political globalization is global political evolution

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Political Globalization is GlobalPolitical EvolutionGeorge Modelski a & Tessaleno Devezas ba University of Washington , Seattle, Washington,USAb University of Beira Interior , Covilhã, PortugalPublished online: 28 Jun 2007.

To cite this article: George Modelski & Tessaleno Devezas (2007) PoliticalGlobalization is Global Political Evolution, World Futures: The Journal of NewParadigm Research, 63:5-6, 308-323

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World Futures, 63: 308–323, 2007

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN 0260-4027 print / 1556-1844 online

DOI: 10.1080/02604020701402707

POLITICAL GLOBALIZATION IS GLOBAL POLITICALEVOLUTION

GEORGE MODELSKIUniversity of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

TESSALENO DEVEZASUniversity of Beira Interior, Covilha, Portugal

Political globalization is one dimension of a process that is multidimensional(not just economic), historical (in millennial proportions), and transformative (inchanging planetary institutional structures). Conceiving of political globalizationin evolutionary terms (as one centered on innovative sequences of search-and-selection) makes it possible to construct a time-table for global politics, and toderive from it an agenda of priority global problems. The following questions willbe addressed on that basis: Where in that process are we situated at the presenttime? (a time that is one of palpable uncertainty); What global problems does thisanalysis point to, and what does it tell us about where we are heading? These arenot forecasts but rather elements of an “institutional” framework of orientationfor the discussion of the next several decades of global organization.

KEYWORDS: Global, globalization, political evolution.

INTRODUCTION

This is a Big Picture—Long View study. It takes in the whole of global politics,and it also spans more than two centuries. It does not purport to be the theory ofeverything, but it does aim to sketch out in broad outlines the course of politicalglobalization as shaped by global political evolution a century ahead, at least forcertain well-defined problems.

Three questions will be addressed on this occasion:

1) Can political globalization usefully be analyzed as global political evolution?2) What conceptual equipment needs to be deployed to undertake this task?

Based on material presented at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on KondratieffWaves, Warfare and World Security, University of Beira Interior, 16 February 2005, and inthe Harrison Program on the Global Agenda at the University of Maryland, 28 September2005.

Address correspondence to George Modelski, University of Washington, Seattle, Wash-ington, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

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POLITICAL GLOBALIZATION IS GLOBAL POLITICAL EVOLUTION 309

3) What does such an analysis tell us about where in that process we are presentlylocated, and where are we heading in global political organization?

AN INSTITUTIONAL CONCEPTION OF GLOBALIZATION

The conception of globalization advanced here may best be described as insti-tutional because it seeks to explain the rise of great planetary institutions thatinclude free trade regimes and transnational enterprises, global leadership, andglobal governance, world social movements, and world opinion.

An institutional approach might best be contrasted with a “connectivist” ap-proach. In that latter view, globalization is defined, to give one example from arecent report, as the “growing interconnectedness reflected in the extended flowsof information, technology, capital, goods, services, and people throughout theworld” (National Intelligence Council, 2004, p. 27).

Viewing “certain aspects” of these developments as “irreversible,” the reportraises globalization to the status of a “mega-trend” (we describe it as “process”):“a force so ubiquitous that it will substantially reshape all of the other major trendsin the world of 2020.” Such a global mega-trend can be visualized with the aid ofaggregate data on world flows (National Research Council, 2004, p. 27).

That is the pure “connectivist” position. Another facet of globalization viewedas connectivity is “openness.” To operate freely connections require open societiesbecause connections thrive most in the absence of barriers—barriers to trade, tocapital movements, to migrants, or to the diffusion of ideas and practices. That iswhy another set of indices of globalization is country indices of openness—thedegree to which nations are accommodative to the world system. Openness is aproperty of national systems, and nations can be ranked according to the degreeto which they are acceptant of world flows.1

The measurement and analysis of global interactions yields much of the sub-stance of the phenomenon of globalization. Trade flows, capital movements,travel and migrations do indeed make the world more—and at times less—interdependent. Scholars judge the progress of that process on the basic of em-pirical observations. The mapping of connectivity frequently uncovers variety ofnetworks—trade, financial, social—which are structural features of the world sys-tem. Yet these developments also fluctuate, and sometimes even collapse utterly.It is widely noted, for instance, that the hopes for world peace aroused by theexpansion of world trade in the latter part of the 19th century were to be rudelydashed in 1914, and what followed was a substantial reduction, if not derailment,of an apparent trend toward globalization. And yet we are not entitled to say thatthe process as such had then come to a complete halt, only a pause. Most of all, themere ascertainment of trends is no answer to the question: Why do we globalizein the first place?

The approach developed by David Held and his collaborators (1999, p. 14ff) thathas been described as “transformationalist” goes beyond the “connectivist” viewand treats globalization as a historical process that brings about connectivity andopenness but one that also has an institutional grounding, and can therefore be de-picted in two dimensions, spatio-temporal, and organizational, respectively. That

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310 GEORGE MODELSKI AND TESSALENO DEVEZAS

model of globalization combines an interest in the intensity, extensity, velocity,and impact propensity of the flows that animate the world system, with an analysisof the organizational dimension that describes the infrastructure, and the institu-tionalization, of global interdependence (“a new architecture of world order”).

