By JOSÉ LUÍS FIORI*
Author's foreword to the newly released book
In the beginning was the power
“The conclusion that must be drawn is that the apparatus of power, a force that permeates and envelops all structures, is much more than the State. It may even disappear, fall apart; but it must always reconstitute itself and reconstitute itself infallibly, as if it were a biological necessity of society” (Fernand Braudel, The game of exchanges, p. 494).
This work brings together several articles and essays that are part of a long historical research and theoretical reflection that began in the 1980s with the debate on development and “late capitalism” and with the critique of dependency theories, and then took the path of “international political economy” and the critique of its theories of “cycles” and “hegemonic crises”. In all, there were four decades of research into the international situation, read and interpreted in the light of “great historical durations” and a theoretical perspective that was constructed over time, on the expansive dynamics of “global power”.
The situation
The international situation of the last 40 years has been marked by extremely rapid, surprising and profound ruptures and inflections. Starting with the so-called “American crisis” of the 70s, which manifested itself and developed at a time of maximum splendor of North American hegemony after the Second World War. When Europe was reconstructed and several “economic miracles” occurred around the world, “at the invitation” of the United States, including the “Brazilian miracle”, which entered into crisis in the 1980s, as an indirect consequence of the American crisis itself, of the previous decade.
And yet, in a short space of time, between 1970 and 1973, it was as if everything had come crashing down: the United States was defeated in the Vietnam War; at the same time, it was forced to get rid of the “monetary system of Bretton Woods” based on the “gold-dollar standard”, which they themselves had created and overseen since 1944; and were surprised by the World War Yom kippur, in 1973, which was responsible for the explosion in the price of a barrel of oil that had been supported by the Americans and which had been a key part of the “economic success” of the 1950s and 1960s.
At that time, many analysts and scholars of international political economy announced the end of American global supremacy, but history took a completely different turn after the United States redefined its geopolitical and economic strategy in the 1970s. First, it reconnected with China, and then launched a major strategic offensive against the Soviet Union (the so-called “second Cold War”), while at the same time assuming leadership of a new international economic policy of opening up and deregulating financial markets, a true “neoliberal revolution” that changed the face of capitalism and contributed decisively to the American victory in the Cold War. A victory that allowed the United States to exercise unprecedented power in modern history: a military power displayed in the 1991/92 Gulf War, to which was added a financial power that expanded geometrically until the economic crisis of 2008.
In the same decade and a half period, the Soviet Union was destroyed, Germany was reunified, and NATO expanded its presence to Russia’s new borders. It was a time when the “West” celebrated the victory of “liberal democracy” and the “market economy” and the defeat of “nationalism,” “fascism,” and “communism.” And many believed that the time had come for “perpetual peace,” with the emergence of a single global political power capable of overseeing a world order guided by the old values of “European civilization.”
Very soon, however, this global situation changed radically. States, with their national borders and interests, and the “great powers”, with their wars and protectionist policies, returned to the epicentre of the world system, and the great utopian dreams of the 90s were relegated to the background of the international agenda. This was especially true after the start of the “endless wars” waged by the United States and its NATO allies for more than 20 years, mainly in the Islamic territories of the “Greater Middle East”.
In the economic field, after the great financial crisis of 2008, which began in the American real estate market and spread throughout almost the entire world, reaching Europe in an extremely destructive way. From then on, the specter of “right-wing nationalism” and “fascism” returned to haunt the world, and what is most surprising, it penetrated American society and the political system, culminating in the victory of the extreme right in the 2017 presidential elections.
In the first two decades of the 2017th century, the world also witnessed the economic rise of China, the rebuilding of Russia’s military power, and the decline of the European Union within the international system. But there is no doubt that the most surprising development was the new American shift, led by the Republican administration of Donald Trump, which, from XNUMX onwards, began to attack or demoralize the institutions responsible for managing the “liberal cosmopolitan” order established by the United States itself after the Second World War.
After that, the world was hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, which paralyzed the global economy and accelerated the process of deconstruction of global economic chains that began with the 2008 financial crisis. A process of “deglobalization” that reached a point of “no return”, then with the outbreak of the War in Ukraine in 2022. A war that began locally and asymmetrically and then turned into one of the most intense since the Second World War, a true “hegemonic war”, involving Russia, the United States and all NATO countries.
The same war that broke out again in Palestine, around the Gaza Strip, in October 2023, and is expected to multiply, with the militarization of other regional disputes and conflicts, which are expected to turn into new wars, due to the absence of criteria and arbitration instruments accepted by the parties involved in each of these conflicts.
A succession of increasingly rapid inflections and ruptures, which signal a situation of increasingly extensive and profound “world disorder”, without any simple or linear explanation. But where the most notable are, without a doubt, the decline of European cultural hegemony over the last 300 years, and the shrinking of the global military supremacy of the United States over the last 100 years.
The story
In order to advance the study and interpretation of the historical context following the crisis of the 70s, we decided to broaden the horizon of our research, going back to the formation of the “interstate system” itself, which was consolidated in Europe during the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries. And later, to put the European system into perspective, we studied the previous systems of “international power” that were formed within the Eurasian continent, first in Mesopotamia and Egypt,[I] and then in China and India.
