World Public Forum

Published on 27 March 2009

Written by Immanuel Wallerstein

Immanuel WallersteinImmanuel Wallerstein – historical social scientist and world-systems analyst, senior research scholar of the Yale University (USA).

Where is the world heading in the next decade or two? There are two arenas in which we can anticipate very great turbulence - the geopolitical arena, and the world-economy. Let me address each in turn. The relative decline of U.S. geopolitical power is now being acknowledged by almost everyone. Barack Obama's election will not change that. Indeed, it will underline it, in that it will make clear that even a more intelligent, more multilateral foreign policy can at most keep U.S. decline from becoming still more precipitate, not reverse it. 

 We have moved into a truly multilateral world, in the sense that the real geopolitical power of relatively weaker states is suddenly much greater. Look at what has been happening this very year in the Middle East. Turkey is brokering long dormant negotiations between Syria and Israel. Qatar brokered successfully a negotiated truce between fiercely opposed factions in Lebanon. Egypt is seeking to broker negotiations between Hamas and Israel.

The Palestinian Authority has resumed negotiations with Hamas. And the Pakistani government has entered into a de facto truce with the Taliban inside the zones bordering Afghanistan. The significant thing about each of these actions is that the United States was opposed to all of these negotiations and has simply been ignored - without any serious consequences for any of the actors.

Who are the major players in this multilateral division of real effective geopolitical power? Alongside the United States, which does remain of course a major player, we find the two other loci of the North as we have known it since the 1970s - the west-European subset of the European Union and Japan. But in addition, of course, there is now Russia, China, India, Iran, Brazil (as the putative leader of a South American bloc), and South Africa (as the putative leader of a southern Africa bloc).

What is happening is that there is an immense amount of jock¬eying for alliances, with a great deal of internal debate in all these zones about the optimal partners and a great deal of uncertainty about what they will decide. In addition, there are a large number of other countries unsure of how they should maneuver within this situation. I think of Poland, Ukraine, Korea, Pakistan, Egypt, Nigeria, Mexico, Canada, and no doubt others. As soon as I list all of these, one can see that we are in a very new geopolitical situation, quite unlike that which the world has known in a very long time. It isn't quite total anarchy, but it is certainly massive geopolitical disorder. It no doubt makes many governments nervous, and sends them in search of a more stable set-up, which precisely increases the harshness of their internal disagreements about policy options. Look at the debates within Iran or Poland right now, to cite just two examples. Look indeed at the debate that is developing within the United States, and which I believe will become still more intense (and tense) beginning in 2009.

Now put this geopolitical disorder alongside the present acute uncertainties about the world-economy. Any reader of the world financial press cannot but be struck by the sharp disagreements among the pundits and among the big players on the world market about what will happen next, and therefore what they should do. How far will market shares plunge? Is inflation a real threat? Where is safe ground?

There are a series of real issues. There is first of all the issue of currencies. We have lived, ever since 1945 at least, in a dollar-stabilized world. The decline of the United States, in particular its decline as a dominant locus of world production, combined with the overstretch of its debt - governmental debt, entrepreneurial debt, and individual debt - has caused a serious decline of its exchange rate, one whose end point is unclear but is probably still lower, even much lower, than it is at present.

This decline of the dollar poses a serious economic dilemma for other countries, particularly those which have placed their in¬creasing wealth into dollar-denominated bonds and stocks. These countries are all torn between wanting to sustain the United States as a significant purchaser of their exports and the real losses they are incurring in the value of their dollar-denominated assets as the dollar declines. It is obvious what is happening. They are all slowly delinking from the dollar, with an emphasis up to now on the "slowly."

But as with all financial exits, the issue for the holders of assets is timing - neither too early nor too late. There is always the risk, the high risk, of sudden panic - a virtual "run on the bank" with of course devastating results for whoever is thirty seconds too late and even more devastating results for the United States - its government, its enterprises, and its citizens/residents. All of us are holding our breath.

But then what? Will some other currency replace the dollar as the reserve currency of the world? The obvious candidate is the euro. It is not sure whether it can play this role or even whether European governments wish it to play this role, although it is possible that it might have this role thrust upon it. If not the euro, might we have a multi-currency situation – one in which the dollar, the euro, the yen, possibly the yuan and the pound are all used for world transactions? The answer here is a bit akin to the question of geopolitical alliances. It would not quite be total anarchy, but it would certainly be disorder, and the world's governments and producers would be feeling most uncomfortable - not to speak of the world's pensioners.

Currency however is far from the only issue. Many large countries have seen large increases in both their productive output and their level of consumption. Take only the so-called BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India, and China - who harbor something like 60% of the world's population. The increase in their output and consumption levels has led to an incredibly increased demand for energy, raw materials, food, and water. Suddenly the prices in all these domains have escalated wildly, since demand has been outpacing supply by a wide margin.

