**Note: Modified for formatting 3/10/23
“The years 1989-1991 mark a decisive turning-point in contemporary history … The end of the Communisms marks the end of an era. The Persian Gulf war marks the beginning of an era … The one is the story of hopes deceived; the other of fears still unfulfilled.” (Wallerstein, 1992: 96)
So opens an essay penned by the father of world-systems analysis Immanuel Wallerstein in early 1992, after these dramatic events had just unfolded. The title of this essay is ‘The Collapse of Liberalism.’ The notion that the collapse of Leninist regimes was also the collapse of the ‘liberal international order’ must have seemed absurd at the time, and still no doubt strikes some as counter-intuitive even now. In the crisis ridden decades since Wallerstein has been heralded as having been proven correct. But in what way? He was certainly not unique in predicting that the ‘end of history’ as a final triumph of the capitalist West would prove illusory. Nor was he alone in predicting that ‘globalization’ would not lead to a wealthier, more peaceful world for most of humanity. But I would argue that the essay quoted above has proven almost uniquely prophetic as a map of subsequent developments. More specifically, it provides an excellent base on which to build a world-systemic understanding of the ongoing war in Ukraine. To see why, we first need to see why Wallerstein saw liberal capitalism and Leninism as intertwined. He wrote numerous pieces tracing the history of each ideology from their supposed common origins. Wallerstein argued that these similarities, taken together, formed a ‘geoculture,’ or a set of common values. This geoculture was a liberal, reformist one which sought to legitimize the inequalities of the existing world-system by providing a hope for upward mobility within it. The liberal geoculture began its development in the Enlightenment and became fully dominant after liberalism and Leninism together triumphed over atavistic fascism in 1945 (Wallerstein, 1993: 211-212). Without getting too caught up in the history of the Enlightenment and 19th-century liberalism, however, three very general commonalities strike me as being the most important:
Both ideologies were fundamentally optimistic (about the future of the world-system)
Both believed in the possibility that the poor countries of the South could ‘develop’ and eventually have the same living standards as the wealthy core states
Both believed in something called the ‘Cold War’
We will examine each of these in the reverse order of this list.
The that the US and USSR both believed in the Cold War seems like the historiographical equivalent of saying the sky is blue. This is because we all believe that an epic ideological struggle took place between 1945 and ‘89, a notion that Wallerstein emphatically disagrees with. Rather, he argues that US-Soviet relations were governed by an unspoken agreement that stabilized US hegemony in the world-system. In exchange for American non-interference in their own affairs and in those of the other Warsaw Pact states the Soviets would maintain a fundamentally cautious stance that sought to avoid opposing the US in the rest of the world. There is an extensive list of examples where the USSR declined to aid revolutionary movements or encouraged them to move slowly for fear of antagonizing the West, from Greece to China (Wallerstein, 1991: 1103-1104). For its part, the US (mostly) upheld its side of the bargain and eschewed efforts to really destabilize the Eastern Bloc. Western observers have compared the invasion of Ukraine to the Soviet military actions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. But what this analogy misses is that in those cases the West made a lot of indignant noise but actually did very little (Wallerstein, 1991: Ibid), a stark contrast to the limitless provision of military support to Ukraine.
I realize that the above critique of Soviet complicity in US hegemony may bear an unfortunate similarity to all sorts of dogmatic arguments made by “anti-Stalinist” political sects. However, contra those who reject the Soviet experiment, typically in favor of some different flavor of Leninism, I wish to argue that it was precisely because the USSR was so successful that it was able to occupy the role described above.
