Mid Term Paper

dependency and

world-systems theories

Christopher Chase-Dunn

Dependency approaches emerged out of Latin

America in the 1960s in reaction to moderniza-

tion theories of development. Dependentistas

attributed the difficulties of development in

the global South to the legacies of the long

history of colonialism as well as contemporary

international power relations. This approach

suggested that international inequalities were

socially structured and that hierarchy is a cen-

tral feature of the global system of societies.

The world-systems perspective is a strategy

for explaining social change that focuses on

whole intersocietal systems rather than single

societies. The main insight is that important

interaction networks (trade, information flows,

alliances, and fighting) have woven polities

and cultures together since the beginning of

human social evolution. Explanations of social

change need to take intersocietal systems

(world-systems) as the units that evolve. How-

ever, intersocietal interaction networks were

rather small when transportation was mainly a

matter of hiking with a pack. Globalization, in

the sense of the expansion and intensification of

larger interaction networks, has been increasing

for millennia, albeit unevenly and in waves.

The intellectual history of world-systems

theory has roots in classical sociology, Marxian

political economy, and the thinking of the

dependentistas. But in explicit form the world-

systems perspective emerged only in the 1970s

when Samir Amin, André Gunder Frank, and

Immanuel Wallerstein began to formulate the

concepts and to narrate the analytic history of

the modern world-system.

The idea of the whole system ought to mean

that all the human interaction networks, small

and large, from the household to global trade,

constitute the world-system. It is not just a

matter of ‘‘international relations’’ or global-

scale institutions such as the World Bank.

Rather, at the present time, the world-system

is all the people of the earth and all their

cultural, economic, and political institutions

and the interactions and connections among

them. The world-systems perspective looks at

human institutions over long periods of time

and employs the spatial scales that are required

for comprehending these whole interaction sys-

tems.

The modern world-system can be under-

stood structurally as a stratification system

composed of economically, culturally, and mili-

tarily dominant core societies (themselves in

competition with one another), and dependent

peripheral and semiperipheral regions. Some

dependent regions have been successful in

improving their positions in the larger core/

periphery hierarchy, while most have simply

maintained their peripheral and semiperipheral

positions. This structural perspective on world

history allows us to analyze the cyclical features

of social change and the long-term patterns

of development in historical and comparative

perspective. We can see the development of

the modern world-system as driven primarily

by capitalist accumulation and geopolitics in

which businesses and states compete with one

another for power and wealth. Competition

among states and capitals is conditioned by

the dynamics of struggle among classes and by

the resistance of peripheral and semiperipheral

peoples to domination and exploitation from

the core. In the modern world-system, the

semiperiphery is composed of large and power-

ful countries in the third world (e.g., Mexico,

India, Brazil, China) as well as smaller coun-

tries that have intermediate levels of economic

development (e.g., the newly industrializing

countries of East Asia). It is not possible to

understand the history of social change without

taking into account both the strategies and

technologies of the winners, and the strategies

and forms of struggle of those who have

resisted domination and exploitation.

It is also difficult to understand why and

where innovative social change emerges with-

out a conceptualization of the world-system as a

whole. New organizational forms that trans-

form institutions and that lead to upward mobi-

lity most often emerge from societies in

semiperipheral locations. Thus all the countries

that became dominant core states in the mod-

ern system had formerly been semiperipheral

(the Dutch, the British, and the United States).

This is a continuation of a long-term pattern of

social evolution that Chase-Dunn and Hall

1060 dependency and world-systems theories

(1997) have called ‘‘semiperipheral develop-

ment.’’ Semiperipheral marcher states and semi-

peripheral capitalist city-states had acted as the

main agents of empire formation and commer-

cialization for millennia. This phenomenon

arguably also includes organizational innova-

tions in contemporary semiperipheral countries

(e.g., Mexico, India, South Korea, Brazil) that

may transform the now-global system.

This approach requires that we think struc-

turally. We must be able to abstract from the

particularities of the game of musical chairs

that constitutes uneven development in the

system to see the structural continuities. The

core/periphery hierarchy remains, though

some countries have moved up or down. The

interstate system remains, though the interna-

tionalization of capital has further constrained

the abilities of states to structure national

economies. States have always been subjected

to larger geopolitical and economic forces in the

world-system, and as is still the case, some have

been more successful at exploiting opportu-

nities and protecting themselves from liabilities

than others.

In this perspective many of the phenomena

that have been called ‘‘globalization’’ corre-

spond to recently expanded international trade,

financial flows, and foreign investment by

transnational corporations and banks. Much of

the globalization discourse assumes that until

recently there were separate national societies

and economies, and that these have now been

superseded by an expansion of international

integration driven by information and transpor-

tation technologies. Rather than a wholly unique

and new phenomenon, globalization is primarily

international economic integration, and as such

it is a feature of the world-system that has been

oscillating as well as increasing for centuries.

Recent research comparing the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries has shown that trade globa-

lization is both a cycle and a trend.

The Great Chartered Companies of the

seventeenth century were already playing an

important role in shaping the development of

world regions. Certainly, the transnational cor-

porations of the present are much more impor-

tant players, but the point is that ‘‘foreign

investment’’ is not an institution that only

became important since 1970 (nor since World

War II). Arrighi (1994) has shown that finance

capital has been a central component of the com-

manding heights of the world-system since the

fourteenth century. The current floods and ebbs

of world money are typical of the late phase of

very long ‘‘systemic cycles of accumulation.’’

