All the articles included in this issue on ‘world system approaches’ attempt to analyze various aspects of global politico-economic realities in order to reveal some essential features of the world system concerned. This introductory essay gives an overall survey of various intellectual traditions which have been discerned among various world system approaches:
(1) macrohistorical sociology, focusing on mechanisms of societal chage;
(2) comparative economic history, using cost-benefit calculation and emphasizing on institutional lags from productive potentials;
(3) dependency theory, interested in negative domestic consequences of core-periphery relations;
(4) behavioral sciences, concerned about falsifiability;
(5) microeconomic theory, assuming rational individual behavior and examing provision of public goods;
(6) philosophy and phenomenology, scrutinizing theoretical assumptions and their consequences;
All the articles are related to one or two of these traditions, demonstrating diversities of world system approaches as well as interactions among various traditions.

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The aims of this paper are: to construct a general model regarding choice between war and peace; to develop a set of propositions regarding the stability of the international system; and empirically to test some of these propositions. The. model, which is constructed on the basis of the expected utilities of war and diplomatic means, provides us with three general factors which affect the stability of the international system: (a) the power structures which determine the probability of winning in war; (b) the level of conflict which is measured by the benefits that would be obtained by victory; and (c) the level of diplomatic harmony which is measured by the highest expected utility of the non-war alternatives. The bipolar stability can be obtained, according to our model, by maintaining the bilateral power parity to reduce the probability of winning in war to a fifty-fifty chance so that the expected utility of war becomes zero; the unipolar stability can be obtained by lowering the level of conflict and/or raising the level of diplomatic harmony; and the multipolar stability can be obtained by manipulating multilateral power equilibrium and by maintaining a medium level of conflict and diplomatic harmony.
Though it is difficult directly to measure the level of conflict and diplomatic harmony, the conditions —ups and downs— of the world economy are believed to affect these levels. The relative potency, and the interaction effects, of the power structure and economic conditions on the occurrence and severity of major power wars are empirically examined during the period between 1495 and 1975 by utilizing the Levy's and Goldstein's data. The major findings are: while the power structure factor has a strong influence on the occurrence of war, the economic condition factor has a significant effect on the severity of war; and the interaction effects of the two factors have a large, though statistically not significant, influence on both occurrence and severity of major power wars.

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Immanuel Wallerstein's writings on the “world-system, ” like any other grand-theory-oriented works, have been subject to a great deal of criticisms since his The Modern World-System I was first published in 1974. For example, he is criticized for his alleged neglect of “domestic” factors and the “interstate system” factors. He allegedly reduces everything to the international economic division of labor (“world-economy” in his word), thus making his arguments too holistic to be falsifiable.
However, many of these criticisms are based on inadequate understanding of Wallersteins's theoretical framework, in which he distinguishes the reshuffling of the three-tier structure (core-semiperiphery-periphery) of the world-economy during the period of “contraction” from the strengthening and persistence of the existing structure during the period of “expansion.”
Wallerstein's argument about the period of “expansion” is, as his critics insist, largely reductionist and unfalsifiable. However, when he explains the reshuffling of the world-economy during the period of “contraction, ” he does utilize “domestic” factors such as efficiency of the state bureaucracy and “inter-state system” factors such as the rivalry among core countries. Therefore, one can examine the strength (or weakness) of Wallerstein's theoretical framework much more adequately by analyzing what actually happens during the period of “contraction.”
A survey of major industry studies dealing with interactions between the TNC's and the semiperiphery states of Latin America leads us to a tentative conclusion that the reshuffling of the world-economy which, Wallerstein predicts, should occur during the period of “contraction, ” is not occurring at least at the present time of “contraction” which, according to Wallerstein, began in the latter half of the 1960's.
This is largely attributable to the changes in basic characteristics of the “product life cycle” in our days. Previously, this cycle functioned in the way in which the locations of production of a certain industry moved from one country to another accompanying a change of major producers. At the present day, this type of transfer of production centers is not observed even in some of the industries in which the standardization of technology has progressed. Instead, one huge entity, TNC, organizes a whole chain of production integrating a large number of countries in an intracompany division of labor. Since the TNC's attempt to keep the most strategic and profitable parts of their productive chain for core countries where a large diversified market and well-developed infrastructure are available and leave less profitable ones for the semiperiphery and the periphery, the hierarchical structure of the world-economy has not changed at all.
The semiperiphery states, in spite of their increasing efficiency, have been unsuccessful in forcing the TNC's to transfer most strategic facilities to their countries. The TNC's keep their power vis-à-vis the states and producers in the semiperiphery, taking advantage of their capability of intensive advertizement, product differentiation, mutual cooperations, etc.

