International Relations in a Global Age E-Book

Gillian Youngs

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 341

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The book investigates the ways in which state-centred approaches to international relations have limited our understanding of global, political, economic and cultural processes. By assessing a wide range of such state-centred work, Youngs identifies the challenges we must address to grasp the complexity of the contemporary world.

Leseprobe

International Relations in aGlobal Age

A Conceptual Challenge

Gillian Youngs

Polity Press

Copyright © Gillian Youngs 1999

The right of Gillian Youngs to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1999 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd

Editorial office:Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Marketing and production:Blackwell Publishers Ltd108 Cowley RoadOxford OX4 1JF, UK

Published in the USA byBlackwell Publishers Inc.Commerce Place350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Youngs, Gillian, 1957-     International relations in a global age : a conceptual challenge/  Gillian Youngs.            p. cm.     Includes bibliographical references and index.     ISBN: 978-0-7456-6921-2 (Multi-user ebook)     1. International relations 2. National state. I. Title.  JZ1308.Y68 1999  320.1’2—dc21

99-12647CIP    

Typeset in 10 on 12pt Palatinoby Ace Filmsetting, Frome, SomersetPrinted in Great Britain by MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

For my students and colleagues

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: From International Relations to Global Relations

The basis for this study

State-centrism and beyond

Spatiality

The parameters of this conceptual journey

Feminist thought and the conceptual challenge

Back to the state

Part I Inside State-centrism

1 Embedded State-centrism: From Realism to Neorealism

State/market problematic

Actors, agency and structure

State as rational man writ large

2 Conceptual Determinism Revealed

‘Economism’ as reductionism

Social dynamics obscured

Gender and political economy

Conclusion

Part II Beyond State-centrism

3 Beyond Superficial Paradigmatism

Fundamental versus superficial paradigmatism

Theory as discourse

Gender as radical category

4 Beyond the Normative Divide

The realist/idealist moment

Spatial understanding and normative issues

New analytical contexts for normative concerns

Conclusion

Part III The Spaces of Global Relations

5 States, Time and Space

Spatiality

Reclaiming/reinventing agency

Radicalizing spatial understanding of the local: gendered imperatives

6 Political Economy of Spatiality

Global/local: rethinking social boundaries

Inequality and spatiality

Space/time relations and patriarchal structures

Conclusion

The Conceptual Challenge: Concluding Thoughts

Seeing states afresh

Thinking collectively

Gender analysis and global relations: the power of theory and practice

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

As usual there are far too many thanks to include here. Special mention must be made of my family, my former teachers at Sussex University, many of whom have since become valued colleagues and friends, and the British International Studies Association and US-based International Studies Association, where I have found vital intellectual community. Their international political economy sections, BISA gender and international relations working group and ISA feminist theory and gender studies section have come to represent my main intellectual homes and I thank all my associates for making me so welcome and for playing such an important part in nurturing my ideas. Individuals who have offered key support and encouragement include Roger Tooze, Marc Williams, Marysia Zalewski, Jill Steans, Marianne Marchand, Spike Peterson, Anne Sisson Runyan, Jan Jindy Pettman, Hazel Smith, Richard Little, Cynthia Enloe, Kate O’Mara, Cynthia Weber, Rob Walker, Michael Dillon, Michael Shapiro, John Hoffman and Susan Strange.

The approach of this volume is especially indebted to the multi-disciplinary influences I have been fortunate to find in three years lecturing in the Humanities Faculty of The Nottingham Trent University, UK, and more recently in the Centre for Mass Communication Research, Leicester University. The book developed from my PhD completed at TNTU. The staff of the Clifton branch of the TNTU library gave valued assistance, and Hong Kong University library was kind enough to extend its facilities to me for research work undertaken there while I was based at Syracuse University (New York) Hong Kong Center. I am grateful to the following for funding support to attend conferences where ideas were first presented: the Department of International Studies and the European Centre for Co-operation and Awareness at TNTU; University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; the Department of International Relations and the Belle van Zuylen Institute, University of Amsterdam; the BISA gender and IR working group. I would like to thank all those whose comments on my papers have contributed to the work presented here. My Foucaultian perspectives have been sustained by the History of the Present Group, and the Centre Michel Foucault, Bibliothèque du Saulchoir, Paris, where valuable research work has been conducted.

