Class, States and International Relations

A critical appraisal of Robert Cox and neo-Gramscian theory

Adrian Budd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138945296
• eBook ISBN: 9781135049027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides an outline and a critique of neo-Gramscian international relations theory, from a Marxist perspective.

Focusing on the pioneering work of Robert Cox, but also drawing on the wider neo-Gramscian literature, this book presents a comprehensive account of neo-Gramscian international relations theory. It highlights the neo-Gramscian critique of mainstream Realist theory and the theoretical innovations that resulted from the mobilisation of Gramsci's ideas and Cox's emphasis on the social forces underpinning forms of state and world orders. The author explains how this is especially relevant in the current period of war and crisis, when the international dimensions of social existence continue to exercise a major influence over 'domestic' politics and economics, and when the interest in Marxism can be expected to grow. The book continues to provide a critique of the neo-Gramscians and of what the author argues is their one-sided reading of Gramsci. Placing coercion at the centre of a mode of production analysis of world order, the author elaborates a Marxist alternative to neo-Gramscianism that provides more robust explanations of world order dynamics and change.

Using a combination of IR theory and historical explanation, including of contemporary world order dynamics and US power, this book will appeal to both students and scholars of International Relations, international studies, and international history.

Part I
Robert Cox and neo-Gramscian theory

1 Robert Cox and the origins of the neo-Gramscian perspective

Three decades since their publication Robert Cox's essays ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’ (1981) and ‘Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method’ (1983) retain much of their freshness. In a world in which convention still has it that, for instance, it was America that invaded Iraq in 2003 and China that is currently enhancing its military capabilities, Cox's insistence that phenomena such as these cannot be explained by reference to state power alone and that states are terrains of conflict underpinned by the interests and actions of social forces remains compelling. Equally compelling is his introduction of Marxism's distinctive approach to capitalist modernity into International Relations (IR), forcing both mainstream theory and Marxism, to the extent that their competing interests allow, to address their mutual neglect. These essays are often referred to as ‘seminal’ for good reason, for Cox's theoretical and methodological reflections both exposed the shortcomings of and interests served by mainstream theory and sowed the seeds from which the sturdy plant of the neo-Gramscian perspective would grow.

This chapter outlines Cox's approach to social scientific enquiry in general and his theoretical contribution to IR in particular. In the first part of the chapter I situate Cox's ideas within the broader critical theoretical tradition, and in particular analyse how that tradition has evaluated the dominant Realist perspective in IR. In the second part I show how Cox's elaboration of an alternative approach draws on the historicist tradition in social science, including Gramsci's historicist Marxism. Cox's reading of Gramsci informs his conception of historical structures as frameworks for human action, which he counter-poses to what he regards as the more abstract theorization deriving from a mode of production analysis and to the transhistorical approach of Realism. The significance of historicism becomes especially clear in the third part of the chapter, which is devoted to Cox's reading of Gramsci's work on hegemony. In the fourth part of the chapter, I discuss Cox's triadic model of the international system — comprising social forces, forms of state and world orders. The fifth part is devoted to the internationalization of the concept of hegemony. In this initial outline of neo-Gramscian theory I focus primarily on Cox's early essays, but also draw where appropriate on later works by both Cox and other neo-Gramscians.

Gill has reminded us that there is no ‘consensual interpretation’ of The Prison Notebooks, and has counselled against ‘intellectual sectarianism’ in the use of Gramsci in IR (Gill 1993a: 1–2).¹ This is especially important in that Cox's purpose in reading The Prison Notebooks was not ‘a critical study of Gramsci's political theory but merely a derivation from it of some ideas useful for a revision of current international relations theory’ (Cox 1983: 162). Against critics of his reading of Gramsci he comments that ‘the concern should be with the adequacy of Cox's understanding of the world rather than with the adequacy of his understanding of Gramsci’ (Cox 2002: 29). In similar vein Gill argues that the point is not ‘simply to apply his concepts — the key issue is how such concepts might be adopted and indeed transformed in a contemporary problematique to address the question of world order’ (Gill 2008: xxi). The way that the neo-Gramscians address this question flows strongly from the conceptual framework that Cox established in the perspective's founding documents of the early 1980s.

