Kailash Srinivasan

Traditional IR theory in the realist vein views history as a times cycle in which domination and
violence recur cyclically through the system. The pacification of tensions among the Great Powers,
explosion of forms of human interconnectedness and the general spatio-temporal compression of social
life has rendered this pessimistic verdict on history indeterminate. A strain of analysis trying to account
for the evolving logics of the world system come from strands in systems theory which look at how
systems transform with both a directionality and endogenous to its own logic. Alexander Wendt (2003)
argues that evolutionary tendencies point toward an inevitable world state. He argues that the struggle
for recognition among groups, technological advances in the means of destruction and the cultural
evolution of anarchy makes the system of states a disequilibrium which will force it to evolve until a
sovereign world state emerges. Andrew Linklater (2010) imagines a global civilizing process embedded
in the increase in longer chains of interdependence and monopolies of power spanning the millennia of
human civilization. Although he maintains the inevitability of interconnectedness, he is less predictive on
the possibilities of civilizing. His call is rather normative looking toward the international society to
proliferate mechanisms such as international law to control violent and non-violent harm.
These three accounts for the past and present of the world system unite in their belief that the
course of human history has been more or less one of pacification through the centralization of power.
In order to maintain such an account, their account of international society relies upon a flat ontology of
space. Wendt and Linklater do so explicitly since increased human interconnectedness breaks down the
borders between states toward a more network-like organizational model. Tang maintains the
distinctiveness of territorial space but he relies upon the realist frame in which states are relatively
equal black boxes. What each theorist correctly accounts for is the logic of de-territorializing imminent
to the capitalist world system. What is, however, missed is the moment of re-territorializing that occurs
in and through the logic of uneven and combined development. The role of the logic of capital in
understanding the spatiality of the world-system is contradictory. It underwrites the tendency toward
centralization in the monopoly of power but provides a limit at which further centralization becomes
impossible.
Uneven and combined development comes from the works of Leon Trotsky and argues that
what constitutes the international is the fact that societies develop both at different rates but also
together. As such, when one mode of production becomes developed in another, the course does not
take the same as others. The timing of industrialization affects, for instance, the specificity of polity type
and class formation such that a late industrializing state does not look like an earlier. The shifting
historical geography of the competition for surplus-value gives rise to conflicts of interests and territorial
fragmentation among state organizations that are differently located in the global accumulation
process. This top-down explanation of uneven development at the inter-state level is, however,
explanatory indeterminate. It accounts for fragmentation in the incompatibility of interests but does not
as yet account for the tendency toward concentration and unit-similarity that have taken place in the
longue duree of the capitalist world-system. Indeed, it explains both the outcomes toward centralization
and fragmentation since unevenness within states does not necessarily lead to fragmentation.
The resolution is to provide a bottom-up account for unevenness within the micro-action of
individuals and firms. David Harvey argues that neither labor-time nor commodity circulation are
possible without built environments to provide the infrastructure and space necessary for accumulation.
The process is driven by the recurrent crises of capitalism whereby surplus capital and surplus labor is
disposed of through spatial fixes which involve expansion into new markets, investments in the built
environment or rationalization of existent spaces. Harvey further outlines that competition between
capitalists for greater profit tends to annihilate spaces in order to reduce turnover time. But, productie
forces or transportation and communications networks must be embedded in space. Capital
accumulation depends on differential economic climates for its regeneration. The persistent search for
competitive advantage leads to movement from oversaturated economic spaces toward new spaces
where it can extract greater profit.
The action of the capitalist production process creates the fundamental spatial geography which
states exist upon. States can, then, not be viewed as territorially fixed but rather develop through
economic processes. Such a process has a modicum of directionality toward territorial concentration
and increased human interconnectedness in the formation of the world market. And yet, there are
countervailing tendencies to these economies of scale as spatial unevenness also leads certain spaces to
become devalued and de-developed. Hence, the process by which space is annihilated by time and thus
universalized is wracked by the contradiction that space can only be produced by space (Harvey 1981).
The unevenness of development deflects the trajectory toward a world state that Wendt sees.
Initially note, Wendts account relies upon the struggle of recognition supervening to a global we-feeling
predicated on equality. He maintains that recognition based on coercion or unequal power relations
tends toward instability in the long-run. Unevenness of development points, however, to the
inevitability of such inequality between states. As such, it is unclear what the conditions of possibility are
for Great Powers to recognize Small Powers as equals. Wendt pre-empts the claim by arguing that small
states should be even more willing to join the world state because of its restraining power on stronger
nations. And yet, it is not clear that small states would act in this manner because they would want to
protect their independence or be wary of the possibility of exploitation within the new framework.
Although any empirics is de facto problematic because of the historical uniqueness of the world state,
the example of the United Arab Republic is instructive. Egypt and Syria united based upon a common
Arab identity in 1958, but the Syrian perception of its exploitation by the greater power led to its
secession in 1961. Unevenness leads to a collective action problem for global elites subverting attempts
at constructing a transnational state. Wendt points out the tendency toward a horizonless totality within
the internal dynamics of the capitalist interstate system. It is, however, a spaceless universality which
encounters internal barriers to its realization.
Linklaters obfuscation of unevenness leads his ethical call to devolve into ideology. His account
of increased interdependence over the millennia ignores that the recurrent tendency toward
fragmentation. The tendency toward centralization is a process that can only be called internal to the
system in the past 500 years of capitalism. This is because of the unique politico-economic nature of
capitalism in its universalizing tendency. Its tendency to break down all Chinese walls through the
extension of the market and incorporation of peoples into the wage-form creates powerful drives
toward standardizing societies into the form of the nation-state. But, the timing of industrialization and
transition to capitalism takes place at different times for different societies. As such, there is not a
mechanical replication of the same kind of social form in each society but takes on its unique
characteristics. As such, although one can posit economies of scale to territorial agglomeration, there
is a limit to scale at which point countervailing tendencies set in.
His ethical account is furthermore one which universalizes a particular Western European
experience of the postwar into a framework for further civilizing. He ignores the way in which all those
putatively civilizing acts like international law or humanitarian norms have also been mobilized by Great
Powers as the justification for military intervention into other states. That is, how international society
has come into existence not through the equality of societies but rather the right of a particular group to
speak in the name of the universal interest. The antagonistic nature of capitalism in which certain
societies and spaces are alternatively valued or devalued prevents any kind of collective global civilizing
mission. Even if warfare ends, the kinds of non-violent harm that Linklater wants to prevent will exist
precisely because, within the framework of capitalism, economic violence or other non-violent harms
are not really violence but the outcomes of the system itself.
In the end, systems theorizing provides a powerful lens by which to view the evolutionary
dynamics of international relations. They are, however, limited as long as they do not take into account
that systems are internally contradictory and thus opposite tendencies might be mutually constitutive in
system-functioning- a system which might be said to work precisely because of the incessant creation of
disequilibria. An account of contradiction points toward a system that is neither the tragedy of great
power politics nor a sovereign world state but rather a perpetually unstable form in which the advanced
capitalist states obey a logic resembling collective security while defining itself against peripheral regions
and rogue states. States will, then, cooperate in a system resembling that of a concert of powers rather
than a world state as such.
Bibliography
Harvey, David (1982)- The Limits to Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Linklater, Andrew (2010) Global Civilizing Processes and the Ambiguities of Human
Interconnectedness, EJIR, 16, 155-178
Wendt, Alexander (2003) Why a World State is Inevitable, EJIR, 9, 491-542