This book would not have been produced without the initial interest and continued support of David Held at Polity. Special thanks go to him, the Polity team and the anonymous readers whose comments and criticisms proved of much assistance. Throughout the years of this volume’s generation and completion, Keith Baldock has been my special companion, sub-editor, and computer and communications ally. His input cannot be easily defined, so I will not try. Warm thanks for everything Keith, especially the positive force of the creative spirit.

Finally, my intellectual debts are vast, and many are clearly noted throughout this volume. The responsibility for what follows rests, of course, entirely with me.

Gillian Youngs Leicester

Introduction: From International Relations to Global Relations

The basis for this study

The conceptual challenge addressed in this volume relates to dominant state-centric approaches in the discipline of international relations. The central argument put forward is that these approaches have significantly defined the discipline. They have articulated its conceptual parameters in specific and highly rigid terms. The title of the book signals a dissatisfaction with this theoretical deadlock and the desirability of new forms of thinking about what could be more openly termed ‘global relations’. The arguments presented trace the basis for this thinking in a wide range of critical work that has attacked the state-centric paradigm from contrasting positions. Thus they contribute to a further development of the critical debate on state-centrism. Their particular quality is twofold. First, they interweave varying critical positions in international relations to identify points of mutual strength across them. The aim here is to consolidate state-centric critique through the identification of these specific connections. Second, they make further links with wider disciplinary debates relevant to such critique. These are mainly in social theory and geography, where the changing nature of the state as a political entity and actor has been the focus of growing investigation.

The context for much of this work has been the phenomenon known as globalization. This can be variously defined, but in broad terms refers to the reshaping of political, economic and cultural boundaries in relation to the expansion of the world capitalist market and its production and consumption patterns, the growth of forms and networks of communications and the widening of political associations and movements (Kofman and Youngs 1996a; Youngs 1997b; Mohammadi 1997; Youngs 1999b). Studies of globalization, for theoretical and policy reasons, have stressed the central importance of fresh thinking about the qualities and potential of states in contemporary times. The influential World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (World Bank 1997) focused on the capabilities of states and the possibilities for ‘reinvigorating’ their institutions. At the close of the twentieth century, the role of the state as key political category is understood to be deeply in need of reassessment on the basis of a ‘new geography of power’ (Sassen 1996) or a ‘diffusion of power’ in circumstances where ‘the territorial boundaries of states no longer coincide with the extent or limits of political authority over economy and society’ (Strange 1996: ix).

The state is being investigated in its global context with focus on ‘governance’ rather than government, the former breaking down assumptions about national boundaries as sufficient to political definitions of accountability and effects (Held 1995; Hirst 1997). Such debates refocus our attention on how the state has been understood in the past and, in particular, according to this volume, the problem of state-centrism and its conceptual limitations. But they do so in a particular way, emphasizing understanding of the state as political space, its changing relations to economic or market space, and their impact on citizens and citizenship (Sassen 1996). This is the broad context for the discussion that follows. The discussion itself ranges across critical developments and interconnections primarily within, but also beyond, the disciplinary boundaries of international relations to investigate detailed and interrelated ways in which they urge rethinking of the state as concept.

International relations, academically and practically, has been centrally concerned with questions of political control over territorially defined spaces, and the contests, including those of the most violent kind, for that control. The ‘power politics’ or realist analytical stance (Morgenthau and Thompson 1985) has been viewed as the clearest articulation of that focus within the discipline. Realist frameworks present the predominant tenets of state-centrism: the prime definition of international reality as interactions between states understood as discrete political units (Hollis and Smith 1991: 20–36). The ‘reductionism’ (Maclean 1981) evident in this understanding of international relations is now a well-established basis of critiques of state-centrism in the discipline.

The major question that this study seeks to address is how state-centrism has endured as a dominant paradigm despite such critical onslaught. The use of the term ‘paradigm’ is important here because it emphasizes a theoretical preoccupation. This concentrates on the characteristics of international theory that define and perpetuate state-centric perspectives. These characteristics, of course, relate to concrete considerations about the changing nature of states and the relative importance of other actors and processes in international relations, but the prime interest in this study is the unravelling of the theoretical problem of state-centrism. As will be explained in more detail in chapter 3, the use of the term ‘paradigm’ directs attention to the fundamental assumptions underlying state-centrism (Vasquez 1983). The assessment presented here seeks to set out the grounds on which these have endured, including the structure of theoretical debate within the discipline. This structure of debate, which I identify as superficial paradigmatism, tends towards the treatment of theoretical developments as separate and distinct rather than interconnected.

