Globalizaticn. Imperialism and the Capitalist World System

Callinicos, Alex. 2007. „Globalization, Imperialism and the Capitalist World
System“. In Globalization Theory: Approaches and Controversies,
herausgegeben von David Held und Anthony G. McGrew, 62–78. Global
transformations v. 4. Cambridge: Polity.
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Globalizaticn. Imperialism and the
Capitalist World System
Alex Calllnicos
Globalization: Transhistorical Process or Imperial Project?
The theme of globalization has already migrated from commentary on contemporary
trends into more academic literatures. In the course of doing so, the tendency to treat it
as a long-term historical process rather than a more immediate feature of the world at the
end of the twentieth century has become more pronounced. Thus historians have sought
to detach globalization from its original association with the progressive integrationof
the modern world economy and to trace the different forms in which human interactions
have over the centuries transcended political boundaries, civilizations, and even continents,' Often these efforts have also aimed at decentring world history: C. A. Bayly, for
example, has explored the theme of 'archaie globalization', by which he means the interregional and intercontinental impacts of the agrarian empires - Qing China, Mughal
India, Togukawa Japan, Java, and the Ottoman, Romanov and Habsburg empires - that
dominated much of the early modern world (Bayly, 2002 and 2004, eh. 1).
Such research is an instructive example of how present preoccupations may allow us to
re-examine the past from a new, and often illuminating perspective. But the present also
powerfully pulls us away from the idea of globalization as a transhistorical process. The
specific geopolitical context in which globalization has come so to dominate both schol,arly and more ephemeral discourse - the era since the Cold War drew to a close at the end
of the 1980s - has provided a powerful impulse to conceive globalization, not as a secular
tendency, but as a highly specific political and economic project represented notably by
the neo-liberal policies of the Washington Consensus - deregulation, privatization, monetary and fiscal stability, etc. - and informed by the drive to maintain and even extend the
position of the United States as the dominant global power. Already under the Clinton
administration Peter Gowan developed a compelling interpretation of '[t]he American
post-Cold War global project' as 'a search for new ways of brigading states under
American leadership and of anchoring American economic ascendancy', including 'globalization: this involves the opening of a state's political economy to the entry of products,
companies, financial flows and financial operators from the core countries, making state
policy dependent upon developments and decisions taken in Washington, New York, and
other main capitalistcentres' (Gowan, 1999, pp. vii-viii).
The experience of the administration of George W. Bush, whose leading figures made
no bones about their aim of entrenching US global primacy and their disdain for the constraints imposed by international institutions and coalition-building, has greatly reinforced the widespread perception of globalization as a technique of American imperial
Globalization, Imperialism and Capitalism
63
rule.? Such vie~s are not confined merely to the left of the political spectrum. Niall
Ferguson, an energetic Tory economic historian, has now devoted two books to the theme
of what he calls 'Anglobalization'. The first celebrates the British Empire as 'an agency
for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively uncorrupt
government on roughly a quarter of the globe' (Ferguson, 2004a, p. xxi). The second reiterates the case for 'liberal empire' (which Ferguson describes as 'the politicalcounterpart
to economic globalization'), namely that the 'only hope' for the 'failed states' of the world
'would seem to be intervention by a foreign power capable of constructing the basic institutional foundations that are indispensable for economic development' (Ferguson 2004b,
p. 183). Ferguson considers the United States to be the only candidate for resuming the
burden once borne by Britain of 'imperial globalization', even though he has doubts
whether American political culture has the resources necessary to sustain such a role
(Ferguson, 2004b, p. 193).3
Ferguson's 'case for liberal empire' depends on the major premise that 'economic openness - free trade, free labour movement and free capitalflows - helps growth' and the
minor one that such openness does not develop automatically but depends on the military and financial power of an imperial state (Ferguson, 2004b, pp. 183-4; see also
Ferguson, 2004a, pp, xviii-xxiv), But, of course, many deny the major premise. Mike
Davis, for example, has written a masterly historical study of the role played by the liberal
imperialism steered from Whitehall and the City of London in producing the terrible
famines that affiicted India, China and Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century (Davis,
2001). Nor is this merely of historical interest. The widespread perception that contemporary neoliberal economic policies have increased global poverty and injustice and accelerated the processes of environmental destruction has been the main motivation behind
the emergence of a new movement against the contemporary forms of globalization at
the very end of the twentieth century,"
Thosewho share this critique of neoliberalism are likely to view globalization as a less
benign imperial project than that portrayed by Ferguson. Thus James Petras and Henry
Veltmeyer argue that we must conceptualize globalization 'not in structural terms but as
the outcome of a consciously pursued strategy, the political project of a transnational
capitalist dass, and formed on the basis of an institutional structure set up to serve and
advance the interests of this dass' (Petras and Veltmeyer, 2001, p. 11). The term 'globalization' should, they contend, be seen 'as an ideological tool used for prescription rather
than accurate description. In this context it can be counterposed with a term that has
considerably greater descriptive value and explanatory power: imperialism' (Petras and
Veltmeyer, 2001, p. 12). The analytical virtues of the two concepts are indicated by what
they respectively stress:
The concept of globalization argues for the interdependence of nations, the shared nature of
their economies, the mutuality of their interests, and the shared benefits of their exchanges.