The view advanced here leans strongly toward this second dimension as onemore suited to an evolutionary analysis even while recognizing the importanceof having good reliable measurements of the multitude of interactions that are ofinterest. Notice that both connectivity and openness are the product of a set oforganizational and institutional arrangements. They derive from the organizationsthat originate and manage these flows, the regimes that facilitate and govern them,the matrices of mutual trust that sustain them, and the systems of knowledgethat guide them. In particular, and briefly stated, political globalization tracks theevolution of world order architecture, from the classical imperial form, throughglobal leadership, to global organization.

The institutional approach not only focuses on the facts of transformation (andis therefore also “transformationalist”), but also reaches out for explanation ofthese vast changes. And it sees such explanation basically in a learning process, inthe humans’ stubborn search for a better world, a journey with many detours andfalse promises, but one that has so far taken us quite far. A learning process canalso be modeled, simulated, and projected into the future.

GLOBALIZATION IS HISTORICAL, TRANSFORMATIONAL,AND MULTIDIMENSIONAL

Globalization is sometimes described as the defining feature of our current era.Some call it a process of the world “getting smaller.” Others emphasize thosefeatures that increase connectivity. Let us postulate that it is the process of “emer-gence of organizations of planetary scope.” That is a definition that favors theinstitutional factor, but sees “connectivity,” and “openness,” both as causes, and asconsequences.

In some discussions, globalization is treated as solely economic in character.Others view it as essentially a contemporary phenomenon and an obvious conse-quence of technological advances, and yet others treat it as a condition of life to-daywithout inquiring greatly into its provenance. In this discussion globalization isseen as a process that is historical, transformational, and also multidimensional,as well as one facet of world system evolution.2

Globalization is a process in time, and therefore it also is a historical process inthat its understanding requires tracing it back to its beginnings. These beginningsmay arguably be traced i.a. to the Silk Roads across Eurasia, and the projectsof World Empire, most prominently pursued by Genghis Khan and his Mongolsuccessors in the 13th century, but more clearly seen in ocean-based enterprisesof succeeding centuries. Similarly we cannot expect it to assume final form forpossibly another millennium. It also is a historical project in that there is only oneinstance of it in the experience of the humankind. We cannot generalize about it (inthe sense of summing up a number of instances) except by trying to trace that oneinstance of it that we know, but also by reducing it to a set of constituent processesand elements.

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Globalization is transformational-institutional because it traces successive stepsin what we might call the development of a planetary constitutional design. Whereone millennium ago, the human species was recognizably organized in some fouror five regional ensembles, with basically minimal mutual contact, and no organi-zation, common rules, or knowledge, today information is abundant and low-cost,contacts have multiplied, and organization and rules dealing with collective prob-lems are no longer exceptional. The institutions whereby human relate to eachother have been undergoing a transformation at the planetary, but also at local,national, and regional levels.

Globalization, finally, is also multidimensional. That is, it has no simple recipefor identifying “stages of world history,” such as slavery or capitalism. As generallyrecognized, it comprises not just the spectacular expansion, under the banner offree trade, of world commerce and of capital movements, with the large array oftransnational enterprises, and the elaborate body of rules and regulations governingall of these. Globalization also concerns the rise of global social movements, andworldwide cultural trends, and the emergence of world opinion as conception ofcommon interest, but most particularly in the context of this article it has a politicaldimension. But before we enter into a discussion of political globalization we needto review a few concepts basic to this analysis.

SOME KEY CONCEPTS

As is appropriate for the process of globalization, the approach adopted here isholistic, in that the basic unit of analysis is planetary. It also is diachronic inthat it is about processes (rather than structures) in world system time. It is evo-lutionary in that the key to it are learning processes centered on variation andselection; and in its methodology it is social–scientific in that it confronts ob-servational data with theory and then tests and retests it. Here are six key con-cepts of this argument, and two tables in particular that will presently be used asillustrations.

Process. This is the central term of an analysis that privileges change over stasis,and “flux” over structure. It is a distinct way of perceiving reality, in that it “con-nects the dots” to create event sequences. More than a mere trend (a drift, tendency,or general movement), it is defined as “series of connected developments unfoldingin programmatic coordination.” Four (self-similar, relatively autonomous) global(institutional) processes—economic, political, social, cultural—arrayed in a cyber-netic hierarchy, make up globalization. Political globalization, or global politicalevolution, is at the heart of this inquiry and belongs to the (nested) family of po-litical processes (that also includes the actor-level-long cycles of global politics,and the species level, evolution of world politics). In Table 1, second column, thecentral (institutional-level) process of political globalization is the evolution ofglobal politics.

