AFTER THE COLD WAR: THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD-SYSTEM
W. L. Goldfrank
University of California, Santa Cruz
Presented at the Taft Conference on the Changing
World Order, University of Cincinnati, May 3-4,
1991
Surveying the changing world around us, as
scholars and intellectuals we confront empirical puzzles and
interpretive uncertainties.  As citizens of a rich
and mighty power we bear responsibility for the
present and
future out of proportion to our numbers.  And for those
of us who identify with worldwide social and political
movements seeking more democracy, more equality,
more justice, more rationality, we find ourselves at once free and
daunted.  We are free, finally, from
the albatross of party-states calling themselves
"socialist," from the illusion that social-democratic
welfare states are trending toward perfection, from the myth that
national development in the Third World is closing
the gap.  And we are daunted by the
double task of (1) reconstructing a
strategy of global transformation and (2)
making a viable movement out of the multiple
oppositional fragments scattered about the global
landscape.
.PP
This paper attempts to confront some puzzles and
interpret some uncertainties about the future.
If this contributes to understanding our
responsibilities and political opportunities,
so much the better.  World-system analysis is
my chosen optic, so before I sketch visions of the
short-run, the medium-run, and the long-run,
let me rehearse the basic premises from which
this interpretation follows.
.PP
The modern world-system is a capitalist
world-economy today encompassing virtually the entire
globe, although as a system its 16th-century original
scope was limited territorially
to parts of Europe and the Americas.
Historically changing, it is nonetheless a system,
a structured totality whose parts both complement
and affect one another.  We call it a world-economy
because its commodity chains link disparate peoples
and cultures via the market, unlike a world-empire,
which links cultures via a
political/administrative apparatus.  We call it
capitalist because accumulation is its
driving force, because labor is thereby commodified,
and because competition and class struggle are its
hallmarks, competition and struggle that occur
across as well as within state boundaries.  We understand this division into
 classes
to intersect a division into zones, some with great
wealth, sophisticated and diversified production, and strong states
(the core), some with little wealth, low-wage
production, and weak states (the periphery), and
some in between on these dimensions (the
semi-periphery).  Via unequal exchange, plunder, capital
flight, and labor migration, surplus moves from
periphery to core as it does in the production
process from labor to capital.
Over historical time the locus of particular
products shifts from one to another zone (as,
say, iron and steel production has recently been
shifting from the core to the semi-periphery).
And particular states may move from one zone to
another (as South Korea and Taiwan have recently
advanced from periphery to semi-periphery, or
Finland, since World War II, from semi-periphery to
core).  But the massive fact about the modern
world-system to date is its reproduced stability, as
capitalist commodification has penetrated more and more of the globe
and proletarianized more and more of its
inhabitants, and as the interstate mix of diplomacy and
war has contained and reprogrammed rebellious
oppositional movements.
.PP
Further, we understand this modern world-system to
move at once cyclically and via secular trends.
The cycles are economic and political.
Economically, the world
economy undergoes 50-60 year long waves of expansion and
contraction (or A and B phases), increasingly yet still
imperfectly synchronized in their
various national manifestations.  The global polity
experiences much longer hegemonic cycles with four phases, which
we may call
ascent through conflict, supremacy, decline,
and condominium.  The secular trends are familiar to
students of modernity: commodification (including
labor), mechanization, bureaucratization,
geographical expansion.  But we understand these
trends to be constitutive of--rather than external
to--the system, and we
understand their
limits--which some scholars think are very close to
being reached--to presage a crisis from which a new
politico-economic form of global social orgnization
will emerge.