Imperialism, in contrast, emphasizes the domination and exploitation by imperial states and
multinational corporations and banks of less-deve1oped states and labouring c1asses. (Petras
and Veltmeyer, 2001, pp. 29-30)
The course taken by world history since 11 September 2001 certainly confirms that
any analytical framework that fails to find a proper place for conflict, domination and
Alex Callinicos
Globalization, Imperialism and Capitalism
imperialism is of little use either intellectually or morally. Nevertheless, Petras's and
Veltmeyer's suggestion that we effective1y equate globalization and imperialism - or, more
accurate1y, treat the former as an ideological construct that serves to mask the contemporary forms taken by the latter, while in many ways tempting, is unnecessarily restrietive. Two considerations serve to indicate why. First, Petras and Veltmeyer tend, in
presenting globalization as an imperial project, to conceive it as 'intentional and contingent, subject to the control of individuals who represent and seek to advance the interests
of a new international capitalist class':
of a subordinated society by an imperial society' (Doyle, 1986, p. 30). This broad definition is intended to be of transhistorical scope. What brings together globalization and
imperialism in the modern context is a third term - capitalism. My understanding of this
concept derives from Marx's critical analysis of the capitalist mode of production in
Capital - that is, of an economic system constituted by two fundamental features, the
exploitation of wage labour by capital and the competitive accumulation of capital. In
other words, under the capitalist mode, on the one hand, the immediate producers are
denied direct access to the means of production and thereby compelled to sell their
labour-power to the capitalists who do control these means on terms that lead to the
workers' exploitation, and, on the other, the competitive interaction of rival capitals leads
to the reinvestment of a large share of the profits that are fruits of this exploitation in the
further development of the productive forces.?
From a Marxist perspective, the lens through which to view globalization is that of the
historical development of capitalism as a world system. Immanuel Wallerstein offers a
classic definition of the 'European world economy' that began to take shape in the late
fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries:
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A survey of major events, world trade treaties and regional integration themes is enough to
dispel any explanation based on technological determinism: it is the policy-makers of the
imperial states who establish the framework for global exchanges. Within that shell, the major
transactions and organizational forms of capital movements, supported by international
financial institutions, whose personnel are appointed by the imperial states. (Petras and
Veltmeyer, 2001, pp. 12,30)
As in the case even of Gowan's more analytically sophisticated and empirically grounded
interpretation, this view of globalization as 'a consciously pursued strategy' can easily
lend itself to a conspiratorial view of world events. Now, as the manoeuvres of the neoconservative wing of the administration of the younger Bush shows, conspiracies certainly do take place. But the conquest and occupation of lraq amply demonstrate
that conspiracies are liable go astray amid a concatenation of unforeseen consequences.
To return to the case of globalization, the opening and integration of markets over
the past generation undoubtedly has been made possible by the political interventions
of networks of actors centred on what has come to be known as 'the Wall
Street-Treasury-IMF Complex'. 5 Recognizing this is a crucial corrective to the commonplace view of globalization as an irresistible force of nature. But to reduce globalization to these interventions is sure1y to exaggerate the capabilities of undeniably
, powerful actors who are nevertheless dependent on structural conditions beyond their
control or even understanding. This leads us to the second reason for refusing straightforwardly to equate globalization and imperialism, namely that this equation closes off
any exploration of the ways in which long-term economic processes may facilitate or
impede imperial projects. The rest of this chapter is, among other things, an attempt to
show why such exploration may be of some he1pin understanding imperialism in its contemporary forms.
Capitalism and la langue duree
Before proceeding, however, some definitions are essential. 'Globalization' is understood
here primarily as an economic process, increasing cross-border integration of production
and markets. In adopting this definition, I do not intend to deny either the existence or
the significance of the processes commonly described as political and cultural globalization: but, for my purposes here, economic globalization is what counts.'' Michael Doyle
succinctly defines empire or imperialism as 'effective control, whether formal or informal,
65
It was a kind of world system the world has not really known before and which is the distinctive feature of the modern world system. It is an economic, but not a political entity,
unlike empires, cities, and nation-states, In fact, it precisely encompasses within its bounds (it
is hard to talk of boundaries) empires, city-states and the emerging 'nation-stätes'. It is a
'world' system, not-because it encompasses the entire world, but because it is larger than any
juridically defined politicalunit. And it is a 'world economy' because the basic linkage
between the parts of the system is economic, although this was reinforced to some extent by
cultural links and eventually ... by political arrangements and even confederal structures.
(Wallerstein, 1974, p. 15)
Despite the serious analytical weaknesses of Wallerstein's understanding of capitalism (to
which I return below), he is quite right to underline the historical novelty of the modern
capitalist world system. Various scholars have argued that this system was preceded by
earlier world economies in which Asian societies played the dominant role. Janet AbuLughod, for example, has written a distinguished study of what she calls 'the ThirteenthCentury World System' - the circuits of trade and investment that between AD 1250 and
1350 bound together merchants and producers of luxury and manufacturing goods in a
vast zone stretching from France to China, in which western Europe was a backward 'subsystem' peripheral to more advanced Asian civilizations (Abu-Lughod, 1989). One of the
conclusions that Abu-Lughod draws is the error of portraying the subsequent 'rise of the
West' as inevitable. This is certainly right: other historians have gathered powerful evidence that Europe and North America succeeded in economically outdistancing China,
Japan and India only comparatively recently and for highly contingent reasons (see, for
example, Pomeranz, 2000).8
It is, however, one thing to resist Eurocentrism, another to assert the existence of premodern world economies whose linkages were as powerful as those of the modern capitalist system. An important question to be addressed in assessing the latter claim is
whether the economic exchanges that bound together the great civilizations of medieval
Eurasia had an intensity comparable to those that came to prevail with the irruption of
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Alex Callinicos
modern capitalism. Robert Brenner offers one way of giving this question more precision.
