창작과 비평

 

Immanuel Wallerstein and Paik Nak-chung

Immanuel Wallerstein is an American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems analyst. Paik Nak-chung is a professor of English literature at Seoul National University.

 

*The Korean translation of this article was published in The Quarterly Changbi (Spring 1999).

 

 

Paik: It is a rare privilege for our journal to introduce your thoughts in the very first issue of 1999, at a time when both Korea and East Asia, as indeed the entire world, are in great turmoil, and many readers feel an urgent need for some larger view of what is happening and what kind of choices may be available to them. And this interview happily coincides with the imminent publication of the Korean edition of Utopistics, a book that engages in that kind of analysis and examines the 'historical choices of the twenty-first century', as its subtitle puts it. But the immediate occasion for this interview was provided by your kind invitation for me to participate in this very interesting conference on 'Transmodernity, Historical Capitalism, and Coloniality' held yesterday and today under the auspicies of Fernand Braudel Center of Binghamton University. Here let me intrapolate for the benefit of our Korean readers that 'transmodernity' is a key concept in the discourse of Enrique Dussel, 'historical capitalism' of course is the title of one of your books, and 'coloniality of power' a preoccupation of Anibal Quijano.

 

Now, these two topics - the book and the conference - alone should offer ample material for our conversation, although later on I would like to add a few questions specifically about Korea and East Asia. Well then, we may start with Utopistics . By now your name and some of your work are well-known to a good many Korean readers, but even so I think our readers would like to know how the intellectual journey that led you to writing this book and I heard you mention yesterday that the world revolution of 1968 was in the origin of the idea of historical capitalism and your notion of the modern world-system. Could you elaborate on that with some more biographical details?

 

Wallerstein: Yes. I began teaching at the university in 1958 when I was at Columbia University in the Department of Sociology and was writing a dissertation on an African topic. I was, in fact, writing about modern nationalism in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, a neighboring British and French colony. I suppose at that point in my life I was considered to be a political sociologist and Africanist. And indeed most of my writing for the next 10 years at least was on African topics and I wrote a number of books on Africa, numerous articles and so forth. I was in fact unhappy with some of the kinds of things I was writing about because it was so contemporary that I felt I was chasing after headlines following the changing situation in contemporary African countries. And they were changing with some rapidity after independence. The majority of countries in Africa except for southern Africa became independent by 1960. So that period when I was actually writing most of the stuff on the early postcolonial years, I began to think that I had to put this into deeper historical perspective and I had an idea. It was a mistaken idea, but it turned out to be very fruitful. The language we used about these countries was that they were new nations. I said to myself that if they are new nations, other nations have been new nations. Why don't we look at other new nations earlier. And I had the idea, which as I say turned out to be not the way to look at it, that I should look at west European nations when they were new nations, meaning I thought somewhere around the 16th-17th century when the modern state structures coalesced. So I began to do reading and I began to do teaching. Now this is the same time of course as a lot of political turmoil. Writing about Africa, I was of course involved with African nationalist movements and thinking of how they saw the world as a struggle against colonialism and against neo-colonialism which was also a phrase that came in at that time.

 

When 1968 burst out, the first place in the western world where there was a major event was at Columbia University. It started a month before the Paris uprising. And I was quickly in the middle of it because when the students occupied the buildings in opposition to the administration, there were two main issues. One was the Vietnam War and what they saw as Columbia University's involvement by the fact that they did research work for the defense department and such in the Vietnam War. And the second was Black/White relations, which was a major issue at the time, and Columbia was building a gymnasium in a public park and thereby taking land away that was being used by a Black community and so forth. Those were the two sparks of Columbia and set the students who occupied buildings against the administration. A group of faculty formed very quickly to try to mediate this for a whole week. And I was in fact the co-chair of this very large faculty group whose mediation was ultimately unsuccessful. The administration called in the police after a week. They evicted the students from the buildings, but that of course led to simply a further explosion and we had long process of trying to revise university structures and it actually went on for two years. So I was very involved in that. I wrote a book, several books at the time about this.

