The main theoretical discussion within my book on the geopolitical and energy transitions, 2.2 to 2.5.
This is usually the hardest part of a book to produce, and I may have to revisit it once the book is completed. I welcome any comments on possible additions/changes. Next the chapter on China.
2.2. The Mainstream Representations of the International System
With neorealism (also know as structural realism) Waltz placed the focus upon his third image, the anarchic international system with states as the most significant actors; the referent object with respect to the attainment of security. States are seen as being forced to act in a rational way to the balance of power within the international system that they inhabit, with no recourse to a higher power. Those states not acting rationally in their own interest will either be socialized by the negative consequences of their actions or removed from the system altogether by those consequences. The other two images, the nature of the individual humans and social groups involved, and the internal configuration of each state, fall into the background. States are assumed to be “like objects” with little or no significant variation between human policy making groups or states structures that will affect foreign policy. To maintain their security, states must act with respect to the nature of the international system as otherwise they will either lose relative position or even perish; “the international system socializes states over time to balance against rising great powers and to emulate the successful security behaviour of their peers” (Ripsman, Taliaferro & Lobell 2016, p. 17). This systemic and rational theoretical perspective was first put forward by Waltz in the 1970s, at the height of the influence of systems theory within the academy. It also borrowed heavily from a microeconomics that views individuals as reacting rationally for their own utilitarian interests with respect to an external market system.
The assumption of generic rational individuals and social groups who perceive the world accurately and can adequately process all of the information available severely limits the applicability of structural realism. Robert Jervis (1976, 2017) and others (Booth 1979; Katzenstein 1996; Krause & Latham 1997) have argued that the actual human beings that conduct foreign policy frequently make perceptual and cognitive mistakes across a whole range of variables, such as the possible options available and the relative balance of power. This can be due to a combination of cognitive and cultural biases, the sheer complexity and possible contradictory nature of information flowing from the international system, and the possible lack of clarity of such information. A state that has never been invaded may view the international system in a very different way to one that has been repeatedly invaded, leaders may have very different temperaments, other states may work hard to conceal their own motives, and the probabilistic and complex nature of planning may produce stasis rather than insight. Waltz’s first image may have significant impacts upon actual outcomes, with the Strategic Culture (Glenn, Howlett & Poore 2004) specific to given national strategy making groups, and even the proclivities of individual leaders, impacting national decision making over decadal timeframes. With respect to the US, Layne (2017) makes the case for a strategic culture, stemming from a “foreign policy establishment”, that has displayed a significant amount of continuity from the 1890s to the present day; supporting the case for strategic culture as a long-term determinant of foreign policy:
The foreign policy establishment has had two incarnations. The ‘old’ foreign policy establishment’s heyday was from the late 1890s to the late 1960s, the era where the East Coast elite was clearly ascendant in the US foreign policy making process … Since the 1960s, the foreign policy establishment has become less white, less male, less Protestant, less East Coast centric, and its ranks leavened significantly with women, people of color, Catholics, and Jews [but] the foreign policy establishment successfully co-opted, assimilated, and socialized the members recruited from non-traditional backgrounds (Layne 2017, p. 263-264).
The current US elite may look somewhat different to those of the late 1890s or 1950s, but there may be relatively few differences in their strategic culture – “the foreign policy establishment’s world view … has remained fundamentally unchanged since the early 1940s” (Ibid., p. 267). With neo-realism treating states as “like-objects”, possible variances in such things as the state/society complex configuration, domestic institutions and political considerations, and the ability to mobilize internal resources with respect to external challenges are not considered. This ignores the real possibility that states may compromise their position within the international community to prioritize internal economic, political and social needs. Barnett (1972, 1986) argues that the drive of the post-WW2 Labour government to meet the clamor of the population for greater social welfare after the sacrifices of two world wars redirected resources that were required to limit its relative decline with respect to other nations.
The social and political culture of a nation may also greatly affect its ability to make full use of the resources available. For example, the cultural norms that delayed the mobilization of women as an industrial workforce by the Nazi German leadership placed Germany at a disadvantage with respect to a Britain that had no such resistance. The “Vietnam Syndrome” can also be seen as restricting US foreign policy options even into the current period, with a foreign policy executive and military branch highly averse to the domestic political risks of taking major casualties or instituting a draft. A dominant group within society may also be able to create a strategic culture, and foreign policy actions, that furthers its own interests (Narizny 2007) above those of the state; with the nature and construction of the dominant group differing between nations.
With the ongoing failure of neo-realism to align with actual state actions, scholars looked for intervening variables that may account for this failure. Two leading scholars of neo-realism, Waltz and Mearsheimer (2007), looked at the influence of Israel upon US foreign policy as a possible intervening variable. Over time the investigation of such variables lead to a less tactical approach, a neoclassical realism as put forward by Ripsman, Taliafero and Lobell (2016) that conceived of four clusters of intervening variables (leader images and perceptions, strategic culture, state-society relations, and domestic institutions) and extended the temporal range over which such variables can operate. This facilitated the usage of neoclassical realism as a theory of international relations in itself, rather than as a device to tactically deal with outcomes at variance to neorealist expectations. The relative importance of variables may change with each new nationally and temporally specific case; the particularity of the circumstances of a given nation at a given time is accepted within their analytical structuring. In some cases, leader images and perceptions may be subsumed within the strategic culture – especially with a regular turnover of leaders.