He argues that 'modern economic growth', that is, 'the presence in the economy of a systematic and continuous tendency or drive to transform production in the direction of
greater efficiency', presupposes that economic actors, whether (in Marxist terms)
exploiters or direct producers, are dependent on the market for their reproduction:
It is only where the organizers of production and the directproducers (sometimes the same
person) have been separated from direct access to the means of subsistence, that they must
buy on the market the tools and means of subsistence they need to reproduce themselves. It
is only where the producers must buy on the market their means of reproduction, that they
must be able to seIl competitively on the market, i.e. at the socially necessary rate. It is only
in the presence of the necessity of competitive production - and the correlative absence of
the possibility of cutting costs, or otherwise raising income, by forcefully squeezing the
direct producers - that we can expect the systematic and continual pressure t~ increase
efficiency of production which is the sine qua non of modern economic growth. (Brenner,
1986, pp. 24, 33)
Undoubtedly relatively large numbers of economic actors in Abu-Lughod's
'Thirteenth-Century World System' were market-dependent in the relevant respects. It is
nevertheless open to question how deep these relationships went into the societies bound
together by medieval trade circuits. Thus, to take a slightly later case, in Mughal India
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, undeniably an advanced civilization by
the standards of the early modern world, in which local and international trade was comparatively developed, the dominant econornic relationship was the extraction of tribute
by the state from peasant smallholders - precisely the kind of forcible surplus-appropriation that Brenner argues gave pre-capitalist exploiting cIasses no incentive to promote
greater econornic efficiency (Habib, 1999; compare Brenner, 1986, pp. 27-32). Moving in
the opposite direction chronologically, Chris Wiekham sees the 'Roman world system'
that economieally bound together the Mediterranean in a web of exchanges during late
antiquity as unified by the same kind of tributary relationship - more specifically, 'the
fiscal spine' underpinning the flows of tax revenues and commodities to the imperial capitals of Rome and Constantinople: when this spine broke, in the fifth and sixth centuries
AD in the West, and in the seventh century in the East, the Mediterranean world
system fragmented, with many regions experiencing a decline in economie complexity.
Consequently, as Wiekham writes of the Byzantine empire, the state acted as 'a structuring device for all exchange activity, incIuding commerce' (Wiekham, 2005, eh, I I,
quotation from p. 790). Held, McGrew and their collaborators suggest that pre-modern
economic exchanges are best seen as a case of what they call 'thin globalization', characterizedby 'high extensity, low intensity, low velocity, low impact' (Held, McGrew et aL,
1999, p. 25; see also pp. 22, 416). The qualitatively greater intensity and impact of
modern globalization followed the incorporation of the great civilizations of Asia into
the capitalist world system, with the catastrophic human consequences documented by
Davis, as spreading market-dependence and Western colonial bureaucracies undermined
the mechanisms for coping with dearth put in place by the pre-colonial tributary states
and increased peasant producers' vulnerability to the fluctuations of weather systems
and the global economy (Davis, 2001).
Globalization, Imperialism and Capitalism
67
Giovanni Arrighi and his collaborators have developed the most compelling attempt to
dep~oy. the concept of the capitalist world system in a historieally iIIuminating fashion.?
Arnghl.argues that history of this system is best understood as a succession of overlapping
'systemic cycles of accumulation', each characterized by 'the leadership of communities
and blocs of governmental and business agencies' that promote specific 'strategies and
structures' constituting a distinct 'regime of accumulation on a world scale' (Arrighi, 1994,
p. 9). There have been four such cycles to date, each associated with the hegemony of a partieular state - Genoa (I 340s to c.1630), the Netherlands (c.I560 to 1780s), Britain (c.I 740
to the 1930s), the United States (1870s to ?). Each systemic cycle has a universal form that
Arrighi uses Marx's general formula of capital, M-C-M' (the investment of money in the
production of commodities that are then, thanks to the extraction of surplus-value in production, sold for a larger sum of money than that initially invested), to characterize:
The central aspect of this pattern is the alternation of epochs of material expansion (MC
phases of capital accumulation) with phases of financial rebirth and expansion (CM' phases).
In phases of material expansion money capital 'sets in motion' an increased mass of commodities (including commoditized labour power and gifts of nature); and in phases of financial expansion ~n increasing mass of money capital 'sets itself free' from its commodity form,
and accumulation proceeds through financial deals (as in Marx's abridged formula MM').
Together, the two epochs or phases constitute a full systemic cycle0/ accumulation. (Arrighi,
1994,p.6)
Within this framework, periods of financial speculation are 'a recurrent phenomenon'
marking 'the transition from one regime of accumulation on a world scale to another'
the decline of one hegemonie power and its regime and the ascent of their successors
(Arrighi, 1994, pp. ix-x). Financial expansions replace material (or trade) expansions
because t.he rate.of profit on the production and sale of commodities inevitably falls,
encouragmg the mvestment of surplus money capital in speculation in financial markets.
Each financial expansion begins and ends with a crisis of the dominant regime of accumulation, the first a 'signal crisis' announcing the beginning of a new cycIe, the second
the 'terminal crisis' marking the end of the old cycle. The US regime of accumulation
experienced its signal crisis around 1970 (Arrighi, 1994, pp. 215-16). Arrighi now argues
that the fatally misjudged invasion of Iraq in 2003 marked the beginning of the terminal
crisis of this regime (Arrighi, 2005a and 2005b).
Arrighi and his collaborators have used this theory of systemic cycles of accumulation
to develop some extremely rich analyses of specific conjunctures and patterns of development (for example, Arrighi, 1994, ch. 4, on 'The Long Twentieth Century'). Nevertheless,
it is vulnerable to two criticisms applicable to all versions of world systems theory. The first
was developed by Brenner in a cIassie essay (1977). He critieizes what he calls 'NeoSmithian Marxism', whieh he associates not merely with Wallerstein but also with dependency theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank (for example, Frank, 1971). These theorists
share the assumption, first stated by Adam Smith, that all that is required for a distinctively capitalist economic dynamic (involving the intensive development of the productive
forces) to develop is the formation of agIobaI market involving an international division
of labour. One implication of this assumption is that what Brenner caIls social propertyrelations (Marx's relations of production, i.e, relations of effective control over the
o
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Alex Callinicos
Globalization, Imperialism and Capitalism
productive forces) play only a secondary role in supporting this dynamie. Thus, for
Wallerstein, the 'second serfdom' east of the EIbe and the slave plantations of the
Caribbean - both forms of coerced labour producing for the world market - were simply
'modes of labour control' performing the same function in the 'periphery' as did wagelabour in the 'core' (Wallerstein, 1974, eh. 2).