State-centrism and beyond

The story of state-centrism’s endurance starts with the transformation of realist principles into neorealist ones. Neorealism modified realist state-centric principles to take overt account of the changed international circumstances for US hegemony. This development transformed the realist preoccupation with international politics into a mainstream focus on international political economy. The state/market problematic became central but, as part I explains, the conceptual parameters of the state remain fundamentally realist and the understanding of the market is constrained by these. Structural realism, as neorealism is alternatively named, aims to be a holistic form of analysis: that is, one that addresses the political-economic conditions of international relations. But its state-centrism compromises its potential in this respect from the outset. And, as critical studies of sovereignty have demonstrated, its approach to the state as an acting unit is defined in abstract terms that essentialize state space by framing it purely as bounded territory.

Fundamental to the abstraction too is the removal of women from the picture. Sovereign identity as captured in the state-centric model is inherently male, presenting the state as rational man writ large, a unit that defines political action strictly in terms of the male-centred world of public power – the decision-making spheres of political and economic activity. Feminist critiques of international relations disrupt this abstraction by highlighting the importance of the so-called private world of social reproduction to a deep understanding of social relations of power. These critiques are identified as central to the endeavour to de-essentialize state space as it is abstracted through the dominant state-centric paradigm.

The remainder of part I focuses on the state/market problematic in more detail, and in particular on the reductionist approach towards the economic as well as the political sphere evident in state-centrism. Drawing on a range of critical approaches to neorealism and political economy, including those that focus on gender, the discussion assesses the lack of attention to social dynamics of power resulting from state-centric abstractions.

Part II locates the possibilities for moving beyond state-centrism significantly in relation to the structure of debate within international relations and its continuing superficial paradigmatism, which emphasizes distinctions rather than connections across different theoretical approaches, and which has been influential in veiling the state-centric bonds between realism and neorealism discussed in part I. The ‘territorialising logic’ (Ashley 1991) of the discipline has crucially, it is explained, separated feminist critique from other forms of critique (Whitworth 1989), a situation that this study seeks actively to address. The whole nature and meaning of theoretical exchange is thus problematized and this has been a major characteristic of the recent ‘third debate’ (Lapid 1989), providing a focus on theory as discourse (Der Derian and Shapiro 1989; Foucault 1971). This requires an awareness of the degree to which theoretical discourse is embedded in social practices more generally. It is a recognition of theoretical discourse as a form of practice rather than as something that is divorced from practice. Grounding theory in this way directly addresses questions of time and space. Theory can no longer be abstracted from its social and historical contexts, but must be understood in direct relation to them.

The works of Richard Ashley and Rob Walker, referred to extensively in this study, have been most influential in revealing and interrogating state-centric, sovereign-bound theory as discourse. In international political economy, Craig Murphy and Roger Tooze (1991a) have assessed, from a Gramscian perspective, how such dominant forms of knowledge gain the influential status of assumed ‘common sense’. Such critical work seeks to view theory in relation to practice, including in relation to historical and social context. For example, Murphy and Tooze focus on material developments in the post-1945 global economy, the changing nature of US hegemony and the development of theoretical ‘orthodoxy’. They support a new ‘culture’ of heterodoxy, of open critical exchange and ‘honest attempts at synthesis’, a stance generally characteristic of the third debate. This requires movement beyond superficial paradigmatism.

I argue that feminist forms of analysis in international relations have a particularly powerful contribution to make. They identify gender as a radical category by revealing and investigating in detailed ways the links between theory and other forms of practice that shape social relations of power as gendered. They locate these theory/practice links in a comprehensive sense of social space that takes account of the public/private hierarchies in respect of both subjectivities and actions. It is argued that the third debate, despite its critical richness, has taken power/knowledge issues only so far. It has failed to interrogate its own assumptions about public/private hierarchies, and the pervasive ‘territorialising logic’ of superficial paradigmatism has fed the blindness to the broad purchase of feminist insights. These offer a complex understanding of social space, incorporating the dynamics of public/private connections, and thus provide an escape from a gender-neutral sense of spatiality (Youngs forthcoming).