Neoclassical realism “retains the primacy of the international system that structural realists emphasize, while relaxing the constraints of external determinism” (Ripsman, Taliaferro & Lobell 2016, p. 25) to allow the inclusion of factors internal to the individual nation-state, providing for both the structural and unit-level causes that Waltz accepts are required to explain actual behaviors and outcomes. One use has been a relatively tactical one of explaining empirical variances to what would have been expected from a neorealist perspective. This assumes that states tend to act in a way conformant to neorealist theory, with only occasional variances. Another has been to explain more than just anomalies, providing insights into “a broader range of foreign policy choices and grand strategic adjustment” (Ibid., p. 29) – a general theory of foreign policy. The referent object of both approaches is still the state within an anarchic system, but states that may not be “like objects”. This aligns with the possibility of state differentiation proposed by Buzan & Schouenborg (2018, p. 23) that “suggests that ‘like-units’ might be quite radically different from each other”, for example in the nature of their state/society complexes. Ripsman, Taliaferro and Lobell (2016) also expand on Waltz’s understanding of system structure, including Buzan’s concept of “interaction capacity” factors that are systemic without being part of the system – such as “technological capabilities and shared international norms and organization” (Ibid., p. 39), referring to them as “structural modifiers”.
Although striving to integrate Realpolitik and Innenpolitik through the use of these groupings of domestic variables etc. to account for outcomes that confound neo-realist expectations, neoclassical realism still provides only a relatively limited and superficial approach. The individual variables are not problematized, no interaction between the domestic variables is conceptualized, nor with other nation’s domestic variables, no defined historical process of change is provided, there is no real integration between materialism and constructivism, and the ‘primacy of the international system that structural realists emphasize’ (Ripsman, Taliaferro & Lobell 2016) is still retained. The general approach has the feeling of attempting to incrementally change a dog into a cat rather than accepting that the starting place (neo-realism) was wrong. In addition, the approach is devoid of any treatment of class conflict as a major driver of both domestic and foreign policies. This continues the mainstream analytical blindness to issues of domestic and cross-national class and power relationships, with the state seen as sitting above society rather than possibly being controlled by a dominant class grouping.
Trubowitz (2011) has proposed that the national state executive has to balance the somewhat amorphous and unproblematized variable of ‘domestic politics/party preference’ with geopolitical considerations, mirroring much of the above neoclassical realist conceptual structure and therefore suffering from many of the same shortcomings.
More recently, Balzacq, Dombrowski and Reich (2019) have followed a research agenda toward grand strategy that attempts to integrate Realpolitik and Innenpolitik while taking a more subjectivist approach:
[rejecting] a preponderantly systemic and rationalist approach in favour of a heterogeneous one that focuses on the interaction between the external environment, subjectivist interpretations of that environment, and the key historical and domestic political factors that condition state responses. (Ibid., p. 4).
In the edited volume Comparative Grand Strategy (2019), edited by the three, much of the same lack of a critical political economy lens is evident. A shining counter-exception is the chapter on Brazil by Carlos R. S. Milani and Tiago Nery, which engages directly with the nature of the Brazilian elites and the possibility that Brazil’s grand strategy may serve a raison d’elite rather than a raison d’etat. They utilize the concept of capitalist class fractions to represent contestation within the Brazilian elite that affected foreign policy; between a neo-developmental grande bourgeoisie and a neo-liberal coalition of domestic and international financial capital, large landowners and the upper middle class. This allows them to look beneath the superficial trappings of democracy to address the underlying relations of power within Brazilian society. Such an approach would have paid dividends in the analyses of other countries within the volume, an example being Michael Hudson’s (2022) contrasting of industrial and rentier capitalist sectors within the US economy. Although not explicitly utilizing these concepts, Barnett’s (1986) investigation of the political economic bases for the collapse of British power in the twentieth century provides a much deeper analysis than that provided within the chapter on the United Kingdom in the edited volume.
The edited volume The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy (2021) edited by Balzacq and Ronald Krebs contains a vast array of work on the history, theoretical approaches, sources, instruments and examples of grand strategy, but the single chapter by Kevin Narizny stands out for asking the questions “whose strategy?” and “who does that strategy benefit?” and asserts that to answer such questions we must begin with political economy. Although Narizny discusses what could be constituted as capitalist class fractions he does not directly engage with the concept, remaining somewhat within a liberal framing; for example, the contrasting of ruling coalitions in “democratic” and “authoritarian” states. The possibility of a ruling capitalist class that can both act as one to enhance overall class interests and compete internally on fractional interests, with “democracy” remaining highly constrained by capitalist class interests is not considered. How much are Western politicians really pre-selected before any “democratic” vote is allowed? The dominant role of US political donors in pre-selecting political candidates points to this; with many donors giving to both parties of the US duopoly. “Democracy” may simply be a more nuanced way for a ruling class to maintain power, rather than fundamentally different to an “authoritarian” regime.
The liberal pluralist framing is evident within Narizny’s book The Political Economy of Grand Strategy (2007) which tends to focus on electoral political coalition building, missing many of the major political economic changes in the coverage of the domestic politics of the US and Great Britain between 1850 and 1930. For example, with respect to the US, factors such as the massive scale explosion of US corporate “trusts”, the failure of the multi-decadal struggle for power by trades unions and small farmers, the post-Civil War escalation of the Amerindian ethnic cleansing, the end of Reconstruction in the South and the reinstatement of white dominance through neo-slavery, and the coming of a truly national press are predominantly missed. Once bourgeois hegemony had been firmly established at home, and the national “frontier” closed, the US elites could focus resources on the external expansion opportunity provided by the Spanish-American War.
Liberal institutionalism was partly touched on in the previous section, with the belief that “Western capitalist democracy” is the highest form of society with the need for the West to “help” the rest of the world toward this higher plane of existence. The utterly self-serving nature of this view, providing theoretical support to Western supremacist beliefs and for liberal interventionism designed to “save” other societies from their “autocratic” paths is also touched on above. Modern liberal institutionalism is simply the latest version of the Wilsonian act of recasting racist notions of white civilizational supremacy, “the white man’s burden”, into cultural and institutional terms. An underlying set of Western beliefs given exposure by high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy describing Europe as a civilizational “garden” and the rest of the world as a “jungle”, stating that the “gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means” (Borrell quoted in Bishara 2022). Both a legitimation of liberal intervention and an Othering of the non-Western. At a deeper level, liberalism started as the philosophical weaponry of the elites to overcome the control of the sovereign. It was never meant to facilitate rights for the vast majority of the population that the elites were to be freed to fully exploit. Domenico Losurdo (2011) in Liberalism: A Counter History, details how many of the great “liberal” thinkers railed against the “slavery” of the elites under absolute monarchy while fully supporting actual racialized slavery and colonial rule. There was also the “tyranny of the masses” that must be defended against; i.e. full political rights for those that the elites wanted full freedom to exploit, alongside the slaves. There is a reason that “freedom of property” is at the core of liberal beliefs, viewed as above mass political freedom and equality, because it has always been the upper classes that control the vast majority of property.
