Immanuel Wallerstein - The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World

Table of Contents

Also by Immanuel Wallerstein

The Modern World-System (3-vol.)

To William H. McNeill

who will not agree with everything,
but whose persistent large-scale vision
has been and will remain an inspiration
to all those who study the human condition

INTRODUCTION

September 11, 2001, was a dramatic and shocking moment in American history. It was not, however, a defining moment. It was merely one important event within a trajectory that began much earlier, and will go on for several more decades, a long period which we may call that of the decline of U.S. hegemony in a chaotic world. Stated in this fashion, September 11 constituted a shock into awareness, to which too many have responded with denial and with anger. Americans need to respond with as much clarity and sobriety as they can command. We need to try to preserve our best values and maximize our security amidst fundamental transformations of the world-systemtransformations that we may affect but that we cannot control. We need to join with others elsewhere in the construction, in the reconstruction, of the kind of world in which we want to live.

American politicians like to refer to the American dream. The American dream does exist, and is internalized in most of our psyches. It is a good dream, so good that many others across the world wish the same dream for themselves. What is this dream? The American dream is the dream of human possibility, of a society in which all persons may be encouraged to do their best, to achieve their most, and to have the reward of a comfortable life. It is the dream that there will be no artificial obstacles in the way of such individual fulfillment. It is the dream that the sum of such individual achievements is a great social gooda society of freedom, equality, and mutual solidarity. It is the dream that we are a beacon to a world that suffers from not being able to realize such a dream.

Of course it is a dream, and like all dreams, it is not an exact representation of reality. But it represents our subconscious longings and our underlying values. Dreams are not scientific analyses. Rather they offer us insights. However, to understand the world in which we live, we have to go beyond our dreams to a careful look at our historythe history of the United States, the history of the modern world-system, the history of the United States in the world-system. Not everyone wants to do that. Sometimes we fear reality will be grim or at least less beautiful than our dreams. Some of us prefer to see the world, as they say, through rose-colored glasses.

One would have thought that the events of September 11 would have shattered the illusions. And no doubt they did so for many. But the Bush administration has been working hard to prevent us from looking soberly at what happened in order to pursue an agenda that predates those events and to use them as an excuse to ram through this agenda. So I propose here to describe briefly two things: what I think is the meaning of September 11 in the light of previous history; and what I think is the agenda of the Bush administration. I believe September 11 brought to the forefront of our attention five realities about the United States: the limits of its military power; the depth of anti-American feeling in the rest of the world; the hangover from the economic binge of the 1990s; the contradictory pressures of American nationalism; and the frailty of our civil liberties tradition. None of these is consonant with the American dream as we have imagined it. And the policies of the Bush administration are exacerbating the contradictions.

Let us start with the military situation. The United Stateseveryone says, and correctlyis the strongest military power in the world today, and by far! Yet the fact is that a miscellaneous band of fanatic believers, with rather little money and even less military hardware, was able to launch a serious attack on the homeland of the United States, kill several thousand people, and destroy and damage major buildings in New York City and the Washington area. The attack was audacious and efficacious. It is all very well to give these people a label, that of terrorists, and then to launch a war on terrorism. But we should start by realizing that, from a military point of view, 9/11 should never have happened. One year later, the perpetrators have not been caught. And our major military response has been to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the September 11 attack.

Anti-American sentiment is nothing new. It is pervasive, and has been, ever since the United States became the world-systems hegemonic power after 1945. It is a reaction to those with great power and to the arrogance that seems almost inevitably to become natural to those who hold such power. Such anti-American sentiment is sometimes understandable, sometimes irrational and unjustified. The latter goes with the territory. When all is said and done, such sentiment did not impede the United States significantly for a long while. For one thing, it was balanced by the sentiment of significant groups of people, especially in the countries the United States considered allies, that the United States was playing a necessary role of leadership and defense of their values in the world-system. For these people, American power was legitimate because it served the needs of the world-system as a whole. Even in those parts of the world that are poor and oppressed, there was often some sense that, despite what they thought were the negatives of American power, it had a worthy side implementing some universalistic values.

September 11 demonstrated that in spite of these sentiments, the depth of anger may have been greater than the United States has ever acknowledged. To be sure, the immediate reaction of many throughout the world was to express sympathy and solidarity with the United States, but one year later that sympathy and solidarity seems to be evaporating, while those expressing the anger have not at all muted the expression of their sentiments.

The United States had seemed to do exceptionally well economically in the 1990shigh productivity, a booming stock market, low unemployment, low inflation, and a liquidation of an enormous U.S. governmental debt, creating a quite remarkable surplus. In general, Americans took this as a validation of their dream, of their leaders economic policies, and the promise of an unendingly glorious future. It is quite clear now that this was not a dream but an illusion, and a dangerous one.

September 11 was not the primary cause of the subsequent economic difficulties of the United States, although no doubt it exacerbated them. What is causing the downturn in American economic perspectives is that the prosperity of the 1990s (actually, primarily the late 1990s) was in many ways just a bubble, sustained very artificially, as all the revelations of corporate greed have made clear. In fact, however, the cause of the downturn lies deeper. The world-economy has been in a long relative economic stagnation since the 1970s. One of the things that happened in this period, as in any such period, is that the three areas with powerful economic locithe United States, Western Europe, and Japantried to shift the losses to each other. In the 1970s, Europe did relatively well. In the 1980s, Japan did well, and in the 1990s, the United States did well. But the world-economy as a whole did not do well in any of these periods. And the economic pain across the world has been stupendous. We are now in the final stage of this long downward spiral, and once the bankruptcies are rampant, the world-economy may start to turn up again. It is not all clear, or even too likely, that the United States will outshine western Europe and East Asia in the eventual upturn. A below-the-surface set of fears about this lessthan-sterling economic future is shaping American politics today.