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Putting the nation back into 'the international'Neil Davidsona

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Putting the nation back into ‘the international’

Neil Davidson1

University of Strathclyde

Abstract Alex Callinicos and Justin Rosenberg have both drawn on the concept ofuneven and combined development to resolve what they see as deficiencies in internationalrelations theory: in the case of the former, the absence of a non-realist explanation for thepersistence of the states system; in the case of the latter, the absence of a sociologicaldimension to geopolitics. However, Callinicos omits any consideration of the ‘combined’aspect of uneven and combined development, while Rosenberg ascribes characteristics oftranshistoricity and internationality to uneven and combined development which it doesnot possess. Against attempts to either restrict or over-extend use of the concept, I willargue that its theoretical usefulness depends on understanding the limits of its spatial andchronological reach. An alternative, if still partial, explanation for the continued existenceof the states system will emphasize the continuing indispensability of nationalism as ameans of both containing class conflict within capitalist states and mobilizing support for‘national capitals’ engaged in geoeconomic and geopolitical competition.

Introduction

In his article ‘Does capitalism need the state system?’, Alex Callinicos raises aseries of important methodological, conceptual and empirical issues about thisrelationship (Callinicos 2007). While I agree with his conclusions, especially inrelation to the likely persistence of the states system and the continued relevanceof imperialism as a category, I disagree with some of the arguments by which hearrives at them. One such argument is that uneven and combined development(U&CD) can explain the continued coexistence of many capitals and many states.The broader significance of this concept has been the subject of a subsequentexchange between Callinicos and Justin Rosenberg (Callinicos and Rosenberg2008). The first part of this article explains my disagreements with their respectiveinterpretations of U&CD: in the case of Callinicos, that his argument actuallydraws on the theory of uneven development rather than that of U&CD; in the caseof Rosenberg, that his argument ascribes characteristics of transhistoricity andinternationality to U&CD which it does not in fact possess. The second part of thisarticle outlines an alternative, if still partial, explanation of capitalism’s need for

1 I am grateful to Alex Anievas and two out of three anonymous reviewers for theircomments. Justin Rosenberg, with whom disagreement is always an intellectual stimulus,helped me clarify our respective positions during a discussion in Brighton during May2007. This paper was written with the support of Economic and Social Research CouncilGrant RES-063-27-0174.

Cambridge Review of International Affairs,Volume 22, Number 1, March 2009

ISSN 0955-7571 print/ISSN 1474-449X online/09/010009–20 q 2009 Centre of International Studies

DOI: 10.1080/09557570802683920

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the states system, emphasizing the ‘national’ aspect of nation-states that has beenignored or at least downplayed in these discussions so far.2

Uneven development or uneven and combined development?

Several contributors to these linked debates have agreed with Callinicos thatU&CD can explain the persistence of the states system under capitalism (see, forexample, Pozo-Martin 2007, 556). Leaving the substantive issue aside for themoment, it is not clear to me that Callinicos is referring to combined development atall.3 He invokes it at the beginning of his discussion, but almost immediately shiftsattention onto the earlier and less comprehensive theory of uneven development.In particular, he draws from Lenin’s Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism toshow how ‘uneven development that both raises productivity and is economicallydestabilizing, is inherent in capitalism’ and ‘constantly subverts the efforts tointegrate “many capitals” into a single entity’ (Callinicos 2007, 544–545; Lenin1960–1970b, 295). The slippage involved here from U&CD to uneven developmentis an example of a more widespread confusion.4 In his exchange with Rosenberg,Callinicos cites Robert Brenner’s comparison between English and Frenchfeudalism in a passage that concludes, ‘the development of the mechanisms offeudal accumulation tended to be not only “uneven” but also “combined”, in thesense that later developers could build on previous advances made elsewhere infeudal class organization’ (Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008, 101; Brenner 1985, 255).Giovanni Arrighi summarizes this conception of ‘combination’ for the con-temporary period as ‘the process whereby laggards in capitalist development seekto catch up, and eventually succeed in catching up, with the leaders of thatdevelopment’ (Arrighi 2007, 102). But what exactly is being ‘combined’ in suchcases? As we shall see, what is being discussed in these passages remains unevendevelopment.

As Callinicos’s reference to Lenin suggests, the concept of unevendevelopment was a component of the classical Marxist tradition. Trotsky himselfstressed that the concept, if not the term, was present in the work of Marx andEngels, despite claims to the contrary by Stalin (Trotsky 1974, 15, 61; 1972b, 116).More recently, it has also informed such memorable analyses as Brenner’sdelineation of competition between the core economies of global capitalism afterthe Second World War; Doreen Massey’s construction of a general explanatorymodel of regional inequality more comprehensive than that of either theneoclassical equilibrium or the cumulative causation school; and Neil Smith’sdepiction of the ‘seesaw’ reproduction of capital which leads to both spatialdifferentiation and equalization on the urban, nation-state and global scales(Brenner 2003, 9–24; 2006, 32–40; Massey 1995, 118–119; Smith 1990, 135–154).Can it also explain the persistence of the states system? There is one fundamentalreason why I think it cannot.

2 The broader question of whether the relationship between capitalism and the statessystem is determined by historical contingency, twin logics or some other factor isdiscussed in Davidson (forthcoming a).

3 Callinicos has discussed the ‘combined’ element of U&CD elsewhere. See Callinicos(1999, 199).

4 For different examples from those cited here, see Davidson (2006a, 10).

10 Neil Davidson


Individual states have coexisted with massive internal unevenness, in somecases carried over in a different form from the feudal to the capitalist period,without it necessarily leading to fragmentation. The long-standing status of thenorth/south divide in Italy and the later emergence of a further distinctgeographical area in the post-war ‘Third Italy’ have not seriously threatened theintegrity of the state (Morton 2007, 51–73; Ginsburg 1990, 17–38, 210–235).Similarly, the Scottish Highland/Lowland divide shows how ongoing and, inWestern European terms, unparalleled levels of unevenness have existed at a sub-state, regional level within Britain since 1707 (Davidson 2000, 63–78, 102–106;2003, 52–70, 220–227, 261–267; Davidson 2004, 448–452). Why could similarextremes of unevenness not be contained within a single global state? As we shallsee, there are reasons why a single world state is unlikely, but the territorialunevenness of capitalism is not one of them. But if uneven development alone isunable to explain the continued existence of many states, is U&CD proper anymore effective? To answer this question we must first establish the relationship,and the differences, between these two concepts.

