Wilma A. Dunaway

Has Terrorism Changed the World-System Forever?

Pp. 1-13 in Crises and Resistance in the 21^st Century World-System, edited by W.A. Dunaway

(Praeger Press, 2003).

This Article Is Copyrighted: When citing this article, be sure to cite the book in which it is published, not this website.

The first half of the 21st century will, I believe, be far more difficult, more unsettling, and yet more open, than anything we have known in the 20th century. (Wallerstein 1997)

The 11 September 11 2001 terrorist assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon threw U.S. citizens into their first "shock of recognition" (Wilson 1955) that the world's hegemonic power is accountable for the harm it does to other societies. Has the world changed forever? This question is not just about the flamboyant terrorism of 11 September; this is the central question of the early 21^st century! Those of us who work within the world-system perspective have been asking that question for more than two decades. Moreover, some of us, especially Immanuel Wallerstein (1999b), have been predicting such turmoil and antisystemic resistance for quite some time. We argue that there are two ways to analyze the degree of change within the modern world-system, and recent events make those ideas so timely that they merit reiteration.

THE IMPENDING CRISIS IN THE WORLD-SYSTEM

From a world-system perspective, the first answer is that we have seen "the end of the world as we know it" (Wallerstein 1999b). However, that change has not happened as a result of terrorist acts against the core. Indeed that terrorism is only a symptom of the ongoing structural and ideological change that has been occurring for several decades. Wallerstein (1999b, 1999c, 1999e) contends that four structural and ideological contradictions of the existing system are generating a major structural crisis from which world capitalism cannot be rescued with the kinds of policies that have worked in the past:

structural contradictions which are cutting into profit levels, thereby threatening accumulation of capital by the system: (1) rising costs of labor and (2) ecological entropy:

structural contradictions which are pushing the system toward chaos and turmoil: (3) the declining role of the nation-state, accompanied by (4) increasing levels of antisystemic resistance (Wallerstein 2000d).

THE COSTLY ECOLOGICAL CRISIS OF THE 21^ST CENTURY

One of the threats to the continued existence of the world-system is ecological degradation. Five core nations generate the vast majority of the fossil fuel emissions and greenhouse gases that cause global warming, and core consumption patterns are generating such rapid worldwide deforestation that a majority of the earth's rainforests will be gone early in the 21^st century (Hauchler and Kennedy 1994). Only 47 percent of the world's land is now cultivable, and desertification had encompassed nearly two-fifths of the earth's surface by the end of the 20^th century. Oil slicks on the oceans and the rise in sea level triggered by global warming have endangered more than half the world's coastal ecosystems. Yet 60 percent of the world's population lives within 65 miles of coasts, relying on those habitats for food and economic livelihood (United Nations 2000).

In addition to these human costs associated with ecological change, Wallerstein (1999a) argues that capitalist profits are dependent on the externalization of costs (entropy) to the world- ecosystem. Those continued profits now endanger the natural resources upon which the world-economy depends.

One of the ways in which capitalists make money is that they don't pay their bills. One of the things they do is that they create problems and don't pay for them. For example, they engage in activities which pollute. They haven't paid for that. The states permit it in effect, and it saves capitalists a lot of money. Or they destroy resources without replacing them. They cut down forests, but they don't replant trees because that costs too much money. So that is what I mean by not paying their bills. Economists have fancy language for this; it is called "externalizing costs." Capitalists can engage in such practices so long as there are resources out there that they can exploit, but there comes a point when there are no more trees to cut down or streams to pollute. The capitalist world-system has reached that point (Dunaway 1999: 294).

There is not likely to be an affordable way to reverse this environmental crisis and thereby salvage the current economic system.

What can capitalists do about the fact that resources are getting scarce? Well, they could pay to restore things. . . . [However], there is no point in undoing all the damage unless the system can take steps not to repeat its past destructive patterns. The amount of money we are talking about is enormous, so who would pay to undo such ecological damage? We might ask the states to pay for it, and then you would question, who would they tax? Taxpayers are already screaming that we are overtaxed. If we taxed the capitalists who are causing the problems, they would say, "but we won't make profits." It is true, they won't make profits in such a situation. Suppose we say to capitalists, "no more externalizing costs." We could pass laws that might force them to internalize all their costs. Then capitalists will say: "profit squeeze!" True! The profit squeeze is the most insoluble problem of the current system. On the one hand, capitalists are experiencing a profit squeeze from the slow growth of real wages, with the decline of new rural people to pull in as very cheap labor. Then there is the second profit squeeze from the real expenses associated with capitalists being forced to pay for their free ride [based on] the externalization of costs. The world faces the choice of ecological disaster or of forcing the internalization of costs. But forcing the internalization of costs threatens seriously the ability to accumulate capital (Dunaway 1999: 295).

