Post on 04-Mar-2023
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Deciphering ‘the International’ in Theory and History: A Reply to The Disorder of
Things Forum1
Alexander Anievas
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge
Introduction
It brings me great pleasure to be invited to respond to such thoughtful and challenging critiques
of my book Capital, the State, and War (CSW). On the (meta-)theoretical front, Mark Rupert and
Kamran Matin question my use of uneven and combined development (UCD) as a
transhistorical ‘general abstraction’ to be incorporated into a historical materialist framework. On
the more historical/historiographical front, Campbell Craig challenges my interpretation of
Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policies during and after the First World War, arguing that I rely too
heavily on the extant historiographical literature, specifically N. Gordon Levin’s 1968 ‘New Left’
critique Woodrow Wilson and World Politics. Craig further criticizes my theoretical approach for
being overly structuralist and consequently ‘devoid of agency or praexeology’, while pushing me
to consider the relevance of UCD to contemporary world politics.
While disagreeing with some of my interlocutors interpretations of what I was trying to
do in CSW, it is a breath of fresh air that they have all offered substantive engagements with my
work in ways dealing with genuine theoretical disagreements; though, as I hope to demonstrate,
in the case of Matin and possibly Rupert, these theoretical disagreements may be less serious
than they first appear. So I would be remiss not to express my deep gratitude to Rupert, Matin
and Craig for their highly stimulating critiques and to the editors of The Disorder of Things – in
particular Paul Kirby and Nivi Manchanda – for giving me the opportunity to reply. In what
follows, I will engage with the precise standing of UCD and ‘general abstractions’ in filling out of
a distinctly historical materialist theory of ‘the international’, before turning to the more specific
historical-theoretical issues raised by Craig.
1 An extended draft of this reply can be found here.
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I. Method, Abstraction and Historicity in Marxist Theory
While ‘largely convinced’ by the ‘relational, historical, and dialectical conceptual apparatus’ I
deploy in explaining the interstate conflicts of the Thirty Years’ Crisis of 1914-1945, Rupert
remains sceptical of my conceptualization of UCD as a ‘general abstraction’. He thus raises the
important question: ‘In a world where a great deal of epistemological and actual violence is done
by universalizing abstractions, why create another as the basis for a theory whose basic impulse is
de-reification, re-contextualization, and re-historicization in the interest of opening potentially
emancipatory horizons?’. As such, Rupert is ‘unpersuaded’ by my argument that UCD is best
understood as a transhistorical phenomenon which can be employed as a ‘general abstraction’.
Kamran Matin, by contrast, argues that I have not realized the full potentials of
deploying UCD as a transhistorical abstraction, arguing instead that my specific
conceptualization of UCD as a ‘progressive problem-shift’ within a historical materialist research
programme is too restrictive: a ‘critical conservative’ approach to the question of the relationship
between UCD and historical materialism. My approach is ‘critical’, Matin argues, because it
explicitly recognizes the challenge of ‘the international’ (i.e. political multiplicity) for Marxism
given the theory’s ‘recurrent inability to accommodate certain historical phenomena within its
explanatory remit’, but simultaneously ‘conservative’ since I conceptualize UCD as ‘merely an
auxiliary theory [that] protects the basic premises of historical materialism, its “hard-core”…
from the destabilizing effects of…theoretical externalities’.
So clearly I have some explaining (and persuading!) to do. While sympathetic to both
Rupert and Matin’s perspectives, I think their criticisms can be addressed by further teasing out
my understanding of UCD as both a ‘general abstraction’ and ‘progressive problem-shift’ within
the broader ‘research programme’ of historical materialism. Given that the historical subject of
CSW rests squarely within the capitalist epoch, I didn’t spend much time fleshing out my specific
interpretation of UCD as a ‘transhistorical’ phenomenon – or, more precisely, a transmodal one –
that is somewhat different from Justin Rosenberg’s approach (see pp. 52-54). Before doing so, I
think it’s worth restating the basic premises of the theory’s two main concepts – unevenness and
combination.2
2 The following draws on Anievas and Nisancioglu (2015: Chapter 2).
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So, unevenness denotes developmental variations both within and between societies, along
with the attendant spatial differentiations between them. The starting point then is a strong
empirical observation about the basic ontology of human development: that a multiplicity of
societies varying in size, culture, political organization, and socioeconomic systems is a
transhistorical feature of development. From this general empirical observation, one is able to
capture both the quantitative (multiple societies) and qualitative (different societies) character of all
development: what can be termed uneven development. But rather than simply describing two
static conditions (multiplicity – difference), uneven development captures their dynamic
interaction: societal multiplicity producing intersocietal interactions in turn generating societal
differences. This forms the basic social-relational texture of the historical process as a whole,
from which the shifting identity of any particular society accumulates and crystalizes.