And it was along this path that we arrived at the first great “international order” that was actually formed on the Eurasian continent, after the end of the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire, in the 5th and 6th centuries AD. The order created by the “Muslim expansion”, between the 7th and 11th centuries AD, when Islam became a unifying cultural force, connecting the Arab world with the Asian civilizations, and with all the other Mediterranean peoples of the old Western Roman Empire.[ii]
Religious preaching, trade and diplomacy played a decisive role in this expansive process of Islam, but it was the wars of conquest, above all, that opened the doors to the advancement and consolidation of its power system, which was subject, first, to taxation by the Assanid Caliphate of Damascus, and then by the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, long before the Turkish invasions and the formation of the Seljuk Empire in the 11th century and the Ottoman Empire in the 14th century.
It is important to emphasize that it was in this space, which was integrated by wars of conquest and then temporarily pacified by the Mongol and Turkish powers, that the first major long-distance trade routes were established and consolidated, linking China to Europe between the 11th and 14th centuries, passing through Central Asia, Asia Minor, North Africa and the Mediterranean. This was especially true after the Yuan dynasty, founded by the Mongols, pacified China and stimulated trade towards the West, reopening and protecting the “Silk Road” and its connections to the cities and great European fairs.
When one looks at the formation of these first “Eurasian international systems” and their “exhaustion” and disintegration in the 14th and 15th centuries, one realizes that the formation and subsequent expansion of the “European interstate system” was not a “bolt of lightning from the blue”, nor did it arise in a vacuum.[iii] Its first impulse came from its own internal wars, but its expansion outside Europe took advantage of the advantages created by the disintegration of the previous system and resumed its same spaces, routes and commercial circuits, only now led by the territorial States and private capital that had been accumulated within the “European peninsula”, between the 11th and 15th centuries.
In this sense, it is very important to understand these political and economic struggles and transformations within the “European peninsula” during the long period of Islamic hegemony and Turkish supremacy, in order to explain the victorious expansion of the Europeans in the subsequent period during the 16th and 17th centuries.
With regard to these “endogenous” or inter-European processes, it is important to highlight two fundamental things: first, the fact that the European territory was small and limited by militarized and insurmountable borders, to the east and south, where the Mongols and the Muslims settled; and second, that Europe had been transformed into a mosaic of small “sovereign” territorial units after the decomposition of Charlemagne’s Empire. A geopolitical configuration that forced competition and almost permanent war between these small fiefdoms or territorial powers, before they began their maritime expansion, bypassing the “Ottoman siege”.
In this continuous struggle for one's own survival, as Norbert Elias said, “those who did not rise, fell, and expansion meant domination over those closest to us and their reduction to a state of dependence”.[iv] And all the units involved had the same strategic objective: to accumulate as much land, subjects, slaves and tribute as possible, while monopolizing access to new opportunities for accumulating wealth. In other words, all the small units of this European power system aspired to and fought for the same thing: the conquest of an increasingly large, unified and centralized territory.[v] A conquest that was achieved, almost invariably, through wars that became an inseparable part of the new system of power that was being forged within Europe, even before its “explosion” outside the European continent.
At this point, our research shifted its focus to European military and mercantile expansion, with the formation of its first maritime and colonial empires around the world. Six or seven “great powers” that conquered, dominated and defined the rules of the international system over the last 500 years. Great Britain and its global empire in the second half of the 70th century and the United States and its almost universal military empire in the 80th and XNUMXst centuries stand out. A global panorama and a configuration of international forces that assumed their contemporary form through the two great World Wars of the XNUMXth century, at least until the crisis of the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, when the transformations that were the direct object of our historical research in recent decades began to accelerate.
The method
Karl Marx's essay, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, exerted a very important initial influence on our method of historical-conjunctural research. Above all, due to his idea of studying and interpreting the French political situation of the mid-1848th century, in the light of a long-term theory of the capitalist mode of production and the formation of class societies. Even though we were firmly convinced that the concept of “class interest” did not, in isolation, account for the multiplicity of material and analytical connections established by Marx himself, between structural history and the conjunctural time of the struggle between the political parties and groups that occupied the Parisian scene, between 1851 and XNUMX.
To enrich this concept and try to overcome its limitations, we look for alternative complementary suggestions in Gramsci's theory of hegemony and historical blocs, Nicos Poulantzas' theory of “relative autonomies”, Max Weber's theory of rational action and domination,[vi] in Von Clausewitz's theory of war,[vii] in Fernand Braudel's theory of “historical times”,[viii] and in the “indiciary method” of historian Carlo Ginzburg.[ix]
But it was the practice and continued exercise of the analysis of the current situation that allowed us to develop and improve the instruments and categories that we use in our reading and interpretation of the political and economic situation, nationally and internationally, since the publication of our first methodological work, in 1984.[X] Closely following Fernand Braudel's recommendation that “there is nothing more important than the lively and intimate opposition, infinitely repeated, between the instant and slow time”.[xi] And suffering a strong influence from the psychoanalytic theory and method that also influenced the “evidential paradigm” of the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg.