Program. “Programmatic coordination” inheres by definition in the notion ofprocess. Global processes such as political globalization are evolutionary se-quences and are conjectured to be programmed accordingly by a Darwinianalgorithm of search and selection. A program is implied in the conception of

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Table 1Evolution of Global Politics: Political Globalization (930 AD–2300 AD)

Generic learningalgorithm

Evolution of global politics:Institutions Actor/Agency

Search coalition 930—Imperial experimentsSelect amplify Failed world empire 1200—Mongol empireSearch coalition 1430—Global leadershipSelect amplify Global nucleus 1640—Britain I, IISearch coalition 1850—Global organizationSelect amplify Global governance 2080—Democratic comm.Search coalition 2300—Consolidation

Note: Columns show processes; rows show 4-generation periods.

self-organization. Search and selection respond to priority problems, and these areresponded to by means of innovations.

Period. The unit of a process is a period. World system time is not continuous orflowing but discrete or grainy, reckoned in generations, and unfolding in distinctperiods. Political globalization (evolution of global politics has a characteristicperiod of some 16 generations (about 500 years). Each period is defined by a setof priority global problems, and by the launching and diffusion of institutionalinnovation. In Table 1, the principal institutional innovations shown are ImperialExperiments, Global Leadership, and Global Organization. Empirical analysis ofthe Portuguese cycle of global leadership (Devezas and Modelski, 2006) demon-strates it to have the form of a learning process.

Phase. Each period is a phased, evolutionary, learning process and has a pro-grammed time-structure: an event sequence that consists of four phases whosegeneric names (as in Table 1, first column) are variation, coalition, selection, andamplification3 (the first two phases might also be called “preparatory,” and theother two, “decisive”). That also means that all processes are self-similar (have thesame time-structure, but at different periodicities). One period of political global-ization consists of four phases, each of which is one long cycle that acquires partof its problem-focus from that position. In Table 1, in each of the three periods ofglobal political evolution, the selection (third) phase (e.g., the Britain I in “globalleadership”) is decisive for shaping the global political system for the ensuing twoto three centuries.

Power law. Each period has a characteristic duration, reckoned in generations.In the cascade that makes up world system evolution, global processes synchronize,and they also stand in a fixed relationship that is expressed by a power law. “Bigger”processes (those higher in the cybernetic hierarchy, of higher information content)have longer duration, hence presumably greater importance. That is why politicalprocesses (such as political globalization) can be shown to have twice the lengthof the evolution of the global economy.4

Problem. Note that the learning algorithm specifies the characteristic prob-lem (or problem set) for each phase of a period. Thus the phase of the

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current period of political globalization (global organization) defines a prior-ity problem—coalition—for global politics of that period, as one of laying the“democratic base” for global political evolution. That is how process defines theagenda.

We shall now review, first, political globalization and shall then follow it up withthe long cycle, and democratization. For each we shall ask: where in its trajectoryis global politics located at the present time, and what might be the prognosis forthe future, up to a generation ahead.

ESSENTIALS OF POLITICAL GLOBALIZATION

The focus of this analysis is global-level organization that is a necessary conditionof an ordered world society but cannot spring into being all at once, in an instant,but only as the result of a sustained process of political globalization. In this article,attention is focused (principally, but not entirely) on the political dimension, and thequestion is asked why political globalization might indeed be viewed analyticallyin an evolutionary perspective.5 In its political dimension, too, globalization is anevolutionary process because it exhibits the same basic features as global politicalevolution. It describes changes in the collective organization of the human species,and traces the operation of the Darwinian learning algorithm of search and selectionin the context of humankind as a learning system. Thus it shows how evolutionarymechanisms have helped to transform the way we live on earth.

Political globalization therefore shares with global political evolution all theprimary characteristics, of process, time, change, and multidimensionality. But anevolutionary approach gives it, as it were, one additional yet essential, feature: itsupplies an internal motor of change. It brings out the mechanisms that make forglobal political change, without invoking thedeus ex machina of technology whilepaying prompt attention, too, to concurrent and antecedent developments in theeconomy, society, and culture.

Table 1 depicted a summary outline of the course of global political evolutionover two millennia. It may also be read as a timetable of political globalization,as well as a forecast of its future course. It is of course very much a Big Picturerepresentation with emphasis on an evolutionary explanation. In going back onemillennium it does take globalization back somewhat further than some would(although it is difficult to imagine how such a change could occur without printing,compass, and also gunpowder that the Mongols brought to Europe) but in itsmain lines conforms to the now increasingly familiar “history of globalization.”That unfolded promptly over long haul of the long 16th century. But in lookingtoward the future it also suggests that the critical (decisive) period for politicalglobalization might be our own century.

In the main, Table 1 presents the evolution of global politics as a higher order,institutional-level process, animating the search for new forms of collective or-ganization and the transformation of worldwide structures away from traditionalempire, via the institution of global leadership, and toward global governance. Thetable also briefly hints (in the third column) at actor- or agent-level processes thatwe call long cycles that are nesting within, and driving it. That is the level at which

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global political competition centered on priority global problems is particularlyevident. In the past half-millennium they took the form of the rise and declineof the powers exercising global leadership, of which the mature form has beenthat of Britain in the 19th century, followed by the United States in the 20th. Itgives a foretaste of what an evolutionary analysis of globalization might add toour knowledge.