Cox, Realism and critical theory

During his time at the International Labour Organization (ILO) Cox's acceptance of the Realist understanding of the international system became increasingly critical and partial. He remained sympathetic towards the Realism of E.H. Carr but was highly critical of what he calls ‘neorealism’, the tradition of post-war American Realism initiated by Hans Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations (Morgenthau 1948).² Morgenthau's textbook, written in the shadow of the fragmentation of the international system in the 1930s, was instrumental in articulating IR scholarship with the interests of the US state. According to Stanley Hoffmann Realism thereafter became ‘an American science’ which provided an ‘intellectual compass’ to navigate the stormy waters of the Cold War (Hoffmann 1977: 47; see also Stephanson 1996). The overlapping academic and political careers of, for instance, Kissinger, Huntington, Brzezinski, Nye and Rice support Hoffmann's claim, and Realism became a tool kit of statecraft in an international system in which states were seen as the only significant actors and their external orientations and relations, particularly military relations, were paramount.³ It was in this context that Cox's critique of mainstream theory began to develop.

Critical theory is not a unified tradition but can be broadly defined by its systematic ‘negative evaluation’ of, and adoption of a critical stance towards, the social practices it studies (McCarney 1986: 11; see also Sayer 2000). Cox's approach to IR shares important elements of critical theory's critique of mainstream social science, the methodology of which is reflected in Realism. First, where Realism adopts the atomistic/individualist methodology characteristic of mainstream social theory, and conceives the international sphere as constituted by the interactions of autonomous states defending independent national interests, critical theory adopts a holistic approach. It thus directs attention away from the specific properties of apparently autonomous units and towards the systemic pressures of what Cox calls world orders that impact upon them. However, Cox does not fall into the opposite camp, exemplified by World Systems Theory's tendency to reify the world system and ‘undervalue the state by considering it as merely derivative from its position in the world system’ (Cox 1981: 127). For states concentrate social relations and social power within the national territories they regulate, and should not be conceived as passive expressions of, or reducible to, the world system. Realist state-centrism does, then, ‘at least gesture at something of considerable importance’ (Rosenberg 1994a: 31) and is a preferable error to ‘the fanciful belief’ that the contemporary trend towards what is generally labelled globalization entails the transcendence of inter-state conflict (Callinicos 2001: 93). Nevertheless, Realism's atomist approach is an important source of its explanatory weakness.

Realism is also weakened by its conventionalist separation of the social totality into discrete objects of enquiry. With the abstract structuralism of certain versions of academic Marxism in mind, Cox recognizes that this separation can assist understanding, for ‘contemplation of undivided totality may lead to profound abstractions or mystical revelations, but practical knowledge (that which can be put to work through action) is always partial or fragmentary in origin’ (Cox 1981: 126). Yet, although critical enquiry may proceed from analysis of a concrete issue or sphere of social life, the social totality is a permanent frame of reference.⁴ Thus, Cox argues, ‘whether the parts remain as limited, separated objects of knowledge, or become the basis for constructing a structured and dynamic view of larger wholes, is a major question of method and purpose’ (Cox 1981: 126). Where Realism tends towards greater ‘analytical subdivision’, Cox's perspective directs us towards the juxtaposition and connection of partial totalities in related spheres and therefore towards a conception of ‘the social and political complex as a whole … of which the initially contemplated part is just one component, and seeks to understand the processes of change in which both parts and whole are involved’ (Cox 1981: 129).

