Theories of International Relations

1
Theories of International Relations

• International Political Economy II Neo-Marxist
  and Critical Theories

2
Introduction

• Welcome to our second class on international
  political economy. Last week we discussed
  Realist and Liberal ideas about IPE.
• This week we are going to look at Marxist and
  Marxist-inspired approaches, and how they relate
  to issues of rich and poor, and North and South
  in the world. As we have seen, in International
  Relations, these various ways of thinking about
  theory are often referred to as Critical
  theory.
• The lecture will start by reviewing critical
  theory. I then review the basic concepts of
  Classical Marxism introduced last term, and
  Lenins notion of imperialism.
• After this, we will discuss dependency and world
  systems theory. This is followed by a brief
  examination of approaches to globalization,
  before some evaluation.

3
Outline

• Critical Theory
• Classical Marxism Redux
• Lenin on Imperialism
• Dependency World Systems
• Transnational Historical Materialism
• Approaches to Globalization
• Evaluation
• Main Things and Next Time

4
Critical Theory

• Critical theory is used in a very broad way in
  international relations theory. In the rest of
  social science it is typically used to refer
  specifically to the ideas of the Frankfurt School
  of German social theory.
• Just as not all Realists are realistic, the term
  critical does not imply that only critical
  theorists are critical of the international
  system.
• Following Robert Cox, theories can be
  distinguished by their purpose.
• Theory is always for someone and for some
  purpose. Most theory is designed to make the
  world we know work a little better.
• This is problem-solving theory. Realism is
  problem-solving.
• Critical theorists reject the limited purpose of
  problem-solving. They see this as reinforcing
  the status quo, thus preventing the basic root
  causes of problems from being dealt with.
• Critical theory is committed to overturning the
  status quo and all that goes with it in order to
  improve the world.
• This implies revolution rather than evolution.

5
Classical Marxism Redux

• Marxism is typically the route source for
  critical theory.
• The most important idea in Marxism is class.
• Class is the idea that people can be grouped
  together based on their relations of production.
  Marx argued that the class that owned the means
  of production exploited the other class.
• The other important thing to take from Marx is
  the idea that different modes of production exist
  through history. Each mode has characteristic
  relations of production (classes) and forces of
  production (eg. feudal agriculture vs capitalist
  industry).
• Key element of Marxist thought materialist
  conception of history - processes of historical
  change are ultimately a reflection of the
  economic development of society.
• Each mode has it own internal laws which are, for
  Marxists, the starting point for understanding
  why change and development occurs in the world.

6
Lenin on Imperialism

• Published in 1917, Lenins Imperialism the
  Highest State of Capitalism argues that
  capitalism has entered a new (final) stage with
  the development of monopoly capitalism.
• For Lenin, monopoly capitalism refers to an
  economy in which the state intervenes to protect
  the interests of large monopolistic or
  oligopolistic firms from competition by smaller
  businesses.
• Under monopoly capitalism - two-tier structure
  developed within world-economy with a dominant
  core exploiting a less-developed periphery.
• Lenin suggested that the conflict between
  capitalist states in the struggle to acquire
  colonial territories reflected the falling rate
  of profit within the core capitalist countries.
• The role of states in this situation was to
  create an imperialist foreign policy so as to
  restore the rate of profit by providing new
  territories for capitalist investment. His meant
  conquering and colonizing countries typically
  with a much lower level of development.

7
Lenin on Imperialism (cont.)

• The bourgeoisie in the core countries could use
  profits from exploitation to improve the lot of
  their own proletariat.
• Gains from this policy would give higher skilled
  workers at home better wages, lowering the
  likelihood of revolution in the core, rich
  states.
• The class structure and exploitation could
  continue.
• As a consequence no harmony of interests between
  all workers.
• Lenin's account, in contrast with Marx's, was a
  very negative and Realist-like account of
  competing and war-like states, but with a very
  different driving force from Realism. The driving
  force was not in anarchy or human nature, but in
  the laws of the capitalist mode of production.

8
Dependency World Systems (1 of 3)

• We jump ahead for the next part of our story to
  the 1950s. The end of colonialism and
  imperialism created some optimism after World War
  II that all states would develop and prosper.
• In the US, Walt Rostow developed a theory of
  Modernization in which he asserted that all
  states pass through various stages on the way to
  sharing basically similar Western-type secular
  institutions.
• This period of optimism was fairly brief. From
  the late 1960s onwards, new theorists like Gunder
  Frank, Johan Galtung and Immanuel Wallerstein
  argued that uneven development and exploitation
  of some states by others is characteristic of the
  international system.
• In this view, Third World states were losing out
  to American and European multinational
  corporations (MNCs). There are many different
  competing theories.

