World-systems approach

World system approach is a post-Marxist view of world affairs, one of several historical and current applications of Marxism to international relations.

One of the basics of the approach is its view of imperialism, which for many Marxists during the 20th century represented "the highest stage of capitalism", a term coined by Vladimir Lenin, who also used the terms periphery and core as a means to analyze world politics and economy.

Immanuel Wallerstein, a leading advocate of the approach, uses the same terminology. He characterizes the world system as as a set of mechanisms which redistributes resources from the "periphery" to the "core". In his terminology, the "core" is the developed, industrialized, democratic part of the world, and the "periphery" is the underdeveloped, raw materials-exporting, poor part of the world; the "market" being the means by which the "core" exploits the "periphery".

Wallerstein traces the origin of today's world-system to the 16th century in Western Europe, and defines it as:

:"...a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence. Its life is made up of the conflicting forces which hold it together by tension and tear it apart as each group seeks eternally to remold it to its advantage. It has the characteristics of an organism, in that it has a life-span over which its characteristics change in some respects and remain stable in others. One can define its structures as being at different times strong or weak in terms of the internal logic of its functioning." [Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) "the Modern World-System", New York, Academic Press, pp. 347-57.]

Apart of these, Wallerstein defines four temporal features of that. "Cyclical rhythms" represent the short-term fluctuation of economy, while "secular trends" mean deeper long run tendencies, such as general economic growth or decline. In the theory the term "contradiction" means a general controversy in the system, usually concerning some short-run vs. long run trade-offs. For example the problem of underconsumption, wherein the drive-down of wages increases the profit for the capitalists on the short-run, but considering the long run, the decreasing of wages may have a crucially harmful effect by reducing the demand for the product. The last temporal feature is the "crisis": a crisis occurs, if a constellation of circumstances brings about the losing of the system's structure, which also means the end of the system.

Technically speaking, World-systems analysis is not a theory, but an approach to social analysis and social change. It is based in part on the works of Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein with major contributions by Volker Bornschier, Peter Turchin, Andrey Korotayev, Janet Abu Lughod, Tom Hall, Kunibert Raffer, David Wilkinson, and others.

It should be noted that World-systems analysis is not only derived from the neo-Marxist literature on development but also from the French Annales School tradition(especially Fernand Braudel).

The world system perspective

The essence of world systems theory starts with the following assumption, as once was stated by the Latin American economist Osvaldo Sunkel, a representative of dependency theory, once stated:

cquote|"The interpretation so far advanced suggests that the international capitalist system contains an internationalized nucleus of activities, regions and social groups of varying degrees of importance in each country. These sectors share a common culture and ‘way of life’, which expresses itself through the same books, texts, films, television programs, similar fashions, similar groups of organization of family and social life, similar style of decoration of homes, similar orientations to housing, building, furniture and urban design. Despite linguistic barriers, these sectors have a far greater capacity for communication among themselves than is possible between integrated and marginal persons of the same country who speak the same language (...) Modernization implies the gradual replacement of the traditional productive structure by another of much higher capital intensiveness (...) On the one hand, the process of modernization incorporates into the new structures the individuals and groups that are apt to fit into the kind of rationality that prevails there; on the other hand, it expels the individuals and groups that have no place in the new productive structure or who lack the capacity to become adapted to it. It is important to emphasize that this process does not only prevent or limit the formation of a national entrepreneurial class, as indicated by Furtado, but also of a national middle class (...) and even a national working class. The advancement of modernization introduces, so to speak, a wedge along the area dividing the integrated from the segregated segments (...) In this process, some national entrepreneurs are incorporated as executives into the new enterprises or those absorbed by the TRANCO (i.e. transnational corporations), and others are marginalized; some professionals, forming part of the technical staff and the segment of employees are incorporated, and the rest are marginalized; part of the qualified labor supply and those that are considered fit to be upgraded are incorporated, while the remainder are marginalized."

