Gramsci’s Marxism and International Relations

By Adrian Budd

 

Introduction

Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are not an obvious starting point for the study of international relations. However, in the past few decades a group of radical scholars has drawn on his work to challenge the dominant ‘Realist’ perspective in this field. The Realist perspective is associated with key US strategists such as Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who provided the US state with its ‘intellectual compass’ during the Cold War.¹ Realism takes the bourgeois view of human nature as a struggle between atomised individuals and transposes it onto the international system—its essence is inter-state rivalry and conflict. It assumes that since the time of the ancient Greek city-states the world’s states have had coherent national interests that they project internationally, chiefly by military means.

Given this abstract, ahistorical approach, in which there is no place for the rise and fall of modes of production or the class dynamics underpinning them, it is not surprising that there was ‘mutual neglect’ between Marxism and international relations for much of the 20th century.² But recently, the ‘neo‑Gramscian’ perspective, initiated by the Canadian Robert Cox, has provided a convincing critique of Realism.³ Cox firmly rejects the label ‘Marxist’, and has merely applied to the study of international relations ideas derived from a selective reading of the Prison Notebooks—of which the most important is the concept of hegemony. The neo-Gramscians have helped enlarge the space for Marxist ideas in international analysis but their selective use of Gramsci and their idealist understanding of hegemony mean that they neither accurately represent Gramsci’s Marxism nor convincingly explain the dynamics of the international system.

Gramsci’s comments on international relations are fragmentary and under-developed. His use of the concept of passive revolution, however, illustrates a consistent appreciation of the interpenetration of the national and international. Passive revolution is central to Gramsci’s analysis of 19th century and early 20th century European history, including Italian unification (the Risorgimento) in the 1860s. It describes a top-down process in which a narrow, modernising elite brings about a transformation of traditional social relations by piecemeal reform. Unlike the Jacobins in the French Revolution, this elite failed to mobilise mass activity behind its revolutionary programme. The pressure behind this process arose not from domestic economic development, but was ‘instead the reflection of international developments which transmit their ideological currents to the periphery—currents born of the productive development of the more advanced countries’.⁴ Similarly, Gramsci argued that the Fordist development of early 20th century American industry, itself a passive revolution that transformed existing forms of capitalist relations, was reshaping European societies and forcing states to adopt structures and policies more supportive of free enterprise and economic individualism.⁵ Gramsci also suggested that Italian fascism represented a passive revolution designed to preserve the power of a decaying bourgeoisie faced with the revolutionary challenge from Russia.

Whatever their historical accuracy, these arguments illustrate Gramsci’s understanding of a national-international dialectic in which international forces both provide the context of change and penetrate and transform national political and social relations. There are hints of Leon Trotsky’s theory of the uneven and combined development of world capitalism here but Gramsci did not develop these ideas. Nor did he produce an analysis of imperialism like those of Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin, who both saw imperialist rivalry as a consequence of capitalism’s economic dynamic, particularly the growth of capitalist monopolies and the tendency for economic processes to transcend national limits. Nor did Gramsci place competitive processes (including capitalist accumulation, imperialist expansion and war) at the centre of the national-international dialectic, focusing instead on mechanisms of ideological transmission.⁶ Nevertheless, against much academic Marxism, which even today analyses social relations and state power in their specifically national dimensions, he understood that internal and international relations ‘intertwine’ and that Marxism should study how ‘the international situation should be considered in its national aspect’.⁷

Language, Legitimacy, and the Project of Critique

By Duncan S. Bell

 

From “ Alternatives: Global, Local, Political.  27.3 (July-Sept 2002): 327(24). Expanded Academic ASAP. Gale. Univ of California Santa Cruz. 30 Nov. 2007 

 

We are…in a world in which power figures and reconfigures; in which human artifice must struggle with human necessities; in which notions such as justice, freedom, compassion, and autonomy, authority, legitimacy, security and force animate, constrain, and enable human beings in each and every arena within which they engage one another.

Jean Bethke Elshtain

 

In our own times we can neither endure our thoughts nor the task of rethinking them. We think restlessly within familiar frameworks to avoid thought about how our thinking is framed.

William E. Gonnolly

 

Introduction

The role of language in the constitution of social and political life has long been overlooked in the academic study of international relations. The most influential theoretical approaches, those that dominate debate in U.S. political science, remain firmly wedded to a correspondence theory of truth and the “elusive quest” for a scientific understanding of the world. (1) Concerns about language and intersubjectivity are deemed irrelevant in the positivist mission to explain the pattern(s) of world politics. It is as if much of twentieth-century social theory and philosophy had never been written. Nevertheless, over the last few years, a plethora of critical voices have sought to challenge this pervasive attitude, and their work has made an “indelible impression” on the topography of the field, undermining its boundaries, questioning its questions and problematizing its practices. (2)

The starting point for many of these critical approaches–which include postmodernism(s)/poststructuralism(s), most forms of feminism, and some constructivists–has been work produced in the wake of the “linguistic turn” in social and political theory. (3) This turn has followed a number of diverse routes, encompassing the universal pragmatics propounded by Habermas and Apel, the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl, the ordinary language analysis of Wittgenstein and Austin, and the hermeneutics of, among others, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. Nevertheless, in social and political theory in general, and international-relations theory in particular, much of this intellectual terrain remains under-explored. One important project is that developed by what in this article I am calling the Cambridge School (CS) of historians–in particular, by Quentin Skinner. Kari Palonen, for example, has claimed that Skinner should be regarded as one of “the few dissidents in the contemporary academic world” who concentrat e on the role of conceptual-linguistic transformation in the unfolding of history; and Charles Taylor argues that Skinner has formulated an “interesting and challenging” political theory. (4) This article outlines the Skinnerian position in relation to IR, and as such it is a partial response to Ken Booth’s contention that it “is vital that students of IR give language more attention than hitherto, as words shape as well as reflect reality.” (5) The CS approach has much to offer the theorist of international politics, especially through its focus on the historicity of conceptual change and its understanding of how political legitimacy is embedded in and constrained by the set of political vocabularies available at any given time.

