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

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).

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.

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; and 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.

1 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.

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.

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).

This is most clearly expressed in K. Waltz , Man, the State and War ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1954).

Leviathan, Part 1, chap.xi

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.

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.

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.

Ibid., p.6, para. 35; p.22, para. 145; p.25, para. 161; p.62, para. 349.

Ibid., p.19, para. 127.

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".

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).

As in Krasner, op. cit., and Peter Katzenstein (ed.) Beyond Power and Plenty. Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced Industrial States (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). The United States is represented by these authors as a state which is weak in relation to the strength of civil society (or more particularly of interests in civil society), whereas other states, e.g. Japan or France, are stronger in relation to their societies. Civil society is thus seen in the US case as limiting the effectiveness of the state.

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.

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), p. 59.

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).

C. Taylor, op. cit. points out that expectations with regard to negotiating behaviour are culturally differentiated in the present world. Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (London: Cape, 1955) studied the origin of the ideas outlined in this paragraph which are implicit in the modern state system.

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.

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; Gramsci, Selections op. cit., pp. 169-170.

E.H. Carr , Nationalism and After (London: Macmillan, 1945).

Charles Moraze , Les bourgeois conquérants ( Paris: Colin, 1957).

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.

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.

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.

Two classic studies relevant particularly to the inter-war period are Karl Polanyi , The Great Transformation (Boston, Mass: Little, Brown, 1957) and E.H. Carr , The Twenty Years' Crisis, op. cit. The chapter by Stephen Blank, " Britain: The Politics of Foreign Economic Policy, the Domestic Economy and the Problem of Pluralistic Stagnation", in Katzenstein (ed.), op. cit, comments on post-war British economic policy; as does Stephen Krasner in, "State Power and the Structure of International Trade", World Politics (Vol 28, No.3, April 1976). Also see R.F. Harrod , The Life of John Maynard Keynes (London: Macmillan, 1951 ).

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.

The basic point I am making here is suggested by a passage in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks which reads: "Do international relations precede or follow (logically) fundamental social relations? There can be no doubt but that they follow. Any organic innovation in the social structure, through its technical-military expressions, modifies organically absolute and relative relations in the international field too." Gramsci used the term "organic" to refer to relatively long-term and permanent changes, as opposed to "conjunctural". Selections op. cit., pp. 176-177. In the critical Italian edition, the original is to be found in vot III, pp. 1562.

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.

Among analysts who concur in this are Karl Polanyi , op. cit, Gunnar Myrdal , Beyond the Welfare State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960); E.H. Carr , Nationalism and After, op. cit; and Geoffrey Barraclough , Introduction to Contemporary History (London: Penguin, 1968).

George Lichtheim , Imperialism (New York: Praeger, 1971) has proposed a periodisation of imperialisms, and I have taken the term "liberal imperialism" from him.

"The Imperial State System" paper presented to the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., August 1980.

Max Beloff was perhaps the first to point to the mechanisms whereby participation in international organisations altered the internal policy-making practices of states in his New Dimensions in Foreign Policy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961). R.W. Cox and H.K. Jacobson , et al, The Anatomy of Influence: Decision-making in International Organisation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972) represented the political systems of international organisations as including segments of states. R.O. Keohane and J.S. Nye , "Transgovernmental Relations and International Organizations", World Politics (Vol. 27 October 1974) pointed to the processes whereby coalitions are formed among segments of the apparatuses of different states and the ways in which international institutions facilitate such coalitions. These various works, while they point to the existence of mechanisms for policy co-ordination among states and for penetration of external influences within states, do not discuss the implications of these mechanisms for the structure of power within states. It is this structural aspect I wish to designate by the term "internationalisation of the state". Christian Palloix refers to "L'internationalisation de l'appareil de l'Etat national, de certains lieux de cet appareil d'Etat ...." (L'internationalisation du capital, Paris, Maspero, 1975, p. 82) by which he designates those segments of national states which serve as policy supports for the internationalisation of production. He thus raises the question of structural changes in the state, though he does not enlarge upon the point. Keohane and Nye, subsequent to the work mentioned above, linked the transgovernmental mechanism to the concept of "interdependence", Power and Interdependence, ( Boston: Little, Brown, 1977). 1 find this concept tends to obscure the power relationships involved in structural changes in both state and world order and prefer not to use it for that reason. Peter Gourevitch, op. cit., does retain the concept interdependence while insisting that it be linked with power struggles among social forces within states.

There is, of course, a whole literature implicit in the argument of this paragraph. Some sketchy references may be useful. Andrew Shonfield , Modern Capitalism (London: Oxford University Press , 1965) illustrated the development of corporative-type structures of the kind I associate with the welfare-nationalist state. The shift from industry-level corporatism to an enterprise-based corporatism led by the big public and private corporations has been noted in some industrial relations works, particularly those concerned with the emergence of a 'new working class', e.g. Serge Mallet, La nouvelle classe ouvrière ( Paris: Seuil, 1963), but the industrial relations literature has generally not linked what I have elsewhere called enterprise corporatism to the broader framework suggested here (cf. R.W. Cox , "Pour une etude prospective des relations de production", Sociologie du Travail, 2, 1977). Erhand Friedberg , "L'internationalisation de l'economie et modalités d'intervention de l'état: la 'politique industrielle' ", in Planification et Société (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1974), pp. 94-108, discusses the subordination of the old coporatism to the new. The shift in terminology from planning to industrial policy is related to the internationalising of state and economy. Industrial policy has become a matter of interest to global economic policy makers, cf William Diebold, Jr. , Industrial Policy as an International Issue (New York: McGraw-Hill for the Council on Foreign Relations, 1980) and John Pinder , Takashi Hosomi and William Diebold , Industrial Policy and the International Economy (Trilateral Commission, 1979). If planning evokes the spectre of economic nationalism, industrial policy, as the Trilateral Commission study points out, can be looked upon with favour from a world economy perspective as a necessary aspect of policy harmonisation: "We have argued that industrial policies are needed to deal with structural problems in the modern economies. Thus, international action should not aim to dismantle these policies. The pressure should, rather, be towards positive and adaptive industrial policies, whether on the part of single countries or groups of countries combined. Far from being protectionist, industrial policy can help them to remove a cause of protectionism, by making the process of adjustment less painful." (p. 50). It may be objected that the argument and references presented here are more valid for Europe than for the United States, and that, indeed, the very concept of corporatism is alien to US ideology. To this it can be replied that since the principal levers of the world economy are in the United States, the US economy adjusts less than those of European countries and peripheral countries, and the institutionalisation of adjustment mechanisms is accordingly less developed. Structural analyses of the US economy have, however, pointed to a distinction between a corporate international-oriented sector and a medium and small business nationally-oriented sector, and to the different segments of the state and different policy orientations associated with each. Cf John Kenneth Galbraith , Economics and the Public Purpose (London: Andre Deutsch, 1974) and James O'Connor , The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973). Historians point to the elements of corporatism in the New Deal, e.g. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. , op. cit

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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).