Global State Formation:
For Whom?
Christopher Chase-Dunn
Institute for Research on World-Systems
University of California, Riverside
Outline of the Talk:
State Formation and the evolution of human institutions
What is a polity?: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states, empires
What is a state?: A “sovereign” organization with specialized institutions of
regional control
(bureaucracies and armies).
The growth of polities: rise and fall and occasional upward jumps.
Hierarchies and Networks: pulsation and rise and fall
Complex Chiefdoms, Early states, Empire formation
Expansion of the Central World-System
Semiperipheral capitalist city-states
The Rise of the West
Modern nation-states and capitalism
Waves of economic and political globalization
The rise and fall of modern hegemonic core powers: the Dutch in the 17th
century, the British in the 19th century, the U.S. in the 20th century
Reproduction of the Interstate System and the long rise of a global state
Global Governance: The Concert of Europe; The League of Nations;
The United Nations
Global Class Formation
The transnational capitalist class in the 19th and the 20th centuries
Transnationalization of workers and citizens
The Globalization Project and the formation of capitalist
transnational state
Reconfiguration of national states and international institutions for the
purposes of neoliberalism
Global Keynesianism: the Tobin Tax, etc. the World Economic Forum
Globalization from below: the World Social Forum
Waves of Globalization and Globalization Backlash
Globalization from Below vs. Anti-globalization
Anti-Systemic Transnational Movements: The Labor Movement;
The Women’s Movement; Global Indigenism; The Environmental
Movement
Semiperipheral Democratic Socialist Regimes
Sticky Wickets: Hegemonic Rivalry, Global Inequality, Ecocatastrophe
Toward Global Democracy
Rise and Fall of large powerful
polities with intermittent upsweeps
Iterative Causes of City and State
Growth
State and Market Formation
Semiperipheral Development
Semiperipheral Regions are Most Often the Sites of
Innovations in New Institutions and Technologies that lead to
Upward Mobility and/or Transform the Logic of Social
Change
Types of Semiperipheral Societies:
Semiperipheral Marcher Chiefdoms: Patrick Kirch
Semiperipheral Marcher States
Semperipheral Capitalist City States
Semiperipheral World Regions: Europe
Modern Hegemons: Dutch, British, U.S.
Rise of the Central
System
East/West Pulsations and Merger
4000
Central PGN
BCE
East Asian PGN
Time
Central PMN
Mongol Empire
East Asian PMN
2000
CE
West
East
Resistance, World Revolutions and the
Historical Development of World Orders
Waves of Colonization and Decolonization
since the 16th century
David P. Henige, Colonial Governors
Core-Wide Empire vs. Modern
Hegemony
US Hegemonic Decline
Globalization (two kinds)
• The Globalization Project (market magic as
political ideology)
• Structural Globalization (economic and political
transcontinental integration)
• Waves of Structural Globalization:
– Nineteenth Century
– Twentieth Century
Average Openness Trade Globalization
(5 year m ov ing av erag e)
0.25
Trade
Globalization
Since 1830
0.15
0.1
0.05
2
S1
86
80
968
974
1956
1962
1944
1950
1938
1926
1932
1908
1920
Year
1914
1896
1902
1884
1890
1878
1866
1872
1854
1860
1842
1848
1830
0
1836
Trade Globalization
0.2
Global Class Formation
Transnationalization
of Classes
The Global Capitalist Class
Transnationalization of workers and
peasants
Transnational Social Movements
Global Class Formation
Transnational
Segment
Big Capitalists and Political Elites
Transnational
Segment
Professionals and Managers
World
Classes
Transnational
Segment
Workers and Peasants
World Regimes and
World Revolutions
• World Regimes are hegemonic normative, legal
and economic institutions that are the outcome
of local and global struggles (geoculture)
• The World Revolutions of the 19th, 20th and 21st
centuries:
– 1848- labor, socialism, religious nationalism,
utopian communism
– 1917 soviets and state communism
– 1968 the new social movements
– ???? Deglobalization and globalization from below
Globalization from Below and Deglobalization
Counter-hegemonic transnational movements:
The Labor Movement
The Women’s Movement
Global Indigenes
The Environmental Movement
Religious Nationalism
Anarchism
Local Sustainable Development
Environmental Protest in Korea
Forming alliances:
Transnational coalitions
and world citizenship
The Semiperiphery:
(Mexico, India, Korea, Indonesia, Brazil, China)
as fertile space for transformational action
Sticky Wicket 1:
Inequality and Chaos:
Increasing Global Inequalities
Vulnerability of Complex Systems
Global Justice and Productivity of Labor
Sticky Wicket 2:
• Environmental Disaster
The Biotech Century
Global Warming
• Global Impasse: the limits of the biosphere
and the American model of development
Sticky Wicket 3:
Hegemonic Rivalry and Core Wars of the Future
On to a Democratic and
Collectively Rational Global
Commonwealth