In the Great Britain of the seventeenth century there were two revolutions. The first one swept away the monarchy but threatened a real “levelling” of society and had to be quashed. The monarchy was returned but the new monarch didn’t understand his new subservient position, so a replacement King was imported from thoroughly bourgeois Holland and the “Glorious” revolution was proclaimed; with the previous revolution treated negatively by court historians. As we shall see with the chapter on the US, there were two US revolutions. The first removed the British but threatened to devolve authority to individual states, with the people exercising their power to protect their interests. This required a counter-revolution of the rich who managed through manipulation, bribery and misrepresentation to implement a strong central government that would protect their interest. As with the animals in Orwell’s Animal Farm, a short period of real freedom was enjoyed but only for the new masters (the domestic aristocracy, financiers and bourgeoisie) to show just how much they were like the old masters. A passive revolution usurping a real revolution as Gramsci would see it.
The people’s revolution in France could not be so easily constrained and the European monarchies had to carry out a pan-European war to destroy it. Even then it resurrected itself in the Paris commune of 1870, quickly reminding the warring French and German elites of their joint class interests. The Germans quickly allowed French troops to pass through their lines to carry out the bloody massacres required to put down the will of the people. The ongoing establishment hatred for the Jacobins stemming from their wanting of a true revolution, a complete overthrow of the elite regime.
What liberal internationalism really means is that all the nations of the world will allow a capitalist ruling class to dominate society for its own class interests, with compromises needed with other classes when necessary to quell any threat of real revolution. At the top of this ruling class will be the Western capitalists, with US capitalists at the head of them. The whole world will be freed to enjoy capitalist exploitation and Western domination. This is the reality that the reams of ideology turned out by liberal scholars, schools, media etc. obfuscates, with “democracy” providing a performative illusion. Gramsci’s work starts at this premise, the need for a dominant elite to ideologically control the other classes in an environment of greater general freedoms and literacy.
2.3. The Gramscian International System
Antonio Gramsci was born in 1891 on the Italian island of Sardinia, one of the poorer parts of the country. His childhood was blighted by both physical ailments and by poverty. Through his intellect he gained a scholarship to the University of Turin in 1911; a city going through a period of rapid industrialization. He abandoned his studies in 1915, as he became active in Italian Socialist Party (PSI), worker education and journalism. These involved him directly in the biennio rosso (two red years) of 1919-1920 as one of Turin’s leading socialists, during which large strikes occurred, factories were occupied, and workers councils were set up. The worker’s councils failed to grow into a national movement due to the lack of support by the PSI of which Gramsci was a member as well as the General Confederation of Labour (CGL); resulting in its defeat by a mixture of recession-induced layoffs and elite concessions. He then became one of the leaders of the newly founded (in 1921) Italian Communist Party and was elected as a parliamentary deputy representing the Veneto area; Gramsci became the party’s leader in June 1924. In November 1926, Gramsci was imprisoned by the fascist government that had come to power under Mussolini, and he would remain imprisoned until his death in 1937. Without access to proper medical care, Gramsci’s health had very significantly deteriorated during his years in prison.
During his eleven years of incarceration, Gramsci worked to understand why Italian fascism had proven to be a viable long-term political regime, rather than the passing phase of bourgeois reaction to the biennio rosso that he had believed it to be. His thoughts were recorded on over 3,000 pages of what is known today as the prison notebooks. His investigation was heavily informed by his deep role in political activism and journalism, in addition to his intellectual interests; he had been embedded in the materiality of capitalist class conflict. His greatest insights were with respect to how a ruling capitalist class gains and maintains control over society as a whole in an era of increasing literacy, mass media, and freedom from feudalistic controls over social and geographical mobility. This required the addition of cultural control to the options of coercion and violence; an elite-serving common sense internalized by the citizenry. This cultural hegemony did not replace coercion and violence, but instead represented the most effective tool that the dominant class can use to maintain societal dominance in capitalist industrial societies. Coercion and violence are still very much available, and used, when bourgeois cultural hegemony is threatened; Italian fascism being just such a case.
