; also 1986).
To my knowledge, neither Hamashita nor Kawakatsu tell us
much about what was left of the Sinocentric tribute-trade system
at the end of the Second World War and what happened to it in the
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Cold War era. Their analyses are nonetheless presented as having
important implications for our understanding, not just of East
Asian history, but also of the present and likely future evolu-
tion of political and economic relations within the region and
between the region and the rest of the world (see, for example,
Hamashita 1995: 4-5). These implications are not spelled out
but, at least in so far as Hamashita is concerned, it seems to me
that they can be summed up in two propositions.
First, the present political, economic, and cultural config-
uration of East Asia is a legacy of the tribute-trade system that
regulated relations among the various political jurisdictions of
the region for centuries before its incorporation into the modern
interstate system. This incorporation is a very recent phenomenon
and cannot be expected to have displaced, let alone erased,
shared understandings of interstate relations that have deep
roots in the geography and history of the region. These shared
understandings will continue to influence the way in which
interstate relations operate in East Asia and between East Asian
and non-East Asian states.
Second, the legacy of the Sinocentric tribute-trade system
can be expected to weigh even more heavily on relations among
business enterprises in the region than on relations among
governments. For tribute was inseparable from a regional trading
system which, over time, became increasingly autonomous from the
actual dispatch of tribute missions. The main expression of this
autonomy was the growth of large interstitial business communi-
ties, most notably an Overseas Chinese business diaspora, that
connected the local economies of the region to one another in
complementarity and, increasingly, in competition with tribute
missions (Hamashita 1994: 97-103; 1995: 12, 15-16). When the
Sinocentric tribute system began to wither away under the combined
impact of endogenous nationalism and exogenous incorporation
in the Eurocentric interstate system, these interstitial
business communities did not vanish into thin air. On the
contrary, they continued to constitute an "invisible" but powerful
[Page 5]
connector of the East Asian regional economy.
This conceptualization of East Asian history contains an
implicit critique of established world-systems theories that
present both analogies and differences with Frank's critique.
The two critiques are analogous in their emphasis on the pre-
modern ancestry of the contemporary world system and on the
superficiality of Western hegemony in Asia in general, and in
East Asia in particular. Since modernity and Western hegemony
have been associated in Braudel's and Wallerstein's conceptual-
izations of world history with the rise and expansion of a
Eurocentric *capitalist* world system, this emphasis is tantamount
to a rejection of capitalism as a useful notion for the analysis
of world historical social change. Frank rejects the notion
explicitly, as we have seen; but Hamashita does so implicitly by
omitting any reference to capitalism in his account of the
Sinocentric world system and of its transformation under Western
influence.
For all their similarities, the two critiques diverge in one
important respect. The main thrust of Frank's critique is to
underscore the basic continuity *in time* of a single global world
system before and after the European discovery and conquest of
the Americas (Frank 1994: 273; see also Gills and Frank 1992 and
Frank and Gills 1993). The main thrust of Hamashita's implicit
critique, in contrast, is to underscore the basic *dis*continuity
*in space* of *regional* world systems that retain their geo-
historical identity even after they are incorporated in a single
global world system. To put it crudely, the main thrust of Frank's
critique is to erase modern (and capitalist) history from the map
of the contemporary global economy, while the main thrust of
Hamashita's critique is to put regional geopolitics at the center
of contemporary world history.
The purpose of this paper is to show that, taken jointly or
separately, these critiques go both too far and not far enough.
They go too far, because their legitimate preoccupation with the
pre-modern ancestry of the modern world system translates into a
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negation of the undeniable specificity of the modern era, as
defined by the extraordinary expansionary thrust of the Euro-
centric system both absolutely and relative to the Sinocentric
system. Wallerstein's theory of the rise in Europe of an inher-
ently expansionary *capitalist* system is meant to highlight and
explain this phenomenon and, as such, it cannot be dismissed
unless we produce an alternative and more plausible explanation.
Neither Frank nor Hamashita do, and that is the reason why
their critiques of established world-systems theories do not go
far enough. By dismissing (Frank) or neglecting (Hamashita) the
role of capitalism in shaping the contemporary world, they cannot
see the challenge that the great events of our days pose to our
understanding of capitalism as world historical social system.
In the next two sections of this paper, I shall sketch the nature
of this challenge as can be perceived from an East Asian perspec-
tive. I shall then return to the issues raised here to propose a
reconceptualization of historical capitalism that accomodates
Frank's and Hamashita's legitimate preoccupation with the pre-
modern ancestry of the contemporary world system.
II
As the title of this paper suggests, the rise of East Asia
and the present crisis of the system of nation-states are closely
related phenomena. By and large, this close relationship has
gone unnoticed. Each phenomenon has been debated as if it bore
no significant relationship to the other.