"The effects of the disintegration of each social class has important consequences for social mobility. The marginalized entrepreneur will probably add to the ranks of small or artesanal manufacture, or will abandon independent activity and become a middle class employee. The marginalized sectors of the middle class will probably form a group of frustrated lower middle class people trying to maintain middle class appearance without much possibility of upward mobility and terrorized by the danger of proletarization. The marginalized workers will surely add to the ranks of absolute marginality, where, as in the lower middle class, growing pools of resentment and frustration of considerable demographic dimension will accumulate (...) Finally, it is very probable that an international mobility will correspond to the internal mobility, particularly between the internationalized sectors (...) The process of social disintegration which has been outlined here probably also affects the social institutions which provide the bases of the different social groups and through which they express themselves. Similar tendencies to the ones described for the global society are, therefore, probably also to be found within the state, church, armed forces, political parties with a relatively wide popular base, the universities etc." (Sunkel, 1972: 18-42)

Dependency and world system theory hold, that poverty and backwardness in poor countries are caused by the peripheral position that these nations have in the international division of labor. Ever since the capitalist world system evolved, there is a stark distinction between the nations of the center and the nations of the periphery.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso summarized the quantifiable essence of dependency theories as follows:

* there is a financial and technological penetration by the developed capitalist centers of the countries of the periphery and semi-periphery
* this produces an unbalanced economic structure both within the peripheral societies and between them and the centers
* this leads to limitations on self-sustained growth in the periphery
* this favors the appearance of specific patterns of class relations
* these require modifications in the role of the state to guarantee both the functioning of the economy and the political articulation of a society, which contains, within itself, foci of inartuculateness and structural imbalance (Cardoso, 1979)

Giovanni Arrighi proposed in his analysis of the ‘Long 20th Century’ (1995) the thought that the logic of accumulation on a world-scale is governed by the ups and downs in the succession of regulation and de-regulation, starting from the Venetian (regulatory) and Genoese (deregulated) era of capitalism, followed by the Dutch (regulatory) and British (deregulated) era, and the US hegemony, which - after 1945 - was a regulatory model. From the late 1970s, however, we witness, Arrighi’s argument goes on, again the renewed rise of a deregulated model of world capitalism.

The often bemoaned end of the Keynesian era has its real basis, Arrighi’s argument goes, in the shifting accumulation pattern of world capitalism. Some other world-system analysts agree with Arrighi that the rise of financial capitalism and the decline of productive capitalism are always connected to major shifts in the location of the centers of world capitalism, first from Venice to Genoa, followed by the shift from Genoa to Amsterdam, from Amsterdam to London, from London to New York, and from there on to the capitalist archipelago of East Asia of yesterday, perhaps to be followed by South Asia today (Arrighi, 1995).

Arrighi also introduced the important notion, that there is a certain coexistence in the time-perspective between the ‘different logics’, so that elements of the waning and elements of the emerging order might coincide for years. Arrighi’s sequential model of world capitalism is also a historic interpretation of the old Marxist notion of financial expansion - > material expansion- >financial expansion (MCM’), and as such radically challenges the notion of ‘unchanging’ general laws of rise and decline. Following Arrighi, we postulate that regulatory strategies might have been well compatible with growth under the rise of the Venetian, Dutch, and American era, while at the time of the rise of ‘deregulation’, such deregulatory strategies and not ‘big government’ will be conducive to economic growth

Wallerstein's formulation of the world-system approach

The most well-known version of the world-system approach has been developed by Immanuel Wallerstein. Wallerstein analyzes the World System as follows: "A system is defined as a unit with a single division of labour and multiple cultural systems."

In Wallerstein’s 1987 publication, "World-System Analysis", he defines World-System Analysis by contrast with various theses which he rejects.

* "The 'disciplines' of modern social science are intellectually coherent groupings of subject matter that refer to discrete 'logics."'

World-systems analysis rejects this and calls for an unidisciplinary historical social science, and contends that the modern disciplines, products of the 19th century, are deeply flawed because they are not separate logics, as is manifest for example in the de facto overlap of analysis among scholars of the 'disciplines.'

