Responding
to Cui Jian-shu’s
“Cyclical
Logic in the Transition of Hegemony:
George
Modelski
Contents
1. Four questions for long cycle theory
Is leadership needed in the world system?
Would the future international system
transition conform to
a
global war model?
Is international power necessarily
sea power?
Does the global political system
evolve cyclically or spirally?
2. China’s peaceful rise, and Long cycle theory
Assessing
Strategic options
Long cycle theory’s predictive
function
In closing
Responding at length to
this well-documented analysis and critique of the “long cycles” research
program is a worthwhile task because it allows us to review a number of
important issues. But we need to
observe right from the start that the title Cui Jian-shu,
the author, chose for his paper: “Cyclical Logic in the Transition of Hegemony”
is itself the first weakness of that recent contribution to World Economics and Politics (
For the theory of long
cycles is in fact neither a study in cyclical logic nor is it an exposition of
“hegemony”. It is a field of research
in world politics that pinpoints periodic regularities in the working of the
global political system over the last half millennium. These regularities form a repetitive beat,
ultimately attributable to the coming and going of generations that activates
and the beat carries a system-building, evolutionary, process. Nor is that program to be confused with the
theory of hegemonic stability or other accounts of hegemonic transition, as is
evident in the table that Cui Jian-shu reproduces but
then ignores, claiming that the use of terms such as global leadership is
nothing but an (American) attempt to conceal a hegemonic design.
The author of “Cyclical
logic…” organizes his discussion as answers to four questions, dealing
respectively with leadership and hegemony, global war, sea power, and
evolutionary logic. These are good
questions, and the present response will follow the same order, and review each
one of them in turn. Rounding up this
debate we shall ask how long cycle theory illuminates the prospects for China’s
“peaceful development”, and what are the grounds for respecting its predictive
capacity.
1. Four questions for long cycle theory
Is leadership needed in the world
political system?
That
is the first, and most important question asked by Cui Jian-shu,
and his own answer is clear: The
world’s political system does not need leadership because, he argues, it is an
anarchy of independent states [1] For
him moreover, there is no difference between leadership, as understood in long
cycle theory, and hegemony, as used in hegemonic stability theory (now largely
abandoned), or as understood in common parlance going back to the
classics. That is why he maintains that
“an international system free from hegemony is indispensable to independence,
variety, and effective competition”, and that is why he claims that “an attempt
to dominate the international system by a world power” will fail. The attempt to make hegemony look benign by resort to the
concept of “public goods’ created by it is no more than a sham, he claims. Leadership, in this context, is for him
nothing but hegemony, and that means domination and exploitation. This raises two questions for
examination: does the world system need
global political organization, and is leadership the best form of such
organization?
In
response, consider first the matter of terminology of this debate. The concept used in all recent long cycle
work is global leadership. It
connotes leadership that arises in response to global problems: those that
concern the world system as a whole, such as global security, world trade, and
inter-continental exchanges more broadly.
It needs to be construed narrowly, and it is not intended to suggest
omnipotence, or to stand for armed intervention in national and other ‘domestic
affairs’. Global leadership is not to
be used interchangeably with “world
leadership”, a term used in the early 1980ies, but since discontinued,
following the publication, in 1988, of Documenting
Global Leadership” [2].
Second,
the global political system is not (as some other scholars also maintain)
anarchic, that is in a state of lawlessness, or absence of authority or
lack of governance. It is not a world
government, but it certainly is a system that has been evolving, in the modern
era, toward a degree of political organization that is substantial but still
leaves much to be accomplished. Since
about 1500, the main thrust of global-system building has been in the work of a
succession of world powers exercising “global leadership”:
Third,
a system whose human population has multiplied at least 25-fold between 1000
and 2000 would be expected to develop new forms of global organization,
arranged in a federalist-type, multiple-level format, providing not only for
local and national but also regional and global political institutions. The
precise form the global political structures will assume in decades and centuries
to come remains to be seen. In the
modern era since about 1500, the second period of global political evolution, the standard choice
has been between world empire, and global leadership. Remarkably, successive attempts to pursue the
imperial type of rule have been invariably and regularly defeated. But global leadership is not the only
possible alternative to a world empire.