From unevenness to combination

By the beginning of the twentieth century uneven development had three mainaspects. One was the process by which the advanced states had reached their leadingpositions within the structured inequality of the world system. Marxists such asRudolf Hilferding and Antonio Gramsci, and non-Marxists like Thorstein Veblen,noted that late-developing capitalist states had enjoyed the ‘advantages ofbackwardness’ (Hilferding 1981, 332–333; Gramsci 1977, 36; Veblen 1939, 65–66,85–86). Trotsky himself gave perhaps the most concise statement of this aspect in oneof the most famous—and most quoted—passages in The history of the RussianRevolution: ‘The privilege of historic backwardness—and such a privilege exists—permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of anyspecified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages’ (Trotsky 1977a, 27).

During the late nineteenth century the ‘skipping of stages’ had been theexperience of several states, notably Germany, Italy and Japan. The pressure ofmilitary and commercial competition between the actual or aspirant great powersforced those which were still absolutist states based on the feudal mode ofproduction—or at least those which were capable of doing so—to adopt thecurrent stage of development achieved by their capitalist rivals, if they were tohave any chance, not only of successfully competing, but of surviving at thesummit of the world order. In very compressed timescales they were able to adoptthe socio-economic achievements of Britain to the extent that they becamerecognizably the same kind of society, without necessarily reproducing everycharacteristic of the Anglo-Saxon pioneer.

Unevenness continued to exist within the territory of these states, of course,but this was also true of Britain itself, as the parallel I have drawn between theScottish Highlands and the Italian south suggests. Where backwardness remainedit tended to be in the nature of the political regimes led by monarchs or emperorssupported by a landowning aristocracy. But again was Britain so very different?Between 1870 and 1914 imperial Britain, Germany and Japan all consciouslyemphasized the role of their monarch-emperors; in each case the pre-existingsymbolism of the crown being used to represent national unity against two main

Putting the nation back into ‘the international’ 11


challenges: external imperial rivalry and internal class divisions (Cannadine 1983,120–150; Bayly 2004, 426–430). By the outbreak of the First World Warmembership of the group of dominant capitalist states was essentially fixed.What remained was the second aspect of uneven development: the ongoing rivalrybetween the great powers which involved them constantly trying to ‘catch up andovertake’ each other in a contest for supremacy which would continue as long ascapitalism itself. This rivalry led in turn to a third aspect: the developedimperialist states collectively but competitively asserting their dominance over twoother types, described by Lenin as ‘the colonies themselves’ and ‘the diverse formsof dependent countries which, politically are formally independent but in fact, areenmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence’, like Argentina andPortugal (Lenin 1960–1970b, 263–264). Colonial expansion prevented some of thesocieties subject to it from developing at all, and in the case of the mostundeveloped the peoples involved suffered near or complete extermination andtheir lands were taken by settlers. More often the peoples survived, but their socialsystems were immobilized by imperial powers interested in strategic advantageor plunder, or both.

Trotsky certainly took uneven development in these three senses as his startingpoint—as is suggested by the word order in the title of his own theory: ‘I wouldput uneven before combined, because the second grows out of the first andcompletes it’ (Trotsky 1979 [1940], 858). How then does the concept of U&CDdiffer from uneven development as such? The former cannot be understoodoutside the context of strategic debates within the international socialistmovement. Like all Russian Marxists at the turn of the twentieth century, Trotskywas concerned with the nature of the forthcoming revolution. The strategy heproposed of a minority working class movement overleaping the supposedlynecessary stages of bourgeois democracy and capitalist development came to becalled permanent revolution. But how was it that the working class of a countrylike Russia, backward in so many respects, could play the kind of role predictedby Trotsky and realized in 1905 and 1917?

During the Chinese Revolution of 1925–1927 the emergent Stalinist regime inRussia ordered the local communist party to subordinate its own organization anddemands to those of the bourgeois nationalists in the Guomindang. The ultimatelydisastrous outcome for the Chinese working class movement was the catalyst forTrotsky to generalize the strategy of permanent revolution from Russia to sectionsof the colonial and semi-colonial world; not indiscriminately—since some werestill untouched by capitalist development and had no working class of any size—but where conditions similar to those in Russia prevailed. Due to a common set ofcircumstances, the working classes in these countries had far greater levels of bothconsciousness and organization than the proletariat in the more developedcountries where Marxists had traditionally expected the socialist revolution tobegin. Trotsky claimed that ‘the prediction that historically backward Russiacould arrive at the proletarian revolution sooner than advanced Britainrests almost entirely upon the law of uneven development’ (Trotsky 1969, 241).But uneven development was not the sole basis for this prediction, as we can seeby contrasting actual Russian development with two possible alternatives.

One was the path of the advanced capitalist states. The pace of developmentwas relatively faster in most of the countries that followed Holland and England,partly because of the urgency of acquiring the attributes of capitalist modernity,

12 Neil Davidson


partly because the long period of experiment and evolution, characteristic of thetwo pioneers, could be dispensed with. In the case of Scotland in the eighteenthcentury or Germany in the nineteenth century, this led to enormous tensionswhich resolved themselves in moments of class struggle foreshadowing theprocess of permanent revolution: the general strike and insurrection of 1820 inScotland, the revolution of 1848 in Germany. But because these societies did makethe transition—did join the ranks of the advanced societies, either in their ownright (Germany) or as part of another national formation (Scotland/Britain)—these moments passed with the tensions that caused them.5

The other was the path of the colonies or semi-colonies. What Peter Curtin(2000) calls ‘defensive modernization’ was not enough to protect these societiesfrom Western incursions. The Bugandese client-chiefs, for example,

did not want to imitate Europe but to protect the new alignment of power, withChristianity and a few other borrowings from the West added . . . basically designedto protect Ganda society as it emerged shortly after 1900. (Curtin 2000, 143)