Emphasizing the specificities of any given society’s development within this wider
intersocietal milieu, Trotsky demonstrated how a society’s development is irreducible to any
unilinear path of development. For example, ‘Russia stood not only geographically, but also
socially and historically, between Europe and Asia’.3 As both cause and effect of this international
differentiation, unevenness also captures the peculiar sociological forms of internal
differentiation in political, cultural and class relations. Differential tempos and forms of change
over time are matched by variations in space. Unevenness thereby transverses the multiple,
interconnected spatial fields of social constitution and organization, breaking with any discretely-
conceived notions of the ‘national’ and ‘international’.
Combination, conceived at the most abstract level, refers to the ways in which the
internal relations of any given society are determined by their interactions with other
developmentally differentiated societies. In turn, the very interactivity of these relations produce
amalgamated political institutions, socioeconomic systems, ideologies and material practices
melding the ‘native’ and ‘foreign’, the most ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’, within any given social
formation. As with unevenness, combination has a strong empirical referent: multiple societies
do not simply exist hermetically side-by-side. Rather, they interactively coexist, which by
necessity – and with varying degrees – determines their collective social and geopolitical
development and reproduction. Accordingly, a combined development also refers to the
processes in which societies draw together the ‘different stages’ of development. This then
3 Trotsky (2008: 3-4).
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creates the conditions for multilinear trajectories of development. From this perspective,
historical processes are always the outcome of a multiplicity of spatially diverse nonlinear causal
chains that combine in any given conjuncture. What does it then mean to speak of UCD as a
transmodal phenomenon functioning as a ‘general abstraction’ to be incorporated into a
materialist theory of history and, by extension, ‘the international’?
Frederic Jameson once exclaimed: ‘Always historicize!’ is ‘the one absolute and we can
even say “transhistorical” imperative of all dialectical thought’.4 Does Jameson’s injunction
necessarily translate into a denial of the use of ‘transhistoricals’ in Marx’s methodology? I believe
not, as a number of studies have well demonstrated that transhistorical abstractions did in fact
play quite an important role in Marx’s work.5 As Robert Wess notes in a discussion of Marx’s
method, Marx ‘insists, at the very outset, that to avoid the bourgeois misconception of capitalism
as “natural”, one must paradoxically begin on the transhistorical level, with production in
general…[as] the transhistorical renders visible the concrete historicity of capitalism’.6 Or, as Marx put it in
explaining his method of abstraction in the Grundrisse, one must start with the ‘general, abstract
determinants which obtain in more or less all forms of societies’.7
Indeed, contrary to common wisdom, Marx worked with a number of general,
transhistorical categories: ‘use-value’, ‘concrete labor’, and ‘production in general’, to name but a
few. However, Marx’s use of these transhistorical categories was strikingly different from their
employment within traditional IR theory. For neorealists, for example, the ‘general’ abstraction
of ‘anarchy’ takes the form of the primary explanans from which all other concepts (the ‘balance
of power’, ‘national interest’ and ‘security dilemma’, etc.) are then deduced. From this
perspective, the abstraction forms the theory itself. By contrast, in Marx’s writings, a general
abstraction functions as a kind of in-built assumption which accounts for the existence of a concrete
general condition whose historically specific form has to be accounted for by still further explanans.
In other words, the abstraction is question-begging. It serves the purpose of highlighting and
isolating particular objects of study, which in turn raise analytical questions that can only be
answered through their connection to other abstracted moments concretized through historical
analysis.
4 Jameson (1981: 9). 5 See esp. Sayer (1979: 78–79, 87–88, 91–103, 109–113, 144, 146–147); Sayer (1987: 21); Fracchia (2004); Callinicos (2014: 152-155). 6 Wess (1996: 16). 7 Marx (1976: 108); Cf. Marx (1994, Vol. 34: 236).
