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Is world politics evolutionary learning?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

George Modelski
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The claim is advanced for recognizing evolutionary learning as the generative principle of world politics. Immanuel Kant was the first to specify a “natural” process leading toward “perpetual peace.” The long cycle, seen as the process of structural change. is explained with the help of a Parsonian learning model and a social evolutionary model and is argued to be coupled with the Kantian process. The long cycle defines the agenda for change in the major institutional complexes of world politics and deepens our understanding of the conditions for the control of global war.

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Articles
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International Organization , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , Winter 1990 , pp. 1 - 24
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Copyright © The IO Foundation 1990

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References

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Chicago in September 1987 and at the University of Stockholm in April 1988.1 am grateful for helpful comments from Timothy Amen, Richard K. Ashley, A. R. James, Stephen Krasner, Randolph Siverson, and William R. Thompson.

1. Wolfers, Arnold, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), pp. 248–49.Google Scholar

2. Unless otherwise noted, quotations from and citations of Immanuel Kant's “Perpetual Peace” (published in 1795) are taken from Friedrich's, C. J. translation in Inevitable Peace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948), pp. 245–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Friedrich renders the title of Kant's essay as “Eternal Peace.”

3. See, for example, Nisbet, Robert A., Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).Google Scholar

4. Quoted in Forsyth, M. B., Keens-Soper, H. M. A., and Savigear, P., eds., The Theory of International Relations: Selected Texts from Gentile to Treitschke (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970), p. 189.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., p. 186.

6. See Kant, , “Perpetual Peace,” pp. 249–59Google Scholar. In line with the consensus of early modern thinkers, Kant viewed the concept of democracy in a negative light, holding it to be “necessarily a despotism” on the grounds that it was least likely to be representative. A “republican” regime, on the other hand, was for him a form of government (forma regiminis) that was the opposite of despotism and therefore acceptable. It was the publication of “Democracy in America” by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 that restored respectability to democracy.

7. Kant, , “Perpetual Peace,” p. 259.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., p. 260.

9. “Self-organization” is a “unificationist” perspective on the sciences that has evolved, for example, out of the work of Prigogine on “dissipative structures”; it is evolutionary in inspiration, moving away from deterministic and reversible processes and toward stochastic processes and irreversibility, and bridging gaps between physics, chemistry, and biology. See Jantsch, Erich, The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Prigogine, Ilya and Stengers, Isabelle, Order out of Chaos (New York: Bantam, 1984)Google Scholar; and Yates, F. Eugene, ed., Self-Organizing Systems: The Emergence of Order (New York: Plenum, 1988)Google Scholar. For Pagels, this is the domain of complex systems and of the “sciences of complexity.” See Pagels, Heinz, The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Sciences of Complexity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).Google Scholar

10. See Table 1.1 in Modelski, George, Long Cycles in World Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987), p. 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in which I present two of these dimensions: the vertical (up-down) and the horizontal (left-right). The table needs to be supplemented by the community dimension (forward-backward) and the time dimension of the world system.

11. Kant, , “Perpetual Peace,” quoted in Forsyth, Keens-Soper, and Savigear, The Theory of International Relations, pp. 244 and 258.Google Scholar

12. See Campbell, Donald T., “Variation and Selective Retention in Socio-Cultural Evolution,” General Systems, vol. 15, 1969, especially pp. 74–76Google Scholar; and Pagels, , The Dreams of Reason, pp. 45 and 138.Google Scholar

13. See, for example, Friedrich, , Inevitable Peace, pp. 62–63.Google Scholar

14. Axelrod, Robert, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984).Google Scholar

15. Kant, , “Perpetual Peace,” quoted in Forsyth, Keens-Soper, and Savigear, The Theory of International Relations, p. 214.Google Scholar

16. This is how Kant's thesis might be formulated today.

17. See Parsons, Talcott, The Systems of Modern Societies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), pp. 1–8Google Scholar; and Habermas, Jürgen, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon, 1979), pp. 95 ff.Google Scholar

18. Boulding, Kenneth E., The Meaning of the Twentieth Century: The Great Transition (New York: Harper, 1964), pp. 100–103.Google Scholar

19. See Nye, Joseph, “Nuclear Learning,” International Organization 41 (Summer 1987), pp. 371–402.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. Parsons, Talcott, Bales, Robert F., and Shils, Edward A., “Phase Movement in Relation to Motivation, Symbols Formation, and Role Structure,” in Parsons, , Bales, , and Shils, , eds., Working Papers in the Theory of Action (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953), pp. 163–269.Google Scholar