 

Paik: I wasn't aware you had written books about it, though I remember reading about your experience during the Columbia incidents.

 

Wallerstein: I wrote a book in 1968 calledUniversity in Turmoil: The Politics of Change, and in 1969 I edited a two-volume reader with Paul Starr:University Crisis Reader. I also published a number of articles on the subject between 1968 and 1970. Anyway, the Columbia uprising was part of what I think of as the world revolution of 1968. And the world revolution of 1968 seemed to me to be a world revolution, first of all, because it took place everywhere. That is, almost everywhere from the United States to western Europe to Japan to China (because I counted the cultural revolution as part of the world revolution) to eastern Europe (I counted the Czech uprising as part of the world revolution) to Africa to Latin America. It took different forms, but I argued in various essays at the time, and especially later, that the world revolution had two underlying themes which you could find reproduced everywhere. Theme number one was that the United States and the Soviet Union, who were supposedly the great antagonists, were really in collusion with each other. This is the Chinese talking about the two superpowers, but it was the New Left and the rest of the world saying a plague on both their houses and so forth. So that was one theme which I thought everybody was talking about in one way or another. The Czechs were in effect saying the same thing. The second theme, which I found common everywhere, and which took me a while to figure out, but then became very obvious, is that the main target of all the people who rebelled was not the right, but the left. Whether it was the Social Democrats in western Europe or the Communist parties in western and eastern Europe or in China the Communist party which was the object of the cultural revolution or the United States where it was New Deal democrats or India where it was the Congress Party. When you went to Tunisia it was the Neo-Destour Party. It was all these movements which had paraded themselves for 20, 40, 100 years as antisystemic movements. And what the revolutionaries of 1968 said is you haven't solved the problem, you're part of the problem. You failed in various ways.

 

I found these two themes as a very common theme, and then, I put it in language which I would now use. What it was was a challenge basically to the liberal geoculture that was dominating the world-system - the belief that everything could get better, and would get better if only you got the right people in power in each state. Once you got the right people in power in each state, they could reform the system in significant ways. And I decided that that really had been the line not only of the Social Democrats, but of the Communists as well, and certainly the national liberation movements. And I thought that what happened in 1968 was people saying "well you got into power, but you didn't change the world." That is to say, its quite remarkable if you look at the map of the world between let's say 1945 and 1968 in how many countries either the Communist party or a Social Democratic party or a national liberation movement came to power. There are very few countries of which this isn't true. It was a remarkable achievement and this is what I think they were complaining about. So now what this did, I think, within the universities of the world, but more largely, within the intellectual arenas of the world, is it broke the liberal consensus. It isn't that liberalism disappeared. It broke the automaticity of its acceptance.

 

What immediately happened, you can see now, is an emergence of the old right which had been suppressed basically, had really disappeared, with really right wing themes now coming up. I mean take something as obvious as Milton Friedman's economics. I can well remember before 1968, Milton Friedman was an American university joke. Nobody took him seriously. And all of a sudden in the 1970's they not only take him seriously, he gets awarded a Nobel Prize and the other people who get Noble Prizes largely get it because they share his point of view. So I mean the right resurged. In a way I think they weren't as powerful since 1848. Then I think there was space open for a left to reemerge, but much less coherently than the right. It's in this atmosphere that I think there's a receptivity to the kinds of things which some of us put forward, and which got to be called world-systems analysis. World-systems analysis said, look it's not only that the liberal consensus doesn't make sense politically, but there's a whole set of intellectual ideas underlying it, which in fact inform all of social science, and we've got to, in my phrase, unthink that social science.

 

Paik: Of course that's the title of one of your books, which is also available in Korean. I know the publishers and the translator had quite a time trying to find an appropriate Korean title. They had to settle on the best substitute, since 'unthinking' is an untranslatable coinage of your own.

