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10. IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN: “Recognize the structural crisis of the world-system”
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◆ ◆ ◆ 169 10 “Recognize the structural crisis of the world-system” IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN in conversation with Kevan Harris Immanuel Wallerstein served as distinguished professor of sociology at Binghamton University until his retirement in 1999 and as head of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilization at Binghamton University until 2005. In a conversation that revisits and expands upon ideas that he has worked on throughout his career, Immanuel Wallerstein reflects on a world-system in crisis. He explains the origins and current applications of his seminal notion of a world-systems analysis and applies it to the current geopolitical landscape. He argues that U.S. hegemony is indeed in decline, and much more visibly so today than in past decades, but that this decline should not be thought of as precipitous, nor should the United States be thought of as no longer a leading world power. On the other hand, the fate of the United States is directly tied to the continuing financial crisis, and Wallerstein cautions that we cannot simply return to the status quo, as politicians in the United States and elsewhere continue to suggest. He also highlights the importance of movements from Occupy to the Arab Spring in speaking to cogent Photo courtesy of Immanuel Wallerstein. 170 ◆ ◆ ◆ Understand the Global Balance of Power problems and placing social issues on the public agenda, but he cautions that all such spontaneous movements face the threat of burning out without having lasting effects or of being co-opted. In a worldsystem facing a structural crisis, he argues that what is needed are new tactics and strategies to face up to an unpredictable and unprecedented situation. But he also argues for pragmatism in action, whereby people ’s immediate needs are met and suffering alleviated, without losing sight of medium- and long-term goals for social, political, and economic transformation. KH: For over three decades you have been on record as predicting the relative decline of the hegemonic power of the United States. This prediction followed from the theoretical conclusions you drew out of world-systems analysis, which reframes international relations over the long-term historical development of the capitalist world-economy. The reception of your prediction, in the media as well as by other scholars, has gone through its own rise and decline since the 1970s. But ever since the 2008 world financial crisis, talk of U.S. decline has gone mainstream. Can I ask, therefore, how one knows decline and crisis when one sees them? IW: Hegemony is a concept that has to be followed historically. I define it this way: you get your way 95 percent of the time on 95 percent of the issues. That’s being hegemonic. Whatever the language, whatever the official version of this, the reality is that you can do that. The United States, in this sense, was hegemonic more or less from 1945 to the end of the 1960s. It got its way all the time. I define hegemony as a kind of quasi-monopoly on geopolitical power, and like all quasi-monopolies, it exhausts itself for various reasons. And when it begins to decline, it doesn’t go from all to nothing. The hegemonic power fights back and tries to maintain itself, so you go through a period where there’s a relative decline; that is to say, it’s no longer true that it gets its way 95 percent of the time on 95 percent of the issues, but it gets its way on a lot of issues by making various kinds of compromises, by operating in various ways to slow down the decline. [34.234.83.135] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:55 GMT) Immanuel Wallerstein ◆ ◆ ◆ 171 I see this having largely occurred in the case of the United States more or less between the early 1970s and the year 2000. It was a decline, but it wasn’t a disastrous decline. And then along came George W. Bush, who tried to reverse the decline, but what he did was counterproductive and led to what I call a precipitate decline, so that by 2010, let’s say, it’s no longer true that the United States can get its way most of the time. How do we know that? Well, we know that because other countries are beginning to act directly counter to the way the United States wishes them to act, and the United States is simply unable to do anything significant about...