Wallerstein: Nation-State Order, Class Containment, and the Global Periphery

Immanuel Wallerstein in February 1997 in France. (Louis Monier / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

In his analysis of world-systems, Immanuel Wallerstein describes capitalism as a transnational economic system, with core capitalist countries at the center and periphery countries at the edge. The system survives through two forms of control: within the nation-state, the ruling class crushes class conflict; and outside, the state stabilizes its dominance over the economic and cultural periphery.

Historically, core states (e.g., Britain, France, Germany) have established high-value forms of production while the periphery has been limited to extractive labor (e.g., mining, monoculture agriculture), effectively creating a global division of labor. Local elites in the periphery, who were often educated, or socially aware, through or with the assistance of institutions supported by the core, maintained the low-cost exports home, while ensuring political compliance with the core.

Dependence on periphery economies allowed core countries to provide limited social concessions or reforms (e.g., cheap bananas for British workers). Limited social reforms helped assuage class conflict in core economies. He accused the field of science of promoting ideological cohesion, by training peripheral elite (e.g., medical, education) professionals in a Western-trained professional colonization of their knowledge, elites reproduce dependency, recreating division of labor within society.

Wallerstein describes two responses to the system that are anti-systemic: socialist (and integration, productivist); and nationalist (and resistance and highlighted by a state identity). Both response forms may seem sunken oppositional, they often reproduce the same systemic processes against capital.

In Europe, only independence movements that are not state-based, that fuse class struggle to national struggle (e.g. Basques, Irish republicanism), have sustained mass movement.

The system is a historical process that continues to endure by portraying alternatives either impractical or co-opted.