Page 62 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

48 Politics in a Small World

Wallerstein, there is nothing new in the global scope and orientation of
capitalism. It has, of course, expanded greatly in 400 years, to the point
where it now forms a world economic system, but the logic of its expan-
sion was there from its beginning in sixteenth - century Europe. Wallerstein
sees capitalism as an integrating world system which has an internal
dynamic of development; capitalism needs to expand its geographical
boundaries in order to combat the regular slumps to which it is prone
(Wallerstein, 1990 ). Although the world system is, therefore, driven by
economic imperatives, Wallerstein ’ s account is neo - Marxist in that he sees
states as essential to the stability of global capitalism. The capitalist world
system is historically unique in that it involves a global economy com-
bined with a political system of sovereign nation - states; it is, therefore,
quite unlike previous world economies which were regional rather than
global, and centered on imperial states. The capitalist world system inte-
grates what Wallerstein calls “ political states ” in a common international
division of labor. The core developed states, such as those of the EU,
Japan, and the US, dominate on the basis of higher - level skills and greater
capitalization, while peripheral areas with weak states, including the
newly industrializing countries of the South, provide the conditions for
capitalist expansion through their economic dependence on the core. In
addition, there are semi - peripheral areas, including the “ tiger economies ”
of South - East Asia, the oil - producing countries, and the former socialist
countries of Eastern Europe, with moderately strong governmental struc-
tures and single - commodity or low - technology economies, which provide

a buffer zone preventing polarization and outright conflict between core
and periphery (Wallerstein, 1979 ; Waters, 1995 : 226).
Wallerstein ’ s world systems theory has been widely criticized for its
practically exclusive emphasis on the economic aspects of globalization.
Although politics actually features more centrally than class in his account,
global integration seems to take place solely at the economic level; the
relationships of trade and exploitation he sees as characterizing the world
economy take place between relatively sovereign nation - states, each with
its own relatively independent culture (Waters, 1995 : 25). World systems
theory therefore fails to address the changing form and role of the state
in the context of the multiple and shifting sites of sovereignty which now
characterize global governance (Held, 1995a : 26). Furthermore, as Roland
Robertson points out, although Wallerstein has given up his original view
that culture is epiphenomenal to economic processes, he tends to consider
it only under the guise of “ an ideological impediment ” to the realization
of socialism as a world system or, alternatively, as a resource for the
“ anti - systemic movements ” he sees as opposed to the cultural premises