The method he suggested in the criticism of painting, in the diagnosis of illnesses, and in the investigation of the unconscious, through the identification of clues, signs and symptoms “that allow us to capture a deeper reality that is not directly experienced”. An “indirect, circumstantial and conjectural” research, which requires a deep knowledge of the painters, the patients, the “schools”, the “nosographic tables” and the psychoanalytic theory, in order to be able to read and discover, in each sign and symptom, the clue that can lead us to the identification of the author, the illness or the neurosis.
The difference is that, in the case of history and its conjunctures, the analyst also needs to use information and knowledge extracted from geography, demography, sociology, and cultural and civilizing value systems. He must work simultaneously in the three temporalities that Fernand Braudel speaks of: the “brief time,” of immediate political and journalistic events, “the most capricious, the most deceptive of durations”; the “cyclical time,” typically economic; and the “long duration,” the time proper to structures and great historical permanences.
One must remain permanently alert and attentive because the same events that reveal “historical permanences” are those that may be signaling, at any moment, a “change of direction”, or a great historical rupture that may already be in the process of gestation, without the researcher having any law that anticipates the paths of the future and facilitates the diagnosis of the present.
For this very reason, in order to move in this extremely complex and unstable field, the researcher needs some theoretical vision of the dynamics of the international political and economic system. Only then is it possible to identify the “crises”, “ruptures” and “inflections” that hide behind events, hierarchizing and connecting local, regional and global facts and conflicts within the same interpretation scheme. This theory, however, needs to be tested and subjected to a constant exercise of “falsification” of its hypotheses, which can only be done through the conjunctural analysis itself, through successive analyses of the conjuncture, which is why it will always be a “method” and a “theory in the process of construction”.
The theory
In broad terms, to recap, our research program began with an abstract and universal concept of “power” and then examined its concrete historical relations with wars and with the process of formation and expansion of the “European interstate system.” It then investigated how the process of centralization and expansion of territorial power within the European continent met with the process of creating an economic surplus and accumulating capitalist wealth, particularly after the formation of its first states and national economies.
Let us therefore look at some topics or steps of this research and theoretical construction that is still under construction:
About power
From a strictly logical, abstract, and universal point of view, power is an asymmetrical, hierarchical relationship, and a dispute over power itself, and over monopolistic control of its expansion. This is certainly a tautological definition, which is justified, however, because it is a phenomenon, or a conflict, that presents the same structure and the same fundamental dynamics, on any plane, at any time, or in “any world we can imagine”.[xii]
Still on this logical and universal level, it can be deduced that the power relationship cannot be binary, because if it were binary, it would be a “zero-sum” dispute, and if one of the two sides wins, the constitutive relationship of power would disappear. In this sense, it can be stated that the “binary relationship” of power presupposes the existence of a third element, vertex, or “player”, whose logical necessity is imposed so that power itself can exist.
Furthermore, power is “expansive”, or is in permanent expansion, and the energy that moves it “forward” does not come from outside, it comes from its own internal dispute. It is in this sense that one can affirm that power is movement, it is permanent flow, much more than a stock of equipment, of any nature whatsoever. In fact, power only exists while it is exercised and accumulated: (P= +P= P'= +P = P''…..).
Finally, the triangular relationship of power suggests that power is – in a certain way – a “prisoner” of itself, because it can only exist within a “system of powers” in which each “power relationship” presupposes the existence of another “power relationship”, and so on infinitely. And so, when we look at the whole, from within the system itself, whether “backwards” or “forwards”, what we see are always new power relationships, all of them in movement, which indicates to us that the whole of this system of powers also expands infinitely.
On power and war
From our perspective, therefore, power is essentially hierarchical and conflictual, and its dispute involves a permanent competition for more power, and for the conquest and monopolistic control of the most favorable conditions for the expansion of this power. Therefore, in the history of relations between tribes, peoples, empires and nation states, the struggle to impose the will of some over that of others has included the possibility and the “limited necessity” of resorting to war. In this sense, it can be said that war is inseparable from power, or even more harshly, that there is no way to eliminate wars as long as power exists.
But even knowing that wars have always existed, the numbers prove that they acquired a much greater frequency, regularity and intensity after the formation of the “European interstate system”, when they became the driving force behind its first units of territorial power, from the 12th-13th centuries and, in particular, after the 16th and 17th centuries.
Historian Charles Tilly estimates that “from 1480 to 1800, a major new international conflict broke out somewhere every two or three years; from 1800 to 1944, every one or two years; and from the Second World War onwards, roughly every fourteen months. And the nuclear age has not diminished the trend of previous centuries, and wars have become more frequent and deadly.”[xiii] From which he derived his hypothesis that “it was the war that wove the European network of national states, and preparation for war was what forced the creation of the internal structures of the states within this network”.[xiv] According to Charles Tilly, these wars were the main activity of European nation states, consuming around 80-90% of their budgets over the last five centuries.
On power, tribute and “surplus”
Since power is “movement” and is synonymous with “accumulation of more power,” its exercise demands material resources or, in economic terms, it could be said that “territorial power” needs to “finance” its “simple” and “expanded” reproduction. These resources were acquired, in the early days, through the conquest and plunder of new territories and populations, and later, through the establishment and imposition of “services,” “taxes,” “tithes,” or “tributes”—first, exceptionally, during wars, and later, increasingly regularly and universally.