The evolution of global politics is a higher-order learning process than the longcycle. It is a process of globalization because it is creative of political institutions ofworldwide scope albeit in periods spanning half-a-millennium. It is one of politicalglobalization because it accounts for the formation of political structures that weavetogether several strands of relationships and collective enterprises. Earlier, in theclassical era, political interaction was either local or regional. It is only about theyear 1000 AD that interactors (conquerors, traders, explorers) began to emerge atthe planetary level and they set in motion a process of global political evolution.Driving that process at the agent level are long cycles of political competitionbut at the higher, institutional, level this adds up to global political evolution(Table 1).

Since the start of the modern era, about 1000 AD, global political evolution hasestablished, in the course of “imperial experiments,” the technical preconditionsof global order, in part by defeating the project of the Mongol world empire. Inthe period that fashioned the institution of global leadership (say 1430 AD to1850 AD) an (oceanic) nucleus of global organization emerged in the defeat of(continental) imperial challengers. The two British cycles were the mature form ofthat structure as it moved from selection to amplification. The current period, asshown in Table 1, from 1850 onward as “Global Organization,” is to be completedin about two to three centuries. If the first period was one of no organization (orfailed), and the second one of minimal organization, the third is one of selectingan adequate structure (to be completed in the fourth phase). By adequate we meanone that has the capacity to respond effectively to problems of human survival,especially those posed by threats that are nuclear and environmental.

Where in this scheme do we stand at the beginning of the 21st century? As Table2 shows in greater detail in its second and third columns, we have now entered thethird period of political globalization. (We leave aside until later a discussion of theco-evolving processes of democratization, and of K-waves.) That third period isone of “global organization,” and according to our analysis it certainly is “critical.”That period is critical because it is one that is programmed to be the one “selecting”new forms of institutional innovation. That period is currently in the second of itspreparatory (integrative, community-building) phases, and it lends an agenda toLC10 that, as note in the following section, centers on building a democratic basefor global governance that will lay the ground—the sub-structure of solidarity—toserve as the foundation for significant institutional change in the next (selectional)phase of that process, a century from now.

The prognosis is this: global politics has been, since 1850, in transition to apresumptively democratic global organization, and that means that the U.S. cyclehas been no mere repetition of the British experience, but was shaped by that veryfact. But at the start of the 21st century we are still in the second, cooperative, or

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Table 2Social, Political, and Economic Globalization, 1850–2080

YearGlobal socialmovements

Evolutionof global politics

Long cyclesof Global politics K-waves

1850 DemocratizationEarly adopters

Global organizationInter-governmental

LC9 - USAAgenda-setting

K17 - Electric-steelTake-off

1878 Coalition-building High growth1914 Democratic

nucleusMacro-decision:

World Wars I, IIK18 - Electronic-

auto-aeroTake-off

1945 Execution High growth1975 Democratic

transitionDemocratic base LC10

Agenda-settingK19 - Computer-

InternetTake-off

2000 Coalition-building High growth2026 Consolidation Macro-decision K20 - Collective

intelligence2050 Execution2080 Democratic

communityGlobal governance LC11

Agenda-settingK21 - ?

Note: Periods (of learning process) in bold letters; phases in smaller print.Each column represents one process; each row represents one generation.

coalitional, phase of that transition that is unlikely to be completed until mid-21stcentury. That second phase establishes the solidarity matrix within which futureglobal organization will take shape. It is an implication of this analysis that sucha condition is less likely to emerge from within a system of multipolarity. As po-litical globalization gains additional strength, the control of global organization,for example, via majority voting blocs or veto power (hence institutional power)will increasingly become the condition of organizational leadership. Such a con-text will favor a functioning democratic community. It is on the foundation of amajority-democratic global base that a more effective system of global governanceis likely to emerge in the 22nd century.

One other point. The all processes in Table 2 are learning processes: experimentsaccounting for the rise of world powers, and of global institutions. That is why eachsuch “rise” comprises two preliminary phases that ready the ground for, and leadup to, the third one that activates the selectional mechanisms of collective decisionand, in the fourth, achieves the completion of the process and “full tenure.” Wereckon the U.S. (learning) long cycle as extending from 1850 to 1975, with itspreparatory phases lasting up to 1914–45, laying down the foundations for globalleadership that was fully established only after 1940. But the United States’ (lightlyinstitutionalized) “term of office,” then started, extends beyond 1975, until anotherselection is achieved (on our timetable, after 2026). Thus in respect of that U.S.cycle, the learning sequence ends in 1975, but the “term of office” lasts longer,on this accounting, until 2026, but might also appear as a “lame duck” season, in

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which the global political system (as though in an election campaign mode), setsup the conditions for “macro-decision,” that is, post-2026, for a new selection, orre-selection. The same considerations also apply to the learning process in politicalglobalization.

