Global Governance As Response To Revolts From Below

Discussion

Christopher Chase-Dunn:

"The sequence of hegemonies can be understood as the evolution of global governance in the modern system. The interstate system as institutionalized at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 is still a fundamental institutional structure of the polity of the modern system. The system of theoretically sovereign states was expanded to include the peripheral regions in two large waves of decolonization (see Fig. 1), eventually resulting in a situation in which the whole modern system became composed of sovereign national states. East Asia was incorporated into this system in the nineteenth century, though aspects of the earlier East Asian tribute-trade state system were not completely obliterated by that incorporation (Hamashita 2003). Each of the hegemonies was larger as a proportion of the whole system than the earlier one had been. And each hegemony developed the institutions of economic and political-military control by which it led the larger system so that capitalism increasingly deepened its penetration of all the areas of the Earth. After the Napoleonic Wars, in which Britain finally defeated its main competitor for system-wide hegemony, France, global political institutions began to emerge over the tops of the Westphalian international system of national states. The first proto-world-government was the Concert of Europe, a fragile flower that wilted when its main proponents, Britain and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, disagreed about how to handle the world revolution of 1848. The Concert was followed by the League of Nations and then by the United Nations and the Bretton Woods international financial institutions (The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and eventually the World Trade Organization). The political globalization evident in this trajectory of global governance evolved because the powers were in heavy contention with one another for geopolitical predominance and for economic resources, but also because resistance emerged within the polities of the core and in the regions of the non-core. The series of hegemonies, waves of colonial expansion and decolonization and the emergence of a proto-world-state occurred as the global elites struggled with one another with resistance from below.

The waves of decolonization were accompanied by slave revolts, the rise of the labor movement, the extension of citizenship to men of no property, the women's movement and other associated rebellions and social movements. These movements affected the evolution of global governance in part because the rebellions often clustered together in time, forming what have been called ‘world revolutions’ (Arrighi et al. 1989). The Protestant Reformation in Europe was an early instance that played a huge role in the rise of the Dutch hegemony. The French Revolution of 1789 was linked in time with the American and Haitian revolts. The 1848 rebellion in Europe was both synchronous with the Taiping Rebellion in China and was linked with it by the diffusion of ideas, as it was also linked with the emergent Christian Sects in the United States. Nineteen seventeen was the year of the Bolsheviks in Russia, but also the same decade saw the Chinese Nationalist revolt, the Mexican Revolution, the Arab Revolt and the General Strike in Seattle led by the Industrial Workers of the World in the United States. Nineteen sixty-eight was a revolt of students in the U.S., Europe, Latin America as well as Red Guards in China. Nineteen eighty-nine was mainly in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but important lessons about the value of civil rights beyond justification for capitalist democracy were learned by an emergent global civil society (Kaldor 2003). The current world revolution of ‘20xx’ (Chase-Dunn and Niemeyer 2009) will be discussed as a contemporary instance of global struggle. The big idea here is that the evolution of capitalism and of global governance is importantly a response to resistance and rebellions from below. This has been true in the past and is likely to continue to be true in the future. Boswell and Chase-Dunn (2000) contend that capitalism and socialism have dialectically interacted with one another in a positive feedback loop similar to a spiral. Labor and socialist movements were obviously a reaction to capitalist industrialization. U.S. hegemony and the post-World War II global institutions were importantly spurred on by the World Revolution of 1917 and the waves of decolonization."

(http://www.sociostudies.org/books/files/globalistics_and_globalization_studies_2/036-055.pdf)