Theoretically and arguably, it is a transitional form that is evolving,
via system-building in the third period, into a form of organization that is
commensurate with emerging global problems. [3]
Global
leadership is about solving new problems and forming new institutions, more
specifically about global system-building or, for short, system-building.
[3] For the
social organization of humanity does not pre-exist as part of the ‘environment’
but has to be constructed,. Global
leadership itself is an institution that has to be built (based on classical,
and Italian models) from the simpler forms of the Portuguese, and the Dutch, to
the more powerful rounded ones devised by British and American political
organizations. Those who opposed them
in global wars were aspirants to imperial power, striving for continental
supremacy. “System-building” is, of
course, an ideal-typical concept that highlights important features of the
experience of global leadership but does not exhaust that experience. In contrast to hegemony’s emphasis on
“order”, system-building is, of course, innovating, creating new forms of
organization (elements of the global political system) and improved conditions
for global exchanges (global communications and trade). In that sense, it too is creative of order,
in the form of global public goods that may initially yield high returns for
the innovators but whose benefits will – via competition – increasingly spread
far and wide. To repeat, such public
goods are in themselves creative of order but they do require broad global
support for their maintenance, and broad order-maintenance is not in the
purview of global leadership, and must rest on such wide-spread support if it
is to be effective.
Hegemony
has a tendency to veer into imperialist stances. The experience of the past half-millennium
has been of global system-building in the face of imperial designs by supremacy-seeking
continental hegemons.
System-building is a necessary feature of global organization; but
hegemony is not. Put briefly, hegemony
is about order (as in the imperial Pax Romana) but global leadership as system- building is
about legitimate change, appropriate to the conditions of the past millennium,
but in turn also itself subject, in good time, to thoroughgoing change.
In
short, the answer to the first question is:
all social systems have a political component; global leadership has been selected as
the most adaptive form of global political
organization for the second period of global evolution, now approaching
its end.
Would the future international system
transition conform to a global war model?
Cui
Jian-shu claims not only that long cycle theory
assumes that “leadership is derived from global war” but also that it projects
“the future of the international system on the basis of global war”. He writes as though long cycle theory predicted
another global war.
All
that is, of course, not just wrong, but also positively misleading. In the first place, long cycle theory is not
a global war model. It is the model of a
phased evolutionary process, one of whose phases involves selection of a
particular set of structures and/or policies from among those ‘on offer’. Call that phase the macro-decision phase of
an evolutionary learning process. We
observe, second, that in five previous cases, and at intervals of just over 100
years, a global
war functioned in just that fashion (selecting non-imperial, and innovative
modes of organization). But we also
know that world system processes are evolutionary, and therefore function as
mechanisms of change. That is why,
thirdly, and for many years, a key question for students of this subject has
been not just that of global war but also of the substitutes that might emerge
to replace it as a macro-decision mechanism.
No one is entitled “to predict the next cycle of global war based on Modelski’s long cycle theory”, as Cui implies that they
might.
For
the key to understanding the role of global war in the past is to see it as a
process of renewing the political structure and selecting its priorities. That is why it has been viewed,
analytically, as a macro-decision phase of the long cycle. Such a systemic decision is analogous to an
electoral campaign that in a national system might take years, and at the
global level, might take as long as a generation.
That
is why it is entirely consistent with the theory that new forms of
macro-decision, other than global war, might emerge in the course of the
current cycle. One crucial benefit of
such a theory is that it might, and should, not just alert political leaders
and other participants in that process to the need for devising new solutions
to the problem of refreshing the structures of world politics but also lend
greater urgency to that task. Globalization, and changes in military technology clearly
lower the probabilities of another global war.
But attention to political development, and to
the selection of new or reconfigured leadership will also be necessary.