THE FUTURE OF WORLD CITIES

The world's cities are points of concentrated ecological entropy, particularly those that are expanding rapidly in poor countries. By 2015, 70 percent of the world's population will be urbanized, and there will be 22 megacities of 8 million or more people located in poor countries. The movements of people to cities are occurring much faster than less developed nations are creating jobs or the water, waste, and healthcare systems to handle those exploding populations. Half the world's people are already living in conditions without adequate sanitation or safe water, so we can expect those problems to worsen over the next few decades (World Health Organization 2000). In addition to the economic, environmental, and demographic crises of world cities, Wallerstein pinpoints this process of urbanization as one of the structural contradictions of the world-system.

The system is based on a ceaseless accumulation of capital, and that accumulation process is now being seriously threatened. There are a series of developments which have undermined the basic structures of the capitalist world-economy and therefore have created a crisis situation. The first of these is the deruralization of the world. Two hundred years ago, 80 percent or more of the world's population was rural. By now, the rural population is less than 30 percent. Well, so what? The major mechanism by which capitalists have maintained relatively low wages worldwide is that there have always been new rural people to pull into the wage labor force. By world standards, these new workers entered the labor force at incredibly low wages, but it seemed like an economic improvement to those workers for the first few decades. Then the workers cotton on to what is going on, they become politically more conscious, and they begin to demand higher wages. So this system works very well so long as we've got new people to migrate, but the system is running out of new rural areas from which to draw cheap laborers. . . . To recapitulate, the deruralization of the world has virtually eliminated the traditional compensatory mechanism of opening up new primary production zones, and, therefore, the worldwide cost of labor will rise to the detriment of capital accumulation (Dunaway 1999: 294).

Despite their problems, cities are the centers of trade, economic innovation, and public services, and poor countries are increasingly polarized internally between urban and rural areas (Hauchler and Kennedy 1994). Because of all these trends, the world's cities will be critical to directions of the 21^st century world-system.

DECLINING U.S. HEGEMONY AND THE COMING AGE OF UNCERTAINTY

Unlike western media, economists and politicians who are optimistic about growth and expansion of the world-economy, Wallerstein (1999b) has predicted the demise of the capitalist world-system within the first half of the 21^st century. The world-system has reached a critical bifurcation point, a short period which will be characterized by a sudden shift in the long-term structural trends that have created and sustained the world as we know it. These are changes to be feared. To these may be added, "fear itself," to quote Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is likely that violence, warfare, and terror will increase in the near future both as cause and effect of the bifurcation. Wallerstein (1997b, 1999d) warns that we are about to enter two to three decades of such turmoil, uncertainty, and conflict. The current system is grinding to a halt, he cautions, even if we cannot hear every one of its desperate gasps.

The first half of the 21st century will. . . be far more difficult, more unsettling, and yet more open, than anything we have known in the 20th century. These next three decades will be very messy politically. When people turn against the state-- and people have now turned against the state everywhere-- things get pretty dicey. This takes the form of an increased sense of personal insecurity, all over the world. Everybody tells you the last five years have been the worst; I expect they will tell us that for the next 25 years (Wallerstein 1997b).

For Americans, much of the instability of the first half of the 21^st century will stem from the struggle of the United States to retain its hegemonic position in the world-system, even though it has begun a long decline (Wallerstein 2000b: 435).

A country as wealthy as the U.S. can be in decline for a hundred years and live very well. But, yes, the U.S. is in relative economic decline in the sense that there are now more efficient producers elsewhere. Relative to the U.S., these other countries have been coming up in the world-economy for twenty years. In terms of the gross world product it controlled, the U.S. was at its height in the 1960s. What's been happening since the 1960s is that western Europe and Japan have become more efficient, so they are closing in economically on the U.S. . . . . Economic decline is already evident in the sense that the income of average Americans and of the working poor is, in fact, lower than it was twenty years ago. Their real purchasing power will go down even further over the next two decades. At the same time, the people in the upper echelons, the richest 10 or 15 percent of the U.S., are doing extremely well (Dunaway 1999: 291).