 

Wallerstein: Yes. And in this, we said, we've got to raise questions first of all about the unit of analysis. The assumption has been that each state was the unit of analysis, that they were separate entities. And that of course fit in with a stages theory of development arguing that each state was sort of on an escalator. They were somewhere on the escalator. They were on step three, or step six, or step nine, or step twelve. And so of course what you did if you were lower on the escalator, is you looked at people higher and you said what did they do. And then you got there. And we came along and said, no it's all part of a single system. And if some people are low in the escalators, it's because they've been pushed down there by other people being pushed up elsewhere - the development of underdevelopment, etc.

 

My main point is the ideas were put forth but suddenly there was a receptivity to them. Of course, then we started to develop these ideas not only about core, periphery, and how the economics of the capitalist system works. That was just kind of an initial thrust. Then we said yes but there's a political structure to this world-system, the interstate system, and has things like hegemonies which rise and fall. And then we said look at all these households structures that got created within the system because they are in a way handling the whole allocation of labor and income so we began to study them. Then we said the antisystemic movements themselves should be an object of study. So we started to study them. And then we got really to the hardest question of all which is the epistemologies, the underlying structures of knowledge. So it's my Unthinking Social Science, and the Gulbenkian Report,Open the Social Sciences. It's a big project we still have going here at the Fernand Braudel Center.

 

And as all this work was being produced over the years, people, especially people who were politically active, would come along and say well that's all good and well, but therefore what should we do? And I realize that is a perfectly legitimate question and then there were all sorts of people saying yes, but for God's sake don't repeat what they did in the Soviet Union. Look how bad that was, or Mao or something else. So there were all these dangers like reefs that you were supposed to avoid. And I began to think yes you have to read that whole history intelligently and you have to draw some intelligent conclusions.

 

About seventeen years ago, almost by accident, I was at a conference and giving a talk before Ilya Prigogine gave a talk too. And when I heard him, I said my God that's things I've been thinking a long, long time but I never knew that physical scientists felt this way. So I began to read in what is called today complexity studies, which is what I call a knowledge movement within the natural sciences, within physics, within chemistry, within mathematics, within biology, and I thought these ideas were terribly, terribly important. I began to try to see how I could use these ideas within the context of my own work.

 

As I said today at the conference and I've said in writing many times, the minute you have a concept of a historical system, you're doing several things by that. I am rejecting the nomothetic/idiographic split because the system is the nomothetic, and the historical is the idiographic, and I'm saying you can't be one or the other, you have to be both at all times. And that you find out what the rules are that govern social behavior but only within the context of a particular historical system because the systems change. And that brought me to my distinction between the origin of the system, the ongoing life of the system, and the crisis of the system. I found Prigogine terribly useful about the crisis of the system. Because he says that at a certain point as systems move far from equilibrium, which is their technical language, they can no longer function well or rather the oscillations become so great you get a bifurcation which technically, for a physical scientist, simply means you get a point where two different sets of data will solve the equation. It isn't just one solution. There are at least two solutions. And so the whole idea that you split and you go one way or the other way but also that it's unpredictable. There's an infinite number of developments that go into it which are uncontrollable, so we don't know in advance which way we'll go. But a little push in one direction or the other will push it. I said yes that's the way to think about it.Utopisticsis the end of that process. Utopisticsis an attempt to assess the fact that there was this immense attack on the old left by the revolutionaries of 1968

: let's assess what they did do, what they didn't do, why they did it, etc. And then say o.k., if we can assume that we've reached a crisis in the system, what does a crisis look like? And that's really chapter two. I try to say it looks terrible. It's what they call chaos, which in social terms, is not a pleasant thing to live in. It's an unpleasant thing to live in, and people are frightened. And they have every reason at a personal level to be frightened. There's more violence around. There are more sudden changes of all kinds so they really are frightened. I can't say you shouldn't be frightened. It's a frightening situation. But I try to analyze that and what people do when they are collectively frightened. And then I say o.k. so what's at stake? What's at stake is a big battle. The system isn't going to go on and I try to find structural reasons from within the system, why the system cannot survive. Then what's at stake and what are our choices? So that's the subtitle of course, 'historical choices for the twenty-first century'.

