The disappearance of Immanuel Wallerstein

Giampiero Bordino
Professor in Contemporary History and Political Analyst. President of the Einstein Center for International Studies

At almost 89 years, on August 31, 2019, Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the greatest contemporary historians and sociologists, passed away. He has been a witness and interpreter of the era of successes, contradictions and crises of capitalism, of great international conflicts and the “cold war”, of decolonization, of the 1968 movements, of globalization (of which he was somehow a forerunning prophet), of the triumph and then the decline of the American empire. Since 2003, Wallerstein, who by the way had been a founder and militant of the Student Federalists Movement in American universities since 1944, three years before the World Federalist Movement was created, has also been, with some significant articles, one of the most famous collaborators of our review.

Between the Seventies and the Eighties of the Twentieth Century, Wallerstein published his most famous work in three volumes, “The modern world-system”, which illustrates, analyzes and interprets, since its origins in the 16th century, capitalism as a planetary economic and social system, a real “world-economy” with its dialectical articulations between a “center” and “peripheries”, with its hierarchies and its internal conflicts.

In his great historical reconstruction, Wallerstein had, by his explicit admission, a famous inspirer and reference, though critically re-read and cited, in Karl Marx. He also has some fundamental references closer in time, with some of whom he has directly worked and collaborated in the years of his long cultural and academic commitment. There is, first of all, the French historian Fernand Braudel, who precedes him by a generation (he was born in 1902 and died in 1985), one of the great masters of the historiographical school active around the Parisian magazine Annales, of which Braudel was director between 1946 and 1968. Braudel sees and depicts history as a story of “long-lasting structures” (modern capitalism is precisely one of these long-lasting structures), going over and beyond the short breath of events that ripple its surface. It is no coincidence that Wallerstein has been the head of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilization at the Binghhamton University in New York for several years. The other important intellectual referent of Wallerstein, of more distant years, is the Hungarian historian, sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), author in 1944 of a work destined to great resonance: “The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time”. His critique of the “market society”, that is, of the society in which “everything is a market”, prefigures fundamental analyses and trends in the cultural and political debate of the following decades.

Among Wallerstein’s collaborators and friends, there are also some of the most significant intellectuals of the global radical left engaged in the critique of capitalism and in the struggle against neo-colonialism and imperialism, from the Martinican-French writer Frantz Fanon to the Italian economist and sociologist (also a lecturer at the Fernand Braudel Center) Giovanni Arrighi, from the Egyptian-French economist Samir Amin to the German sociologist and economist Gunder Frank.

In Wallerstein’s analysis and reflection, the distinction between the concepts of “world-economy” and “world-empire” plays an important role. The world-economy described in his books is a horizontal structure with respect to the different territories: it could originate and develop, and become hegemonic between the 16^th and the 19^th centuries, even in the absence of an empire-world, that is, of a vertical and unified political center of power. In essence, what characterizes the world-economy (the modern and contemporary capitalism, in other words) and allows its hegemonic role, is the separation between the economic sphere, of world dimensions, and the political sphere, fragmented in sovereign territorial entities (in Europe, the national states), therefore powerless to regulate and control capital and markets.

Wallerstein, in an article published in The Federalist Debate in November 2005 (“The Ambiguous French NO to the European Constitution”) on the occasion of the French referendum that rejected the draft European Constitution, observes that to be satisfied with that negative outcome are essentially three sectors of public opinion, although different and even politically distant from each other: the Eurosceptic right, the American neo-cons and also a large part of the radical left. In the latter, according to Wallerstein, the awareness is missing that precisely the absence of a common European political power (today obviously not in the form of an empire, but of a continental federal democracy) makes it impossible to both develop social policies and counter the American imperialism. Also in subsequent interventions published in the review Wallerstein reiterated that the political union of Europe is necessary for these purposes. It is significant that in the last few decades, in the time of the decline of the American empire, and as it is evident today with the Trump presidency, the United States has increasingly aligned itself against the political unification of Europe and against its supporters, regarded as enemies.

In sum, a “world-democracy”, that allows for the control and regulation of the “world-economy” (in other words, for the civilizing of capitalism and globalization), is necessary today. So, the cultural and political legacy of Immanuel Wallerstein, a scholar who certainly cannot be suspected of pro-European rhetoric or globalist “radical-chic” leanings (as today’s sovereignist and neo-nationalist populists might say), can help us all to better understand our present world.