* "History is the study of events (the idiographic approach) and social science discovers universal rules of human/social behavior (the nomothetic approach)."

Wallerstein writes that "World-systems analysis offers the heuristic value of the "via media" between trans-historical generalizations and particularistic narrations...It argues that the optimal method is to pursue analysis within systemic frameworks, long enough in time and large enough in space to contain governing 'logics' which 'determine' the largest part of sequential reality, while simultaneously recognizing and taking into account that these systemic frameworks have beginnings and ends and are therefore not to be conceived of as 'eternal' phenomena."

* "Modern countries or 'states' are societies, or there is a society underlying each state."

World-systems analysis argues that modern states have never been societies, but are the political units of modern society's interstate system and economy. In Wallerstein's view, there have been three kinds of societies across human history: mini-systems or what anthropologists call bands, tribes, and small chiefdoms, and two types of world-systems (single state world-empires and multi-polity world-economies). World-systems are larger, and ethnically diverse. Modern society, called the "modern world-system" is of the latter type, but unique in being the first and only fully capitalist world-economy to have emerged, around 1450 - 1550 and to have geographically expanded across the entire planet, by about 1900.

* "Capitalism is a system based on competition between free producers using free labor with free commodities, 'free' meaning its available for sale and purchase on a market. Situations in countries that deviate from this definition, such as the "communist" or "socialist" countries, and "Third countries", are not yet capitalist."

World-systems analysis argues that capitalism, as a historical social system, has always integrated a variety of labor forms within a functioning division of labor (world-economy). Countries do not have economies, but are part of the world-economy. Far from being separate societies or worlds, the world-economy manifests a tripartite division of labor with core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral zones. In core zones businesses, with the support of states they operate within, monopolize the most profitable activities of the division of labor. In recognizing a tripartite pattern, world-systems analysis criticized dependency theory with its bimodal system of only cores and peripheries. There are many ways to attribute a specific country to the core, semi-periphery, or periphery. Using an empirically-based sharp formal definition of "domination" in a two-country relationship, Piana in 2004 defined the "core" as made up of "free countries" dominating others without being dominated, the "semi-periphery" as the countries which are dominated (usually—but not necessarily—by core countries) while at the same time they dominate others (usually in the periphery)and "periphery" as the countries which are dominated. Based on 1998 data, the full list of countries in the three regions—together with a discussion of methodology—can be found [http://www.economicswebinstitute.org/essays/tradehierarchy.htm here] .

* "The late 18th and early 19th centuries marked a great turning point in the development of capitalism in that capitalists achieved state-societal power in the key states which furthered the industrial revolution marking the rise of capitalism."

World-systems analysis contends that capitalism as a historical system formed earlier, that countries do not "develop" in stages, but rather the system does, and these events have a different meaning as a phase in the development of historical capitalism; namely the emergence of the three ideologies of the national developmental mythology (the idea that countries can develop through stages if they pursue the right set of policies): conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism.

* "Human history is progressive and inevitably so."

World-systems analysts, along with anthropologists, argue that the historical evidence suggests the contrary, that human societies have become increasingly unequal. The reason for the belief otherwise is precisely that modern social science emerged in the core zones, which contain about 20% of the modern world-system's population but controls about 80% of its wealth, which has expanded as inequality and power polarization has increased as a trend of the system.

* "Science is the search for rules which summarize most succinctly why everything is the way it is and how things happen."

Wallerstein writes: World-systems analysis is a call for the construction of a historical social science that feels comfortable with the uncertainties of transition, that contributes to the transformation of the world by illuminating the choices without appealing to the crutch belief in the inevitable triumph of good. World-systems analysis is a call to open the shutters that prevent us from exploring many areas of the real world. World-systems analysis is not a paradigm of historical social science. It is a call for a debate about the paradigm.