 

Paik: Before we go on to discuss some of the large themes you have been developing, I'd like to interject one personal question. Did your involvement in the Columbia University incident have any immediate impact on your professional career?

 

Wallerstein: Well, sure. I mean before 1968 I thought I would be at Columbia University all of my life. I had been a student there. I then became a professor there. I had been born in New York City. I loved New York City. I loved Columbia. I simply assumed always that I would stay there forever. Things became complicated at a personal level. Had I stayed there the complications probably would have gone away in two or three years. But like many people involved in the university uprisings, in one way or another, and on all sides of the political fence, one of the consequences was to change universities. Simply get a little bit of relief and so at that time, I did make the decision. It's a little complicated. It was 1968. From 1970 to 1971 I spent the year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto and I used that year to write theModern World-System, volume I. So which of course got me onto a new track. I was no longer an Africanist, now I was writing about the capitalist world-economy, the modern world-system. This is most of my writing since then. I had to make a decision of what I was to do and I decided to move to McGill University in Montreal, which of course had also been affected by 1968. It was in 1969 that there was a major thing in Montreal, but it hadn't escaped the atmosphere. This was also the time however when one of the expressions of the new movements was what was called the Front de Liberation du Quebec which had just engaged in certain kinds of violent acts and the government had cracked down on it.

 

The atmosphere was tense. And the issues of Quebec nationalism and secession were very heavy. McGill was of course an English-speaking university in the middle of Quebec. Well I got involved there too in Quebec issues and so forth even though I was an outsider in some sense and I had to limit the degree of my involvement. But the university ambiance reflected the tension, the atmosphere and after a number of years, it got extremely tense within the Department of Sociology at McGill.

 

At that point, I had various possibilities. One of them was to come to where I am now at Binghamton, where a colleague of mine from Columbia, Terence Hopkins, who had been sort of my closest associate at Columbia, was my age, had come here after 1971 to start the graduate program of Sociology. He wanted me to join him here. The administration was very anxious to have me and yes, become chair of the department, build it up, create a Center. It seemed an attractive idea. So I came. I did not think at the time I would stay this long, but here it is twenty-one years later, and I'm still here. The Center is still here, Hopkins died two years ago, and this has become, no doubt, the major Center worldwide of world-systems analysis. We have our students all over the place and we have a lot of activities and accomplishments under the belt in terms of research and books, and our journalReview and so forth. So, it's a knowledge institution. Now as you know the name of the institution is the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations. When I gave you the story of my itinerary, I left out Braudel. I'll tell you how Braudel came into the story. Somewhere around 1965 or 1966, reading an Africanist journal, there was an article by a Polish economic historian named Marian Malowist, who wrote an article on the gold trade in the Middle Ages between West Africa, North Africa, and Europe. Since he wrote on the Late Middle Ages and early modern times, that was not that unusual. It was a very interesting article. And the article quoted Braudel's Mediterranean at some length. I said I had better read this book. I read the book and I thought, yes this is very good stuff. So I discovered Braudel in the late 1960's. And when I went to the Center of Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, and I started writing the Modern World-System, and I wrote the first two chapters drafts, I said why don't I send these to Braudel whom I had met in the most superficial way a year or two before. But we didn't know each other. So I sent it to him. And I waited about a month or six weeks and I got a letter back, a very nice letter - not from him, but from his secretary saying that Braudel had read it and thought very well of this stuff or some such. A brief letter but it was very positive. And I thought, o.k. I'll send him some more and then he wrote back an even nicer letter that he had been sharing this stuff with his students.

 

Paik: This time from himself?

