William I. Robinson

Beyond Nation-State Paradigms: Globalization, Sociology, and the Challenge of Transnational Studies

Globalization has made it increasingly necessary to break with nation-state centered analysis in macrosociologies. Social structure is becoming transnationalized, and an epistemological shift is required in concurrence with this ontological change. A new interdisciplinary transnational studies should be predicated on a paradigmatic shift in the focus of social inquiry from the nation-state as the basic unit of analysis to the global system as the appropriate unit. Sociologys fundamental contribution to a transnational studies should be the study oftransnational social structure. This article does not establish a new transnational paradigm. Rather, it surveys and critiques nation-state-centrism in extant paradigms, provides a rationale for a new transnational approach, and proposes a research curriculum of a new transnational studies that may contribute to paradigmatic reconceptualization.

Gramsci and Globalisation: From Nation‐State to Transnational Hegemony

Abstract This essay explores the matter of hegemony in the global system from the standpoint of global capitalism theory, in contrast to extant approaches that analyse this phenomenon from the standpoint of the nation‐state and the inter‐state system. It advances a conception of global hegemony in transnational social terms, linking the process of globalisation to the construction of hegemonies and counter‐hegemonies in the twenty‐first century. An emergent global capitalist historical bloc, lead by a transnational capitalist class, rather than a particular nation‐state, bloc of states, or region, is pursuing a hegemonic project. The US state is seen as the point of condensation for pressures from dominant groups to resolve problems of global capitalism. US‐led militarisation is a contradictory political‐military response to the crisis of global capitalism, characterised by economic stagnation, legitimacy problems and the rise of counter‐hegemonic forces.

LATIN AMERICA AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM

William I. Robinson teaches sociology at New Mexico State University. His most recent book, Promoting Polyarchy: globalization, US intervention, and hegemony, won the 1997 Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Political Economy of the World System Section of the American Sociological Association. Latin America is a continent in struggle against the structures of inequality, oppression and underdevelopment still in place 506 years after the Conquest. But those structures and the struggles against them are undergoing dramatic transformation m the face of capitalist globalisation. The restructuring of world capitalism, its new transnational logic and mstitutionality, the polarisation between the rich and the poor and the escalation of the inequalities, marginalisation, deprivation taking place under globalisation, have profoundly changed the terrain on which Social struggle and change will take place in Latin America in the twenty-tirst century. Globalisation represents a shift from the nation state to a new transnational phase of capitalism. Transnational capital has become the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale, and its agent, an emergent transnational capitalist class (or elite), is reorganising the world in its interests. The globalisation of production and the global integration of national and regional economies involves fundamental economic, social, political and cultural-ideological restructuring m every country and region. The transnationalisation of capital also brings with it the transnationalisation of classes, the emergence of a transnational state apparatus, a dominant ’global culture’ of consumerism and individualism, and so on.

'Aqui estamos y no nos vamos!' Global capital and immigrant rights

The recent mass demonstrations by millions of Latino immigrant workers in the US, against planned legislation that could lead to the criminalisation and deportation of, literally, millions of workers shook the Bush administration and took commentators by surprise. The upsurge has been dubbed the new civil rights movement. It marks a new stage in globalisation and the phenomenon of mass, trans-national migration that such globalisation has engendered. Unprecedented in size and scope, the movement challenges the structural changes bound up with capitalist globalisation and points to the necessity of transnational popular and democratic struggles against it.

Latin America in the Age of Inequality: Confronting the New “Utopia”

The gales of global capitalism have hit Latin America hard. The region has been ravaged by a new market apartheid characterized by a striking contradiction. Social movements of every type have proliferated in an increasingly dense civil society and are vibrant protagonists. But the accomplishments of social movements in organizing the popular classes have not been matched by an ability to offset the dramatic sharpening of social inequalities, increased polarization, and the growth of poverty brought about by globalization. How do we account for this paradox?

(Mal)Development in Central America: Globalization and Social Change

This article develops a globalization framework and a model of transnational processes for analysing social change and development, and then applies the model to Central America. The analysis emphasizes determinacy, in the last instance, of social forces in historic developmental outcomes, and documents how social forces in struggles in an emergent transnational environment have shaped Central Americas changing profile within the global economy and society. Revolutionary movements, a new class structure, US geo‐political considerations, and the internationalization of East Asian economies, have all contributed to a new model of development; from the 1960s into the 1990s the national model of development is being replaced by a transnational model. Maquiladora garment production, tourism, non‐traditional agricultural exports, and remittances from emigrant workers are coming to eclipse traditional agro‐exports as the most dynamic economic sectors linking the region to globalized circuits of production and distribution. The article also examines Central American migration to the US and gender dimensions of the new transnational model of development.