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Such a method consequently requires that conceptual abstractions involve not only an
understanding of how any given empirical phenomenon appears and functions, but also ‘how it
develops’, wherein ‘its real history is also part of what it is’.8 This imbues Marx’s abstractions
with a radical depth historicity,9 where their content is not rigidly fixed, but ‘developed in their
historical or logical process of formation’.10 In Capital Volume I, for example, the commodity is
both a bearer of the universal need to produce use-values and the historically-specific conditions
under which such production occurs. Similarly, ‘labor’ is at once conceptualized as ‘concrete
labor’ (the general feature of all human labor) and ‘abstract labor’ (the historically-distinct
condition under which concrete labor takes place within capitalism).
Hence, unlike neorealism’s deductive method, where general categories are ‘applied in an
unmediated way’11 to real world politics, Marx’s abstractions do not on their own provide the in-
built explanatory mechanisms required for the generation of concrete historical knowledge. Nor
do they act as axioms from which secondary concepts are derived, where concretization takes
place in a linear fashion from the abstract to concrete. Instead, the object of study is continually
reconstituted by viewing it through different contextual prisms, analytical vantage points or
‘windows’. The view from any singular vantage point will tend to be flat, static and lacking
perspective. But once we move across different vantage points, those elements formerly hidden
come into view, reconstituting our understanding of the object of investigation with ‘greater
depth and perspective’.12
Understood in this way, general abstractions are ‘a guiding thread, an orientation for
empirical and historical research, not a theoretical substitute for it’.13 As such, Marx ‘explained’
phenomena by carving open analytical and theoretical spaces that would necessitate the
introduction of – and relation to – additional explanatory determinations derived from
alternative vantage points. Across the three volumes of Capital, Marx repeatedly changed register
and (re-)analysed social relations through different conceptual prisms, moving from the singular
capitalist enterprise in Volume I, to circulation in Volume II, to many capitals in Volume III.
Thus understood, each analytical shift serves to ‘destroy the simplicity’ of anterior
vantage points and ‘complicate their phenomenology’ by bringing them into interrelation with
8 Ollman (2003: 65). 9 Sayer (1987: 21). 10 Marx and Engels as cited in Sayer (1987: 21). 11 Rosenberg (2000: 81). 12 Harvey (2007: 2). 13 Sayer (1987: 13).
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other abstracted moments.14 Through this disclosure of the internal relations between these
expanding sets of abstracted moments, the multiplicity of concrete conditions and
determinations pertaining to the capitalist production mode was unearthed and reconstituted in
thought. Marx’s explanation took place not by the reduction of social reality into a simplified and
elegant abstraction, but by the expansion and complexification of the object under study.
Therefore, an abstraction should not be judged heuristically useful by what elements of reality it
successfully excludes, but by what elements of history are opened up to further exploration. In
short, rather than positing abstractions (such as anarchy) as theories unto themselves, a general
abstraction should orient theoretical investigation to particular objects of study that still require
further explanation.
In like fashion, I would argue that any proper understanding of the complex
interrelations between history and theory in the study of world politics that seeks to capture the
unique causal properties of ‘the international’, rather than simply reducing such properties to a
social order conceived in the ontologically singular,15 requires at the outset of theoretical enquiry
the introduction of a ‘general abstraction’ that identifies and focuses on the object of
examination: ‘the international’. Moreover, to avoid the problem of reification, the abstraction
would necessarily refer to both a general condition that accounts for the existence of ‘the
international’ and a concrete condition that would require the incorporation of further abstracted
moments that would then furnish a historically-specific explanation of the particular dynamics,
forms, scales, and articulations of such phenomena. For the committed Marxist, this would mean
re-attaching the general abstraction accounting for the ‘the international’ with a mode of
production-based analysis of its historical specificities.
However, it is absolutely crucial to note, that in keeping with the method I’ve just
outlined, this would not mean applying the ‘mode of production’ concept in a kind of
unmediated or unidirectional fashion in explaining such historical specificities. This is because
the function of the ‘general abstraction’ is to re-focus and reconstruct the other abstracted
moments (here, the ‘mode of production’) through the inclusion of additional determinations.
