Abstract
Waltz's neorealist theory has been charged with falsely separating geopolitical from social and economic processes. Yet Waltz's critics themselves have failed to show how sociological and geopolitical phenomena can be explained in a unified international theory. Such a theory, says Waltz, would have to pass three tests. It must delimit a field of specifically international phenomena. It must identify structured (and hence theorizable) effects within this field. And it must furnish ‘a brilliant intuition’, which reveals the causal relations that explain these effects. This article argues that the idea of ‘uneven and combined development’ (U&CD) can pass these tests. The article delimits ‘the international’ as those phenomena arising from the interactive multiplicity of societies. Next, it uses Gerschenkron's theory of backwardness to identify internationally structured effects arising from societal multiplicity. And finally, by considering the debate on the First World War, it explores how the causal mechanisms identified by U&CD can be used to construct a unified sociological and geopolitical explanation.
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Notes
Barrington Moore had described the postwar international circumstances favouring the success of Chinese Communists as ‘fortuitous in the sense that they did not derive from anything taking place in China itself …’ . Noting how regularly Moore invoked international causes in his analyses, Skocpol asked ‘Can an explanatory factor so systematically resorted to really be “fortuitous”?’ (Skocpol, 1973, p. 29).
Eleven years later, Waltz repeated these criteria (Waltz, 1990, pp. 31–32).
The error of ‘predicting outcomes from attributes’ had been ‘made by almost everyone, at least from the nineteenth century onwards’ (1979, p. 61).
‘A theory of international politics … can tell us what international conditions national policies have to cope with. To think that a theory of international politics can itself say how the coping is likely to be done is the opposite of the reductionist error’ (1979, p. 72).
This applies even to the apparent exceptions. E.H. Carr's assertion that ‘Man has always lived in groups’ (Carr, 1981, p. 95) appears at first to correct the problem with a sociological premise. However, in fact, this premise elides the classical perception of the sociality of humans as a species with the question of why this sociality should issue in a multiplicity of societies. Therefore, at best, it explains the existence of ‘society’ but not of ‘societies’, which it merely asserts.
Entitled ‘The King of Thought: Theory, the Subject and Waltz’, the conference was held at Aberystwyth University in September 2008.
An important exception here is the work of Barry Buzan and Richard Little (2000). For a detailed engagement with their explanation of political multiplicity, see Rosenberg (2010).
This applies also to Durkheim's advocates in IR, such as Ruggie (1983), Larkins (1994), Barkdull (1995) and of course Waltz himself.
In a colourful metaphor, Michael Mann later described the (re)discovery of states and geopolitics in sociological theory during the 1980s as the act of a Sociological ‘raiding party’, which, looting IR for useful materials, ‘immediately grabbed for the Realist state’ (Mann, 1995, p. 555).
For a detailed argument that U&CD explains political multiplicity, rather than simply including it as an additional premise, see Rosenberg (2010).
For earlier discussions, see Rosenberg (2000, 2007).
Though Trotsky had some inkling of the mechanisms here, they were much better explored by Thorsten Veblen (1915/1964, especially pages 23–39).
For a brief contextualisation of Trotsky's views in relation to Russian Marxist thought in 1905, see Knei-Paz (1978, p. 27ff).
Gerschenkron's biography and profession – a Russian emigre who, being an economic historian, was also a specialist in twentieth-century Russian thought – surely make it impossible for him to have been unfamiliar with Trotsky's writings. Indeed, his analysis of pre-modern Russian state formation and his choice of quotations from Marx against which to counterpose his own prognoses of social development are quite uncannily similar to Trotsky's own. However, to my knowledge he does not reference Trotsky's work.
He several times mentions military considerations to which, like Trotsky, he gives an overwhelming significance in Russian history; he cites nineteenth-century Denmark as a case where interaction (with the British economy) actually precluded the phenomena he analysed from coming into play at all; and he regularly insisted that ‘one cannot understand the industrial development of any country, as long as it be considered in isolation …’ (1962, p. 42).
The distinction here resembles Waltz's own between capabilities (which belong to units) and their distribution (which is a property of structure) (1979, p. 98).
17 Paul Kennedy notes that by 1900, levels of per capita industrialisation* in Europe (let alone England), which in 1750 had been broadly comparable with those obtaining elsewhere, had risen to become 18 times higher. (And when industrialisation was applied to the means of warfare, a parallel ‘firepower gap’ opened up, which left European countries’ military resources ‘fifty or a hundred times greater than those at the bottom’ (1988, pp. 149–150).)
In 1879, Bismarck noted that ‘There are no longer any great countries to discover; the globe is circum-navigated, and we cannot find any new mercantile nations of any great extent to which we can export’ (cited in Bairoch, p. 60). Twenty years later, Chancellor von Bulow expressed the same point in shriller tones: ‘We cannot allow any foreign power, any foreign Jupiter to tell us: “What can be done? The world is already partitioned”,’ (cited in Kennedy, p. 213).
Friedrich Liszt warned that the Germans were being reduced to ‘carriers of water and hewers of wood for the Britons … treated even worse than the downtrodden Hindu’ (cited in Trebilcock, 1981, p. 40).
During this period, relations with England also produced a dynastic connection via the marriage of the Prussian Crown Prince to Queen Victoria's eldest daughter in 1858. The latter never made any secret of her desire to convert the Hohenzollerns into a constitutional monarchy. And Bismarck's determination to blunt this threat was a key reason why he ‘cynically cultivated [a] popular hatred of Britain’ (Calleo, 1978, p. 23). It even played an intermittently strong role in his foreign policy (Lowe, 1994, p. 96) – the flurry of imperialist expansion in 1884, the conflict over the Bulgarian succession in 1885–1886. In the event, the liberalizing ambitions of the royal couple came to nothing because the prince was mortally ill when he assumed the throne in 1888 and died within a year. But the union also left a more enduring problem in the form of the new heir – the mentally unstable Wilhelm II who for the rest of his life alternated between craven Anglophilia and German nationalist resentment of Britain's ascendancy.
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Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was presented at the British-German IR conference (BISA/DVPW) held at Arnoldshain, Germany on 16–18 May 2008. I am grateful to Simon Bromley, Chris Boyle, Michael Cox, Kamran Matin, Beate Jahn, Fouad Makki and many others – too numerous to thank individually – for helpful discussions of its subject matter and argument.
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Rosenberg, J. Kenneth Waltz and Leon Trotsky: Anarchy in the mirror of uneven and combined development. Int Polit 50, 183–230 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2013.6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2013.6