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ST2 : Penser Le Changement International Systemic Change 1 CONGRÈS AFSP STRASBOURG 2011 ST2 : Penser le changement international Golub, Philip American University of Paris (AUP) [email protected] Systemic Change Over Long Periods: East Asia’s Reemergence and the Two Waves of Globalization Synopsis: The re-emergence of East Asia and of other formerly peripheral world regions represents the most significant systemic transformation since the European industrial revolution. Wealth and power, long concentrated in a handful of states and a small fraction of the world population, is diffusing to post-colonial societies that have become, or are fast becoming, active units of the world system, shaping the global environment rather than simply being conditioned by it. As a result, we are witnessing a gradual but historically speaking rapid return to the conditions of pluralism and relative international equality that prevailed prior to the fracture between the “West and the rest” during the first wave of globalization in the nineteenth century. This paper examines systemic change over long periods and argues that the end of the long cycle of Euro-Atlantic ascendancy calls for a multidisciplinary rethinking of modernity to deal with the intellectual challenge posed. Keywords: globalization, core, periphery, empire, modernity Twenty years ago, when most American and European observers were focused on the end of the Cold War and celebrating the supposedly definitive ‘triumph’ of the West, Janet Abu-Lughod presciently anticipated the end of the era of “European/Western hegemony” and a “return to the relative balance of multiple centers” that preceded the age of western empire and industry. [Abu-Lughod, 1991, 370-371] Since then, the movement towards a polycentric systemic configuration has quickened rather dramatically as various postcolonial countries have exited the periphery and consolidated their emergent position as growth centers of the world capitalist economy. Though the dynamic extends beyond East Asia, the most significant advances have occurred there. Indeed, the region is gradually but irresistibly 2 regaining the economic position held prior to the European industrial revolution as one of the world’s centers of wealth creation, credit and trade. The results, discussed below, include a new geography of world production, finance and trade. A fundamental re-patterning of international relations is underway, the full effects of which will become apparent as the Asian economic revolution unfolds. This paper argues that we are witnessing a systemic transformation comparable to the European industrial revolution in terms of its importance and effects: the re-emergence of East Asia as well as other postcolonial world regions marks the end of a long historical cycle during which wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of a small number of euro- Atlantic states. The hierarchical international system constructed in the late modern period that was centered in the Atlantic and ordered by the West, and which established a global division of labor dividing the world into dominant cores and dependent peripheries, is giving way to a horizontal world system organized around multiple semi-autonomous cores – a world system without a center of gravity. This movement marks a return, under conditions of far deeper interdependence and incomparably denser inter-linkages than the past, to the decentred systemic configuration of the early modern period in which various économies mondes coexisted under conditions of relative equality. (Abu-Lughod, 1991; Braudel, 1986; Pomeranz, 2000) The discussion is divided in three parts. The first describes the main features and effects of the East Asian developmental dynamic. The second places it in long historic perspective and the third addresses the challenge it poses for theory and understandings of globalization and modernity. I. EAST ASIA’S RE-EMERGENCE East Asia has been engaged in a time-compressed process of economic expansion and ascent, the intensity, spatial scope and duration of which have been remarkable by historic standards. Beginning with Japan in the 1960s the regional growth dynamic spread successively, in wave like formations, to the Newly Industrialized Countries of North East Asia (South Korea, Taiwan), to the “emerging” countries of South East Asia (ASEAN 4) and, over the past two decades, to China. Sustained economic growth over long periods – 6-8 percent in the case of the Newly Industrialized Countries (NIC) of North East Asia (Taiwan, South Korea), 6-8 percent for the ASEAN 4 (Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia), and over 10 percent per annum on average over the last three decades in the case of China, has irreversibly transformed the region and had world transforming effects. The NIC’s and Singapore have successfully caught up with the most advanced economies while many other countries that in the 1960s and 1970s appeared condemned to lasting “underdevelopment” and endemic poverty have exited the ‘Third World’ and become middle income societies. While varying initial conditions have resulting in differentiated outcomes, there is no question that we are dealing with a general dynamic that has unfolded over time and space and extends to virtually the entire region today. A brief statistical review highlights what has been said: East Asia’s aggregate share of constantly rising world gross domestic product (GDP), in purchasing power parity (PPP), has risen from approximately 10 percent in 1980 to around 24 percent in 2009, a share expected to reach 32 percent of a doubled world GDP in 2020. (Graph 1) Asia as a whole is expected to account for more than 40 percent of the world total, with most of the increase coming from East Asia and the rest from India. Per capita GDP, a more reliable measure of development than aggregate GDP, underlines the trend even more clearly, rising spectacularly in nearly all 3 countries of the region.1 Since 1980, per capita GDP (PPP) has multiplied by 12 in South Korea, by over 7 in Singapore and Thailand, and by 6 in Malaysia and Indonesia. In China, per capita GDP has risen even more spectacularly from a low $250 to $6778 in current international dollars, a 27-fold increase that reflects the intensity of growth and its cumulative impact from 1979 onwards. (Table 1.) China, which accounted for a mere 2 percent of world GDP (PPP) in 1980, is now the world’s second largest economy and is expected to equal the United States in 2020 (around 20 percent). The Chinese economy will be three times larger than Japan’s, the share of which has fallen from 9 percent to around 6 percent today, and more than twice as large as the three mature industrial economies of Northeast Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) combined (8-9 percent).2 Graph 1. Asia’s Share of World GDP (PPP) 1980-2020 Derived from UN Statistics Division and IMF These statistics obviously provide a flattened picture of the regional transformation that, in ways akin to the European Industrial Revolution, has disrupted longstanding balances between urban and rural areas, generated new social stratifications and tensions, and created large-scale environmental problems and infrastructure bottlenecks that raise questions about its long range sustainability. Modernization has been an uneven and unequal process, leading to significant irregularities among countries as well as within countries between cities and rural areas or, as in the case of China, between the internationalized coastal areas and the much poorer continental heartland. An economic and social cartography of the region highlighting these irregularities would make apparent often sharp spatial and social disparities: the areas of wealth concentration around the dominant urban points of the capitalist structure, the intermediate productive zones supplying these dominant centers, and the internal peripheries left for the moment by the wayside.3 Nonetheless, uneven development does not disconfirm the general trend or undermine the thesis presented here. It is inherent to what Braudel calls the “capitalist dynamic which, as European modernization in the nineteenth century shows, feeds on social and spatial unevenness.” (Braudel, 1985) Indeed, the international disparities observable in East Asia can be usefully compared to the European Industrial Revolution, the diffusion of which proceeded at different rhythms in various parts of the continent 4 and which was characterized by sharp 1 Notable exceptions include the Philippines, which has underperformed when compared to other countries of the regions due to the persistence of oligarchic social structures that go back to the period of Spanish colonization, as well as semi-autarkic totalitarian states (Myanmar, North Korea) that present no significance for this analysis. 2 International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Economic Outlook Database, April 2008. 3 For a fuller discussion see Philip Golub, “East Asia in the World Political Economy”, in Cartographare il presente, Centro dei Studii Historichi, University of Bologna, 2007. 4 Industrialization and urbanization in continental Europe was much slower and far less intense than in Great Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. France’s share of world manufacturing output was equal to 4 social inequalities. East Asia’s capitalist dynamic has in fact been generally far less socially unequal than Europe’s in the nineteenth century, and remains more balanced than in other postcolonial world regions such as Latin America. Indeed, relative equity can be considered a significant factor of
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