Hence, in keeping with Kamran Matin’s approach, this would necessitate the ‘modification of the
“hard-core” ontological premises’ of historical materialism (more on this below).
14 Bensaïd (2009: 106). 15 Rosenberg (2006).
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Rather than protecting these hard-core premises by limiting their explanatory scope
(‘monster barring’) or by identifying anomalies as exceptions or pathologies, my deployment of
UCD aims to magnify the explanatory power of the original research programme. So, instead of
replacing Marxism’s traditional focus on class conflict and modes of production, UCD directs
our attention to the ways in which these historical processes are inextricably bound to
developments at the ‘international’ as well as domestic levels, thereby offering a synthesized
theory of development and reproduction that moves beyond the persistent divide between
‘sociological’ and ‘geopolitical’ modes of explanation.
I argue that the incorporation of UCD’s plural ontology (political multiplicity) is consistent
with the hard-core premises of historical materialism, because there’s nothing in Marx and
Engel’s conception of development that would necessarily deter the pluralization of their basic
ontological premises (see pp. 53-54). I therefore partially agree with Neil Davidson’s claim that
the ‘inseparability of the international from the social is… inscribed in historical materialism
from the moment of its formation, notably The German Ideology’.16 I say partially because neither
Marx nor Engels ever theoretically formalized a substantive conception of ‘the international’, which
remained an ad-hoc externality to their later theoretical works (most notably, Marx’s Capital).
In this sense, Trotsky’s theory helps make explicit certain elements of Marx and Engels’
analyses that were never fully theorized – elements that remained present ‘in a practical’, but not
theoretical state. UCD may be then considered a ‘progressive problem-shift’ within the larger
research programme of historical materialism in the sense that it grows out of and completes – rather
than replaces – Marx’s materialist conception of history. In this respect, I’m happy to endorse
Matin’s call for reconceptualizing Marx and Engels’ ‘double relationship’ as a ‘triple relationship’
spanning: (1) nature to; (2) the social; to (3) the intersocietal.17 I do so, however, with the caveat
that Marx and Engels’ ‘double relationship’ never logically excluded a conception of ‘the social’
as ontologically plural, though I do find Matin’s approach useful in explicitly bringing out this
plural, interactive dimension of the social.
I think it’s therefore helpful to pick through three distinct but interrelated ways UCD
may be used in the study of ‘the international’. Firstly, as an ontology of human development –
that is, as a general, abstract set of determinants highlighting a general condition confronted by
all societies irrespective of historical context. Secondly, as a methodology or set of epistemological
16 Davidson (2009: 17). 17 Matin (2013: 154).
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coordinates derived from the preceding ontological claim, that informs what historical material may
be deemed ‘causally’ significant, and how that material relates to each other. As noted, however,
these general ontological and epistemological assumptions taken on their own do not constitute
a theory as such – at least not in the specifically Marxist sense, which would require their
reconnection to more historically-specific concepts and determinations.
In this theoretical respect, thirdly, UCD also refers to and theorizes concrete historical
processes, be they epochal or conjunctural. We may then speak of a theory (or theories) of UCD
in this more historically-delimited sense: in terms corresponding to specific epochs or
conjunctures characterized by different modes of production that animate the broader dynamics
of such historical temporalities. It is therefore only at the level of the mode of production that
one can properly speak of theory. Nonetheless, UCD goes beyond a mode of production-
centred analysis by capturing the surplus of determinations generated by the interactions and
accompanying combinations of different modes of production.
For example, in my forthcoming co-authored book How the West Came to Rule, we
examine the historically-distinct dynamics, scales, and forms of UCD in no less than five modes
of production: the nomadic, tributary, feudal, slave-based and capitalist. Each of these modes
generated very different forms of unevenness and combination countering any supra-historical
application of the ‘theory’ of UCD that Rupert and others have challenged.18 Moreover, the
various interactions between these developmentally differentiated societies produced a
multiplicity of variegated sociological amalgamations, representing entirely new modalities of
development whose ‘laws of motion’ were more than the sum of their parts thereby defying any
neat modal classificatory schemas. Such sociological combinations were not either/or but both
and more. From the perspective outlined above, it may then turn out that the differences
between Matin, Rupert and myself are less than they first appear.