Organic intellectuals that represent ‘the thinking and organising element of a particular fundamental social class’ (Hoare & Smith 1871, p. 3), are seen as playing a central role in the construction of a ruling ideology and the ‘struggle to assimilate and to conquer “ideologically” the traditional intellectuals’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 01). This ruling ideology is transformed into a hegemonic culture, which acts as the common sense that structures the way in which citizens view society; a common sense that legitimizes the position of the dominant social group, the historic bloc. The hegemonic culture may be seen as a constantly remade bricolage of past and present elements, representing accommodations within, and reformulations of, the historic bloc, accommodations with other elements of society, general social trends, and historical elements that are deemed useful or too embedded to be excluded. Thus, the intellectuals play a crucial role for the dominant societal group as that ‘dominant group’s “deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government’ (Ibid., p. 12). Gramsci saw a significant part of the massive expansion of intellectual occupations as a function of the greater scale and subtlety required for societal domination in a world of universal literacy, geographic freedom within the nation and expanded suffrage:
In the modern world the category of intellectuals … has undergone unprecedented expansion. The democratic-bureaucratic system has given rise to a great mass of functions which are not at all justified by the social necessities of production, though they are justified by the political necessities of the dominant fundamental group. (Ibid., p. 13)
Accepting the relative specificity and historically deterministic nature of individual societies, Gramsci immersed himself in the history of Italy, and Europe in general, and the nature of the dominant ruling coalitions. As Sau more recently states, ‘other interests fused with economic needs will most likely be tied with a specific country’s history and culture’ (Sau 2021). Gramsci rejected ‘a scholastic and academic historico-political outlook which sees as real and worthwhile only … movements that are governed by plans worked out in advance to the last detail or in line with abstract theory’ noting that ‘reality produces a wealth of the most bizarre combinations … it is not reality which should be expected to conform to the abstract schema’ (Gramsci 1971a, p. 200); a fundamental critique of universalist and positivist scholarship. In Germany and England, the bourgeoisie had allied itself with the old feudal aristocracy who remained as a governing stratum. As in Italy, Gramsci saw the resultant ‘revolutions’ as passive ones, driven by the dominant classes and the state downwards rather than by a mass revolution that replaces the dominant classes (e.g. the Russian Bolshevik Revolution). The US Civil War swept away the feudal and aristocratic structures of the South, and the extremely small (in relation to European nations) scale of the US state represented little resistance to a more purely bourgeois dominance.
Gramsci noted that any political analysis must take into account levels ranging from ‘the relations between international forces’ to ‘the objective relations within society – in other words, the degree of development of productive forces; to relations of political force and those between parties (hegemonic systems within the State); and to immediate (or potentially military) political relations’. He also stated ‘that there can be no doubt [international relations follow fundamental social relations] … However, international relations react both passively and actively on political relations’ (Gramsci 1971b, p. 176). The complex interactive nature of the relationship between material base and institutional and constructivist superstructure, and the power of a new ideas that become part of the common sense, is detailed by Gramsci:
Another proposition of Marx is that a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force or something of the kind, which is extremely significant. The analysis of these propositions tends, I think, to reinforce the conception of historical bloc in which precisely material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content had purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces (Gramsci 1971c, p. 377).
Gramsci conceived the modern state as an integral state that represents the historic bloc, with civil society lead by political society and integrated with, rather than separated from, the state. The major US philanthropic foundations can be seen as part of such an integral or extended state (Liguori 2015), or state/society complex as noted above, acting not just as major providers of grants that affect the direction of academic research, but also as Parmar (2012, p. 4) identifies, as mediators ‘between the concerns of state, big business, party politics and foreign-policy related academia’ who facilitate ‘elite consensus and forward policy planning’. Where civil society is little developed, as in pre-communist Russia, a direct assault upon the state, a war of manoeuvre, may be successful. Where civil society is well developed, as in the liberal capitalist nations, such a direct assault will not prevail. The war of manoeuvre must be preceded by a war of position that challenges the cultural dominance of the historic bloc. In this respect, the constant focus of the historic bloc upon ‘radical’ intellectuals, and actions to repress and delegitimize them becomes a first line of defence against the success of a counter-hegemonic cultural project.
Within the above Gramscian framework, the hegemonic culture can be seen as the underlying source of strategic culture, a basis of continuity in the absence of major changes to the hegemonic culture, and a constraint upon significant deviations between strategy making entities; individual wings of the military, intelligence bodies, civilian foreign policy and finance organizations, and strategy think tanks. Layne (2006, 2017) notes the ability of US strategic culture to maintain ideological discipline over many decades even when challenged by both a more diverse talent pool and changing geopolitical realities, and Parmar (2011) details the dichotomy between the diversity of identity and the monoculture of ideology within US strategic culture. The US historic bloc formed in the 1930s (Ferguson 1991, 1995), although of course subject to reconstitution over time, has maintained a relatively constant stance of the ‘indispensable’ need for the US to ‘manage’ the globe within the hegemonic culture, even overcoming the severe setback of the Vietnam War; reflecting the interests of the dominant grouping of the capitalist class. Favouring an Open-Door orientation of forcing open other nations to US and Western elite profit making and exploitation (Wertheim 2010; Shoup 2015; van Apeldoorn & de Graaff 2016).
Many strategy makers may also be part of ‘a capitalist class half in disguise’ as rentiers with the financial freedom to enter riskier and/or less remunerative positions as ‘artists, government officials and in the liberal professions’ (Gustavssen & Melldahl 2018, p. 192) that are central to the fields of politics and culture; Gramsci’s organic intellectuals. They may also have shared experiences of hegemonic socialization through elite schools and universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, the ENA (École Nationale d'Administration) and the École Polytechnique in France, and the Ivy League of the US as well as elite private schools. Within the Chinese Party-state such ideological discipline is maintained through a highly selective entry process to the Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy, ‘an applicant’s family background, gender, rural or urban roots, academic performance, university ranking, and perceived loyalty all affect their chances’ (Dickson quoted in Morrow 2015); Xi Jinping required multiple attempts to join the Party (Economy 2018, p. 5). This is then followed by a decades long path during which individuals are constantly vetted for ideological acceptability (Thomas 2020) within an institution that predominantly subsumes civil society, and both maintains and reflects the hegemonic culture.
The ‘Gramscian turn’ within international political economy is reflected in the works of Cox (1981, 1983, 1987) and Gill and Law (1988) from the Toronto School, with these being examples of what became known as Transhistorical Materialism (THM); with the Amsterdam School being the other significant proponent of THM. While Cox utilized Gramsci in a more eclectic fashion that shed much of its Marxist conceptual base (Cox & Sinclair 1996), the Amsterdam School took an explicitly Marxian approach in conceptualizing diversity within a capitalist elite class through class fractions that may both cooperate with respect to general class interests and compete with respect to specific fractional interests.