The Merinian monarchs of Madagascar were similar: ‘They not only failed tomodernize beyond adopting Christianity and superficial European fashions, theyfailed to build a kind of society and government administration that wouldperpetuate their own power’ (Curtin 2000, 150). Colonial rule could even throwsocieties backwards, as in the case of British-occupied Iraq. Ruling through theHashemite monarchy after 1920, the regime deliberately rejected any attempts atmodernization, except in the oil industry. Instead, they reinforced disintegratingtribal loyalties and semi-feudal tenurial relationships over the peasantry. PeterGowan describes the British initiatives as ‘the creation of new foundationalinstitutions of landownership in order to revive dying traditional authorityrelations, resulting in economically and socially regressive consequences,undertaken for thoroughly modern imperialist political purposes—namely, tocreate a ruling class dependent upon British military power and thereforecommitted to imperial interests in the region’ (Gowan 1999, 167).

Tsarist Russia neither emulated the process of ‘catch up and overtake’ amongthe advanced countries nor suffered that of ‘blocked development’ within thebackward, but instead experienced a collision between the two. The tensionscreated by rapid development went unresolved: the modern and the archaictherefore continued to exist in an ongoing tension. Marxists before Trotsky hadnoticed their coexistence in Russia. Antonio Labriola commented that Russianindustrialization ‘seems destined to put under our eyes, as in an epitome, all thephases, even the most extreme, of our history’ (Labriola 1908, 133). Lenin wrote ofRussia ‘where modern capitalist imperialism is enmeshed, so to speak, in aparticularly close network of pre-capitalist relations’ (Lenin 1960–1970b, 259). ButTrotsky was the first to see that these elements did not simply coexist inpicturesque or dramatic contrasts: they overlapped, fused, merged in dynamicways that generated socially explosive situations in which revolution becamewhat Georg Lukacs termed ‘actual’ (Lukacs 1970, chap 1).

Between 1928 and 1930, Trotsky continued to employ the term ‘unevendevelopment’—above all in the articles collected in The Third International after

5 For the Scottish experience see Davidson (2000, 167–186) and Davidson (2005, 29–36).



Lenin and in Permanent revolution and its various prefaces—yet he did so in waysthat suggest that he was conscious of stretching its meaning to cover newphenomena, which would ultimately require new terminology (Davidsonforthcoming b, chap 3). The inability of ‘uneven development’ to fully encapsulatethese phenomena is what appears to have made Trotsky search for a new conceptwith which to supplement it.

From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which for want of abetter name, we may call the law of combined development—by which we mean adrawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps,an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms. (Trotsky 1977a, 27–28)

A third group of states embodied ‘combination’: those unable to reproduce thelevel of development attained by the advanced capitalist states, but neverthelessable to ‘unblock’ themselves to the extent of making partial advances in specificareas. There were essentially three sub-sets in this group. The first were feudal-absolutist or tributary states, like Russia or Turkey, which, under pressure fromthe Western powers, were forced for reasons of military competition to introducelimited industrialization and partial agrarian reform. The second were still morebackward states like China or regions like the post-Ottoman Arab Middle East,which had been broken by imperialist pressure but which, instead of beingcolonized, were allowed to disintegrate while the agents of foreign capitalestablished areas of industrialization under the protection of either their owngovernments or local warlords. The third were colonial states like British India,and to a lesser extent French Algeria, where the metropolitan power wasunwilling to allow full-scale industrialization in case it produced competition forits own commodities, but was prepared to sanction it in specific circumstances forreasons of military supply or where goods were not intended for home markets.In each case,

an entirely new ‘combined’ social formation in which the latest conquests ofcapitalist technique and structure root themselves into relations of feudal orprefeudal barbarism, transforming and subjecting them and creating peculiarrelations of classes. (Trotsky 1976, 583)

In the end, in order to describe these new formations Trotsky had to abandon themetaphors drawn from human biology which had been used in relation todevelopment from the Enlightenment to the Second International:

The absorptive and flexible psyche, as a necessary condition for historical progress,confers on the so-called social ‘organisms’, as distinguished from the real, that is,biological organisms, an exceptional variability of internal structure. (Trotsky1972c, 251)

U&CD usually involves what Michael Burawoy (1985, 99) calls ‘the combination ofthe capitalist mode of production with pre-existing modes’. Jamie Allinson andAlexander Anievas too have written of how the ‘logics of different modes ofproduction interact with one another in consequential ways in backward countries’(Allinson and Anievas 2009, 52). But a process that permeates every aspect ofsociety, ideology as much as economy, must involve more than this.The ‘articulation’ of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes had, after all, beenprogressing slowly in the Russian countryside since the abolition of serfdom

14 Neil Davidson


in 1861, and had led to many complex transitional forms (Lenin 1960–1970a,191–210). None led to the type of situation Trotsky was seeking to explain.

At the same time that peasant land-cultivation as a whole remained, right up to the

revolution, at the level of the seventeenth century, Russian industry in its technique

and capitalist structure stood at the level of the advanced countries, and in certain

respects even outstripped them. (Trotsky 1977a, 30)

The detonation of the process of U&CD requires sudden, intensive industrial-ization and urbanization, regardless of whether the pre-existing agrarianeconomy was based on feudal or capitalist relations. Burawoy is therefore rightto describe U&CD as a product of ‘the timing of industrialization in relation to thehistory of world capitalism’ (Burawoy 1985, 99). Trotsky himself saw China in the1920s as an example of U&CD, and consequently a situation where the strategy ofpermanent revolution could be applied, but argued strongly that capitalistrelations of production already dominated the economy, ‘and not “feudal”(more correctly, serf and, generally, pre-capitalist) relations’ (Trotsky 1974, 160).