The rest of part II explores the importance of the normative divide -originally separating idealist and realist approaches to international relations. This oppositional structure has worked in many ways to place ethical or normative concerns outside or beyond the realist version of politics. The effective result is a narrow and particular version of politics. Drawing in particular on Rob Walker’s writings, chapter 4 begins by assessing the ways in which sovereignty as a category in mainstream thought perpetuates this view by incorporating linkages between territory, identity and power. In state-centrism, sovereign political identity is essentially bounded identity; divisions between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are definitive in constructing and maintaining such identity. Sovereignty is a category with timeless, eternal qualities tied to a fixed sense of bounded territory or space. Sovereign identity in this context relates to political subjects as well as states, for the definition of sovereign being is intrinsically collective, dividing polities from one another and groups of political subjects from other groups. Such divisions are part and parcel of the security, including that of identity, which assertions of sovereign power seek to maintain. Here attention is drawn to Walker’s emphasis on the practices of sovereignty, including the theoretical ones encapsulated within the dominant state-centric paradigm.

The discussion then moves to Richard Ashley’s (1980) early work on political economy and its investigation of knowledge processes as integral to an understanding of security in international political economy. It is argued that such critiques identify the need to reclaim politics from its state-centric constraints, including those which oppose realism and idealism and thus fail to recognize normative issues as integral to politics rather than beyond them (Frost 1986). The critiques discussed in this volume seek to create quite new analytical contexts for considering normative concerns, opening up the political space that is the state as complex, contested and contingent, irreducible to just the meanings of its boundedness.

Spatiality

Part III focuses on the question of spatiality and draws on wider disciplinary concerns, notably in social theory, geography and postcolonial studies. These are becoming increasingly relevant to the discipline of international relations as the state is assessed in direct relation to globalization and globalizing processes. The meanings of state boundaries are problematized in theory as well as in other forms of practice. It is proposed that we think in terms of a political economy of spatiality approach which builds on the critical connections explored in the earlier sections. An examination of the concept of spatiality returns to John Herz’s (1957) influential early work on the ‘rise and demise of the territorial state’ in a nuclear era. This reminds us that, in the key area of security, international relations analysis confronted early on the potential challenge to territorial integrity. Nuclear weapons brought increased state power and ‘vulnerability’. Herz’s work included a broadening of security concerns to include political-economy issues. Neorealism placed these at the centre of its interests, but in the reductionist fashion of state-centrism.

Critical Gramscian approaches have challenged this reductionism and contributed to opening up time/space questions in relation to international political economy. One focus, for example, has been restructuring in the global political economy and its effects on inequalities within and across states (Hettne 1995a). These perspectives maintain a strong purchase on questions of agency because of their interest in counter-hegemonic possibilities as well as hegemonic tendencies. They contribute to awareness that reclaiming the political incorporates reclaiming agency as an active and open consideration rather than as a restricted category in the vein of state-centrism. A radicalized sense of social space is at the heart of gender critiques’ attempts to reclaim these areas because of their central concern with public/private social dynamics. Gender critiques open up social dynamics as intrinsic to thinking about local/global relationships; they demonstrate that a sense of the local without such dynamics is partial in the extreme and works on the basis of assumptions about the political and economic.

The final chapter focuses on state/market boundaries and the transformative tendencies evident in their interrelationship in contemporary times. The so-called post-cold war scenario that has stimulated so much of the study of globalization features a renewed emphasis on the world economy and its changing spatial characteristics. These include economic polarization between the richest and the poorest both within and between countries (UNDP 1996). Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) ‘end of history’ thesis focuses, in contrast, on a celebratory interpretation of the spread of liberal capitalist values as increasing numbers of people around the globe are integrated into the world economy, albeit on highly differentiated terms. These differentiations relate to consumption as well as production, and direct attention to economic as well as political subjectivity. The growing role of consumption of communications, mediarelated and various entertainment products encourages thinking about what Scott Lash and John Urry (1994) have termed ‘economies of signs and space’. Inequality consequently has to be defined socially and spatially, taking account of the distinctions dividing the information-and-communication rich and poor, and relative capacities to manipulate and transcend time/space restrictions. Such factors come into play whether we are thinking of corporate entities, social groups or individuals, whether of capital, physical or communicative mobility.

