Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory

Millennium - Journal of International Studies

Volumn 10, Issue 2, 1981, Pages 126-155

  Cox, Robert W ^a  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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EID: 84970203238     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298810100020501     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, Economie et Capilalisme, XVe - XVIIIe Siecle, 3 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1979). Braudel's theory and method are outlined in his essay first published in 1958 in Annales E.S.C. “Histoire et sciences sociales. La longue duree” (republished in Bruadel, Ecrits sur l’histoire Paris: Flammarion, 1969).
2. There is now quite a large literature produced by this school. The basic work is I. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974). A brief summary of the world systems theory is in Wallerstein, “The rise and future demise of the world capitalist system: Concepts for comparative analysis”, Comparative Studies in Society and History (vol. 16, no. 4, Sept. 1974), pp. 387-415.
3. Among critics of the world systems approach, note especially Theda Skocpal, “Wallerstein's World Capitalist System: A Theoretical and Historical Critique”, American Journal of Sociology (Vol. 82, No.5, March 1977 ), pp. 1075-90
4. More generally, her major study, States and Social Revolutions ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Also see Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism”, New Left Review (No. 104, July-August 1977) pp. 25-92.
5. Use the term “world order” in preference to “inter-state system” as it is relevant to all historical periods (and not only those in which states have been the component entities) and in preference to “world system” as it is more indicative of a structure having only a certain duration in time and avoiding the equilibrium connotations of “system”. “World” designates the relevant totality, geographically limited by the range of probable interactions (some past “worlds” being limited to the Mediterranean, to Europe, to China, etc.). “Order” is used in the sense of the way things usually happen (not the absence of turbulence); thus disorder is included in the concept of order. An inter-state system is one historical form of world order. The term is used in the plural to indicate that particular patterns of power relationships which have endured in time can be contrasted in terms of their principal characteristics as distinctive world orders.
6. E.P. Thompson argues that historical concepts must often “display extreme elasticity and allow for great irregularity”. His treatment of historical logic develops this point in his essay “The Poverty of Theory” in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978), esp. pp. 231-242.
7. Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and its Place in Modern History trans. by Douglas Scott (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957).
8. This is most clearly expressed in K. Waltz, Man, the State and War ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1954).
9. Leviathan, Part 1, chap.xi
10. Kenneth Waltz, in a paper presented to a panel discussion at the American Political Science Association in August 1980 for which a first version of the present essay was written, asked the question “Will the future be like the past?”, which he answered affirmatively - not only was the same pattern of relationships likely to prevail but it would be for the good of all that this should be so. It should be noted that the future contemplated by Waltz was the next decade or so.
11. A recent example of this argument is Stephen Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). The normative intent of the new realism is most apparent as a polemic response to liberal moralism. This was also the case for E.H. Carr's The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939 (London: Macmillan, 1942) which offered a “scientific” mode of thinking about international relations in opposition to the “utopianism” of the supporters of the League of Nations in Britain. Dean Acheson and George Kennan, in laying the foundations for US Cold War policy acknowledged their debt to Reinhold Niebuhr whose revival of a pessimistic Augustinian view of human nature challenged the optimistic Lockean view native to American culture. Krasner's chosen target is “Lockean liberalism” which be sees as having undermined the rational defence of US national interests.
12. The New Science of Giambattista Vico trans. from the third edition by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1970), p.62, para. 349.
13. See, for instance, R.G. Collingwood's Distinction between dialectical and eristicat reasoning, The New Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942). Collingwood takes dialectic back to its Greek origins and spares us the assertions of theological Marxism concerning “Diamat”.
14. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks edited and trans. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), esp. pp. 158-168. The full critical Italian edition Quaderni del carcere (Torino: Einaudi editore, 1975) contains additional passages on this point, e.g. pp. 471, 1321, 1492. Gramsci saw ideas, politics and economics as reciprocally related, convertible into each other and bound together in a blocco storico. “Historical materialism”, he wrote, “is in a certain sense a reform and development of Hegelianism. It is philosophy freed from unilateral ideological elements, the full consciousness of the contradictions of philosophy.” (Einaudi edition, p.471, my rough translation).
