Abstract
The rise and decline of world powers has attracted much scholarly attention in recent years. The theory of long cycles answers parsimoniously the question: why, in the past half millenium, have Portugal, the Dutch Republic, Britain (twice), and the United States risen to global leadership while others have failed to do so? This accounts for the success, or failure, of individual states, but to explain the entire sequence we need to employ an evolutionary paradigm that proposes that each of these long cycles is one mechanism in a spectrum of global evolutionary processes. The leadership succession is an intermediate stage in the evolution og global politics, whose next likely major phase, reaching a high point later in the 21st century, will be the gradual absorption of the informal role of global leadership, when embedded in a democratic community, into a network of more formal positions within an emerging global organization of a federalist character. The conditions of that process can now be specified.
Highlights
Our work suggests that global leadership succession is an intermediate stage of an evolutionary process that went through several instances of global leadership, but one whose likely major phase will be the gradual absorption of the informal role of global leadership, embedded in a democratic corrununity, into a wider network of more formal positions with global responsibilities
In a si1nplified analysis, and for the earlier cases, we shall not go too far astray if we focus our attention on the strategies of actors 1nost closely linked to the current world power: its leaders, their politico-strategic forces, the coalitions they
At the general level we argue that a free and open society provides a superior support fra1nework for the evolution of cooperation, and provides the seedbed for strategies that in turn serve as the foundation for global leadership
Summary
Hallpike, Oxford: C.R. 1986. "The long cycle of global politics and COMPARATIVE STUDIES Ill SOCIETY AHD HISTORY. "VJorld syste1n evolution: annual 1neeting, Vancouver, April. EVOLUTIOHARY PARADIGMS Ill THE SOCIAL SCIEHCES, Seattle, VJorkshop of May. EVOLUTIOHARY THEORY: PATHS IHTO THE New York: John VJiley. "Collective action and the selection rules: so1ne notes on the evolutionary paradig1n in social in M. VJallerstein, New York: I1mnanuel.
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