North Atlanticism in Decline

NORTH ATLANTICISM IN DECLINE Immanuel Wallerstein L he end of nato is near. That is not the same thing as the end of the world. It will rather be one step in a gigantic restructuring of world alliances that may take thirty years to crystallize fully and whose implications for the twenty-first century are surely hard to discern in any detail. The economic roots of the restructuring are very straightforward. Since I have analyzed this elsewhere,1 let me simply summarize my views here. U.S. global hegemony, a brief phenomenon, as have been previous such hegemonies, was based on a temporary dramatic edge in the efficiencies of U.S. productive, commercial, and financial enterprises. This period is now over. Enterprises in Japan on the one hand and in Western Europe (with France and Germany at its heart) on the other are genuinely competitive with U.S.-based enterprises, and the trend is in their favor rather than against them. The continued relative decline of U.S. economic enterprises, and of the politico-military power of the U.S. state (though one should remember that the decline is slow and is, for the moment, only a relative decline), can only render more acute the competitive atmosphere. In the 1980s, when the world-economy will still be in the throes of its stagnation phase, this competition will center around the fiscal crises of the states and the attempts of the major industrial powers to export unemployment to each other. In the 1990s, when the world-economy will probably be on the upturn, the competition will center around the rate ofexpansion ofthe new growth-industries (microprocessors, biotechnology, etc.). Japan seems to be playing the same role today vis-à-vis the United States that the United States played vis-à-vis Great Britain in the late nineteenth 1. "Friends as Foes," Foreign Policy 40 (Fall 1980), pp. 119-31; and "Crisis as Transition" in Samir Amin et al., Dynamics of Global Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982). Immanuel Wallerstein is the Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and Director of the Fernand Braudel Center. His most recent book is World System AnalysL·: Theory and Methodology, co-authored with Terence K. Hopkins. He is a frequent contributor to the Monthly Review, New Left Review, and other publications. 21 22 SAIS REVIEW century. Unburdened in the short run by the level of politico-military expenditures of the old leading power, unburdened also by the high rent that economic cadres of the old leading power extract from the accumulation process, unburdened by as much existing antiquated plant (in the broadest sense of this term), Japan presents the figure of lean, aggressive, confident economic growth. To be sure, Japan lacks the immense internal resourcebase upon which the nineteenth-century United States could count. But a Sino-Japanese economic symbiosis could remedy that. Far from tweaking the nose of the United States, Japan is trying to emulate U.S. policy toward Great Britain in the late nineteenth century: Turn the old leader gently and gradually into thejunior partner. No doubt there are acute difficulties in such a project, not least of which is the cultural distance, but it is not an inherently unfeasible objective. No doubt, also,Japan eventually will have to assume a military posture consonant with such a role, but there is no rush. Remember the slow transformation of the U.S. military from 1873 to 1945. Against this Pacific Rim geopolitical alliance, whose pioneer was none other than Richard Milhous Nixon (as he more or less constantly reminds us, most recently on The New York Time's Op Ed page of February 28, 1982), Western Europe has nowhere else to turn in order to survive economically but in the direction ofa similar geopolitical alliance with the U.S.S.R. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the French signing of the gas-pipline arrangements with the U.S.S.R. precisely when French public opinion was more angrily anti-Soviet than at any other moment in recent history because of the developments in Poland. The raison d'état of Charles de Gaulle is the raison d'état...