Therefore, the power of the “princes” or “sovereigns” was calculated indirectly by the amount of their conquered territories and the size of their subjugated or enslaved populations, but also, and increasingly over the centuries, by their ability to impose the payment of taxes, rents and services by the populations established within their “domains”. From this came the resources indispensable for hiring mercenary armies and for the military mobilization of their vassals, serfs and peasants, long before the formation of the first regular and professional armies.
If it were not for wars, one could theoretically imagine that direct producers could survive at the level of their “simple reproduction”. But with wars and the imposition of taxes, these direct producers were forced to increase their production and set aside a “surplus” to pay their “fiscal debts” to the sovereigns. Thus, one can deduce that wars were directly associated with the first forms of “economic surplus”.
For William Petty, taxes existed because there was a surplus of available and taxable production.[xv] But it seems more appropriate to us to say that – from a logical point of view – the true origin of the “surplus” was the power of the “sovereigns” and their ability to define and collect taxes, regardless of what – at that moment – the productivity of labor and the size of the production available in the hands of the direct producers was.[xvi] “This “logical precedence” of “power” over the production and distribution of wealth is obvious in the period from the 11th to the 17th centuries. But, from our point of view, it remains even after the establishment of capitalist production and the consolidation of the process of concentration and private centralization of capital. And this is, without a doubt, one of the fundamental premises of our theoretical vision of “global power.”
On power, currency and public debt
With the increase in wars and conquests, the cost of maintaining new territories increased, as did the difficulty of paying troops and acquiring weapons. These new conditions encouraged the “monetization” of taxes paid by defeated populations to the victors of wars. And so the first currencies emerged, issued by the “sovereign powers” established in different latitudes of the European territory, allowing the replacement of taxes and services paid in kind, facilitating exchanges at a distance, and facilitating the quantification of the first private “economic contracts.”
However, the wars themselves created the need for an exchange between the currency of the conquerors and that of the defeated, and the “financing” of the wars, beyond the fiscal capacity of the sovereigns, forced the creation of the first “public debt” bonds. These ended up becoming the privileged “territory” of the “king’s financiers” and the “merchant-bankers”, who won the favor of the “princes”, along with their monopoly right to exercise “monetary seigniorage”, in the relationship between the various currencies and debts of the European territorial powers.
This monetization of taxes allowed a net and more agile transfer of part of the surplus produced by direct producers to their rulers and, indirectly, into the hands of financiers and traders, allowing a first separation, in the long term, of the two circuits: that of the accumulation of power and that of the accumulation of private wealth.
From this point of view, the real history of capital and European capitalism did not begin with the “game of exchanges”, nor even with the “world market”; it began with the “conquest” and “accumulation of power”, and with the stimulus produced by wars in relation to the production and multiplication of the economic surplus, the exchange of goods and financial gains. Great profits and financial gains were accumulated by the “financiers of kings”, progressively giving rise to the first “banking houses” that were created in the shadow of the victorious powers.
And this is how, from the very beginning of the new European political and economic system, an “atomic” relationship was forged between the “expansive compulsion of power” and the “infinite accumulation of capital.” A relationship that has been maintained and deepened over the centuries, even with the increase in complexity and relative autonomy of the “private circuits” of wealth in relation to the “public circuits” of power. A relative autonomy that has always been, in fact, the counterpart of a mutual dependence that manifests itself more clearly with each new war or major systemic economic crisis. A true alliance, fundamental for the joint conquest of new monopolistic positions in the world of power and wealth.
On “markets” and “national economy-states”
In a conference given at Johns Hopkins University in the United States in 1977, Fernand Braudel asked himself about the origin of “national economies” and answered himself by saying that: “[…] the national economy is a political space that was transformed by the State, due to the needs and innovations of material life, into a coherent, unified economic space, whose activities began to develop together in the same direction… A feat that England achieved early, the revolution that created the English national market”.[xvii]
It is very important to add that it was precisely these states that ended up becoming the distinguishing mark of European “superiority” in relation to the rest of the Eurasian continent. In particular after they created their “national economies” – as Fernand Braudel teaches – and transformed them into an instrument of power with an enormous capacity for accumulating wealth. Until the 15th century, the European continent was an economic periphery – almost an appendix – of the “Islamic world” and its gigantic network of tributary, military and commercial connections, which extended – as we have seen – from the Mediterranean to Southeast Asia.
And it is not wrong to say that it was precisely the emergence of these “national economy-states” that changed the course of events, signaling the beginning of the rise of Europe and its conquering expansion towards Africa, Asia and America. Fernand Braudel highlights the importance of the “game of exchanges” in this process of reorganization of power within Europe and the entire Eurasian geoeconomy, but we believe that historian Charles Tilly is right when he says that it was wars, in fact, that ultimately built the internal and external borders of this new “system of power” that was born within the “European peninsula”, before projecting its power and supremacy over the rest of the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.
During this long secular period of original accumulation of power and wealth, incipient relations were established between the world of exchange and the world of war, but only after powers and markets had mutually “internalized” each other can we speak of the birth of a new revolutionary force, with a power of global expansion, a true machine for the accumulation of power and wealth that was only invented by Europeans: the “national economy-states”.
