2 - The rise of East Asia and the withering away of the interstate system

Summary

History continually messes up the neat conceptual frameworks and the more or less elegant theoretical speculations with which we endeavor to understand the past and forecast the future of the world we live in. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, two events stood out as eminently subversive of the intellectual landscape: the sudden demise of the USSR as one of the two main loci of world power and the gradual rise of East Asia to epicenter of world-scale processes of capital accumulation. In recent years, this recentering of world-scale processes of capital accumulation on East Asia has manifested itself in instability rather than growth. As argued elsewhere, however, this follows a well-established historical pattern – the pattern, that is, whereby newly emerging centers of world capitalism tend to become focal points of system-wide financial turbulence long before they acquire the politico-institutional capabilities to promote and govern a system-wide expansion of trade and production. Suffice it to mention the crucial role played by the United States – the emerging center of the early twentieth century – in the making and global propagation of the crisis of 1929–31 (Arrighi et al. 1999).

Although the demise of the USSR and the rise of East Asia have each received more than their due of scholarly attention, it is their joint occurrence that has the most significant conceptual and theoretical implications. World-systems studies are as likely to be revolutionized by this joint occurrence as any other field of historical inquiry.