A further criticism of Realism, related to its atomist methodology, is that it reifies the state, which it treats as a ‘black box’ isolated from its generative social relations and as an unproblematic unitary representative of the national interest. In particular it erects a rigid division between politics and economics, conceiving them as autonomous spheres connected by merely external linkages. Thus, class conflict is all but invisible within IR and deemed to be unworthy of serious consideration. Meanwhile state power is naturalized, allowing Realism to construct a timeless and therefore abstract state-centric science of international politics and war and ‘a topsy-turvy world of appearances’ in which state power is abstracted from social power and states ‘are invested with self-activating drives and enter into direct social relations with each other’ (Rosenberg 1994b: 107). Morgenthau makes some reference to social processes but bases his reasoning not on the prevailing social relations in any given historical form of society but on a transhistorical conception of human nature in which the drive to dominate is uppermost. Thus, he argues, ‘all history shows that nations active in international politics are continuously preparing for, actively involved in, or recovering from organized violence in the form of war’ (Morgenthau 1967: 36). This transhistorical essentialization of states suggests, Cox argues, a ‘continuing present (the permanence of the institutions and power relations which constitute its parameters)’ (Cox 1981: 129). International conflict is thus presented as a ‘recurrent consequence of a continuing structure’ rather than, as Marxism, for instance, perceives it, ‘a possible cause of structural change’ (Cox 1981: 134). The simplicities of transhistorical essentialism might produce what Robert Keohane calls theoretical elegance — ‘spare, logically tight’ theory (Keohane 1986: 197) — but for Cox, ‘one person's elegance is another's oversimplification’ (Cox 1996f: 53).⁵ As we shall see shortly, oversimplification is not simply an expression of methodological errors but reflects an ideological bias serving social interests that are comfortable with the perpetuation of current arrangements.

Rather than seeing states as black boxes, Cox and the neo-Gramscians conceive them as ‘terrains of conflict’ intimately connected to the interests of social forces (Sinclair 1996: 3). The relations between these forces are therefore central to the explanations of the origins, forms and transformations of states and world orders. As a consequence Cox argues that state-society complexes, rather than states in isolation, are the ‘basic entity of international relations’ (Cox 1981: 127). This is of great importance, for the neo-Gramscians' recognition of the plurality of social forces and the often unintended and contingent outcomes of their struggles in a variety of national contexts allows them to highlight, against Realism, that there exists a ‘plurality of forms of state, expressing different configurations of state/society complexes’ (Cox 1981: 127). This produces a welcome historical concreteness but, as we shall see in Part II, comes with a tendency to focus too narrowly on differences between state-society complexes and to overlook the underlying (albeit differentiated) unity of the capitalist world system. I will argue that this approach lacks the explanatory power of a non-reductionist, historicized Marxist mode of production analysis.

A further criticism concerns Realism's positivist methodology. Treating world order as essentially ‘out there’, to be analysed from a neutral position akin to that adopted by natural scientists (Smith 1999: 99), Realism separates subject from object and thereby denies that dominant ideas and values are themselves part of objective reality (Cox 1995a: 33; Tooze 1988: 290). This, Cox argues, expresses the ideological bias of ‘comfortable’ social interests which accept prevailing structures of social power. Yet, he argues, since ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’, positivism is implicitly value-bound (Cox 1981: 128). By focusing on the correction of problems and imbalances within the prevailing order rather than on the deeper relations and forces from which they result, traditional IR is for Cox ‘problem-solving theory’ (see also Kütting 2000: 3). In contrast, Cox enquires into the origins of the prevailing order, seeks ‘to lay bare its [Realism's] concealed perspective’, and orientates IR towards ‘an appraisal of the very framework for action, or problematic, which problem-solving theory accepts as its parameters’ (Cox 1981: 128, 129).

