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Global capitalism and the states system: explaining geopolitical conflicts in contemporary world politics

The discipline of international relations (IR) has traditionally had a troubled relationship with sociological modes of explanations, particularly those invoking the concept of ‘capitalism’. This can be explained by the peculiarities of the subject-matter under investigation: the decentralized and anarchic features of the international realm seem to elude theorization based upon the precepts of classical social theory. An additional reason can be found in the historical origins of the discipline itself. Established in the Anglo-Saxon countries after World War I, the study of international relations took shape in a world-historical milieu riddled by ideological strife and political uncertainty. From its inception, IR was closely aligned with foreign policy-making elites. Such circumstances contributed to the systematic silencing of inquiries into the dynamics of capitalism vis-à-vis the causes of war—a key concern of the classical Marxist theories of imperialism. While it has become increasingly recognized in IR that the exclusion of such inquiries has had theoretically debilitating consequences, there remain few studies systematically exploring these crucial issues. The contributions in this section, the first of a special two-part series, go some way toward filling this lacuna. The section centres around Alex Callinicos’s lead article, ‘Does capitalism need the state system?’, which situates the question within the context of the current globalization-imperialism debate. For Callinicos, capitalist imperialism is constituted by the interweaving of two distinct, but mutually irreducible, forms of competition—the ‘economic’ and the ‘geopolitical’. From this perspective, Callinicos defends, on metatheoretical grounds, the necessity of incorporating a ‘realist moment’ into a Marxist approach to geopolitics, which would help understand how the states system exerts distinct determinations irreducible to the logic of capital accumulation. Gonzalo Pozo-Martin questions this ‘realist moment’, illustrating the incompatibility of realist modes of geopolitical explanations vis-à-vis Marxism. In doing so, Pozo-Martin calls for a theoretically informed investigation of the state– capital nexus that would provide the needed ‘missing agency of imperialism’. Benno Teschke and Hannes Lacher criticize Callinicos’s approach, which, they claim, preserves the core of the problematical classical Marxist theories of imperialism. Drawing on the historical works of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood, they offer an alternative perspective, re-theorizing the ‘geopolitical structuring of capitalist modernity’ in the ‘gradual and protracted nature of the transition from feudalism to capitalism’. While John Hobson commends Callinicos’s search for a non-reductionist Marxism, he claims that it inevitably collapses into a ‘thin materialist reductionism’. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Volume 20, Number 4, December 2007