In short, core citizens especially Americans "are in a kind of fool's paradise" in which they do not recognize that they are "in for very strong economic difficulties" between 1990 and 2025 (Wallerstein 2000b: 435).

WORLD POLARIZATION: THE SECOND WORLD-SYSTEM VANTAGE POINT

Has the world been transformed forever because of terrorism against the United States? From our second vantage point, the modern world-system has changed very little. On the one hand, we have seen "the end of the world as we know it" (Wallerstein 1999b), and events like those of 11 September 2001 are only precursors of the uncertainty which lies ahead. On the other hand, polarization and inequality have not diminished in the world. Instead those conditions have worsened and deepened over the last three decades of global neo-liberalism (United Nations 1999). Despite the shock of a well-orchestrated terrorist assault on the United States, the structure, trends, and cyclical rhythms of the world-system still operate (Wallerstein 2000b: 71- 103). Those assaults have triggered no structural change in the three-tiered interstate system which is controlled by the core (Wallerstein 1993: 47-74). Multinational corporations based in the six richest core nations still monopolize two-thirds of the dollar value of all international trade (Third World Institute 1992, 1999). The neo-liberal globalization agenda (while under stress) is still thriving and cementing core control over the economic and natural resources of the semiperiphery and the periphery (Bello 2001). Debt and structural adjustment continue to cripple peripheral nations (Anderson 2000), and the future of eastern European post-communist nations is still highly uncertain (Hauchler and Kennedy 1994). Except for an added dimension of political pressure and military repression from the core, 11 September 2001 has not altered the daily struggles of a majority of the people on the planet. While capitalists regroup to try to widen profit margins and to overcome the internal structural contradictions of the world-system, living conditions in the world are growing increasingly polarized. Two-thirds of total world wealth is controlled by only 18 nations that contain only 12 percent of the world's people. Consequently, the vast majority of the world's households struggle to survive on annual incomes that fall far below $1,000 yearly. (Hauchler and Kennedy 1994). As wealth is increasingly concentrated into fewer and fewer hands around the world, 100 countries have lost economic ground since 1985 (United Nations 1999). Most of the people of the world live in poverty, without safe water and without adequate levels of sanitation, education, and health care. World-system analysts see little hope that conditions will improve for poor countries in the 21st century.

Conditions will actually get worse every year. The polarization of the world is on the steady increase. We do not feel the world's misery in the United States. We don't observe it because things are getting better all the time for the top 15 or 20 percent of the world. That top global echelon includes maybe half the people in the United States. So many Americans keep saying, "gee, we're doing well," while most of the people of the world are doing worse. The rich West keeps promising the poor countries that international trade is the solution to their problems. The "free market" can no more transform the economic prospects of the poorer 75 percent of the world's populations than taking vitamins can cure leukemia. The promise of economic growth and improvement is a fake, and the damage is already done to the Third World (Dunaway 1999: 293).

Recent terrorism against the United States has not altered the polarization of the world-system in terms of political or military power, economic inequalities, or the wide chasm between core and periphery with respect to quality of life. The United States still spends half the world's military budget and owns the vast majority of the world's weapons of mass destruction-- and terrorism is likely to exacerbate that militarism. In addition, the U.S. and the European Union export most of the arms that are available to poor nations (Hauchler and Kennedy 1994), and in the 1990s, the world spent $1.57 on arms to every dollar expended for grain. Political hardships have not diminished for most of the people of the world. On the contrary, political repression and lack of effective democratic governments are still characteristic of a majority of the world's countries. Indeed, it is likely that political repression will deepen as the core seeks to control terrorism by directing military and policing actions toward poor countries. Nor has the incidence of interethnic conflict changed. On average, there are 35 such conflicts occurring ever year, resulting in the death and displacement of nearly 30 million people annually (Hauchler and Kennedy 1994). No matter its success in making U.S. office buildings or aircraft safer, the core war against terrorism will only exacerbate those horrendous global problems.

