ABSTRACT
The long-term trend since the Stone Age has been for polities and states to get larger. This long-term trend is partly masked because all inter-polity systems oscillate between relatively greater centralization and decentralization. During the centralized phase a single very large polity is predominant, but then this power declines relative to competitors. The long-term upward trend in polity size has been produced by occasional upward sweeps in which a new polity that is much larger than any earlier one emerges. The modern worldsystem is different from earlier systems in that the centralization/decentralization sequence has taken the form of the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers rather than the earlier pattern of the rise and fall of core-wide empires. Imperialism in the modern world-system has usually taken the form of vast dispersed colonial empires, and formal empire has been abolished as the system of states that began in Europe has been spread to the rest of the world. In the long run, the human species is probably headed toward global state formation, but the contemporary institutionalization of the multipolity interstate system remains very strong. Yet there has been an upward trend toward the formation of international political organizations since the Napoleonic Wars and national states have become reconfigured by the forces of the ‘globalization project’ (McMichael 2004; Sassen 2006) so that they are increasingly coming to be the enforcers of institutions that support neoliberal accumulation – a process that can be seen as a form of global state formation. The hegemony of the USA is declining and a new period of inter-imperial rivalry seems to be in the making, but there are also possibilities for new and more democratic forms of multilateral global governance to emerge within the next few decades.