This should remind us that U&CD was intended to deepen a fundamentallystrategic conception. Thus, for Trotsky, the most important consequence of U&CDwas the enhanced capacity it gave the working classes for political and industrialorganization, theoretical understanding and revolutionary activity:

when the productive forces of the metropolis, of a country of classical capitalism . . .

find ingress into more backward countries, like Germany in the first half of the

nineteenth century, and Russia at the merging of the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries, and in the present day in Asia; when the economic factors burst in a

revolutionary manner, breaking up the old order; when development is no longer

gradual and ‘organic’ but assumes the form of terrible convulsions and drastic

changes of former conceptions, then it becomes easier for critical thought to find

revolutionary expression, provided that the necessary theoretical prerequisites exist

in the given country. (Trotsky 1972a, 199; see also Trotsky 1977a, 33)

Following Trotsky, McDaniel argues that there are four reasons why what hecalls the ‘autocratic capitalism’ of Tsarist Russia tended to produce a revolutionarylabour movement. First, it eliminated or reduced the distinction betweeneconomic and political issues. Second, it generated opposition for both traditionaland modern reasons. Third, it reduced the fragmentation of the working class, butprevented the formation of a stable conservative bureaucracy, thus leading tomore radical attitudes. Fourth, it forced a degree of interdependence between themass of the working class, class-conscious workers and revolutionary intellectuals(McDaniel 1988, 41–47). McDaniel claims that a comparable situation has arisenonly in Iran, but this seems to unnecessarily restrict the applicability of the modelto situations that resemble pre-revolutionary Russia closely in formal terms(McDaniel 1988, 407). In fact, the relentless expansion of neoliberal globalization,and the consequent irruption of industrialization and urbanization into areas theyhad previously bypassed, means that U&CD is the process most characteristic ofthe current phase of capitalist development. Mike Davis has identified Dubai andChina as the most extreme contemporary examples (Davis 2007, 53–54). Indeed,in the case of the latter, it might be said that the neoliberal turn after 1978 actuallyresumed the process of U&CD which had been consciously halted by a Maoist



leadership only too conscious of the explosive effects of uncontrolled urbanexpansion in particular (Davidson 2006b, 214–222).

This does not mean that wherever U&CD exists today the working classmovement will automatically adopt what Trotsky called the ‘boldest conclusions ofrevolutionary thought’ (Trotsky 1937, 33). In circumstances where Marxist ideas(and those of secular radicalism more generally) are either unavailable ordiscredited after the experience of Stalinism, movements will reach for whateverideas seem to assist them in their struggle, regardless of their antiquity—but theywill transform them in the process. Carol McAllister explains the Islamic revival ordakwah in Malaysia, for example, as ‘primarily a reaction against both the economicstress and dislocation and cultural deracination brought by capitalist development;it is in large part an attempt to define a personal and a political alternative’. Drawingexplicitly on the theory of U&CD, she argues that interpreting this resistance as‘a return to the past or a strengthening of tradition’ misunderstands the nature ofIslamic militancy, which involves ‘the reassertion but also reinterpretation of thetraditional Malay Islam it promotes’, and consequently has to be seen as‘a contemporary phenomenon, arising from people’s current problems and needs’(McAllister 1990, 12). Given the increasingly hysterical Islamophobia thatdominates public discourse in the West, this is clearly a contemporary area wherethe theory of U&CD might be usefully employed in more general ways.

The limits of uneven and combined development

The concept of U&CD was excluded from serious discussion for several decades,partly as a result of Stalinist opprobrium, and partly because—although it informsvirtually all of Trotsky’s concrete analysis—in theoretical terms it remained a sketchthat has to be reconstructed from chapter 1 ofThe history of the Russian Revolution anda series of ‘occasional’ pieces (Davidson forthcoming b, introduction and chap 3).The term now appears with increasing frequency, but often attached to virtually anytopic, no matter how distant from those it was originally intended to illuminate. Onesenses here a variation on a familiar academic strategy, whereby a currentlyfashionable concept is used to anoint arguments derived from quite differenttheoretical sources (see, for example, Dufour 2007). Like many other Marxistconcepts developed to explain specific situations or institutions (such as Gramsci’suse of ‘hegemony’ or Benedict Anderson’s (2006) notion of ‘imagined community’),the explanatory power of the concept can only be diminished or diluted byover-extending its applicability. The major exception to this superficial anduncomprehending use of U&CD has been a series of thought-provoking articles byRosenberg, which represent the most serious recent attempt to draw out theimplications of Trotsky’s theory, although as we shall see they too suffer from atendency to over-extend the concept.

Rosenberg claims the theory of U&CD can overcome a twofold absence: of aninternational dimension from sociological theory and of a sociological dimensionfrom international relations (Rosenberg 2006, 310–313). As he writes in hisexchange with Callinicos,

by simultaneously asserting the uneven and combined character of . . .

development overall, it recovers for social theory those properties ofmultilinearity and interactivity which would otherwise unavoidably give rise

16 Neil Davidson


to a sociologically impregnable and rival discourse of geopolitical explanation. Iknow no other idea that does this. (Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008, 86)

But Rosenberg also claims that U&CD is of limited use by itself, for ‘it lacks anytools for specifying the causal properties of those processes of social life to whosemultiplicity and interaction it draws attention’. Consequently, ‘it cannot operate asa replacement for the classical social theories whose limitations we are trying toovercome’ and without these ‘it cannot reach down to the level of concretehistorical explanation at all’ (Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008, 86). I find this claimpuzzling, since U&CD was conceived precisely as a specific application of one‘classical social theory’ (historical materialism) to explain a ‘concrete historicalsituation’ (the revolutionary potential of the working class in Russia and otherlate-developing countries). Here, however, I want to contest two positive claimsthat Rosenberg makes for the concept: one, that it identifies a process that ispresent throughout history, and, the other, that it only takes place at the level of‘the international’.6

