faculty.washington.edu/modelski/WSE1.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20140519232033/https://faculty.washington.edu/modelski/WSE1.html
EXCERPT -
introduction
The point of departure of this discussion is the paper entitled “From
Leadership to Organization: Th e Evolution of Global Politics,” fi rst
read in Zurich in 1993, and in Bielefeld in 1994, at the World Congress of
the International Sociological Association, published in this journal in 1995,
and fi nally, in hardcopy in 1999, in a volume edited by Volker Bornschier and
Christopher Chase-Dunn. I mention these circumstances for two reasons. It
means that I presume at least some general acquaintance with the content of its
arguments but more importantly I wish to point to the lapse of time, more than
a decade since its writing, and that makes it worthwhile to pose the question:
are its arguments still valid and how were they aff ected by the passage of time
and the eventful course of world politics since the early 1990s.
In that paper (subsequently referred to as “Leadership”), I examined in
some detail the make-up of two important processes: the well-known long cycle
of global politics, a.k.a. the hegemonic cycle, or the rise and decline of world
powers; and the less well-recognized evolution of global politics, a related institutional
process at a higher level of organization that is in eff ect one of “political
globalization.” I presented the thesis, and the prediction, that the working of
long cycles activates, at a higher level of organization, the evolution of global
politics, such that the political system at that level moves from a condition in
which the chief institution organizing it is global leadership, to “global organization,”
one of a more fully institutionalized form of governance.
George Modelski
Department of Political Science
University of Washington
101 Gowen Hall
Seattle, WA 98195–3530
modelski@u.washington.edu