.PP
Given this optic, let me try to characterize the
present moment as a baseline for projecting the
future.  Leaving to the side some of the
controversial and borderline cases, the contemporary
core includes the U.S.A. and Canada, most of Western Europe,
and Japan.  They are relatively wealthy and relatively
democratic, specializing in high-technology
products such as computers, aerospace, and machine
tools, producing abundant food, experiencing
shrinkage in industrial employment and growth of the
so-called service sector (much of which is of course
part of the production process).  The contemporary
semi-periphery includes most of Eastern Europe and
Russia, at least the more industrial countries of
Latin America (Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil,
Argentina, Chile), South Africa, Turkey, and
the East Asian NICs.  These countries feature heavy
intermediate industrial production (iron and steel,
petrochemicals), strong but diminishing state control
of the economy, enormous debt burdens, and most of the democratization wave
of the last decade.  Their working classes are
increasing in social power, but where statist protectionism
has been dominant they face especially difficult
policy dilemmas.  The contemporary periphery
includes the poorer countries of Latin America,
sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and
China.  Most of the world's two billion peasants
live in the periphery, and with their compatriots
who are no longer peasants
they produce an array of raw materials and simple
manufactures (textiles, assembly).  They live for
the most part under authoritarian regimes and face
the stark alternatives of exclusion from the world
economy (as rulers in Myanmar and Kampuchea chose for a
time) or superexploitation within it.
.PP
In the contemporary period, under the auspices of
transnational corporations and international
agencies, the formal organization of the world is
catching up with its long-term structure.  Roughly
fifty percent of all
international trade now takes place within corporations
rather than between them,
and it is not unusual for corporations to design goods
and produce the machine tools to make them in
the core, manufacture them in the semi-periphery,
and sell and service them everywhere, including the
periphery.  The much ballyhooed "internationalization
of capital" is more an internationalization of
organization than of capital itself.  As for
regulation and management, the International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank, and the United Nations are taking on
increasing responsibility for regulating the system,
and with Amnesty International we even have a sort
of global civil liberties union to go along with
countless IGOs and NGOs in every institutional area.
.PP
In terms of the cycles and trends outlined above,
where do we stand?  Economically, the world is
approaching the end of a long wave that included the
great post-war boom of the 1950s and 60s and the
slowdown of the 1970s and 80s.  As with previous
booms, a rising tide floated many boats, giving rise
to now-nostalgic beliefs: that the core countries
had solved the problem of crises by fiscal and
monetary fine tuning, that the so-called socialist
countries would catch up (remember Khrushchev's
"We will bury you"? or the once-fashionable idea that
the USA and the USSR would soon "converge"?), that the periphery should be
called "developing nations" in "the springtime of
freedom."  The downturn of the 1970s and 80s has
been quite another story, however.  Too much
emphasis has been given to the exceptional successes
during this B-phase, for example, of Japan and the East Asian NICs, which
greatly resemble
the advances in Germany and some of its eastern
neighbors during the depressed last quarter of the
nineteenth century.  The other side of this coin during
the past
twenty years is elsewhere and opposite: twelve consecutive
years of African impoverishment, the Sahelian and
Sudanese famines, the collapse of living standards
in Eastern Europe and most of Latin America--leading most recently to
the reappearance of cholera, desperation in the
Philippines, disaster in Bangladesh; nor should we
neglect the
slowing or cessation of real wage increments in parts
of the
core, accompanied in the U.S. by a regressive redistribution of
income via inflation, mergers and acquisitions, junk
bonds, tax policies, benefit cuts,
and savings and loan scams.
.PP
Further, as is characteristic of B-phases, new
product lines are being prepared for widespread
marketing when the world-economy turns the corner
toward accelerated growth.  The most important of
these appear to be microprocessing, genetic
engineering, robotics, and alternative energy
technolgies.  Over the cries of environmentalists,
geographic expansion into the last
underexploited territories is well underway, in the
Amazon and other tropical woodlands, in the Arctic, and
if only the Japanese would help, in Siberia.  And
Antarctica beckons.
.PP
In terms of the political cycle, we approach the end
of U.S. hegemony and witness its transmutation into
trilateral condominium.  The political maneuvering
that surrounded the Gulf massacre speaks volumes,
with its confused mix of old-time U.S. unilateralism plus
hat-in-hand begging and U.N. resolutions and authorizations.