Transhistoricity

Trotsky wrote in The revolution betrayed, ‘The law of uneven development issupplemented throughout the whole course of history by the law of combineddevelopment’ (Trotsky 1937, 300). Whether Trotsky actually demonstrates thisclaim is another matter. Rosenberg (2006) attempts to illustrate the transhistoricityof U&CD with examples from the Russian state after AD 800 which he claimsshow three aspects of combination. First, ‘the course of Russian development was“combined” in the sense that at every point it was causally integrated with a widersocial field of interacting patterns of development’ (Rosenberg 2006, 321). By thishe means that Russia was subject to ‘inter-societal causality’, an environment inwhich the endless interplay of other states or social forces shaped the nation’sinternal structure in a way that could never be completed. Second, combinationalso involved ‘structures’ that ‘extended beyond Russia itself’. Among suchstructures Rosenberg includes ‘regional political orders, cultural systems andmaterial divisions of labour’. The third, ‘yet deeper’ dimension is the consequenceof the first two, the creation of a ‘hybrid’ social formation, ‘a changing amalgam ofpre-existent “internal” structures of social life with external socio-political andcultural influences’. Consequently, there ‘never existed a “pre-combination”Russia’; at every point its existence was traversed by these influences: ‘combineddevelopment identifies the inter-societal, relational texture of the historicalprocesses within which the shifting meanings of the term “Russia” crystallizedand accumulated’. In general terms, Rosenberg invites us to ‘abandon at thedeepest theoretical level any notion of the constitution of society as analyticallyprior to its interaction with other societies’ (Rosenberg 2006, 321–325).

I agree with all of this, but I remain unconvinced that it has anything to do withU&CD. The inseparability of the international from the social is, after all, inscribed inhistorical materialism from the moment of its formation, notablyTheGerman ideology.

6 Allinson and Anievas also have concerns with Rosenberg’s claims for thetranshistorical nature of U&CD, although for different reasons to those expressed here.See Allinson and Anievas (2009, 62–63).



But in this moment Marx and Engels were also clear that ‘history becomes worldhistory’ as a result of the spread of capitalism (Marx and Engels 1976, 50–51).Why? Before capitalism all societies, with the exception of those based on slavery,were based on variations of the same mode of production, involving surplusextraction from a class of peasants and taking either a ‘feudal’ or ‘tributary’ formdepending on whether the main agent of exploitation was a class of local landlordsor the state bureaucracy (Haldon 1994, 63–69; Wickham 2005, 57–61). There wereimportant differences between them, particularly in terms of how the ruling classesorganized, but most pre-capitalist societies seem to have involved elements of both,with one or the other achieving dominance at different times. Those cases whichwere the purest examples of one variant or the other (for example, feudal England ortributary China) had quite different possibilities for capitalist development. Untilthat development took place, however, societies could borrow from each other, couldinfluence one another—particularly in the field of culture and philosophy—but werenot sufficiently differentiated from each other for elements to ‘combine’ to any effect.The very terms that Trotsky uses in describing combination—‘archaic and morecontemporary forms’—were unthinkable until capitalism defined what it meant tobe ‘archaic’ (Trotsky 1977, 28).

We therefore need to draw a distinction between Trotsky’s general account ofRussian development, which, as Rosenberg correctly says, was always subject toexternal influence, and the specific moment at which these influences were notmerely successfully absorbed into an endlessly mutating social form, but set up aseries of tensions that threatened to, and eventually did, tear the fabric of Russiansociety apart in 1917. The moment of U&CD, in other words, only arrives withcapitalist industrialization and the historically unique society to which it gave rise.The immense difference between industrial capitalism and previous modes ofproduction meant that, from the moment the former was introduced, combinationbecame possible in a way that it had not been hitherto; but the structural dynamismof industrial capitalism compared with previous modes of production also meantthat combination became inescapable, as all aspects of existing society registered theimpact on them, to differing degrees, of this radically new means of exploitation.‘In contrast to the economic systems that preceded it,’ wrote Trotsky, ‘capitalisminherently and constantly aims at economic expansion, at the penetration of newterritories, the conversion of self-sufficient provincial and national economies into asystem of financial interrelationships’ (Trotsky 1974, 15). Rosenberg himself notesthat, ‘for Trotsky, capitalism did not just change the world: it actually changed theoverall nature of historical change itself’ (Rosenberg 2007, 456). I think he hasinsufficiently incorporated this insight into his own work.

Internationality

Rosenberg argues that, for Trotsky, ‘“combined development” was a phenomenonnot of individual societies alone, but of the evolving international social formationas a whole’ (Rosenberg 2005, 41). In a discussion of Marx’s original plan for thestructure of Capital, he further claims that if we ‘neglect the significance of unevenand combined development’ at the level of those determinants which apply to allsocieties, then ‘either reductionism or proto-Realism will unfailingly result furtherdown the line’ (Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008, 99). Colin Barker has reachedsimilar conclusions, suggesting that an ‘extended’ concept of U&CD is implicit in

18 Neil Davidson


Trotsky’s own work: ‘Only from the angle of world economy, of the combineddevelopment of the different countries within it, do words like “advanced” and“archaic” have any meaning, as measures of coercive comparison within a largersystem of competitive transactions’ (Barker 2006, 78). Allinson and Anievas (2009)also see this globalized view of U&CD as a ‘logical extension of Trotsky’s originalconcept’ (54). I have more sympathy with these arguments than with those fortranshistoricity, since, as I have argued above, U&CD is produced by the impact ofdifferent aspects of the international capitalist system (economic competition,military rivalry and colonial rule) on the societies constitutive of it. It is important,however, not to confuse the sources of a particular historical process with theprocess itself.

Trotsky famously wrote that

Marxism takes its point of departure from world economy, not as a sum of nationalparts, but as a mighty and independent reality which has been created by theinternational division of labour and the world market, and which in our epochimperiously dominates the national markets. (Trotsky 1969, 146)

U&CD is a consequence of the world economy, but it is played out within thecomponent parts of the states system whose continued existence initiated thisdiscussion: the territorial confines of these states are where the specificcombinations take place. Indeed, it is difficult to see how any analysis ofa ‘concrete situation’ could take place while remaining at the level of‘the international’. If the writers quoted above are right, and what happened inRussia was merely an example of a universal process, then what remains of the‘peculiarities’ of Russian development which Trotsky took as the basis of histheory, and which he later extended to other areas of the colonial and semi-colonial world? If everywhere is subject to U&CD then it clearly explains nothingin particular about Russia, or anywhere else for that matter, and we must searchfor another theory to achieve what Trotsky sought to do. U&CD is a feature ofcertain societies: unlike the world economy of which Trotsky spoke or the statessystem, whose interaction gave it birth, it does not constitute ‘an independentreality’ greater than its component parts.