Developments of Wallerstein's approach

Sobocinski [ [http://www2.asanet.org/sectionchs/newsletter/chs03fall.pdf An article by Sobocinski] (pages 8-9 in Comparative & Historical Sociology Vol. 15 No. 3, Fall 2003)] noted that "points to the relevance of even the simplest indicators - per capita GDP - to identify core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral countries, and notes that, as the areas "external" to the world system have disappeared over time, so also has there been a decrease in the percentage of the world's population that exists in peripheral countries, as defined in traditional developmental terms. Sobocinski's approach favors degree of proletarianization (described in Wallerstein's "Historical Capitalism") as an indicator of a country's status rather than degree of domination (as described above). Sobocinski indicates that economic trends seem to point to semi-peripheral status for the vast majority of the world's population, and the importance of internal inequalities (and internal colonialism) within such countries as a predominant concern over the near future, to likely be followed by the emergence of international class-based conflict on a global scale (rather than merely within selected nations and regions) as (per-capita) wealth inequalities between nations continue to decrease. Note that this sort of analysis is one of convenience, due to the ease of using data at the state level, although Wallerstein has pointed out that peripheral areas are not to be confused with peripheral states. Thus, one of the modern trends would seem to be the decline in peripheral states, in favor of a reemergence of peripheral areas within states - a kind of neo-"internal colonialism."

Originally Wallerstein distinguished two types of world-systems: "world-economies", systems of polities integrated within a single economy, and "World-Empires" where a single polity dominated and integrated an economy.

New Developments of the World System Analysis

Abu Lughod's version

Janet Abu Lughod argues that a pre-modern World System extensive across Eurasia existed in the 13th Century prior to the formation of the modern world-system identified by Wallerstein. Janet Abu Lughod contends that the Mongol Empire played an important role in stitching together the Chinese, Indian, Muslim and European regions in the 13th century, before the rise of the modern world system. [Abu-Lugod, Janet (1989), "Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350"] In debates, Wallerstein contends that her system was not a "world-system" because it did not entail integrated production networks, but was instead a vast trading network.

Other contributions

Andre Gunder Frank goes even further and claims that a global-scale world system that includes Asia, Europe and Africa has existed since the 4th millennium BCE. [Andrey Korotayev et al. go even further than Frank and date the beginning of the World System formation to the 10th millennium BCE, connecting it with the start of the Neolithic Revolution in the Middle East - see: Korotayev A., Malkov A., Khaltourina D. (2006). [http://urss.ru/cgi-bin/db.pl?cp=&lang=en&blang=en&list=14&page=Book&id=34250 "Introduction to Social Macrodynamics: Compact Macromodels of the World System Growth"] . Moscow: KomKniga. ISBN 5-484-00414-4] The center of this system was in Asia, specifically China.

Europe only prospered when Asian economy was in its contracting phase of long-term economic cycle and Europe had access to virtually free silver and gold from the Americas. There was no European miracle, Europe simply had geographical advantage in the discovery of Americas. This contracting phase is now coming to an end and the center is moving back to Asia. In a joint critique, Wallerstein, Arrighi, and Samin attacked the empirical data of this argument.

Archaeologically too the idea of a World System was extended to the Late Chalcolithic-Early Bronze Age, looking at the period of dominance of ancient Uruk, within the system that stretched from Egypt to the Indus.

These debates have seen a split in the identification of world-systems analysis and "world systems theory."

An important contribution to the study of the history of the World System was produced by Christopher Chase-Dunn and Tom Hall who discovered a significant synchrony in the urban dynamics of the western and eastern parts of Afroeurasia starting from the 1st millennium BCE (Chase-Dunn, C., and T. Hall. Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems. Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1997). The possible mechanisms of this synchrony were analyzed by Peter Turchin and Tom Hall (Turchin, Peter and Thomas D. Hall. 2003. Spatial Synchrony among and within World-Systems: Insights from Theoretical Ecology. Journal of World-Systems Research 9:37-66).

Modern applications of the theory have sought to incorporate the changing relations between the First World and the Second World with the collapse of the Soviet Union, describing attempts by the United States and Europe to "colonize" or "absorb" the Newly Indepenent States of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe into the New World Order. David Lempert's description of "Pepsi-stroika" builds on the "Coca-colonization" theme. Michael Burawoy has also focused on these transformations.