The works of Bode (2018), van der Pijl (1984, 1998), Jessop (1990), Overbeek (1990), Overbeek and van der Pijl (1993) and van Apeldoorn (2002, 2004) provide much of the conceptual basis for the school. During different periods of time, differing class fractions or combinations of fractions, may become historic blocs, which dominate with a specific hegemonic concept of control that is most appropriate for the prevailing state of capital accumulation and class relations. For example, liberal internationalism during the Pax Britannica of the 1870s to 1914, state monopolism from the 1920s to the 1950s, corporate liberalism from the 1950s to the 1970s and neoliberalism from the 1980s onwards (Overbeek & van der Pijl 1993). The Marxian distinction between money capital (e.g. merchants and rentiers) and productive capital (those directly involved in the production value through the domestic workforce), together with the extensive or intensive nature of production, and other geographic and political considerations are seen as differentiators of capital class fractions. There is also the possibility of the ‘articulation of money capital and productive capital into finance capital’ with the result that all investments are judged ‘by essentially rentier criteria’; a possibility that may be quite relevant to the present practice of capitalism within the US (Hudson 2021).
Van der Pijl’s later work (2007, 2010, 2014) has developed a greater role for non-material factors, and van Apeldoorn and de Graaff have utilized social network analyses of both capitalist (US) and non-capitalist (China) strategic decision-making groups (van Apeldoorn & de Graaff 2016, 2021; de Graaff & van Apeldoorn 2017, 2018). With respect to the US, ‘at the apex of US society we find a corporate elite that is closely networked with both the world of [corporate funded and directed] think tanks and with the state’ (de Graaff & van Apeldoorn 2017, p. 341), with foreign policy formation taking place within the resultant network; reflecting the dominance of an autonomous capitalist class. Many individuals will move between corporations, think tanks and state positions, creating a strategic decision-making elite that does not only serve the hegemonic capitalist elite but in many cases is part of it. Such work dovetails with the renaissance of an Elite Studies (Gilens & Page 2014; Domhoff 2017; Korsnes et al 2018) that identifies the specific groups of actors in capitalist nations that may both directly fund and constrain strategy makers, as well as become strategy makers themselves. In contrast, ‘in the Chinese state-capital nexus, the primacy ultimately lies with the state and the state class organized around the Chinese Communist Party’ (de Graaff & van Apeldoorn 2017, p. 352). This greater focus on non-material factors is complementary to the work of Jessop and Sum (2017) in developing a Cultural Political Economy that focuses on the interplay between semiosis and structuration. Gramsci’s work is seen as providing ‘an important link between the critique of political economy and critical semiosis’ and Foucault’s as “a bridge between discourse analysis and critical political economy’ (Sum & Jessop 2013, p. 22) in a way that provides a conceptualization of the processes of hegemonic cultural creation and recreation; ‘aspects of sign-systems that are related to the legitimation and mystification of structured power relations’ constructed from ‘meaning systems, social imaginaries and lived experience’ (Ibid., p. 479).
2.4. The Making and Remaking of Subjugated Societies
Much of Gramsci’s writing is directed at a historical analysis of the development of Italy, and other European nations, from the late eighteenth century to the 1930s; resulting from his focus on understanding the dynamics that led to the success of fascism within Italy. What is missing form his analysis is the wider dimension of the European remaking of the world from the end of the fifteenth century to the present day, an expansionary project of global domination of which the US is now the hegemon. An expansionary project driven as much by personal and ruling class gain than any need for “security” and certainly not driven by any “white man’s burden” to “raise up” other nations; reconceptualized in less racist terms from the early twentieth century and now embedded in the notion of the “liberal international order”. An understanding of the subjugation and remaking of vast swathes of the globe through colonization and occupation by the European powers and (later) the US, produces a very different view of the international system than that provided by mainstream discourses. Gramsci’s understanding that a national elite may serve foreign masters, becoming a comprador elite, allied with his complex conceptualization of hegemonic processes is central to an understanding of how the making and remaking of subjugated societies has produced the current world system.
The Anglo-Saxon world was vastly expanded with the British white settler colonies of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; established both through the multi-century ethnic cleansing of indigenous populations and wars with other European nations and Mexico. In the case of the US, its independence in 1776 facilitated its rise to be the leading Anglo-Saxon nation in the post-WW2 period. Only in the past half century has the dominance of the northern elites upon US strategic decision making, established through the US Civil War, become more geographically, racially and sexually diverse. The shared languages, cultures and histories of the five Anglo-Saxon nations facilitate a US-dominated core of the Western powers, with the “five eyes” relationship that deeply integrates the intelligence communities of the five nations an example. Another being the recent AUKUS (Australia, UK and US) alliance in the Indo-Pacific formed at the expense of Australia-France military cooperation.
Latin America was predominantly colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese from the 1500s onwards, under the demarcation of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas that divided up the “New World” between the two nations. Greatly aided by the incredibly high death rates of Amerindians exposed to European diseases, in the first century of colonization the Aztecs (in New Spain) and the Incas (in the Viceroyalty of Peru) were defeated by the Spanish, with the final defeat of the Maya (in the Yucatan Peninsula) taking until 1697. The inter-breeding of European males with Amerindian females (unlike in North America the colonists were predominantly male, and miscegenation was legal) lead to the development of a substantial mestizo population. In the present day only in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Paraguay do significant percentages of the population identify as Amerindian rather than mestizo or Caucasian. In Brazil, millions of slaves from Africa were brought in given the inability to dominate and utilize local populations, with the result being a large mixed-race population a little smaller than the dominant Caucasian (predominantly Portuguese) population but much larger than the Black population. Argentina and Chile are also dominated by the Caucasian community (predominantly Italian and Spanish respectively). The wave of independence spread across Spanish America from the early 1800s, facilitated by the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar and the French occupation of Spain during the Peninsula War of 1807-1814, simply replaced Portuguese and Spanish rule with that of the local white settler and lighter-skinned elites; even in nations such as Bolivia where the white elite were a very small percentage of the population. As the European powers declined, and the US gained strength, US hegemony was extended over the whole of the western hemisphere; with the Europhile elites becoming compradors of the US.
