Latin America World Systems Theory

Inspired by dependency theorists, Wallerstein developed the concept of world systems analysis in the 1970s as a response to the methodological impasse, or Methodenstreit, within the social sciences over how to explain the existence of stark inequities among three different worlds within the modern global economic order: those of societies in the core (the West and Japan), those on the semiperiphery (Eastern Europe and much of Asia), and those on the periphery (most of Africa, Latin America, along with the Middle East, except for Israel, plus some parts of Asia). Wallerstein opposed, on the one hand, what he deemed the "universalizers" in mainstream economics, sociology, and political science, who defend Western modernization theory as an international standard, and, on the other, the "particularizers" in anthropology, history, art history, and other disciplines in the humanities, for whom all economic developments are merely relative to the peculiar regions in which they occur. The latter assertion amounts to a fetishism, or universalization, of relative difference. According to Wallerstein,

Both groups … tend to share one premise in common: the unit of analysis was politico-cultural structure … whether the term they used for this unit was the state, or the people, or the nation.… This book makes a radically different assumption. It assumes that the unit of analysis is an economic entity, the one that is measured by the existence of an effective division of labor, and that the relationship of such economic boundaries to political and cultural boundaries is variable.… Once we assume that the unit of analysis is such a "world-system" and not the "state" or the "nation" or the "people," then much changes in the outcome of the analysis. Most specifically we shift from concern with the attributive characteristics of states to concern with the relational characteristics of states. We shift from seeing classes (and status-groups) as groups within a state to seeing them as groups within a world-economy. (pp. xi–xii)

A critical example of this approach, with its emphasis on underlying economic causes for political and cultural events, was his analysis of the advent of modern society, a process that for Wallerstein begins with the novel emergence of mercantile capitalism in late fifteenth-century Europe, which ultimately produced for the first time an entire world system. Wallerstein divided his analysis of the "determining elements" of the modern world system into four major epochs: the formation of the European world economy from 1450 to 1640; the consolidation of the system between 1640 and 1815; the technological transformation of industrialization from 1815 to 1917; and the "consolidation of this capitalist world-economy from 1917 to the present, and the particular revolutionary tensions this consolidation has provoked" (pp. 10–11).

The breadth of vision and sense of political urgency that underlay this new theoretical approach is evident in the introduction to Dynamics of Global Crisis, a manifesto on behalf of world systems theory that included a joint statement by coauthors Wallerstein, Amin, Gunder Frank, and Arrighi in which the following shared premises were declared:

1. We believe that there is a social whole that may be called a capitalist world economy … [that emerged] in the sixteenth century, and that is expanded historically from its European origins.…
2. We believe that we cannot make an intelligent analysis of the various states taken separately without placing their so-called internal life in the context of the world division of labor, located in the world-economy.…
3. We believe that, throughout the history of this capitalist world-economy, there has been increasing organization of oppressed groups within the world-system and increasing opposition to its continuance.…
4. After World War II, the United States was the hegemonic power, having commanding power in the economic, political, and military arenas, and able to impose relative order on the world system—a fact which correlated with the world's unprecedented economic system.…
5. We do not believe that the struggle between capitalist and socialist forces can be reduced to, or even symbolized by, a struggle between the United States and the USSR, however much the propaganda machines of both assert otherwise.…

These premises laid out, it remains only to indicate our prejudices and our visions. We are all on the left. That is, we all believe in the desirability and possibility of a world that is politically democratic and socially and economically egalitarian. We do not think the capitalist world-economy has done very well on any of these accounts. We believe that capitalism, as a historical system, will come to an end. (pp. 9–10)