15. The notion of a framework for action recalls what Machiavelli called neressita, a sense that the conditions of existence require action to create or sustain a form of social order. Necissità engenders both the possibility of a new order and all the risks inherent in changing the existing order “… few men ever welcome new laws setting up a new order in the state unless necessity makes it clear to them that there is a need for such laws; and since such a necessity cannot arise without danger, the state may easily be ruined before the new order has been brought to completion.” Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses (ed.) Bernard Crick (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1970) pp. 105-106.
16. In this regard, Stanley Hoffmann has written: “Born and raised in America, the discipline of international relations is, so to speak, too close to the fire. It needs triple distance: it should move away from the contemporary world towards the past; from the perspective of a superpower (and a highly conservative one), toward that of the weak and the revolutionary - away from the impossible quest for stability; from the glide into policy science, back to the steep ascent toward the peaks which the questions raised by traditional political philosophy represent.” In “An American social science: international relations”, Daedalus (Summer 1977), 59.
17. On intersubjective meanings, see Charles Taylor, “Hermeneutics and Politics”, in Paul Connerton (ed.) Critical Sociology (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965), chap. VI. Also relevant is Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971).
18. Collective images are not aggregations of fragmented opinions of individuals such as are compiled through surveys; they are coherent mental types expressive of the world views of specific groups such as may be reconstructed through the work of historians and sociologists, e.g. Max Weber's reconstructions of forms of religious consciousness.
19. Gramsci's principal application of the concept of hegemony was to the relations among social classes, e.g. in explaining the inability of the Italian industrial bourgeoisie to establish its hegemony after the unification of Italy and in examining the prospects of the Italian industrial workers establishing their class hegemony over peasantry and petty bourgeoisie so as to create a new blocco storico (historic bloc) - a term which in Gramsci's work corresponds roughly to the notion of historic structure in this essay. The term “hegemony” in Gramsci's work is linked to debates in the international Communist movement concerning revolutionary strategy and in this connection its application is specifically to classes. The form of the concept, however, draws upon his reading of Machiavelli and is not restricted to class relations but has a broader potential applicability. Gramsci's adjustment of Machiavellian ideas to the realities of the world he knew was an exercise in dialectic in the sense defined above. It is an appropriate continuation of his method to perceive the applicability of the concept to world order structures as suggested here. For Gramsci, as for Machiavelli, the general question involved in hegemony is the nature of power, and power is a centaur, part man, part beast, a combination of force and consent. See Machiavelli, The Prince, Norton Critical Edition (ed.) Robert M. Adams (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), pp. 49-50;
20. E.H. Carr, Nationalism and After (London: Macmillan, 1945).
21. Charles Moraze, Les bourgeois conquérants ( Paris: Colin, 1957).
22. A recent discussion of the reciprocal character of these relations is in Peter A. Gourevitch, “The Second Image Reversed”, International Organization (Vol. 32, No.4, Autumn 1978), pp. 881-911.
23. I have been engaged with Jeffrey Harrod in a study of production relations on a world scale which begins with an examination of distinctive patterns of power relations in the production process as separate historical structures and which then leads to a consideration of different forms of state and global political economy. Bringing in these last two levels is necessary to an understanding of the existence of the different patterns of production relations and the hierarchy of relationships among them. One could equally well adopt forms of state or world orders as the point of departure and ultimately be required to bring the other levels in to explain the historical process.
24. Robert O. Keohane, “The Theory of Hegemonic Stability and Changes in International Economic Regimes, 1967-77”, in Ole Holsti, Randolph Siverson, and Alexander George (eds.), Change in the International System (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1981). Keohane cites as others who have contributed to this theory Charles Kindleberger, Robert Gilpin and Stephen Krasner. “Hegemony” is used by Keohane in the limited sense of dominance by a state. This meaning is to be distinguished from its meaning in this article which is derived from Gramsci, i.e. hegemony as a structure of dominance, leaving open the question of whether the dominant power is a state, or a group of states, or some combination of state and private power, which is sustained by broadly-based consent through acceptance of an ideology and of institutions consistent with this structure. Thus a hegemonic structure of world order is one in which power takes a primarily consensual form, as distinguished from a non-hegemonic order in which there are manifestly rival powers and no power has been able to establish the legitimacy of its dominance. There can be dominance without hegemony; hegemony is one possible form dominance may take. Institutionalised hegemony, as used in this essay, corresponds to what Keohane calls a “strong international regime”. His theory can be restated in our terms as: dominance by a powerful state is most conducive to the development of hegemony. In the present text, the term “hegemony” is reserved for a consensual order and “dominance” refers only to a preponderance of material power.
