Transnationalist Marxism: a critique

Introduction

While John Maclean could write of the ‘mutual neglect’ between international relations

and Marxism in 1988, since the end of the cold war increasing numbers of Marxists

have contributed to debates on the international system, focussing in particular on the

impact of globalization on national politics and national economies.1 One group of

Marxist-inspired scholars, including Robert Cox and the neo-Gramscians and members

of the Amsterdam School, has proposed a radicalized version of globalization theory

that argues that an emergent transnationalization is transforming the global political

economy.2 Transnationalization, they argue, is not simply forging greater global

interconnections between national economies and nationally-organized social forces,

but is tending towards the transcendence of the nation-state as the organizer and

container of capitalist politics and economics. For William Robinson, who has become

the key figure in the transnationalist perspective and systematically elaborated

transnationalization theory, this represents an ‘epochal change’ in world

capitalism.3

Transnationalist theorists reject the dominant mainstream tradition in international

relations, Realism, which they argue promotes a transhistorical essentialization and

reification of state power. Against this, transnationalism emphasizes the ontological

primacy of social forces and, in particular, the developing power of a transnational

capitalist class (TCC) committed to the neo-liberal restructuring of the global political

economy. The transnationalization of production and the rise of the TCC, they argue,

have displaced the nation-state from the central place it once occupied in the

international system. For the neo-Gramscians the nation-state has been

transnationalized, while for Robinson economic transformations underlie the

emergence of a transnational state (TNS). According to transnationalist theorists, the

consequence of these developments is that the inter-state system has been

transformed, rendering earlier understandings of global geo-politics and national

projects of imperialist power projection increasingly anachronistic.

1

Transnationalist theory represents a sophisticated attempt to integrate novel

developments within a renewed historical materialist understanding of the global

system. But, I will argue, its appraisal of contemporary trends is one-sided and fails to

capture the contradictory nature of the uneven development of the capitalist world

system. In the first part of this article I explore transnationalist arguments on the

nature of the global economy, and argue that while transnationalism is indeed an

important trend the national organization of economic structures and processes

remains significant. In the second part I offer a critique of transnationalist arguments

on contemporary trends in the power and role of the nation-state. Here I argue that,

while Robinson is right to reject neo-Weberian theory and to emphasize the structural

interdependence of economics and politics, if we take this seriously we must conclude

that the transnationalist view that economics is unilaterally driving politics is

mistaken. The nation-state is not simply an agent of transnationalization but remains a

central actor in the competitive dynamics of the global economy. In the final part of

the article I consider transnationalist arguments on imperialism and the way that these

competitive dynamics are expressed at the level of the inter-state system. Here I argue

that while the world’s major national ruling classes share a common interest in the

stability of global capitalism, common interests are tempered by the persistence of

rivalry between them, which continues to influence the dynamics of the contemporary

global system.

Transnationalism and the global economy 4

Global economic integration has been driven over the past century by successive

waves of trade (commodity capital), foreign direct investment (FDI) (industrial capital)

and more recently financial flows (financial capital). The consequence has been, for the

transnationalists, a transition from an international economy, characterized by what

Peter Dicken calls the ‘shallow integration’ of externally linked national circuits of

accumulation, to a global economy shaped by integrated production and finance

(Dicken’s ‘deep integration’).5 The statistical basis of this argument seems

incontrovertible. According to the UN’s World Investment Report 2003 FDI inflows

rose from $52 billion in 1982 to $651 billion by 2002, and FDI increased annually by

an average of 28 percent between 1986 and 2000.6 As a result of these enormous

investment flows, Robinson argues, ‘national production systems have become

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fragmented and integrated externally into new globalized circuits of accumulation’,

organized via ‘an integrated global financial system’.7 Cox similarly highlights the

emergence of ‘complex transnational networks of production’, which constitute ‘an

economic space transcending all country borders’, as the state-regulated exchange of

the international-economy model is progressively subordinated to the world-economy

model.8 Integrated global production has, since the 1970s, been reinforced by the

increased power of transnational finance capital, the two combining to exercize

considerable leverage over state policy.

Cox recognizes that the transcendence of the international-economy model is

incomplete, but nevertheless argues that transnationalization has produced ‘a “new

capitalism” which opposes any form of state or interstate control or intervention’.9 As

national economic regulation and planning have declined, he argues that the

contemporary global economy is best conceptualized as a ‘nebuleuse’, which

‘expresses the consensus of forces promoting global capitalism’ and neo-liberalism.10

For Robinson, the new liberal world order dismantles national barriers to the free

movement and operation of capital as it creates an integrated world market along lines

similar to the earlier establishment of national economies, including ‘a single set of

laws, taxes, currency, and political consolidation around a common state’.11

Criticism of this view does not entail denying either the reality of economic

transnationalization as an important contemporary tendency or the expansionary

dynamic of capital highlighted by Marx and Engels. As they argued in the Communist

Manifesto, capitalism ‘batters down all Chinese Walls’ as it is driven to spread across

the globe by the imperative of competitive accumulation.12 Nevertheless, a degree of

caution should be exercized over what Michael Löwy refers to as ‘a certain economism

and a surprising amount of Free Tradist optimism’ in Marx and Engels.13 For, the

economic logic of capital has never been separable from politics, and the global

expansion of capitalism has both dismantled and re-erected state-built walls around

national economies. In the context of contemporary debates about transnationalism,

over-emphasis on capital’s expansionary dynamic risks presenting a theory of global

integration driven primarily by an economic logic, abstracted from what Philip

McMichael refers to as the ‘residuals’ of earlier phases in the development of

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capitalism as an historical living reality. These residuals, he argues, ‘have a way of

asserting themselves and conditioning the process under examination’.14

We can think of the national economy as one such residual. The transnationalists

correctly problematize the idea of a national economy, for there are, as Robinson

argues, no closed national markets, protected national production systems and

insulated national financial systems.15 But if the national can only be fully

comprehended as part of the global and subject to global determinations, the economic

concentrations within the national remain significant. To deny this, and to highlight

only the fragmentation of national production systems and the transcendence of

national borders, results in a one-sided simplification of a complex and contradictory

reality and the obscuring of the elements of continuity with the past that co-exist with

the dynamic of change.

Notwithstanding the growth of FDI during three decades of neo-liberal restructuring,

production and investment remain overwhelmingly oriented on national economies.