There was no rational calculation or long-term strategic planning in this expansive movement of local powers […]. What there were were “units of power” that competed for the same territory, and it was this struggle that guided the expansive movement of the winners who then continued to fight with new neighbors and competitors, in a continued process of “integrative destruction”.[xviii]
It is important to note, however, that from the very beginning of the formation of these new units of territorial power, it was their collective nature and their ongoing internal struggle that forced them to develop their “national economies,” as had already happened with their “tax systems” and their first “financial houses.” And it was this same environment of competition and dispute that created the original conditions of the “capitalist mode of production” itself, which was a true monopoly in Europe, at least until the 19th century.
With its progressive commodification of all consumer and production goods, with the universal monetization of exchanges, with the wage-earning of labor and the continuous reproduction and valorization of capital. And the same can be said with regard to the subsequent process of industrialization or mechanization of the production process, which operated decisively in favor of Europe's global supremacy, by enhancing, in a very particular way, the military capacity of Europeans, which distanced itself from the rest of the world at an increasingly accelerated rate from the 18th century onwards.
About the “capitalist interstate system”
It is important to remember, however, that none of these “national economy-states” operated alone, nor can they be understood in isolation. For the innovative force of Europe came from this system of power, and not from its individual units taken separately. Above all, it was the competition and internal struggles of this “interstate system” that generated its driving force, just as we said when discussing the abstract and universal premises of all systems of power.
In the European case, as Norbert Elias noted, “a relatively large number of power units deviated from their state of equilibrium and approached a different state, in which an increasingly smaller number of power units competed with each other.”[xx] And in this system, “those who did not rise, fell, and their expansion meant domination over those closest to them, and their reduction to a state of dependence.”[xx] A rule valid for all European territories and states that were obliged to expand and conquer, in order to preserve their own territory and their own power, continually increasing them, within the limits of their material possibilities.
Even so, contrary to what Norbert Elias predicted, and contrary to what happened in China, for example, in Europe, this process of concentration and competitive centralization of power reduced the number of units involved in this competition, but it did not give rise to the creation of a single empire, with the consequent submission of all to a single victorious state. This corroborates and reinforces the thesis that the differential power of the European interstate system came from the continuous competition between its territorial units, contiguous, relatively small, and armed with the same instruments of power.
On hierarchy and the “international order”
The internal struggles of Europe did not give rise to a single empire, but its process of concentration and centralization of power produced a hierarchical ordering of its fiefdoms, prelacies, and kingdoms, which multiplied after the disintegration of Charlemagne's imperial project in the 9th century and after the failure of Pope Innocent III's project to build a “universal monarchy” in the 13th century.
And since the beginning of this history, and in particular after the 15th and 16th centuries, there has been a group of territories and states that have monopolized the upper positions in this international hierarchy. A small “club” of five or six states that maintained complementary political and economic relations with each other, but at the same time were in an almost permanent state of war. And even within this group of “great powers,” there has always been a hierarchy in which Portugal, the Habsburg Empire, France, Holland, England, Russia, etc. have stood out at different times.
The best way to graphically represent the hierarchical and expansive movement of this system is as if it were a “lying cone” that behaves like the tail of a large comet. The small group at the top of the hierarchy would behave as if it were the comet itself, which advances, increasing its size and, at the same time, expanding the space occupied by its tail, which would be – metaphorically – the entire “interstate system”. As if the system of territorial power created by the Europeans, and in particular its “interstate system”, behaved like a true “expanding universe”, continuously and infinitely.
The joint dynamics of this system assume that its “leaders” never stop their expansive movement and are always ahead of the processes of organizational and technological, economic and military innovation, in relation to all the other members of the system. This best explains why the “great powers” are in fact, and at the same time, “orderers” and “disorderers” of the interstate system. Because they can only order and prevent systemic chaos by expanding, innovating and maintaining their relative positions, and at the same time, they can only maintain their relative positions by innovating and changing the rules and regimes of the system itself, and preventing their competitors from accessing the innovations they control.
For this reason, the dispute over the “technological edge” has become, over the centuries, the main cause of the great “hegemonic wars” for leadership of the system. The paradox, however, is that if any of these leading powers stopped expanding, or dedicated themselves only to “stabilizing the status quo”, the most likely scenario is that the system would become disordered and enter a process of entropy and chaotic disintegration.
At the same time, it is also observed that throughout history, every time this “expansive drive” of the great powers brings the system closer to a “unipolar” situation, with the monopolization of power by a single power, it enters into crisis, fragments and ends in some kind of “great war” in which there is a dispute over the definition of the very rules that will govern the new “hierarchical order” of the system that will be imposed after the war and the consecration of its victorious states. Something similar happened with the British Empire at the beginning of the 20th century, and it seems to be happening again at the beginning of the 21st century with the global military empire of the United States.
On imperialism and the internationalization of capital
From what we have seen so far, it can be deduced and affirmed that “imperialism” was a permanent and universal characteristic of all great victorious powers throughout history. It may have been more intense at some times than at others, but ultimately, it was a force and a tendency that was born ultimately from the “expansive drive” of each and every territorial power, from the great empires of the past, as well as from the great powers of the “European interstate system”.