II. Matters of Interpretation: History, Historiography, and Theory of the Thirty Years’
Crisis, 1914-1945
In Craig’s penetrating critique, questions of historiography and historical interpretation loom
large. Acknowledging that I provide some original archival research, he claims that my historical
18 See e.g. Teschke (2014) and Van der Pijl (2014).
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narrative is overwhelmingly drawn from extant historiographical literatures and that in the case
of US foreign policymaking (Chapter 4), I fail to sufficiently differentiate my interpretation from
that of Levin’s Woodrow Wilson and World Politics. Craig also questions my interpretation of the
classical realist critiques of Wilson, claiming that there was ‘far more of an affinity between
Classical Realism and Left critiques of US foreign policy than Anievas acknowledges’, while
arguing that I fail to adequately explain why the US Congress rejected American membership in
the League of Nations and turned the country’s ‘back on world power politics after 1920’: a
‘clear anomaly’ in my account given the role that Wilson’s ideology played in all this. This point
relates to Craig’s particular interpretation of the theory of UCD, and specifically Justin
Rosenberg’s approach, which suffers from a lack of politics – a ‘structural alternative to neo-
Realism that seems to be devoid of agency or praexeology’. He thus takes me to task for not
politically challenging Rosenberg’s approach, and suggests that I should have sharpened my own
use of UCD by further distinguishing it from Rosenberg, which would have allowed me to better
utilize my ‘historical case studies in a more rigorous and deductive fashion’.
I am grateful to Craig for pressing me to further clarify my views on these significant
historiographical and theoretical issues. However, at some points, I believe Craig has partly
assimilated my conception of UCD to that of Rosenberg, and he’s surely not alone in doing so.19
To be fair, Craig acknowledges that my ‘method is quite different from the one used by Waltz
(and Rosenberg)’ since my concern lays with deploying UCD ‘as a means of shaping a detailed
historical explanation of the two world wars’, while Rosenberg’s approach has primarily revolved
around ‘developing a logical or epistemological case for UCD’. However, this significantly
understates the differences between my conceptualization of UCD and Rosenberg’s that I’ve
drawn out in earlier articles,20 within the book (pp. 49-54), and to which the above discussion
hopefully further attests.
19 See, for example, Van der Pijl (2014) and the fundamentally misguided critique of Rioux (2014). The latter is particularly unfortunate as Rioux’s work is littered with flagrant misinterpretations of my work (as well as some of Rosenberg’s), and offers a form of critique that operates via omitting the relevant arguments of those authors he engages with that deal with the very issues he’s criticizing them for, leading him to the befuddling call for the reattachment of UCD with a mode of production-centred theory. Given this is exactly what I have argued for in my book and elsewhere (Allinson and Anievas 2009; Allinson and Anievas 2010; Anievas and Nisancioglu 2013), it’s rather bewildering that someone could take up this position as their own critique of my work. Unfortunately for Rioux, the failure of theory he detects in IR scholarship on UCD is actually a consequence of his own failure of scholarship. 20 Cf. Allinson and Anievas (2009; 2010).
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One point that should be clear from the latter discussion is that I do not conceive of
UCD as a deductive theory, as Craig seems to suggest.21 The aim of CSW is not, and should not
have been, as Craig claims, to ‘show how UCD deductively answers historical puzzles’ or to use
the book’s ‘historical case studies in a more rigorous and deductive fashion’. While Rosenberg
has made the case that UCD can meet the strict criteria of Waltz’s nomological-deductive
conception of theory,22 this is not an endeavour I aspire to in CSW. Instead, my approach is
informed by a critical realist philosophy of science wherein causal explanation takes the form of
uncovering different (and often interacting) ‘generative mechanisms’ operating at the ‘level of
real’, rather than at the ‘level of the event’ or empirical where (neo)positivists focus their
deductive explanations. The relationship between different generative mechanisms cannot then
be conceived as one of equivalence or deduction, but instead in terms of rootedness or emergence.