21. See Alexander, Jeffrey C., The Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983)Google Scholar. Note that Alexander (p. 184) incorrectly describes the AGIL sequence as a learning sequence. Note also that in my analysis here, I utilize the four-function paradigm without employing or necessarily subscribing to Parsons' interchange model. I prefer the term “interface” because it implies the need for specifying the relationship between the several institutional complexes of the world system but leaves open, for the time being, the precise nature of that relationship. For a reaffirmation of the legitimacy of functional explanations in the social sciences, see Parijs, Philippe van, Evolutionary Explanation in the Social Sciences: An Emerging Paradigm (London: Tavistock, 1981), pp. 26–57.Google Scholar

22. Savage, Stephen P., The Theories of Talcott Parsons (London: Macmillan, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Habermas, , Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. 160.Google Scholar

24. Ibid., p. 148.

25. Habermas, Jürgen, Autonomy and Solidarity, ed. Dews, Peter (London: Verso, 1986), p. 168.Google Scholar

26. Eder, Klaus, Geschichte als Lernprozess: Zur Pathogenese politischer Modernität in Deutschland (History as learning process: On the pathogenesis of political modernization in Germany) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), p. 28.Google Scholar

27. Miller, Max, Kollektive Lernprozesse (Collective learning processes) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986).Google Scholar

28. See, for example, Modelski, George, Long Cycles in World PoliticsGoogle Scholar; Modelski, George, ed., Exploring Long Cycles (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1987), a work that includes a bibliography of long cycles on pp. 249–56Google Scholar; Thompson, William R., ed., Contending Approaches to World System Analysis (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1983)Google Scholar; Thompson, William R., On Global War: Historical-Structural Approaches to World Politics (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Goldstein, Joshua, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

29. See Popper, Karl, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (London: Oxford University Press, 1972).Google Scholar

30. See Modelski, George and Thompson, William R., Sea Power in Global Politics, 1494–1993 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. For a review of these approaches, see Thompson, , On Global War.Google Scholar

32. The analogy here is not with the market but, rather, with the economy. An economy consists not only of a set of markets (the network) but also of a set of organizations (hierarchies, such as firms).

33. See Modelski, , Long Cycles, pp. 64–98Google Scholar; Modelski, George and Modelski, Sylvia, eds., Documenting Global Leadership (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Thompson, , On Global War.Google Scholar

34. See Van Parijs, , Evolutionary Explanation, pp. 16–18.Google Scholar

35. I use “generative principle” in the sense in which Ruggie used it in his review of Kenneth Waltz's work; see Ruggie, John Gerard, “Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis,” in Keohane, Robert, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 135–36.Google Scholar For a discussion of the term “generative,” which implies both prediction and formalization, see Lyons, John, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 155–57.Google Scholar

36. Iberall, Arthur and Soodak, Harry, “A Physics of Complex Systems,” in Yates, Self-Organizing Systems, p. 512.Google Scholar

37. “World system” as such is not a Parsonian term, because to the end, Parsons had trouble seeing the human species as constituting a social system; but the term is not inconsistent with the direction of his analysis, especially in his later work.

38. Because the global problems discussed here are those to be resolved by innovation, the interdisciplinary field of innovation-diffusion might be a source of insights. In his recent synthesis of research evidence in this field, Rogers indicates that “stages exist in the innovation-decision process” and that the process is viewed as a sequence of the following: (1) knowledge, (2) persuasion, (3) decision making, (4) implementation, and (5) confirmation. See Rogers, Everett M., Diffusion of Innovations, 3d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1983), pp. 164–209Google Scholar. A basic tool for the analysis of innovation-diffusion is the S-shaped, logistic curve.

39. See Modelski, and Thompson, , Sea Power in Global PoliticsGoogle Scholar; the role of Spain is fully reviewed in chaps. 3 and 9.

40. For a discussion of this point, see Modelski, George, “A Global Politics Scenario for the Year 2016,” in Modelski, Exploring Long Cycles, pp. 234–47.Google Scholar

41. For alternative models for studying the likely shape of this cycle, see Modelski, George, “Global Leadership: End Game Scenarios,” in Rapkin, David, ed., World Leadership and Hegemony, vol. 5 of International Political Economy Yearbook (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rien-ner, forthcoming).Google Scholar

42. Quoted by Stinchcombe, Arthur L. in Constructing Social Theories (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), p. v.Google Scholar

43. The long cycle is one of a family of global collective evolutionary processes. Others coupled with it include the Kondratieff wave, the Kantian process of global community formation (democratization), and the global system process itself.

44. Parsons, Talcott, Social Systems and the Evolution of Action Theory (New York: Free Press, 1977), p. 2.Google Scholar

45. For an excellent discussion of types of evolutionary thought, see Campbell, “Variation and Selective Retention in Socio-Cultural Evolution.” The variant of evolutionary theory pursued in the present study is what Campbell calls “theory descriptive of the process of evolution: variation and selective retention” (pp. 70–71).

