Alexander Anievas

The uses and misuses of uneven and combined development: an anatomy of a concept

A central concern of much contemporary Marxist scholarship in international relations (IR) is to internally relate global capitalism and the state system without reducing one of these systems to an epiphenomenon of the other. A recent attempt at this is Justin Rosenbergs reformulation of Leon Trotskys idea of uneven and combined development (U&CD). This article examines the internal relations of ‘unevenness’ and ‘combination’ as presented by Trotsky and reworked by Rosenberg. From this anatomization of the concept, we focus on the problematic status of U&CD as a transhistorical general abstraction arising from the exchange between Callinicos and Rosenberg (Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 22:1 2008, 77–112) and suggest our own possible solution. We argue that while the uneven and combined nature of historical development represents a truly transhistorical phenomenon, its distinct causal determinations, articulated and expressed through inter-societal competition, are only fully activated under the specific socio-historical conditions of generalized commodity production. These theoretical points are illuminated through three specific historical examples (the Meiji Restoration, the ‘Eastern Question’ and the origins of the two World Wars). Finally, we illustrate some of the dangers of analytical overextension found in Rosenbergs own ambiguous use of U&CD.

The uneven and combined development of the Meiji Restoration: A passive revolutionary road to capitalist modernity

In this article, we examine the utility of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution and its relation to Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development in analysing the transformational effects of world economy and international relations on ‘late-developing’ societies’ transition to capitalism. Although Gramsci never explicitly linked passive revolution to uneven and combined development, we argue that Trotsky’s theory helps make explicit assumptions present in the Prison Notebooks, but never fully thematised. In turn, we demonstrate that incorporating passive revolution into Trotsky’s theory further illuminates the ontology of class agencies that is often lacking in structuralist approaches to bourgeois revolutions. In illustrating these arguments, we examine the case of Japan’s modern state-formation process, demonstrating how the Meiji Restoration of 1868 can be conceptualised as a passive revolution emerging within the context of the uneven and combined process of social development activated and generalised through the rise of the capitalist world economy.

What’s at Stake in the Transition Debate? Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism and the “Rise of the West"

This article draws on the theory of uneven and combined development (U&CD) to construct a non-Eurocentric and ‘internationalist’ analysis of the transition to capitalism. In doing so, we seek to respond to and rethink two challenges: exposures of Eurocentric notions of the ‘Rise of the West’ on the one hand; and recent critiques of Eurocentric assumptions in the theory of U&CD on the other. Beginning with an assessment of Robert Brenner’s Anglo-centric theorisation of capitalism’s origins, we argue Brenner’s efforts are hamstrung by an omission of international determinations and conditions. In turn, we retrace these missing international factors through an analysis of the Mongol invasions of the 13th/14th centuries, Ottoman imperial expansion in the 15th/16th centuries and the contemporaneous discovery and colonisation of the New World. We argue that each case demonstrates the historically specific forms of U&CD that fed into – and ultimately determined – the developmental trajectory of capitalism in north-western Europe.

1914 in world historical perspective: The ‘uneven’ and ‘combined’ origins of World War I

The causes of World War I remain a topic of enormous intellectual interest. Yet, despite the immensity of the literature, historiographical and IR debates remain mired within unhelpful methodological dichotomies revolving around whether a ‘primacy of foreign policy’ versus ‘primacy of domestic politics’ or systemic versus unit-level approach best account for the war’s origins. Given that this historiography is the most prolific body of literature for any war within the modern age, it reveals a much deeper problem with the social sciences: how to coherently integrate ‘external’ and ‘internal’ relations into a synthesized theory of inter-state conflict and war. Drawing on and contributing to the theory of uneven and combined development, this article challenges standard interpretations of the war by distinctively uniting geopolitical and sociological modes of explanation into a single framework. In doing so, the article highlights how the necessarily variegated character of interactive socio-historical development explains the inter-state rivalries leading to war. Contextualizing the sources of conflict within the broad developmental tendencies of the Long 19th Century (1789–1914) and their particular articulation during the immediate pre-war juncture, the article seeks to provide significant contributions to recent debates in IR and historical sociology, as well as those concerning the relationship between history and IR theory.

Critical Dialogues: Habermasian Social Theory and International Relations1

The works of Jürgen Habermas have been a theoretical inspiration for many students of international relations (IR). To date, however, the majority of critical IR approaches drawing from the Habermasian perspective have done so on purely philosophical grounds. This article will thus explore the utility of the social-theoretical aspects of Habermass work for critical inquiries into world politics. To this end, it will examine four main elements of his work: the theory of communicative action; public sphere; lifeworld/system architecture; and discourse ethics. It will be argued that adopting the Habermasian conceptual apparatus provides a social-theoretical route to explaining the contradictory and often paradoxical nature of international relations in the epoch of ‘globalisation’. While various constructivist approaches to IR have recently offered more socially-oriented applications of Habermass theoretical framework, the majority of these studies have done so from predominately non-critical standpoints. This article will thus seek to explore the utility of Habermass work in offering a critical social theory of world politics.

