HISTORICAL MATERIALISM IN IR;

JUSTIN ROSENBERG
A Critique of the Realist Theory of International
Relations, Welcoming Uneven and Combined
Development

PINAR KAHYA
INTRODUCTION
Geopolitical systems are not constituted independently of,
cannot be understood in isolation from, the wider
structures of the production and reproduction of social
life. J. Rosenberg
A structural discontinuity between pre-modern and
modern international relations,
Specific geopolitical systems in Greek polis, the early
modern empires, and the modern system of
sovereign states were structurally tied to WHAT?

Different modes of production
Although most geopolitical orders are characterized
by anarchy, a structural discontinuity separates all
pre-capitalist systems from the modern capitalist
international order.
This structural discontinuity explains the co-genesis
and compatibility of a system of bordered
sovereign states and a transnational international
economy.
Separation between the economic and the political
The capitalist anarchy of the market is replicated in
the intl anarchy of the states-system.
THE TROUBLE WITH REALISM
E.H. Carr
A discourse of raison d'tat; a view of the state as
subject, this leads to illumination of international
history as the half-mastered practice and partly
staggered outcomes of state policy.
Social power is taken into account as instrument or
constraint of state policy.

! For the implied image of the circle really does miss
the wood for the trees


Morgenthaus Axiomatic Realism
The constitutive relation between human nature and
social world is one-way only certain basic laws of
political behaviour will persist thought history.
States are by nature power maximizers
Power denotes anything that establishes and
maintains the control of man over man
! The price one has to pay identifying the timeless
features of the political landscape is the sacrifice of
understanding the process of change in world
affairs.

Waltzs theoretical realism
Rational choice model
Waltz uses logical necessity in dilemmas of intl
relations, Rosenberg argues that he simply
reproduce the assumption of raison d'tat at a
higher level of abstraction.


Realism is the conservative ideology of the exercise of
modern state power: it provides a terminology of
intl relations which dramatizes the dilemmas,
legitimizes the priorities and rehearses of realpolitik.

! The history of the states-system has a live political
content;a moments glance at this content.

THE EMPIRE OF CIVIL SOCIETY
Marx himself provides a theory of anarchy not as the
timeless condition of geopolitics, but as the
characteristic social form of capitalist modernity. The
argument includes the theoretical redefinition of the two
core categories of realist IR; anarchy and sovereignty.
The structural specificity of state sovereignty lies in its
abstraction from civil society- an abstraction which is
constitutive of the private sphere of the market hence
inseparable from capitalist relations of production.
Meanwhile, anarchy- which, for realism comprises a pre
social state of nature- is rediscovered as a historically
specific condition defined by Marx as personal
independence based on dependence by mediated by
things.

Rosenberg explains Marx methodology in the structural
basis of civil society part of his book, he especially
underlines that the difference between precapitalist
societies and capitalism.
In capitalist societies the direct producers are no longer
in possession of their own means of subsistence, and
what binds them to the processes of surplus extraction is
no longer political command, but rather the requirement
to sell their labour in order to gain this subsistence. This
necessity supports the distinctive capitalist relations of
surplus extraction themselves: a legally sanctioned
contract between formal equals in which the labourer
accepts authoritative subordination in- the private realm
of production and forgoes any rights over the product
in exchange for an agreed wage paid.

FEUDAL STRUCTURE
In precapitalist societies the apparatus of public rule
was implicated directly in the process of surplus
extraction* and the producers were therefore as
politically unfree.
The labour contract takes the form of a relation of
exchange between legal equals, the process of
surplus extraction is reconstituted as a private
activity of civil society.
Capitalisms basic feature is the emergence of distinct
institutional spheres called the state and the
economy.
*Surplus-value is the social product which is over and
above what is required for the producers to live.


SOVEREIGNTY AS A CAPITALIST POLITICAL
FORM

We should define sovereignty primarily not in terms of the practical
ability of the state to command the behaviour of the citizens,
nor yet as a kind of residual legal paramountcy. Of course
without these there would be no sovereign states but these are
descriptive attributes so do not explain why the modern states
assume its distinctive purely political form.
The sovereignty of the state does not depend on both a kind of
abstraction from production and the reconstitution of the state
political sphere as external to civil society. But this is not an
abstraction which means that the sovereignty of the state is
neutral. On the contrary, its very form is dimension of class
power because its entails the parallel consolidation of private
political power in production. In other words, the state was
neither withdrawing from civil society nor necessarily
encroaching further upon it. It was reimposing the separation of
political functions between public and private spheres which is
the form of both class power and the state power under
capitalism.


Industrial disputes are immediately political
disputes. The appropriation of the surplus becomes
an object of public political struggle within the
state rather than private political struggle within
the productive corporations of civil society. The
private despotism of the workplace becomes the
public despotism of the state.

