Resources and Development

Week 9

Ciara Cloake

0209473

 

The question that was posed for this seminar was should the world be seen as one system? After reading around the topic, the conclusion I reached was that yes it should.  There are a number of reasons for this, the one I will mainly focus the presentation on is that of Wallersteins World systems theory, which is a challenge to the modernization paradigm, in which he reformulated the unit of analysis of development from the nation-state to the world-system. I will use the theory and some examples to show how the world can be seen as one system. Another reason the world can be seen as one system is through the process of Globalization but I will not go in to the detail of that as Gerard’s presentation is on that topic. Environmentally the world can also be seen as one ecological system, as it has been proven that what is going on in one area can affect others, think ozone layer and polar ice-caps. The phrase “spaceship earth” has become frequently used when discussing that kind of issue. The last point that I wish to make on why it can be seen as one system is that we all share the fact that we are all human and are facing many of the same problems on Global scale such as Terrorism or Aids or Drugs.

Wallersteins World System Theory has become the dominant paradigm in development since the 1970’s. I will start with the historical context, where did the theory come from?

The failure of modernization programs in Latin America in the 1960s led to the emergence of neo-Marxist dependency school, which attacked modernization on the basis that it was Imperialist in nature. Wallerstein then found there were many new activities in the capitalist world economy that could not be explained within the confines of the dependency model. The world system approach includes nation-state behavior and the role of hegemonies and can be seen as realist in an international relations sense.

One the first things that he noticed was that East Asia (By which I mean Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore) continued to experience a remarkable rate of economic growth. It became harder to portray this East Asian economic miracle as “manufactured imperialism” or “dependant development”; these states have actually challenged the economic superiority of the United States now.

The second thing was that there was a crisis among socialist states, such as the Sino-Soviet split, failed Cultural Revolution, economic stagnation and gradual opening of the socialist states to capital investment. These signaled to Wallerstein that revolutionary socialism was no longer in effect.

The third thing he noticed was that there was a crisis in US capitalism, such as the Vietnam War, Watergate, oil embargo, stagnation and inflation, and government deficit. These factors signaled to Wallerstein an end to the US hegemony in the capitalist world.

Wallerstein himself was heavily influenced by neo-Marxist development theory and by the Annales school, which taught that social science should encompass all the relevant disciplines under one roof so to speak, so that when researching he could include all disciplines (politics, sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology etc) The other idea he borrowed from them was a synthesis of history and social science through emphasis on the long term, cyclical nature of history.

There were Mini-systems, world empires and world economies. It was in the pre-agricultural era that there was a multiplicity of mini-systems that were small in space and brief in time. Between 8000 BC and 1500AD there were world wide Empires, they were political structures that had many different cultural groups in them and were usually controlled from a central source. It was not until 1500 approx that the capitalist world economies came in to existence.

Wallerstein defines capitalism as “a system based on the competition between free producer using free labour with free commodities, ‘free’ meaning its availability for sale and purchase on the market”

For Wallerstein says that “A world-system is 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”

He goes on to add that  “Indeed, on the contrary, we are arguing that the only real social systems are, on the one hand, those relatively small, highly autonomous subsistence economies not part of some regular tribute-demanding system and, on the other hand, world-systems. These latter are to be sure distinguished from the former because they are relatively large; that is, they are in common parlance "worlds."

Only two varieties have been seen thus far of such world-systems: the first is world-empires like the Roman Empire or the British Empire and the second is those systems in which such a single political system does not exist over all, or virtually all, of the space. The term "world-economy" has been used to describe the latter.

Wallerstein also said that he developed world system theory as an alternative to modernisation theory.

Wallerstein then goes on to talk about the core, periphery, semi periphery (about which I have prepared an acetate)

After which I have a case study on Africa to discuss as well.