№ 4 - 2005
Modelski G.
The Evolution of Global Politics (II)

In this second part of his article (for its first part see Polis, 2005, № 3), with the Russian translation of which article we are acquainting the readers, George Modelski, a well-known American researcher, author of a number of scholarly writings in history and theory of global politics, argues in favour of the thesis that long cycles in global politics are more than a mere churning of great states. They inhabit, in the author’s wording, a more expansive universe, that of the construction of the global polity via the stages of preconditions, nucleus, and organization. For the explanation of this process, he employs an evolutionary paradigm that proposes that the leadership succession is an intermediate stage in the evolution of global politics whose next likely major phase will be the gradual absorption of the informal role of global leadership into a network of more formal positions within an emerging global organization of a federalist character.