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Reviewed by Jerry Kloby Immanuel Wallerstein is the director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University and is well known as the principal developer of World System Theory. The Decline of American Power is a collection of essays, some written before 9/11 and some after, in which Wallerstein argues that U.S. hegemony is on the decline and that it will continue to decline for several more decades. This is a bold argument to make in light of recent moves by the United States that illustrate a new found willingness to act unilaterally and to flaunt international agreements. It’s true that the right wing has come to dominate U.S. government and that foreign policy is dominated by hawks who believe the U.S. wields overwhelming military power and should act as an imperial power because 1) it can get away with it and, 2) if the U.S. doesn’t exert force it will become marginalized. But Wallerstein believes they will fail for military, economic, and ideological reasons. Predictions aside, for a moment, The Decline of American Power presents a clear and insightful analysis of the rise of American power and the challenges it faces today. In typical Wallerstein fashion, The Decline of American Power outlines the broad strokes of history and highlights crucial moments. Wallerstein argues that the rise of U.S. hegemony started around 1870 as the United Kingdom began its decline. The U.S. and Germany competed for hegemony, with both economies outpacing the UK between 1870 and 1914. Germany’s mistake was trying to transform the world-system into a world-empire triggering an intracapitalist world war. (Will the United States do the same in the 21st century?) On the other side of the dialectic, various antisystemic movements were developing their strategies for social transformation. Wallerstein calls this the two-step plan: first mobilize to achieve state power in each state, then use state power to transform society. The collapse of Communism in 1989-91 was the climax of disillusionment within the antisystemic movement that had started in the 1960s. Keeping with one of the principle analytical tools of world system theory, Wallerstein tags the post WWII period as a Kondratieff cycle with the downturn coming in the late 60s – early 70s and continuing today. But the arrangements made at the end of WWII have been altered. At that time the U.S. needed a stable world order with renewed effective demand in order to take full advantage of its economic strengths. The problem of order was established by creating a set of interstate institutions (the UN, World Bank, and IMF) and coming to an uneasy stalemate with the Soviet Union. The U.S. thrived for several decades under this arrangement but faced economic stagnation by the 1970s as the European economies and Japan closed the productivity gap. Capitalist growth, specifically global expansion, has always served to provide improved conditions domestically but there are limits to capital accumulation. Wallerstein focuses on three major ones (structural asymptotes): 1) The deruralization of the world. Marx argued that wages were largely determined by the political strength of the working class and the size of the reserve army of labor. In the world system, the ability to tap into the world’s rural population as a supply of low wage labor is reaching a limit. 2) The ecological limits of toxification and exploitation of natural resources. Environmental crises are placing growing constraints on capital’s ability to externalize costs. 3) The limits of taxation. The spread of democracy brings with it demands for increased expenditures on health, education, and lifetime income guarantees. The three trends are essentially redistributive and they interfere with capital accumulation. They also lead capitalists to demand a rollback in government programs and taxation. In the U.S., hawks feel that the U.S. world position has been declining since the Vietnam War. The two wars with Iraq have been part of an attempt to reverse that. Hawks hope to reconfigure the Middle East. They want to eliminate regimes hostile to the United States. They want to undermine the power of Saudi Arabia (keeping it as an ally, but in a more subordinate position). They seek to impose a Bantustan type of solution on the Palestinians. And, domestically, they want to disfigure the U.S. government budget so that it has no room for anything but military expenditures and (maybe) corporate subsidies. They also want to limit the expression of opposition. The present world system has always been resented and challenged by those left out by the development of "well-organized U.S. hegemony" but the state socialist alternative disappointed many and today the antisystemic movement is searching for other options and creating them where possible. What are the strategies for creating an alternative future? Among those advocated by Wallerstein are the following: 1) Expand the spirit of Porto Alegre – build popular movements for immediate goals and for long term fundamental change. 2) Use defensive electoral tactics – electoral victories will not transform the world but the battles must be fought to help minimize the damage that can be inflicted by the "world right" via their control of the world’s governments. 3) Push democratization unceasingly – demand more education, more health care, more lifetime income security. In spite of the strength of the right wing in the United States, American capitalist hegemony faces not only the structural limitations noted above but also threats that are resulting from several global cleavages likely to worsen in the twenty-first century. Among these are the struggle within the "triad" of the U.S., the European Union, and Japan, to be the locus of capital accumulation; the continuing struggle between the core capitalist nations and the other zones of the world system; and, finally, between the spirit of Davos and the spirit of Porto Alegre about the kind of world we collectively intend to build. The Decline of American Power, despite being a collection of individual essays, stands as a very coherent theory of U.S. power. The analysis is hopeful but realistic. It provides the scope and insight one expects from the leading proponent of world system theory.
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