The concept of U&CD is an attempt to comprehend in thought an actual socialprocess. That process emerged historically at a specific moment in time, whenimperialism led to the expansion of capitalist industrialization outside theboundaries of the advanced capitalist powers themselves, and operatedgeographically within a specific area in space, where capitalist industrializationmet and merged with earlier socio-economic forms. The time of U&CD continues,and the space of U&CD expands, since capitalism still encroaches onto ever newareas, and returns in new forms to areas that it had previously encompassed.The state ‘containers’ within which the process of U&CD unfolds, includingChina, will never achieve the type of total transformation characteristic of thestates that formed the original core of the capitalist world system, at least in anyforeseeable timescale. U&CD is therefore likely to be an ongoing process whichwill only be resolved by either revolution or disintegration. But in the meantime,China and other states like India and Brazil where growth has been less dramaticremain both inherently unstable in their internal social relations and expansive intheir external search for markets, raw materials and investment opportunities.This combination is likely to lead to clashes with other states and an increasing



escalation of nationalist ideology to maintain social control. Because it is not auniversal experience U&CD can scarcely explain the persistence of the statessystem throughout the world. It can, however, act to heighten two general aspectsof capitalist development that are genuinely universal throughout the system,even in those areas where U&CD has never been present or is only a distantmemory. One of these is what Edward Luttwak (1998) calls ‘geo-economics’(see also Davidson forthcoming a). The other, to which I now turn, is nationalism.

Capital, states and nations

International relations specialists have been known to complain that the veryconcept of ‘the international’ improperly draws attention away from the fact thattheir discipline is concerned with state relations, not national relations (Halliday1994, 81). In fact, despite the presence of the term ‘national’ within the title of thediscipline, discussions of ‘the international’ are almost always about inter-staterelations, and the fact that states are usually also nation-states is simply notregistered as significant, the terms ‘state’ and ‘nation-state’ being treated asvirtually interchangeable. The difficulty is compounded if nations are also seen aspre-dating capitalism, as they are by both political Marxists and Althusserians, forwhom nations are apparently a phenomenon with a purely contingent relationshipto the dominant mode of production (Wood 1991, 28–31; 2007, 153; Balibar 1991,89–90.) Callinicos, who is certainly aware of the modernity of nations, only writesin passing that ‘the formation and fission of national identities no doubt plays itspart in producing the intense and exclusive nature of modern territorialsovereignty’ (Callinicos 2007, 545). The issue is more central than these positionssuggest. As Claudia von Braunmuhl once noted, ‘the bourgeois nation state is bothhistorically and conceptually part of the capitalist mode of production’(Braunmuhl 1978, 173). The prefixes ‘bourgeois’ and ‘nation’ are not simplyterminological elaborations here, but indicate a key distinguishing feature ofcapitalist states that contributes to the survival of the states system.

One powerful state could hypothetically succeed so overwhelmingly in thecompetitive struggle that it not only imposed hegemony over all the others, butactually achieved their territorial incorporation; the fusion of political unity andeconomic anarchy on a global basis. But such an outcome could only betemporary, before the former rapidly fragmented into newly created or recreatedstates of the type with which we are currently so familiar. The reason is not simplyone of practicality. Ellen Wood has noted the difficulties of maintaining statecontrol over too large an area, while Smith has argued that states can also be toosmall to be effective for capital (Wood 2003, 141; 2006, 25; Smith 1990, 142–143).But size is not the decisive issue. As Vivek Chibber notes, ‘one could certainlyimagine a federated system, in which administrative and regulative authority islocalized, but sovereignty is not’ (Chibber 2005, 157). The capitalist class in itsconstituent parts has a continuing need to retain territorial home bases presidedover by states for their operations (Anderson 1992, 6; Harman 1991, 32–38;Harvey 2005, 35–36). Why?

Capitalism is based on competition, but capitalists want competition to takeplace on their terms; they do not want to suffer the consequences if they lose. In onesense, then, they want a state to ensure that they are protected from these

20 Neil Davidson


consequences—in other words, they require a state to provide more than simply aninfrastructure; they need it to ensure that the effects of competition are experiencedas far as possible by someone else. A global state could not do this; indeed, in thisrespect it would be the same as having no state at all. For if everyone is protectedthen no one is: unrestricted market relations would prevail, with all the risks thatentails. The state therefore has to have limits, has to be able to distinguish betweenthose who will receive its protection and support and those who will not. Capitalswithin a global super-state would therefore tend to group together to create newstates or recreate old ones in order to achieve these ends.

But the state cannot simply be the site of particular functions, with noideological attachment; capitalists, and to an even greater extent, state managers,have at least to try to convince themselves that what they are doing is in a greater‘national’ interest, even if it is plainly in their own. Without some level of self-delusion, some ‘ethico-political’ justification for their actions, the tendency wouldbe for the legal rules and other structures put in place to organize the collectiveaffairs of the bourgeoisie to be in constant danger of collapse, resulting in meregangsterism. The nation is as much required here as the state. Therefore, whenLiah Greenfield describes the ‘spirit of capitalism’ as ‘the economic expression ofthe collective competitiveness inherent in nationalism—itself a product of itsmembers’ collective investment in the dignity and prestige of the nation’, she isturning history on its head (Greenfield 2001, 473). It is the collectivecompetitiveness of capitalism, expressed at the level of the state, which requiresnationalism as a framework within which competitiveness can be justified interms of a higher aspiration than increased profit margins. If ‘Britain’ is to becollectively competitive then this obviously means that individual Britishcompanies must be individually competitive, but they are in competition witheach other as much as with foreign rivals. In the course of competition some willfail. Their failure is, however, a contribution to national survival, comparableperhaps to the sacrifice of soldiers in the field: competition is the health ofthe nation, just as—in Randolph Bourne’s famous phrase—war is the health ofthe state.