The State Department inclined toward the new
multilateralism, the Defense Department toward the
old unilateralism.  The president wavered, one foot
in each era.  Unilateralism predominated, but with a
heavy ideological emphasis on the coalition, the
alliance, the UN.  So if for the moment the U.S. has a near-monopoly on
tactical military might, this seems less the
expression of a robust hegemony than a
specialized function within a condominium of core
powers, the 9-1-1 of the world-system.  Perhaps because of
memories of German and Japanese expansionist
and racist militarism in World War II, this
specialization will likely persist for some time.
But with the possible exception of the Caribbean
basin, unilateralism is finished as hegemony wanes.
.PP
Many speak of the end of the Cold War, as if the
basic geopolitical frame of the entire
postwar period had been the so-called superpower
conflict.  The Cold War, an "imaginary war" in Mary
Kaldor's phrase, had many consequences,
including the build-up of huge military industrial
sectors in the U.S. and the USSR and the somewhat
halting and reluctant Soviet support for oppositional
movements and regimes around the globe.  But as the
Chinese saw perhaps the earliest and most clearly,
the Cold War was rather more collusive than
conflictful, serving to enable the vastly unequal
superpowers to control for a time their respective
allies and clients.  Immanuel Wallerstein (1990) goes so
far as to describe the USSR from Yalta to Malta as a
sub-imperial partner of the United States, with
considerable logic and evidence.  Not pseudo-strengthening by
Reagan, but the continued relative weakening of the
U.S. vis-a-vis Western Europe and Japan convinced
Gorbachev that the only chance for Russia to avoid
falling further behind was to disinvest in
militarism and empire and to redeploy resources toward
the more advanced sectors of the world-economy.
Though his prospects, at this time, look iffy,
the raw materials, workers, and customers of Russia are
too important to the world-economy, and the threat
of destabilizing disruption in that zone too great
to world politics for the core powers to allow a
collapse into chaos.  In any case, the Cold War was
part of the stable framework of U.S. hegemony;
Saddam Hussein would never have dared to invade
Kuwait under its rules.
.PP
Implicit in this synopsis of the present is my
vision of the short-run, the next decade or so.
After one, or possibly two more recessionary dips in
the next few years,
the accumulation process will accelerate as the
world-economy enters a new long wave.  The leading
sectors, which will return outsize profits to
investors in Japan, Western Europe, and the US,
will be the high-technology processes mentioned a
moment ago.  Semi-peripheral competition for
intermediate industrial production will intensify,
and rebellious labor movements in democratized
settings may well chase some
of it to the periphery.  The trend toward
multinational corporate decomposition of production
processes will gather momentum, making national
development or national industrialization even more
chimerical than they are today--except, perhaps, in
a much longer time frame, for very large countries
like Brazil, India, and China.  Those semi-peripheral
countries with a firm grasp on particular export
niches--I think here of Taiwan and Chile--will fare
better than others.  Much of the periphery will
suffer new exploitation, much a disdainful exclusion
punctuated by binges of charity.
.PP
In world politics,the transition to condominium will go forward, with
West European unification, a strengthening of OECD coordination,
and a thickening of other
international institutions.  With the formation of
free trade zones, the apparent tendency will be
toward three vertical blocs, one led by
Japan, one by Western Europe, one by the U.S.  In the U.S. it would
not be a surprise to see the beginnings of a party
realignment, with more conservative Democrats
defecting to the Republicans (who will continue to
win most presidential elections), and a social
democratization of the Democratic Party itself.
This would mean losses in the short term, but the
possibility of significant gains in the medium run.
One can understand this period in U.S. politics as quite
clearly analogous to that of Great Britain's hegemonic
decline, during which time the Liberal Party faded
and the Labor Party replaced it as the principal
opponent of enduring Conservatism (Goldfrank 1983).
Meanwhile, the educational system will continue to bifurcate,
with the gulf between professional/technical
specialists (Robert Reich's [1991] "symbolic analysts") and
production or service workers growing wider.
.PP
If we shift our attention further ahead, to the
middle-run 50-60 years of the new long wave,
prediction becomes more difficult.  Most probably,
before much of the 21st century has elapsed, the three
current core zones of the
world-system will have formed two competing blocs.