To
describe long cycle theory as ‘projecting the future of the international
system on the basis of global war” is therefore grossly misleading. It is surprising that Cui Jian-shu blithely ignores those portions of long cycle
debates that deal with “the two principal global problems: those of avoiding
nuclear war and of reconstructing global solidarity” [4] in the books he is citing. He neglects to
mention that discussion in the paper just cited
even though he mentions several other contributions to that volume.
In
fact, long cycle theory sounds a warning that adherence to antiquated concepts and traditional
practices could bring about a slide into conditions that through misperception,
illusions, accidents or the operation, or unintended consequences may spark
global warfare. The probability of such
occurrence may be low but is not negligible, in particular as long as major
nuclear arsenals persist, and increasing numbers of states accumulate nuclear
arms and means of their delivery.
Merely to rely on the fear of such weapons, or grim forecasts of the
consequences of their use is to make the same mistakes as were made by those
who, on the eve of World War I argued that the lethality of new weapons (the
machine gun), and the strength of trade linkages would avert recourse to
warfare.
We
might, finally remark on the critic’s views of what constituted a global war in
the past half-millennium, for he claims that only the two world wars of the 20th
century deserve such appellation. But
the facts suggest otherwise. The first
series of wars he questions, the wars of
The
short answer to the second question is:
long cycle theory is one of an evolutionary selection process, and not a
‘war cycle’, or global war transition model.
Is International Power necessarily
Sea Power?
It
is a postulate of long cycle theory that forces of global reach are among the
four necessary conditions for establishing global leadership. In past cycles of global politics, sea power
with an oceanic operational capacity obviously was the chief element of global
reach. It made it possible for
Sea Power in Global Politics,
1494-1993” [9] was published in 1988 as part of long cycle studies, and as an
empirical demonstration of
the importance of oceanic maritime forces in the unfolding of
long cycles. It was never meant to
“overemphasize” (in Cui’s claim) the significance of
that particular component of conditions of global leadership. But it does
support the general concept of ‘forces of global reach’ with a large array of
historical data.
Cui
Jian-shu devotes a large portion (1/5th)
of his article to discussing sea power, but fails to examine the importance of
the other necessary conditions of global leadership: in particular that of economic innovation, the creation of leading
commercial and industrial sectors, and the role of these in world trade. Those matters were elaborated at length in “Leading Sectors and World Powers [10] published in 1996, that, surprisingly, he does not mention at
all. Similarly lacking is any attention
to the role of open, and democratic-tending societies in these matters, a
subject discussed i.a. in “Democratization from a
Long Perspective” (1991). [11] Studies of global democracy
suggest that the leading role of the world powers of the long cycle was in part
attributable to their democracy-tending
societies. They also show that
these democracies, in particular
In
short answer o the third question: sea power has been just one of the
ingredients of global political potential; space power is now rising in
importance.
Does the Global Political System Evolve
Cyclically or Spirally?
The
short answer to this fourth question is:
the global political system does evolve, but it does so neither
cyclically (strictly speaking) nor spirally.
It does not do it cyclically in the sense of the system moving through a
number of phases and then returning to its starting position. And yet global political evolution does have
periods composed of four phases of about 100 to 120 years, and each a long
cycle, and that amounts to a distinct regularity that deserves to be
highlighted.
We
have no disagreement on the point that each successive world power has been
different from its predecessors, and its successors, and the author makes that
point strongly. He also describes the process as “evolution” but does not
explore the uses that this concept has been put to in long cycle theory. In particular, he fails to observe that the
sequence of world powers is not random but represents phases in the process of
global evolution, each successive power contributing its own special
characteristics appropriate to that phase (
Cui
Jian-shu makes no mention in particular of “Leading
Sectors and World Powers” – in [9] – as well as “From Leadership
to Organization: The Evolution of Global politics” – in [3]. He does not seem to have
visited the “Evolutionary World Politics”
Home Page either; it was started in 1997, and remains current. He has not followed the literature of the
last decade because the most recent long cycle paper he cites dates from 1996,
and most of the others go back to the 1980ies.