The last part of the chapter relates the discussion to feminist purchase on public/private social dynamics and its capacity to reveal the gendered nature of consumption as well as production. Furthermore, it explains the dynamics of globalization as a dynamics of patriarchal forces. A recent collection of essays on Hong Kong (Pearson and Leung 1995b) demonstrates how, for example, gendered forms of capitalist production and consumption meet British colonial and Chinese patriarchal forces. Postcolonial analysis is spatially and temporally sensitive and also addresses multiple inequalities: for example, of race, class or social hierarchy and gender. Subjectivities are key here in respect of understanding agency because they communicate the integrated results of such multiple influences as well as the grounds on which they can generate resistance to and reproduction of established social relations of power.

The parameters of this conceptual journey

It is anticipated that the reader of this volume will have varied interests in its subject matter and an introductory knowledge of the discipline of international relations. However, the aim is to make as accessible as possible the key conceptual points raised about state-centrism and efforts to move beyond it, by drawing on interrelated critical perspectives. Part III, outlining the bases for a political economy of spatiality approach, develops out of the earlier assessments, but ranges more broadly across some writings from social theory and geography as well as from post-colonial studies. The volume as a whole places some detailed theoretical discussion about the restrictions of the state-centric paradigm, and grounds for moving beyond it, in the context of broad considerations about state/market dynamics in an era of globalization.

This is primarily a book about theory, but it seeks to develop an understanding of theory as a form of practice. It seeks to confound assumptions about the separation of theory from practice, about theory as an abstract force discretely fixed in the realm of ideas. The critical work it assesses is in the main centrally concerned with this problem: the need to make the material force of knowledge processes evident, particularly dominant forms that attain the powerful status of ‘common sense’. Despite being a predominantly theoretical study, therefore, it consistently makes reference to concrete issues and themes, although these cannot always be developed at great length because of the main preoccupation with theoretical threads. The use of the term ‘threads’ is helpful in indicating the breadth of the critical discussion and its inherent limitations in exploring each aspect in great detail. It does not pretend to any comprehensive aim of this kind, and to this end provides extensive references for further and background reading. Its concern is to bring out the connections between the different threads and to weave them together as closely as possible.

In breaking down some of the major barriers of superficial paradigmatism, the book sets out why gender critiques and the feminist theoretical perspectives underpinning them are central to the future development of post-state-centric critical thought about global relations. The discussion about feminist work is related predominantly to international relations, but parallels multidisciplinary debates about social relations of power and their gendered characteristics and processes. The spatial sophistication of such analyses is highlighted in this study, which explains ways in which feminist consideration of power across public/private contexts is deeply relevant to assessments of global relations that aim to expand understanding of local-global linkages. These cannot be negotiated, it is argued, through fixed or assumed notions of state / market boundaries and their meanings. Critical consideration of this problem is incomplete without incorporating so-called private as well as public social space, and the gendered subjectivities and patterns of production and consumption that define the socially generated distinctions between them.

Part III outlines the conceptual endpoint of this study, framed as a political economy of spatiality approach. The main aim is to illustrate different grounds for linking consideration of political economy and spatiality in conceptualizing global relations. This part intends only to set out what are regarded as relevant bases for further thinking in poststate-centric mode – it provides signposts and discussion about them rather than a detailed framework. Importantly, it locates feminist analysis as central to further work in this area, and explores at length how its approach to theory as practice reveals an explicitly radical spatial content through its multiple public/private concerns. The assessment emphasizes that an understanding of global processes, including those linking colonial and postcolonial patriarchal influences, can often be gained only by precise local study of a particular location and context. Feminist purchase on public/private connections offers the richest conceptual bases for investigations of this kind, which can be sensitive to the interaction of differently located global and local patriarchal forces.

This is a dynamic approach to social relations of power in a complex spatial sense – with an integrated negotiation of both public and private, and global and local. The first two parts of the volume illustrate why such an approach would be considered radical in relation to state-centric traditions and male-centred conceptual constraints. They explain why, even in critical debate, superficial paradigmatism has kept such deep feminist insights to one side.