This entails that each layer of mechanisms cannot be deduced from another, even those from
which it emerges, as it retains its own distinctive causal properties.23
But, to clarify further, one of the key differences between Rosenberg and myself is not
simply an attention to theoretically-informed historical explanations (indeed, Rosenberg has
provided some of these himself, albeit at a rather high level of abstraction imbued with a heavy
dose of structuralism),24 but with the very problems that Craig identifies with my approach: that
is, of failing to challenge the overly structuralist framework offered by Rosenberg.25 Yet I
explicitly address these criticisms of structuralism and lack of politics and agency in Chapter 2
(esp. pp. 37-38, 48-49), and take them much further in a forthcoming book.26 As I write in CSW:
The emphasis placed in this work on the structural constraints and enabling properties of uneven and
combined development…in no way seeks to erase the crucial function of agents in processes of
policymaking and large-scale social change. The significance of these ‘first image’ sources of interstate
relations is further drawn out in the cases of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and particularly President
Woodrow Wilson in Chapters III and IV, respectively… In short, agents and agency matter (p. 49).
21 See similarly, Teschke (2014) and van der Pijl (2014). 22 Rosenberg (2013). See Cooper (2013) on the relationship between UCD and critical realism. 23 Cf. Callinicos (2006). 24 Cf. Rosenberg (2010; 2013). 25 See similarly, Lawson (2005); Teschke (2014); van der Pijl (2014). 26 The question of agency and the political implications of UCD for contemporary socialist strategy are further drawn out in Chapters 2 and the Conclusion of Anievas and Nisancioglu (2015), respectively.
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I hope readers will forgive the vulgarity of quoting myself at length, but I do so in order to
demonstrate that the putative inattention to agency and agents Craig criticizes me for is
somewhat misplaced. While one may criticize my particular conception of agency, to claim that my
account is devoid of agency is inaccurate.
For the sociopolitical and economic effects of UCD are always partially indeterminate: one
cannot say in advance exactly how the developmental pressures of intersocietal relations will
impact upon any given society without an analysis into the changing balance of class forces (i.e.
human agency), among many other factors, which is itself shaped and partly determined by their
wider intersocietal milieu. Indeed, one of the great advantages of UCD is how it offers an
explanation of the sociologically differentiated forms that agency takes that counters any ‘pre-
determined’ unilinear readings of sociohistorical development (p. 48). As I wrote in the summary
piece to this forum, one of the main aims of CSW was to ‘infuse the theory of UCD with a much
stronger ontology of class conflict than had been hitherto on offer in the more recent IR debates
concerning the utility of the concept in providing a theory of “the international”.27 And, as the
sub-title of the book (Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years’ Crisis, 1914-1945) might attest,
throughout the work I continually examine processes of class struggle and inter-capitalist rivalry,
along with their interconnections to policymaking (see esp. 51, 71-72, 74-75, 76-83, 92, 94, 96-97,
121-122, 126-138, 142-144, 156-162, 168-174, 176-177, 188-203, 204-206, 209-213). These are all
issues that, in one form or another, relate to questions of agents and agency.
With all this in mind, the ‘clear anomaly’ of the Senate’s rejection of US membership in
the League of Nations that Craig identifies is much less the anomaly that he makes it out to be.
For while it is true that I don’t spend much time on the subject, this was not because I had no
explanation for it, but rather because I didn’t think it required any further exploration as it had
little bearing on my overall analysis: just because the motivations for Wilson’s League of Nations
diverged from the subsequent outcome in no way invalidates the significance of the original
intentions nor the primary causal forces driving them. Moreover, while Wilson’s own personal
idiosyncrasies (i.e. contingencies) played a part in the failed campaign for Treaty ratification, as
did his particular ideology (the formation of which I spend some time examining in the book
from the perspective of UCD: see pp. 115-126), a crucial – perhaps the – factor was the tactical
disagreements within US policymaking and business circles regarding the role and form US
