Political Globalization and Global Party Formation
Discussion
Christopher Chase-Dunn, Rihard Niemeyer, et al. :
"The nineteenth century saw the beginning of what we shall call political globalization – the emergence and growth of an overlayer of regional and increasingly global formal organizational structures on top of the interstate system. We conceptualize political globalization analogously to our understanding of economic globalization – the relative strength and density of larger versus smaller interaction networks and organizational structures (Chase-Dunn, Kawano, and Brewer 2000). The most obvious indication of political globalization is the evolution of the uneven and halting upward trend in the transitions from the Concert of Europe to the League of Nations and the United Nations. The waves of international political integration began after the Napoleonic Wars early in the nineteenth century. Britain and the Austro-Hungarian Empire organized the "Concert of Europe" that was intended to prevent future French revolutions and Napoleonic adventures. After World War I the League of Nations emerged as a weak proto-state designed to provide collective security by preventing future "Great Wars". The failure of the United States to take up the mantle of British hegemony during the Age of Extremes, and the weakness of the League (which the US never joined) led to another round of unbelievably destructive world war. After World War II a somewhat stronger proto-world-state, the United Nations Organization, emerged and the United States stepped firmly into the role of hegemon.
The trend toward political globalization can also be seen in the emergence of the Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) and the more recent restructuring of the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade as the World Trade Organization, and the heightened visibility of other international fora (the Trilateral Commission, the Group of Seven [Eight]).
Some of the proponents of a recent stage of global capitalism contend that strong transnational capitalist firms and there political operatives working within national states have combined with existing international organizations to constitute an emerging transnational capitalist state (e.g., Robinson 2004). This version of the global state formation hypothesis claims that a rather integrated transnational capitalist class has emerged since the 1970s, and that this global class uses both international organizations and existing national state apparatuses as coordinated instruments of its rule. A related perspective holds that the US has so completely dominated the other core powers since World War II that it constitutes a world empire (Gowan 2006). These approaches probably overstate the degree of integration of class governance on a global scale.
The current reality is that both the old system of nationally competing capitalist classes and a very high degree of global integration now exist and these contend with one another to an extent that is much greater than in the past. An internationally integrated global capitalist class was also in formation in the second half of the nineteenth century, but this did not prevent the world polity from descending into the violent interimperial rivalry of the two twentieth century World Wars (Barr et al. 2006). The degree of integration of both elites and masses is undoubtedly greater in the current round of globalization, but will it be strongly integrated enough to allow for readjustments without descent into a repetition of the Age of Extremes? That is the question.
In addition to the formation of regional and global international organizations, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also saw the emergence of transnational social movements and the enlargement of what has come to be known as global civil society. These have also altered the form of global governance by providing expanded arenas in which individuals and organizations participate directly in world politics rather than through the mediating shell of national states. Specialized international and transnational non-governmental organizations (e.g., the International Postal Union) exploded in the middle of the 19th cen-tury (Murphy 1994; Mattelart 2000). Abolitionism, feminism and the labor movement became increasingly transnational in nature. Earlier local movements had also had a transnational aspect because sailors, pirates, slaves and indentured servants carried ideas and sentiments back and forth across the Atlantic (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000) but the large global consequences of these movements occurred when many mainly local developments (e.g., slave revolts) occurred synchronously.
The Black Jacobins of the Haitian revolution, by depriving Napoleonic France of important sources of food and wealth, played a role in the rise of British hegemony (Santiago-Valles 2005). These kinds of effects of resistance from below became stronger in the middle decades of the 19th century – the years around the world revolution of 1848. This is usually thought of in terms of developments in Europe, but millenarian and revolutionary ideas traveled to the New World to play a role in the "burned over district" in upstate New York, where several important new Christian sects and utopian communes emerged. And in China the huge Taiping peasant and landless rebellion was fomented by a charismatic leader who became convince that he was Jesus Christ's younger brother after reading some pamphlets supplied by a millenarian Baptist preacher from Tennessee. Non-elites were becoming transnational activists. Elites had long been involved in international and transnational activism as statesmen, churchmen, businessmen and scientists. The decreasing costs of long-distance communications and transportation were now allowing some non-elites to play a more important and direct role in world politics.
These developments ramped up during the "Age of Extremes" (Hobsbawm 1994), the first half of the twentieth century. Internationalism in the labor movement had emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. Global political parties were becoming active in world politics, especially during and after the world revolution of 1917. The Communist International (Comintern) convened large conferences of representatives from all over the globe in Moscow in the early years of the 1920s. The history and evolution of global party formation is treated in several recent works on this topic that are considering current developments at the World Social Forum (Chase-Dunn and Reese 2010; Sehm-Patomaki and Ulvila 2007). Global party formation is playing a role in deepening the participation of the peoples of the Earth in world politics, and thus in the process of global state formation.