Feminist thought and the conceptual challenge

This study makes a particular case for the centrality of feminist work in reconceptualizing international relations as global relations in post-state-centric fashion. It builds on a wealth of feminist critique undertaken in international relations, to which extensive reference is made. It identifies this work as part of the collective critical onslaught on state-centrism from contrasting and mutually reinforcing directions. Therefore in many respects it aims to bring feminist perspectives to the heart of critical endeavours in the field, and to emphasize the connections that can be made across it. It offers a fresh conceptual context for thinking through well-established feminist points. Perhaps it could be claimed that it communicates them afresh in so doing.

A number of introductory points should be made in this respect, relating to this study’s conceptual orientation. The feminist public/private emphasis referred to throughout is basically conceptual, indicating the need to go beyond the assumed public parameters of state-centric reality to incorporate the private (domestic) world of social reproduction into investigations of social relations of power. There is no intention to essentialize or universalize the notions of public and private; on the contrary, the aim is to problematize them and to recognize their socio-spatial significance.

The term ‘gender’ is used throughout and this is largely for two reasons. Firstly, in their claims about gender as fundamental to social power, feminist assessments are clearly not only about women, but also about the differentiated and socially structured relations between men and women. Secondly, much feminist critique in international relations has come under the heading of gender. Writing has predominantly focused on the omissions and distortions of male-centred theory, and theoretical and substantive issues around the inequality of women. Recently, masculinity has become a focus too (Zalewski and Parpart 1998). This volume’s concerns stress the role of feminist insights into social relations of power in general, and concentrate on their importance in this context to post-state-centric reconceptualizations of international relations.

The use of the term ‘patriarchy’ in this study demonstrates an interest in the holistic and historic impacts of gender inequalities. By holistic I mean that patriarchal influences are understood to operate across both public and private settings, and are not restricted to family or political structures (Youngs forthcoming). Debates over patriarchy have a long history and ‘patriarchal confusions’ abound, largely, as Carole Pateman (1988:20) has argued, because the term ‘has yet to be disentangled from patriarchal interpretations of its meaning’. The discussion that follows uses patriarchy in the broad-brush manner outlined above and seeks, if anything, to contribute to the debate about its nature and contrasting forms. It recognizes patriarchal forces within the state as well as the market, and thus incorporates notions of ’social and sexual divisions of labour’ (Mies 1986: 38). Its focus is on patriarchal influences in the global context, hence the attention to colonial-postcolonial dynamics. It links patriarchy to investigations of globalization and, in association, globallocal considerations to feminist perspectives on spatiality.

Back to the state

The concluding thoughts make clear that it is not this volume’s overall intention to suggest that international relations should or will drift away from its preoccupation with the state. The indication is quite the reverse, that the intensity of interest in the state will continue and can even be considered to have deepened in contemporary circumstances. The arguments do claim, however, that there is an urgent need to move beyond both the constraints of the state-centric paradigm in analysis of the state, and embedded assumptions about the meanings and effects of political and economic boundaries. It is argued that the state as a political unit cannot usefully be taken as given, but needs to be more openly explored with a strong sense of how it may be transforming in different contexts as well as maintaining stability. State/market interactions are key to such a complex approach, which locates consideration of the state in a political-economic rather than a purely political context. Abstract notions of the state as a discrete bounded entity, which are embedded in the state-centric paradigm, hinder rather than facilitate conceptual negotiation of such interactions and their impact on shaping and reshaping the social meanings of boundaries – hence this study’s main preoccupation with the unravelling of that paradigm, in part to open up new perspectives on the state.

Part I

Inside State-centrism

This part of the book looks inside state-centrism by examining the state/market problematic as addressed by neorealism, and by tracing, through various critical lenses, its inherently individualistic, state-driven conceptualization of international relations, as well as its bases for maintaining a distinct separation of state and market. Drawing in particular on the work of John Maclean, Rob Walker and Richard Ashley, I examine the detailed characteristics of the state-as-actor realist model and its endurance in neorealist guise. Specifically, I examine how this model in its realist form collapses effectively the notions of actor and agency, the conceptual motif for this process being the state-as-man-writ-large image. Sovereignty and the associated concepts of sovereign actor, sovereign man, are explored as central to the mystique surrounding state-centrism as a dominant mode of thought. The persistence of Thomas Hobbes’s notion of the state as artificial man is assessed, as is the role of boundaries in defining this acting entity.

