Predictions on the next world-system and the BRIC nations' sort of Joker-like role in its creation

In the Economist article Proftoft* linked to a few posts ago, it seemed to me that the author was suggesting that the "North" was in danger of switching places with the "South" in regards to economic vitality and Debt-to-GDP ratio, and that the BRIC nations had become midwives for the current mutated iteration of the traditional core-periphery relationship between the West and the "Rest".

This got me thinking since I recently reread Wallerstein's World-Systems Analysis, and I couldn't help but see these developments as being an interesting permutation of his core/periphery/semi-periphery trifecta. If the semi-peripheral nations (BRIC) are developing work-arounds to bypass the economic structures currently in place to keep capital flowing from periphery to core, and the core nations are digging themselves deeper and deeper in debt in order to continue to make love to this increasingly outdated model, then is it possible that the BRIC nations are in the midst of creating the next world-system out of the collapsing ruins of the current one**? If this is the case, then what do the BRIC nations' methods tell us about the coming world-system? Or is it possible that even a world dominated by the BRIC nations is still a capitalist world-system, simply with new hegemonic powers?

It seems to me that although there is something unique to the semi-periphery effectively siphoning off the flow of capital between the core and periphery***, this does not in fact constitute a new world-system. Unless of course the BRIC nations are strangling the hegemony of the West in order to institute a new non-global regionalism that resembles more than anything the Medieval world-system described in Abu-Lughod's Before European Hegemony. I suppose it's possible that global hegemony could be wrested from the West in order to simply destroy the idea of global hegemony and replace it with neo-regionalism. Nowhere in Wallerstein's book does it say that the next world-system can't in fact look just like world-systems past; it just can't look like the last one.

This begs the question, then: is it truly a foregone conclusion that the world will continue to grow more and more globally integrated until we reach the critical mass of a One-World Government/Economy/Culture (literal or de facto, it makes no difference)? Or is it possible that the way forward is actually the way backwards, that the current world-system is destined to reach its asymptote and then fall gracefully (or disastrously, depending on what nations lose in this scenario) down to pre-1450 levels?

Certainly there are hints that a capitalist world-system dedicated to the "endless accumulation of capital"^ on a global scale is a disastrously short-sighted policy. It is tantamount to self-extinction, the unchecked growth of the world-economy. As evidence we have the obvious^^ fact of "peak oil," in which the largest economies of the world are eventually deprived of the very substance that powers almost every aspect of their economies. But there are additional horrors that even those obsessed with oil dependency rarely consider. For instance, let's chat about the wonders of Peak Copper or Peak Gallium, or, well, Peak Everything!

It seems to me, then, that the most obvious elephant in the world-economic room is that capitalism is necessarily a zero-sum game in which every United States necessitates 2+ Haitis in order for the system to "work". So, even if it were possible (which I don't think it is), what sort of world-economy would accomodate US-levels of consumption (given also US-levels of income-disparity) across all peoples and all nations? Well, it would be a world that would have a lot less naturally-occurring elements for one. But most of all it would be an extremely short-lived world, unless also attended by a requisite drop in birth rates.

This brings me to what I think is maybe the point of all this: that understanding/studying regional relationships/contradictions is, as Proftoft said in an earlier post, perhaps the most important history of all, not just because it is a heretofore understudied part of the global historical picture, but also because it very well might have more meaning for the next world-system than a literal global perspective. It seems to me, poised on the edge of Peak Everything, an explosion of consumerism in the semi-peripheral nations, the decline of the current hegemonic powers (and the inevitable spasms of violence that usually attend such declines), and a capitalist world-economy whose very demise is written into the blueprint for the design, that globalism might be as quaint an invention in 50 years as Betamax is today.


P.S. Firstly, I am fully aware that this post is probably a tangent, or at best a very long-winded "amen" to Proftoft's post about studying regional contradictions, but I hope that it is useful in some capacity to the general discussion. Having so far only delved into Amsden, a little of Berger, Hannah Arendt's On Violence, and the Economist article, these are the things that have been tumbling through my head, a little like rocks in a dryer. I hope I didn't ruin anyone's day with my pessimism.

Secondly, I have to state for the record that, having only taken one Economics course about ten years ago, Amsden's article not only sailed about twenty feet above my head, but then swooped down around paragraph six just to waggle its little article fingers at me and mock my ignorance. Perhaps a soul far wiser and learned than myself could guide me in the right direction on this particular nugget of economic wisdom? In the interim I shall read it again and I'm sure it'll make a tad more sense to me.


*Sheesh, there I go again. Someone stop me.
**As predicted in the closing chapter of World-Systems Analysis, in which Wallerstein states that the current capitalist world-system is incapable of continuing indefinitely and a new world-system will inevitably grow out of the collapse of the current one.
***And in the process highlighting just how much the core depends on the periphery, and hence how much power the periphery has.
^This is Wallerstein's definition of the current Capitalist World-System, which is dedicated to the endless accumulation of capital, and since I am predicating a great deal of the post on Wallerstein's writing I figure I should at least use his terminology.
^^By 'obvious' I mean simply that eventually we will run out of oil. That is indisputable. I don't wish to ignite any kind of controversial debate.