Average export-GDP ratios are around 10 percent for the most advanced countries (the

US, Japan and the EU, treated as a single economy), such that the material interests of

most people still largely depend on the other 90 percent.16 One measure of

transnationalization, the transnationality index compiled in The World Investment

Report 2003, confirms these arguments. A country’s transnationality index is arrived

at by measurements of four sets of data: FDI inflows as a percentage of gross fixed

capital formation for 1998-2002; FDI inward stocks as a percentage of GDP in 2000;

value added of foreign affiliates as a percentage of GDP in 2000; and employment of

foreign affiliates as a percentage of total employment in 2000. Small countries, such as

Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands have a relatively high transnationality index of

a little over a third. The indices of larger countries, however, are considerably lower:

those of Canada, Britain and Germany are around 20 percent, France’s just over 10

percent, the US’s slightly less than 10 percent, and Japan’s only 1-2%.17 In addition,

United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) figures show that in

the period 1990-2003 FDI accounted for ‘8% of world domestic investment’, leading to

the conclusion that ‘FDI only complements domestic investment’. 18

4

A similar qualification to transnationalist arguments emerges when we explore

beneath the label of ‘transnational corporations’ (TNCs). It remains the case that even

the most internationalized TNCs concentrate research and development and

management control within their home states or regions. Ruigrok and van Tulder’s

detailed analysis of international restructuring demonstrates a relative locational

immobility amongst TNCs: of the world’s 100 largest firms only eighteen keep over

half their assets abroad, and the top 100 firms in terms of foreign assets hold on

1 J. Maclean, ‘Marxism and International Relations: A Strange Case of Mutual Neglect’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol.17, no.2, 1988.

2 The centrality of transnationalization for the neo-Gramscians is captured by Stephen Gill, who labels it as ‘transnational historical materialism’ (S. Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp.46-51).

3 W. I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism, The John Hopkins University Press, London, 2004, p.1.

4 ‘International’, ‘transnational’, and ‘global’, are sometimes used in the transnationalist literature as if they were self-explanatory. Gill, for example, refers to the current ‘internationalisation, transnationalisation or indeed globalisation of the state’ (S. Gill, ‘Gramsci and Global Politics: Towards a Post-Hegemonic Research Agenda’, in S. Gill (ed.), Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p.9). Leslie Sklair provides a helpful distinction: ‘international refers to forces, processes, and institutions based on the pre-existing (even if changing) system of nation-states….transnational refers to forces, processes, and institutions that cross borders but do not derive their power and authority from the state’, such as TNCs, while ‘global’ is defined as ‘the goals to which processes of globalization are leading’, such as a borderless economy, but which are currently far from attained. For Sklair ‘the transnational, transcending nation-states in an international system in some respects but still having to cope with them in others, is the reality’ (L. Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class, Blackwell, Oxford, 2001, pp.2-3).

5 P. Dicken, Global Shift, Guilford, New York, 3rd edition, 1998, p.5.6 UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2003. FDI Policies for Development:

National and International Perspectives, United Nations, New York and Geneva, p.3.7 Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism, p.10, p.15.8 R. W. Cox, ‘Structural Issues of Global Governance: Implications for Europe’,

in S. Gill (ed.), Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, pp.259-260. Henk Overbeek argues similarly that economic processes are ‘transcending and even negating the boundaries of national economies’ (H. Overbeek, ‘Global Restructuring and Neoliberal Labour Market Regulation in Europe. The Case of Migration Policy', International Journal of Political Economy, vol.28, no.1. 1998, p.59.

9 R. W. Cox, ‘The Crisis in World Order and the Challenge to International Organisation’, Cooperation and Conflict, vol.29, no.2, 1994, p.99.

10 R. W. Cox, The Political Economy of a Plural World, Routledge, London, 2002, p.33.11 Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism, p.78.12 K. Marx and F. Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in Karl Marx:

Selected Works volume 1, London: Lawrence and Wishart (1942), p.209.13 M. Löwy, ‘Marxism and the National Question’, New Left Review 96, 1976, p.82. 14 P. McMichael, ‘Revisiting the question of the transnational state: a comment

on William Robinson’s “Social theory and globalization”’, Theory and Society, 30,

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average ‘only 37 per cent of their assets abroad’.19 Only TNCs based in smaller

economies such as Sweden, Holland, and Switzerland, have anything like a majority of

their share-holdings abroad. Hirst and Thompson’s figures show a similar home

concentration of MNC assets, and they conclude that ‘success in the international

economy has national sources’.20 These figures do highlight important changes over

earlier decades, and we would be unwise to discount transnationalization as an

emergent trend, but for now at least capital’s inherited domestic orientation has not

been fundamentally transcended.

One reason for this orientation lies in the nature of capital. Marx argued that capital

can only exist as many capitals, and in the real world of competition capitals are not

simply parts of an abstract global capital but separate alienable commodities which

share the twin aspects of value of all commodities, being both abstract exchange-

values and concrete use-values.21 Conceived of in the abstract, capital has no spatial

bounds and is driven by the systemic imperative of capital accumulation to search for

markets and sources of surplus-value wherever they may be found. As one General

Motors’ executive famously declared, its business is not making cars but making

profits. Yet, and this is true for even the most internationalized financial capitals, profit

realization requires production of concrete use-values, with specific characteristics,

embodying particular labour skills and components, which themselves embody skills,

raw materials, etc.. Capitals rarely exhibit the ‘footloose’ quality ascribed to them by

what Held and his colleagues refer to as ‘hyper-globalizers’.22 For, although the

production of use-values takes place within competitive markets, it requires a

considerable cooperation between capitals, commodities being produced and sold

within complex networks of production (including supply networks), finance, and

2001, p.202.15 W. I. Robinson, ‘Reification and theoreticism in the study of globalisation,

imperialism and hegemony: response to Kiely, Pozo-Martion and Valladão 1’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, vol. 19, no.3, 2006.

16 P. Hirst and G. Thompson, Globalisation in Question, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996, p.112.

17 UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2003, p.6.18 UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2004. The Shift Towards Services, United

Nations, New York and Geneva, p.3.19 W. Ruigrok and R. Van Tulder, The Logic of International Restructuring,

Routledge, London, 1995, p.156.20 Hirst and Thompson, Globalisation in Question, p.98.