9
Dependency (2 of 3)

• A central idea in Dependency and World Systems
  theory as a whole is that of core and periphery.
• This idea suggested that the core states of the
  world (North America and Europe) were responsible
  for extracting resources and profits from the
  peripheral states.
• Raul Prebisch, for example, argued that countries
  in the periphery were suffering as a result of
  declining terms of trade.
• That is, price of manufactured good increased
  more rapidly than that of raw materials.
• As a result of their reliance on primary goods,
  countries of the periphery become poorer relative
  to the core over time.
• Note that here, the process of exploitation
  occurs in trade rather than in production, as in
  the classical Marxist view.
• Class therefore not a central category, but
  markets and states are. It is the states that
  organize and enforce core-periphery relations
  through markets and their MNCs.

10
Dependency (3 of 3)

• World Systems theory can be distinguished from
  Dependency theory by being more focused on
  historical explanations and less concerned with
  making change in the contemporary world.
• Wallerstein capitalism as the driving force
  behind the modern world-system.
• Many Dependency and related theorists have been
  actively engaged in seeking political change in
  core-periphery North-South relations.
• Connected to the Marxist idea that philosophers
  have only interpreted the world in various ways
  the point however, is to change it.
• These ideas were reflected in the demands calling
  for a New International Economic Order in 1970s.
• More recently, campaigns to buy "fairly traded
  coffee" and other produce of developing states.

11
Transnational Historical Materialism

• As noted last term, since the mid-1980s, a new
  stream of Marxist-inspired theory has developed
  in IR/IPE.
• The instigator of this new thinking is Robert
  Cox, a Canadian.
• This new Marxist-inspired IR/IPE is built on the
  thinking of Antonio Gramsci, amongst other
  political theorists.
• This approach, sometimes called Neo-Gramscian
  IPE, argues that culture and ideas are much more
  important in IPE than most other Marxist
  approaches have previously thought.
• Ideas legitimate the status quo but ideas also
  motivate people to organize and make political
  change.

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Transnational Historical Materialism (cont.)

• Cox argues culture and ideas are important in the
  creation and maintenance of a hegemonic system or
  world order between states, by generating consent
  within the populace.
• For Cox, drawing on Gramsci, hegemonic rule is
  based on both coercion and consent.
• For Gramsci, consent is created and re-created by
  the hegemony of the ruling class, which allows
  the moral, political and cultural values of the
  dominant group to become widely dispersed
  throughout society and to be accepted by
  subordinate groups and classes as their own.
• American culture has been instrumental in making
  US norms (freedom, free enterprise, free trade
  etc) and American leadership seem natural and
  desirable to people outside the US.
• But US hegemony also has its coercive side, and
  Cox emphasizes the role of the US military in
  disciplining wayward states such as Iraq, for
  instance.

13
Approaches to Globalization

• Globalization has been of special interest to
  Marxist and other critical IR/IPE thinkers. Lets
  consider four ways we could think of
  globalization (based on Scholte).
• We could focus on increased cross-border
  transactions between countries. For example, an
  Italian company borrowing money in the US.
  Nothing new in this. This sort of thing goes back
  to ancient times.
• Indeed, Marxists IPE theorists tend to argue that
  globalization is not novel - the globe has long
  been dominated by a single integrated economic
  and political entity - the global capitalist
  system.
• Second, we could focus on how restrictions on
  transactions between countries are being
  progressively reduced. This is the open-border
  view. State controls are thought to decline in
  this view of globalization.

14
Globalization

• Third, instead of thinking about transactions
  between countries, the transborder view of
  globalization suggests that companies and groups
  of people less and less define themselves in
  terms of national origin, and look for wealth
  wherever it is. Transactions get more complex and
  faster-paced. It gets harder to define them in
  traditional national terms.
• Last, we could look at the expanding role of
  rules, norms and practices from more powerful
  countries like the US, and how these affect
  globalization. We can call this the hegemonic
  view of globalization. It suggests that some
  countries are more important in setting the rules
  for global finance than are other countries.
  Territory still matters here.

15
Evaluation

• For many Realist and Liberal critics, the
  transitions in the former communist states and
  more market friendly policies in developing
  countries make Marxist and other critical
  theories irrelevant.
• Thinking more analytically, Marxist-inspired
  critical theory can be attacked for reductionism,
  in that most of the writings in this tradition
  see events in the world as determined primarily
  by economic forces, often identified at the
  domestic level.
• More recent versions of this set of theories try
  to make linkages between the experience of
  people's lives and broader global processes in
  terms of focusing on the influence of ideas on
  classes.
• Many variables remain unexamined, however, and
  Transnational Historical Materialism, for
  example, has been criticised for not considering
  the issue of gender in its theorising, although
  scholars such as Stephen Gill are addressing
  these issues.

16
Main Things and Next Time

• Marx was quite optimistic about the even
  development of capitalism around the world, but
  Lenin saw it as an uneven process that produced
  the rush to acquire colonies and ultimately, war
  between the imperial powers.
• Post-WWII approaches attacked the dominant
  American Modernization theory, seeing
  core-periphery state relations as a
  characteristic feature of the world.
• Most recently, Transnational Historical
  Materialism has reasserted the role of classes in
  these relations, and argued that culture and
  ideas are important in how these classes relate
  to each other.
• Next time we review the lectures and discuss the
  examination in June.