While the United States loudly organized its "new world war" against terrorism, most of the people of the world silently continued to battle the same problems and crises they have always faced in the modern world-system. Fears about future terrorism and security may inconvenience the lives of Americans and other core citizens, but these awful events have not improved the everyday lives of a majority of the people who live on the planet. One-half of all Third World children still die before the age of ten (UNICEF 2000), and most of them die from water-borne illnesses that are easily preventable (World Health organization 2000). More than one-quarter of the world's people lack access to safe drinking water; one-third cannot locate the fuelwood they need to run households, and nearly one-half are either malnourished or chronically hungry (United Nations 2000; UNICEF 2000). The AIDS epidemic is spiraling out of control in Africa and Asia (World Health Organization 2000), but more than 80 percent of the world's treatment dollars for this disease are still expended in the core (Hauchler and Kennedy 1994). While half the world's population still lacks regular access to the most basic drugs (World Health Organization 2000), the core plunges ahead with experimental research into genetic engineering and heroic health technologies. In comparison to the 20 million people who die every year from malnutrition, the loss of 6,000 to an act of terrorism seems like a tiny raindrop falling into a giant barrel of accumulated water (United Nations 2000; World Health Organization 2000).

The world's typical woman will have no time or energy to worry about terrorism in the core. The face of world poverty is increasingly feminized, and the central crises of life for those women are directed to the acquisition of safe water, fuelwood, nutrition, and health careB the basic survival needs for their households. Since only about one-third of Third World children are guaranteed even a few years of elementary education, most of the world's mothers still prioritize relief from the high illiteracy rates among females and the necessity for children to be employed in dangerous wage-earning jobs. Every year, 300 times more women and girls are indentured into the global sex industry than died in the September, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States (UNICEF 2000). Moreover, terrorism against the core is not the number one violent crime in the world. Death and maiming from such acts are minuscule in comparison to the devastation caused by the high incidence worldwide of domestic violence and rape (World Health Organization 2000).

IDEOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL CONFLICTS BETWEEN CORE AND PERIPHERY

Some commentators have been quick to cry that terrorism has resulted from the "demonization of America." However, there is a flip side to that ideological coin, for such rhetoric powerfully demonstrates that American hegemonic posturing and ethnocentrism have not diminished. On the one hand, "America's New War" is "not merely a matter of protecting U.S. citizens and residents from attack, but of re-establishing worldwide belief that the U.S. is an invincible superpower" (Wallerstein 2001b). On the other hand, Americans who were outraged and grieved by 6,000 deaths on their own soil had watched with little remorse and no intervention in 1994 as nearly one million Rwandans died in the worst 20^th century genocide since Hitler orchestrated the Holocaust (Public Broadcasting System 1998). Within one month, Americans contributed an average of $100,000 per person who died in the World Trade Center (CNN, 11 October 2001), but they annually ignore the plight of more than 20 million refugees who struggle to survive every year in horrendous conditions in relief camps funded at less than 12 dollars per person (UNHCR 2000). Furthermore, Americans do not react with horror or with humanitarian outpouring after core-generated global warming exacerbates the number and the ferocity of droughts, floods, earthquakes, typhoons, and hurricanes in peripheral nations-- even though each of those natural disasters typically kills 10 to 100 times the number of people who died in the September 11^th assaults on U.S. buildings and aircraft (World Health Organization 2000).

There is yet another aspect to this core ethnocentrism. Cultural differences are significant "ideological battlegrounds" in the world-system (Wallerstein 2000b: 264-89). While Americans can recognize when they are "demonized" (Huntington 1996), they are much less willing to acknowledge that westoxification of nonwestern societies is the cultural pillar of American hegemony that is under assault (Barber and Schulz 1995; Rashid 1998). In a 1999 interview, Wallerstein prophetically warned of the dangers of a U.S. foreign policy that "demonizes Islam" as the new Cold War for the 21^st century.

It is important to examine why the U.S. feels threatened by Islamic Fundamentalism and not by other forms of this theological shift. . . . From the Western governments' point of view, Third World movements, like Islamism, are easy things to demonize. So we engage in this big game of demonizing these movements without analyzing their strengths or the motives of their followers. Why does the U.S. need demons? Precisely because we have lost the other demon, the communist demon. . . . Through its foreign policy, the U.S. demonizes such liberation movements because there is very little we can do about them, like our series of conflicts with Iraq. I certainly do not think that the major problem of the 21st century is Islamic Fundamentalism. In the end, U.S. rhetoric about Islam doesn't really change attitudes in other parts of the world, which is the ostensible motivation of its propaganda. However, such demonization has a function for internal U.S. politics. It prevents U.S. citizens from understanding what is really going on. Moreover, such propaganda diverts attention from real political and economic inequities in the world (Dunaway 1999: 288-89).