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distribution. These networks have indeed been transnationalized within global

production chains, and we can agree with Robinson that ‘society as social structure

cannot be limited to the specific historical form of the nation-state’.23 Nevertheless, the

economic interconnections of the social structure remain densest at the national level,

suggesting that capital remains in a relation of what Harman calls ‘structural

interdependence’ with states, producing distinct national business cultures and what

David Coates has called national ‘models of capitalism’.24

These structures and cultures are not fixed, and the global export of the US-inspired

MBA represents an attempt to penetrate and restructure national business cultures

along more neo-liberal lines. Yet, where capital does undertake international

restructuring under the pressure of globalization, the evidence indicates that it often

does so within relatively narrow geographical limits. UNCTAD notes that ‘the

concentration of FDI within the Triad (EU, Japan, and the US) remained high between

1985 and 2002 (at around 80 percent of the world’s outward stock and 50-60 percent

for the world’s inward stock)’.25 Although low-wage areas such as coastal China are

today included in the major receiving centres, the concentration in the advanced

countries suggests that low wages and welfare costs are not the only concern in

location decisions. Productivity and profits depend on a range of additional factors,

including access to developed markets, implantation behind standards walls, social

and political stability, high levels of skill, education, and expertise, healthy and flexible

labour, high quality supplier networks, patent and property protection, modern and

efficient infrastructure, and the concentration of research institutions. These factors

are concentrated in the advanced regions, providing firms with dynamic external

economies of scale and scope. Thus, in the EU, where the transnational organization of

21 C. Harman, ‘The State and Capitalism Today’, International Socialism (second series) 51.22 D. Held et al, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, Culture, Polity Press,

Cambridge, 1999. Footlooseness usually refers to geographical mobility, but can also be thought of in terms of industrial sector. Figures from The Economist (4 September 2004, p.56) demonstrate the immobility of fixed capital. Profit rates in the car industry have fallen from 20 percent in the 1920s, to 10 percent in the 1960s and 5 percent today. Yet the fixed investments of Ford, GM, Daimler-Chrysler, etc. remain geared to car production.

23 Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism, p.91.24 Harman, ‘The State and Capitalism Today’; D. Coates, Models of Capitalism:

Growth and Stagnation in the Modern Era, Polity Press, Cambridge.25 UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2003, p.23. Hirst and Thompson,

Globalisation in Question, p.68, produce broadly similar figures.

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capital is well-developed, the largest European capitals have largely adopted regional

accumulation strategies as means to maintain global competitiveness.26

By focussing on general trends towards transnationalization and the emergence of a

global capitalism, much transnationalist theory overlooks the particularities of national

and regional concentrations of economic activity and therefore obscures the

unevenness that exists within the global economy.27 This is a vital omission, for

unevenness does not simply describe the global economy but is both a precondition and a

consequence of the competitive accumulation that gives it its dynamic. Within that

dynamic the counterpart of competitive accumulation is competitive destruction, the

significance of which is magnified as the logic of accumulation produces ever larger

corporations whose economic weight within a national economy demands that in times of

difficulty they are supported by political and regulatory authorities, as Britain’s recent

actions over the Northern Rock building society demonstrate. Thus, we must now

consider the transnationalists’ arguments on the contemporary transformations of the

nation-state.

Transnationalization and the nation-state

Marxism has traditionally regarded the working class as necessarily internationalist in

outlook and political orientation. Indeed, somewhat ironically given the current

critique of the neo-Gramscians, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks used ‘the international

class’ to disguise ‘proletariat’ from the prison censor. Today, however,

transnationalists argue that global economic change is transforming the relation

between classes and states and creating what Cox calls a ‘transnational managerial

class’ and what Robinson and Sklair call a ‘transnational capitalist class’ (TCC).

26 G. Carchedi, For Another Europe: A Class Analysis of European Economic Integration, Verso, London, 2001, pp.31-5; B. Balanyá et al, Europe Inc.: Regional and Global Restructuring and the Rise of Corporate Power, Pluto Press, London, 2000. The Amsterdam School has applied a neo-Gramscian approach to transnational restructuring within the EU. See, for example, B. Van Apeldoorn, ‘Transnationalization and the Restructuring of Europe’s Socioeconomic Order: Social Forces in the Construction of “Embedded Neoliberalism”’, International Journal of Political Economy, vol.28, no.1; B. Van Apeldoorn, Transnational Capitalism and the Struggle over European Integration, Routledge, London, 2002; O. Holman, ‘Transnational Class Strategy and the New Europe’, International Journal of Political Economy, vol.22, no.1, 1992.

27 The work of the Amsterdam School on transnational integration in the EU is a notable exception.

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Despite differences between Cox, Sklair and Robinson on the membership of the TCC,

there is agreement that it is, in Sklair’s words, ‘domiciled in and identified with no

particular country but, on the contrary, is identified with the global capitalist system’.28

According to Robinson the objective aspect of TCC class formation lies in the fact that

it ‘is tied to globalized circuits of production, marketing, and finances unbound from

particular national territories and identities and because its interests lie in global over

local or national accumulation’.29 These objective developments have a subjective

corollary because, despite rivalries within it, those controlling the world’s largest

capitals share, according to Cox, a ‘distinctive class consciousness’ and a common

ideology constructed around a ‘policy consensus’ promoting ‘a world economy open to

corporate movements of goods, capital, and technology’.30 That neo-liberal consensus,

it is argued, has been articulated and given programmatic form within increasingly

influential transnational institutional frameworks of capitalist management. This

framework includes both the formal institutions of global economic management - such

as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organization (WTO) - and

informal ‘policy networks’ and business organizations, including the European Round-

table of Industrialists and the World Economic Forum (WEF). So significant have these

institutions and organizations become for transnationalists, that Kees Van der Pijl

refers to the WEF, in language inconceivable for Marxists until recently, as ‘a true

International of capital’.31 One of their key functions, according to Stephen Gill, is to

‘promote a transnational “identity” and a shared consciousness which fosters a closer

identification of interests’ between members of the TCC.32

28 Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class, p.10. Robinson only includes propertied classes in the TCC while Sklair includes its various agents - journalists, state bureaucrats, politicians, technicians, bureaucrats in the international financial institutions, etc.. Despite Sklair’s criticism of neo-Gramscian ambivalence about state-centrism, with which ‘it is necessary to make a decisive break’ (p.16), the membership of Cox’s transnational managerial class is similar to Sklair’s TCC. For a rigorous historical analysis of transnational class formation see the works of K. Van Der Pijl, especially, Transnational Classes and International Relations, Routledge, London, 1998.

