John L Gulick

Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century is an almost unfathomably ambitious and complex work. Its monumentality derives from Arrighi’s conviction that the best way to handicap the possible futures of the world capitalist geo-economy is to analyze the structural evolution of this global system, an evolution spanning more than five centuries; the genius of the work rests in the distinctive approach that Arrighi takes. At the core of his approach is the identification of those long-term trends and accreted characteristics – one might call them “systemic contradictions” – that promise to send the world capitalist geo-economy in a radically different developmental direction as US hegemony wanes. Arrighi’s assessment of these contradictions compel him to make a provocative suggestion: in all likelihood, no singular concentration of state and economic power possesses the territorial scale or the organizational capacities required to lead the global system through another round of restructuring and expansion. Properly framed, this illuminating insight could serve as the starting point for a theoretical exploration of the socio-ecological constraints to global capitalist reproduction, but such is a journey (mostly) not taken by Arrighi in The Long Twentieth Century. In fact, to the degree that he subsequently contemplates the prospect of a China-centered reconstitution of the world geo-economy, Arrighi marginalizes the question of global systemic contradictions altogether.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has gradually drawn the natural resources of the Russian Far East into Northeast Asia’s economic field of gravity. Contrary to what many experts predicted in the early 1990s, the opening of these natural resources to the wider region has generated a substantial dose of interstate friction. Since the turn of the century, much of this friction has revolved around Chinese and Japanese competition to secure hydrocarbon fuels through pipelines transecting the Russian Far East. This competition is mediated by a complex and contradictory situation: Moscow and Beijing are trying to bolster Russo-Chinese partnership through enhanced commercial exchange, but actors in Russian provinces bordering Northeast China remain wary of rising Chinese demographic and economic influence in the area. Nonetheless, the intransigent geopolitical disposition of the US and the changing configuration of world energy markets have given nearly irresistible momentum to expanded Russo-Chinese energy cooperation, even if this portends Russia’s partial sidelining of Japan as a customer of east Siberian oil. However, it is still unclear whether expanded energy cooperation alone can pave the way toward genuine geo-economic integration in the Russian Far East–Northeast China border zone.

This paper evaluates Peter Gowan’s musings on the topic of a U.S.-centered “capitalist world-empire.” Gowan’s heterodox concept of a “capitalist world-empire” is intellectually defensible. And his claim that U.S. hegemony is historically unique, because unlike previous dominant powers the U.S. has been able to distinctly mold the accumulation regimes and security environments of its would-be rivals in the core, is more than convincing. However, Gowan tends to overstate the degree to which the U.S. in the 1990’s enjoyed a productive sector revival, rather than a mere superinflation of dollar-denominated assets. This tendency prevents him from anticipating just how summarily the U.S. would ditch consensual approaches to managing the capitalist world-economy once the Wall Street bubble collapsed, and hence from appreciating just how fed up Western European and East Asian elites would become with the predatory character of U.S. hegemony in decay. In conclusion the paper argues that while the U.S. may have neither the resources nor the credibility to politically control the global division of labor, something akin to a U.S.-East Asian geo-economic bloc may be in the process of forming. This is so because the Chinese and Japanese economic growth models remain wedded to the underwriting of the U.S.’ seigniorage privileges, and because past and present frictions between China and Japan stand in the way of tighter Sino-Japanese political coordination.