Looking at World Systems Theory (as distinct from world-systems analysis) from this perspective demonstrates similarity to the concept of the Oecumene, used by cultural historians like William McNeill. Historically World Systems Theory have been very useful as an antidote to the exceptionalism of Globalisation Theorists who argue that the current system is wholly without precedent in world history. [An overview of current world systems theory debates is to be found, among others, in the volume: "Globalization. Critical Perspectives." Editors: Gernot Kohler and Emilio José Chaves. Nova Science Publishers, Hauppauge, New York, 2003, with key-note contributions by Samir Amin, Patrick Bond, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Andre Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein.]

The question of cycles

World systems theory has become part and parcel of the debate in major international peer-reviewed journals in the social sciences. For one, the entire notion of business cycles fascinates the profession. Without question, the notion of business cycles and war cycles dominates the debate about the time-series trajectory of the world system.

Although many contemporary economists treat the legacy of Nikolai Kondratiev with utter contempt, several major figures of economics of the 20th Century, among them Economic Nobel Prizewinners, were deeply impressed by Nicolai Kondratiev's research, which forms the starting point of the world systems theory notion of long cycles. It suffices to mention here not just Joseph Alois Schumpeter and also in a way Simon Kuznets, but Ragnar Frisch; Gottfried Haberler; Alvin H. Hansen; Walt Rostow; and Jan Tinbergen. The revival of Kondratiev research in the 1960s and beyond is linked to the simulation efforts of Jay Forrester at the MIT in the context of his world modeling for the Club of Rome. IIASA developed a highly sophisticated debate on the issue, centered mainly on the works of the physicist Cesare Marchetti and the Portuguese systems scientist Tessaleno Devezas. Devezas' research is particularly noteworthy here, because it combines sociological insights into values and generations with the mathematics of cyclical swings in economics and demography. Forrester reproduced a 50-year pattern for the US-economy, based on his System Dynamics National Model (NM-model) which is based on 15 sectors. Marchetti moved the debate away from price series to physical quantities, including production and energy consumption. Unfortunately, as sophisticated and statistically satisfying as this IIASA debate might sound, it has been rather overlooked by both the mostly Marxist and world system supporters of Kondratiev waves and by their economist detractors.

Early on, the United States Central Intelligence Agency commissioned a research paper by Ehud Levy-Pascal in the 1970s on Kondratiev cycles, and it was published in 1976. The Swiss world system sociologist Volker Bornschier also carried out quantitative sociological surveys of Kondratiev type of waves. In addition, a decisive breakthrough in the entire debate was the Ph. dissertation by Joshua Goldstein at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under supervision of Hayward Alker Jr., which was published in 1988. NATO's interest in the entire question has an obvious background - long cycle theory allows long-term predictions that are important for military and political contingency planning. Finally yet importantly, Kondratiev's native Russia fully rehabilitated one of her greatest social scientists of all times and now devotes a state research institute to scientific investigation in his memory.

Kondratiev downswings were always particularly severe in the Russian periphery of the world system, and the vicissitudes of reform and the re-centralization of government are closely linked to the Kondratiev cycle. The cyclical swings in the periphery are by far more pronounced than in the center and the depressions more severe. The level of inequality is historically higher in the periphery than in the center, but inequality also increases in the centers. Such comparisons clearly suggest three tendencies:

:a) first, a faster growth in the peripheries during the beginning B-phase of the Kondratiev cycle:b) a more severe depression in the peripheries than in the center:c) a belated recovery in the periphery

