Külügyi Szemle - A Teleki László Intézet Külpolitikai Tanulmányok Központja folyóirata - 2002 (1. évfolyam)
2002 / 3. szám - RÉSUMÉ - Deák András Miklós: The First Lessons of Devolution in the United Kingdom - Lévai Imre: Clash of Capitalisms and remaking of World order?
Résumé cannot be sure of the effects of those on the world system as a whole. However dramatic the past and future events may and will seem to be, projections of a new age of violence would be sheer augury. The "small transformation" in Eastern Europe and the "revolt” in the Middle East in the broad sense appear to be historical events having occurred as potential points of bifurcation linked by the new place and part of former spheres of Russian influence in world politics and the American involvement in those. The global informalisation of economic, social, political, cultural and moral relationships: the multiplication and interpenetration of uncountable informal and illegal activities in society and economy, the "feed-forward" effects and side-effects of social marginalisation, economic polarisation and political corruption, commercialisation and depreciation of non-material cultural values, the crisis of "Western" morals, all go to indicate a downward trend in the 200-years-long cultural world cycle. We are not living in a post-modern "future perfect" but in a present quite imperfect, in a new stage of modern age of the predominance of finance capital, subsuming labour under itself imperfectly. What we praised loudly as modernisation was but the expansion of specifically capitalist accumulation, spreading the capitalist social and economic relations throughout the globe. The pattern of modernisation based on growing productivity of and increasing consumption by labour has, however, got to enter into imperfect competition with recurrent and concurrent patterns, in zero-sum business-games and in negative-sum war-games, based on random and on violent ways of redistribution of profits, that is modern modes of primitive accumulation of capital. It is not about clash of civilisations in noble contest but life-and-death struggle of transnational and regional capitalist concerns, and interrelated formal and informal powers, for survival. The "West", in its descending stage of cultural cycle, is to face its allegedly transcended past, the revival of traditional, pre-capitalist social and economic relationships, attributed to the "Orient" so far. The global economic competition and political challenge of modernising Asian sub-centres, on the one hand, and the militant global-regional-local revolt of peripheries and semi-peripheries, striving to conserve and restore traditional social and economic formations, on the other, represent two different ways and means of breaking out from subordination and exploitation on a world-scale, which seem to remain, for the time being, within the limits of moderated clashes of political interests and local and regional military conflicts. Surviving traditional pre-capitalist modes of production play a decisive role in the accumulation of capital in the Arab region, even if modest attempts at implementing models of organic development and strategies of modernisation adjusted to internal and external conditions could be witnessed there in the past few decades. Appendant international economic place and part, serving the interests of modernisation in the 2002. ősz 227
