HİSTORİCAL MATERİALİSM İN IR; ‘JUSTIN ROSENBERG’

A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations, Welcoming ‘Uneven and Combined Development’

PINAR KAHYA

INTRODUCTION ‘Geopolitical systems are not constituted

independently of, cannot be understood in isolation from, the wider structures of the production and reproduction of social life.’ J. Rosenberg

A ‘structural discontinuity’ between pre-modern and modern international relations,

Specific geopolitical systems in Greek polis, the early modern empires, and the modern system of sovereign states were structurally tied to WHAT?

Different modes of production

Although most geopolitical orders are characterized by anarchy, a ‘structural discontinuity’ separates all pre-capitalist systems from the modern capitalist international order.

This structural discontinuity explains the co-genesis and compatibility of a system of bordered sovereign states and a transnational international economy.

‘Separation between the economic and the political’

The capitalist anarchy of the market is replicated in the int’l anarchy of the states-system.

THE TROUBLE WİTH REALİSM E.H. CarrA discourse of raison d'état; a view of the state

as subject, this leads to illumination of international history as the half-mastered practice and partly staggered outcomes of state policy.

Social power is taken into account as instrument or constraint of state policy.

! For the implied image of the circle really does miss the wood for the trees

Morgenthau’s ‘Axiomatic Realism’The constitutive relation between human

nature and social world is one-way only certain basic laws of political behaviour will persist thought history.

States are by nature ‘power maximizers’ Power denotes ‘anything that establishes and

maintains the control of man over man’! The price one has to pay identifying the ‘’

timeless features’’ of the political landscape is the sacrifice of understanding the process of change in world affairs.

Waltz’s theoretical realismRational choice modelWaltz uses ‘logical necessity’ in dilemmas of

int’l relations, Rosenberg argues that he simply reproduce the assumption of raison d'état at a higher level of abstraction.

Realism is the conservative ideology of the exercise of modern state power: it provides a terminology of int’l relations which dramatizes the dilemmas, legitimizes the priorities and rehearses of realpolitik.

! The history of the states-system has a live political content;a moment’s glance at this content.

THE EMPİRE OF CİVİL SOCİETY Marx himself provides a theory of anarchy – not as

the timeless condition of geopolitics, but as the characteristic social form of capitalist modernity. The argument includes the theoretical redefinition of the two core categories of realist IR; anarchy and sovereignty.

The structural specificity of state sovereignty lies in its ‘abstraction’ from civil society- an abstraction which is constitutive of the private sphere of the market hence inseparable from capitalist relations of production. Meanwhile, anarchy- which, for realism comprises a pre social state of nature- is rediscovered as a historically specific condition defined by Marx as ‘personal independence based on dependence by mediated by things’.

Rosenberg explains Marx methodology in ‘the structural basis of civil society’ part of his book, he especially underlines that the difference between precapitalist societies and capitalism.

In capitalist societies the direct producers are no longer in possession of their own means of subsistence, and what binds them to the processes of surplus extraction is no longer political command, but rather the requirement to sell their labour in order to gain this subsistence. This necessity supports the distinctive capitalist relations of surplus extraction themselves: a legally sanctioned contract between formal equals in which the labourer accepts authoritative subordination in- the private realm of production and forgoes any rights over the product in exchange for an agreed wage paid.

FEUDAL STRUCTURE

‘’In precapitalist societies the apparatus of public rule was implicated directly in the process of surplus extraction* and the producers were therefore as politically unfree.

The labour contract takes the form of a relation of exchange between legal equals, the process of surplus extraction is reconstituted as a private activity of civil society.

Capitalism’s basic feature is the emergence of distinct institutional spheres called the state and the economy.

*Surplus-value is the social product which is over and above what is required for the producers to live.

SOVEREIGNTY AS A CAPITALIST POLITICAL FORM

We should define sovereignty primarily not in terms of the practical ability of the state to command the behaviour of the citizens, nor yet as a kind of residual legal paramountcy. Of course without these there would be no sovereign states but these are descriptive attributes so do not explain why the modern states assume its distinctive ‘purely political form’.

The sovereignty of the state does not depend on both a kind of abstraction from production and the reconstitution of the state political sphere as external to civil society. But this is not an abstraction which means that the sovereignty of the state is neutral. On the contrary, its very form is dimension of class power because its entails the parallel consolidation of private political power in production. In other words, the state was neither withdrawing from civil society nor necessarily encroaching further upon it. It was reimposing the separation of political functions between public and private spheres which is the form of both class power and the state power under capitalism.

Industrial disputes are immediately political disputes. The appropriation of the surplus becomes an object of ‘’public’’ political struggle within the state rather than private political struggle within the productive corporations of civil society. The private despotism of the workplace becomes the public despotism of the state.

THE SOVEREIGN STATES SYSTEM

Capitalist relations of surplus extraction are organized through a contract of exchange which is defined ‘ non-political’.

