The+Modern+World+System


 * =Title= || "The Modern World-System" (excerpted from "Theoretical Reprise" in //The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century//, New York: Academic Press, pp. 229-233) ||
 * =Author= || Immanuel Wallerstein ||
 * =Date= || 1974 (in Lemert 2010) ||
 * =Summary By= || Caroline Chumo ||
 * =Summary= || This is an excerpt from Wallerstein's well-known thesis that international relations is characterized by a system of capitalist economic relations between the center and the periphery. Developed starting in the 1970s through the 1980s, the theory came in opposition to modernization theory and the idea of ever-progressing world economic development.

Wallerstein's world-systems are self-contained, have divisions of labor, and are made up a multiple sub-systems, or cultures. Unlike world-empires, in which a single political system pervades, world-economies revolve around a dominant economic system. Capitalism is a world economic system that endures because it accommodates multiple political structures. While it is impossible for an enduring political system to dominate the entire world, it is entirely possible for an economic system such as capitalism to do so.

The fact that there is a division of labor highlights the distinction of the "core" and the "periphery." The core are those states that stand to gain the most from economic interchanges, while the periphery gains the least. The "semi-periphery" gains marginally and plays and economic and political middle road between the core and periphery. Somehow, the system is set so that the core adds the most value to the systems of production and gains the most rewards.

Given this economic system, a political system will build up around it as a function of class and geography and conflict (402). The process of developing the political system varies:

"From the stand point of the world-system as a whole, if there is to be a multitude of political entities (that is, if the system is not a world-empire), then it cannot be the case that all these entities be equally strong" (403).

Thus, it follows that states in the core are stronger than peripheral states. The patterns of political change takes place across countries is a result of the "pushes and pulls" of the ruling elite as capitalists and the aristocracy compete to avoid bearing the costs of the state, while also upholding each other. || = = = = = = = = = = = =
 * =Discussion points= || Wallerstein claims that "the mark of the modern world is the imagination of its profiteers and the counter-assertiveness of the oppressed" (405), yet in the excerpt he emphasizes the role of the elite only. At what levels and within which processes of the world system of international relations does the "imagination" of the economic elite and "counter-assertiveness" manifest itself? ||

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