Walker’s and Ashley’s varied investigations of sovereignty link the sovereign condition, which affirms political identity strictly in inside/outside terms, to wider conditions of existence in modernity based on power dualisms such as subject/object, man/woman and science/nature. The other, the oppositional force to sovereignty is anarchy, as Ashley maps in his analysis of ‘the anarchy problematique’. He explains how the sovereignty/anarchy relationship is hierarchically defined in terms of presence over absence. Sovereignty as a realist concept is fundamentally the ultimate expression-of-being in state-centric thinking.

While sovereignty tends to be an implicit rather than an explicit category in neorealist analysis, I assess how neorealism, notably as articulated by the theorist generally accepted as its founder, Kenneth Waltz, continues the conflation of actor and agency developed in realism. Neorealism’s major claim to being a structural form of analysis is inescapably compromised by its foundational realist state-centric principles. In realist fashion, the main structural condition recognized is that of anarchy. This identifies structure in a timeless way, not as part of a dynamic historical process. Critiques of neorealism – for example, by Alexander Wendt – have helped us to understand how conceptualization of international relations in anarchic terms obscures agency/structure questions and issues.

Embedded within this position in dominant state-centrism is the gendered conceptualization of the state as rational man writ large. This reflects state-centrism’s fundamental qualities as a male-centred representation of patriarchal political practice. Gender critiques, particularly by theorists such as Ann Tickner and V. Spike Peterson, explore the central role in this practice of the public/private divide: the separation of the mainstream world of public influence and work in politics and economics, and the private sphere of social reproduction, family and home. State-centrism, in common with other dominant forms of political and economic theory, prioritizes the presence of the public over the absence of the private and correspondingly the presence of men over women. While state-centrism works to obscure public/private connections, gender critiques seek to expose them and explain why they are fundamental to understandings of deep social relations of power, importantly of political and economic character (in state and market).

Chapter 2’s examination of the conceptual determinism of state-centrism probes a number of major facets of its reductionism together with its tendency to present a static rather than dynamic interpretation of international relations, including of states as political entities. This chapter fleshes out an important quality of the volume: its distinction between a focus on states and the particularistic focus on states offered by state-centrism. The arguments presented emphasize the degree to which state-centrism features narrow conceptual parameters and fails to explore states as historically created and contingent entities, treating them rather as given and uncontested units of analysis. In contrasting ways the critical work discussed illustrates why and how this is the case and demonstrates an active interest in alternative dynamic understandings of states and the discourses associated with them.

The chapter concentrates on the theme of political economy, exploring the critical work of Ashley on neorealism’s impoverishment of the realist position through an economistic turn. This identifies the key actors, states, in a supra-rationalistic mechanistic manner, drawing away from an emphasis on politics as the realm of competing interests. This economism tells us as much about neorealism’s approach to economics as about its approach to politics. The result is a fusion of politics and economics in a static, deterministic fashion, not the open investigation of the dynamics of political economy in historically sensitive ways. This situation adds further, it is explained, to a precise understanding of the meanings of neorealism’s collapse of actor, agency and structure.

I argue that Ashley’s critique demonstrates how neorealism separates and relates politics and economics to produce an effectively apolitical, abstract framework for analysis. John Maclean’s Marxist perspective provided early insights into the constraints of neorealist method, particularly its lack of a focus on political economy in the context of the development of social relations. Maclean’s critique emphasized neorealism’s partialities as a form of knowledge about the world. Other critical approaches to international or global political economy, as it has increasingly been termed, have focused on this theme, it is explained. Notable among these are Gramscian critiques led by Robert Cox, and Susan Strange’s four-pronged structural power approach (security, production, finance and knowledge).