29 Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism, p.47.30 R. W. Cox, Production, Power and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of

History, Columbia University Press, New York, 1987, p.359.31 Van Der Pijl, Transnational Classes, p.133.32 S. Gill, ‘Neo-Liberalism and the Shift Towards a US-Centred Transnational

Hegemony’, in H. Overbeek (ed.), Restructuring Hegemony in the Global Political Economy. The Rise of Transnational Neo-liberalism in the 1980s, Routledge, London, 1993, p.261.

9

The international institutions also contribute to the development of Cox’s ‘nebuleuse’,

which, he argues ‘has no fixed and authoritative institutional structure’ and

corresponds to the idea of ‘governance without government’, and to the erosion of

state powers of economic management.33 This erosion, whereby economic and social

policies have been subordinated to market processes, Van Der Pijl argues, was

designed to restore the ‘sovereignty of capital’ against challenges from subaltern

social forces operating through sovereign states.34 As a consequence, according to Gill,

social actors increasingly operate within the vice of ‘disciplinary neo-liberalism’ and

under a ‘new constitutionalism’: by enshrining market principles as the irreducible

basis of freedom, and increasingly insulating markets from state or democratic control,

the global economic institutions defend the rights of property owners internationally

and ‘guarantee the freedom of entry and exit of internationally mobile capital with

regard to different socio-economic spaces’.35 The ascendancy of markets, and their

disciplinary power over states, results in the transnationalization of the state.

Robinson rejects the dualist thinking of the neo-Weberians who conceive of states and

markets as separate, externally related, social institutions that follow independent

logics. Instead, he argues that economics and politics are internally related, that the

state institutionalizes the class relations that develop around historically formed

patterns of social production. Thus, for Robinson, the necessary counterpart of

economic transnationalization is the transnationalization of class relations and of

states. Transnationalists do not argue that this entails the disappearance of states, but

that they have evolved into agents of transnational capitalism and of TCC interests.

Robinson presents the most radical argument on the contemporary transformations of

nation-states, which he argues have been incorporated into a developing transnational

33 Cox, The Political Economy of a Plural World, p.83. James Rosenau explores the implications of the idea of ‘governance without government’. He argues that ‘hegemons are declining’, boundaries disappearing, military alliances ‘losing their viability’ and interstate governance is being displaced by new regimes constructed from the interactions of transnational actors (Rosenau: 1992, p.1).

34 K. Van Der Pijl, ‘The Sovereignty of Capital Impaired: Social Forces and Codes of Conduct for Multinational Corporations’, in H. Overbeek (ed.), Restructuring Hegemony in the Global Political Economy.

35 S. Gill, ‘Gramsci and Global Politics’, p.11. One symptom of this is the importance of private credit ratings agencies (such as Moody’s and Standard and Poor) in determining capital markets’ views of sovereign states. TNCs can equally use the World Economic Forum’s annual World Competitiveness Report when making investment decisions.

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regulatory structure, the TNS. He defines this as ‘an emerging network that comprises

transformed and externally integrated national states, together with the supranational

economic and political forums, and has not yet acquired any centralized institutional

form’.36

The neo-Gramscians broadly concur with Robinson on the dynamic of the tendencies at

work, although there are differences between them on whether we are seeing the

emergence of a transnational state. Van Der Pijl’s argument that there is a trend

towards the ‘international socialization of state functions’ in the ‘Lockean heartland’ of

the world system comes closest to endorsing Robinson’s perspective.37 More generally,

the neo-Gramscians and, especially, the Amsterdam school, argue that the liberation of

transnational capital and the TCC from their erstwhile social obligations has resulted

in the dismantling of national welfare states in favour of global accumulation

strategies, entailing inter alia, reductions in business costs, and the weakening of

unions’ national bargaining powers.38 Where states previously mediated between world

economy pressures and the demands of domestic social forces, they now largely act as

‘agencies of the global economy….adjusting national economic policies to the

perceived exigencies of global economic liberalism’.39 In Cox’s famous phrase, states

have ‘willy nilly became more effectively accountable to a nebuleuse personified as the

global economy’.40 Thus, in the transnational era regulation increasingly embodies not

social discipline over capital, but the discipline of transnational capital over society.41

Transnationalist arguments on the state demonstrate an openness to engaging with

novel phenomena and complex global trends. This is both an indispensable condition for

the preservation of Marxism’s viability as a research programme and a challenge to

other Marxists to reflect on traditional historical materialist arguments on state power

and its relation to the international system. For, much Marxist (and wider social) theory

has been cast within a national framework, has emphasized the national determinants of

state power, and merely added the international sphere, where it is acknowledged at all,

as a secondary ‘factor’ with no fundamental importance to the understanding of

national societies.42 Nevertheless, while it can be readily accepted that global

economic pressures impact ever more forcefully on states and state policy, that this is

reflected in the emergence of neo-liberalism as a dominant ideology within the

36 Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism, p.88.

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international institutions, and that state policy is being transformed along neo-liberal

lines, problems remain with the transnationalist perspective. At the most general level,

these flow from that perspective’s primarily outside-in approach to state power,

reflecting a form of linear thinking that is unable to capture the significance of the

contradictory tendencies at work in the global political economy and which, as Philip

McMichael has written of Robinson, ‘suspends the dialectic’.43 At the centre of those

contradictory tendencies is the persistence of state-power, which, even as states introject

the neo-liberal imperatives of the contemporary world system, continues to be projected

into the international system. We can explore these contradictory tendencies by

reflecting further on some of the transnationalists’ key ideas.

As we saw above, Robinson mobilizes the familiar Marxist argument that economics

and politics are internally related. Therefore, while formally separate, they are in

reality ‘distinct moments of the same totality’.44 This represents, as far as it goes, a

perfectly solid foundation for the development of a Marxist understanding of the

contemporary world system. Yet, Marxism traditionally sees a dialectical

interpenetration of the whole and the parts, changes in the whole being expressed, via

complex mediations, in changes in the parts and changes in the parts contributing to a

transformation of the whole. The emphasis of the transnationalists, however, is

37 K. Van Der Pijl, ‘The Sovereignty of Capital Impaired’. For Van Der Pijl’s most recent thinking on the extension of the Lockean heartland, and the rivalries that persists both within it and with the ‘Hobbesian contender states’ see Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq, Pluto Press, London, 2006.