 

Wallerstein: Yes, he said the book was very rich and so forth. So then, when I was in Paris a year after that, I went to see him and he received me again very warmly and told me how much he thought of the book and how good it was and so forth and so forth. So when I got the book published, he immediately said he would like to have an edition in French, in a series that he had. At that point, which was between Montreal and here, I had a year's leave and I had arranged to spend it in Paris. I always had this thing about Paris and I had some links with Paris Africanists. Actually that was the original idea. But by the point, of course, I had written the Modern World-System and when I came to Paris, he received me right away. I had had links prior to that, important links, with his deputy, Clemens Heller, who knew me quite well. But not via Braudel. Quite separately. Braudel received me and said well he gives this seminar, would I give it with him. And we would do it, sort of on the Modern World-System. So I spent the year doing that. That started my links with Braudel and it was in the middle of that year, that I flew back here to Binghamton to discuss with the Administration here what we would do. I had a meeting of a small group who were going to be the people involved with the Center. But we really needed a name for this Center. And I had the idea of a Center of economies, historical systems, civilizations, but it's too long. And then it occurred to me, well why not call it the Fernand Braudel Center because that symbolizes large-scale, long-term social change. And they thought that was a nice idea and I went back to Braudel and I said will you let us use your name? And he said yes, and so we used his name and then the first big conference we had here was on "The Impact of the Annales on the Social Sciences." He came himself for that conference. So I established very strong links with the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris which was his institution. At the time his technical title was Administrator of this big research structure in Paris and eventually I set-up an arrangement with Binghamton that I spend half the year in Paris and half the year in Binghamton, which I still do. And of course we did a lot of things jointly. We built up a whole network of institutions which cooperate with the Center. So we've had links with institutions in France, Germany, Italy, Mozambique, Venezuela, India, Turkey, Hungary. We just created these kind of links with institutions which meant we co-sponsored conferences. That was one possibility. They sent us students. So we got a lot of graduate students who came here for training who were sent to us from these various countries by the people with whom we have links. We keep developing new links. We now have good links with Belgium, which we didn't have in the beginning, and so forth and so on. With Mexico, that's more recent. So that's how the Center has functioned. By now, I've now forgotten what question started this whole line.

 

Paik: Well let's get back to the book Utopistics. We don't want to spend too much time on it, though. Not only because our time is limited, but we don't want to give away too much of the content. We want the readers to get hold of the book and find out for themselves.

 

Wallerstein: But I will say for your readers, it's a short book.

 

Paik: And I may add that to me in reading it, I found it an excellent epitome of your extensive reflections on the past, present and future of the capitalist world-system and I think even to those who have read all or most of your work--I'm not that person, but speaking as a literary critic, I could say that even to those readers it's really a masterpiece of lucid and compact exposition. And I suspect it offers them some new material as well, certainly new emphases. So far you commented only on the second chapter, on the difficult transition, but what I would like is for us to go back to the first chapter and touch upon a very familiar theme in your work, but something still surprising to many people. I mean your interpretation of 1989. You see it as a beginning of the end of capitalism rather than the triumph: 1968 as a real turning point and 1989 a sort of the end of the 'dress rehearsal', as you once put it.

 

Wallerstein: Yes, I'm sure that we'll startle readers in Korea because it startles readers everywhere. It's one of the more outrageous things that I say. That 1989 represents a big defeat of world capitalism rather than its great triumph which almost everybody believes whether they are on the left, center, or right. Everybody seems to believe that. We wrote actually, we I say, Giovanni Arrighi, Terence Hopkins, and I have written a series of articles together over the years on anti-systemic movements. And the last one we wrote together was called "1989, Continuation of 1968." In fact that exists in Korean in the edition of Anti-Systemic Movements. And we tried to show in that article and I won't reproduce it now, but we tried to show very carefully how the events of 1968 led quite directly in Poland, in Italy, and so forth to what went on in 1989. But more generally, what I can say (and that's the heart of the analysis) is that I said one of the two themes of 1968 was the critique of the old left as having failed. Now 1968 is also, depending on exactly how you date it, the beginning of a Kondratieff B-phase. I usually say it started roughly 1967-73. And countries not in the center, which included most of what is called the Third World and also included east and central Europe, suffered economically. The one exception to that is east Asia. I will discuss that separately. From the 1970's on, they have been suffering economically. They've been doing less well by whatever measures you want to use in terms of gross national product or total real income, or distribution of income, or whatever. And of course people get unhappy when they do less well economically, especially if they can remember better times