27 See further, Allinson and Anievas (2010).
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power should take after the war.28 For an important faction of American’s political elites and
capitalists saw the League as thinly-disguised means for Britain to promote a ‘Closed Door’
world economic order which would have adversely affected American ‘national interests’. In
addition, they thought the Treaty’s security agreements were far too limiting on US diplomacy,
particularly by circumscribing America’s long-cherished Monroe Doctrine that kept European
powers out of America’s ‘sphere of influence’ in the Western Hemisphere.29 The main factors
behind the Senate’s rejection of US League membership thus squarely rests within the theoretical
bounds of UCD: ideologically-inflected economic and geopolitical rivalries all emerging from the
uneven and combined character of US development and international capitalism as a whole.30
In these ways, the fight for Treaty ratification was not a struggle between ‘internationalist’
and ‘isolationist’ wings of the US political establishment.31 While a vocal minority ‘isolationist’
wing certainly existed, they were by no means decisive in the Treaty’s rejection. Rather, as Adam
Tooze notes, Wilson’s ‘truly dangerous opponents [to Treaty ratification] were the mainstream
leadership of the Republicans, who could not reasonably be described as isolationist’ as they had
actually ‘favored a far more aggressive stance in the war than Wilson’.32
The US Senate’s ultimate rejection of the Treaty on 19 March 1920 is often viewed as
epitomizing America’s policy of ‘isolationism’ – an interpretation that Craig seems to share when
he writes that it represented the turning of ‘America’s back on world power politics after 1920’.
This is an interpretation fundamentally at odds with the available evidence and the current state
of historiography on interwar US diplomacy.33 US foreign policymaking throughout the period
was actively interventionist in European affairs (among many other regions of the world), though
this would often take the intentionally deceptive form of ‘private diplomacy’ through
businessmen-diplomats such as Thomas W. Lamont and Owen D. Young (see esp. 147-152).
Further, the leading policymakers of the successive Republican administrations of the 1920s,
28 On these tactical divisions within US policymaking and business circles, see Mayer (1968: Chapter 2); Parrini (1969: esp. 55-72); Hoff-Wilson (1971: esp. 15-17); Van Meter (1971: esp. 10-16); Kaufman (1974: esp. 48-50, 165-178, 213); Van der Pijl (1984: Chapter 4); Ferguson (1984); Hogan (1989: Chapter 1). 29 Cooper (2001: 61-62). 30 See further, Anievas (2014). 31 Cf. Parrini (1969: 13-14; Chapter 6); Hoff-Wilson (1971: 20-29); Costigliola (1984: 30-33); Offner (1986: 41-43); Ambrosius (1990); Kuehl (1997); Cohrs (2006: 65-66); Tooze (2014: 334-338). 32 Tooze (2014: 335). 33 See, inter alia, Parrini (1969); Leffler (1979); E. Rosenberg (1982); Gardner (1984); Costigliola (1984); Offner (1986); Hogan (1989: Chapter 1); McCormick (1995: Chapter 2); McDougal (1997); Schuker (1998; 2003); Ninkovich (1999); Rhodes (2001); Hannigan (2002); Cohrs (2006); Hoff (2008); Braumoeller (2010); Iriye (2013) Tooze (2014).
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were overwhelmingly liberal internationalists (some even former Wilsonians) as exemplified by
Herbert Hoover, Charles G. Dawes, Andrew Mellon, Charles Evans Hughes, and Frank B.
Kellogg, to name but a few.
So what about my supposed over-reliance on a particular school of historiographical
thought in examining Wilson’s diplomacy and my putative failure to acknowledge the affinities
between classical realism and Left critiques of US foreign policy? Regarding the latter, I’d direct
the reader to a passage from Lloyd C. Gardner that I quote on page 112: ‘while radicals “may
criticize his [Wilson’s] naïve moralism and idealism along with the realists…a full account of the
development of that outlook is a much more difficult problem”. This was an “outlook” which
had “developed from a much keener insight into the nature of his society (and its needs) than
would appear from the realist critique”’.34 Whilst recognizing these affinities between realist and
Left-revisionist critiques of Wilson(ianism), I also point out one critical difference: the near total
absence of any strong conception of social structures within the classical realist cannon that
could explain the development of Wilson’s liberal-internationalist ideology and policies (see pp.
112-115).