The Comintern was abolished in 1943, though the Soviet Union continued to pose as the protagonist of the world working class until its demise in 1989. In 1938 Trotskyists organized the Fourth International to replace the Comintern, which they saw as having been captured by Stalinism. The Fourth International suffered from a series of sectarian splits and the huge communist-led rebellions that emerged during and after World War II were led by either pro-Soviet or Maoist organizations that held the Fourth International to be illegitimate. The Bandung Conference in 1954 was an important forum in which the leaders of the emerging nations explicated Third World interests. But the heady days of transnational social movements were overshadowed by the Cold War and the hegemonic Keynesian national development project. It was only after the attack on the developmental state model by Reaganism-Thatcherism and the demise of the Soviet Union that a new wave of transnational activists began to form into a global justice movement.
Ulrich Beck's (2005) effort to rethink the nature of power in a globalized world makes the claim that the power of global capitalist corporations is based mainly on the threat of the withdrawal of capital investment, and thus it does not need to be legitimated. Beck further argues that the transnational capitalist class does not need to form political parties, because its power is translegal and does not need legitimation. While this may be true to some extent, it is still the case that one may discern an evolution of political ideology that is promulgated by the lords of capital and the states that represent them. The Keynesian national development project that was the hegemonic ideology of the West from World War II to the 1970s was replaced by neoliberalism, a rather different set of claims and policies. William Carroll (2007) traces the history of liberalism and neoliberalism as it emerges from the eighteenth century, takes hiding in monastery-like think tanks during the heyday of Keynesianism, and then reemerges as Reaganism-Thatcherism in the 1970s and 1980s. The further evolution can be seen in the rise of the neoconservatives in the 1990s, and concerns for dealing with those pockets of poverty that seem impervious to market magic in the writings of such neoliberals as Jeffrey Sachs (2005). Stephen Gill's (2000) suggestive discussion of "the post-modern prince" – a left global political party emerging out of the global justice movement, also proposes an analysis of corporate media, think-tanks, and institutions such as the World Economic Forum as participants in a process of global political contestation. Necessary or not, the transnational capitalist class and its organic intellectuals engage in efforts to legitimate its own power, and this can be seen to interact with popular forces. Thus did the advertised concerns of the World Economic Forum shifted considerably after the rise of the World Social Forum.
It is likely that the US will be "the last of the hegemons" (Taylor 1986). New economic challengers are emerging, but the role of political hegemon played by a single national state is likely to be played within a much stronger context of multilateral global governance. Some see the Peoples' Republic of China as a potential future hegemon. There is little doubt that the PRC will play an important economic and political role in future global governance despite its daunting environmental problems and extreme dependence on the bubble economy of the US dollar.
The European Union process itself only creates a larger core state that can contend with the United States, and as such it does not change the logic of the interstate system and global governance by hegemony. But the example of the emergence of a multinational state apparatus out of a process of peaceful politics, rather than as a result of conquest, holds important lessons, both positive and negative, for the larger process of global state formation. It shows it can be done.
The revised iteration model presented above both explains upsweeps of the past and continues to be relevant for understanding the present and the future. The multiple local and regional and largely disconnected human interaction networks have become strongly linked into a single global system. The treadmill of population growth has been stopped in the core countries, and it appears to be slowing in the non-core. The global human population is predicted to peak and to stabilize in the decades surrounding 2075 at somewhere between eight and twelve billion. Thus population pressure will be a major challenge in the decades of the twenty-first century. The exit option is mainly blocked off and a condition of global circumscription exists. Malthusian corrections are not a thing of the past, as illustrated by continuing warfare and genocide. Famine has been brought under control, but future shortages of clean water, good soil, non-renewable energy sources, and food might bring that old horseman back. Huge global inequalities complicate the collective action problem. First world people have come to feel entitled, and non-core people want to have their own cars, large houses and electronic geegaws. The ideas of human rights and democracy are still contested, but they have become so widely accepted that existing institutions of global governance are illegitimate even by their own standards. The demand for global democracy and human rights can only be met by reforming or replacing the existing institutions of global governance with institutions that have some plausible claim to represent the will and interests of the majority of the world's people. That means global state formation, although most of the contemporary protagonists of global democracy do not like to say it that way.
There is nothing inevitable about global state formation, especially within the next several decades. But the continuing decline of US hegemony and the issue of hegemonic transition put the problem in the middle of the table of world politics. A United States of Earth will be needed to deal with the social, political, economic and environmental problems that our species has produced for itself. The question is whether that upward sweep will occur soon and relatively painlessly or after a long period of Malthusian correction similar to what happened in the first half of the twentieth century."