Ever since Charles Kindleberger (1969: ch. 6) declared the
nation-state to be "just about through as an economic unit," the
crisis of the system of nation-states has been associated with,
and traced to, the emergence of a system of transnational corpo-
rations which, in Kindleberger's characterization, owe to no
country more loyalty than to any other, nor feel completely at
home in any country (see also, among others, Hymer and Rowthorn
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1970: 88-91; Barnet and Muller 1974: 15-16; Reich 1992: 3). In
recent years, other facets of the disempowerment of nation-states
have been brought into the picture. Thus, Peter Drucker (1993:
141-56) traces the disempowerment to the combined impact of three
forces: the "transnationalism" of multilateral treaties and
suprastatal organizations, including transnational corporations;
the "regionalism" of economic blocs like the European Union and
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); and the "tribalism"
of increasing emphasis on diversity and identity. Either
way, the symptoms and the causes of the ongoing crisis of the
system of nation-states are sought and found in all regions of
the world without any special attention being paid to East Asia.
Accounts of economic expansion in East Asia, for their part,
make almost no reference to the disempowerment of nation-states
as a significant aspect of the phenomenon (for a partial excep-
tion, see Bernard and Ravenhill 1995). Worse still, the neo-
liberal fantasy of a greater respect for, and reliance on, self-
regulating markets on the part of economically successful East
Asian governments, has channeled debates on the wrong track. In
dismantling authoritatively and effectively this fantasy, Chalmers
Johnson (1987, 1988), Alice Amsden (1989) and Robert Wade
(1990), among others, have conveyed the impression that the
crisis of nation-states, if at all real, does not concern East
Asia, where states are well and strong.
Leaving aside the question of whether the states of East
Asia are well and strong--some of which are, while others are
not--let us begin by noticing how peculiar East Asian states
appear when compared with the ideal type of nation-state. Three
peculiarities stand out above all others: the "quasi-state"
nature of the economically most successful states of the region;
the importance of informal business networks in connecting the
economies of these quasi-states to one another and to the rest of
the region; and the extreme imbalance of the distribution of
military, financial and demographic resources among the states
operating in the region.
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The expression "quasi-states" has been coined by Robert
Jackson (1990: 21) to designate states that have been granted
juridical statehood, and have thereby become members of the
interstate system, but lack the capabilities needed to carry out
the governmental functions associated historically with state-
hood. Jackson uses the expression with special reference to the
less successful among the Third World states that have emerged
from the post-Second World War wave of decolonization. Neverthe-
less, to varying degrees and in different ways the five most
successful capitalist states of East Asia--Japan and the so-
called Four Tigers--all qualify as quasi-states.
For the internal and external aspects of national sovereignty
are essentially theories about the legitimacy of authority.
National polities organized into states are theorized as the
pinnacle of legitimate authority, "neither subordinate to the
world polity nor defied by local polities or organizations." The
theory, however, "is often violated by the facts" (Boli 1993: 10-
11). As we shall see, key facts of the history of the modern
world system violate the theory of nation-states as the pinnacle
of legitimate authority. But at no time since the sixteenth
century have the facts of an emerging center of world capitalism
violated the theory more conspicuously than today in East Asia.
Among the region's most successful capitalist states, only
the largest, Japan, is a nation-state in the full sense of the
term. Regionally and globally, however, even Japan is still a US
military protectorate. Mutatis mutandi, it fully deserves the
designation of "semisovereign state" with which Peter Katzenstein
(1987) has characterized the Federal Republic of Germany. South
Korea and Taiwan, the two states of intermediate size, are also
US military protectorates. In addition, neither of them is a
nation-state in the full sense--South Korea living in constant
hope or fear of being reunited with its northern half, and Taiwan
in constant hope or fear of becoming the master or the servant of
Mainland China. Finally, the two smallest but by no means least
important states, the semisovereign Hong Kong and Singapore, are
[Page 9]
not nation-states at all but city-states, exercising in the East
Asian region functions not altogether different from those
performed by Genoa and Venice in early-modern Europe--the commer-
cial-industrial entrepot functions exercised by Singapore making
it resemble Venice, and the commercial-financial entrepot func-
tions exercised by Hong Kong making it resemble Genoa (Arrighi
1994a: 78).
This peculiar configuration of East Asian capitalist states
is matched by an equally peculiar configuration of the region's
business organizations. Up to very recently, East Asia (North-
east Asia in particular) has been a secondary source and destina-
tion of foreign direct investment in comparison, not just with
North America and Western Europe, but also with Latin America,
Southern and Central Africa, North Africa and the Middle East.
As a result, the vertical integration of economic activities
across political jurisdictions typical of US corporate capitalism
never became as important in East Asia as it did in most regions
of the non-Communist world.
Although in the 1970s and, above all, in the 1980s foreign
direct investment within East Asia and between East Asia and the
rest of the world grew rapidly (Petri 1993: 39-42), the cross-
border organization of business enterprise in the region relied
heavily on informal networks among juridically independent units
rather than vertical integration within a single multi-unit
enterprise. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the leading agency in
the formation of regional business networks of this kind were
Japanese trading and manufacturing companies, which transplanted
across the region their domestic multilayered subcontracting
system (Arrighi, Ikeda and Irwan 1993). From the mid-1980s
onwards, however, the leading role of Japanese companies in the
formation of regional business networks was supplemented, and in
key areas surpassed, by the activities of the Overseas
Chinese business diaspora (Arrighi 1994b; Irwan 1995). These two
agencies, in the words of a senior economist for Deutsche Bank
Capital Markets in Tokyo, "don't really mix, but complement each
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other well. The Overseas Chinese are the oil--the lubricant that
makes deals possible--and the Japanese are the vinegar--the
technology, capital, and management that really packs a punch"
(quoted in Kraar 1993: 40).