38 For Philip Cerny states have been transformed from welfare states into ‘competition states’; P. Cerny, The Changing Architecture of Politics, Sage, London, 1990, ch.8.

39 R. W. Cox, ‘Civil Society at the Turn of the Millennium: Prospects for an Alternative World Order’, Review of International Studies, vol.25, no.1, 1999, p.12.

40 R.W. Cox, ‘‘Global perestroika’, in R. Miliband and L. Panitch (eds.), The Socialist Register 1992: New World Order?, Merlin Press, London, 1992, p.27. See also Cox, The Political Economy of a Plural World, p.81.

41 Van Der Pijl, ‘The Soverignty of Capital Impaired’, p.49. In the global south, less resistant to the international institutions’ structural adjustment conditionality, neo-liberalism has been devastating, such that in many cases ‘the patrimonial glue that holds society together is dissolved’ (A. Hoogvelt, Globalisation and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1997, p.175). Interestingly, however, transnational capital’s requirement for political stability means that neo-liberalization has ‘had to uphold the state and destroy it at the same time’ (p.169). Consequently, for Cox weaker states have become agents of ‘global poor relief and riot control’ (R. W. Cox, ‘Critical Political Economy’, in B. Hettne (ed.), International Political Economy: Understanding Global Disorder, Zed Books, London, 1995, p.41.

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overwhelmingly on one side of this dialectic, and transformative powers are located

almost entirely within the global economy. The consequence of this, that states are

deprived of their own agency and reduced to the status of epiphenomena of the global

economy, is expressed in Cox’s argument that states have been made, ‘willy-nilly’,

accountable to the global economy and that the nation-state has become ‘a

transmission belt from the global to the national economy’.45

Peter Burnham has criticized Cox for underplaying ‘the extent to which “globalisation”

is authored by states’.46 But, while the realization of capitalism’s potential for

globalization is not automatic but dependent on the intervention of states, highlighting

the persistence of state power merely challenges the tenor of much transnationalist

theory without dealing it a mortal blow. As we have seen, transnationalism argues that

states are not disappearing but being transformed into agents of the global. Thus, the

mobilization of state power to inflict defeats on powerful sections of national labour

movements from the late-1970s, which helped clear the ground for the neo-liberal

advance, and to subsequently erode national welfare provision, is entirely consistent

with transnationalist theory. Yet, if transnationalists can consider these as the acts of

states en route to their own incorporation within a nebuleuse or a TNS, the very

nebulousness of the nebuleuse and the incomplete nature of the TNS suggest that it is

premature, at best, to proclaim a fundamental erosion of state power.

Robinson recognizes that the TNS does not yet have ‘the internal coherence of

national states’, that capitalist competition renders ‘any real internal unity in the

global ruling class impossible’, and that ‘the uneven development of the

transnationalization process is an important source of conflict’.47 These are important

observations, yet their implications are left unexplored. For the interdependence of

42 Justin Rosenberg argues that the historical significance of the inter-societal dimension of social development is such that historical materialism itself may require reformulation. See Rosenberg’s exchange with Alex Callinicos in Cambridge Review of International Affairs, forthcoming.

43 McMichael, ‘Revisiting the question of the transnational state’, p.201.44 Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism, p.96.45 Cox, ‘Global perestroika’, p.31. Following criticism, Cox has withdrawn the

transmission belt metaphor, but the sense behind it still pervades transnationalist thinking. See Cox, The Political Economy of a Plural World, p.33.

46 P. Burnham, ‘Globalisation: states, markets and class relations’, Historical Materialism 1, 1997, p.153.

47 Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism, pp.117-8, p.46, p.134.

13

states and capitals that developed in the twentieth century is unlikely to be dismantled

without the development of ‘real internal unity’ of the TCC and the transcendence of

conflict in the international system. Furthermore, there seems no good reason to

reduce states to mere bearers of structural imperatives and so deny them powers of

agency to defend their own interests and territory by shaping, managing and

negotiating the impact of global neo-liberalization.

How successful they are depends on a range of factors that express the uneven

development of the capitalist world system and the persistence of national

concentrations of political and economic power. Thus, rather than there being a linear

tendency towards the global law, tax, and financial regimes that Robinson suggests,

Benno Teschke and Christian Heine have argued that:

The uneven spread of crisis, non-synchronous national and sectoral

business cycles, nationally diverging balances of class forces, and

historically different institutional contexts of industrial relations,

[have] translated into palpable divergences in political management

strategies that do not follow an exclusive economic rationality.48

48 B. Teschke and C. Heine, ‘The dialectic of globalisation: a critique of Social Constructivism’, in M. Rupert and H. Smith (eds.), Historical Materialism and Globalization: Essays on Continuity and Change, Routledge, London, 2002, p.180. Henk Overbeek’s argument that national programmes of neo-liberalization are not simply externally determined and that nation-states mediate ‘between the “logic” of global capital and the historical reality of national political and social relations’, illustrates that the neo-Gramscian perspective is an evolving research programme that does not generate uniform outputs (H. Overbeek (ed) Restructuring Hegemony in the Global Political Economy, p.xi).

14

This argument directs us away from the abstract linearity of some transnationalist

writing, particularly that of Robinson, and towards the real history of capitalism. It

encourages us, following McMichael, to ‘historicize theory’ and recognize that the

logic of global capital accumulation always unfolds within constraints set by pre-

existing national social relations and institutional structures. As Sam Ashman has

argued, ‘local conditions mediate the impact of capitalism’s “laws of development”’.49

Once we recognize this, the historicization of theory logically follows, for these local

conditions are not timeless and unchanging. Rather, they involve evolving patterns of

social relations and a permanent tendency to disrupt the sedimentation of their

consequences in national institutions, cultures, business and trade union practices, etc..