POLARIZATION AND ANTISYSTEMIC RESISTANCE

Economic, health, cultural, and ideological polarization will exacerbate the structural crises of the world-system. For a majority of the world's people, the sharp contrast between their misery and the luxurious core lifestyle are constant reminders that there is not likely to be a more egalitarian world within the constraints of the present system (Wallerstein 1997b). Consequently, "the excluded South will become politically far more restive than at present, and the level of global disorder will increase markedly"(Wallerstein 1997a). Moreover, "we are seeing today a decline in the strength of state structures everywhere in the world, which means rising insecurity" (Dunaway 1999: 297). According to Wallerstein, there are four major dilemmas:

that have been growing for hundreds of years and have now reached the crisis point. There are three irreversible structural crises that are putting real pressures on global profits-- thereby threatening the accumulation of capital that propels the existing system. On top of that, disillusionment with 20th century movements has caused the elimination of a safety valve that once protected the system. The failures of communism, socialism, and national liberation movements means the removal of the major political mechanism that kept the lid on the pot of world grievances (Dunaway 1999: 296-97).

In short, the core can expect to witness an increasing number of events like the September 11^th terrorist assaults in the United States.

Ironically, that very democratization that is ideologically favored by the core spawns social movements that seek to protect their societies against cultural genocide. Since the world-system has reached a bifurcation point, that growing antisystemic resistance takes on new significance. Indeed, Wallerstein (1999b, 1999e) has argued that it is precisely in periods of transition from one historical system to another that human struggle can have the greatest impact. "We are in a systemic bifurcation, which means that very small actions by groups here and there may shift the institutional forms in radically different directions."

When a system functions "normally," as the capitalist world-system functioned for several hundred years, people could push and pull, but those actions would only have limited effect. That has been one of the problems with the current system. People have pushed and pulled pretty hard for the last 200 years. Since their struggle has only had limited effect, most of the people of the world are very disillusioned. When a system is in crisis, however, it fluctuates incredibly, and it becomes very unstable. So a little push here and a little push there really has tremendous effect. . . . When a system is in normal operation, we can say that the system heavily determines our lives. But when it is in crisis, there is much more space for operation of the free will. It is only in such times of transition that what we call free will outweighs the pressures of the existing system to return to equilibria.

Consequently, antisystemic events like the September 11^th terrorist act can have a lasting structural impact on the system now that such a singular incident would not have had at an earlier historical stage.

CONCLUSION

As we look forward to the first half of the 21^st century, there are more crucial questions to explore than detailed analysis of any singular event.

Will the U.S. position in the world-system be stronger than today? Will today's geopolitical line-ups survive as a serious mode of organizing global politics? Might the "anti-globalization" movement perhaps have been metamorphosed into something more coherent and far more military than today? . . . . Above all, may not chaotic conditions become something much more the universal norm, and insecurity the daily potion of still more of us? And might the world economy not begin to oscillate wildly? And if it does, where will be 50 years from now? Nothing could be less certain. But looking back 50 years ahead, it is doubtful that Sept. 11 in itself will seem all that important (Wallerstein 2001a).

Bottom line, there are more significant structural crises than terrorism, no matter how significant it may seem now to the core. Those structural crises and the antisystemic resistance they foment will shape the future of the world-system to a much greater extent than any single terrorist act or even a series of such acts.

NOTES

1. I would like to thank Donald Clelland for his critical comments and suggestions. I am alluding here to Edmund Wilson's (1955) notion that a great writer stimulates a powerful "shock of recognition" in the reader and is able to elevate suddenly her or his consciousness about a reality that did not previously enter their awareness.

2. The 21^st annual PEWS conference focused on ecological degradation. See Goldfrank, Goodman, and Szasz (1999).

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Bello, Walden. 2001. The Future in the Balance: Essays on Globalization and Resistance. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.

Dunaway, Wilma A. 1999. Crisis, Transition, and Resistance Movements: A Conversation with Immanuel Wallerstein. Appalachian Journal 26 (3): 284-305

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