Po-keung Hui (1995) has documented the derivation of the
Chinese capitalist diaspora that is emerging as a leading agency
of processes of capital accumulation in East Asia from the
business communities that grew in the interstices of the Sino-
centric tribute-trade system before and after the European
impact. His analysis lends support to Hamashita's contention of
the continuing relevance of the Sinocentric tribute-trade system
for an understanding of the present and future dynamic of the
East Asian region. But it also invites a comparison with similarly
structured business agencies that played a critical role in
the formation and initial expansion of the Eurocentric capitalist
world-economy.
I am referring specifically to the Genoese capitalist
diaspora which, in association with the territorialist rulers of
Portugal and Spain, promoted and organized the transoceanic
expansion of the European world-economy in the late fifteenth and
early sixteenth centuries (Arrighi 1994a: ch. 2). We shall later
return to the significance of this Genoese-Iberian association
for an understanding of the origins of the Eurocentric capitalist
world system. For now, let us simply underscore two striking
similarities between the sixteenth-century Genoese and the late-
twentieth-century Chinese capitalist diasporas. First, like the
networks of commercial and financial intermediation controlled by
the sixteenth-century Genoese diaspora, the business networks
controlled by the Chinese diaspora occupy places (Hong Kong,
Taiwan, Singapore, as well as the most important commercial
centers of Southeast Asian countries and Mainland China) but are
not defined by the places they occupy. What defines the networks
is the space-of-flows (the commercial and financial transactions)
that connect the places where individual members or sub-groups of
the diaspora conduct their business (cf. Arrighi 1994a: 82-4).
[Page 11]
Second, like the business networks of the sixteenth-century
Genoese diaspora, the business networks of the Overseas Chinese
are an interstitial formation that thrives on the limits and
contradictions of very large territorial organizations--organiza-
tions whose networks of power are so extensive as to resemble
pre-modern world-empires rather than nation-states.
This brings us to the third peculiarity of the political-
economy of the East Asian region: the extreme imbalance of the
distribution of power resources among political jurisdictions.
This extreme imbalance is the obverse side of the two peculiarities
we have just discussed. Broadly speaking, the "semisovereignty"
of the most successful capitalist states of the region is
the obverse side of their incorporation within the networks of
power of the United States. And the growing importance of the
Overseas Chinese in promoting the economic expansion and integration
of the region is but one aspect of the reincorporation of
Mainland China in regional and world markets.
The extreme imbalance of military power in the region is
primarily a legacy of Japan's defeat in the Second World War and
of the US policy of "containment" during the Cold War era. The
unilateral military occupation of Japan by the United States in
1945 and the division of the region five years later into two
antagonistic blocs created, in Bruce Cumings' words, a US "vertical
regime solidified through bilateral defense treaties (with
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines) and conducted by
a State Department that towered over the foreign ministries of
these four countries" (1994: 23).
All became semi-sovereign states, deeply penetrated by
American military structures (operational control of the
South Korean armed forces, Seventh Fleet patrolling of the
Taiwan strait, defense dependencies for all four countries,
bases on all their territories) and incapable of independent
foreign policy or defense initiatives. All were in a sense
contemporary "Hermit Kingdoms" vis-a-vis each other, if not
in relation to the U.S.... There were minor demarches
through the military curtain beginning in the mid-1950s,
like low levels of trade betwen Japan and China, or Japan
and North Korea. But the dominant tendency was a unilateral
American regime heavily biased toward military forms of
communication. (Cumings 1994: 23-4)
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It is interesting to notice how this "unilateral American
regime" combined from the start features that made it resemble
the pre-modern Sinocentric tribute-trade system as well as the
early-modern Genoese-Iberian regime of rule and accumulation.
The main resemblance with the Sinocentric system was the interpe-
netration of tribute and trade relations between an imperial
center whose domestic economy was of incomparably greater size
than that of its vassal states. In this respect, we may well say
that the Pax Americana in East Asia transformed the periphery of
the former Sinocentric tribute-trade system into the periphery of
a US-centric tribute-trade system.
The US-centric East Asian regime, however, fostered a
functional specialization between the imperial and the vassal
states. This functional specialization had no parallel in the
old Sinocentric regime. Rather, it reminds us of the sixteenth-
century Genoese-Iberian quasi-imperial regime. The main feature
of the latter regime was a relationship of political exchange
between an (Iberian) territorialist organization--which specialized
in the provision of protection and in the pursuit of power--
and of a (Genoese) capitalist organization, which specialized in
trade and in the pursuit of profit. A similar relationship can
be clearly recognized in US-Japanese relations throughout the
Cold War era. For "semisovereignty" enabled Japanese capital to
externalize protection costs and to specialize in the pursuit of
profit as successfully as Genoese capital had done four centuries
earlier (Arrighi 1994a: 120, 338).