LC 10: FROM AGENDA-SETTING TO COALITION-BUILDING

Consider now the shorter-range, long cycles, nested within, but also driving, globalpolitical evolution that, in the second period of its trajectory (see Table 1), assumedthe form of “global (sometimes called “hegemonic”) leadership”6

The concept of the long (or “hegemonic”) cycles of the “rise and decline ofworld powers” is familiar to students of world politics, and it highlights princi-pally the role of leading states, and of the imperial challengers that squared offagainst them. It also helps to establish the time-location of the global politicalsystem.

As shown in Table 2, as of 2005, long cycle LC10 has moved from the initialphase of Agenda-setting (1975–2000) to that of Coalition-building. Agenda-settingshook up the comforts and certainties of the post-World War II world, and placednew problems on the list of world priorities. Whereas the successes of the industrialrevolution brought in its train environmental dangers, the information–scientificrevolution produced nuclear threats to human survival. The collapse of the Sovietbloc cleared the way for creating a majority-community of world democracies,and this came to pass in the next phase, that of Coalition-building.

Even while the United States is still filling the (informal) role of leadershipassumed in 1940s, the system of global politics is now in the preparatory phases ofa new “macro-decision” (selection for new global leadership). On the analogy of afour-year electoral cycle, global leadership has moved into the lame duck season,anticipating a coming (s)electoral test. In the current phase, the principal questionis: How will the key players of the global political system line up in view of theapproaching problem of re-selection?

COALITION FOR RENEWED GLOBAL LEADERSHIP

The Coalition-building that began in 2000 is a period of new alignments, andrealignments. The opening sentence of a recent (National Intelligence Council2004, p. 9) report declares: “At no time since the formation of the Western alliancesystem in 1949 have the shape and nature of international alignments been in sucha state of flux.” In previous cycles this has been the time when blocs were startingto form that then squared off in generation-long global wars to select new globalleadership. A classic example of such a formation is the “balance of power” thatarose in Europe in the two to three decades prior to 1914 when the European systemof states, after a period of uncertainty, came to line up into two opposing campsthat ultimately faced off in World Wars I and II, but also resolved the question ofglobal leadership.

The current phase is equally likely to be increasingly influenced by competitionfor global leadership, one that is likely to set in even more actively in the third

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decade of this century. This might take the form of opposition to the sitting,status quo world power or else reflect the need to line up a winning coalitionthat would sustain renewed global leadership that, if and when it prevails over theinevitable challengers, or coalitions of challengers, would emerge from that processin the following one-two decades. The respective positions of i.a. China, India,Russia, and the European Union, and the United States in relation to these issueswill be closely watched and their geopolitical positioning carefully monitored.The general tendency is toward deconcentration, most clearly economic but alsopolitical.

Since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989–91 the concept of “multipolarity”has served as a source of one alternative vision. That is a notion that used to beadvocated prominently by the President of France, but also one that at various timeswas also espoused by leaders in i.a. Moscow, Beijing, and New Delhi (relevantdevelopments include the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the East Asiansummit held in Beijing in December 2005). Lacking in detail, it harks back to late-19th century conceptions of balance of power just mentioned. At bottom, and inpresent conditions, multipolarity is a product of deconcentration, and is a counterto unipolarity that is seen to have arisen from the United States’ post-Cold Warpredominance.

Do world conditions in the coming decade or two trend toward multipolar-ity? Measured in terms of raw power, military force distributions at the globallevel (nuclear-missile-space and air-naval) suggest unipolarity but at the regionallevel the situation is less clear. On the other hand, the distribution of economicpower (in GNP terms) indicates, with the anticipated rise of China and India,a situation that is turning increasingly multipolar. The mounting for oil and gasin the world economy, hence rising prices, enhance the wealth, and influence,of the energy producers, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Iraq, or Venezuela.In terms of institutional power (that is the power to influence the decisions ofinternational organizations, in summits, UN bodies, global financial institutions,world trade talks) the situation appears even more fluid, marked by ad hoc coali-tions. In other words, the strategic option of multipolarity may not be easilydismissed.

But there is alternative conjecture, arguing that a similarly strong focus ofcontemporary coalitioning will be the possibility of an “alliance of democracies.”It is a hallmark of this current, Coalition-building, phase that, accounting for overone-half of the world’s population, democracies have now (for the first time ever)acquired a majority position, a condition that favors cooperation and makes warless likely among a large portion of the world’s peoples. That is why arguably theother strategic option, that of democracy, has a good chance of prevailing, and whythe odds for the long term may lie on the side of democratic institutions, even at theglobal level. The democratic “lineage” (the sequence of democratic-leaning worldpowers) runs through a millennium of global political evolution and is closelylinked to democratization (the worldwide spread of democratic practices).