Something has to give. We could have a major worldwide inflation, as the prices of all these commodities continue to zoom upward, fueled by speculators. We could then have massive protec¬tionism, as governments sought to safeguard their own supplies by limiting any and all exports. As we know from past experiences, this could create an erratic vicious circle. Or we could have massive shortages felt here and there, resulting in high mortality rates and serious additional environmental catastrophes.

Governments assaulted by reduced real revenues, and under pressure not to increase taxes to compensate, might cut back seriously in the three key domains of education, health, and old-age pensions. But these are the three domains that, as part of the democratization of the world over the past two centuries, have been the key demands that publics have made of governments. Governments unable to address seriously the maintenance of these three forms of social redistribution would face a major loss of legitimacy, with very uncertain consequences in terms of civil uprisings.

Now this entire short-run negative picture is exactly what one means when one says that the system has moved far from equilibrium and has entered into a state of chaos. Chaos, to be sure, never goes on forever. Chaotic situations eventually breed their own resolution in what Prigogine and Stengers called "Order Out of Chaos" in the English title of their classic work (1). As the authors emphasized, in the midst of a bifurcation, there is creativity, there is choice, but we cannot be sure what choices will be made.

The question for the world today is just that: what shall we choose, how shall we choose, and how may we try to achieve the result that our choices shall prevail. The world left had a vertiginous rise in the nineteenth and especially the twentieth century. It mobilized support on a vast scale and very effectively. There came a moment in the post-1945 period when it seemed to be succeeding everywhere and in every way. The tone of triumphalism dominated the spirits of all its supporters.

Then came the grand disillusionments. There were so many. The states where the antisystemic movements came to power in one way or another were in practice far from what the popular forces had expected and hoped to institute. And the irreversibility of these regimes turned out to be another illusion. I will not review for you here the many causes of these disillusions and the many ways in which the erstwhile mass support for these movements dissipated. You can all recite them.

By the early 1990s, triumphalism had totally disappeared amongst the world left, to be replaced by a widespread lethargy, often a sense of defeat. There were few who were still ready to mouth the formulas, the langue du bois, the certainties of thirty years earlier. Indeed, triumphalism had changed camps. Suddenly, we were assailed from the right by the theme of the "end of history," by Mrs. Thatcher's slogan of TINA - "there is no alternative" to the only choice available, neo-liberal globalization.

And yet, as we know, the triumphalism of the world right fell apart as well, most spectacularly in the utter fiasco of the neo- con assertion of a permanent U.S. imperial domination of the world. In the five years since 2003, George W. Bush's proclamation, amidst fake pageantry, of "mission accomplished" has become a stale joke. From the Zapatista uprising of 1994 to the successful closing-down of the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in 1999 to the founding of the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre in 2001, a reignited world left is now on the world scene again.

The real question is what kinds of political actions can be meaningful in the middle-run of the next thirty years that will tilt the struggle over the choice in the systemic bifurcation in the direction of a better world-system, one that is largely democratic and largely egalitarian. I am struck by the degree to which in this so-called globalized world, the insistent popular demand is more control at the local level by popular forces.

This demand for devolution of real decision-making is to be found in the push of indigenous movements for "pluricultural" states. It is to be found in the demands of landless workers not merely for access to the land but for self-sufficiency in food production. It is to be found in the demand of groups composed of persons of alternative sexual practices to get the states out of the bedrooms in every possible way. It is to be found in the demands of industrial workers in industries undergoing the threat of employers to "run away" to gain control of their own plants and continue their functioning even if the level of profitability is low. And it is to be found, most of all, in the insistence of women to achieve genuine autonomy in all the myriad aspects of their real lives.

One might think that this was some resurrection of classic anarchism. But it really isn't, since almost all of these pressures are acted out less by fighting to destroy the state than by seeking to make the states somehow truly less relevant in their lives. These thrusts are not those of "bomb throwers" but of builders.

We are living in a chaotic world environment. Chaos is a big whirl, with great fluctuations. It is very difficult therefore to see clearly. It is a bit like trying to make our way forward in a major snowstorm. I've never been in a truly blinding snowstorm. But I imagine that the survivors are those who both use something like a compass to know in which direction to walk and also look at the ground inches in front of them to make sure they do not tumble into some hole. The compass is our middle-run objectives. The ground inches in front of us is the politics of the lesser evil. If we don't do both, we are lost. Some people survive snowstorms, and some do not. Let us debate about the direction of the compass, ignoring the states and ignoring nationalism. Let us nonetheless engage with the states and nationalism in the short run, so that we avoid the crevices. Then we have a chance of survival. Then we have a chance that we will achieve that other world that is possible.

(1) Ilya Prigogine & Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature, New York: Bantam, 1984. The original French title was La nouvelle alliance Metamorphose de la science, Paris: Gallimard, 1979.

This article was published in the World Public Forum “Dialogue of Civilizations” Bulletin in 2008.