Freed from the burden of defense spending, Japanese govern-
ments have funneled all their resources and energies into an
economic expansionism that has brought affluence to Japan
and taken its business to the farthest reaches of the globe.
War has been an issue only in that the people and the conservative
government have resisted involvement in foreign
wars like Korea and Vietnam. Making what concessions were
necessary under the Security Treaty with the Americans, the
government has sought only involvement that would bring
economic profit to Japanese enterprise. (Schurmann 1974:
143)
[Page 13]
For all its similarities with pre- and early-modern modes of
rule and accumulation, the post-Second World War US-centric East
Asian regime differs radically from its predecessors in at least
one respect: the incomparably greater size and technological
sophistication of the US military-industrial apparatus. The
far-flung network of quasi-permanent overseas bases put or kept in
place by the United States after the Second World War "was
without historical precedent; no state had previously based its
own troops on the sovereign territory of other states in such
extensive numbers for so long a peacetime period" (Krasner 1988:
21). Not even in their wildest dreams could the rulers of
Imperial China or Imperial Spain imagine that such an extensive
and potentially destructive deployment of military muscle could
ever materialize.
And yet, it was precisely in the military sphere that the
the US-centric East Asian regime began to crack. For the Vietnam
War destroyed what the Korean War had created. The Korean War
had instituted the US-centric East Asian regime by excluding
Mainland China from normal commercial and diplomatic intercourse
with the non-communist part of the region, through blockade and
war threats backed by "an archipelago of American military
installations" (Cumings 1994: 23). The Vietnam War, in contrast,
initiated a reversal of the economic fortunes of the United
States and Japan that, over time, made US world power dependent
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on Japanese finances. More importantly, it forced the United
States to readmit Mainland China to normal commercial and diplomatic
intercourse with the rest of East Asia (cf. Arrighi 1994b).
This outcome transformed without eliminating the previous
imbalance of the distribution of power resources in the region.
The rise of Japan to industrial and financial powerhouse of
global significance transformed the previous relationship of
Japanese political and economic vassalage vis-a-vis the United
States into a relationship of mutual vassalage. Japan continued
to depend on the United States for military protection; but the
United States came to depend ever more critically on Japanese
finance and industry for the reproduction of its protection-
producing apparatus. That is to say, power resources became more
evenly distributed between the United States and Japan but the
structural differentiation between the two states that was at the
basis of their relationship of political exchange, if anything,
increased further.
At the same time, the reincorporation of Mainland China in
the regional and global market economies brought back into play a
state whose demographic size, abundance of labor resources, and
growth potential surpassed by a good margin that of all other
states operating in the region, the United States included.
Within less than twenty years after Richard Nixon's mission to
Beijing, and less than fifteen after the formal re-establishment
of diplomatic relations between the United States and the PRC,
this giant "container" of labor power already seemed on the verge
of becoming once again the powerful attractor of means of payments
it had been in pre-modern and early-modern times. To be
sure, the PRC has been reincorporated in regional and global
markets at the lowest levels of the value-added hierarchy of the
capitalist world-economy. And in spite of the extraordinary
expansion of its domestic production and foreign trade over the
last fifteen years, its GNP per capita at world market prices has
remained among the lowest in the world (Lu 1995). Nevertheless,
this failure of relative GNP per capita at world market prices to
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rise has further increased the attractiveness of the PRC's huge
reserves of labor for foreign capital and entrepreneurship, as
reflected in the explosive growth of capital flows to China since
the late 1980s (Arrighi 1994b).
If the main attraction of the PRC for foreign capital has
been its huge and highly competitive reserves of labor, the
"matchmaker" that has facilitated the encounter of foreign
capital and Chinese labor is the Overseas Chinese capitalist
diaspora.
Drawn by China's capable pool of low-cost labor and its
growing potential as a market that contains one-fifth of the
world's population, foreign investors continue to pour money
into the PRC. Some 80% of that capital comes from the
Overseas Chinese, refugees from poverty, disorder, and
communism, who in one of the era's most piquant ironies are
now Beijing's favorite financiers and models for moderniza-
tion. Even the Japanese often rely on the Overseas Chinese
to grease their way into China. (Kraar 1993: 40)
In fact, the era's most piquant irony is not Beijing's
reliance on the Overseas Chinese to ease Mainland China's re-
incorporation in regional and world markets. As Alvin So and
Stephen Chiu (1995: ch. 11) have shown, the close political
alliance that was established in the 1980s between the Chinese
Communist Party and Overseas Chinese capitalists made perfect
sense in terms of their respective pursuits. For the alliance
provided the Overseas Chinese with extraordinary opportunities to
profit from commercial and financial intermediation, while
providing the Chinese Communist Party with a highly effective
means of killing two birds with one stone: to upgrade the
domestic economy of Mainland China and at the same time to
promote national unification in accordance to the "One Nation,
Two Systems" model.