This is not to devalue the sort of Marxist theorization of the unfolding and consequences

of capital’s abstract logic championed by Robinson, for the local conditions constructed

by social agents must be understood within the context of de-personalized structural

imperatives, including capitalism’s rhythm of expansion and crisis. It is, however, to

argue that a key task for Marxism in international relations is to articulate an

understanding of capitalism as a mode of production – and so foreground its constitutive

mechanisms of competitive accumulation and exploitation – within an analysis that

recognizes the changing historical forms within which capitalism’s most important

processes have unfolded.

Here, unfortunately, the transnationalist literature contains two diametrically opposed

approaches, both of which are one-sided. Cox argues that his own approach is

consistent with Gramsci’s insistence that Marxism is ‘absolute “historicism”’ and in

opposition to the ‘static and abstract’ analysis produced by those structuralist Marxists

who mobilize the concept of mode of production.50 But care must be exercized here, for

Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks were intended not for publication as a complete statement

of Marxist theory but to clarify his own thinking and guide the immediate practice of

the Italian Communist Party. And, as Gramsci’s other works indicate, he had a clear

understanding of the role played by general features of the capitalist mode of

production in shaping the immediate context of political activity.51 Cox then, produces

a more immediate historicism than Gramsci’s richer and deeper historicism and fails to

fully historicize theory in the way suggested above.

49 S. Ashman, ‘From world market to world economy’, in B. Dunn and H. Radice (eds.), 100 Years of Permanent Revolution – results and prospects, Pluto Press, London, 2006, p.90.

15

Robinson’s approach, on the other hand, forecloses exploration of the fertile fields of

the history of capitalist development. He argues, correctly but abstractly, that ‘there

is nothing in the historical-materialist conception of the state that necessarily ties it to

territory or to nation-states’. In any case, he holds to the somewhat mystifying belief

that only ‘social classes and groups are historical actors. States do not “do” anything

per se. Social classes and groups acting in and out of states (and other institutions) do

things as collective historical agents’. Finally, he reinforces his denial of the

significance of the nation-state form of capitalist politics when he argues that ‘the

nation-state and the inter-state system are not a constitutive component of world

capitalism as an integral social system but a (the) historical form in which capitalism

came into being….[and is] a disintegrating structure’.52 These arguments are

expressions of an undialectical ahistorical essentialization of capital as a social force

that echoes the mechanical materialism that Engels cautioned against when he

argued that superstructural elements ‘also exercise their influence upon the course of

the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form’.53

50 A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (eds.), Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1971, p.465; R. W. Cox, ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’, in R. W. Cox (with T. Sinclair), Approaches to World Order, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p.94. Cox appears to share the commonplace understanding of abstract as disconnected from, and so unable to explain, concrete reality. The danger of abstraction in this sense confronts all social theory, including Marxism. Marx, however, regarded abstraction as a necessary stage in scientific understanding, which distinguishes between essences and phenomenal forms of things. Science must transcend appearances in order to discover underlying structures and generative mechanisms actualized in observable phenomena. But, since we have no unmediated access to essences, it must proceed via a process of abstraction, i.e. the formation of concepts that capture basic features of some thing isolated from its concrete interconnections with other things. This, however, is the first step in a double movement, from the concrete to the abstract and back to the concrete, for Marxism’s abstract categories always take society as their necessary reference point. By this method, Marx argued, the concrete features of society could now be conceived not as a chaotic whole, ‘but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations’ (K. Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, p.100).

51 See in particular A. Gramsci, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks (D. Boothman, ed.), Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1995; A. Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks volume 2 (J. Buttigieg ed.), Columbia University Press, New York, 1996.

52 Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism, p.97, p.98, pp.143-4.53 F. Engels, ‘Letter to Joseph Bloch, 21 September 1890’, in Karl Marx: Selected

Works volume 1, Lawrence & Wishart, 1942, p.381.

16

The essentialization of transnational capital’s power is illustrated by Robinson’s

argument that transnationalization coincides with the ‘dismantling of the Keynesian

social structure of accumulation’ (149). This echoes the argument, noted above, that

national welfare states are also being dismantled. The evidence, however, does not

point straightforwardly to these conclusions. While there is no necessarily direct

correlation between the dismantling of Keynesianism and levels of state spending,

Robinson’s argument leads us to expect a decline in the latter. Yet, The Economist

reports that ‘within the OECD, public spending accounted for a larger slice of GDP in

2002 than in 1990, which was in turn higher than in 1980’.54 Similarly, any dismantling

of welfare states would suggest a reduction in public welfare spending, but again

reality does not conform easily to transnationalist arguments. Data produced by the

Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that the proportion of national income accounted for

by public spending on non-health social protection did indeed decline between 1997

and 2002. Yet, health spending rose in twenty-four out of thirty of the world’s most

advanced economies, and fell (albeit marginally) only in Hungary, Luxemburg and the

Slovak Republic. Indeed, in Britain, Western Europe’s vanguard neo-liberal state, state

health spending rose in real terms every year between 1980 and 2007.55

Without further analysis these figures should be treated with a degree of caution. They

nevertheless indicate that the tendency towards neo-liberal restructuring, although

real, is constrained by counter-veiling factors. The recent experiences of Germany and

Japan suggest two such factors. In Germany, ruling-class attempts to restructure the

social-market economy, Modell Deutschland, along neo-liberal lines since the early-

1980s were hindered for nearly two decades by fears about their potential political

consequences. These include the reinforcement of divisions between east and west and

the recurrence of the industrial and social struggle that accompanied attempts at rapid

restructuring in the mid-1990s (paralleled on a wider scale in France when similar

measures were proposed in 1995-6).56 Meanwhile, faced with a prolonged period of

stagnation during the 1990s, the Japanese state, rather than implementing orthodox

neo-liberal measures of structural reform, provided immense support for Japanese

capitalism. This included assisting banks that by the strict market principles would be

insolvent, priming the economy with massive fiscal stimuli, and holding interest rates

54 http://www.economist.com/research/Economics/alphabetic.cfm?letter=G55 C. Emmerson and C. Frayne, Public Spending – election briefing 2005,

Institute of Fiscal Studies, London, 2005.