It should be easy enough to see why Brenner should object to this conceptualization,
given his argument cited earlier. Where exploitation is based on what Marx called 'extraeconomie coercion', as it is in the case of slavery and serfdom, neither exploiters nor direct
producers have an incentive to develop the productive forces, since they can gain access
to the means of subsistence without having to go onto the market. Things change when
both classes are dependent on the market. Capitalists have to compete to reproduce
themselves and hence have an interest in reducing their costs of production (and therefore the priee of their products) through productivity-enhancing investments. But, even
more important, it is only where the immediate producers themselves have no direct access
to the means of subsistence - as is, above all, true of wage-labourers who have no control
of the means of production - that they can be induced to cooperate in increasing productivity through a combination of market-based sanctions (ultimately, unemployment)
and rewards (for example, higher wages for improved productivity). Hence the distinctive
dynamic of 'modern economie growth' can only be sustained once, not merely the world
economy, but capitalist property relations - and in particular the relationship between
capital and wage-labour - have been fully constituted. Brenner accordingly argues that
the decisive breakthrough came with the emergence of capitalist agrieulture in early
modern England: without the increases in food output that this made possible the factory
labourers of the Industrial Revolution could not have been fed.'?
The charge against world systems theory is, then, that,in reducing property (or
production) relations to mere 'modes of labour control', it fails fully to grasp the historical specificity of the capitalist world system, and in particular the way in whieh the
market-dependence of exploiters and producers subjectsthem to the imperative of competitive accumulation. This helps to explain the tendency of this school to project world
economies far back into the historieal past - a tendency most fully realized by Frank, for
whom world systems have existed for 5,000 years (for example, Frank, 1998). This is surely
to stretch the concept of the capitalist world economy so far as to render it meaningless.
The second major critieism explicitly thematizes this transhistorical quality of world
systems theory: in portraying global history as the rise and fall of hegemonie powers
world systems theory tends to efface the differences between distinct phases in the evolution of the state system and impose a rigid pattern on contemporary history that is in fact
absent. 11 One of the attractions of Arrighi's version of world systems theory is its
sensitivity to the historieal differences between the successive hegemonies it distinguishes
(for example, Arrighi, Silver et al., 1999, eh. 2). Nevertheless, his commitment to the idea
of cycles of systemie accumulation does confront hirn with difficulties when he considers
the future of capitalism. Arrighi argues that American capitalism is on the way toa
terminal crisis while a new regime of accumulation took shape in East Asia:
unclear. But the displacement of an 'old' region (North America) by a 'new' region (East
Asia) as the most dynamic centre of the pracesses of capital accumulation on a world scale
is alreadya reality. (Arrighi, 1994, p. 332)
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Whetherwe are about to witness a changeof guard at the commanding heights of the capitalist world economy and the beginning of a new stage of capitalist development is still
Initially Arrighi identified Japan as the driving force of this new 'dynamie centre': 'the
Japanese multilayered subcontracting system has developed dynamieally and expanded
trans-nationally in a close symbiotie relation with the ascendant and highly competitive
supply of labour of the East and Southeast Asian region' (Arrighi, 1994, p. 244: see also
ibid., pp. 347-51). The obvious problem with this analysis is that in the 1990s Japanese
capitalism sank into a protracted deflationary crisis while the US economy, supposedly
on the way out, experienced an equally prolonged boom (Brenner, 1998 and 2002).
Meanwhile, of course, the emergence of China as a major centre of capital accumulation
has become one of the most salient facts of global politieal economy (Hore, 2004; Harvey,
2005, ch.5; Harman, 2006). In more recent versions of Arrighi's argument, the focus
accordingly shifts away from Japan to 'the revitalization of the overseas Chinese business
diaspora' (Arrighi, Silver et al., p. 149;see also ibid., eh. 4, and Arrighi, 2005b). As always,
Arrighi has much of interest to say about the distinctive characteristies of East Asian capitalism, but the fact that his argument has to be reframed in this manner suggests a certain
looseness of fit between his cyclical theory and the historieal evidence - an impression
that is reinforced when he seeks to explain away the Japanese crisis as a sign of strength
rather than weakness (Arrighi, Silver et al., 1999, pp. 95-6).12
Arrighi hirnself identifies a further anomaly: 'Whereas previous transitions resulted in
a greater fusion of world financial and military power under the jurisdiction of the rising
hegemon than had been realized by the declining hegemon, the present transition has
resulted in a fission under different jurisdietions of the two sources of world power'
(Arrighi, Silver et al., p. 95). The following assessment of 'the peculiar configurationof
world power that has emerged at the end of the US systemic cycle of accumulation' was
written in the early 1990s, but it is as true of the presidency of the younger Bush as it was
of the era of Reagan and Bush pere:
On the one hand, the United Statesretainsa near-monopoly of the legitimate useof violence
on a worldscale... But its financial indebtedness is such that it can continue to do so only
with the consentof the organizations that contral worldliquidity. On the other hand, Japan
and lesser 'islands' of the East Asia capitalist archipelago have gained a near-monopoly of
worldliquidity ... But their militarydefencelessness is such that they can continueto exereisethe near-monopoly onlywiththe consentof the organizations that contraI the legitimate
use of violence on a worldscale. (Arrighi, 1994, pp. 352-3)
This 'bifurcation of military and financial power' (Arrighi, Silver et al., 1999, p. 96) is
indeed one of the main features of contemporary global polities. But the fact that it marks
an important deviation from the pattern that Arrighi claims to have discovered in earlier
systemie cycles of accumulation suggests that this cyclical theory is too confining. The
very rich concrete analyses that Arrighi and his collaborators have developed could be
accommodated within a more roomy conceptual framework, one provided by the Marxist
theory of imperialism.