The most piquant irony of the situation is rather how pre-
[Page 16] Journal of World-Systems Research
modern "post-modernity" looks in what has become the most dynamic
region of the capitalist world system. According to most ac-
counts, one of the main features of post-modernity is the waning
of the usefulness and power of nation-states.
The key autonomous actor in political and international
affairs for the past few centuries appears not just to be
losing its control and integrity, but to be the *wrong sort*
of unit to handle the newer circumstances. For some prob-
lems, it is too large to operate effectively; for others, it
is too small. In consequence there are pressures for the
"relocation of authority" both upward and downward, creating
structures that might respond better to today's and to-
morrow's forces of change. (Kennedy 1993: 131; emphasis
in the original)
If the problem with nation-states is that they are either
"too large" or "too small" to operate effectively, gifts of
history and geography seem to have provided East Asia with a
solution to the problem by endowing it with a variety of territorial
and non-territorial organizations that are either something
less, or something more, or something different than nation-
states. There are city-states, and quasi-states; quasi-empires,
and "nations" that are not states, like the Overseas Chinese;
and above all, there is a structural differentiation among the
most powerful organizations in the region that has left the
United States in control of most of the guns, Japan and the
Overseas Chinese in control of most of the money, and the PRC in
control of most of the labor. In this "messy" but capitalisti-
cally most successful political economic formation there are
plenty of nation-states. But either they are peripheral components
of the regional formation--as Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia,
Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and the Phillipines to different
extents and in different ways all are--or they do not fit the
image of nation-state with which we have been trying to under-
[Page 17]
stand the origins and present dynamics of the modern world.
III
The peculiar political economic configuration of contem-
porary East Asia poses two main challenges to established world-
systems theories. First, is it possible that some or all of its
peculiarities are in fact more ordinary features of historical
capitalism than we have been willing or able to acknowledge? And
second, if that's the case, what kind of theoretical construct
would best enable us to grasp the logic and implications of the
rise of East Asia and the concomitant demise of nation-states as
key actors in world politics? In this section I shall concentrate
on the first challenge, leaving the second for brief
consideration in the concluding section.
The foregoing description of the peculiarities of the
political economy of East Asia has already underscored how
difficult it is to disentangle within the East Asian "melting
pot" modern from pre-modern, and Eastern from Western forms of
organization. On the one hand, we have pointed out how the
strategies and structures of the leading governmental and business
institutions of late-twentieth-century East Asia resemble
those of their counterparts in sixteenth-century Europe. On the
other hand, we have noted some striking resemblances between the
US-centric East Asian regime of the Cold War era and the Sinocentric
tribute-trade regime of pre-modern times.
To this we should now add that the political economic
configuration of the entire history of the Eurocentric capitalist
world system is as "messy," nay, "messier" than the present
configuration of East Asian capitalism. In particular, the
notion that nation-states have been the key agencies of the
process of formation and expansion of the Eurocentric capitalist
system obscures as much as it clarifies about that process.
City-states, diaspora capitalist classes, quasi-states and quasi-
[Page 18] Journal of World-Systems Research
empires have all played as critical a role as nation-states.
In the original formation of the system, city-states led the
way. As Mattingly (1988), Cox (1959), Lane (1966; 1979), Braudel
(1984: ch. 2), and McNeill (1984: ch.3) have emphasized in
different but complementary ways, the late-medieval system of
city-states centered on Venice, Florence, Genoa, and Milan
anticipated by two centuries or more many of the key features of
the European system of nation-states that was instituted by the
Peace of Westphalia of 1648. In fact, according to Mattingly
(1988: 178), the Peace of Westphalia was modeled after the Peace
of Lodi of 1454 which institutionalized the balance of power
among the Italian city-states.
The two-hundred-year period that separates 1648 from 1454
corresponds almost exactly to Braudel's and Wallerstein's "long"
sixteenth century. At the beginning of the period, capitalism as
mode of rule and accumulation was still embedded primarily in the
Italian system of city-states and, as such, it remained an
interstitial formation of the European world-economy. At the end
of the period, it had become embedded in a European-wide system
of nation-states and, as such, it had become the dominant mode of
rule and accumulation of the entire European world-economy. The
obverse side of this transformation of the inner structure of the
European world-economy was an extraordinary expansion of its
outer boundaries through the conquest of the Americas, major
incursions in the Indian Ocean world-economy, and the establishment
of direct contacts with the Sinocentric tribute-trade system
(Arrighi 1994a: 32-47).
From the vantage point of the present political economic
configuration of East Asia, the most interesting aspect of this
transformation-cum-expansion is that its agencies were either
something less, or something more, or something different than
nation-states. To be sure, nation-states were the main benefi-
ciaries of the process. But they were not its promoters and
organizers.
