1 | P a g e

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.

2 | P a g e

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).

3 | P a g e

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).

4 | P a g e

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).

5 | P a g e

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).

6 | P a g e

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).

7 | P a g e

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).

8 | P a g e

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).

9 | P a g e

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).

10 | P a g e

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.

11 | P a g e

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).

12 | P a g e

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).

13 | P a g e

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

14 | P a g e

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.

15 | P a g e

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).