Immanuel Wallerstein - World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction

THE MEDIA, AND INDEED the social scientists, constantly tell us that two things dominate the world we have been living in since the last decades of the twentieth century: globalization and terrorism. Both are presented to us as substantially new phenomenathe first filled with glorious hope and the second with terrible dangers. The U.S. government seems to be playing a central role in furthering the one and fighting the other. But of course these realities are not merely American but global. What underlies a great deal of the analysis is the slogan of Mrs. Thatcher, who was Great Britains prime minister from 1979 to 1990: TINA (There Is No Alternative). We are told that there is no alternative to globalization, to whose exigencies all governments must submit. And we are told that there is no alternative, if we wish to survive, to stamping out terrorism ruthlessly in all its guises.

This is not an untrue picture but it is a very partial one. If we look at globalization and terrorism as phenomena that are defined in limited time and scope, we tend to arrive at conclusions that are as ephemeral as the newspapers. By and large, we are not then able to understand the meaning of these phenomena, their origins, their trajectory, and most importantly where they fit in the larger scheme of things. We tend to ignore their history. We are unable to put the pieces together, and we are constantly surprised that our short-term expectations are not met.

How many people expected in the 1980s that the Soviet Union would crumble as fast and as bloodlessly as it did? And how many people expected in 2001 that the leader of a movement few had ever heard of, al-Qaeda, could attack so boldly the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon on September 11, and cause so much damage? And yet, seen from a longer perspective, both events form part of a larger scenario whose details we might not have known in advance but whose broad outlines were quite predictable.

Part of the problem is that we have studied these phenomena in separate boxes to which we have given special namespolitics, economics, the social structure, culturewithout seeing that these boxes are constructs more of our imagination than of reality. The phenomena dealt with in these separate boxes are so closely intermeshed that each presumes the other, each affects the other, each is incomprehensible without taking into account the other boxes. And part of the problem is that we tend to leave out of our analyses of what is and is not new the three important turning points of our modern world-system: (1) the long sixteenth century during which our modern world-system came into existence as a capitalist world-economy; (2) the French Revolution of 1789 as a world event which accounts for the subsequent dominance for two centuries of a geoculture for this world-system, one that was dominated by centrist liberalism; and (3) the world revolution of 1968, which presaged the long terminal phase of the modern world-system in which we find ourselves and which undermined the centrist liberal geoculture that was holding the world-system together.

The proponents of world-systems analysis, which this book is about, have been talking about globalization since long before the word was invented not, however, as something new but as something that has been basic to the modern world-system ever since it began in the sixteenth century. We have been arguing that the separate boxes of analysiswhat in the universities are called the disciplinesare an obstacle, not an aid, to understanding the world. We have been arguing that the social reality within which we live and which determines what our options are has not been the multiple national states of which we are citizens but something larger, which we call a world-system. We have been saying that this world-system has had many institutionsstates and the interstate system, productive firms, households, classes, identity groups of all sortsand that these institutions form a matrix which permits the system to operate but at the same time stimulates both the conflicts and the contradictions which permeate the system. We have been arguing that this system is a social creation, with a history, whose origins need to be explained, whose ongoing mechanisms need to be delineated, and whose inevitable terminal crisis needs to be discerned.

In arguing this way, we have not only gone against much of the official wisdom of those in power, but also against much of the conventional knowledge put forth by social scientists for two centuries now. For this reason, we have said that it is important to look anew not only at how the world in which we live works but also at how we have come to think about this world. World-systems analysts see themselves therefore as engaging in a fundamental protest against the ways in which we have thought that we know the world. But we also believe that the emergence of this mode of analysis is a reflection of, an expression of, the real protest about the deep inequalities of the world-system that are so politically central to our current times.

I myself have been engaged in and writing about world-systems analysis for over thirty years. I have used it to describe the history and the mechanisms of the modern world-system. I have used it to delineate the structures of knowledge. I have discussed it as a method and a point of view. But I have never tried to set down in one place the totality of what I mean by world-systems analysis.

Over these thirty years, the kind of work that comes under this rubric has become more common and its practitioners more widespread geographically. Nonetheless, it still represents a minority view, and an oppositional view, within the world of the historical social sciences. I have seen it praised, attacked, and quite often misrepresented and misinterpretedsometimes by hostile and not very well-informed critics, but sometimes by persons who consider themselves partisans or at least sympathizers. I decided that I would like to explain in one place what I consider its premises and principles, to give a holistic view of a perspective that claims to be a call for a holistic historical social science.