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The characteristics of Asian modernization can be clarified by study of the Chinese tribute trade system.
Historically speaking, intra-Asian trade expanded gradually from the 13th and 14th centuries, and encompassed two major areas, the East Asian trade network with China as its centre and the South Asian trade area centered on India. Together with several entre-pot ports in between, these two major trade regions were combined to form the whole Asian trade network.
The truth of the matter is that Western countries sought to participate in, and indeed did join in, this pre-existing trade network for Asian products exchanging them for their silver. In the course of this participation they associated themselves with a part of the established Asian trade zone and the “triangular trade” between Great Britain, India and China was one reflection of this situations.
Thus, the modern Asian trade network was not “formed” by the advance and impact of the Western countries, but was organized with the historically existing Asian trade network as its base and developed by the entry of Western countries. Taking this whole process into consideration, our analytical viewpoint must be one which sees the formation of the Modern Asian trade network as being propelled mainly by forces emerging from inside historical Asia.
Looking into the historical transformation more concretely, we can identify those factors which provided the Asian trade network itself with unity as follows:
(1) In the historical background were the trade relations of the tribute trade network in East Asia centred on China, the local trade of the South Asian region around India, and the trunk trade route between India and China. This traditional trade network in the Asian area was developed by the opening of Singapore and Hong Kong.
(2) Immigration from China and India to South-east Asia and the consequent commercial expansion by Chinese and Indian merchants served to strengthen trade and economic relations between Southeast Asia, China and India.
(3) Trade activity inside this trade area has been settled through the home remitting system adopted by overseas Chinese and Indians. Under this system, currencies of various countries and native products like rice and seafoods were used as media of remittance in addition to silver bullion. But it should be clearly remembered that the Asian trade network was supported by an Asian financial market closely connected with this remitting system and that, in fact, a Asian silver currency area or silver circulating area was a functioning reality.

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Today, arguments on the whys and hows of the decline of America's industrial strength, starting around 1973, are abundant, and the great industrial debates thus flourish. However, they seem to share the profoundly similar viewpoint: American pre-eminence is taken for granted. The process by which America assimilated European technologies, particularly those of British and Germany, has already been dealt with by economic historians. But, because of thier professional interest in the investigation of economic behavior, they discussed little of the government's involvement in the process of assimilation and the subsequent growth periods. In this context, this essay focusses on the emerging process of American (and also British and German) industrial pre-eminence. Then, this research can be distinguished from economists' previous attempts in two ways. First, our focus is extensively on the government intervention and its implications. Second, our research epistemology is policy-biased: this study assumes that “visible policy, ” rather than the “invisible hand, ” is a prime mover for particular country in its emergence as powerful techno-industrial nation.

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The dependency theory which was developed in the mid 1960's in Latin America, has had a remarkable impact on various fields of social science. From it, a number of theories including Immanuel Wallerstein's World System, have been derived. For this reason, it is natural that many scholars see much similarity between the Dependency Theory and the World System Theory. However, despite this, the latter has not yet been widely accepted in Latin America. Latin American dependency theorists tend to take the world system as given and analyze the effects of dependency on Latin America as a whole or each country individually. How can this viewpoint be explained? Our hypothesis is that it is a logical consequence of their criticism against André Gunder Frank's original dependency theory which stresses the tight chain of center-periphery (metropolis-satellite) relations in which the satellite countries are destined to underdevelopment. Some Latin American dependency theorists reject such a simple view, pointing out differences between countries in the grade and effect of dependency. Wallerstein, on the contrary, tends to overlook national differences and emphasizes that the world system fundamentally conditions the process of change in each country; thus staying away from the general arguments of the Latin American dependency theorists. This paper will try to review some basic characteristics of the Latin American dependency theory, comparing them with Wallerstein's World System Theory.

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Recent theoretical efforts in international relations focus increasingly on building grand and dynamic theories with major emphasis on cycles in addition to trends. This essay is to critically review an important part of these recent efforts: long cycles both in economic sphere as well as in political-military sphere and their linkages. First, recent researches in the Kondratieff waves are briefly summarized as those emphasizing on (a) technological innovations, (b) capital accumulation, and (c) resource abundance and scarcity. Second, George Modelski's “long cycles” theory is examined with particular emphasis on how it treats economic-political linkages. Third, a brief summary of the Wallersteinian “world-system” approach is given. How it relates long cycles in economics (the Kondratieffs) with the rises and declines of hegemony is the case in point. I summarize Bousquet's attempts to critically examine Wallerstein and others' early effort and to reconstruct it focusing on technological innovations. I suggest that current efforts in long cycles both in economic and political spheres have strong similarities with such early works by Toynbee and Akamatsu in the 1930s and 1940s. Recent efforts have clear advantages in research environment both in terms of increase of increase of empirical data and availability of computers, however. I argue, however, that more conceptual clarity and sophistication is necessary if the current efforts are to go beyond a simple revival of the research a half century ago.