Nationalism does not simply unify territorially demarcated sections of thebourgeoisie; it plays an equally important role for capital in fragmenting theworking class.7 Lukacs (1970, 66) points out that one of the ways in whichthe bourgeoisie tries to prevent workers achieving coherent class consciousness isby ‘binding the individual members of those classes as single individuals, as mere“citizens”, to an abstract state reigning over and above them’. But it cannot be an‘abstract state’; it has to be a very concrete, particular state founded on a senseof common identity. In historical terms, nationalism originally had two sources forindividual working classes. One was from the spontaneous search for a formof collective identity with which to overcome the alienation of capitalist society.National consciousness was therefore an available alternative to class conscious-ness, but was never a complete alternative, since reformism was effectively themeans by which nationalism was naturalized for workers. The other source was

7 Nationalism affects all classes, not only capitalists and workers; but for the purposes ofthis argument I am using a ‘two-class’ model that does not exist anywhere in pure form, noris ever likely to.



the deliberate fostering of nationalism by the bourgeoisie in order to bind workers tothe state, and hence to capital (Davidson 2000, 37–46; 2008, 158–160). Hence, theabsurdity of claims by Tom Nairn that ‘what the extra-American world should fearis not United States (US) nationalism but the debility of the American state’—as ifnationalism were not the means by which the American state mobilizes popularsupport behind imperialist adventures like Afghanistan and Iraq (Nairn 2005, 233).

Nationalism often appears to be so internalized that any attempt to transcend itmust be futile; but this is simply to accept, as Nairn has done, the self-imagepresented by nationalist ideology. In fact, although nationalism runs wide, it doesnot always or necessarily run very deep, which is why defenders of the bourgeoisorder must ensure that attempts by the exploited to overcome alienation throughcollective identity are constantly directed towards national rather than classresolutions. Nationalism is the spontaneous ideology generated by capitalist society,but it has always to be supplemented by a conscious process of reinforcement.

We should not, however, mistake the possibility of dispensing withnationalism for the illusion that this has already occurred. Exaggerated claimsthat a transnational class of capitalists is about to emerge tend to coexist withover-optimistic assessments of similar developments occurring among theoppressed and exploited, in which ‘the ideas of national interest and nationaleconomy were revealed for the ideological tools that they were’ (Sklair 2001, 31).In fact, as David Harvey (2005, 84) has noted, ‘the neoliberal state needsnationalism of a certain sort to survive’. Why?

The application of neoliberal policies over the past 30 years, even if only partlyachieved, has increased the alienation and atomization that are the normalcondition of capitalist everyday life. ‘Capitalism needs a human being who hasnever existed,’ writes Terry Eagleton, ‘one who is prudently restrained in theoffice and wildly anarchic in the shopping mall’ (Eagleton 2003, 28). But preciselybecause these human beings do not exist, because the economic and the social arenot as separate in life as they are in academic disciplines, anarchy, the emphasis onself-gratification, self-realization and self-fulfilment through commodities, hastended to permeate all relations, with uncertain consequences requiringrepression. Unchecked, the future will be as foreseen by George Steiner at thefall of the Berlin Wall, combining repression and commodification: ‘The knout onthe one hand; the cheeseburger on the other’ (Steiner 1990, 131). But repression onits own will not produce the degree of willing acceptance that the system requires.In these circumstances nationalism plays three roles. First, it provides a type ofpsychic compensation for the direct producers which is unobtainable from themere consumption of commodities. It is, as they say, no accident that thenationalist turn in the ideology of the Chinese ruling class became most markedwith the initial opening up of the Chinese economy to world markets in 1978 andthe suppression of the movement for political reform in 1989, which was followedby a ‘patriotic education campaign’, the general tone of which continues to thisday (Hughes 2006). Second, nationalism acts as a means of recreating at thepolitical level the cohesion that is being lost at the social level. Third, it uses thissense of cohesion to mobilize populations behind the performance of nationalcapitals against their competitors and rivals. This last aspect requires someelaboration.

The division into national territories has always helped to determine where thedevaluation or destruction of capital occurs, as one set of state managers attempts

22 Neil Davidson


to protect their ‘own’ national capital from the pressure of global crisis at theexpense of other sets attempting the same.8 This occurs most sharply in cases ofactual military conflict: ‘In an age of mass politics all interstate wars are nationalistwars, conducted in the name of nations and purportedly in their interests’(Beissinger 1998, 176). But war is scarcely the only, or even the most common, formof geopolitical rivalry; there is also what Luttwak describes as ‘geo-economics’ or‘warfare by other means’:

In it, investment capital for industry provided or guided by the state is theequivalent of firepower; product development subsidized by the state is theequivalent of weapon innovation; and market penetration supported by the statereplaces military bases and garrisons on foreign soil as well as diplomatic influence.(Luttwak 1998, 128)

These are not simply analogies. As Luttwak notes, war may be ‘different fromcommerce, but evidently not different enough’: ‘In particular, an action–reactioncycle of trade restrictions that evoke retaliation has a distinct resemblance to crisisescalation that can lead to outright war’ (Luttwak 1998, 128). Indeed, the ability towage war is clearly seen as an advantage by state managers in relation to theireconomic strategies. Greenfield quotes one Indian commentator: ‘A soft state thatyields on vital national issues cannot project an image of a tough negotiator ontrade and commerce’ (Greenfield 2001, 482).

