Long-Term Trends in World Politics

Description

// Journal of World-Systems Research. 2005, vol. 11 (issue 2). - P. 195-206.This paper is about the inter-relation of global politics (world security) and the global economy (K-waves). It reviews the current and prospective state of two major processes of global politics: the long cycle (of the rise and decline of world powers), and global political evolution (global level institutional change), and then ask: how they are related to the current Kondratieff (or K-) wave of the rise of the computer-internet industries (as the global leading industrial sectors). The evolution of global politics that is in the long-term period of forming planetary-level organization now offers opportunities for building a global democratic community but also suffers from the structural weaknesses of the institution of global leadership (in the long cycle), and runs into dangers of large-scale warfare two-three decades ahead. Both these processes interact strongly with the current (1975-2026) K-wave that diffuses information technology, lays the information bases of democratization, and enables world-wide cooperation but also diffuses power in the world at large, and to likely competitors. These are not forecasts but rather elements of a framework of orientation for the discussion of the next several decades of some crucial global processes.