The very logic of industrial processes and basic innovations, as well as the societal models, connected with them, would suggest building cyclical fluctuations into more general theories of development (Amin, 1997). Blast furnaces and other important components of the industrial process, too, have a certain life cycle, comparable with the Juglar cycles and Kuznets cycle, just as technical innovations are scattered in a non-random fashion along time, coinciding with the Kondratiev cycle (Bornschier, 1988 and 1995; for a very comprehensive summary Scandella, 1998). There are short term instabilities of 3 to 5 years duration (Kitchin cycles), 8-11 years duration (Juglar cycles), 18-22 years duration (Kuznets waves), and longer, 40-60 year Kondratiev waves. The following dating scheme, taken here from Tausch/Ghymers, 2006 could be suggested in the light of the Schumpeterian theory tradition (Scandella, 1998). Global capitalism since 1740 had the following Kuznets cycles (calculations based on the untransformed rates of global industrial production growth, 1740 - 2004), based on polynomial expressions of the sixth order:

:1741-1756; R^2 = 23.5 %:1756-1774; R^2 = 36.1 %:1774-1793; R^2 = 34.8 %:1793-1812; R^2 = 39.7 %:1812-1832; R^2 = 16.4 %:1832-1862; R^2 = 25.7 %:1862-1885; R^2 = 36.3 %:1885-1908; R^2 = 56.2 %:1908-1932; R^2 = 44.2 %:1932-1958; R^2 = 19.1 %:1958-1975; R^2 = 60.9 %:1975-1992; R^2 = 75.8 %

The period between 1756 and 1832 is then the first Kondratiev cycle of the industrial age, the period between 1832 and 1885 as the second Kondratiev cycle, the period between 1885 and 1932 as the third Kondratiev cycle, and the period between 1932 and 1975 as the fourth Kondratiev cycle. Therefore, according to this logic, we are now in the fifth Kondratiev cycle of the industrial age; with one Kuznets cycle after the depression of the mid-1970s already well behind us, and the second Kuznets cycle since 1992 pointing in a downward direction.

For Volker Bornschier, there are the following phases in the K-cycle:
*Upswing
*Prosperity
*Prosperity-recession
*Crisis
*Temporary recovery
*Depression

Tests, provided by Tausch/Ghymers show that the Bornschier dating scheme much better corresponds to the structure of world production data than the alternative, proposed by Goldstein. This scheme is in line with the dating scheme proposed by Joshua Goldstein, Phil O'Hara, and Ernest Mandel, among many others.

The question of war cycles has received enormous international attention. Joshua Goldstein was led to the conclusion that the capitalist world systems tends continuously towards wars and violent conflicts. The international system is characterized according to him by

:global war -> world hegemony of the dominant power -> de-legitimization of the international order -> de-concentration of the global system -> global war et cetera

The duration of these phases of the international order is approximately one Kondratieff cycle, so the unit of time of the international system can be symbolized by the expression 1K.

At a time of major shifts in world politics and economics, it is no wonder that systematic studies in the evolution of the international order have gained ground. Goldstein's quantitative approach (1988 ff.) concentrated on the major power confrontations as the `watershed' in international relations. Ample empirical evidence supports both Arrighi's and Goldstein's theories. Each world political cycle up to now corresponded to a `W'-pattern of untransformed annual battle fatalities from major power wars in thousands. The war cycle 1495-1648 is a polynomial expression of the 6th order; R^2 is 91.7%; 1649-1816 yields an R^2 of 33.6%; while a polynomial expression of the 6th order explains 50.1% of war intensity 1817-1945. The x-axis in our graph is the number of years after the end of the major power wars, i.e. 1648, 1816, and 1945. The same, deadly function explains 49.5% of annual battle fatalities in thousands from 1946 to 1975 (Tausch, 2007).

Now, one of the most intriguing features of contemporary capitalism seems to be the fact that vigorous upswings need to be supported by a tightly organized new world political hegemonic order, while the strength of the downswings and the severity of the depressions always are a function of the waning world political order. All real major depressions in the world system were hegemonic transition phases, and all these major crises thus had the character of what the present author calls a "Tsunami wave" of world politics that each time was also connected with terrible social upheavals, depressions and the onsets of major power wars, like the great crash of the early 1340s, which marked the beginning of the Genoese age (Arrighi) or Portuguese and Genoese age (Modelski), the crash of the 1560s, which marked the beginning of the Dutch era, the depression of the 1750s and 1760s, which marked the beginning of the British era, and the Great Depression in the 1930s, which was the terminal crisis of British world capitalist dominance (Arrighi, 1995).