17

at close to zero percent. These measures, which contradicted the neo-liberal emphasis

on a narrow market rationality and on reductions in state debt, cushioned corporations

from the potentially devastating consequences of short-term restructuring, including

possible bankruptcy, and indicated that forces for neo-liberal change confront ‘strong

persistent forces’ which limit neo-liberal restructuring.57

The state, then, cannot be adequately understood if it is conceptualized as a mere

transmission belt from the global to the national or agent of the TCC. It is certainly

constrained by the interests of transnational capital and there is a powerful tendency

towards neo-liberalism in the majority of the world’s states. But, the state is Janus-

faced, its outlook deriving from the historically conditioned mediating position it

occupies between the international system and domestic social forces: it remains

concerned not only with global developments but also with national class relations, the

health of national economies, and the national reproduction of political and social

relations conducive to continued capital accumulation. Transnationalists’ resistance to

these arguments flows from their focus on the power of transnational capital and their

corresponding under-theorization of capitalism’s wider social relations. These relations

are beset by contradictions – between capital and labour, between competing capitals,

between a dynamic of change and the requirement of a degree of continuity and fixity,

between capital’s immediate and long-term interests. The unfolding of these

contradictions through time is internalized in the thinking and behaviour of social

actors such that the past – McMichael’s residuals – permanently shapes and haunts the

present.

The relative weights of the global and domestic pressures on states that frame their

mediating position – whereby they project national power into the international system

while simultaneously introjecting the dynamics of that system – are not fixed. But,

56 A. Budd, ‘The crisis and contradictions of stake-holder capitalism’, Contemporary Politics, vol.3, no.2, 1997; M. Upchurch, ‘The rise and fall of Modell Deutschland?’, in M. Upchurch (ed.), The State and ‘Globalization’: comparative studies of labour and capital in national economies, Mansell, London, 1999. It is interesting to note that the recent acceleration of neo-liberalization depended on the election of an SPD-led government apparently more sympathetic to workers’ interests (see S. Bornost, ‘Germany’s political earthquake’, International Socialism 116, 2007.

57 G. Foljanty-Jost, ‘Introduction’, in G. Foljanty-Jost (ed.), Japan in the 1990s – crisis as an impetus for change?’, Transaction Publishers, London, 2004, p.9.

18

while these relative weights differ between successive periods of capitalist

development, the subordinate element in what Hannes Lacher calls the

‘national/global dialectic’ is never fundamentally marginalized.58 This is true of both

the state’s role within the global economy and in its relation to the geo-political

rivalries at the level of the inter-state system. The final part of this article considers

transnationalist arguments on contemporary geo-politics and imperialism.

Transnationalism and Imperialism

Contemporary geo-political developments pose a problem for transnationalist theory,

for since the end of the cold war economic transnationalization has coincided with an

increasing resort to war and military interventions on the part of the most advanced

states, within which the core of the TCC is based. How have transnationalists

attempted to resolve this problem? Initially, in a paper written in late-1991, Cox

argued that there was ‘an increasingly marked duality and tension between the

principles of interdependence and territorially based power’, which is ‘ultimately

military’.59 Regarding the United States, Gill explained this duality as a consequence of

the conflict between nationalist and transnationalist forces. The former, he argued,

were associated with the military and realist geopolitical strategists, while the

interests of the latter would be served by global co-operation and alliances to secure

capitalist stability and if the US state were ‘persuaded to forgo the temptations of

military adventures…’.60 In the immediate aftermath of the cold war, then, both Cox

and Gill saw a contradictory relationship between the use of military power and

capitalist transnationalization. Cox’s position has evolved however. He now recognizes

that military force is an important aspect of the contemporary global system, but

conceives it as a means to enforce the rules of the transnational managerial class

within the global economy. And, with the diffusion of power under transnationalization,

national imperialist projects are in decline and it is no longer possible to identify a

‘regime of dominance’ at the summit of the world order.61

58 H. Lacher, ‘Putting the state in its place: the critique of state-centrism and its limits’, Review of International Studies, vol.29, no.4, 2003.

59 Cox, ‘Structural Issues of Global Governance’, p.263.60 S. Gill, ‘Neo-Liberalism and the Shift Towards a US-Centred Transnational Hegemony’, p.273.61 R. W. Cox, ‘Civil Society at the Turn of the Millennium: Prospects for an

Alternative World Order’, Review of International Studies, vol.25, no.1, 1999, p.12.

19

Robinson’s argues similarly that today hegemony is exercised by the emergent TCC

rather than a dominant nation-state. The competition that persists is, according to

Robinson, no longer between national capitalist classes but between transnational

conglomerates. State power, especially that of the US, remains important, but, like

Cox, Robinson argues that US power is now mobilized ‘on behalf of a transnational

hegemony’ such that recent US military actions in the middle east ‘resulted in a

transnational outcome, despite surface appearances, insofar as these regions were

drawn further into the global capitalist system’.62 These arguments are close to those

put forward by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri in Empire: that ‘there is no place of

power - it is both everywhere and nowhere’, within a realized world market which ‘is

necessarily the end of imperialism’; that there are, therefore, ‘no differences of nature’

between the United States and Brazil, Britain and India, ‘only differences of degree’;

and that ‘the United States does not, and indeed no nation state can today, form the

centre of an imperialist project’.63

Robinson quotes the conservative New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in

support of his argument:

the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.

McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of

the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for

Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force,

Navy and Marine Corps.64

Friedman’s words reinforce Robinson’s argument that economic and military power

are inter-connected aspects of the global system. But they sit uncomfortably with the

wider transnationalist perspective. For, contra Gill, they show that the exercise of US

military power is not solely the preserve of nationalist forces but serves the interests

of US transnationals. And, contra Cox and Robinson, they show that the primary

concern of the US state is not the interests of the TCC but those of the US ruling class. 62 Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism, p.77, p.139.63 M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass,

2000, p.190; p.333; p.335; p.xiv.64 T. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York, 1999, p.373.

20

Although contemporary imperialism is too large a subject to be dealt with fully here,

the key elements of an alternative to the transnationalist understanding of

contemporary imperialism, more consistent with what I believe to be Friedman’s

intended meaning, can be briefly sketched out.