The transnational state and the BRICS: a global capitalism perspective

It is commonplace for observers to see the increasingly prominent role of the BRICS in international economic and political affairs as a Southern challenge to global capitalism and the power of the core Trilateral nation-states. Extant accounts remain mired in a tenacious realist debate over the extent to which the BRICS are challenging the prevailing international order. I suggest that we shift the paradigmatic focus in discussion of the BRICS phenomenon towards a global capitalism perspective that breaks with such a nation-state/inter-state framework. Global integration and transnational capitalist class formation has advanced significantly in the BRICS. BRICS protagonism is aimed less at challenging the prevailing international order than at opening up space in the global system for more extensive integration and a less asymmetric global capitalism. The article examines agricultural subsidies, US–China relations and international trade agreements as empirical reference points in arguing that the concept of the transnational state provides a more satisfying explanatory framework for understanding the BRICS phenomenon than the variety of realist approaches. By misreading the BRICS critical scholars and the global left run the risk of becoming cheerleaders for repressive states and transnational capitalists in the South. We would be better off by a denouement of the BRICS states and siding with ‘BRICS from below’ struggles of popular and working class forces.

Global Crisis and Latin America

This essay examines Latin America’s experience in the crisis and restructuring of world capitalism from the 1970s into the twenty first century, with particular emphasis on the neo-liberal model, social conflicts and institutional quagmires that have engulfed the region, and the rise of a new resistance politics. The empirical and analytical sections look at: Latin America’s changing profile in the global division of labour; the domination of speculative finance capital; the continued debt crisis, its social effects and political implications; capital–labour restructuring, the spread of informalisation and the new inequality; the passage from social explosions to institutional crises; the new popular electoral politics and the fragility of the neo-liberal state. These issues are approached through the lens of global capitalism theory. This theory sees the turn-of-century global system as a new epoch in the history of world capitalism, emphasising new patterns of power and social polarisation worldwide and such concepts as a transnational accumulation, transnational capitalists and a transnational state. Finally, the essay argues that global capitalism faces a twin crisis in the early twenty first century, of overaccumulation and of legitimacy, and explores the prospects for social change in Latin America and worldwide.

The Pitfalls of Realist Analysis of Global Capitalism: A Critique of Ellen Meiksins Wood's Empire of Capital

Th e dynamics of the emerging transnational stage in world capitalism cannot be understood through the blinkers of nation-state-centric thinking. In her study Empire of Capital, Ellen Meiksins Wood exhibits the reification and outdated nation-state-centric thinking that plagues much recent work on world capitalism and US intervention, expressed in the confusing notion of a ‘new imperialism’. Th e overarching problems in Wood’s study – and, by extension, in much of the ‘new-imperialism’ literature – is a reified notion of imperialism, a refusal to draw out the analytical, theoretical, methodological, and epistemological implications of capitalist globalisation, and an incessant reification of the state. Instead of a ‘new US empire’, the current epoch is best understood as a new transnational phase in the ongoing evolution of world capitalism, characterised in particular by the rise of truly transnational capital, globalised circuits of accumulation, and transnational state apparatuses. ‘US imperialism’ refers to the use by tansnational elites of the US state apparatus to continue to attempt to expand, defend an stabilise the global capitalist system. US militarisation and intervention are best understood as a response to the intractable contradictions of global capitalism.

The Global Economy and the Latino Populations in the United States: A World Systems Approach

There are broad, historical-structural linkages among the distinct Latino groups in the United States, on the basis of which a Latino national minority is forming. In analyzing the disproportional effects on Latinos of the global economy, this essay argues that there is a common Latino historic experience vis-à-vis the world system: incorporation into the U.S. political economy, with its characteristic pattern of racialized social relations, from the immediate U.S. periphery, the Greater Caribbean Basin, and through colonial conquest. This constitutes the structural underpinning for a Latino national minority. This analysis also provides new components of a theoretical framework for understanding minority group formation.