The U.S. and Japan will together dominate the first,
including in their orbit the Americas and the
Pacific.  A politically unified Europe--just how
unified and how inclusive remain to be seen--will dominate the other,
reaching out to the east and south.  India would
appear to be the surest candidate for contestation
between the two blocs, perhaps also southern
Africa.  But this tendency toward
bipolar bloc formation and rivalry will be dampened
by a continuing trend toward a high level of organizational
integration among at least the core states at the
corporate, the governmental, and the associational levels
(quite likely including labor).
.PP
Meanwhile, significant new proletarianization in the
semi-periphery and periphery will lead to the
reinvigoration of oppositional movements, as will
the further degradation of nature and increased
exploitation of women.  New challenges to
Enlightenment rationality and utilitarian
philosophies of progress may make Khomeini's Iran
look like a Sunday school picnic, while regional
wars among ambitious semi-peripheral states armed
with 21st-century weapons (nuclear trickle-down?)
could make the last decade in the Persian Gulf seem
a mere curtain-raiser.  Pressures toward
world state formation will come from core
middle strata fearing disruption or environmental
disaster, from semi-peripheral syndicalism after
the OPEC model, and from Third World workers
demanding global redistribution.  In the absence of
such redistribution, we are highly likely to see
massive migratory movements toward the core, with
increasing potential for reactionary movements of
ethnic and racial chauvinism.
.PP
What of the longer run, beyond the horizons of the
long wave that will take us to the middle of the
next century?  Since capitalism is an historical
system, it will eventually, some day, come to an end
(for an earlier version of this view, see Goldfrank
1987).  The
secular trends that have nourished it will reach
limits.  In the past, many opponents of capitalism
have seen its impending end in one or another of the
crises we now understand to be part of its normal
cyclical operation.  So it behooves us to look at the limits
of the crisis-relieving processes.  While it is
conceivable to me that those limits will be reached
during the next long wave, it is more likely that
two or even three such cycles will occur.  So by the
year 2100, or 2150, commodification will lack new
targets.  The middle strata of the
world-economy will have acceded, via
bureaucratization, to greater power
vis-a-vis the capitalist class, by then concentrated
in a finite number of giant global corporations.
The rising costs of redistribution to, and policing
of the workers of the world will help persuade the
far-sighted that a change of system is in the cards.
.PP
Geographic expansion provides cheaper resources and
new proletarians to the world-economy.  It is reaching its limits in the
present with intensifying exploitation of the
Arctic, the tropics, and soon Antarctica.  The last remaining
areas of hunting/gathering and subsistence cultivation now
find themselves incorporated into national
development programs and/or opened to exploitation by
multinational enterprises.  We should not be
surprised by the burgeoning resistance movements of
indigenous peoples, sometimes called the fourth
world, for they are classic Polanyi-ish
responses to the intrusion of the market.  Seabed
mining offers perhaps another direction for
expansion, but costs are high and returns, to this
date anyway, are negligible.  Outer space remains a
fantasy.  Hence we should not be surprised by the
growing emphasis on recycling materials and on
renewable energy sources, precisely because the
territorial limits of capitalist expansion are so
clearly on the short- to medium-term horizon.
.PP
Proletarianization is the second crisis-relieving
process, and its limits are clearly further off.
High birth rates combined with declining death rates
in much of the Third World mean that millions of new
potential proletarians are entering the world
each year--and will for a long time to come even as
birth rates decline, given
the age structure of the current global population,
which will reach six billion before the
end of this century.  Much of this population
continues to have substantial access to
household-controlled land to meet part of its basic needs,
often precariously, to be sure.  In so advanced a
semi-peripheral country as the USSR it is striking
how important private plots of land are to the
food supply of urban families.  Commodification of
household production itself--so-called "women's
work"--has begun in earnest only in the core zones,
so we may expect large increases in the spread of
packaged and convenience foods, commodified child
care, and other household technologies.