Spain established the Philippines as their colony in the 1560s, and the Dutch colonized what is now Indonesia in the seventeenth century. As in South America, the Spanish forcibly replaced indigenous religions with the Catholic faith and Spanish culture and institutions were implemented. From the mid eighteenth century the British entered and colonized India, then Myanmar and Malaysia. India became incredibly important to the British, through both massive financial transfers to the colonial center and a large army paid for by the Indians themselves but used by the British in their colonial and other wars. Late in the nineteenth century the French colonized what is now Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The ability of Asian populations to resist European diseases together with the great climatic differences between Asia and Europe, tended to produce a political economy where a small number of colonial Caucasian officials lived separately from the local populations and relied upon an indigenous elite to rule large indigenous populations. Japan resisted colonization as it successfully implemented a passive revolution to catch up with the West, and although China was dominated by the Western powers it maintained its own culture and social institutions. Thailand also remained independent. When independence came, many times after significant conflicts with colonial powers (e.g. the Indonesians against the Dutch and the Vietnamese against the French and the US), power was taken by indigenous elites, not by Caucasians or mixed-race groups. These new nations had been somewhat remade by Western colonization, but not on the same scale as South and Central America. The Philippines is somewhat of an exception, with the imposition of the Catholic Church and later alignment with US culture during its time as a US colony and in the decades after when the country still hosted extensive US bases. In addition, Japan, Thailand and China had significantly maintained their sovereignty through the colonial period; although Japan was heavily remade by the post-WW2 US occupation (see below). The 30-year Vietnamese fight for independence also helped establish a strong nationalism within that nation.
In 1870 only about 10% of Africa was colonized (Angola & Mozambique by Portugal, Algeria by France and the Cape Colony by Britain). With the advent of quinine to treat malaria, together with the steamship, railway and telegraph the main obstacles to full European colonization were removed. The result was the “scramble for Africa” from 1881 to 1914. With the European division of the continent agreed at the Berlin conference of 1884, by 1914 90% of the continent was subjugated (with only Ethiopia and a Liberia linked substantially with the US resisting). With the relative lack of “modern” state structures and social institutions in place in most areas, outside the North African coastal nations, the colonizing powers fundamentally remade many of the colonized areas as well as co-opting an indigenous comprador ruling elite. In Zimbabwe and South Africa, with climates closer to those of Europe, there were significant Caucasian settlement resulting in about 10% and 20% of the populations respectively being Caucasian. The resulting independent nations were white-ruled, resulting in Civil Wars that ended white rule in 1980 (Rhodesia) and 1994 (South Africa). In the British colonies, which were significantly expanded through the takeover of the German colonies as a result of WW1, the protestant church was widely adopted. In the Portuguese areas, Catholicism was widely adopted. In North and sub Saharan Africa, Islam was already well established, and Christianity did not make deep inroads.
At the start of WW1, the globe was either colonized by, or dominated by, the West European and white settler powers with the few major exceptions being Japan, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Ethiopia. WW1 destroyed the Ottoman Empire, allowing Britain and France to dominate the Middle East with spheres of influence agreed in the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 (as noted above Britain also took over most of the German colonies in Africa). The Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved into a number of lesser new nations (e.g. Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and what became Yugoslavia) as decided by the victorious European powers. Western European and white settler nation dominance had become even more pronounced. Following WW2, West Germany, Japan and Italy were occupied by the US and consciously remade and integrated into the US-dominated joint security agreements (NATO and the US-Japan Security Treaty). Only the Soviet Union (with its Warsaw Pact), China (after the 1949 communist victory) and India represented major nations that remained outside the US led Western dominance; and the latter two were extremely poor. In Latin America US-supported elites could be relied upon in most cases to align their nations with Western capitalist elite interests. In Africa, repeated interventions were required to remove post-colonial nationalistic leaders or groups and impose Western compradors (e.g. the killing of Lumumba in the Congo). Support from the Soviet bloc also allowed some African nations to resist Western dominance, for example Angola and Tanzania, while supporting other African groups in gaining control (for example, Sadat in Egypt, Gaddafi in Libya, the FLN in Algeria).
With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the Eastern European nations were remade significantly by the West with the help of large diasporas that had spent many decades in the West, and a myriad of state (USAID, NED), supra-state (IMF, World Bank, UN), Western foundation (Ford, Rockefeller, Open Society) and NGO channels. In addition, the end of support from the Soviet bloc when combined with the Third World Debt Crisis opened up Africa to a new process of remaking using the same channels as those used in Eastern Europe. Russia was turned into a deeply corrupt, oligarch-dominated capitalist nation; with a President that acted very much as a Western comprador. With India and China being seen as opening up to dominance by the Western “liberal international order”, the five-century process of Western global dominance seemed to be within sight. This was the “unipolar moment” and the End of History (1992). The high point of this unipolar era can be considered to be the destruction of Libya that opened the way for greater Western domination in North and Sub-Saharan Africa.
The true (neo)Liberal International Order can be currently considered to be the Anglo-Saxon nations (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), a Western Europe substantially remade by the US after WW2, and a Japan added after its remaking by the US occupation forces. The US still stations significant occupation forces in Germany, Italy and the UK. Latin America (excluding Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua), South Korea and Eastern Europe can be considered to be within Western hegemony. The rest of the globe, excluding China, Russia and Iran, generally have varying levels of ability for independent action. Western hegemony rests upon five centuries of overall Western making and remaking of nations, the US ability to remake nations such as Germany, Italy and Japan in the post-WW2 period when it enjoyed overwhelming economic dominance, and the period of remaking during the unipolar post-Soviet period. It also rests upon an extensive array of violent, coercive and cultural tools – with the latter being the preferred “least cost” tool, but always with the others present in both active and reserve forms.