By re-analyzing latest conflict data (great power battle fatalities from all wars, Goldstein, 1988 and COW/PRIO, 2005, from 1495 to 2002 and as yet unpublished UNIDO data about the growth of world industrial production 1740 - 2004) it was shown in Tausch/Ghymers that the long Kuznets and Kondratiev swings and cycles of capitalist world development that play such an important role in the analysis of global war since 1495 have indeed not ended after the end of Communism, and that instability, and not stability, characterize the world economy, and that there is an indented "W" shaped pattern of global conflict since 1495 that did not end with the end of the Cold War. World hegemonies that characterize the workings of world capitalism arise and they end. As it is well known in world system research, especially from the works of Arrighi and Silver, there are signal crises of world capitalism (the usual Kondratiev depressions), and there are terminal crises of the world system, when hegemonies end. Peaceful transitions from one hegemony to the other are among the most intricate questions of peace research and peace policy of our time.

Regaining a Schumpeterian perspective

Authors like Joseph Alois Schumpeter, and later world system and dependency writers like Samir Amin, Volker Bornschier, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Raul Prebisch, and Osvaldo Sunkel were always aware of the crises, cyclical imbalances, regional shifts, and of the rise and decline of entire regions and even continents in the process of capitalist development.

Like many other development theorists of the first generation of development economists after the Second World War, whose stars began to rise long after Schumpeter in the post-war period, and who all greatly influenced “dependency theory” in the world periphery, like Kurt Mandelbaum, Paul Narcyz Rosenstein-Rodan, and Hans Wolfgang Singer, capitalism for Schumpeter never was a smooth equilibrium process, whose end result is crisis-free growth, full employment, environmental sustainability and an end to social exclusion.

Quantitative world systems debate has to mention the name of the Swiss sociologist Volker Bornschier, who throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond, has been a critical voice on the long-run detrimental effects of transnational penetration on the host countries in world capitalism, dynamizing the host countries of transnational foreign investment only in the short run, but leading towards inequality and stagnation in the long run, thus enormously enriching earlier work on dependency theories, pioneered by Peter Heintz and the Latin American "dependency theory school". His theoretical and empirical developments made "dependency theory" truly global and linked it up to the evolving world system school, and by his networking and collaboration –especially with Christopher Chase Dunn – firmly entrenched the "quantitative approach" in the world system school. His later work, related to the long cyclical fluctuations in the world economy, has shown that instability is also an overwhelming element in the historical evolution of capitalism, and that the world would need a new social contract similar in its encompassing nature to the one that shaped the world after the Great Depression in the 1930s. Bornschier put high hopes into the European Union as an alternative, more "social" pole in the world economy.

Literature (Selection)

