Abstract
Understanding the role of the state within neoliberal “globalization” has been, since the 1980s, a crucial concern of social scientists. This interest is linked to practical concerns to make sense of the political, economic, and social crises that have become the ordinary aspects of contemporary capitalism throughout the world. Hence, the crucial question as to whether states are capable of intervening in, and are complicit in, such crises, or are the victims of them, has been much debated. Such discussions have failed to produce consensus, although they tend to reassert a notion of the state as an autonomous political authority to be contested from a neoliberal point of view or strengthened on a nationalist or racist basis.
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Notes
David McNally, “Marxism, Nationalism and National Struggles Today,” New Socialist http://www.newsocialist.org/newsite/index.php?id=96, 1996.
Simon Clarke, “State, Class Struggle and the Reproduction of Capital,” in The State Debate ed. Simon Clarke (London: Macmillan, 1991), 185.
Examining what Cox really means by an “alternative world order,” what kind of judgments have shaped his particular counter-systemic attitude, and how his position, in this respect, has evolved in time is obviously beyond the limits of this paper. But there are important signs that Cox has some undertanding of “improbable alternatives” in his mind, a perception that does not, though, prevent him from welcoming the possibility of constructing “a new discourse of global socialism.” See Robert W. Cox’s “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,” in Neorealism and Its Critics ed. Robert O. Keohane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 210; and “Global Perestroika,” in New World Order? Socialist Register ed. Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch (London: Merlin, 1992), 40.
Robert W. Cox, Production, Power and World Order (New York and Guildford/Surrey: Columbia University Press, 1987), 399.
See Clyde W. Barrow, “The Return of the State: Globalization, State Theory, and the New Imperialism,” New Political Science 27, no. 2 (2005): 123–45
and Jim Glassman, “State Power beyond the ‘Territorial Trap’: The Internationalization of the State,” Political Geography 18 (1999): 669–96 as two examples.
Cf. Peter Burnham, “Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and the International Order,” in Global Restructuring, State, Capital and Labour, Contesting Neo-Gramscian Perspectives ed. Andreas Bieler, Werner Bonefeld, Peter Burnham, and Adam D. Morton (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 32. It has to be clarified that, although Cox’s concern to challenge the state-centric approaches in IR has been shared by the other prominent neo-Gramscian writers, such as Kees van der Pijl, Mark Rupert, and Stephen Gill, their latter’s methodological premises, as well as specific research focuses, have varied from each other; hence, one should be cautious in directing similar criticisms to different neo-Gramscian writers without qualification.
Burnham, “Neo-Gramscian Hegemony”; Leo Panitch, “Globalisation and the State,” in Socialist Register ed. Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch (London: Merlin, 1994).
Robert W. Cox, “Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method,” in Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations ed. Stephen Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 62.
Stephen R. Gill, “Gramsci and Global Politics: Towards a Post-hegemonic Research Agenda,” in Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations ed. Stephen R. Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 11.
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Stephen R. Gill, “Epistemology, Ontology and the ‘Italian School’“ in Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations ed. Stephen R. Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 27.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21–22.
Derek Sayer, ed., Readings from Karl Marx (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 71–72.
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Robert W. Cox, “Global Restructuring: Making Sense of the Changing International Political Economy,” in Political Economy and the Changing Global Order ed. Richard Stubbs and Geoffrey R. D. Underhill (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994), 50.
Rupert differentiates these as the first-and second-order alienations. See Mark Rupert, “Alienation, Capitalism and the Inter-state System: Toward a Marxian/Gramscian Critique,” in Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations ed. Stephen R. Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 67–92.
Şebnem Oğuz, “Sermayenin Uluslararasilaşmasi Sürecinde Mekansal Farklilaşmalar ve Devletin Dönüşümü,” in Kapitalizmi Anlamak ed. Demet Yilmaz, Ferhat Akyüz, Fuat Ercan, Koray R. Yilmaz, Ümit Akçay, and Tolga Tören (Ankara: Dipnot Yayinlari, 2006), 178–79.
William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class and State in a Transnational World (Johns: Hopkins University Press, 2004).
Kees van der Pijl, “Feature Review,” New Political Economy 10, no. 2 (2005): 275–76.
Barrow, “The Return,” 128; Panitch, “Globalisation,” 69; and Sol Picciotto, “The Internationalisation of the State,” Capital and Class 43 (1991): 45.
Werner Bonefeld, “The Spectre of Globalization: On the Form and Content of the World Market,” in The Politics of Change: Globalization, Ideology and Critique ed. Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 35.
Peter Burnham, “The Politics of Economic Management in the 1990s,” in Global Restructuring, State, Capital and Labour: Contesting Neo-Gramscian Perspectives ed. Andreas Bieler, Werner Bonefeld, Peter Burnham, and Adam D. Morton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 91–110.
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, “Global Capitalism and American Empire,” in The New Imperial Challenge, Socialist Register (London: Merlin, 1994), 7.
Ellen M. Wood, Empire of Capital (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 152.
Simon Clarke, “Class Struggle and the Global Overaccumulation of Capital,” in Phases of Capitalist Development: Booms, Crises and Globalizations ed. Robert Albritton, Makoto Itoh, Richard Westram, and Alan Zuege (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 80.
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© 2008 Alison J. Ayers
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Bedirhanoğlu, P. (2008). The State in Neoliberal Globalization. In: Ayers, A.J. (eds) Gramsci, Political Economy, and International Relations Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616615_6
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