I further acknowledge the similarities between the contemporary realist literature on US
foreign policy, which Craig claims I appear unfamiliar with, and Left critiques mentioning, for
example, the works of Fareed Zakaria, Andrew Bacevich and Christopher Layne – all of whom
have drawn on the ‘Wisconsin School’ of US diplomacy (pp. 112 and 241-242fn7). This point is
further drawn out in a footnote discussing the three dominant schools of historiographical
thought (realist, liberal, and revisionist), where I write that ‘[l]ike any broad school, none of these
approaches are monolithic’, noting that some Left-revisionists have ‘more in common with
realist approaches’ than liberals. Of direct relevance to Craig’s charge that I essentially reproduce
these revisionist works’ (specifically, Levin’s) interpretations of Wilson’s foreign policy during
and after the war, I write that ‘my interpretation is closer to the latter [‘realist’ revisionists – AA]
but also draws on Lloyd Ambrosius’s “realist” critique, which offers a useful supplement to
those revisionist scholars neglecting the international sources of Wilsonian diplomacy’ (241fn3,
emphasis added).35
34 See also Anievas (2014). 35 While the interpretative (not theoretical) framework deployed in analysing Wilson’s policies was indeed closest to the revisionists, I was keenly aware of the problems emerging from drawing too heavily on any single school of historiographical thought, which essentially presents theory as evidence (cf. Lustick 1996). Hence, throughout my
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This last issue regarding the lack of any substantive conception of ‘the international’ is a
blind spot for nearly all revisionist-Left critiques of Wilson (Levin’s included), which, broadly
speaking, interpret the sources of US foreign policymaking as emerging from the inherent limits
and contradictions of the American socioeconomic system: the need to export capital and trade
‘surpluses’ necessary to maintain economic growth and prosperity thereby circumventing radical
reforms to the domestic status-quo order – hence, the ‘Open Door’ (see pp. 121-124). While
recognizing this was indeed an important factor in Wilson’s policy calculations, my own
theoretical approach, by contrast, emphasizes the interconnections between these ‘domestic’
sources and distinctly geopolitical determinations: firstly, by examining how America’s own
unique pattern of UCD preceding – and causally feeding into – the Civil War36 and after
generated the historical-sociological conditions for the development of Wilson’s politics and
ideology and Wilsonianism as such (pp. 116-126); and, secondly, by demonstrating how the
‘chief social substance of Wilsonian policy’ was the attempted ‘geopolitical management of
combined development’ (p. 132).37
That is to say, the Wilsonians’ attempt to transform the internal social structures of
societies through the imposition of an abstract liberal universality (capitalism) that sought to
erase those extant conditions of (geo)political and socioeconomic unevenness, resulted in the
geopolitical management of the explosive effects emerging from such US interventions. For a
significant consequence of US interventions into later-developing societies was the grafting of
capitalist social relations onto pre-existing non-capitalist structures generating various
contradictory-ridden forms of combined development (see pp. 124-125, 130-133). Hence, far
from moderating the effects of UCD in the Global South, an unintended consequence of the
Open Door was to exacerbate those very tendencies: implanting market forces and capitalist
relations onto such societies in ‘inorganic’ ways, their development took convulsive and
destabilizing forms unhinging traditional social structures. In these ways, US foreign
policymakers were often the unknowing ‘agents’ of combined development (125-126). While
William Appleman William’s famous work The Tragedy of American Diplomacy interpreted and
described some of these processes, neither he nor his students ever theoretically incorporated
these geopolitical dimensions of Wilson’s policymaking into their interpretative frameworks,
discussions of US foreign policymaking (Chapters 4 and 5), I draw on an array of scholars from different historiographical traditions. 36 See Anievas (2014: 625-627). 37 Quoting in part Rosenberg (1996: 12) who is referring to post-1945 US foreign policymaking.
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instead focusing almost exclusively on the domestic origins of the ‘Open Door’. This is then a
rather substantial difference between the theoretical framework I offer through UCD and the
‘inside-out’ interpretation of the ‘Open Door’ policy provided by the revisionists.
Conclusion
Craig’s final claim regarding the ‘challenge’ to explain the post-1945 epoch of international
relations from the perspective of UCD is a very welcome suggestion. While I don’t think the
post-1945 transformations in world politics Craig mentions pose as much as a problem to the
explanatory power of UCD as he suggests, unfortunately I can’t adequately address this
important subject in such a short reply.38 I would therefore echo Craig’s call for an analysis of the
post-WWII period to be an avenue for future research and, modestly suggest, that the theoretical
framework I outline in CSW may offer some insights into how this might be carried out.
38 For a provisional outline of such an analysis, see the extended version of this reply and Anievas (2014).