46. For a discussion of the place of the evolutionary model in contemporary political science, see Corning, Peter A., “The Biological Bases of Behavior and Some Implications for Political Science,” World Politics 23 (04 1971), pp. 321–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The evolutionary perspective on economics is rooted in the work of Joseph Schumpeter, whose Theory of Economic Development (1934) described competition as a continuing, winner- and loser-producing disequilibrium led by innovation-inducing entrepreneurs and whose Business Cycles (1939) introduced the Kon-dratieff wave as a bunching of innovations. For a full exposition of this perspective, see Nelson, Richard L. and Winter, Sidney G., An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).Google Scholar Nelson and Winter criticize the orthodox model based on choice maximization and equilibrium and offer in its place an evolutionary alternative based on the distinction between routine behavior and innovation and on the concepts of variety-inducing search and selection: “Through the joint action of search and selection, the firms evolve over time, with the condition of industry in each period bearing the seeds of its condition in the following period” (p. 19). Their account of economic evolution is an account of a Markov process in which, given that event A has occurred, the question becomes, “What is the probability that the next event is B?” According to Nelson and Wilson, “It is precisely in the characteristics of the transition from one period to the next that the main theoretical commitments of evolutionary theory have application” (ibid.). For examples of recent economic research on Kondratieff waves, see Freeman, Christopher, ed., Long Waves in the World Economy (London: Francis Pinter, 1984).Google Scholar

47. Popper's evolutionary theory of science comes quite close to the learning model. In Objective Knowledge, pp. 242–43Google Scholar, Popper states that organisms are engaged in solving objective problems (P) which need not have a conscious counterpart and that problem solving proceeds by trial and error (TS) (the source of variation) and error elimination (EE) (selection). Popper insists that his sequence P(1) → TS → EE → P(2) is not a cycle, because the completion of one problem, P(1), creates a new situation for the start of the next problem-solving sequence, P(2).

48. See Pringle, J. W. S., “On the Parallel Between Evolution and Learning,” Behavior, vol. 3, part 3, 1951, pp. 174–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pringle notes that “a type of mechanism … capable of performing a selection of variation in time in a manner analogous to the natural selection of variation in form … is to be found in the properties of coupled oscillators” (p. 186) and that “the phenomenon of synchronization of oscillators … can lead, in a population of oscillators, to an ‘evolutionary’ increase of complexity of rhythm, in a manner analogous to the increase in structural complexity which occurs in organic evolution” (p. 212).

49. For an appraisal of the state of current evolutionary theory in general and macroevolution (higher-order selection operating upon groups of species) in particular, see Gould, Stephen J., “Is a New General Theory of Evolution Emerging?” in Yates, Self-Organizing Systems, pp. 113–30Google Scholar. Gould is critical of the “modern synthesis” for its reductionism. He argues that a new evolutionary theory will embody a concept of hierarchy of levels and will stress the control of the process both by selection and by the constraints of history, development, and architecture.

50. Eder, , Geschichte als Lernprozess, pp. 39 and 47.Google Scholar

51. The argument of Eder (ibid.) is a related one. His underlying question is, “Why wasn't Germany like England?” Why did Germany lag in democratic development? Eder, broadly following Habermas's work, argues that in the social learning process, the variety which springs from the multitude of free, voluntary, and equality-based associations must stand in a denned relationship of equilibrium with the process of institutionalization. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Germany had the requisite variety but met failure on the more purely political front. Selection therefore dominated variety, and the result was a “pathological” learning process. It is an interesting argument based on a model of social system learning. Interestingly, too, the question could be posed as a long cycle problem, the solution for which a full range of long cycle categories could be deployed. The works of Eder and Habermas show a convergence of thought on an emerging evolutionary model.

52. Calvinist International is the term used by historians to denote the network of connections linking national religious organizations and Calvinist political leadership in Europe after 1560. For documentation of the Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-American “core alliances” serving as the nuclei of the global system, see Modelski, and Modelski, , Documenting Global Leadership, especially documents 12, 15, 16, 19, 21–24, 53, and 56–61.Google Scholar

53. For a theoretical and empirical development of the idea of a liberal community, see Cole, Timothy M., “United States Leadership and the Liberal Community of States,” Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1987.Google Scholar

54. See Doyle, Michael W., “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science Review 80 (12 1986), pp. 1151–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Rummel has published several studies documenting the dearth of violence between democratic states; see, for example, Rummel, Rudolph, “Liberalism and International Violence,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 27 (03 1983), pp. 27–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55. In the late 1980s, almost 40 percent of the world's population lived in democratic countries. If democratization is an innovation-diffusion process (as is likely), this fraction is likely to rise toward the 90 percent level sometime in the course of the twenty-first century. See Modelski, George and Perry, Gardner III, “Democratization in Long Perspective,” paper presented at the International Conference on Diffusion of Technologies and Social Behaviour, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria, June 1989.Google Scholar

56. Kant, , “Perpetual Peace,” p. 256.Google Scholar

57. States with innovative potential in respect to these institutional orders are those characterized by open societies, free economies, global reach, and insularity.