Out of the ruins of the Russian empire, a deeply impoverished region of the world-economy, Lenin and his successors built a fully de-linked economic space (Kagarlitsky, 2008: 279). The spectacular success of Soviet industrialization and the consequent rise in living standards for Soviet people implied that other semi-peripheries and peripheries could similarly defy the stratifying tendencies of global capitalism. Wherever Leninist movements came to power they sought to emulate the development achievements of ‘socialism in one country,’ going so far as to exactly copy the language of Five Year Plans, etc.. The post-war developmentalist ideology of Truman and Rostow was supposedly a rival of this Soviet one, but in actuality hard to distinguish from it. Both believed that each poor country would individually ‘catch up’ to the North in prosperity. The Leninists may have believed more sincerely in and urged more committed action towards this goal. But they shared an identical belief with the liberals that poor countries could escape ‘underdevelopment’ in a world where a state of ‘overdevelopment’ existed in the rich countries of the North (Brolin, 2007: 201). Leninist polemics against imperialism (Lenin, 1988) were inspiring, but the analysis undergirding them was haphazard. They vaguely intimated against the activities of Western capital in poor countries (Nkrumah, 1965) without really understanding that the countries of the South could not develop as long as the North continued to retain massively disproportionate wealth and power. One might rightfully argue that the Soviet leadership only chose ‘socialism in one country’ because of the failure of revolution in Western Europe. While that is the case, it does not change that this developmentalist model was only able to exist under a certain set of world-systemic conditions and was fated to dissolve once these changed. Once the world-system began to enter a major crisis in the 1970s, it was no longer possible to allow the Second World to retain such a relatively large share of surplus out of a rapidly diminishing pool (Wallerstein, 2005: 1266-1273). Thus the Soviet bloc, as well as allied developmentalist regimes throughout the South, collapsed.
In rolling back Soviet and other developmentalisms, however, the North undermined a key feature of the geoculture that legitimized its rule. Radical developmentalists the world over were sure of themselves during the postwar decades, going so far as to declare that the 1970s would be a ‘decade of development.’ Between the West claiming that liberal capitalism could lift all boats and the Leninists claiming that developmentalist policies could do the same, people of all political stripes had a common optimism about the future. Khrushchev's famous “we will bury you” was not nearly as radical as it sounded but rather an expression of supreme self-confidence — in a belief that industrial superiority would allow Leninist regimes to out-compete capitalism on its own terms. Intellectuals both East and West were so hopeful, indeed, that a rhetoric of ‘convergence’ (Chase-Dunn, 1980: 516) began to arise. The successes of both Soviet-style development and Western capitalism would eventually build on each other to usher in an era of common prosperity. But when Leninism and associated developmentalist projects in the South vanished, so did such buoyant attitudes. Optimism was replaced by a feeling of desperation, and desperation not optimism is what leads to revolts — for the simple reason that as long as there is hope in the system, the costs of violent action to change it will always seem greater than the benefits. The crisis of legitimacy affects not just the whole world-system but US hegemony specifically. As Gramsci tells us, hegemony is a condition where everyone believes that what the ruling strata wants will also benefit them. America lost the Cold War, because the point of the Cold War was never to win but to keep it going. As long as the Soviets and similar regimes in South believed that directly challenging American power could only jeopardize hard-won gains there was little incentive to do so. When the US lost its Soviet foil, it also lost the ability to contain conflicts that the Cold War provided. The United States is still gigantically powerful, but this power is now only in the form of military and financial brute strength, a condition of domination rather than hegemony (Arrighi, 2009: 150).
And so we arrive at the second part of Wallerstein’s turning point, the significance of the Gulf War. To me not only is his analysis of the conflict accurate but it also maps uncannily onto the war in Ukraine thirty years later. Wallerstein writes:
“Saddam Hussein drew the lesson of this collapse of the liberal ideological carapace. He concluded that 'national development' was a lure and an impossibility even for oil-rich states like Iraq. He decided that the only way to change the world's hierarchy of power was via the construction of large military powers in the South. He saw himself as the Bismarck of an eventual pan-Arab state. This was not the Bismarck of enlightened conservatism, but the Bismarck who was the leader of a state fighting an uphill battle in the interstate system. The invasion of Kuwait was to be the first step for Saddam Hussein in such a process, and would have as a side benefit the immediate solution to Iraq's debt crisis (elimination of a main creditor plus a windfall of looted capital)” (Wallerstein, 1992: 105).