What Luttwak calls the ‘adversarial attitudes’ mobilized by states can ofcourse escape the control of those who initially fostered them (Luttwak 1998, 128).Ian Kershaw suggests that one of the reasons the Japanese military elite wasforced into the Second World War was that it had encouraged levels of masschauvinism and expectations of military–territorial expansion from which itcould not retreat without provoking popular hostility: the generals were trappedin a prison of their own devising (Kershaw 2007, 105–106, 380). Norman Stoneargues more generally that the First World War could not have been brought to anegotiated conclusion by the end of 1916 no matter what the politicians andgenerals may have wished, because the nationalist hatreds they had encouraged,now amplified by the deaths, injuries and destruction, had acquired their own‘momentum’ and called forth leaders committed to victory (Stone 2007, 97). Butsimilar outcomes can be found in the neoliberal era. Before 1997 the BritishConservative Party was associated with an imperialist nationalism opposed to‘Europe’—not because the European Union (EU) was in any sense hostileto neoliberalism, but as an ideological diversion from the failure of neoliberalismto transform the fortunes of British capital. The nationalism invoked for thispurpose now places a major obstacle before British politicians and state managers

8 What counts as ‘national capital’ is a complex matter, as was pointed out by ColinBarker in an important contribution to the debate over the relationship between the stateand capital during the 1970s (Barker 1978, 33–37). For the purposes of this article, itincludes all capitals, state and private, based in the nation-state of their origin, plus theiroverseas operations. More controversially, perhaps, I would argue that it should alsoinclude all those foreign capitals operating within that nation-state, to the extent that theyare subject to its legal and fiscal regime. One consequence of this in the era of neoliberalglobalization would of course be that some capitals will increasingly be claimed as‘national’ by two or more states: their state of origin and those other states upon whoseterritory they operate.



who want to pursue a strategy of greater European integration, however rationalthat may be from their perspective (Gowan 1997, 99–103). But there is anotherdanger for the ruling classes too, namely that neoliberal nationalism will lead tothe fragmentation of neoliberal states. Harvey writes,

Margaret Thatcher, through the Falklands/Malvinas war and in her antagonisticposture towards Europe, invoked nationalist sentiment in support of her neoliberalproject, though it was the idea of England and St George, rather than the UnitedKingdom, that animated her vision—which turned Scotland and Wales hostile.(Harvey 2005, 86)

But would the hostility of (some) Scottish and (some) Welsh people have been lesshad Thatcher conveyed a sense of Britishness rather than Englishness? GordonBrown is currently trying to do the former, with no real success. The difficulty here isa deeper one. Because nationalism is such an inescapable aspect of capitalistdevelopment, the first response to intolerable conditions is to seek to establish a newnation-state, although this is usually only possible where some level of nationalconsciousness already exists, as it does, for example, in Scotland. In other words,neoliberalism may require nations, but it does not require particular nations.

In spite of the risks, however, it is not clear what could replace nationalism as ameans of securing even the partial loyalty of the working class to the capitaliststate and preventing the formation of revolutionary class consciousness. Early inthe neoliberal era, Raymond Williams noted that ‘a global system of productionand trade’ also required ‘a socially organized and socially disciplined population,one from which effort can be mobilized and taxes collected along the residual butstill effective national lines; there are still no effective political competitors in that’(Williams 1983, 192). Could loyalties be transferred upwards to a global or evenregional state? Montserrat Guibernau has argued that the EU will ultimatelyrequire ‘European national consciousness’ to give coherence to the otherwiseuneven group of nations that comprise that body (Guibernau 1996, 114). But, asAnderson writes, ‘in themselves, market-zones, “natural”-geographic or politico-administrative, do not create attachments. Who would willingly die for Comeconor the EEC [European Economic Community]?’ (Anderson 2006, 53.) Nor couldloyalties easily be transferred downwards to individual capitals. It has beenknown for workers to support their company, even to make sacrifices to keep it inbusiness. But this tends to happen where firms are local, well established andworkers are employed on a long-term basis. Where workers make sacrifices interms of job losses, worsened conditions and—as happened in the US duringthe 1980s—real cuts in pay, they do not do so because of loyalty to the firm,but because their trade unions had won the argument that there was no alter-native that did not involve the even worse fate of the firm closing down entirely.Individual managers or ‘team leaders’ may internalize the ethos of McDonald’s orWal-Mart, but workers cannot: the reality of the daily conflict between themselvesand the employer is too stark to be overcome. Beyond this, even those companieswhich still retain health insurance and pension arrangements come nowhere nearproviding the integrative functions of even the weakest nation-state. It is of coursepossible for workers outside a company to celebrate its achievements—but onlybecause it is national, as, for example, in the reaction of German workers to themerger of Daimler and Chrysler, which effectively saw the German companyacquire the American (Greenfield 2001, 483).

24 Neil Davidson


Conclusion

By asserting the centrality of national consciousness and nationalism to thecontinued existence of the states system, I am not proposing that we simply add asub-set of political science (‘national and ethnic studies’) to international relationsand sociology, in the hope that this, and an awareness of U&CD, will overcometheir theoretical deficiencies. The obstacles to understanding caused bydisciplinary specialization, which Rosenberg highlights, are real enough, butnot accidental. They are the direct consequence of the disintegration of post-Enlightenment bourgeois thought, which involved retreating from the cultivationof a scientific understanding of the world as a whole, and turning instead to thecontemplation of individual fragments arbitrarily divided into academicdisciplines. These categories would have made no sense to Adam Smith. Thewealth of nations is neither a work of ‘economics’, the one to which it has beenretrospectively consigned, nor an academic text; it is a revolutionary programmefor the transformation of Scotland and ultimately the world into ‘commercialsociety’ (Davidson 2005, 11–12, 18). In one sense, classical Marxism was anattempt to restore the lost unity of bourgeois thought for similarly revolutionaryaims, but on the basis of a new proletarian class subject. U&CD may inadvertentlyhelp resolve the problems identified by Rosenberg, but only because it is a specificapplication of historical materialism and shares its methodological assumptions.One in particular is central here. Trotsky noted how his own intellectualdevelopment was influenced by the ‘Hegelian Marxist, Antonio Labriola’ whocounterposed the concept of totality to ‘the theory of multiple factors’ in historicalexplanation (Trotsky 1984, 123; Labriola 1908, 140–155). The ostensibledisciplinary base from which analysis is undertaken is less important than anapproach that recognizes that the real ‘specificity’ of the capitalist mode ofproduction is precisely the way in which it permeates and colours every form ofidentity (the nation), every institution (the state) and every set of structures (thestate system). How it does so is an issue that will have to be addressed elsewhere(see Davidson forthcoming a).

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