Poli Sci 239 Syllabus - Spring '96 CIVILIZATIONS AND WORLD SYSTEMS: WORLD POLITICS IN THE VERY LONG TERM Spring 1996 Instructor: David Wilkinson Dept of Political Science, University of California-Los Angeles Classroom: 3288 Bunche Hall Office: 3280 Bunche Class hours: Monday 6-8:50 pm Office Hours: after class and by appointment Course Requirements: a one-page critique of an article or book each week (with enough copies for all class members); and a 20-50 page final paper, Final paper due date: Thursday, June 13, 6:30 PM, 3280 Bunche The course will examine a variety of notions, theories, concepts, and speculations about the overall political structure, statics, dynamics, determinants, desiderata, and engineerability of the current global system of world politics and the sub-global world systems/civilizations that have preceded or structured it. The "very long term" for purposes of the course might be conservatively defined as "one generation or more." Thoughts advanced by writers daring to theorize/fulminate on the largest-size and longest-term political phenomena will be critically appraised by the participants in the course, in order to allow each participant to approach an answer to the question "How far can one, and how should one, conceive, hypothesize, theorize, classify, forecast, desire, and act in respect to politics at the macro scale?" Course credit will be earned by a single 25-50 page critique of one or several writers who have dealt with political events at the scales in question, preferably involving empirical contemporary and/or historical research designed to test two or more conflicting theories read for the course; or, for the more ambitious, by a "constructive" paper that seeks to advance the development of one such approach, your own or that of others. (Kindly number your pages.) Students will be required to provide weekly 1-page summaries and critiques of relevant writings, whether on the required list, the reserve list or outside both, to focus class discussions. Required Readings for Class Discussion Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky, The Real World Order Chatham House, 1993. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press, 1992. Samuel P. Huntington et al. The Clash of Civilizations:The Debate. Foreign Affairs, 1993. Stephen K. Sanderson ed., Civilizations and World Systems:Studying World-Historical Change. AltaMira, 1995. Potential Readings/Sources for One-page Critiques 1. Vis-a-vis Singer and Wildavsky, an appraisal of the post-Cold-War era in world politics from a policy-oriented empirical, pragmatic, liberal-progressive political science standpoint, one could compare any of several hundred books that could be located on Orion via "fti new world order," or via "bsu world politics" followed by a search for books indexed under the subject "world politics--1989-". There is some resemblance between the cross-sectional analysis of the world system in Singer and Wildavsky and the longitudinal analysis of the trajectories of its parts (states) projected by Cyril Black in The Dynamics of Modernization. An interesting, unacknowledged, dialectical cross-connection which might be explored is the relationship between the two-zone doctrine of Singer and Wildavsky and its predecessors, the three-worlds doctrine of the Cold War era, the two-camp and three-camp doctrines of the Stalin era, and the zonal doctrines of Islamic theopolity. 2. Vis-a-vis Fukuyama, cf. discussions in Burns, After History?; Bertram and Chitty, Has History Ended?; Jensen,A Look at "The End of History?". The predecessor piece, Fukuyama's"Have We Reached the End of History?", is worth looking at; it stimulated a discussion in The National Interest (Fall 1989), which should be read along with it. Alternatives and/or sources of liberal-democratic-progressive endist theories worth inspecting are Condorcet's Sketch, Kant's Perpetual Peace, Hegel's Philosophy of History, and the Marxist-Leninist/Soviet endism which can be found in the English-language edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Case V, URL Reference Room), in the following articles: v. 21, "Progress"; v. 10, "Historical Materialism"; v. 27, "Socioeconomic Formations"; v. 19, "Primitive Communist System"; v. 21, "Slaveholding System"; v. 27, "Feudalism"; v. 11,"Capitalism"; v. 19, "Transition from Capitalism to Socialism"; v. 24, "Socialism"; v. 12, "Communism". The relationship between theological eschatology and secular endism, evident in the lives of Hegel and Marx, could be examined--it goes back at least to the 12th century Calabrian prophet Abbot Joachim of Floris (Flora, Fiore--"fsu Joachim Fiore" is best). 3. Vis-a-vis Huntington, his theoretical source is Toynbee's A Study of History, which can be approached in several different ways. The one-volume abridgement (with Jane Caplan) is the most readable (Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History. A new edition, revised and abridged by the author and Jane Caplan. New York:Oxford University Press, 1972). The "Argument" at the back of each volume of the two-volume abridgement (by D.C. Somervell) is the most concise, with the abridgement itself coming next. The ten-volume full study gives all the details. The twelfth volume, Reconsiderations, takes into account hundreds of critiques. The Reith lectures, published as The World and the West, come closest to Huntington's own argument, but with a rather different attitude. Arguments about fundamental phase-changes in world politics are presented in Rosecrance, Rise of the Trading State, in a more theoretical way in Rosecrance, Action and Reaction in World Politics, and in a multiple-equilibrium form in the work of Morton Kaplan, perhaps most accessible in his collaboration with Katzenbach, Political Foundations of International Law. Contrasts with non-evolutionary arguments can be made via Waltz's Theory of International Politics. 