How
then does the global political system evolve?
It evolves algorithmically, and in conjunction with the learning
experience of the major participants. It
evolves in sequences of four phases that jointly constitute one period of an
evolutionary process, and can be represented by a logistic curve. Each long cycle, with its four phases, is an
algorithmic process of the diffusion of a major political innovation (such as
laying the foundations for a global political system, as in [4]).
Successive phases of that long cycle are agenda-setting,
coalition-building (our current phase, 2000-2025), macro-decision, and
execution. Four long cycles constitute
one period of global political evolution, and govern the character of the
problems encountered in each cycle. The
current period of the evolution of global politics (since about 1850) is
centered on the emergence of global political organization.
In
sum, the dynamic of the global political system is neither cyclical nor spiral; it is that of a
multi-level evolutionary learning process.
2.
China’s peaceful rise, and Long cycle theory
Assessing
Cui
Jian-shu claims in conclusion that “an interpretation
of the prospects for
These
are important arguments but neither of these two conditions, multipolarity, or globalization, are incompatible with long
cycle theorizing. [12] Multipolarity is the condition that tends to occur in the
latter part of the trajectory of global leadership, in the phase of
de-concentration in particular. The
standard example of that condition was the state of the international system at
about 1871, with Britain beginning a retreat from power, Germany ascending, and
the United States, Japan, and Italy poised to make an entrance onto the world
stage. The current situation (2008) is precisely that condition: one of de-concentration, with
But
the problem with multipolarity is its
instability. It is not a lasting
solution to institutionalizing global politics or to perpetual peace. In the example just cited, soon after 1900,
the global powers arranged themselves into two rival alliances: with Britain moving toward a “special”
relationship with the United States, as well as understandings with France,
Russia and Japan, while Germany, riding
high, was left to stand by Austria-Hungary, with its commitments in the
volatile Balkans. In other words, multipolarity morphed into bipolarity that in short time
took the form of two military blocs that proceeded to fight World Wars I and
II. Cui Jian-shu
rejects the possibility that
Nor
is globalization a condition that is outside the reach of long cycle theory
that is grounded in an evolutionary approach, nor is it incompatible with the
possibility of ‘perpetual peace’. For
globalization is more than just a vast expansion of world trade, making
Expecting
globalization to do its work is the stance implied in Cui Jian-shu’s
argument, that is one of waiting for current trends in relative economic weight
to take effect (as China’s GDP is projected to equal that of the United
States in two or three decades time). “The present international system, ruled by
the
Strategic options
As
just noted, the global political system is currently (in 2008) in the phase
that might extend for up to another two decades, say to 2026, that of
de-concentration. Alternatively, we
might locate it in the phase of coalition-building. In that ‘long cycle’ perspective, the two
following options are open to
First,
and less attractive, is one that would represent a surrender to the inertia of
the past, one that would turn into a revisionist posture, much like that
Germany assumed on its way to 1914, and 1939, or that revolutionary France
adopted in 1792. In the broadest of
terms that posture might take the form of a challenge to the existing
territorial system, and a rejection of the global structures (such as
international institutions, or international law) that are Western in their
origins but have more recently become near universal. The one concrete issue that could fall into
the ‘revisionist’ category for China could be the future of Taiwan, and of the
South China Sea islands, problems that
might however be susceptible to peaceful development [14] for in other respects – maybe Tibet or Xinjiang
– a status quo approach might carry the day.
Another
possibly revisionist power is
An
alternative, and more attractive stance might be the
choice for continuity, meaning ongoing integration into the contemporary
“international community”, say on the model of
In
2003
In
fact, and in long cycle theory, both positions are tenable. Evolutionary considerations, including
economic globalization, and widespread awareness of nuclear dangers, and of
common interests in survival, make ‘peaceful development” the stronger option. But the inertia of the existing system of
power politics, and a failure to deal with the question of leadership, added to
ordinary ignorance, misperception, miscalculation or terrorism, mean that the
probability of major, even nuclear war is greater than zero, and not credibly
negligible.
