The idea for this book began with the concept that the decline of U.S. hegemony in the world economy has altered past assumptions of international political economy and has forced us to begin the process of reevaluating the structures and processes of the world-system. As this idea developed, a complementary theme arose which focused on evaluating the long-term effects of the general crisis the world has been experiencing since the late 1960s. We came to the realization that according to the principles of world-system theory, the long period of general crisis will soon come to an end and we had best begin now to contemplate what the future structures of the world-system are likely to be in order to avoid rehashing research on the existence of the crisis situation or applying previous theories inappropriate to understand the new historical situation. This is not to say the crisis is now over and only prosperity lies ahead, but it is to recognize that a conjuncture should soon appear on the horizon. Understanding how the last 20 years differed from the previous two decades provides the background necessary for projecting which existing social situations are long-term trends that will survive the upcoming conjuncture and structure subsequent periods, and which features of the current crisis are temporal and cyclical phenomena, the termination of which will signify that the conjuncture has arrived. the final agenda for this volume thus focuses on two causal processes, hegemonic decline and economic crisis, and two central themes, evaluating the past effects and investigating the future consequences of those causal processes.

Compilation of this volume has been aided by the research assistance of Inny Ham. in addition, we would like to acknowledge the comments of Roberta Schulte, Frank Lechner, and Edgar Kiser, the staff assistance of Shontay Bernay and Maggie Stevens, and the original editorial support for the project provided by Lynda Sharp who has since left Praeger for more exotic locales.

Research support for Chapter 6 was provided by a grant from the Emory University Research Fund. Partial research support from University of Utah Research Grant No. 6-41554 and technical assistance from Seung-Kuk Kim and Ken Hulme was provided for Chapter 7. Portions of Chapter 9 appeared in Chapter 10 of Stephen D. Krasner Structural Conflict: the Third World Against Global Liberalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), and are reprinted with permission of the publisher.