Initially, its main agency was the previously mentioned
[Page 19]
Genoese-Iberian complex brought and held together by a mutually
beneficial relationship of political exchange between the Genoese
capitalist diaspora and the territorialist rulers of what very
quickly became Imperial Spain. As the European world-economy was
reorganized and expanded under Genoese-Iberian leadership,
various forms of proto-nationalism emerged in its midst in
opposition to the imperial pretensions of the territorialist
rulers of Spain and to the centralizing tendencies of the Genoese
capitalist diaspora in European high finance. Even then, however,
the leading loci and agencies of this countervailing power
were not the more accomplished nation-states, like France,
England and Sweden. Rather, it was the quasi-state of Holland--a
semi-sovereign organization still struggling for juridical
statehood and having more features in common with the declining
city-states than with the rising nation-states (Arrighi 1994a:
109-158, 177-195).
After the Peace of Westphalia, nation-states did become the
main agencies of change in the Eurocentric world system. Never-
theless, the nation-state that was most active and successful in
promoting the outward expansion of the system, Britain, relied
heavily on forms of governmental and business organization that
had been pioneered by city-states, business diasporas, quasi-
empires and quasi-states. This pre- and early-modern heritage
became particularly evident in the nineteenth century, when
Britain briefly, but almost literally, ruled the entire world
through a combination of techniques of power derived equally from
Venice and Holland on the one side, and from Genoa and Imperial
Spain on the other (Arrighi 1994a: 57-8, 167-71, 195-213).
Britain's half-territorialist, half-capitalist world empire
eventually collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.
Nevertheless, by the time of its collapse the world had been
transformed out of recognition and the ground had been prepared
for the subsequent universal expansion and simultaneous supersession
of the European system of nation-states. The "industrial-
ization" of war, transport, and communication led to an unprece-
[Page 20] Journal of World-Systems Research
dented breakdown of temporal and spatial barriers both within and
between the previously discrete regions of the global economy.
In its turn, this "time-space compression"--as David Harvey
(1989: 240-1) has called the phenomenon--revolutionized the
conditions under which states formed and related to one another.
On the one hand, state-making and national-economy-making
could now be pursued effectively on a much greater scale than
before. As a result, the typical nation-state of the European
core came to be perceived as being "too small" to be able to
compete militarily and commercially with the continent-sized
national economies that were forming in the Russian Empire on its
eastern flank and in the United States on its western flank.
Germany's obsession with Lebensraum--paralleled in the Sino-
centric system by Japan's obsession with tairiku--was but an
aspect of this perception, which soon became a self-fulfilling
prophesy by exacerbating the conflicts that led to the First and
then to the Second World Wars. Even before the Second World War
was over, notes Paul Kennedy (1987: 357), "The bipolar world,
forecast so often in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
had at last arrived; the international order, in DePorte's
words, now moved 'from one system to another.' Only the United
States and the USSR counted... and of the two, the American
'superpower' was vastly superior."
On the other hand, the low-volume, low-density web of
exchanges that had linked loosely the world-economies and world-
empires of Afroeurasia to one another since pre-modern times and,
in modern times, to the Americas and then Australasia, now grew
in volume and density at a speed that had no historical precedent.
As a result, the global economy came to be perceived as so
highly interdependent as to make national economic independence
anachronistic. Ironically, the earliest prophets of global
economic interdependence were the founding fathers of that brand
of socialism that eventually became the staunchest advocate of
national economic seclusion. "All old-established national
industries"--proclaimed Marx and Engels (1967: 83-4) at a time
[Page 21]
when the great mid-nineteenth century revolution in world trans-
port and communication had hardly begun--"are dislodged by new
industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question
for all civilized nations, that no longer work up indigenous raw
material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; indus-
tries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every
quarter of the globe.... In place of the old local and national
seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every
direction, universal interdependence of nations."
As Robert Wade (forthcoming) has noted, much of recent talk
about globalization and the irrelevance of nation-states simply
recycles arguments that were fashionable hundred years ago.
There are nonetheless two important differences between the
realities, if not the perceptions, of the obsolescence of nation-
states today and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. First of all, a hundred years ago the reality, and to
a large extent the perception, of the crisis of nation-states
concerned the states of the old European core relative to the
continent-sized states that were forming on the outer perimeter
of the Eurocentric system, the United States in particular. The
irresistible rise of US power and wealth, and of Soviet power,
though not wealth, in the course of the two World Wars and their
aftermath, confirmed the validity of the widely held expectation
that the nation-states of the old European core were bound to
live in the shadow of their two flanking giants, unless they
could themselves attain continental dimension. The reality, and
to a lesser extent the perception, of the present crisis of
nation-states, in contrast, is that the giant states themselves
are in trouble.
The sudden collapse of the USSR has both clarified and
obscured this new dimension of the crisis. It has clarified the
new dimension by showing how vulnerable even the largest, most
self-sufficient, and second-greatest military power had become to
the forces of global economic integration. But it has obscured
the true nature of the crisis by provoking a general amnesia
[Page 22] Journal of World-Systems Research
about the fact that the crisis of US world power preceded the
breakdown of the USSR and, with ups and downs, has outlasted the
end of the Cold War.