Most world-systems scholars contend that

leaving out the core/periphery dimension or

treating the periphery as inert are grave mis-

takes, not only for reasons of completeness, but

also because the ability of core capitalists and

their states to exploit peripheral resources and

labor has been a major factor in deciding the

winners of the competition among core conten-

ders. And the resistance to exploitation and

domination mounted by peripheral peoples has

played a powerful role in shaping the historical

development of world orders. Thus world his-

tory cannot be properly understood without

attention to the core/periphery hierarchy.

McMichael (2000) has studied the ‘‘globali-

zation project’’ – the abandoning of Keynesian

models of national development and a new (or

renewed) emphasis on deregulation and open-

ing national commodity and financial markets

to foreign trade and investment. This approach

focuses on the political and ideological aspects

of the recent wave of international integration.

The term many prefer for this turn in global

discourse is ‘‘neoliberalism,’’ but it has also

been called ‘‘Reaganism/Thatcherism’’ and

the ‘‘Washington Consensus.’’ The worldwide

decline of the political left predated the revolu-

tions of 1989 and the demise of the Soviet

Union, but it was certainly also accelerated by

these events. The structural basis of the rise of

the globalization project is the new level of

integration reached by the global capitalist

class. The internationalization of capital has

long been an important part of the trend

toward economic globalization, and there have

been many claims to represent the general

interests of business before. Indeed, every mod-

ern dominant state has made this claim. But the

real integration of the interests of capitalists all

over the world has very likely reached a level

greater than at the peak of the nineteenth-cen-

tury wave of globalization.

This is the part of the theory of a global

stage of capitalism that must be taken most

seriously, though it can certainly be overdone.

The world-system has now reached a point at

which the old interstate system based on

dependency and world-systems theories 1061

separate national capitalist classes exists simul-

taneously with new institutions representing

the global interests of capital, and both are

powerful forces. In this light each country can

be seen to have an important ruling class fac-

tion that is allied with the transnational capital-

ist class. The big question is whether or not

this new level of transnational integration will

be strong enough to prevent competition

among states for world hegemony from turning

into warfare, as it has always done in the past,

during a period in which a dominant state (now

the United States) is declining.

The insight that capitalist globalization has

occurred in waves, and that these waves of

integration are followed by periods of globali-

zation backlash, has important implications for

the future. Capitalist globalization increased

both intranational and international inequalities

in the nineteenth century and it has done the

same thing in the late twentieth century

(O’Rourke & Williamson 2000). Those countries

and groups that are left out of the ‘‘beautiful

époque’’ either mobilize to challenge the status

of the powerful or they retreat into self-reliance,

or both.

Globalization protests emerged in the non-

core with the anti-IMF riots of the 1980s. The

several transnational social movements that

participated in the 1999 protest in Seattle

brought globalization protest to the attention

of observers in the core, and this resistance to

capitalist globalization has continued and

grown despite the setback that occurred in

response to the terrorist attacks on New York

and Washington in 2001.

There is an apparent tension between, on the

one hand, those who advocate deglobalization

and delinking from the global capitalist econ-

omy and the building of stronger, more coop-

erative and self-reliant social relations in the

periphery and semiperiphery and, on the other

hand, those who seek to mobilize support for

new, or reformed, institutions of democratic

global governance. Self-reliance by itself,

though an understandable reaction to exploita-

tion, is not likely to solve the problems of

humanity in the long run. The great challenge

of the twenty-first century will be the building

of a democratic and collectively rational global

commonwealth. World-systems theory can be

an important contributor to this effort.

SEEALSO:Capitalism;Colonialism (Neocoloni-

alism); Development: Political Economy;

Empire; Global Economy; Global Justice as a

Social Movement; Global Politics; International

Gender Division of Labor; Kondratieff Cycles;

Revolutions; Transnational Movements; World

Conflict

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED

READINGS

Amin, S. (1997) Capitalism in the Age of Globaliza-

tion. Zed Press, London.

Arrighi, G. (1994) The Long Twentieth Century.

Verso, London.

Cardoso, F. H. & Faletto, E. (1979) Dependency and

Development in Latin America. University of Cali-

fornia Press, Berkeley.

Chase-Dunn, C. (1998) Global Formation. Rowman

& Littlefield, Lanham, MD.

Chase-Dunn, C. & Hall, T. D. (1997) Rise and

Demise: Comparing World-Systems. Westview,

Boulder, CO.

McMichael, P. (2000) Development and Social

Change: A Global Perspective. Pine Forge Press,

Thousand Oaks, CA.

O’Rourke, K. H. & Williamson, J. G. (2000) Globa-

lization and History. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Shannon, T. R. (1996) An Introduction to the World-

Systems Perspective. Westview, Boulder, CO.

Wallerstein, I. (2000) The Essential Wallerstein. New

Press, New York.

Derrida, Jacques

(1930–2005)

Michael Lipscomb

Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born philoso-

pher remembered for his development of

deconstruction, an approach to thinking that

seeks carefully to analyze signifying objects in

terms of the differences that are constitutive of

those objects. Typically, this deconstructive

approach proceeds through a close analysis of

the ambivalent and marginal terms that help

secure the bounded understanding of a text,

1062 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2005)