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Alex Callinicos
Globalization, Imperialism and Capitalism
Imperialism, its Phases and Future
partnerships with their states in order to advance their global interests (Harman, 1991).
As Arrighi puts it, 'the fusion of the territorialist and capitalist logics of power had gone
so far among the three main contenders (Britain, Germany, and the United States) for
world supremacy that is difficult to say whieh were the capitalist rulers and whieh were
the territorialist' (Arrighi, 1994, p. 59).
Another way of thinking about these changes would be to say that competition among
capitals now takes two forms - economic struggles for markets, investment sites, and
resources, and military and diplomatic conflicts between states. It is important to understand this claim in a non-reductionist way: in other words, the thought is not that, with
the advent of imperialism, states become instruments of capitalist firms. David Harvey
puts it well when he calls 'capitalist imperialism' the 'contradictory fusion' of Arrighi's
capitalist and territorialist logies:
From a Marxist perspective, imperialism is what happens when two forms of competition - the economic struggle among capitals and geopolitical rivalries between states fuse. Arrighi has drawn an analogous distinction between
'eapitalism' and 'territorialism' as opposite modes of rule or logies of power. Territorialist
rulers identify power with the extent and populousness of their domains and eoneeive of
wealth/eapital as a means or a by-produetof the pursuit of territorial expansion. Capitalist
rulers,in eontrast, identifypowerwiththe extent of their eommand overseareeresourees and
eonsiderterritorial aequisitions as a means and a by-produetof the aeeumulationof eapital.
(Arrighi, 1994, p. 33)
As a first approximation, these two logics of power can be seen as having their origins in
different modes of production. Marx argues that the 'laws of motion' of capitalism - the
tendencies distinctive to this mode of production, in partieular, capital accumulation and
its consequences (greater economie concentration and recurrent crises of overproduction)
- become operative by virtue of the competitive struggle among rival capitals. Brenner
has suggested that, in pre-capitalist modes of production such as feudalism, the lords
could expand their income only by 'building up their means 0/ coercion - by investment
in military men and equipment' that would allow them to seize land and peasants from
their rivals. 'Indeed, we can say the drive to politicalaccumulation, to state-building, is the
pre-capitalist analogue to the capitalist drive to accumulate capital' (Brenner, 1986,
pp. 31, 32). In the politically fragmented conditions of late medieval Europe, politieal
accumulation provided the basic impulse behind the chronic condition of warfare, territorial expansion and political consolidation that provided the formative context of the
modern state system over five hundred years. But, as the capitalist world economy began
to take shape, economie and geopolitical competition increasingly intersected. Initially,
colonial ventures provided European rulers with resources to pursue their projects of
dynastie territorial aggrandizement. The first capitalist states, however, the United
Provinces and post-revolutionary England, enjoyed a selective advantage in these struggles thanks to their more dynamic economie bases, and thereby put the great absolute
monarchies under growing pressure to modernize, unleashing a destabilizing process of
political transformation that swept Europe into turmoil between 1789 and 1871. 13
By the beginning of the twentieth century, two decisive changes had taken place. First,
aglobai economic space had been created that was increasingly dominated by capitalism
in its mature form - the industrial capitalism that, from its initial bases in northwestern
Europe and the North American Atlantic seaboard was spreading out to unify, dominate,
and transform the world (Hobsbawm, 1975). Secondly, political and capital accumulation
were now integrated into a single process. On the one hand, the 'industrialization of war'
compelled even the great European land empires - Germany, Austria-Hungary and
Russia - to promote the development of industrial capitalism within their domains if they
were to maintain their position in the state system (McNeill, 1983, chs 6-8). On the other
hand, the internationalization of trade and investment encouraged the increasingly large
and intertwined banks and corporations now dominating industrial capitalism to build
71
The relationship between these two logies should be seen therefore as problematie and often
eontradictory(that is,dialeetieal) rather than as funetional or one-sided. This dialeetieal relationship setsthe stagefor an analysis of eapitalistimperialism in terms of the interseetionof
these two distinet but intertwined logies of power. The problem for concrete analyses of
actual situations is to keep the two sides of this dialecticsimultaneously in motion and not
to lapse into either a solely politieal or a predominantlyeconomicmode of argumentation.
(Harvey, 2003, pp. 26, 30) 14
On the basis of this methodological injunction it is possible to distinguish three phases in
the history of modern, that is to say capitalist, imperialism." The first is that of what we
might call classical imperialism (1875-1945). This is, of course, the era in which the
European powers incorporated most of the rest of the world in their formal or informal
empires. But this process of colonial expansion must be seen against the backgroundof
the more fundamental development highlighted by Arrighi: in this phase, economic and
geopolitieal competition were mutually reinforcing. By the beginning of the twentieth
century, Britain, the European state with the strongest claim to be a global power, confronted Germany and the Uni ted States as both economic and geopolitical challengers:
both countries had built up highly competitive manufacturing industries that broke
Britain's position as the Workshop of the World, but both were also developing navies
that threatened the key form of military power through which London knitted together
its dispersed possessions and dependencies. Similarly, control over economic resources
played a decisive military role in the two world wars that were the consequence of this
triadic conflict: the importance of access to oil in shaping German and Japanese strategies during the Second World War is merely the most obvious illustration of this fact.
Allied victory in this gigantic conflict ushered in a second phase, what one might call
superpower imperialism (1945-90). From a long-term perspective, the most important
aspect of this era was a partial dissociation of economic and geopolitical competition.
