The Great Chartered Companies of the 17th century were already playing an important role in shaping the development of world regions. Certainly the transnational corporations of the present are much more important players, but the point is that "foreign investment" is not an institution that only became important since 1970 (nor since World War II). Finance capital has been a central component of the commanding heights of the world-system since the 14th century. The current ebb and flow of world money are typical of the late phase of very long "systemic cycles of accumulation."

World-systems scholars contend that leaving out the core/periphery dimension or treating the periphery as inert is a grave mistake, not only for reasons of completeness but also because the ability of core capitalists and their states to exploit peripheral resources and labor has been a major factor in deciding the winners of the competition among core contenders. And the resistance to exploitation and domination mounted by peripheral peoples has played a powerful role in shaping the historical development of world orders. Thus world history cannot be properly understood without attention to the core/periphery hierarchy. The abandoning of Keynesian models of national development led to a new (or renewed) emphasis on deregulation and opening national commodity and financial markets to foreign trade and investment. The term many prefer for this turn in global discourse is neoliberalism, but it has also been called "Reaganism/ Thatcherism" and the "Washington Consensus." The structural basis of the rise of the globalization project is the new level of integration reached by the global capitalist class and the crisis of overaccumulation that emerged in the 1970s when Germany and Japan had caught up with the United States in the production of high-technology commodities.

The world-system has now reached a point at which both the old interstate system, based on separate national capitalist classes and states, and new institutions, representing the global interests of capital, exist and are powerful simultaneously. In this light each country has an important ruling class fraction allied with the transnational capitalist class. The big question is whether or not this new level of transnational integration will be strong enough to prevent competition among states for world hegemony from turning into warfare as in the past, during a period in which a hegemon (now the United States) is declining. The insight that capitalist globalization is a cycle as well as an upward trend and that periods of deglobalization follow these waves of integration has important implications for the future. Capitalist globalization increased both intranational and international inequalities in the 19th century and did the same thing in the late 20th century. Those countries and groups left out of the "beautiful époque" either mobilize to challenge the hegemony of the powerful or retreat into self-reliance, or both. Globalization protests emerged in the non-core with the anti-International Monetary Fund riots of the 1980s. The several transnational social movements that participated in the 1999 protest in Seattle brought globalization protest to the attention of observers in the core, and this resistance to capitalist globalization continued and grew despite the setback that occurred in response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., in 2001.

An apparent tension exists between those who advocate deglobalization and delinking from the global capitalist economy and the building of stronger, more cooperative and self-reliant social relations in the periphery and semiperiphery, on the one hand, and those who seek to mobilize support for new (or reformed) institutions of democratic global governance. Self-reliance by itself, though an understandable reaction to exploitation, is not likely to solve the problems of humanity in the long run. The great challenge of the 21st century will be the building of a democratic and collectively rational global commonwealth. World-systems theory can be an important contributor to this effort.

References:

1) Amin, Samir. 1997. Capitalism in the Age of Globalization. London: Zed.

2) Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century. London: Verso.

3) Chase-Dunn, Christopher. 1998. Global Formation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

4) Chase-Dunn, Christopher and Thomas D. Hall. 1997. Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems. Boulder, CO: Westview.

5) McMichael, Philip. 2008. Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective. 4th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge.

6) O'Rourke, Kevin H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. 2001. Globalization and History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

7) Shannon, Thomas R. 1996. An Introduction to the World- Systems Perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2000. The Essential Wallerstein. New York: New Press.

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