LONG-CYCLES IN GLOBAL POLITICS

 

 

 

 

George Modelski

 

 

 

 

 

Prepared for  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS

EOLSS Publishers Co Ltd, Oxford, OX1 1BN , U.K.

 

 

 

 

Keywords:

 

 

 

Long-cycles, world powers, global leadership, challengers,

global wars, global political problems, democratization, global leading sectors,

evolutionary world politics.

 

 

 

 

Contents

 

The study of long cycles of global politics

 

                        What are long cycles

                        Their place in IR literature

                        The ‘existence’ of long cycles

 

A brief history of global politics:  West and post-European

 

                        From Eurasia to the Atlantic-Pacific

                        Portugal

                        The Dutch Republic

                        Britain I and II

                        The United States

 

Basic concepts

 

                        World powers and global leadership

                        Global wars and their alternatives

                        Transitions and challengers

                        Core alliances and coalitions

                        Global agenda and global public goods

                        Innovations and democratic deficit

                        Leading sectors and K-waves

                        Democratization and the democratic lineage

 

Evolutionary explanation

 

                        A broader perspective

                        Long cycles drive global political evolution

                        Global politics and world system evolution

                        At the edge of order and chaos?

 

From leadership to global organization

 

 

 

 

Abstract

 

 

                        The study of long cycles attempts to capture a critical element of regularity in the operation of world politics in the modern era.   In the first place, it offers a description, based on systematic empirical evidence, of the rise and decline of a succession of named world powers since the 16th century:  Portugal, the Dutch Republic, Britain, and the United States of America.    For their time, the global order led by world powers was superior to classical imperial arrangements.   But the working of long cycles is also shown to be closely linked to a series of global wars that have been a marked feature of that period and that were contests between world powers, those aspiring to global leadership and others challenging them.   While the world powers constructing and animating the global political system, and successfully responding to priority global problems have been sea powers of global reach, with open societies and lead economies,  the challengers that rose to oppose them  were regional powers with substantial land armies, and less open societies and economies.   The rise and decline of world powers can be seen to be synchronized with the rise and decline of leading industrial and commercial sectors in the global economy.   It also actuates world democratization, in as much the world powers have constituted the core of the democratic lineage.

 

                        Secondly, it explains the observed regularities of long cycles as one mechanism of evolutionary world politics and, more broadly, of world system evolution.   In conditions of high evolutionary potential and in response to major global problems that mechanism activates innovation, cooperation, and selection of global policies.   In turn, a sequence of long cycles builds new global structures and effectuates global political evolution.   Such evolution tends toward the replacement of the global leadership-global war sequence by increasingly institutionalized forms of world organization.   In the third place, the study of long cycles therefore offers a prediction of new institutional developments in global politics.