This paper centers on extending Arrighi’s regional analysis to the study of the Russian-Eurasian historical system and its interaction with the capitalist world-economy. Unlike larger and more central units like East Asian or European...
moreThis paper centers on extending Arrighi’s regional analysis to the study of the Russian-Eurasian historical system and its interaction with the capitalist world-economy. Unlike larger and more central units like East Asian or European regional systems, Russian-Eurasian systems formed far beyond the margins of established complex societies and evinced lesser demographic and economic magnetism. For this reason, they constituted secondary cores whose initial dynamism was itself triggered by core formation elsewhere. In two earlier instances, that of the Abbasid-Islamic Commonwealth and Mongol-Chinese amalgam, the initial capture of nominally “Russian” groups as tribute-paying satellites supplying raw materials and slaves nevertheless allowed the generation of core-like attributes and the projection of their own imperial orbits in the longer term. When the long-distance networks generated by the primary cores broke down in the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively, Russians were able to tap into existing dynastic, religious and commercial structures to survive the transition and preserve the outlines of regional integrity. In the third instance constituted by the Euro-Atlantic capitalist system, however, the increasing density of accumulative nodes in the “organic core” ensured Russia’s incorporation, not as a secondary core, but as s semi-periphery exerting ever-greater efforts to expand imperial boundaries, keep pace economically, and generate a distinct cultural identity, even as these efforts provided greater stability to the world-system as a whole. In the twentieth century, the attempt to implement a mobilizational political economy first introduced under Mongol rule initially resulted in the rise of the Soviet superpower, but subsequently led to its precipitous collapse and peripheralization. Although no longer poised to exercise global leadership, post-Soviet Russia nevertheless seeks to tap into nationalism, a rump imperial polity, energy infrastructure, and post-socialist linkages in order to garner a chance at reconstitution as a secondary core in an East Asian-centered system. The recent dramatic events in Ukraine invite analysis in light of the Long Twentieth Century’s third trajectory - deepening systemic chaos that threatens to undo both the modern world-system and the Eurasian regional system – at the conclusion of the paper.