4. The civilizationist currently most active in work on international relations is Matthew Melko. His chapter in Sanderson points to others of note. Aside from Toynbee, the most international-relations relevance is probably to be found in Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis (New York: Macmillan, 1961); Quigley was one of Bill Clinton's teachers, and seems to have had some influence on his thought, or at least his language. Melko's own work on the comparative-historical study of peace culminates in Peace in our Time. See also Melko, The Nature of Civilizations (Introduction by Crane Brinton. Boston: Porter Sargent 1969), and Melko and Leighton R. Scott, eds. The Boundaries of Civilizations in Space and Time (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1987). Melko was influenced by Toynbee through Martin Wight, by whom see Power Politics edited by Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad. Leicester University Press, 1978), and Systems of States(edited with an introduction by Hedley Bull. Leicester University Press, 1977). Another civilizationist approach to world systems is that of Robert G. Wesson: The Imperial Order University of California Press, 1967) and State Systems: International Pluralism, Politics and Culture (New York: Free Press, 1978). Two early twentieth-century civilizationists who provide a peck of salt to take with happy-end-of-history theories (though when they wrote these were often revolutionary-socialist rather than the current democratic-capitalist versions) are Pitirim Sorokin (e.g. Social and Cultural Dynamics) and Oswald Spengler The Decline of the West). Orthodox world-systems theory (with the hyphen) extends, or breaks with, Marxism and Marxism-Leninism over, respectively, the importance and the nature of international relations; it is chiefly embodied in the work of Immanuel Wallerstein. Rather than the well-known Modern World-System, the best introduction to the Wallersteinian line seems to me to be a combination of Wallerstein's other works: Historical Capitalism (London: Verso, 1983), The Politics of the World-Economy: the States, the Movements, and the Civilizations (Cambridge University Press, 1984), and Geopolitics and Geoculture (Cambridge University Press, 1991). Two main secessions from this analytical stream, both rejecting the idea that "modernity" represents a fundamentally new historical phase, are represented by Chase-Dunn and Hall on the one hand, and Frank and Gills on the other; they disagree with each other on the number and historical geography of world-systems that have existed, but retain the economistic focus carried over by Wallerstein. The latter approach is well represented in Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills, eds., The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? (London: Routledge, 1993), the former in Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas D. Hall, eds., Core/Periphery Relations in Precapitalist Worlds (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1991, though neither collection is homogeneous. (Further research sources, mostly from these schools, may be acquired electronically from csf.colorado.edu/wsystems This will take you to the World Systems Network and the World-Systems Archive and the Journal of World-Systems Research. . In the archive you will find under "papers" additional papers by several authors, e.g. chase-dunn &hall, gunder-frank, stephen-sanderson, and others. Under announce, wsn-announcement will be found data about the World Systems Network. the web addres is http://csf.colorado.edu/wsystems/index.html Of a different character, influenced by the social-system analysis of Talcott Parsons and by earlier social-evolutionary ideas of Comte and Spencer, is the (unhyphenated) world system theory of George Modelski, William R. Thompson, and Karen A. Rasler. Major works are Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, c1987); Modelski and Thompson, Seapower in Global Politics,1494-1993 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, c1988); Thompson, On Global War: Historical-Structural Approaches to World Politics (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1988); Rasler and Thompson, War and State Making: The Shaping of the Global Powers (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Rasler and Thompson, The Great Powers and Global Struggle 1490-1990 (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky, 1994). Forthcoming is Modelski and Thompson. "Innovation, Growth and War: The Co-Evolution of Global Economies and Politics." (manuscript) The various world-systems and world systems approaches share an interest with the civilizationists in global war patterns, and in the anticipation and (where not deterministic) the avoidance of the next systemic general war.