.PP
Redistribution of global income and hence purchasing
power is another mechanism of recovery.  It may be
currently occurring through the democratizing (or
redemocratizing) movements that have gripped our
imaginations over the past decade, in Mexico and the
Southern Cone, in South Africa, in Israel/Palestine,
in Eastern Europe and the USSR, in South Korea, and
more dubiously because they are more peripheral, in
China and the Philippines.  There seems to be a
recognition on the part of the bankers and economic
policy-makers at the summit of the world economy
that debt renegotiations are necessary, that the
northward capital transfers of the last fifteen
years are part of the problem rather than part of
the solution.  But if via restiveness or alliances some
of the larger semi-peripheral
countries and/or the peripheral giants China and India
achieve significant global redistribution, say
during the B-phase of the next long cycle, this will
mean a substantial shift in the world balance of
forces.  Such a shift, in turn, would alter the
conditions under which subsequent long waves would
unfold.
.PP
Mechanization, the continued application of science
to revolutionizing the production process, is
theoretically limitless.  It cheapens the cost of
production, and it may soon be liberated from the
constraints of non-renewable resources.  It presents
the potentiality, however, of liberating so many
humans from drudgery, that entertainment and
consumerism may well fail to dull their political
aspirations.
.PP
Let me suggest four possible long-run futures,
destruction, fascism, social democracy, and
socialism.  Number one, destruction, could come about quickly, via nuclear
incineration, or slowly, via irreversible damage to
the biosphere.  In spite of occasional scares (Cuba,
Berlin), nuclear war between major powers was less
likely during the Cold War arrangement than it will
be for some time into the future, perhaps until
the hegemonic succession after the next few decades,
with the gravest danger when--or perhaps
if--condominium gives way to active rivalry.
Previous hegemonic successions have in fact occurred
in part through system-wide wars, first in the 17th
century (the 30 Years War), then at the turn of the
19th century (the Napoleonic Wars), and then in the
first half of this century (World Wars I & II).
Although regional conflicts could certainly escalate
into global war, five factors militate against repetition of this
aspect of world-system cycles.  First, the example
of Sarajevo is much on the minds of foreign and
military policy makers in the core: they may talk
Munich, but they think Sarajevo.  Second, the
knowledge that first use will most probably lead to
nuclear holocaust must have a sobering effect on
would-be aggressors; it is one thing to risk losing
a war and quite another to commit virtual suicide.
Third, the increased interpenetration of the various
core zones by transnational corporations and banks based in
each of them has extended the peace interest within
the world capitalist class.  Fourth, political
influence of middle and working classes has grown,
further contributing to the peace interest, as the
European resistance to the Reagan build-up
foreshadows.  And, finally, the increasing density
of international organization makes it more likely
that global state-formation will soften the rough
edges of inter-core rivalry.
.PP
Destruction of the biosphere would be slower than
a holocaust but no less deadly to the human
prospect.  For centuries, capitalists--and I
emphatically do not exclude the self-proclaimed socialist
state elites from this characterization--have ravaged
particular environments in the pursuit of profit and
power; often, they have pushed peasants to do the
same via increasingly desperate searches for arable land.
Particular localized environments can be abandoned,
perhaps cleaned up or regenerated.  But in recent years
capitalist growth on a global scale has begun to
have clearly discernible effects on the ozone layer
and the climate, effects which may or may not be
checked in time to prevent irreversible, perhaps
fatal damage.  Capitalists and policy makers are
becoming conscious of this danger to the goose that
lays their golden eggs, and popular movements (generically,
the Greens) are
reinforcing the point.  International regulation
of pollution as well as armaments is thus on the agenda
and can only increase the pressure toward global
state formation.