Historically, the sovereign state system transformation has two overlapping phases;

State building process is the centralizing of political authority by absolutist monarchs, the suppression of rival centres of power and the construction of bureaucratic machinery of government. All you know that Orthodox IR theory started the modern world in here. But Rosenberg underlines that disaggregation of social functions and social power between public and private goes simultaneously with state building process.

The historical rise of the sovereign state is one aspect of a comprehensive reorganization of the forms of social power. For under this new arrangement, while relations of citizenship and jurisdiction define state borders, any aspect of social life which are mediated by relations of exchange in principle no longer receive a political definition and extend across these borders.

Realism ignores that the changing structural definition and content of ‘the political’. Realists tell us that modern int’l political system organized by anarchy is different only in terms of shifting empires to the states system. Rosenberg says that ‘’ We can have a global states-system only because modern ‘politics’ is different.’’

Rosenberg tries to theorize this difference with historical development of capitalist relations of production.

HISTORICIZING THE BALANCE OF POWER

A theory of the balance of power must be able to do more than identify the historically specific character of the states making up an alternative way of understanding the interaction of states which we call anarchical.

We should recognize that the modern balance of power is not the plurality of armed actors. (Impersonal, empty and scientific technical)

Every historical episode of imperial expansion elaborates its own distinctive ideological legitimation according to the specific forms of domination and surplus appropriation involved in its reproduction.

WHY İS THERE NOINTERNATİONAL HİSTORİCAL SOCİOLOGY?Despite the wealth of historical sociological

contributions, the international itself has not escaped sociological definition.

By ‘the international’, Rosenberg means that dimension of social reality which arises specifically from the coexistence within it (the international) of more than one society.

Historical sociology must always encounter international phenomena as theoretically external —whatever empirical significance it might allow them in its concrete explanations.

Neorealist theory has been charged with falsely separating geopolitical from social and economic processes. Yet critics themselves have failed to show how sociological and geopolitical phenomena can be explained in a unified international theory.

Geopolitical

reification‘Domestic analogy’

Rosenberg suggests a sociological definition of the international.

The existence of ‘the international’ arises ultimately from the ‘unevenness’ of human sociohistorical existence; its distinctive characteristics can be derived from analysis of the resultant condition of ‘combined development’; and its significance, thus sociologically redefined, entails a reconceptualizationof ‘development’ itself.( It removes the source of the 'domestic analogy’ problem for historical sociology.) Classical social theory aimed to provide theories of social development as a whole.

UNEVEN AND COMBİNED DEVELOPMENT The classical tradition never formulated

theoretically the multilinear an interactive dimensions of social development as a historical phenomenon.

U&CD; Trotksy’s idea

Extending far beyond the analysis of capitalist development

Uneven and combined development was intrinsic to the historical process.

Trotsky overcame the obstacles to a sociological definition of the international

U&CD reconceptualizes the international as an object domain, defining it sociologically as ‘that dimension of social reality which arises specifically from the co-existence within it of more than one society’

It identifies an entire class of inter-societal patterns, including but not restricted to the geopolitical structure.

The two realms (domestic and international) manifest common structural properties given by their shared capitalist identity: in the international sphere too, the absolute character of the political right of self-determination (like the freedom of labour/the individual) may be seen to hinge precisely upon its substantive permeability by other, 'non-political' mechanisms of surplus appropriation.

CONCLUSİON Every historical process materializes within a concrete

setting of uneven development, and then actively we seek out what additional causal dimensions this adds to the movement of the process itself.

The external source of international phenomena is external no more – for it has no being apart from the universal unevenness of development itself. And the international phenomena themselves can therefore now appear as what they must actually be: a class of sociological causes arising specifically from the intrinsic unevenness of social development and expressed and refracted through its primary consequence: inter-societal multiplicity.

Teschke’s CriticsStructuralist tones in geopolitical order

analysis( neglecting to theorize social conflicts, wars

and crises)Less concern for pre-capitalist geopolitical

orders for the purposes of IR theory (though not for Marxism)

Modernity is not a structure but a process.Necessity of more explanatory analyses on

emergence of capitalism and it relation with int’l order

BİBLİOGRAPHY Rosenberg, J. (1994) The Empire of Civil Society. A Critique

of the Realist Theory of International Relations. London: Verso

Rosenberg, J. (2006) Why is There no international historical sociology? European Journal of International Relations 12(3): 307–340.

Rosenberg, J. (2010) Basic problems in the theory of uneven and combined development. Part II:Unevenness and political multiplicity. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 23(1): 165–189

Rosenberg,J. ‘The Origins of International Relations’ Seminar Presentation, University of Kent, October 20th 2010

Teschke, B. (2003) The Myth of 1648. Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations. London: Verso.

NOTES A Combined and Uneven Development

Approach to the European Neolithic David Steel Cambridge University, UK