All in all, we are still early in the Coalition-building phase, with maybe twomore decades to go, and much is yet to happen. Our framework suggests thatthe major institutional innovation of the current long cycle will be securing a

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democratic base for future global governance but that base is unlikely to be fully“operational” until after it had been “selected,” say after 2050.

IMPERIAL TEMPTATION?

A rounded conception of the two preparatory phases of the next long cycle drawsattention to the “lame duck” feature of this season of world politics. At a timewhen the “sitting” world power is past the phase of executing its primary agenda,that whose execution placed it in office in the first place, and whose major achieve-ments involved the defense of clusters of autonomous states from the designs ofimperial powers, friction and uncertainty arise, powered by hubris, that tend toprompt projects that amount to an “imperial detour.” A case in point, and a sig-nificant current example, is the Iraq war of 2003. For in the moment of transitionaway from one completed (learning) cycle of global leadership, world politics ispoised uneasily between the historically familiar form of large-scale political rulethat is “empire,” on the one side, and “global organization,” as the wave of thefuture, on the other. The incumbents of the office of global leadership are tornbetween the “traditional” pull of empire and the beckoning but uncertain promiseof global organization. Their primary agenda will have tackled the then urgentglobal problems but as these problems have been met, they then tend to slip into“traditional” patterns and yield to imperial temptation.

Those who succumb to the lure of empire ignore one of the principal rulesof their “trade.” For the essence of global leadership is “global network control.”It lies in a skillful employment of forces of global reach for constructing, andmaintaining, a worldwide arrangement of fleets, bases, and alliances that yields“command of the seas” or, more up-to-date, possibly “space control.” A special-ization in global network control has the corollary of abandoning projects thatentail continental or imperial-scale conquests at regional or national levels. Oneclassic example of this strategy has been England’s abandonment of European ter-ritorial ambitions as a pre-condition of its global aspirations. Powers that becomeentangled in pacification campaigns, colonial wars, “nation-building,” wars “onthe mainland of Asia,” run great if avoidable risks.

Past the second (learning) cycle (1750–1850), Britain’s Boer War (1899–1902)offers an illuminating example of this structural problem. But a similar pattern hasalso been observed in the “lame duck” seasons following each one of the threeearlier cycles of global politics. In the Portuguese and Dutch cases, they markedthe end of the creative phases of their global experience; in the first British cycle,it was the war of American independence that brought forth a continental coalitionthat heralded the end of what the historians call the “first empire,” and a redesign ofBritain’s strategy in the world system, one that made possible the “Pax Britannica”of the 19th century.

This “imperial detour” is a structural problem of the “lame duck” phases ofthe “global leadership” period of global political evolution that is troublesome butnot beyond remedy. The evolution of global politics rejected “world empire” at itsearly stages, defeated several attempts at imperial domination in the past severalcenturies, and works to discourage it in the 21st century.

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GLOBAL WAR, OR DEMOCRATIC PROCESS?

The most recent U.S. National Intelligence Council report (2004, p. 98) declaresthat “the likelihood of great power conflict escalating into total war in the next 15years is lower than in any other time in the past century.” That statement accordswell with our own analysis. But for those seeking to peer beyond 2020 therecomes the next phase of the current cycle, its “selection” phase of Macrodecision(c. 2026–2050). In the four to five earlier cycles this was the phase that generatedglobal wars (not because of some local conflict but due to the decay of the globalpolitical structure), but one also that generated new leadership. A consensus ofworld system history scholars judges this a period, beyond 2025, to be fraughtwith dangers of large-scale warfare (Denemark, 1999, pp. 63–64). In fact, such a“worst case scenario” cannot be excluded from an assessment of world security twoto three decades ahead. But our long-standing argument has been that in principlethere is no reason why in this case the process might not assume a new form, in thatthe global polity could arrive at a collective decision about leadership and globalpriorities without resort to large-scale violence because substitutes for global warcan arise from within the democratic community. For it is the chief characteristic ofdemocratic procedures that they are explicit substitutes for war (Modelski, 1999).

Consider two scenarios concerning the form such a macrodecision might as-sume.7 In the first, an effective global democratic community, comprising not onlythe majority of the world’s population, but also the preponderance of its military,economic, and technological resources, and forming a majority “party” within in-ternational bodies, in fact guarantees world peace. This arrangement might presentsuch unassailable strength that a direct military challenge would obviously be un-productive, if not utterly disastrous (though it might induce asymmetric conflicts).But such a scenario calls for constructive initiatives and some structural innovationin the institution of global leadership.

The second, multipolar, scenario, which is more “traditional,” allows for al-liances between the several poles of that system, and within the United Nations,hence also between democratic and non-democratic states. This alternative couldreduce the chances of a polarizing divide but is basically opportunistic and courtsthe dangers of large-scale military confrontation conceivably leading up to a nu-clear catastrophe.

To recapitulate, global politics is now approaching, say in two to three decadestime, the end of the “term of office” of “sitting global leadership,” but the proceduresof renewing its mandate remain uncertain. Repeated failures to agree on a newstructure for the UN Security Council are a symptom of that uncertainty. Yet ineven longer perspective, the process of search for new organization to tackle globalproblems must continue.