THE SOVEREIGN STATES SYSTEM

Capitalist relations of surplus extraction are
organized through a contract of exchange which is
defined non-political.
Historically, the sovereign state system
transformation has two overlapping phases;
State building process is the centralizing of political
authority by absolutist monarchs, the suppression
of rival centres of power and the construction of
bureaucratic machinery of government. All you
know that Orthodox IR theory started the modern
world in here. But Rosenberg underlines that
disaggregation of social functions and social power
between public and private goes simultaneously
with state building process.

The historical rise of the sovereign state is one aspect of
a comprehensive reorganization of the forms of social
power. For under this new arrangement, while relations
of citizenship and jurisdiction define state borders, any
aspect of social life which are mediated by relations of
exchange in principle no longer receive a political
definition and extend across these borders.
Realism ignores that the changing structural definition
and content of the political. Realists tell us that modern
intl political system organized by anarchy is different
only in terms of shifting empires to the states system.
Rosenberg says that We can have a global states-
system only because modern politics is different.
Rosenberg tries to theorize this difference with historical
development of capitalist relations of production.

HISTORICIZING THE BALANCE OF POWER

A theory of the balance of power must be able to do
more than identify the historically specific character
of the states making up an alternative way of
understanding the interaction of states which we
call anarchical.
We should recognize that the modern balance of
power is not the plurality of armed actors.
(Impersonal, empty and scientific technical)
Every historical episode of imperial expansion
elaborates its own distinctive ideological
legitimation according to the specific forms of
domination and surplus appropriation involved in
its reproduction.


WHY IS THERE NO
INTERNATIONAL HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY?
Despite the wealth of historical sociological
contributions, the international itself has not
escaped sociological definition.
By the international, Rosenberg means that
dimension of social reality which arises specifically
from the coexistence within it (the international) of
more than one society.
Historical sociology must always encounter
international phenomena as theoretically external
whatever empirical significance it might allow
them in its concrete explanations.
Neorealist theory has been charged with falsely
separating geopolitical from social and economic
processes. Yet critics themselves have failed to
show how sociological and geopolitical phenomena
can be explained in a unified international theory.




Geopolitical
reification
Domestic
analogy
Rosenberg suggests a sociological definition of the
international.
The existence of the international arises ultimately
from the unevenness of human sociohistorical
existence; its distinctive characteristics can be
derived from analysis of the resultant condition of
combined development; and its significance, thus
sociologically redefined, entails a
reconceptualizationof development itself.( It
removes the source of the 'domestic analogy
problem for historical sociology.) Classical social
theory aimed to provide theories of social
development as a whole.

UNEVEN AND COMBINED DEVELOPMENT
The classical tradition never formulated
theoretically the multilinear an interactive
dimensions of social development as a historical
phenomenon.
U&CD;
Trotksys idea


Extending far beyond the analysis of capitalist
development
Uneven and combined development was intrinsic
to the historical process.
Trotsky overcame the obstacles to a sociological
definition of the international
U&CD reconceptualizes the international as an
object domain, defining it sociologically as that
dimension of social reality which arises specifically
from the co-existence within it of more than one
society
It identifies an entire class of inter-societal patterns,
including but not restricted to the geopolitical
structure.
The two realms (domestic and international)
manifest common structural properties given by
their shared capitalist identity: in the international
sphere too, the absolute character of the political
right of self-determination (like the freedom of
labour/the individual) may be seen to hinge
precisely upon its substantive permeability by
other, 'non-political' mechanisms of surplus
appropriation.
CONCLUSION
Every historical process materializes within a concrete
setting of uneven development, and then actively we
seek out what additional causal dimensions this adds to
the movement of the process itself.

The external source of international phenomena is
external no more for it has no being apart from the
universal unevenness of development itself. And the
international phenomena themselves can therefore now
appear as what they must actually be: a class of
sociological causes arising specifically from the
intrinsic unevenness of social development and
expressed and refracted through its primary
consequence: inter-societal multiplicity.

Teschkes Critics
Structuralist tones in geopolitical order analysis
( neglecting to theorize social conflicts, wars and
crises)
Less concern for pre-capitalist geopolitical orders for
the purposes of IR theory (though not for Marxism)
Modernity is not a structure but a process.
Necessity of more explanatory analyses on
emergence of capitalism and it relation with intl
order

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rosenberg, J. (1994) The Empire of Civil Society. A Critique
of the Realist Theory of International Relations. London:
Verso
Rosenberg, J. (2006) Why is There no international
historical sociology? European Journal of International
Relations 12(3): 307340.
Rosenberg, J. (2010) Basic problems in the theory of
uneven and combined development. Part II:Unevenness
and political multiplicity. Cambridge Review of
International Affairs 23(1): 165189
Rosenberg,J. The Origins of International Relations
Seminar Presentation, University of Kent, October
20th 2010
Teschke, B. (2003) The Myth of 1648. Class, Geopolitics and
the Making of Modern International Relations. London:
Verso.


NOTES
A Combined and Uneven Development Approach to the
European Neolithic David Steel Cambridge University,
UK