For
the problem, in the next few decades of global politics will be not just to
avoid (suppress) global war, but to select, and to execute the adjustments
and/or changes that are likely to be necessary for dealing with global
problems, and in political arrangements and institutions including global
leadership and the responsibilities of ‘stakeholders’. As the political system is moving toward multipolarity, it will tend to lose direction and coherence
and, without a revitalizing “macro-decision” (that is,
selection of new global leadership, and recasting of global political
arrangements), it will tend toward disorder.
The
range of options for 2026-2050 that
combine macrodecision with global war might therefore
be represented as follows:
Table
1: Global systemic options for
2026-2050
|
|
Global war |
No global war |
|
Macro-decision |
(1) 1914-1945 |
(2)
|
|
No macro-decision |
(4) |
(3) |
The
“traditional” outcome might be (1), as in 1914-1945, a period of major
warfare. The preferred outcome is (2),
because global war is obviously to be avoided, and also avoidable. But it requires a decision on renewal/recasting of global
leadership, and associated global political arrangements. Option (3) is that just mentioned, of multi-polarity
without war, but without effecting adjustments in political organization at the
global and regional levels, and therefore unstable. This makes it clear that the mere avoidance
of global war, without political restructuring, is not costless. Option (4) could mean the chaos of global
war that renders the world incapable of reconstituting a global structure of
solidarity.
Cui
Jian-shu argues for outcome (2) but does not
discuss the possibility of macro-decision (the “transition of hegemony”, that
is ‘hegemonic transition’, of his title)
in the long cycle timeframe. As noted
earlier, he merely writes that in due time, “the present international system
ruled by the
The
global leadership role of long cycle theory has had a long pedigree, but only light
institutionalization, and experienced steady change. It is to be expected that its shape will be revisited in the next macro-decision
phase in the light of global conditions, two or more decades, from now from,
say, 2026 onward. But the question of a
“world without nuclear arms” is still with us, and as long as the powers remain
nuclear-armed, long cycle theory will continue to remind us that the problem of
global war (of low, but not zero probability) remains with us, urging that the
task of remaking global leadership-organization calls for close attention and
is becoming more urgent every passing year. [16]
Here
are, in summary, the implications of evolutionary long cycle theory for viewing
1. Don’t be a challenger, and avoid revisionist
positions;
2. As ‘stakeholder’,
work within the global polity for innovation and change;
3. Lead by meeting global problems (climate,
energy, nuclear arms);
4. Seek the Kantian peace but remember that
nuclear war is not wholly unthinkable as long as nuclear arsenals remain.
Long cycle theory’s predictive
function
Cui
Jian-shu admits that long cycle theory offers an
“explicit paradigm” for the study of change in international politics but also
maintains, in his summary, that two factors, economic globalization, and
revolution in military technology, “greatly” diminish “the predictive function”
of that theory. To maintain that is, of
course, to ignore the evolutionary components that are at the core of
long-cycle theorizing.
Long
cycle theory, and its more generalized form, evolutionary world politics,
accord greater attention to long-term trends than any extant international
relations theory The basic premise of
long cycle theory is that world politics is not static but dynamic, and
therefore best viewed in an evolutionary perspective in which the central
problem is the emergence of global-level political organization. Emergence of political organization at the
global level constitutes, of course, political globalization. That is why long cycle theory is a theory of
globalization, and more precisely, one of political globalization [18]. That emergence is driven by (“short-term”) world-power competition
at the actor level, and by (“medium-term”) evolution of political institutions. To argue that the predictive capacity of
long cycle theory is undermined by a lack of attention to globalization shows,
at a minimum, an excessively narrow conception of the problem that sees it in
purely economic terms; at worst, it is a misrepresentation of an approach that
pays close and systematic attention to the relation of politics and economics [19].
