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Interview with Giovanni Arrighi Special Contribution: Interview with Giovanni Arrighi “At Some Point Something Has To Give” – Declining U.S. Power, the Rise of China, and an Adam Smith for the Contemporary Left1 Conducted and transcribed by Kevan Harris Princeton University iovanni Arrighi (1937-2009) spent rise of everyone else, or to paraphrase Alice his life thinking and writing about Amsden (and Zakaria himself), what we are G what he saw on his well-traveled seeing is the “Rise of the Rest.” Zakaria path: liberation movements in Africa, writes, “Billions of people are escaping from worker rebellion in Italy, global inequality abject poverty. The world will be enriched between North and South, the military and and ennobled as they become consumers, financial limits of US power, and the producers, inventors, thinkers, dreamers, and economic rise of China. In his many articles doers. This is all happening because of and books, including an unplanned trilogy American ideas and actions. For 60 years the on the origins and workings of global United States has pushed countries to open capitalism, Arrighi grappled with the their markets, free up their politics, and complexities of history and the limitations of embrace trade and technology – to learn the existing economic and political theories. secrets of our success.” He goes on to say This rethinking was fully on display in his that rising protectionist and isolationist final book, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages sentiments in the U.S. today go directly of the Twenty-First Century. Although I against this track record of success. How interviewed Arrighi on May 18, 2008, much truth is there in Zakaria’s argument? several months before the financial meltdown in global markets, his prescient Giovanni Arrighi: Well, there is one statements are relevant for the crises we element of truth there. The United States did face today. Arrighi passed away in June indeed push countries to liberalize trade. 2009. His scholarly and intellectual And it is true that the liberalization of trade tradition continues on at the Giovanni in the world, generally, has enabled many Arrighi Center for Global Studies at The countries to industrialize and “modernize.” Johns Hopkins University. However, in spite of widespread “modernization,” “industrialization,” etc. of Kevan Harris: Fareed Zakaria, in his book “the Rest,” the income gap between the The Post-American World, says that the North and the Rest – what used to be the United States is no longer the country of Second and Third Worlds – has not been “number ones.” We don’t have the tallest reduced much. So, on the whole, the wealthy building in the world, the biggest mall, the remain wealthy, and the poor remain poor. biggest company, the biggest airplane, or However, starting in the 1980s, there has even the biggest movie industry. Zakaria been major diversification and unevenness believes, however, this is not a world of outcomes within the global South. Some defined by the decline of America but by the regions have done well, most notably East Copyright ©2012, American Sociological Association, Volume 18, Number 2, Pages 157-166 ISSN 1076-156X Interview with Giovanni Arrighi 158 Asia and to a lesser extent South Asia. Some neoliberal economic principles, and through regions have done very badly, experiencing this a fusion of militarism (public and social, economic, and political catastrophes private) and market fundamentalism has – first and foremost Sub-Saharan Africa, but pervaded the reunification of the world also Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, economy since the 1970s. This is and the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. emblematic of a more general belief on the So, it is true that on the whole there is not an US and European left that participation in absolute decline of the United States as the world market carries with it the much as the relative rise of certain regions. subjugation of a country’s population to the First Europe and Japan narrowed the gap in prevailing international political and relation to the United States in the decades economic order. There is similarity here immediately following the Second World with Zakaria’s argument, except that Klein War, and then more recently certain regions sees this as disastrous for the global South. in the global South. But this has been Is this a better way to view the last 30 years? counterbalanced by the widening of the gap in other places. GA: Well, this other way of viewing the last 30 years is as problematic as the first view. Also, in terms of periods, one has to It is problematic because, just for the distinguish the 1980s and 1990s, which had countries you mentioned, only Chile meets been rather bad for most of the global South, the characteristic of having trade and the late 1990s and early 2000s, where liberalization and shock therapies applied by just within China there has been a great a dictatorship. In China, though it may be improvement of living conditions. Zakaria considered a dictatorship, it certainly did not says “billions,” but in fact there have been introduce any shock therapy or rapid hundreds of millions of people uplifted from liberalization and privatization of the kind poverty, according to and as defined by the that was done in Chile and elsewhere. In World Bank. But almost all of them are other cases, these changes were introduced actually in China. So one has to look at what democratically. If you take the 1980s, it was has happened in China and ask if China has a period when Latin American dictatorships lifted hundreds of millions of people out of were in crisis and were displaced by poverty because it followed the advice of the democratic regimes, who then often United States. In my view, China has not introduced these changes in the 1990s. followed that advice. Certainly that’s also the case with the implementation of shock therapy in Russia KH: Let’s turn to another popular book under Yeltsin, where the country had moved about global development, Naomi Klein’s from a Soviet dictatorship to a The Shock Doctrine. Klein argues that free democratically elected leadership. So I think markets did not spread around the world the problem with that type of democratically and peacefully, and that characterization is that the introduction of countries such as Chile, Russia, China, and shock therapies and neoliberal prescriptions most recently, Iraq, were “shocked,” or occurred under diverse circumstances, since subjected to rapid and severe social in many cases the neoliberal changes dislocation as a result of political or occurred during the shift from authoritarian economic catastrophes. Afterwards, regimes to parliamentary democracies. international and local elites subsequently reengineered these societies based on 159 Journal of World-Systems Research In the case that matters most in terms of but also to an historical heritage that doesn’t positive results – that is, China – as Joseph exist elsewhere. Stiglitz and many others have pointed out, they did not follow the prescriptions of For example, two legacies have been crucial Washington at all. They were very gradual in the success of the Chinese reforms. One is and careful, issuing countermeasures to the revolutionary tradition that created very prevent massive unemployment, for equal conditions in the country. China did example. So, again, if we single out China, it not dispossess or destroy the peasantry, as is a case which doesn’t fit in either one of had happened in the Soviet Union, but these views. In fact, there is a convergence uplifted the peasantry through health and of views, between liberals and those on the educational improvements, which were left, which claims that China followed the major achievements before the reforms prescriptions that came out of Washington, began. So they had a large peasantry that whereas in fact they didn’t. So, in a way, supplied not just cheap labor but also large China is the exception that proves the rule masses of small-scale entrepreneurship who that the prescriptions that came out of mobilized this labor locally and translated it Washington in the 1980s and ‘90s were into the growth of the Chinese domestic disastrous rather than beneficial. market, which was crucial in generating the rates of growth that China has been KH: You’ve argued that the world has experiencing. moved from a Washington consensus towards a Beijing consensus, though you Another important legacy was that of the certainly didn’t coin those phrases yourself. late Imperial market economy that had What is the difference between the two, and involved peasants and artisans in widespread are you saying that the rise of China as an market exchanges but was not a capitalist economic power is a model that other market economy, in the sense that it did not countries can follow? lead to massive dispossession of the peasants. So these were characteristics of the GA: Well, the Chinese themselves are very labor force that were rather different than careful in not setting themselves up as a those produced by proletarianization, model. In some ways, the experience of specialization, and divisions of labor of the China is a model in the sense that market kind experienced by the West. These reforms have to be introduced very conditions exist in China because of legacies cautiously, gradually, and always with other that don’t exist elsewhere, nor can they be actions that counter the negative effects of reproduced. For example, in Southern liberalization. From this point of view, in a Africa, there was an extreme dispossession general sense it could be taken as a of the peasantry. prescription that is antithetical and opposite to that of the Washington consensus. So, there is an awareness that different However, unlike the Washington consensus, regions of the global South have different the so-called Beijing consensus goes against legacies and therefore policies have to be the idea that “one size fits all.” The Chinese tailored to these differences.
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