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There are two types of world-system theory. One is a wave theory which includes Kondratieff's theory of long waves and Modelski's theory of long cycles. The other is a structural theory represented by the theory of hegemonic stability presented by Kindleberger, Gilpin, Krasner, and Keohane. The purpose of this study is to examine various implications of these theories for trade flows and trade policy.
There is an interesting relationship between Kondratieff's long waves and international trade. During Kondratieff's upswing, trade growth rate increases while it decreases during the downswing. In other words, price movements and trade flows draw similar curves, as demonstrated by French trade statistics during the 1850-1895 period. It may be that during the upswing one sees greater economic activities and greater productivity, stimulating expansion of foreign trade. It is also important to note that the trade expansion period for France (1850-1875) corresponds with the period of trade liberalization in Europe, symbolized by the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty concluded between England and France in 1860.
Modelski's “world power” is a lead economy which sets rules for international economic transactions. But not every world power necessarily promotes free trade. 16th-century Portugal, 17th-century Netherland, and 18th-century England as world powers resorted to monopolistic practices, tending to constrain intercontinental trade flows. Modelski implies that only those powers which emerged after the Industrial Revolution-England during Pax Britanca and the United States during Pax Americana-have actually promoted free trade. The second English world power did promote free trade, particularly during its “delegitimation” phase (1948-73) which coincided with an upswing period defined by Modelski as well as by Kondratieff. During the next upswing (1914-46), however, England became increasingly protectionist. After the 1870s, in fact, one sees substantial discrepancy in periodization between Kondratieff's and Modelski's upswings and downswings. The present period corresponds with Modelski's upswing and delegitimation phase, but one sess the United States as world power becoming less economically competitive, facing serious domestic protectionist pressures. Kondratieff would have referred to the present as a downswing period.
A “hegemonic power” promotes free trade more directly than Modelski's world power, though they largely overlap in the 19th century and in the post-World War II period. Modelski himself associates a “hegemonical” power with a world empire pursuing only selfish interests, not necessarily producing collective goods such as an open international economic system. The theory of hegemonic stability helps us explain the steady shift toward protectionism in English trade policy in the early 20th century as it was replaced by the United States as hegemonic power. But it does not satisfactorily explain the American trade policy today. Despite its declining hegemonic status, the United States (especially its executive branch of government) has not turned markedly protectionist, though increasingly under protectionist pressure at home. Moreover, the theory somewhat runs counter to the fact that the United States in the postwar period (up to the mid-1960s) had largely subordinated its trade policy to foregin policy, promoting “free trade for the free world” for the sake of greater cohesion of the western coalition against communist expansionism. The “bipolar system” theory, which calls one's attention to the impact of the changing East-West relationship on U. S. trade policy, sheds more light in this respect. It may be worthwhile to note that, according to Wallerstein, the hegemonic theory applies only to the capitalist world, with the decline of the hegemonic power occurring during Kondratieff's downswing.
The free trade regime has not yet

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The aim of this paper is to locate work in the world-system perspective. Work must be differentiated from the worker as an analytical concept, since it is related to both of renters and factory workers, non-manual and manual workers, or the white- and blue-collar.
A few propositions are put forward in this regard as follows.
First, workers have been presumed to be a driving force for peace in the Marxist theory. This presumption has failed to be true in the real politics among Socialist countries. A new analytical device is badly needed to have the working people oriented toward peace, international and domestic.
Second, according to Immanuel Wallerstein, the location of each nation in the world-system, that is the core, semiperiphery or periphery, determines the essential nature of work there. This is, however, too inclusive to apply in determining the nature of individual work. There exist part-time jobs even in the core, and subsistence economy, not-coerced, thriving in the periphery, too. A series of work, connecting two or more nations, would be a useful device to tackle the problem of work in the world-system perspective.
Third, data of labour migration have been presented to show the ‘upward’ current of people from the periphery or semiperiphery to the core in Western Europe and from the periphery to the semiperiphery in the Middle East. Wallerstein's thesis on labour migration has proved valid in the former, whereas failing in the latter.
Fourth, no foreign labour is permitted to enter Japan for a job now, but there has existed the problem of job discrimination against 680, 000 of the Korean residents, who came or were forced to come there before 1945 when Japan's colonialism collapsed, or who are their descendants. Korean migration and their discrimination can be explained in the perspective of the world-system.

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The purpose of this paper is to supplement the contemporary argument on international regimes and to construct an antithesis of the theory of hegemonic stability. It is a challenge to the theory of hegemonic stability in that it assumes the possibility of world stability without a hegemon.
According to structural perspective which composes the main stream of the argument on international regimes, the basic orientation of world political economy is identical to the theory of hegemonic stability. Because it does not assume the possibility of construction of a regime without a hegemon, it implicitly or explicitly has to conclude that the world political economy will break down some time after the hegemony begins to erode.
On the contrary, I maintain that it is possible to construct a regime without a hegemon on condition that world communication and transportation is so advanced that there is no more room for defecting others. I assert that when the era of hegemonic decline continues, regimes conforming to the following will exist without hegemonic leadership.
1) The opportunity of making the regime occurs after several crises which change the cognizance of related actors.
2) The interests of actors are evenly distributed.
3) The regime contains non-governmental actors.
4) The rule is relative compared to absolute rules of regimes made by a hegemon.
5) The type of cooperation is coordination.
I conclude that these regimes will contribute to the world cooperation and therefore to the stability of world political economy.

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