The history of the Middle East. Latin America, Africa, and Asia is redolent with examples of compradors and their alignment with foreign interests to discipline their own populations and remove overly independent leaders (Black 1977, 1986; Cummings 2005; Brands 2010; Amin 2011; dos Santos 2020), together with the usage of a wide array of disciplinary economic, social and political tools utilized by external powers (LeFeber 1973; Blum 1995; Karabell 1999; Grandin 2006; Turse 2012; Deghan & Norton-Taylor 2016; William 2021); with outright invasion or armed intervention only used in extreme cases such as Korea in the 1950s (Cummings 2005), Cuba in 1961, Vietnam in the 1960s, Nicaragua in the 1980s, Panama in 1989, Iraq in 2003, and Libya in 2011. In recent years, European elites in Venezuela, Honduras, Bolivia, and Ecuador have aligned with US interests in attempts to forestall even mildly populist and nationalist projects As noted by Gandin (2006), the US perfected its neo-colonial dominance of other nations through the support and manipulation of local elites and hegemonic cultures in Latin America. The move to indirect and covert processes of hegemonic dominance started with President Wilson, as direct intervention was replaced with support for “friendly ‘strong men’ who promised to respect American interests and establish stable self-government” (Foglesong 1996, Intro., Para. 9). Attempts to expand democratic rights and more equitably share wealth across Latin America were “repeatedly thwarted by their respective nations’ ruling classes, made up of military officers, Catholic conservatives, and economic elites” (Gandin 2006, p, 13).
Mainstream international relations scholarship tends to make such relationships of hierarchy and dominance invisible through either the assumption of independent nations interacting in an anarchic international system and/or assuming that alignments between nations are jointly beneficial at the level of the national interest. As we have already seen, for any nation it may be much more the raison d'élite rather than the raison d'état that drives strategic decision making. With such comprador elites with hegemonic cultures significantly affected by foreign powers, strategy may be assumed to be a combination of the raison d'élite and the raison d’un autre état/élite. If we consider that only a small number of nations exercise true sovereign autonomy, perhaps the US, China, Russia, India and Iran (and perhaps the much smaller Cuba), then the vast majority of nations must be seen as to some extent dominated by another power, allied in resistance to a power that is attempting to dominate them, or contested between powers. The international system becomes perhaps a set of national constellations some led by a hegemon, others grouped together for mutual defence, and the remaining nations sitting uncomfortably between constellations.
The main area of resistance to the US hegemonic constellation can be found in Eurasia. Western aggression has enabled the somewhat unlikely deepening alliance between Russia, Iran and China (RIC); which has significant influence in Central Asia. The refusal of the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) group to take a side between the West and the RIC, while enjoying the benefits of increased trade and investments, seriously limits Western options. India’s maintenance of an independent stance, including ignoring Western sanctions to trade with Russia, also greatly limits the West’s options. The Western retreat from Afghanistan, Iran’s influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, Pakistan’s partial alignment with China, and Turkey’s independent foreign policy add further limitations to any attempt to contain the RIC in Eurasia. Eurasia, excluding US-aligned Europe, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, is a made up of a highly diverse set of nations struggling to maintain a non-aligned stance in the face of conflict between the US-hegemonic constellation and deepening RIC alliance.
Possibly the greatest surprise to the US has been the recent refusal of the Latin American nations to either sanction Russia or send arms and funding to Ukraine. This points to a reduction in the strength of US hegemony in its “backyard” as the RICs gain relative strength. Latin America may not be in open rebellion against US hegemony, but it certainly seems resistant to any “coalition of the willing”. African nations have also utilized the increasing relative strength of the RICs (especially China and Russia) to loosen the tight Western control that was implemented in the post-Soviet decades. The ability of the new Ethiopian government to resist the challenge of the US-backed Tigrayan rebellion (the US-aligned TPLF had ruled Ethiopia for decades), and other African government’s expulsion of Western “peace keeping” military units, underline the changes in the relationship between the West and African nations; only a decade after the West’s destruction of the Libyan regime. The Western sanctions against Russia shone a sharp light on the loosening of Western hegemonic strength, with 7/8 of the world’s population which represents ¾ of global GDP refusing to join the Western sanctions and even in some cases increasing trade with Russia.
In Africa, the support of the Soviet Union for many independence movements has left a base of support for Russian alliances. The position of China as a fellow victim of colonialism and a successful development economy (especially when compared to the failed Western “development” policies pushed upon the continent) has also provided some advantages in the region. The West enjoys major advantages from its widespread making and remaking of African nations though, and although Africa has seen an increasing presence from China, that nation will never possess the uncontested ability to subjugate nations that the West has previously enjoyed. China, and even the combination of China, Russia and Iran will never repeat the global hegemony that the West has held. Instead, their rise will produce a more pluralist global order based much less on the ability to make and remake other nations. The ability of the West to exercise hegemonic control outside the Western core may become increasingly restricted.
2.5. A Gramscian Framework for Analysis
From the above we can sketch out a neo-Gramscian framework through which we can analyze individual nations, and constellations of nations. The very first question, differing greatly from mainstream scholarship, is that of which group(s) control the strategic policy making processes and for what purpose; i.e. does an elite capable of dominating the state/society complex, made up of one or more social class fractions (Jessop & Overbeek 2019) that may compete but also coalesce when collective interests are threatened, exist? At the same time, it is accepted that cross-national coalitions of elites may exist in differing structures of equality and hierarchy. A given national state/society complex and/or elite may significantly prescribe the actions of another. The processes through which the US exerts such control over the Brazilian and other South American elites and state/society complexes are well documented (Barbosa dos Santos 2019; Black 1977, 1986).