.PP
As a second alternative long-run future, global fascism
would seem to me as much a caricatured exaggeration of
the capitalist world-system as its transformation
into a new kind of politico-economic totality.  Or,
perhaps, it might be understood as a regression to
world-empire, with a central administrative
caste--males, no doubt, but probably not all white--redistributing world
surplus to its specialists in violence, circuses, and
disinformation.  The core/periphery division of
labor would resemble internal colonialism on a world
scale.  Confiscation and expropriation for reasons
of state would attenuate property relations.  Labor
would be controlled through corporatist inclusion,
police repression, perhaps even eugenics and/or
extermination.  Two scenarios, not mutually
exclusive, suggest themselves as
leading to this outcome: the aftermath of a
devastating but not life-extinguishing global war,
or the reaction to a failed insurgency originating
among peripheral and semi-peripheral states or
movements.  In this light, the Gulf massacre makes for eerie
projections, if the U.S. had
nothing against the Iraqi people, why did we
kill tens of thousands of them and expose
still more to the miseries of epidemic disease,
poverty, and homelessness while leaving the upper
echelons of the military caste in place?
.PP
Global social democracy or welfare state (future
number three) and
global socialism (number four) are greatly to be preferred.
Achieving the former would make the latter more
likely, though there may be some who would assert
that "the worse the better," i.e., the more
unsatisfactory the present, the greater the chances
that left-wing insurgency will gather adherents and
carry the day.  Redistribution downward in both
class and zonal terms would be the hallmark of both
such systems.  In the social democratic future, merit-based
technocracy with progressive
taxes and transfer payments would soften the hard
edges of the core/periphery chasm, and world
citizenship rights would gradually erode the
advantages of the privileged.  The political base of
this global order would be along the lines of the
Sandinista revolutionary coalition and its
international supporters: progressive capitalists,
petty producer populists, workers, peasants, social
democrats in the core, nationalists in the
semi-periphery.  This alignment would be vulnerable
to a militarist and racist right-wing unless it
broadened its base by incorporating more
semi-peripheral and peripheral workers in an
effective reallocation of power and wealth.
.PP
Not impossibly, a tipping point might occur in that
reallocation process, such that a socialist world
government appears on the horizon.  Such a formation
would entail democratically accountable investment
planning, democratically controlled enterprises,
local democracy, and gender equality to boot.
Headquarters functions would be redistributed
geographically.  Utopian visions of reducing or even
eliminating mental/manual and town/country divisions
would at least become conceivable.  The global
social base for such a politics is primarily among
the largest, the youngest, and today the weakest
strata in the world-system, the proletarians,
semi-proletarians, and peasantry of the Third World.
Even to mention them is to recognize how far we are
from such a future.  For if once upon a time the strategic
visions of Lenin
or Mao were
to unite them, along with the workers of the core
and the national bourgeoisie of the periphery in a
grand revolutionary anti-imperialist alliance, the
reality of the 20th century has been more nearly the
opposite.  The capitalists of the core, alarmed by
the Russian revolution and other upheavals of that
time, and while settling their differences through the
bloody travail of depression and war, constructed a
quite opposite alliance indeed.  Citizenship for
a substantial portion of core workers was translated
into the benefits of the welfare state, a share in
the gains from productivity increases, pension fund
capitalism, opportunity for higher education,
perhaps some share in at least the psychic income of
world superiority.  Political independence and
contingent membership in the global bourgeoisie was
the deal for the bourgeois nationalists of the periphery,
including, finally, those who came to power as
socialists; this deal includes the right to own
property in Miami, London, Zurich, Tokyo; the right
to send one's children to Oxbridge, the Sorbonne,
the Ivy League; the right to vacation in Rome, Monaco,
and Gstaad; the right, as a Chilean told me proudly,
to enjoy all the appurtenances of a world-class life
style with the bonus of abundant and deferential
household servants.  This alliance of core and
peripheral capitalists, plus a sizable if shrinking
segment of the core working class, was the U.S.
answer to Bolshevism, which was its primary
rationale.  No longer does the seizure of state
power in the separate nations seem a viable strategy for the now-fragmented
left.  Bolshevism is finished, but for the desperate
remnants
in Peru or perhaps the Philippines.  The axial
conflicts of the world-system stand revealed
in their nakedness, where all can see the New World
Order, the Emperor's new clothes.