THE WAR AND THE WORLD-SYSTEM FATE. MODERN INTERPRETATION OF IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN.

Abstract

The Russian-Ukrainian war marked the Rubicon, on crossing which, the world has begun to change dramatically and irreversibly. This article is an attempt to comprehend the Russian-Ukrainian war in the context of the world-system methodology of I. Wallerstein. The authors consider the phenomenon of war and the phenomenon of revolution as key factors of historical change. The authors reconstruct the change in the geopolitical balance of power over long cycles of history, where the world war and the system of treaties after it are considered as starting points for new cyclic turns. The authors consider global changes in the world system order, starting from the period of the "Napoleonic Wars" and subsequent global wars of the XIXth – XXIst centuries. The article traces the role of World wars in the fate of the existing world-system. The Russian-Ukrainian war is seen as the initiation of the breakdown of the existing world order and the establishment of a world-system of a different type. This war has quite a clear geopolitical context, as any other great war in humankind's history. This context is a global geopolitical game that has engulfed almost the entire world community. Looking at Wallerstein's theory we can understand this game as the irreconcilable opposition of the dominant Occidental (Anglo-Saxon) world-system against attempts of the Oriental (China-centrical) system to brake the existing world order radically. World politology discusses attempts by the Chinese-Russian geopolitical alliance to receive the status of a new world-system core. As a result, there is a great increase in mutual tension between the two world-system cores.