Chapter 2 ends with an extensive discussion of gender critiques which have consistently addressed the problem of knowledge and its application, and the impossibility of considering either without taking power into account. I explain how these forms of critique, especially in their focus on public/private dynamics, are deeply disruptive of state-centric assumptions about separations between, for example, political/economic and domestic/international. Cynthia Enloe’s attention to public/private connections in that most macho of areas, security, is highlighted as profoundly influential in this respect. It is stressed that gender critiques, in focusing directly on social relations of power and the mutual reinforcements of patriarchal practices across different social spheres, offer a dynamic approach to political economy and thus an important route of escape from the static determinism of state-centrism.

1

Embedded State-centrism: From Realism to Neorealism

State-centrism has become embedded in the transition of realism to neorealism and the latter’s reformulation of the analysis of power as hegemony in international relations. The realist tradition has always emphasized state-to-state relations, interpreting power as the pursuit of state interests and focusing centrally on the politics of diplomacy (Morgenthau and Thompson 1985). It is state-centric to the extent that it defines international relations within these strict parameters, as this section and the next will explore in detail. Sovereignty is a key concept here, encapsulating the political identity of states based on their capacities to exercise power and authority internally and externally (Camilleri and Falk 1992: 11–43). Sovereign identity is tied to the bounded territorial nature of states according to realist perspectives. The development of the realist tradition in the discipline of international relations occurred in the context of the breakdown of the interwar peace and the outbreak of World War Two. It marked a transition from the idealist phase (which will be discussed in chapter 4) and drew on founding political theorists of the modern state such as Thomas Hobbes, referred to below.

The development of neorealism reaffirmed the US dominance of the field and its tendency to reflect ‘particular aspects of national concern and perception’ (Tooze 1984: 5). The neorealist focus on hegemony significantly sought to take more direct account of economic power in relation to state power, notably that of the USA. The growth of neorealist analysis in the USA from the 1970s has been tied directly to concerns about tests of its economic supremacy, as evidenced in the oil crises of that decade and the weakening of the Bretton Woods financial system (Tooze 1987). Hegemonic stability theory (HST) indicated concerns about what challenges to US power might mean for world order, economically as well as politically (Keohane 1989:74–100). Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony (1984) is a key neorealist statement on ‘cooperation and discord in the world political economy’. His fundamental concept in this study is ‘interdependence’, which has become an influential term in the everyday vocabulary of international relationists (see also Keohane and Nye 1989; Jones and Willetts 1984; Jones 1995). In Keohane’s (1984: 6) framework it represents an expansion of the realist perspective’s emphasis on competition and striving for power as means and ends (Morgenthau and Thompson 1985) to include the cooperation that results from ‘mutual interests’. His main focus is on relations between the advanced industrialized nations on the basis of ‘given’ interests and existing interdependence. In true realist and neorealist fashion, its preoccupations are with states and with those states with the most power (Waltz 1979).

The development of realism evident in this neorealist framework concerns, as do neorealist approaches more generally, how we might understand that power, the reasons for its existence, its operation and maintenance: in other words, the nature of hegemony. Hegemonic power is multifaceted – military, political and economic. One of neorealism’s main developments was a more detailed focus on the linkages between political and economic factors in international relations. Interdependence and the associated notion of ‘regime’ represent the main conceptual developments of neorealism for these purposes. Regimes are conceived in many different ways (Krasner 1983), but are basically interpreted as representing ‘rules, norms, principles, and decisionmaking procedures’ (Keohane 1984: 8). So the neorealist conceptual framework considers power as hegemony in the context of interdependence and the role of regimes. As in realist analysis, the intention is to explore the bases for international order (p. 9). The crucial question, particularly for Keohane, but also for neorealism in general, is how such order will be maintained after ‘the decline of American hegemony’ (p. 15; see also Gilpin 1975, 1981, 1987). Keohane’s conclusions place great emphasis on ‘institutionalism’ for easing conflicts caused by interdependence and generating ‘cooperation without hegemony’ (Keohane 1984: 243–4). In Keohane’s assessment, US hegemony left an important ‘legacy’ of regimes whose effects would endure and which could be regarded as ‘a valuable foundation for constructing post-hegemonic patterns of cooperation’ (pp. 244–5). Such regimes should be valued for the particular settings they provided for continuing international engagements on the basis, at least to some degree, of shared rules and information.

It is largely because of its stress on regimes and cooperation that ‘neoliberal institutionalism’ (Baldwin 1993a; Keohane 1993) is now identified as a theoretical development distinct from neorealism (Baldwin