The second difference between the crisis of the nation-state
today and a hundred years ago is that the strategies and struc-
tures of US hegemony in the Cold War era have deepened and
widened the crisis by transforming small and medium-sized states
into quasi-states, and by creating the conditions for a new time-
space compression that has undermined the power of even the
larger states. To be sure, under US hegemony the nation-state
form of political organization became universal. But as the form
of national sovereignty expanded, its substance contracted like
never before (Arrighi 1994a: 66-9).
In part, this was the direct outcome of the institutionali-
zation of the idea of world government and of the actual exercise
of world-governmental functions by the United States. The
institutionalization of the idea of world government materialized
through the creation of the United Nations and Bretton Woods
organizations, which imposed restrictions of various kinds on the
sovereignty of most of their member nation-states. But the
greatest restrictions were imposed by the series of US-centric
regional military alliances and by the US-centric world monetary
system through which the United States at the height of its power
actually governed the world.
In part, however, the evaporation of the substance of
national sovereignty was the indirect result of the new forms of
regional and world economic integration that grew under the
carapace of US military and financial power. Unlike the nineteenth-
century world economic integration instituted by and
centered on Britain, the system of regional and world economic
integration instituted by and centered on the United States in
the Cold War era did not rest on the unilateral free trade of the
hegemonic power and on the extraction of tribute from an overseas
territorial empire. Rather, it rested on a process of bilateral
and multilateral trade liberalization closely monitored and
[Page 23]
administered by the United States, acting in concert with its
most important political allies, and on a global transplant of
the vertically integrated organizational structures of US corporations
(Arrighi 1994a: 69-72).
Administered trade liberalization and the global transplant
of US corporations were meant to serve a double purpose: to
maintain and expand US world power, and to reorganize interstate
relations so as to "contain," not just the forces of Communist
revolution, but also the forces of nationalism that had torn
apart and eventually destroyed the nineteenth-century British
system of world economic integration. In the attainment of these
two objectives, the overseas transplant of US corporations had
priority over trade liberalization. Thus, as Robert Gilpin
(1975: 108) has underscored with reference to US policy in
Europe, the fundamental motivation of US support for Western
European economic unification was the consolidation of US and
Western power vis-a-vis the USSR. In this pursuit, the US
government was willing to tolerate some discrimination against
the import of US goods in the newly created Common Market. But
it was not willing to tolerate discrimination against the transplant
of US corporations within the walls of that market.
In Gilpin's view, the relationship of these corporations to
US world power was not unlike that of joint-stock chartered
companies to British power in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries: "The American multinational corporation, like its
mercantile ancestor, has performed an important role in the
maintenance and expansion of the power of the United States"
(1975: 141-2). This has been undoubtedly true but only up to a
point. The global transplant of US corporations did maintain and
expand the world power of the United States by establishing
claims on the incomes, and controls over the resources, of
foreign countries. The importance of these claims and controls
should not be underestimated. In the last resort, they consti-
tuted the single most important difference between the world
power of the United States and that of the USSR and, by implica-
[Page 24] Journal of World-Systems Research
tion, the single most important reason why the decline of US
world power, unlike that of the USSR, has proceeded gradually
rather than catastrophically (for an early statement of this
difference, see Arrighi 1982: 95-7).
Nevertheless, the relationship between the transnational
expansion of US corporations and the maintenance and expansion of
the power of the US state has been just as much one of contradic-
tion as of complementarity. For one thing, the claims on foreign
incomes established by the subsidiaries of US corporations did
not translate into a proportionate increase in the incomes of US
residents and in the revenues of the US government. On the
contrary, precisely when the fiscal crisis of the US "warfare-
welfare state" became acute under the impact of the Vietnam War,
a growing proportion of the incomes and liquidity of US corpora-
tions, instead of being repatriated, flew to offshore money
markets. In the words of Eugene Birnbaum of Chase Manhattan
Bank, the result was "the amassing of an immense volume of liquid
funds and markets--the world of Eurodollar finance--outside the
regulatory authority of *any* country or agency" (quoted in Frieden
1987: 85; emphasis in the original).
Interestingly enough, the organization of this world of
Eurodollar finance--like the organizations of the sixteenth-
century Genoese business diaspora and of the Chinese business
diaspora from pre-modern to our own times--occupies places but it
is not defined by the places it occupies. The so-called Eurodollar
or Eurocurrency market--as Roy Harrod (1969: 319) characterized
it well before the arrival of the information super-highway--
"has no headquarters or buildings of its own.... Physically it
consists merely of a network of telephones and telex machines
around the world, telephones which may be used for purposes other
than Eurodollar deals." This space-of-flows falls under no state
jurisdiction. And although the US state may still have some
privileged access to its services and resources, the main tendency-
of the last twenty-five years has been for all nation-states,
including the US, to become the servant rather than the master of
[Page 25]
extraterritorial high finance.