* Amin S. (1973), 'Le developpement inegal. Essai sur les formations sociales du capitalisme peripherique' Paris: Editions de Minuit.
* Amin S. (1976), ‘Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism’ New York: Monthly Review Press.
* Amin S. (1992), 'Empire of Chaos' New York: Monthly Review Press.
* Amin S. (1997), ‘Die Zukunft des Weltsystems. Herausforderungen der Globalisierung. Herausgegeben und aus dem Franzoesischen uebersetzt von Joachim Wilke’ Hamburg: VSA.
* Arrighi G. (1989), 'The Developmentalist Illusion: A Reconceptualization of the Semiperiphery' paper, presented at the Thirteenth Annual Political Economy of the World System Conference, University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign, April 28 - 30.
* Arrighi G. (1991), 'World Income Inequalities and the Future of Socialism' Fernand Braudel Centre, State University of New York at Binghamton.
* Arrighi G. (1995), ‘The Long 20th Century. Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times’ London, New York: Verso.
* Arrighi G. and Silver, B. J. (1984), 'Labor Movements and Capital Migration: The United States and Western Europe in World - Historical Perspective' in 'Labor in the Capitalist World - Economy' (Bergquist Ch. (Ed.)), pp. 183 - 216, Beverly Hills: Sage.
* Arrighi G. et al. (1991), 'The Rise of East Asia. One Miracle or Many?' State University of New York at Binghamton: Fernand Braudel Centre.
* Arrighi G. et al. (1996a), ‘Modelling Zones of the World-Economy: A Polynomial Regression Analysis (1964-1994)’ State University of New York at Binghamton: Fernand Braudel Center.
* Arrighi G. et al. (1996b), ‘The Rise of East Asia in World Historical Perspective’ State University of New York at Binghamton: Fernand Braudel Center.
* Arrighi G. et al. (1996c), ‘Beyond Western Hegemonies’ State University of New York at Binghamton: Fernand Braudel Center.
* Bornschier V. (Ed.) (1994), ‘Conflicts and new departures in world society’ New Brunswick, N.J. : Transaction Publishers.
* Bornschier V. (1976), 'Wachstum, Konzentration und Multinationalisierung von Industrieunternehmen' Frauenfeld and Stuttgart: Huber.
* Bornschier V. (1988), 'Westliche Gesellschaft im Wandel' Frankfurt a.M./ New York: Campus.
* Bornschier V. (1992), 'The Rise of the European Community. Grasping Towards Hegemony or Therapy against National Decline in the World Political Economy?'. Vienna: paper, presented at the First European Conference of Sociology, August 26 - 29.
* Bornschier V. (1996), ‘Western society in transition’ New Brunswick, N.J. : Transaction Publishers.
* Bornschier V. and Chase - Dunn Ch. K (1985), 'Transnational Corporations and Underdevelopment' N.Y., N.Y.: Praeger.
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* Chase - Dunn Ch. K. and Podobnik B. (1995), ‘The Next World War: World - System Cycles and Trends’ Journal of World Systems Research 1, 6 (unpaginated electronic journal at world - wide - web site of the World System Network: http://jwsr.ucr.edu/).
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References

ee also

* Sociocybernetics
* General systems theory
* Social cycle theory
* Systems philosophy
* Systems thinking
* War cycles
* List of cycles

External links

* [http://irows.ucr.edu Institute for Research on World-Systems]
* [http://jwsr.ucr.edu/index.php Journal of World-Systems Research]
* [http://wsarch.ucr.edu/ World-Systems Archive]
* [http://wsarch.ucr.edu/archive/papers.htm Working Papers in the World Systems Archive]
* [http://wsarch.ucr.edu/archive/books.htm World-Systems Archive Books]
* [http://wsarch.ucr.edu/archive/seminars.htm World-Systems Electronic Seminars]
* [http://wsarch.ucr.edu/archive/papers/gunder/prefreor.htm Preface to ReOrient by Andre Gunder Frank]
* [http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/Theorists/Frank/index.htm Andre Gunder Frank resources]
* [http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/courses/WORLDSYS.HTML The Modern World-System by Immanuel Wallerstein]
* [http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/Theorists/Wallerstein/index.htm Immanuel Wallerstein resources]
* [http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24901.shtml The African Crisis - World Systemic and Regional Aspects by Giovanni Arrighi]
* [http://www.transformaties.org/bibliotheek/arr_east_asia.htm The Rise of East Asia in World Historical Perspective by Giovanni Arrighi]
* [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/neomarx.htm Neo-marxist Political Economy]
* [http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol12/iss1/art24/main.html Resilience, Panarchy, and World-Systems Analysis]
* [http://www.openhistory.net A Dynamic Map of the World Cities' Growth]
* [http://www.eumed.net/entelequia/en.index.php Revista Entelequia]
* [http://www.theory-talks.org/2008/08/theory-talk-13.html Read an interview with World-System Theorist Immanuel Wallerstein at Theory Talks (August 2008)]