The Global Strategic-Transition Model

The global strategic transition (GST) is the process by which an increasing number of societies are drawn into the vortex of dynamic interaction between the world’s most economically advanced nations. It is generated by the global unfolding of the prevailing technological paradigm. This unfolding process is neither inevitable nor smooth, a reality reflected in the fluctuating fortunes of the world economy throughout the history of civilization. The twentieth century, for example, has witnessed the Great Depression of the 1930s, the ‘golden age’ of the 1950s and 1960s, and slower, more uneven growth during the past twenty-five years punctuated by strategic crises such as those in East Asia at the close of the twentieth century. And as the dynamics of the global strategic core has waxed and waned, so has the economic development of the rest of the world. The attempt to model the GST in this chapter is based on my dynamic-strategy theory developed in a recent series of books (Snooks 1996; 1997a; 1998b), and explored further in Parts IV and V of this book. Underlying this process of global development are a set of dynamic laws (Snooks 1998a) that are introduced in later chapters. The existence of laws, however, does not imply historical inevitability because individuals and societies can and do act irrationally.