But there is no doubt that the imperialist expansion of the European states acquired a distinct and more powerful nature, as long as it was driven by the “alliance” or combination we have already mentioned, between the “expansive compulsion” of the states and their national and capitalist economies. From then on, power opened the doors to the accumulation of capital, and capital became a weapon at the service of power, and the two together became a true “explosive weapon” put to the service of European supremacy over the rest of the world. At least until the moment when the “rest of the world” learned and reproduced the European model and universalized the capitalist interstate system, with almost all of its original characteristics.
At this point it is worth remembering Fernand Braudel's lesson, when he teaches that "capitalism only triumphs when it identifies with the State, when it is the State", because its objective is extraordinary profits that are achieved through monopolistic positions, and these monopolistic positions are achieved through power. For Braudel, "capitalism is the anti-market",[xxx] because the market is the place of exchanges and “normal gains”, while capitalism is – par excellence – the work of “great predators” and their “abnormal gains”. The accumulation of power creates monopolistic situations, and the accumulation of capital “finances” the struggle for new slices of power.
At this point, we should pay attention to yet another apparent paradox that manifests itself in the very “internationalization” of national economies and their large private corporations, which strengthen their own states and national economies as they become more internationalized. In fact, the competitive expansion of European “national-economy states” created colonial empires and internationalized the capitalist economy, but neither the empires nor international capital eliminated the states and national economies.
On the contrary, what he saw and can affirm is that the internationalization movement of the great powers and their national capital contributes to the development of capitalism on a global scale, but at the same time it increasingly strengthened their own States and economies of origin, reproducing and expanding the asymmetries and inequalities of the interstate system.
On the asymmetric dynamics of capitalist development
The most dynamic economic centers of the system of capitalist “national economy-states” generate a kind of “economic trail” that extends from their own national economy, and can benefit the development of other national economies to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the circumstances.[xxiii] The system, however, can have multiple economic centers, and numerous peripheries and dependencies, which can vary over time without necessarily determining the trajectory followed by the economic development of each particular country.
This is because there are several possible types of economic leadership that can produce the same “trail effect” within their “zones of influence”, giving rise to several “centers” and “peripheries”, and to several types of “dependence”, with very different dynamics and trajectories. There is no doubt that the constant search for “monopolistic gains” by States and their private capital narrows the paths of their competitors and reproduces their inequalities, but even with great difficulty, these inequalities can be modified, depending on the international power strategy of each national State.
In other words: “[…] at all levels and spaces of the system, the same rules and trends of its original European core are reproduced, even if in a form attenuated by time and by the material, geopolitical and strategic conditions of each State. But in any case, there is no way for a national economy to expand simply through the “game of exchanges”, nor is there a way for a capitalist economy to develop in an expanded and accelerated way, without being associated with a State with a project of accumulating power and transforming or modifying the established international order”.[xxiii]
For this reason, when analyzing the capitalist development of successful national economies, one can see a common denominator among them all: they belonged to states that faced major collective challenges and/or had to compete for power with extremely competitive external enemies. In all cases, these challenges or threats acted as “strategic compasses” guiding their public and private investments towards innovation and monopolistic control of cutting-edge technology.
In many of these cases, these challenges contributed to a major national mobilization around objectives that were accepted by various actors who agreed to submit their particular interests to the guidelines of a joint, long-term strategy led by a hegemonic “power bloc,” which remains in place despite changes in government.
Max Weber summarizes this point of view brilliantly and concisely when he says that, “ultimately, the processes of economic development are struggles for domination” and, therefore, are processes that involve a permanent struggle for power, and for power.[xxv]
About “expansive explosions”
Each unit of the “capitalist interstate system” can rise and fall individually, from the point of view of its power, wealth and international prestige, and the same can happen with the world supremacy of the great powers. However, the interstate system – as a whole – has never stopped growing and expanding its spaces and borders, geographical, economic, geopolitical, cultural or civilizational, for about a thousand years.
Even so, it is possible to identify, in this millennial history, the existence of great “expansive explosions” within the system, which go far beyond the “hegemonic cycles” mentioned in some international theories. First, there is an increase in “competitive pressure” within the system; and then, a great “expansive wave”, with the widening of the internal and external borders of the system itself, in addition to the multiplication of its internal power units.
The previous increase in “competitive pressure” is generally caused by the “imperialism” of its great powers and by the increase in the number and intensity of conflicts between the other units of the system. This competitive pressure, in turn, ends up finding an “escape” or “way out” in the form of a “flight forward” of the entire system that expands its borders and redefines its internal hierarchies of power and wealth.
The first time this happened was in the “long thirteenth century”, between 1150 and 1350. The increase in “competitive pressure” in Europe was caused by the Mongol invasions, the expansionism of the Crusades and the intensification of “internal” wars in the Iberian Peninsula, in northern France and in Italy. And the “expansive explosion” that followed turned into a kind of big scared of this “universe” that then begins to expand uninterruptedly.
The second time occurred between 1450 and 1650. The increase in “competitive pressure” was caused by the expansionism of the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire, and by the wars between Spain, France, the Netherlands and England. This was when the first European states were born, with their national economies and a military capacity far superior to that of the sovereign units of the previous period.
The third time was between 1790 and 1914. The increase in “competitive pressure” was caused by French and English expansionism, within and outside Europe, by the birth of the American states and by the emergence, after 1860, of three political and economic powers – the United States, Germany and Japan – which grew very quickly and revolutionized the capitalist economy and the “central core” of the great powers.