DEMOCRATIZATION

Table 2 showed global political evolution synchronized with three related and co-evolving processes that make up globalization at the agent level. One is political(long cycles) but the two others are social, and economic.8 Let us briefly commenton these relevant but basically contextual matters.

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Democratization is the social process that favors and propels the diffusion ofdemocratic practices worldwide. It has a period of one-quarter millennium, andis now in the (decisive, or selectional) stage of “democratic transition,” that isjust past the tipping point of establishing a worldwide majority of democracies,and building a base for future democratic governance. This global evolutionaryprocess of the human species acquiring the elements of democratic practice canbe represented by a learning curve (Devezas and Modelski, 2003, p. 845) thatshows how an increasing portion of the world’s population has come to live indemocracies. The first stage (see Table 2), one of early adopters, unfolded in thedecades prior to World War I (at about the 10 percent level); by 1975, a nucleusof democracies had emerged (reaching the 40ies) that moved, at the close of theCold War, to a majority position in the world population.

Since 1850, democratization encountered a series of militant and competingmovements. These were anarchist–nihilist groups prior to World War I, Nazi andCommunist forces through much of the 20th century, and since the late 1970s,developments in the Arab and Moslem worlds. These may be viewed as succes-sive challenges to democracy, and resistance to the spread of democratic valuesand practices. The earlier attempts demonstrably failed to garner sustained globalsupport. Recently most prominent has been the Islamist–al Qaeda challenge, evenraising the call for a new “caliphate,” harking back to Islam’s classical empires.

Each phase produced its own methods and tactics. In recent decades terrorismhas become prominent at the global level. A study of terrorist incidents showsthem to be in a growing phase but it is too early to tell whether the trend mightyet abort, or whether it will cumulate into a more powerful phenomenon (Devezasand Santos, 2005).

THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

The process of rise and decline of world powers (the long cycles that drive globalpolitical evolution) has run in tandem (except at lower scales) with the rise and de-cline of leading industrial sectors—the driving forces of economic globalization.Both are evolutionary processes in that they exhibit, at the minimum, variation(innovation) and selection (power or market competition). They are self-similar(symmetric across scale), synchronized, and nested, in those K-waves, and ini-tially located in world powers. And K-waves, while supplying the wherewithal ofeconomic globalization, also are the driving forces of global economic evolution.

The computer-internet K-wave (or K19, see Table 2) took off in the UnitedStates, and more precisely in California’s Silicon Valley at about 1973–75. Around2000, after experiencing a (selectional) shake-out, it entered upon high growthmoment likely to last some two to three decades. While shaping and reshaping theglobal economy it launched a burst of innovative energy spearheaded principally byAmerican enterprise. Its significance lies in the qualitative changes it has wroughtin the world economy.

K19 serves as a productive platform that tends to support a bid for a second“term” of global leadership. For the United States, it has boosted American pro-ductivity, and renewed its status as a “lead economy” (that observers in the 1980s

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and 1990s thought was “in decline”). Just as K17 and K18 provided the sinewsof American power in World Wars I and II, K19 induced a “military revolution,”enhancing the U.S. capacity for global reach and equipping its forces with high-precision guided weapons earlier than others.

However, past 2000, K19 is now in the phases of high growth, and advantagenow increasingly shifts from early to late adopters. Producers outside the UnitedStates have mastered the manufacture of computers and the writing of software,and are now part of the cell phone–Internet explosion. The relative advantage ofU.S. producers and users of the new technology is declining, competition rises, andnew productive centers, as in China, India, or Brazil, emerge, while older centers,as in Europe or Japan, retool. At this stage economic globalization reinforcesmultipolarity. But the United States’ status as lead economy in the InformationRevolution, as well as their position as open democratic society, are at this timetwo of the factors making probable American re-selection to a second term ofglobal leadership in an evolving global democratic polity.

A TIMETABLE FOR GLOBALIZATION

All of this goes to show that political globalization can usefully be analyzed asglobal political evolution, and also tells us a good deal about the agenda of globalpolitical problems for the 21st century.

1) For political globalization, the priority problem (in long perspective, since1850) has been the construction of global organization. That is a majorinnovation whose completion cannot be anticipated in any shorter time framethan that of one to two centuries.

2) As part of that process, the agenda of the current phase of political globaliza-tion, since 1975, has been the consolidation of a democratic base for globalgovernance in the next century. A “democratic transition” to a majority-democratic world system is the principal characteristic of the current phase ofdemocratization that may be expected to achieve the widespread diffusion ofsuch basic democratic institutions as elections. This would tend to facilitate theavoidance of global war as a mechanism of selection of new leadership, and ofnew global policies and obviously is a high- priority problem.

