Global World System Research Articles

Globalization and the Evolution of Membership

Nation states, families, ethnic groups, villages, and economic organizations — every collectivity — need to draw a line between what or whom is, or is not, permitted within it. Lacking the determination of such lines of discrimination, namely the production, reproduction and stabilization thereof, the collectivity disappears. Today. we find ourselves in a global world-system which has begun to show its own dynamic. It is a system without any center. It is not controlled by goals, norms or political directives, and its own dynamic is not focused within geopolitical borderlines or by the locality in general. In the following I sketch the deconstruction and reconstruction of borderlines and the emergence of new membership conditions within global settings in the context of the evolution of codes of membership. Also, one needs to mention an essential change in contemporary social sciences as a theoretical consequence of the analysis of the process of globalization. The subject of theorizing social process is not society as a regional or territorial marked unit, not the societas civilis, or like Parsons (1966, 9) has argued: “A society is a type of social system, in any universe of social systems, which attains the highest level of self-sufficiency as a system in relation to its environment.” The realm of the social are the inter-societal communication networks, that is world-systems as Chase-Dunn and Hall (1998) referred to it in the plural, which have restructured all local social structure (on the concept of world-systems, see Wallerstein 1998, Chase-Dunn and Hall 1998, Chase-Dunn 1999).

Caribbean political economy at the crossroads: NAFTA and regional developmentalism

List of Tables Preface Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction Beyond the Paradigmatic Interregnum in Development: Rethinking Ascent in the International System The State and the Caribbean Development Experience Global Restructuring and World System Continuity The Crisis of the National Option in the Caribbean Nafta/Ftaa and the New Articulation in the Americas: `Re-Colonisation' or Structural Opportunity? Reconstituting State Power at the Regional Level: The Road to Achieving Ascent in the Next Century Conclusions Endnotes Select Bibliography Index

Reinventing revolution: the renovation of left discourse in Cuba and Mexico

Preface: Loss, Renewal, and Fridas Blue House Introduction: Global Change, Paradigm Crisis, and the Renovation of Left Discourse The Backdrop: From the Revolutionary 1960s to the Neoliberal 1980sWhats Left? Democracy I: The Persistence of Socialist and Liberal Orthodoxies Democracy II: Renovative Perspectives on Democracy Socialism I: State vs. Market Socialism II: Renovative Perspectives on Economic Alternatives National Sovereignty I: The Nation-State in the PostCold War, Globalized World-System National Sovereignty II: Toward a Relative Autonomy of the Nation-State Conclusions: Past Imperfect, Present Tense, Future Conditional.