An
evolutionary approach is equally appropriate to understanding the “revolution
in military technology”. World power
competition (via long cycles) is the story of rapid change in weapons and
weapon systems; from gunpowder of the
late middle ages, through gunpowder empires of the 16th century, the
great naval fleets of the 16th-18th centuries, to the
machine gun, the torpedo, and the aircraft carriers of the 20th. The industrial revolution that is the
hallmark of modern economic development made possible spectacular advances in
the power of armaments. The advent of
nuclear weapons with global reach appears as no more, and no less, than the
culmination of a trend mounting for the past millennium that is now reaching
its peak, and that is being matched by the growth of bonds of global
solidarity, and must be responded to with an evolutionary search for new global
institutions. That is precisely the
prediction of long cycle theory. [20]
The
“predictive capability” of long cycle theory has two elements: its heuristic value, as a set of new
questions, and, second, in its proven record of analysis over the past decades,
since the 1980s.
Two
sets of questions are at the center of long cycle theory. The first is: where, in that evolutionary
process, are we located at any given time, and where are we heading? That is, what is current phase of the long
cycle, and of the process of global political evolution that is driven by
it? These questions make an analyst
sensitive to the fact that global politics is never static, and makes it
possible to formulate policies and priorities that match these processes. The second set of questions concerns the
qualification for global leadership, the likely characteristics of challengers,
and the nature of emerging global institutions.
Qualifications for leadership [21] include
responsiveness to global problems, open society, forces of global reach, and
innovative economies, and the author of “Cyclical Logic” does report them but
does not discuss how
But
what is actual predictive record of long cycle theory that has “been around”
since the 1980s? In the face of the
euphoria of the 1990s, generated by the end of the cold war and the dissolution
of the Soviet bloc the global political system has now moved, as predicted in
1987 [22], to the long cycle phase of deconcentration/coalition-building
(2000-2026). Its characteristic
features are those of multipolarity: the rise of powers such as
Matching
the weakening of the old order is the stirring of demands for the building of
new coalitions the most capable of which would manage the reordering of the
global system in the decades ahead. [24] The success of democratization over the past centuries to a majority
states may be laying the foundations for a community of democracies, as a base
for a world-wide coalition.
In closing
The
author of “Cyclical Logic” rightly points out that the successive powers of the
long cycle each had different features and, of course, in an important sense each
successive power was better equipped and more adept at dealing with global
problems. These are the characteristics
of an evolutionary process at work.
But while he does seem to come out in a favor of an approach that allows
for emergence, the metaphor he employs, that of a spiral, does not lends itself
to systematic analysis. The alternative
to “spiral” is not “cyclical logic” but systemic (evolutionary) learning.
Notes
*
Cui Jian-shu,
author of “Cyclical
Logic in the Transition of Hegemony: Modelski’s Theory
of Long Cycles and its Weakness” World Economics and Politics (
“ Modelski’s long cycle theory is
one of the most important schools that study the evolution of international
politics. Its fundamental assumptions
are: leadership is needed in the world system;
such a role is derived from global war; sea power is a necessary condition for
its establishment; the evolution of international politics is based on a
cyclical model in which domination by the leading power in the international
system normally lasts about 100 to 120 years.
The contribution of this theory is that it offers an explicit
macro-paradigm for the study of changes in international politics. However, its weakness is also obvious. In particular, it cannot explain some of the
important international phenomena over the past 500 years. In addition, with the development of
globalization and the advances of military technology, the mode of evolution of
the international political system has changed accordingly. To some extent, this undermines the
predictive capability of the long cycle theory in international relations.”