Why have the implications for political theory inherent in the CS project been largely overlooked? The CS authors, and Skinner in particular, are usually bracketed as historians, and aspects of their work that relate to political theory remain unnoticed or are assumed to refer primarily to the study of the history of ideas. (6) This characterization is a mistake, for within the arguments sketched by the CS authors can be discerned an important approach to understanding social and political life. By concentrating on conceptual change and the constitutive role played by language in shaping the normative architecture of (any given) society, we can reach a more sophisticated understanding of language in both the reproduction of social norms and conventions and consequently in the process(es) of change itself. Such an understanding helps to highlight both the limits to and potential for challenging the current construction of social being.

Pinter, Radical Critique, and Politics

By Vivienne Jabri

University of London

 

1. The invasion of Iraq prompted Harold Pinter to call for Tony Blair’s resignation. There is no ambiguity in his message, that this war was wrong, that Parliament and the British public were misled, that claims about imminent threats were exaggerated, that intelligence material was manipulated. Pinter speaks directly to the public, addressing audiences from the million or so strong demonstrating in London against the war in Iraq to the more confined numbers of the National Theatre. His is a voice that protests, repeatedly calling for resistance, condemning acts that violate.

2. Pinter enters the fray in the scene of the international. Not so long ago, this scene was veering towards a rather bewildering optimism; that democracies did not fight each other, that globalisation meant the vindication of interdependence in place of power politics, that postcoloniality centred upon hybridity and the fusion of cultures, that postmodernity meant the celebration of difference. Not so long ago, and even persistently now, there was/is much talk of the scene of the international being that of a global civil society, concerned with human rights and cosmopolitan law. The demise of the state was one casualty, the state upstaged by global forces that were more about homely things, consumer goods accessible by everyone, well everyone who could join in with the club of consumers, the game of the marketplace. The scene of the international was indeed equated with that of the marketplace, of unrestrained exchange where the road to happiness was to be full participant in the Gap/Nike culture that made of us all global citizens, fused within a global culture that had, at the end of time, become universal.

3. The scene was disrupted by events not written into the script when the Berlin Wall was demolished. We had thought that the East, in Europe, would simply join into the marketplace of democracies, transform decades of oppression into limitless consumerism, where the capacity to buy and sell would defeat any ideological fervour. Somehow, the plot was not so much lost as interrupted. For we in the west had assumed that the “age of extremes”, to follow Eric Hobsbawm (1994) was of a bygone era, that genocidal tendencies just simply belonged elsewhere. Could we have written ethnic cleansing into the postmodern plot? Could we have foreseen the incarceration, massacre and systematic rape of entire communities simply for being community, with language, possessing identity and history? Could we have foreseen that there were characters in the script constituted by a desire to obliterate from the scene those who simply did not fit an ideology based on ethnic purity and demographic calculation? The scene of the international, taking place in the heart of Europe, was once again one dominated by imagery that awakened memories; emaciated bodies, the mass transport of women and children, men killed simply for being the men folk of a community, women raped by former neighbours simply because, now in the era of broken taboos and the sudden breakdown of societal rules, they could be.

A Critical Approach To The Study Of Conflicts: Lessons From The ‘Critical Turn’ In Security Studies

By André Barrinha (University of Kent, Canterbury, afd3@kent.ac.uk)

 

Conference on Conflict and Complexity Tuesday 2^nd – Wednesday 3^rd September 2008 University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

 

Introduction

            Until the 1980s, Strategic Studies was seen as the discipline responsible for the study of security issues, back then reduced to military affairs. Since then, Security Studies has become, particularly in Europe, a more widespread label to indicate the discipline responsible for the study of security. Such turn was largely informed by a ‘critical’ approach, where classical paradigms were put into question and new ways of thinking about security advanced. Underlying the vast majority of these new approaches was the idea that security is not a mere technical issue that should be left for experts to discuss, but rather a deeply politically embedded practice in need of careful look.

            One of the main compliments towards Peace and Conflict Studies has been, since the 1960s, its capacity to go beyond the mainstream, often to the very deep margins of academia, without fearing academic discredit. The ‘critical turn’ in Security Studies was, to some extent, inspired by the boldness of Peace and Conflict Studies. And still, such inspiring role was not enough for the field in itself to accept and integrate that ‘critical turn’ into its own works. The main argument of this paper is that such critical turn has still to take place within the Peace and Conflict Studies field, and that the fact that it has not, deserves to be carefully studied. 

            In that sense, this paper will start by discussing what Peace and Conflict Studies exactly mean, and then proceed to its historical evolution in parallel with the most relevant moments in the history of Security Studies. The paper will then focus on the links between the two fields until the end of the Cold War. How divergent/convergent  the paths of both fields have been since then and the relevance of the critical turn for the study of conflicts will occupy the last part of this paper.