On the one hand, during the Cold War the world was effectively partitioned between two
rival military and ideologieal blocs, led respectively by the United States and the Soviet
Union. On the other hand, as Gowan emphasizes, this geopolitical struggle allowed the
United States to brigade together the advanced capitalist states of Western Europe and
Japan under its politico-military leadership. This allowed Washington to pursue its
72
Alex Callinicos
long-term strategie objective of preventing Eurasia from falling under the domination of
a ho stile state or coalition of states, but it also led to the formation of a transnational
(though not yet geographieally global) economie space (whose institutional conditions
were secured by Ameriean-led bodies such as the International Monetary Fund - IMF)
in whieh competition among capitals for markets did not, as it had in the previous era,
lead to geopolitical rivalries. The growing competitive challenge to the United States from
Japan and Germany brought an end to the long post-war boom at the end of the 1960s
and ushered in a protracted crisis of profitability and overcapacity that continues till the
present day (Harman, 1984; Brenner, 1998; Arrighi, 2003). The resulting political and
economic tensions were not sufficient, however, to break up the Western bloc. This era
also saw the end of the European colonial empires, but this transformation was facilitated
by, and in turn promoted what Michael Mann has aptly called 'ostracizing imperialism'the tendency for capital effectively to abandon large parts of Africa, Asia and Latin
Ameriea as international trade and investment became increasingly concentrated within
the advanced capitalist bloc itself (Mann, 2001, p. 54). The emergence of new centres of
capital accumulation in East Asia and Latin America represented an exception to this
trend. The growing size and weight of international trade and investment over the past
generation - of whieh these rising economies have been major beneficiaries - have been
the driving force behind greater economic globalization.
It is hard to find an apt name for the new imperialist phase ushered in by the end of the
Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its empire in 1989-91.
'Hyperpower imperialism' captures the most visible aspect, namely the unchallenged
global hegemony of the United States. But, in many respects, this era involves an intensification of some of the trends that developed after 1945. The Western politieo-economie
space has become genuinely global with the incorporation of the former Communist
states into market capitalism and institutions such as the WTO, NATO, and the European
Union. The partial dissociation of economic and politieal competition within this space
became even starker, as the eelipse of the USSR as the second (though always weaker)
, superpower and the information technology-driven 'Revolution in Military,Affairs' gave
the United States an overwhelming military advantage over all other powers singly or
combined. But, as Arrighi's thesis of a 'bifurcation of military and financial power'
underlines, the global economy is a genuinely multipolar field. Despite the hype about
America's 'New Economy' during the 1990s, productivity levels in the United States and
continental Western Europe are broadly comparable, and Brussels and Washington regularly elash over trade issues. China, Japan, and South Korea form adynamie and increasingly interdependent economic region knitted together by huge flows of commodities and
capital.
Probably the most critieal question for the future of the planet is whether economic
rivalries become geopolitical conflicts as weIl. Praise-singers for globalization have of
course asserted the contrary since 1989, arguing that greater economic interdependence
is washing away national antagonisms and proelaiming contemporary liberal democracy
as 'the state without enemies'. But the very elose links that bound together the world
economy before 1914 were not enough to prevent the great powers unleashing a bout of
hugely destructive wars and, in the interim, the partial disintegration of the world market
during the Great Depression of the 1930s (James, 2001). Fortunately, nothing as terrible
Globalization, Imperialism and Capitalism
73
as this is in prospect. Nevertheless, 11 September 2001 and its aftermath have put paid to
facile talk about the disappearance of national antagonisms. 16 Perhaps the best way to get
the measure of the problem is to say that, while the end of the Cold War made possible
the globalization of the Western-dominated transnational economic space, it also
removed the most obvious reason why the United States should continue to be the hegemonie power within that space. Some American analysts have predicted that, with the discipline of the Cold War relaxed, Germany will assert itself as the regional hegemon in
Europe, and China, if its economy continues its spectacular growth rate, in East Asia (for
example, Mearsheimer, 2001). Gowan is right to argue that the policy of the Clinton
administration was directed to containing these centrifugal tendencies, both by promoting neoliberal economie policies favourable to American investment banks and multinational corporations and by expanding NATO and the EU into East and Central Europe
as a means of maintaining and extending the position of the US as the dominant power
in Eurasia.'?
The global strategy of the administration of the younger Bush is best seen as a different
intervention in this same constellation of forces (Callinieos, 2003b). The seizure of Iraq
in particular is a good example of how geopolitical and economie considerations tend to
combine in imperial policy. In the first place, the demonstration of American military
supremacy would serve to dramatize, notjust for al-Qaeda and its sympathizers but also
for potential geopolitieal rivals, the high costs of contesting US hegemony. Secondly, a
permanent American military presence in the Middle East would make it easier for
Washington to address growing US dependence on imported oil and also give it an
important geopolitieal advantage. Harvey makes the point nieely:
Europe and Japan, as weil as East and South-East Asia (now crucially including China), are
heavily dependent on Gulf oil, and these are regional configurations of political-economic
power that now pose achallenge to US global hegemony in the world of production and
finance. What better way for the United States to ward offthat competition and seeure its own
hegemonie position than to control the price, condition, and distribution of the key economic
resource upon which those competitors rely? And what better way to do this than to use the
one line of force where the US remains all-powerful- military might? (Harvey, 2003, p. 25)
Thirdly, the polarization between 'Old' and 'New' Europe over the Iraq War seemed to
reflect a significant policy shift, in whieh Washington now proelaimed the expanding and
integrating EU as a potential rival that needed to be kept under control through the open
use of divide-and-rule. It is probably this aspect of the Bush administration's policy that
has been most strongly contested within the American establishment, particularly as it
became elear that the military capabilities sufficient to seize Iraq were not the same as
those required to hold it (see, for example, Mann, 2003). Zbigniew Brzezinski has been
particularly forthright in his criticism of the geopolitical incompetence of Bush and his
advisers and in his insistence that a stable US hegemony depended, not on trying to split
the EU, but on incorporating it as Washington's junior partner in 'globalleadership'
(Brzezinski, 2004).18 The outcome of these strategic debates depends on factors too concrete to be addressed at this level of generality, but Brzezinski's own analysis highlights
the fragility of the present global conjuncture, not merely in the Middle East, but also in
74
Globalization, Imperialism and Capitalism
Alex Callinicos
East Asia, where a relatively minor shift in the regional balance of forces could unleash a
nuclear arms race that would bring Japan, whose strategic partnership with the United
States has grown stronger in recent years, into confrontation with China, with South
Korea increasingly aligned with the latter, despite the economic flows that have drawn
these four states together (Brzezinski, 2004, pp. 107-23).