These include international financial and commercial corporate entities, foundations and military organizations (e.g. what was previously known as the School of the Americas). With respect to corporations, the work of Starrs (2013, 2017) has identified that the large US-domiciled corporations are predominantly owned by US nationals and that US nationals own significant stakes in corporations in other countries; no matter how “global” their operations are. Cross-national elite networks may also be based on shared cultures, and their relationships may change significantly over time; as with that between the US and UK elites. The assumption that strategic policy is driven by something called “security” is problematized and questioned, allowing for a greater range of possibilities, such as economic gain, the drive to regain previously “lost” territories (e.g. Poland with respect to the north west of Ukraine), and even hatred of the other (e.g. Polish, Baltic State and Ukrainian elite hatred of Russians).
A mistake that should not be made is to assume that some of the international civil society and supranational organizations are independent of national elite dominance. The World Bank and IMF are located in Washington DC, and as Michael Hudson has noted, can be seen as extensions of the US Treasury Department, with an unspoken agreement that the head of the World Bank will always be from the US and the head of the IMF will be a European; with the US exercising de facto veto power over decisions. International NGOs are heavily dependent on funding from governments (e.g. the NED and USAID), foundations and rich donors. The large foundations (e.g. Bill & Melinda Gates, Open Society, Rockefeller, Ford, Kellogg), predominantly set up by members of the US and Western economic elite, tend to represent the wishes of their founders and of the relevant ruling class. The WTO, located in Switzerland, tends to reflect the interests of European elites in tightly protecting intellectual property and forcing open nations to Western profit making. The European Central Bank worked diligently during the European Debt Crisis of the 2010s to socialize losses and drive costs onto the general populations of debtor nations, spectacularly in the case of Greece, to protect the economic elites of North Western Europe (e.g. France and Germany). In this, it was fully supported by the EU bureaucracy and the EU council.
The first set of questions that then stem from these observations are:
· Does a domestic elite exercise hegemonic control within a sovereign nation?
o Yes, with respect to the US, China, Russia, Iran, Cuba and India perhaps but most other nations will have differing levels of sovereignty.
o A significant number of nations may be rent by domestic struggles for hegemony, with the possibility of external forces being engaged (e.g. Myanmar and until recently Ethiopia).
· Where domestic hegemony exists, including the possibility of comprador domestic elites and foreign influences, what are the main drivers of strategy making? What is the hegemonic culture of which the strategic culture is a derivative?
· If external influences exist, how powerful and pervasive are they (violence, coercion, cultural. administrative) and is there a level of negotiation between national and foreign elite interests? The greatest level of comprador status would be where national elites view themselves acting in union with foreign elites against the “enemy” of the domestic population and may even take actions that are against the national interest.
· What are the historical processes of change that have led to the current configuration of the state/society complex and will continue to change it?
· What are the capabilities of the state/society complex to drive long-term efficiency, effectiveness and growth?
· How will the nature of state-society relations (e.g. the ability of the state to muster societal resources) affect the response to external imperatives?
· How will domestic institutions affect the response to those imperatives?
· How sensitive is the state/society complex to different contingencies, does it have the resources and social structures necessary to deal with contingencies effectively?
Once the above have been answered, the dynamics of the international system can be addressed:
· What are the relative capabilities (economic, military, institutional, cultural etc.) of this state/society complex with respect to others within the international system?
· What are the general dynamics and structure of the international system?
· What are the imperatives of the international system upon a specific state? How is it related to other state/society complexes?
· What impact will international system level variables (e.g. industrialization) have upon the position of this specific state/society complex?
When analyzing a given state/society complex, a group of complexes or the overall world order, material capabilities, ideas and institutions can be seen as interactively co-creative, with no unidirectional causal processes. For example, material capabilities and institutions may give birth to some ideas, but those ideas can change both of the other forces and exist well past the material capabilities and institutions that birthed them. Cox (1981, 1986, 1987) also sees these forces as being applied to what he terms “social forces” stemming from the organization of production. These equate to the system level variables, such as industrialization or an energy system transition, that are not part of the system but may fundamentally affect it over time – through such things as changing relative national material capabilities (e.g. the UK as the first industrializing nation), or the creation of new economic and social actors such as a concentrated industrial work force.
Figure 2 1: Cox’s Forces
Both individual state/society complexes, and the world system must be seen as historical entities, captured at a point in time and open to dialectical and somewhat path-dependent processes of change. Without an understanding of these processes of change within a historical context, any analytical understanding by its nature will be limited.
Figure 2 2: The World Order (or international system) as a historical entity
The questions above become somewhat altered:
What are the current imperatives of competition between state/society complexes within the world order, seen as a point in time within a partially path-dependent historical continuum driven by a dialectical process of change between competing interests and ideas?
What are the world order level variables, such as industrialization, that may affect the relative position of an individual state/society complex over time?
What is the current nature and effectiveness of those complexes, seen as a point in the historical continuum?
What is the current hegemonic/strategic culture, seen as point in the same historical continuum, and how is that culture affected by elite socialization, power and wealth?
What are the interconnecting structures between different state/society complexes and/or elites? How much sovereignty does an individual country possess?
How sensitive is a given state/society complex to different contingencies, and does it have the resources and social structures necessary to deal with contingencies effectively?
Guided by these questions, and the analytical tools provided by a neo-Gramscian approach, we can arrive at a holistic understanding of the dynamics of the world order. This understanding can then provide a base of understanding from which to assess the possible future policy paths of individual state/society complexes, and groups of complexed; as I will show in the analyses of China, the US and Russia that follow.
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Thorough and informative, thank you.
I recommend readers study the Confucian doctrine of hegemony: A state becomes hegemon when other states envy, admire, and emulate it.
Confucius' advice to rulers: "Let people see that you only want their good and the people will be good. The relationship between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and the grass. The grass must bend when the wind blows across it. If good men were to govern a country continually for a hundred years they would transform the violently bad and dispense with capital punishment altogether". Analects.
While America is busy setting an example of bad behavior to enforce its existing hegemony, China is setting a good example to earn its future hegemony.