The Problem With Polities: Some Problems in Forecasting Global Political Integration

Abstract

This article argues the importance to humanity of understanding processes of social, political, and cultural integration and of attempting to forecast the results. It outlines the theoretical grounds for expecting future global trends to be integrative rather than disintegrative. It summarizes past empirical efforts to forecast their ultimate consequence—global unification—and it introduces some methodological cautions about such forecasts. There are underexamined implications to what is meant by unification, what is defined as a polity, and what are taken as units in constructing the empirical trends used in forecasting. Finally, the article points out that different types of resources can be used to construct power relations (and hence integration) and that therefore there is probably no single global unification but only different types of global unification.

Comments

“…The article by Roscoe (2004) challenges from a different direction the validity of the projections arrived at based on past patterns, although he seems to accept the underlying notion of using past patterns to project future trends. His comment that "predictions of when [italics added] it [global unification] will occurwhatever it is-depend an awful lot on what definitional assumptions we start off with" correctly suggests some of the problems with constructing the empirical pattern of past events, but he does not challenge whether complete unification will occur.…”

“…The problem with using statistical projections based on past patterns, however, goes beyond the measurement problem introduced by Roscoe (2004). Involved are both specific problems with using statistical inference for data ranges outside of the range of empirical observations (in this case, using past events to infer future events) and broader problems relating to uncritical borrowing of statistical methods.…”

“…Because they are using archaeological data that excludes historical states, Peregrine et al (2004) used 2000 BP as the first data point in their Figure 1. If we include the present as a data point and take into account the fact that planet Earth is now divided into states, assuming it is these polities and not subpolities within these states that are the primary data (see discussion by Roscoe, 2004), then a graph including contemporary states already reaches an average hierarchy of 3 at Time 0 (see Figure 1). This is contrary to their extrapolation of the quadratic fit to the data set made up of polities at 2000 BP or earlier.…”