 

They had to decide who to blame, and a lot of the blame was on the governments in power, and the government in power were the old left governments. So they begin to turn against them. They begin to turn against them first in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. They threw them out, not that they got better governments to replace them. But nonetheless, they threw them out in many, many countries because they had begun to be disillusioned with the idea that if you got the right government in power it really would improve things. The next group that started to get thrown out were the Social-Democrats in the Western world. You got this whole turn against the state, and the idea of their not doing so well, so we better put in a more conservative governments, or whatever. And my argument is that basically the heart of 1989 was the same movement. In fact, in the 1950's and 1960's, Russia, east and central Europe all did quite well economically. In fact they had about the highest growth rates in the world in that period and there was a real expansion. So it isn't that the system 'failed'. It's that peripheral areas in a B-phase failed. But these peripheral areas did badly at a point in time in which these people in power had said, if you put us in power this won't happen. But it did.

 

I think that one of the major elements in 1989 is economic crisis. You see that extremely clearly in the case of Poland. The initial precipitate in 1980 of Solidarity was the fact that the Polish government, like many governments, had gotten deeply indebted in the 1970's in order to solve its problems of a weakening situation. And when they got deeply indebted they decided the way to handle this, the same way as the structural adjustment of the IMF, was to squeeze the workers, to get a little more money to pay off debts. The only country that got away with that and used to be praised no end by the IMF was Romania, which really squeezed the workers and really paid off its debt. Well Poland tried to squeeze the workers. The workers yelled and screamed. That's called Solidarity. This economic protest combined with the second theme, which (except for Russia) was the question of nationalism. The East Europeans had always felt oppressed by Russian nationalism. They were satellites.

 

You put together the two - nationalism and failure of the promises of the movement - and you get 1989. So what I see them doing is doing what everybody else is doing, throwing out the Old Left. Not because they don't want equality, but because they didn't get it that way. Now briefly they think they may get it through the market. O.K. That illusion went very fast. If you take all of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, there isn't a single country, not one, in which the Communist Party or ex-Communist Party (because of course by now it has changed its name) and so forth hasn't improved its electoral situation since its initial fall. Now that's not because they believe in this anymore. It's just that now they are just voting for something slightly better in some immediate sense, without any illusion.

 

Now what has this got to do with the triumph of capitalism? My argument is that one of the things that sustained the political equilibrium of the system for the last 50 years at least, if not longer, has been the fact that you had these Old Left movements in power. These Old Left movements in power preached a very reformist gradualist line. They said we're in power, don't throw us out, we'll do better next year, just wait, another Left government will come into power somewhere. It will improve, your children will eat better, and so forth. They were in fact the people who were saying don't rock the boat. They're all kicked out now. And they were believed, up to a point, about don't rock the boat because they had credentials. They were the 'left'. They were the workers' representatives, or the peoples' representatives or whatever and a certain number of people still believed that. Right? But they're out now. Nobody is there who is credible who is dampening down so I say what's really happened is you removed the major restraining forces on radical political activity around the world. And that's the last thing that people in power in the world-system really want.

 

I don't think it's accidental that the Western world reacted so cautiously to the overthrow of Communism. I mean they applaud it retrospectively, but if you look at their politics as it actually occurred, they weren't sure what line to take. It was certainly not a picture of them screaming and yelling "overthr