Equally important, the transnational expansion of US corpo-
rations has called forth competitive responses in old and new
centers of capital accumulation that have weakened, and eventually
reversed, US claims on foreign incomes and resources. As
Alfred Chandler (1990: 615-16) has pointed out, by the time
Servan-Schreiber called upon his fellow Europeans to stand up to
the "American Challenge"--a challenge that in his view was
neither financial nor technological but "the extension to Europe
of an organization that is still a mystery to us"--a growing
number of European enterprises had found effective ways and means
of meeting the challenge and of themselves becoming challengers
of the long-established US corporations even in the US market.
In the 1970s, the accumulated value of non-US (mostly Western
European) foreign direct investment grew one-and-half times
faster than that of US foreign direct investment. By 1980, it
was estimated that there were over 10,000 transnational corpora-
tions of all national origins, and by the early 1990s three times
as many (Arrighi 1994a: 73, 304).
This explosive growth in the number of transnational corpo-
rations was accompanied by a drastic decrease in the importance
of the United States as a source, and an increase in its impor-
tance as a recipient, of foreign direct investment. The transna-
tional forms of business organization pioneered by US capital, in
other words, had rapidly ceased to be a "mystery" for a large and
growing number of foreign competitors. By the 1970s, Western
European capital had discovered all its secrets and had begun
outcompeting US corporations at home and abroad. By the 1980s,
it was the turn of East Asian capital to outcompete both US and
Western European capital through the formation of a new kind of
transnational business organization--an organization that was
deeply rooted in the region's gifts of history and geography, and
that combined the advantages of vertical integration with the
flexibility of informal business networks. But no matter which
particular fraction of capital won, the outcome of each round of
[Page 26] Journal of World-Systems Research
the competitive struggle was a further increase in the volume
and density of the web of exchanges that linked people and
territory across political jurisdictions both regionally and
globally.
IV
We are thus back to the rise of East Asia and its "messy"
political economic configuration, which now appears to be a
special case of the even "messier" political economic configuration
of the capitalist world system throughout its history. In
both configurations, the leading agencies of the formation and
expansion of the capitalist world system appear to have been
organizations that are either something less (city-states and
quasi-states) or something more (quasi-empires) or something
different (business diasporas and other transterritorial capitalist
organizations) than nation-states. At a decisive moment of
its evolution, the Eurocentric capitalist world system did become
embodied in a system of nation-states. But its further expansion
continued to depend on the formation in its midst of organiza-
tions that resembled their pre- and early-modern predecessors.
What's more, as the Eurocentric capitalist system came to encom-
pass the entire globe, nation-states gradually lost their centrality
as the main loci of world power. World power came
instead to be concentrated in structurally differentiated govern-
mental and non-governmental organizations that reproduce on a
much larger scale and in incomparably more complex forms many of
the traits of pre- and early-modern modes of rule and accumulation.
This "messy" historical formation does not quite fit the
concept of "capitalist world-economy" that has become dominant in
world-system studies. In order to capture the rise and present
demise of the system of nation-states, that concept needs to be
revised in a way that complements Christopher Chase-Dunn's and
[Page 27]
Thomas Hall's revision of the concept of "world-empire." According
to Chase-Dunn and Hall, Wallerstein's claim that what makes
the modern world system unique is that it is the only world-
economy (competing polities within a single economic system) that
did not transform into a world-empire (a single polity encompassing
an entire economic system) does not quite stand up to empirical
scrutiny. "The modern world-system *apparently* is the longest
lived world-economy, but there have been others that have lasted
for several centuries.... Among other things, this suggests that
the celebrated interstate system of the capitalist world-economy
is not as novel as is sometimes claimed." They accordingly
propose to replace the concept of "world-empire" with the concept
of "core-wide empire" to allow for the fact that pre-modern
state-based world systems oscillated back and forth between core-
wide empires and interstate systems (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1993b;
Chase-Dunn forthcoming; see also Chase-Dunn and Hall 1993a and
forthcoming).
The reconceptualization proposed here, in contrast, concerns
the very idea of "capitalist world-economy." Just as Chase-Dunn
and Hall have found more "modern" features in pre-modern world
systems than Wallerstein's dichotomy "world-empire" versus
"world-economy" allows for, so we have found more "pre-modern"
features in the modern world system than allowed for by that same
dichotomy. The reason why the celebrated interstate system of
the capitalist world-economy is not as novel as Wallerstein
claimed, is not just that several of its features were already
present in pre-modern world systems. It is also that several
features of pre-modern core-wide empires have played a critical
role in the formation, expansion and present supersession of the
modern interstate system.
As the study of early-modern Western Europe and of late-
modern East Asia both suggest, we need a concept of "capitalist
world-economy" that defines capitalism as an interstitial formation
of both pre-modern and modern times. Capitalism as mode of
rule and accumulation did become dominant, first in Europe and
[Page 28] Journal of World-Systems Research
then globally. But it never completely lost its interstitial
character, which is as evident in today's emerging center of
world capitalism (East Asia) as in its original sixteenth-century
center (Western Europe). In between, there lies the era of the
modern interstate system. But as long as we remain infatuated
with the typical "containers" of power of this era, we shall be
as ill-equipped to predict the future of our world as we are to
understand its origins and evolution.
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Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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