The geopolitical fragility of East Asia is particularly telling when we consider that the
symbiotic relationship between this region and the United States is critical to keeping the
world economy afloat. China, Japan and South Korea export vast quantities of relatively
cheap goods to the United States. These countries' governments then lend back many of
the dollars they earn to the United States, allowing it to carry on buying their exports and
keeping their own currencies relatively low against the dollar and thereby maintaining
their ability to compete. This growth nexus then provides markets for the manufactured
goods of Europe and the raw materials of Russia, the Middle East, Latin America, and
Africa. But, not simply could interstate conflict within this region seriously escalate, but,
despite the improvement in relations between Washington and Beijing since 9111, many
in the US security establishment continue to regard China as the most serious mediumterm threat to American global interests - ajudgement that is reflected in the Pentagon's
policy of mounting huge naval exercises in the Pacific, such as 'Summer Pulse 04', which
deployed an unprecedented 7 out of 12 US carrier strike groups offthe Chinese coast.'?
Such displays of American military power invite reflection on the sources of US global
hegemony. In confronting America with a choice between 'global domination' and 'global
leadership', Brzezinski interestingly (but presumably unconsciously) reproduces Antonio
Gramsci's famous distinction between two dimensions of ruling-dass hegemony - purely
coercive 'domination' and the 'moral and intellectualleadership' without which stable
dass rule is unsustainable (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 55ff.). Various Marxist writers have sought
to extend this distinction to the global scale. Arrighi, for example, argues that 'leadership
in an international context' requires that 'adominant state becomes the "model" for other
states to emulate' and that it demonstrates that it has the capability and will to 'address
, system-level problems' (Arrighi, Silver et al., 1999, pp. 22,27,28; see also Harvey, 2003,
pp. 36ff.). He has also suggested that the United States today is in a position of what
Ranajit Guha has called 'domination without hegemony' (Arrighi, 2004, p. 12; see also
Arrighi, 2005a and 2005b). Along somewhat parallel lines WaIden Bello has argued
that the dominant model of neoliberal capitalism - dosely identified, of course, with
US global hegemony - has been experiencing a 'crisis of legitimacy', which, inaugurated by the East Asian erisis of 1997-8, was intensified by the emergence of the antiglobalization movement, the collapse of the Clinton boom, the Enron scandal, and the
Argentinian financial debade (Bello, 2002).
.
It seems indisputable that the war on Iraq and the enormous popular opposition that it
has provoked has further exacerbated this crisis of legitimacy and encouraged more extensive questioning of American hegemony, particularly ~n Europe (for example, Reynie,
2004). The resulting international isolation of the United States and the difficulty that the
Bush administration has consequently faced in recruiting the assistance of states such as
France, Germany and India, not to speak of Middle Eastern elites, in governing Iraq, have
in turn set limits to the ability of American occupation forces to use their overwhelming
firepower to destroy the Iraqi resistance (Callinicos, 2004a; and Bello, 2004). Unvarnished
75
military power - domination without hegemony - has proved relatively ineffective." The
interesting question is what is likely to emerge from this crisis of empire. Is the best we can
expect another turn in the long historical cyde, a new East Asian 'systemic cycle of accumulation'? 21 Or is there any chance of breaking out of this apparently eternal recurrence?
Harvey observes: 'There are, of course, far more radical solutions lurking in the wings,
but the construction of a new "New Deal" led by the United States and Europe, both
domestically and internationally, in the face of the overwhelming dass forces and special
interests ranged against it, is surely enough to fight for in the present conjuncture' (Harvey,
2003, p. 210). Harvey does not specify what this New Deal might involve; presumably
it would mean an attempt to reverse the neoliberal counter-revolution and return to a
more regulated version of capitalism." But, given the intense resistance that, as he
acknowledges, even such relatively limited measures would evoke, might it not be
more rational for the gigantic movements against neo liberal globalization and imperial
war that emerged at the turn of the millennium to target, not just the American hegemony
and the economic model dosely identified with it, but the entire capitalist system that they
sustain?
Notes
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
See, for example, the essays eolleeted in Hopkins, 2002. The approaeh they represent is close to
that taken by David Held, Anthony MeGrew and their eollaborators, who argue that, in premodern times, '[g]lobalization, defined in this eontext as inter-regional and inter-eivilizational
eneounters, operated predominantly ... through the domains of military and eultural power
and human migrations - speeifieally, empires of domination, world religions, nomadie invasions and agrarian expansion, aeeompanied by the movement of human diseases', Held,
MeGrew et a1., 1999,p. 416. For an earlier diseussion of the globalization debate, see Callinieos,
2001a, ch.T.
See, among a vast literature, Callinieos, 2003b; Chomsky, 2003. Mann, 2004 offers the best
aeeount to date of the leading personnel of the seeond Bush administration, while Baeevieh,
2002 stresses the eontinuities between its polieies and those of the Clinton presideney.
