Beyond Cycles of Hegemony: Economic, Social, and Military Factors

Abstract

As we survey the changing world on the eve of the 21st century, scholars confront empirical puzzles and interpretive uncertainties. Those of us who identify with worldwide social and political movements seeking more democracy, more equality, more justice, and more rationality find ourselves at once free and daunted. We are free, finally, from the albatross of repressive party-states calling themselves "socialist," from the illusion that social-democratic welfare states are trending toward perfection, from the myth that national development in the Third World is closing the gap. And we are daunted by the double task of (1) reconstructing a strategy of global transformation and (2) making a viable movement out of the multiple oppositional fragments scattered about the global landscape.