3) At the agency (or actor) level of “long cycles” the principal innovation of thecurrent learning cycle is the consolidation of a democratic base. The U.S. firstterm of global leadership is in a “lame duck” season. More precisely, however,we now find the global political system in the “Coalition-building” phase ofLC10. The priority long cycle problem for the coming decades is the selection,or re-selection, of global leadership. Political alliances are shaping up with theview to determining that selection process, and the platform of global policies tobe implemented. Those forwarding the project of global organization, by beinginstrumental in building the democratic base, are more likely to be successful.

4) In a wider context, it also suggests that the type of analysis developed formodeling world system evolution (as in Devezas and Modelski, 2003) and

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employed here, is also relevant, and applicable, to illuminating the severalother dimensions of globalization: economic, social, and cultural.

An evolutionary account serves well as a timetable of political globalization. Itsuggests that global politics is indeed in the midst of an epochal transformation toan enhanced form of world organization but also that the very great weight of thatprocess demands much time for its completion. It also suggests what is achievable,and at what pace, and what needs to be placed on a longer time horizon.

NOTES

1. The Foreign Policy magazine has published annually since 2005 the A. T. Kearney-Foreign Policy“Globalization Index” (www.atkearney.com), which employs a variety of data to measure the globalentanglement of 62 countries that account for over 80 percent of the world population. In 2005,Singapore ranked 1st on that index, followed by Ireland, Switzerland, and the United States. Chinaplaced 54, and Iran held the last place, at 62. The index measures economic integration, personalcontacts, technological connectivity, and political engagement.

2. Globalization is placed in the context of world system evolution in the modern era in Modelski(2000, pp. 43–49).

3. Each period of global political evolution is an instance of the working of a learning algorithm (i.e., ofthe enhanced Lewontin-Campbell heuristic: g-c-t-r: generate-cooperate-test-regenerate, Modelski,2004). In turn, each such period is driven (in a nested, self-similar process at the agency level) byfour long cycles, each of which represents one phase of that algorithm.

4. It is the conjecture underlying this argument that these learning processes reveal a program (or setof rules) that actuates the social evolution of the human species, via a process of extended groupselection. The human species tends toward self-organization at multiple levels (including also atthe species-hierarchical level), over time in a cascade of (autocatalytic) learning algorithms, andin such a manner as to give rise to interactors and replicators, and to constitute a lineage, assuringcontinuity. For general context see Modelski (2000, 2004) and Devezas and Modelski (2003).

5. The context of this section is a set of ideas known originally as the theory of long cycles andmore recently described as “evolutionary world politics”. Accounting for that shift was the dawn-ing realization that “long cycles” in fact are an evolutionary process. It is not a “general the-ory” of world politics but an account of certain critical processes of transformation. The longcycle is a pattern of regularity in global politics but as an evolutionary process it charts changerather than a circular process of repetition. See i.a., The Evolutionary World Politics Home Page athttp://faculty.washington.edu/modelski/ .

6. Ibid.7. Our analysis suggests that the current long cycle will culminate in another selection for global

leadership, mainly because the global political system is not yet ready for a fuller measure of globalgovernance that will have to be anchored in an extended democratic base, yet to be consolidated.

8. The fourth agent-level global process is the evolution of world opinion (a product of opinion leaders,the media, and the world of learning) that early in the 21st century is in the phase of discovering,defining, and institutionalizing global solidarity (1975–2080), a process that moves ahead with therecognition of common interests in global security and human survival and that will form the basisof common action in the 22nd century.

REFERENCES

Denemark, R. 1999. World system history. International Studies Review 1(1): 43–76.Devezas, T. and Modelski, G. 2003. Power law behavior and world system evolution: A

millennial learning process. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 70: 819–859.

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—2006. The Portuguese as system-builders in the XVth–XVIth centuries: A case studyon the role of technology in the evolution of the world system. Globalizations 3(4):503–519.

— and H. Santos. 2006, The emergence of modern terrorism. In Kondratieff waves, warfare,and world security, Ed. T. Devezas, pp. 245–249. Amsterdam: IOS Press.

Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D., and Perraton, J. 1999. Global transformations: Politics,economics, and culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Modelski, G. 1999. From leadership to organization: The evolution of global politics. InThe future of global conflict. Eds. Bornschier, V., and Chase-Dunn, C., pp. 11–39.London: Sage Studies in International Sociology.

—2000. World system evolution. In World system history: The social science of long-termchange. Ed. Denemark, R., et al., pp. 24–53. New York: Routledge.

—2002. Long cycles in global politics. Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (eolss.net)(1.35.1.8).

—2004. Beyond analogy. Retrieved from: The evolutionary World Politics Home Page,http://faculty.washington.edu/modelski/index/html

—2006. Global political evolution, long cycles, and K-waves. In Kondratieff waves, warfare,and world security. Ed. T. Devezas, pp. 293–302. Amsterdam: IOS Press.

—and Thompson, W. R. 1996. Leading sectors and world powers: The co-evolution ofglobal economics and politics, Columbia: South Carolina University Press.

National Intelligence Council (NIC) (2004), Mapping the global future. Honolulu: Univer-sity Press of the Pacific.

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political globalization is global political evolution

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