See Callinieos, 2004a for a review of Ferguson, 2004b.
For some eontrasting politieal assessments of this movement, see Held and MeGrew, 2002;
Callinieos, 2003a; and Wolf, 2004.
See, for example, Wade and Veneroso, 1998, itself an example of the 'intentionalist' interpretation of eontemporary politieal eeonomy from whieh I am trying to distanee my argument. For
a typieally robust defenee of eonspiraey theories, see Zizek, 2004, pp. 77-9.
But see the diseussion of politieal globalization in Callinieos, 2001a, eh. 3; and Callinieos, 2002.
See Cohen, 1978 for a classic exposition of Marx's eoneepts.
But see Brenner and Isett, 2002 for a stringent theoretical and empirieal eritique of Pomeranz's
eentral claim that Europe and China were at eomparable levels of eeonomie development as
late as 1800.
See esp. Arrighi, 1994; Arrighi, Silver et a1., 1999; Arrighi, 2004; and Arrighi, 2005a and 2005b.
Arrighi, like Wallerstein, aeknowledges the influenee of the great historian Fernand Braudei:
see esp. Braudei, 1981, 1982, 1984.
See Aston and Philpin, 1985;and Hoppenbrouwers and Van Zanden, 2001. Compare also Marx,
1976, pp. 1025-34. Note that Brenner distinguishes separation from the means of subsistenee-
76
ll
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Alex Callinicos
above aIl, land - from separation from the means of production, which comprises tools and other
instruments of production as weIl: according to him, only the latter constitutes proletarianization in Marx's sense, but the former is sufficient for the market-dependence required to support
a capitalist economic dynamic; see Brenner, 2001, p. 278 n. 1 and 310 n. 16.
For aversion of this criticism that is applied also to theories of hegemonie stability in mainstream International Relations, see Nye, 1991, eh. 1.
Arrighi, 2004, responds to criticisms particularly of the cyclical aspect of his theory, for
example in Hardt and Negri, 2000, pp. 238-9.
For theoretical discussion of this highly compressed history, see Callinicos, 1989, and Carling,
1991, part 1.
Arrighi has pointed out that his version of the two logics distinguishes between kinds of state
policy, whereas Harvey in effect contrasts economic and (geo)political forms of power: Arrighi,
2005a, p. 28 n. 15. For further discussion of this point see Ashman and Callinicos, forthcoming. This chapter follows Harvey's rather than Arrighi's usage.
See, for much supporting analysis, Callinicos, 1991; 2001b; 2002; 2003a, pp. 50-65; 2003b, esp.
eh. 5; 2004b; 2005; and Harman, 2003.
Not all this talk has come from the boosters of neoliberal globalization: see Hardt and Negri,
2000.
The latter strategy is expounded by its architect in Brzezinski, 1997.
For a stimulating attempt to place contemporary debates on US global strategy in historical
perspective, see Gaddis, 2004.
For a vivid account of the 'symbiotic relationship between Asian savers and American
spenders', see Ferguson, 2004b, pp. 279-85 (quotation from p. 282). I explore further the nature
of contemporary great power rivalry in Callinicos, 2005.
For a characteristically incisive (though much more pessimistic) use of Gramscian categories
to analyse the contemporary global conjuncture, see Anderson, 2002.
This is one of the three alternatives discussed by Arrighi, 1994, pp. 355-6; and 2004, passim
(the other two are a US-imposed 'world empire' and 'systemic chaos').
Harvey seems a little ambivalent about this strategy: elsewhere he warns that 'it is by no means
sure that this would really work in the face of the overwhelming excess capacity in the global
system. It is salutary to remember the lessons of the 1930s: there is little evidence' that
Roosevelt's "New Deal" solved the problems of the Depression' (2003, p. 76).
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The Places and Spaces of the
Global: An Expanded
Analytic Terrain
Saskia Sassen
The organizing proposition in this chapter is that the global - whether an institution, a
process, a discursive practice, or an imaginary - simultaneously transcends the exclusive
framing of national states yet partly inhabits national territories. Seen this way, globalization is more than its common representation as growing interdependence and the formation of self-evidently global institutions. Further, this proposition also implies
somewhat different methodological and theoretical challenges to state-centric social seiences from the challenges posed by the notion of the global as that which transcends the
state. Each of these two perspectives on the global is a necessary part of the larger effort
to theorize and research globalization. But the second has dominated discussion and
interpretation. Thisehapter can then be read as an experiment in expanding the analytic
terrain for understanding and representing what we have come to name globalization.
If, as I argue, the global partly inhabits the national, it becomes evident that globalization in its many different forms directly engages a key assumption in the social sciences:
the implied correspondence of national territory and national institutions with the
national, that is, if a process or condition is located in a national institution or in national
territory, it must be national. This assumption describes conditions that have held,
albeit never fully, throughout much of the history of the modern state, especially since
World War I, and to some extent continue to do so. What is different today is that these
conditions are partly but actively being unbundled. Different also is the scope of this
unbundling.
We might reformulate this proposition as a research project. The fact that a process or
entity is located within the territory of a sovereign state does not necessarily mean it is a
national process or entity; it might be a localization of the global. Today it is an empirical question. While most such entities and processes are like1y to be national, there is a
growing need for empirical research to establish this for what is in turn a growing range
of localizations of the global. Much of what we continue to code as national today may
weIl be precisely such a localization. Developing the theoretical and empirical specifications that allow us to accommodate such conditions is a difficult and collective effort. This
chapter seeks to contribute to this collective effort by mapping an analytic terrain for the
study of globalization predicated on this more complex understanding.
Abrief introduction discusses critical conceptual and empirical elements in this effort to
expand the analytic terrain for understanding the global. The chapter's first half then
proceeds to elaborate on these elements. The chapter's second half examines the implications
I