Just like Saddam, Putin is deeply resentful that his country’s status in the world-system is decreasing in spite of Western promises. He feels that Russia was left holding the football when the Cold War ended. Gorbachev, a Leninist true believer (Zubok, 2021: 21), fully dropped the Cold War pretense and embraced the rhetoric of ‘convergence’ towards a ‘common European home,’ —and the end result for the USSR cum Russia was political collapse, geopolitical humiliation, and social catastrophe. Just as Putin is no Leninist, he equally cannot be identified with the Yeltsin-era Russian elites — who, lacking their Cold War partnership with the West simply submitted totally. Putin’s clique are best classified as siloviki rather than as oligarchs — indeed, Putin has over his years in power has crushed many of the Yeltsin-era oligarchs such as Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky. The ‘men of force’ surrounding Putin control obscene private wealth, but their true desire is for the militaristic rejuvenation of Russia and they retain some sliver of a social consciousness (Lieven, 2022). Putin’s ruling clique thus bears a broad resemblance to that of Saddam’s Iraq, even if the Russian one has been less willing to part with neoliberal economics (so far). And indeed, just as Wallerstein saw Saddam of the aspiring “Bismarck of a pan-Arab state,” Putin also appears as the aspiring Bismarck of projects of ‘Eurasian integration’ (Glazyev, 2016) whose goal is to reunify the post-Soviet space to fight that “uphill battle in the inter-state system” alongside other large states of the South like China and India. In the case of Ukraine, Putin is attempting ‘Eurasian integration’ by force.
Some might ask why Putin is militarily attacking Ukraine, which is categorically not part of the Global North, if it is in fact the North he is at war with. At the risk of sounding callous, I don’t consider this argument to have much relevance since the NATO states clearly consider Ukraine to have enormous relevance to their interests. The Ukrainian population is supplying the manpower. However otherwise the West is making extraordinary investments in the effort to defeat Russia that are easily comparable to any war effort of its own. The world-systemic explanation for the intense Western interest in Ukraine since 2014 warrants further examination but is beyond the scope of the current piece.
However, prophecy is rarely an exact science, and some parts of the world don’t seem to have gotten Wallerstein’s memo. Optimism, developmentalism, and Marxism-Leninism of a sort are still very much alive in China, buoyed by decades of breakneck economic growth and rising living standards. Some argue that this might be changing soon (Li, 2008; 2016; 2021), but pessimism about the Chinese economic machine has been wrong plenty of times before. With the ruling Communist Party only just now shifting away from an extremely strict ‘Zero COVID’ policy it is entirely possible that the current slowdown in Chinese growth will prove to be a transient phenomenon. Wallerstein, for his part, always expressed confusion about “how to think about China” (Wallerstein, 2010). He regarded the PRC-US relationship as fundamentally cooperative (Wallerstein, 2017), implying that they would go down together. This may be hard to square with today’s escalating tensions over geopolitical issues like Taiwan. The views of Wallerstein’s colleagues Giovanni Arrighi (Arrighi, 2009) and Andre Gunder Frank (Frank, 1998) that the world-system is moving towards Chinese hegemony rather than necessarily collapsing may wind up vindicated.
Equally anomalous is the case of Latin America, where the developmentalist center-left has fared relatively well in the 21st century. Significant radical movements from below have appeared — Mexico’s Zapatistas, Argentina’s piqueteros, and Brazil’s Landless Workers being examples. For the most part they have been vastly overshadowed by the electoral center-left in political importance or even have become its junior partners (Petras and Veltmeyer, 2005). Why the “black period” Wallerstein anticipated (Wallerstein, 1994: 13) seems to have partially or even wholly passed over certain geographical areas is hard to answer. But in most of the periphery and semi-periphery it is readily apparent, particularly in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and the post-Soviet sphere.
If we grow too excited about the eerie foresight Wallerstein displayed, we may forget his warning at the end of “The Collapse of Liberalism:”
“The problem with the neo-Bismarckian and the anti-Enlightenment thrusts in the South is that they are inclined eventually to come to terms with their compeers in the North, . . . There is an alternative ideology to the 'survival of the fittest' groups that can be constructed around the primacy of groups in an era of disintegration. It is one that recognises the equal rights of all groups to a share in a reconstructed world-system while simultaneously recognising the non-exclusivity of groups” (Wallerstein, 1992: 107).
Insofar as those thrusts serve to chip away at power of the North they are likely to be celebrated by many in the South. While we in the West are horrified by the destruction being wreaked on Ukraine, it is hard to talk Putin’s sympathizers in the South into feeling sorry for a state that has made a racialized ‘civilizational choice’ in favor of the West. But those celebrating should be circumspect about the immense fratricidal destruction inherent in military power plays. The most important question remains how the coming world-system can be more equitable than the one whose disintegration is now in full swing.
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