In the light of contemporary interest in US geo-strategy, perhaps the most obvious

point to make is that the argument that US power is mobilized on behalf of the TCC

and as a component of the TNS is diametrically opposed to the America-first

arguments of key actors in the framing of US global strategy since the end of the cold

war.65 Notwithstanding important tactical differences – over the degree to which

unilateralism should be tempered by multi-lateral alliance building for example – there

is an overall consistency in US strategic thinking that embraces the Clinton and Bush

administrations, current and former policy advisers like Fukuyama, Brzezinski, and the

neo-conservatives grouped in The Project for the New American Century. At the core

of this strategic consensus is a project to secure US primacy across Eurasia and

beyond and to prevent the emergence of rivals to US power. Specific arguments from

key Bush administration foreign policy makers reinforce the critique of the

transnationalist case that this quest for primacy entails. To take just three examples,

Condoleezza Rice has argued that US foreign policy should ‘proceed from the firm

ground of the national interest, not from the interests of an illusory international

community’.66 In similar vein, ex-US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, believes that

‘there is no such thing as the United Nations’, or international law.67 Meanwhile, in

relation to NATO enlargement, which on the face of it might be regarded as

representing an expansion of a trans-atlantic transnationalist space, William Kristol,

key neo-conservative and founder member of the Project for the New American

Century, has written that it enabled ‘the continuing exercise of American leadership in

European affairs’ and the realization of ‘the strategic opportunities presented by our

65 Important critiques of US post-cold war strategy include: A. Callinicos: The New Mandarins of American Power, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2003; M. Mann, Incoherent Empire, Verso, London, 2003; N. Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, Hamish Hamilton, London, 2003; P. Gowan, The Global Gamble. Washington’s Faustian Bid For World Dominance, Verso, London, 1999; P. Gowan, ‘Western Europe in the Face of the Bush Campaign’, Labour Focus on Eastern Europe 71, 2002; and D. Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003.

66 C. Rice, ‘Promoting the National Interest’, Foreign Affairs, vol.79, no.1, 2000, p.62.67 Cited in Mann, Incoherent Empire, p.3; and in P. Golub, ‘Cold War

Government With No War To Fight: America's Imperial Longings’, Le Monde diplomatique, July 2001.

21

victory in the Cold War’ by undermining the construction of a potential EU-centred

bloc and the development of an independent EU foreign policy.68 When we note the

US’s current role in the Middle East, or its arms spending, now accounting for

approximately half of the world total, it is difficult to detect any moderation of this

America-first outlook.

We should, nevertheless, resist the temptation to mechanically transpose the

perspective of inter-imperialist rivalry developed by Lenin and Bukharin in the early

part of the twentieth century onto the contemporary world order. For, while they

captured the dynamic of the world order that existed from the period of the scramble

for Africa through to the collapse of the USSR in 1989-91, the developing

interdependence within the West after 1945 tempered the competition between its

ruling classes. In particular US primacy after 1945 ensured that intra-Western

conflicts did not assume a military form. Since 1991 interdependence has both

intensified and become more extensive as the former ‘communist’ states have been

more fully incorporated into the global capitalist system. But, if the world’s ruling

classes share a common interest in the stability and reproduction of global capitalism,

competition between them has not disappeared. Thus, as Doug Stokes argues, the US

is subject to both national and transnational logics, and promotes its own interests

while simultaneously seeking to secure a world order safe for capitalism as a whole.69

Or, as Peter Gowan puts it, ‘the US state has not just been pursuing its own interests

at the expense of all its rivals, but securing the general conditions for the expansion of

capital as a system, in which they have an interest too’.70

These arguments suggest that transnationalist theory is one-sided rather than

incorrect, that it overlooks, as Stokes puts it, ‘the dual national and transnational

logics that have long operated at the heart of US Empire’.71 Thus, while the common

interests of the world’s ruling classes have enabled the international financial

institutions to establish a relative consensus around a neo-liberal framework for global

economic management, the consequences are not straightforwardly transnationalist.

68 W. Kristol, ‘NATO Enlargement’, at http://www.newamericancentury.org/nato-19971008.htm, 1997.

69 D. Stokes, ‘The Heart of Empire? Theorising US empire in an era of transnational capitalism’, Third World Quarterly vol.26, no.2, 2005, pp.230-2.

70 P. Gowan, ‘A calculus of power’, New Left Review, 16, 2002, p.65.71 Stokes, ‘The Heart of Empire?’, p.230.

22

For those institutions are simultaneously arenas of inter-state competition and

bargaining, and seek to manage the centrifugal forces that continue to operate on the

relations between the major powers.72 Inter-state conflict within the advanced core of

the world system is, at present, unlikely to assume a military form, but the

contemporary world order is very far from one in which clashes of interest within the

advanced core have been transcended.

Conclusion

The transnationalist understanding of the nature of the economics and politics of the

contemporary world order raises important questions for all forms of social theory,

including international relations. In foregrounding the global dimension of capitalism

it encourages a reconsideration of traditional conceptions of nationally-integrated

economies operating under the political jurisdiction of coherent nation-states. In

highlighting the dynamic nature of capitalism it warns of the danger of reifying states

and the inter-state system, reminding us that as products of social forces in movement

their own inner mechanisms and structures are subject to change. But, if its openness

to novel developments is a major strength of transnational theory it is also its Achilles

heel.

In recent decades national economies and the policies pursued by nation-states have

become increasingly exposed to world economy pressures. But, the unplanned

dynamic of market competition and the uneven development of the world system

encourage even the most transnationalized capitals to seek the support of states.

Indeed, subject to the intensified global competition that neo-liberalism promotes,

TNCs may make greater demands upon states than smaller capitals. States,

meanwhile, negotiate and manage the global imperatives of neo-liberalism as they

defend and promote their own interests (as well as those of the capitals operating

within their territories) against rivals. Thus, movement in the international system is

not linear – expressing not only the common interests but also the competition

between the world’s major capitals and states, movement promotes counter-movement

and the search for elements of stasis and predictability. In systematically elaborating

72 See M. Gritsch, ‘The nation-state and economic globalization: soft geo-politics and increased state autonomy?’, Review of International Political Economy, vol.12, no.2, 2005.

23

novel phenomena into a theory of the contemporary world system, transnationalism

obscures the elements of continuity and the persistence of pre-existing structures and

forms of social power. It therefore draws conclusions abstracted from the real world of

capitalism’s history and from the hierarchically organized inter-state system.

Ultimately, for all its sophistication and the occasional brilliance of its insights,

transnationalist theory is one-sided: the contradictory inter-penetration of the national

and global that has characterized its entire history continues to shape the capitalist

world system.

24