25. The international implications of the New Deal are dealt with in several passages in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, esp. Vol. II, The Coming of the New Deal (London: Heinemann, 1960). Charles Meier, “The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic Policy after World War II”, in Katzenstein, op.cit., discusses the relationship between the New Deal and the post-war ideology of world order. Richard Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy: Anglo-American Collaboration in the Reconstruction of Multilateral Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956) shows the link between New Deal ideas and the institutions of world economy set up after World War 11 in the Bretton Woods negotiations.
26. E.J. Hobsbawm writes: “The men who officially presided over the affairs of the victorious bourgeois order in its moment of triumph were a deeply reactionary country nobleman from Prussia, an imitation emperor in France and a succession of aristocratic landowners in Britain.” The Age of Capital, 1843-1875 (London: Sphere Book, 1977), p. 15.
27. George Lichtheim, Imperialism (New York: Praeger, 1971) has proposed a periodisation of imperialisms, and I have taken the term “liberal imperialism” from him.
28. “The Imperial State System” paper presented to the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., August 1980.
29. The Zaire case recalls the arrangements imposed by western powers on the Ottoman Empire and Egypt in the late-Nineteenth century, effectively attaching certain revenues for the service of foreign debt. See Herbert Feis, Europe the World's Banker, 1870-1914 (New York: Kelly for the Council on Foreign Relations, 1961), pp. 332-341, 384-397.
30. The evidence for the existence of a transnational managerial class lies in actual forms of organisation, the elaboration of ideology, financial supports, and the behaviour of individuals. Other structures stand as rival tendencies, e.g. national capita! and its interests sustained by a whole other structure of loyalties, agencies, etc. Individuals or firms and state agencies may in some phases of their activity be caught up now in one, now in another tendency. Thus the membership of the class may be continually shifting though the structure remains. It is sometimes argued that this is merely a case of US capitalists giving themselves a hegemonic aura, an argument that by implication makes of imperialism a purely national phenomenon. There is no doubting the US origin of the values carried and propagated by this class, but neither is there any doubt that many non-US citizens and agencies also participate in it nor that its world view is global and distinguishable from the purely national capitalisms which exist alongside it. Through the transnational managerial class American culture, or a certain American business culture, has become globally hegemonic. Of course, should neo-mercantilist tendencies come’to prevail in international economic relations, this transnational class structure would wither.
31. Some industries appear as ambiguously astride the two tendencies, e.g. the automobile industry. During a period of economic expansion, the international aspect of this industry dominated in the United States, and the United Auto Workers union took the lead in creating world councils for the major international auto firms with a view to inaugurating multinational bargaining. As the industry was hit by recession, protectionism came to the fore.
32. R.W. Cox, “Labour and Employment in the Late Twentieth Century”, in R. St. J. Macdonald, et al, (eds.), The International Law and Policy of Human Welfare (Sijthoff and Noordhoff, 1978). This tendency can be seen as the continuation of a long-term direction of production organisation of which Taylorism was an early stage, in which control over the work process is progressively wrested from workers and separated out from the actual performance of tasks so as to be concentrated with management. See Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review, 1974).
33. Recent news from Brazil indicates restiveness on the part of Sao Paulo workers whose unions have been subjected to a state corporatist structure since the time of President Vargas.
34. The World Bank promotes rural development and birth control. The concept of “self-reliance”, once a slogan of anti-imperialism meaning “decoupling” from the imperial system, has been co-opted by the imperial system to mean self-help among populations becoming marginalised- a do-it-yourself welfare programme.
35. I have borrowed the term from Hartmut Elsenhas, “The State Class in the Third World: For a New Conceptualisation of Periphery Modes of Production” (unpublished).