Finally, since the 1970s, a fourth “expansive explosion” of the world system has been underway. Our hypothesis is that – this time – the increase in pressure within the world system is being caused by the expansionist and imperial strategy of the United States since the 1970s, by the multiplication of sovereign states in the system, which now number around 200, and finally by the dizzying growth in the power and wealth of Asian states, and China in particular.[xxiv]
At this moment in history, the inclusion of Chinese civilization within the “interstate system”, Russia’s return to the status of an energy superpower, India’s dizzying growth and the accelerated disintegration of the international order imposed by the victors after the Second World War, allow us to predict that this new “flight forward” – which is now in full swing – will be long and may radically redesign the bases of support for the very system of territorial power created by the Europeans.
On “global governance”
There have always been cosmopolitan projects and utopias proposing some kind of “global governance” for the entire interstate system, but in practice, all known forms of “supranational government” experienced to date have been an expression and imposition of the power and values of the victorious powers at each moment in history. Since the 17th and 18th centuries, these values and rules of governance of the world system have been defined and imposed by a very small group of European countries – which Edward Carr called the “circle of the creators of international morality.”[xxv] – basically, France, England, and the United States, in chronological order.
In the 19th century, an increasing number of European states followed the path of the French Revolution, which saw states separate from one another in terms of faith and religious institutions. Even so, almost all of the great European powers maintained their conviction regarding the superiority of the values and “European Christian civilization” over other peoples, cultures and civilizations in the world. This conviction reappears, albeit in a distorted form, in the Enlightenment belief in the superiority of European “reason” and modern “science.” This conviction also explains the great paradox in the thought of Immanuel Kant, who assumed that “perpetual peace” between peoples could only be achieved through war, and a war that would succeed in imposing European values universally.
Many considered that the time had come for the “perpetual peace” proposed by Kant, precisely after the end of the Cold War and the devastating victory of the United States and its allies in the 1991/92 Gulf War, which would also have been a victory for the values advocated by the three great Western powers “creators of international morality”. With this aim, several conferences were held in the 1990s, such as the Convention on Human Rights promoted by UNESCO and held in 1993, and also The Declaration Towards Global Ethics, formulated by the Parliament of the World's Religions, held in 1993 and signed by more than 200 leaders from more than 40 different traditions and spiritual communities.
Everything indicated that this would be a time of great ethical and ideological convergence among peoples, following a devastating military victory by the United States. But very soon after, the world entered a new period of “endless wars”, declaredly by the “international community” against “global terrorism”, but in practice, in fact, a war by the “Western powers” against their ancient enemy, the “Islamic world”.
And after twenty years of “war on terror,” something even more surprising from a “Kantian point of view” has happened: the United States itself has turned against the system of rules, institutions, and values that it had built and protected after the Second World War, and that it had reaffirmed after its victory in the Cold War. This is a surprising phenomenon that can only be explained when we abandon the classical theories of power and international relations, and understand the infinitely dynamic and expansive nature of the “great powers” and of the “interstate system” itself, as we have seen from our theoretical perspective of “global power.”
About “peace”
Once the fundamental premises and hypotheses on which our vision of “global power” is based have been defined, it is inevitable to conclude that within the “expanding universe” that was formed in Europe, starting in the “long 13th century”, and that only became fully globalized at the end of the 20th century, there has never been and never will be “perpetual peace”, for the simple reason that this “universe” is hierarchized and ordered through its own expansion and, therefore, through successive crises and periodic wars.
The utopia of “perpetual peace” and the project of achieving it through a federation or some type of global power that could impose its values, criteria and its own will on all the peoples and countries of Europe and the world were first proposed by the French diplomat Abbé de Saint Pierre in 1712, and were later taken up by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1794.
The same idea and project reappear in several philosophers and international theorists of the 20th century, such as Edward Carr, Raymond Aron and all the defenders of the “theory of hegemonic stability” formulated by the American political economists of the second half of the 20th century. However, international experience does not seem to corroborate the Eurocentric optimism of these thinkers, because most of the major wars fought in the last five centuries of European world hegemony were initiated by European states themselves – in particular, by the countries that lead this international system.
However, there is a deeper and more permanent reason that explains the failure of all these utopias and projects, as the Dutchman Hugo Grotius realized,[xxviii] father of international law, right from the very beginning of the interstate system, at the beginning of the 17th century: the simple fact that within a system with multiple states, there will always be multiple “innocences”, or multiple values, criteria and arguments in the face of each conflict, and of each dispute between these same states. In other words, looking at the same problem from another angle, within this international system, every “peace” that is achieved through war will always be “unjust” from the point of view of the defeated, and all wars will always be “just” from the point of view of those who start them.
It must be concluded, therefore, that the idea and project of “perpetual peace” is a true logical impossibility within our interstate system, a true “square circle”. Simply because there is not and never will be any international arbitration criterion that is “neutral” or “objective”, because all possible criteria will always be compromised by the values and objectives of one of the parties involved in conflicts between nation states, particularly when these conflicts involve the great powers of the system.