1. But in section
(V.) he cites
approvingly Karl Polanyi to the effect that
2. G. Modelski and S. Modelski eds.
Documenting Global Leadership,
3. That argument
is developed in G. Modelski
“From leadership to organization: The evolution of global
politics” in V. Bornschier and Ch. Chase-Dunn
eds. The Future of Global Conflict,
4. An empirical
study is T. Devezas and G. Modelski, “The Portuguese as
system-builders: Technological innovation
in early globalization” in G. Modelski, T. Devezas
and W.R. Thompson Globalization as evolutionary process,
5. G. Modelski,
“Scenario for the Year 2016” in G. Modelski ed. Exploring Long Cycles,
6. Cui Jian-shu (p. 28) reproduces a table that for the sake of
conciseness refers to Italian wars only; other tables in several of the works
he quotes (but in particular. Table 1.1 in Exploring
Long Cycles, cited, p.4) make it clear that these are “Italian and Indian
Ocean Wars”.
7. G. Modelski
“Enduring Rivalry in the Democratic Lineage: The
8. “Globalizing
space” Washington Post,
is building a wide range of
capabilities in space” including ground-based anti-satellite technology”.
9. G. Modelski and
W.R. Thompson, Sea Power in Global Politics,1494-1993,
10 G. Modelski and
W. R. Thompson, Leading Sectors and World Powers: the
Co-evolution of Global Economics and Politics,
11. G. Modelski
and G. Perry “Democratization from a Long Perspective” in N. Nakicenovic and A. Gruebler eds. Diffusion of Technologies and Social Behaviour,
12. The article
ends on a positive note, with another allusion to Kant: “the historic moment suggests that perpetual
peace of humanity is irreversible”. But
elsewhere, claims are made that cast doubt on this proposition, in particular
that the world system is (or should be?) anarchic. These are the claims that “the international
system will undergo change in the model of peaceful transformation” or else by “small-scale and low intensity
war”, quotes from Adam Smith on the
virtues of the martial spirit, and from Hegel, to the effect that war is not an
absolute evil. Not enough attention is
paid to the problem of the mechanisms that might bring about ‘perpetual peace”,
in contrast to Immanuel Kant who was quite explicit on that question. The conditions he specified were
“republicanism” (democracy), “federalism”, and “hospitality”.
13. See Modelski et al.
eds. Globalization as Evolutionary Process, cited above.
14. Just as
15. Cui Jian-shu points out, in a footnote, that Long
Cycles in World Politics, 1987,
cited, showed, in Table 2.1, p.40, the Soviet Union as “challenger” for
2000-2030, (but Exploring Long Cycles, 1987, pp.224-5, cited in note 5, also
discussed the possible dissolution of the Soviet Union). The Georgian crisis of 2008 may have reopened
this question but fluctuations in the price of oil, and economic depression,
might be dampers of such designs.
16. Cui maintains
that “fewer and fewer states are likely to dream of world leadership”; that statement seems to include China that
on ‘traditional’ long cycle criteria
(cited elsewhere by Cui) would lack qualifications for that position: economy large but not innovative, limited
forces of global reach, lack of democracy, and limited concern for global
problems. Cui lists those conditions but
does not review them in relation to
17. Zbigniew Brzezinski and John Mearsheimer “Clash
of Titans” Foreign Policy
January-February
2005.
18. See G.
Modelski et al. eds., Globalization as
Evolutionary Process, cited, esp. Chs.1-2.
19. G. Modelski and
W.R. Thompson Leading Sectors and World Powers: the Coevolution of
global economics and politics,
20. G Modelski and
T. Devezas, “Political globalization is global
political evolution” World Futures, July-September
2007.
21. Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics, cited,
Ch.9.
22. In Exploring Long Cycles,
cited, and in Long Cycles in World
Politics, cited.
23. In 2003 Joseph
Nye wrote (in “Limits of American Power”
Political Science Quarterly Vol.117(4)p.546) that “”American preponderance will last well into
this century …”. The 2008 report “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed
World” by the National Intelligence Council “describes a decline in the United
States’ world dominance as China, India and other powers assert themselves” ,
reported the New York Times, November21, 2008:A13. The previous (2004) report in the series
anticipated continued
24. A current
example of that process is the announcement (RTTNews,
NASDAQ,,