The corollary of this critique of problem-solving theory is a normative commitment to change and an endorsement of Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach: ‘the philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it’ (Marx 1942a: 473). As Cox puts it, a key purpose in analysing present structures is to explore ‘how and whether they might be in the process of changing’ (Cox 1981: 129), but if change in the critical theory tradition involves not simply the elimination of particular problems, but the transformation of the underlying social processes and structures of which these problems are a manifestation (Horkheimer 1972: 206), that transformation proceeds by way of critique of, rather than the positing of an ideal alternative to, current social practices and contradictions. The consequence of this approach, for Cox, is that while ‘critical theory allows for a normative choice in favour of a social and political order different from the prevailing order’, ‘it limits the range of choice to alternative orders which are feasible transformations of the existing world’ (Cox 1981: 130; see also Devetak 2001). ‘Feasible’ exists here as a counter-weight to the utopian element in critical theory, which is in any case ‘constrained by its comprehension of historical processes’ (Cox 1981: 130, my emphasis). A great deal therefore hangs on how social processes are comprehended — assuming that there is at least a minimum correspondence between theory and practice, how key social dynamics are understood will condition the nature of the transformative strategies that might be adopted to allow societies to ‘escape the strictures that bind human potential’ (Sinclair 1996: 3). I will have more to say about how we should best comprehend the capitalist world in Part II, but for now it is clear that the neo-Gramscians are motivated by an emancipatory vision. Thus, while Cox's work has progressed via ‘detached observation … “objectivity” has little meaning for me in its positivistic implications of separation of subject and object of enquiry, of fact and value. Commitments are, I think, clearly evident in these pieces, as, I hope, is realism of analysis’ (Cox 1996: xi).

More concretely, Cox shares Karl Polanyi's concerns about the illusions of the self-regulating market, the disembedding of economic processes from wider social relations, and the subordination of society to the logic of the market (Cox 1996a: 32; see also Hettne 1995: 3–6). In his analysis of the spread of capitalism — ‘the great transformation’ — Polanyi located a ‘first movement’ comprising the generalization of market relations, the consequences of which included the accentuation of social divisions and, as nature and human labour were commodified, an increasing vulnerability to forces over which the mass of people exercised no control (Polanyi 1957). The subordination of society to private gain, which became, for the first time in human history, ‘a justification of action and behaviour in everyday life’, would, according to Polanyi, have ‘annihilated’ society but for a ‘second movement’ — protective countermoves implemented under pressure from popular movements, ‘which blunted the action of this self-destructive mechanism’ (Polanyi 1957: 30, 76). In today's conditions of neoliberal ascendancy, Cox argues, countermoves are again necessary to re-embed the economy in and subordinate it to wider social structures. The re-embedding of global market forces, via a renewal of both national class compromises and multilateral structures in the global political economy, would, Cox argues, contribute towards ‘greater social equity, greater diffusion of power among countries and social groups, protection of the biosphere, moderation and non-violence in dealing with conflict, and mutual recognition of civilisations’ (Cox 1997: xviii; see also Cox 1996a: 34).

Despite his criticisms of Realism, however, Cox argued that it ‘had something important to say about inter-state relations and world order’, and rather than simply reject Realism he argued that awareness of its problems could serve as a warning prior to his own ‘attempt to sketch a method for understanding global power relations’ (Cox 1981: 131, 128). In particular, he drew upon E. H. Carr's seminal Realist works The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919–1939 and Nationalism and After. Written in 1939 when, according to Cox, state power was ‘the determining factor’ in the international system (Cox 1997: xv), The Twenty Years' Crisis represented a reaction to the ‘wish-dreams’ of Wilsonian idealism, which in any case, according to Carr, reflected the dominant class interests of the victorious (‘satisfied’) powers after 1918.⁶ Carr's argument is in many ways straightforwardly Realist: drawing on Machiavelli and Hobbes, he argued that ‘the ultima ratio of power in international relations is war’, that conflict was inevitable in an anarchic system, and that national survival was paramount within a hostile environment (Carr 1946: 109). In these circumstances, he argued, ethics/idealism and economics were subordinate to, and even aspects of, state power...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Robert Cox and neo-Gramscian theory
• Part II Critique
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index