Suchergebnisse

Leadership long-cycle analyses emphasize the global political economy, sea power, and the cyclical rise and fall of maritime powers. Ludwig Dehio's interpretation of European international politics stressed regional politics, land power, and the cyclical rise and fall of continental powers. Since neither framework totally ignores what the other accentuates, a merger of the two perspectives is quite feasible and results in improved explanatory power. As an illustration, several of Dehio's generalizations about the nature and timing of regional power concentration are tested for the period 1494–1945. The outcome suggests that peaks of regional and global power concentration alternate. Global reconcentration is stimulated, at least in part, by the threat posed by a rising regional challenger.

The popularity of Kondratieff long waves fluctuates according to the economic climate. Periods of slow growth help make long wave explanations more attractive. While their popularity may oscillate, the evidence associated with the existence of long waves continues to be disputed. A review of the pertinent theoretical literature suggests that one reason for the disagreements about the existence of long waves is that much of the available evidence does not correspond as closely as it might to the theoretical foci. A new data series, one based on leading sector production growth rates from 1760 to 1985, is developed to remedy this lack of correspondence. The appropriate analysis of this series requires that particular attention be paid to the rise and relative decline of the world economy's lead state. The empirical outcome provides a close match to the long wave chronology developed by Joseph Schumpeter, Simon Kuznets, and J. J. Van Duijn. While this approach falls short of bringing closure to many of the theoretical and empirical questions concerning long waves, it does establish a solid empirical foundation for further analyses. The article concludes with some observations on the long wave implications for the relative economic decline of Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth century.

The basic assumptions associated with two approaches to analyzing the relationship between the distribution of capabilities and war, namely Waltz's analysis of systemic stability and Modelski's long cycle of global leadership, are examined and contrasted. The systemic stability model concludes that bipolarity is less likely to be associated with destabilizing warfare than is multipolarity. The long cycle model agrees that multipolarity is the least stable arrangement but it depicts unipolarity as the most stable and least conflictual phase in the system's cyclical concentration/deconcentration process. These arguments are tested empirically by first operationalizing polarity and warfare between global powers for 490 years (1494-1983) and then determining how much warfare is associated with each type of polarity. Aggregating across the entire period, global warfare has been least likely in years of unipolarity and near unipolarity, slightly more prevalent in bipolar years, and much more probable in multipolar contexts. Disaggregating time, however, indicates that bipolarity, in certain periods, can be as destabilizing as multipolarity.