In this sense, in conclusion, it would only be possible to conceive of a truly universal and lasting peace if all peoples, empires and national states accepted an agreement like the one proposed by the Persians to the Byzantines, at some point in the 6th century: that the two empires would give up their respective claims to dominate the world, and give up their desire to impose their values, cultures or religions on each other.[xxviii]
This is the real reason why “peace” has become the only authentic universal utopia left in the 21st century: for the entire human species, for all peoples, cultures, religions and civilizations.
* Jose Luis Fiori He is professor emeritus at UFRJ. Author, among other books, of Global power and the new geopolitics of nations (Boitempo) [https://amzn.to/3RgUPN3]
Reference
Jose Luis Fiore. A theory of global power. Petropolis, Vozes Publishing, 2024, 670 pages. [https://amzn.to/3YBLfHb]
Notes
[I] The first recorded international peace treaty signed between the Egyptian and Hittite armies was the Treaty of Kadesh, signed in 1274 BC after the battle of the same name, fought on the great banks of the Kadesh River, located in present-day Lebanon.
[ii] "The rise of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula and the subsequent rapid Arab conquest of the entire region in the seventh century was clearly one of the most decisive events in world history. The Islamic religion and the Arabic language with which it is indissolubly linked served as a powerful unifying cultural force from the Atlantic coast to the Himalayas” (Findlay, R.; O'Rourke, K. Power and Plenty. Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millenium. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, p. 15).
[iii] Abu-Lughot (1989, p. 46).
[iv] Elias, n. the civilizing process. vol. 2. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 1993. p. 94.
[v] Flowers (2021, p. 27).
[vi] Weber, M. Economy and Society. Mexico: Economic Culture Fund, 1977. Vol. I, Part 1.
[vii] Clausewitz, C. Von. Of war. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1979.
[viii] Braudel, F. History and Social Sciences. Lisbon: Presença Publishing, 1972, chap.
[ix] Ginzburg, C. Myths, Emblems and Signs. Morphology and History. New York: Routledge, 1989.
[X] Fiori, JL, “For a political economy of conjunctural time”, TD n 44, IEI/UFRJ, February 1984, text included in this work with the title “Conjuncture, cycles, and long durations”
[xi] Braudel (1972, p. 10).
[xii] "In reality, a tautology cannot be a hypothesis because it cannot be left in a state of problem, the truth is known in advance [...] A tautology is true in any possible world that we can imagine and does not imply any commitment about how the reality is where we are immersed” (Klimovsky, G. The misadventures of scientific knowledge. An introduction to epistemology. Buenos Aires: AZ Editora, 2011, p. 167).
[xiii] Tilly, C. Coercion, Capital and European States, 1990-1992. New York: Routledge, 1996, p.
[xiv] Tilly, 1996, p. 33.
[xv] “For William Petty, taxes were created because there was a “surplus of production” available, when in fact taxes were created because there was a sovereign with the power to proclaim and impose them on a given population, regardless of production and labor productivity at the time the tax was proclaimed. In other words, from a logical point of view, it was only after the proclamation of taxes that the population was forced to separate a part of its production to deliver it to the sovereign, and that was how the “first surplus” was created” (Fiori, JL Global power and the new geopolitics of nations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 20).
[xvi] “The logical precedence of power over the production and distribution of wealth is obvious in the period from the 2007th to the 16th century. But it remains, even after the formation of the capitalist mode of production and the consolidation of the process of concentration and private centralization of capital. The autonomy of markets and the role of intercapitalist competition grow, but the role of political power in the victorious and internationalizing expansion of national capital, in the management of major financial crises, at the cutting edge of technological innovation, and in the continuous and silent function of credit and public spending, which are indispensable to the aggregate expansion of national economies, increases more and more” (Fiori, XNUMX, p. XNUMX).
[xvii] Braudel, F. The Dynamics of Capitalism, Rocco, Rio de Janeiro, 1987, p. 82.
[xviii] Fiori, JL Formation, expansion and limits of global power. In: Fiori, JL (Org.). The American Power. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 2004, p. 22.
[xx] Elias, n. the civilizing process. New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 94.
[xx] Elias, n. the civilizing process. New York: Routledge, 1993. p. 94.
[xxx] Braudel, F. The game of exchanges. New York: Routledge, 1986, p. 403; and The dynamics of capitalism. New York: Routledge, 1987, chap.
[xxiii] Fiori (2007, p. 33-34).
[xxiii] Fiori, JL Conjectures and history. In: Fiori, JL History, strategy and development. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 2014, p. 28.
[xxv] Weber, M. Political Writings. Vol. I. México: Folio Ediciones, 1982, p. 18.
[xxiv] Fiori, JL “The capitalist interstate system in the first decades of the 21st century. In: Fiori, JL; Medeiros C.; Serrano, F. The Myth of the Collapse of American Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 22-23.
[xxv] Carr, E “The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939”, Perennial, New York, 2001, p. 80.
[xxviii] Grotius, H. The law of war and peace. Ijui: Unijui, 2005, p. 40.
[xxviii] The story goes that “the emissary that Khurso—the Persian emperor—sent to the Byzantines presented his appeal for intervention along with an unprecedented formula for a lasting peace between the two empires. Peace could be maintained if the two empires would simply give up their respective claims to world domination, that is, their universalism” (Cline, EH; Graham, MW Ancient Empires: From Mesopotamia to the Origin of Islam. New York: Routledge, 2012, p. 392).