Revolutions and international relations: Rediscovering the classical bourgeois revolutions

In the modern era, revolutions have been central to the structure and dynamics of international affairs. They have always been international events: international in origin, ideology, process and effect, supercharging the rhythms and logics of any given international system. Yet, within the discipline of International Relations, the study of revolutions has remained something of a secondary subject. Not only have there been relatively few studies theoretically engaging with revolution and international relations, but the dominant theoretical frameworks in International Relations have largely bracketed out revolutions from their conceptions of international politics. Yet, if revolutions have been, in part, international in both cause and effect, thereby transcending the confines of ‘second-’ and ‘third-image’ conceptions of international relations, we require theoretical tools capable of capturing the sociological and geopolitical dimensions of these Janus-faced events without reducing one dimension to the other. Drawing on the theory of uneven and combined development, this article provides such a conception, organically uniting both ‘sociological’ and ‘geopolitical’ modes of explanation. It does so, in particular, by re-examining two of the key ‘classical’ bourgeois revolutions of the early-modern epoch: the English and French revolutions.

Debating uneven and combined development: towards a Marxist theory of ‘the international’?

The following is the second of a two-part section series. The first section, ‘Global capitalism and the states system’, brought together a diverse group of scholars to examine a number of issues raised by Alex Callinicos’s article ‘Does capitalism need the state system?’ (2007). In particular, this centred on whether the relationship between a multiplicity of states and capitalism is a contingent or structural one, and, correlatively, how this relationship might be conceptualized in explaining geopolitical competition and war. In other words, are international relations to be understood in terms of two autonomous, but intertwining, territorial and capitalist logics of power, or one, single articulated logic? This led to a subsequent series of letters between Justin Rosenberg and Alex Callinicos (2008) on the theoretical significance of Leon Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development (U&CD)—a resource Callinicos uses to explain the persistence of many states under capitalism. This exchange extended the debate concerning the precise relationship between capitalism and the state system to the more abstract level of inter-societal development (‘the international’). What theoretical significance, if any, could be derived from the coexistence and interaction of multiple political communities? Could ‘the international’ be apprehended through an elaboration and refinement of the methodology provided by classical social theory? Or, alternatively, does ‘the international’ represent a more fundamental challenge to extant social theories? For Rosenberg, the incorporation of ‘the international’ into our theoretical frameworks demands a fundamental reconstruction of social theory. In this vein, he offers a reconceptualisation of Trotsky’s concept of U&CD as a transhistorical ‘general abstraction’ to provide a theory capable of endogenously capturing the multi-linear and interactive dimensions of socio-historical development in its basic conceptions of ‘society’. Further analytical insights of U&CD for international relations (IR) and social theory are explored in the contributions to this section. A relatively obscure Marxist concept such as Trotsky’s U&CDmight seem an unusual place to excavate a theory of international relations. Marxism and IR have traditionally had a troubled relationship: a case of mutual neglect and sometime open hostility. In a past era, the idea that Trotsky’s writings had anything to offer IR theory might have elicited ridicule. Indeed, it did. Some years ago, the late, distinguished scholar Hedley Bull hosted a drinks reception for a group of new IR students at Oxford. At this reception, one student caught Bull’s ear and, as James Der Derian recounts the story, ‘confidently expounded on the general neglect of Leon Trotsky’s writings in the field of IR’. The proposed contribution of Trotsky was, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Volume 22, Number 1, March 2009

History, theory, and contingency in the study of modern international relations: the global transformation revisited

Debates engaging the problems of ahistoricism and Eurocentrism in International Relations (IR) theory have taken on new dimensions in recent years. Scholars from a variety of different theoretical traditions have aimed to reconstruct IR theory on stronger historical–sociological grounds, while re-orienting the study of IR away from the fetish of ‘Western’ thought and agency. Buzan and Lawson’s The Global Transformation offers a welcome contribution to these endeavours to furnish a non-Eurocentric historical sociology of international relations. This article seeks to push their project further by re-assessing the relationship between history, theory, and contingency. In particular, it interrogates whether Buzan and Lawson’s ‘configurational’ approach to the ‘global transformation’, emphasizing the contingent concatenation of historical events and social processes, results in a displacement of theory through an over-emphasis on the interaction of free-floating contingently related causes, causes that are external to any theoretical schema. This approach obscures the deeper, structural forces in the making of global modernity, most notably those that escape Buzan and Lawson’s singular focus on the ‘long 19th century’.

How Did the West Usurp the Rest? Origins of the Great Divergence over the Longue Durée

Traditional explanations of the “rise of the West” have located the sources of Western supremacy in structural or long-term developmental factors internal to Europe. By contrast, revisionist accounts have emphasized the conjunctural and contingent aspects of Europes ascendancy, while highlighting intersocietal conditions that shaped this trajectory to global dominance. While sharing the revisionist focus on the non-Western sources of European development, we challenge their conjunctural explanation, which denies differences between “West” and “East” and within Europe. We do so by deploying the idea of uneven and combined development (UCD), which redresses the shortcomings found on both sides of the debate: the traditional Eurocentric focus on the structural and immanent characteristics of European development and the revisionists’ emphasis on contingency and the homogeneity of Eurasian societies. UCD resolves these problems by integrating structural and contingent factors into a unified explanation: unevenness makes sense of the sociological differences that revisionists miss, while combination captures the aleatory processes of interactive and multilinear development overlooked by Eurocentric approaches. From this perspective, the article examines the sociologically generative interactions between European and Asian societies’ development over the longue duree and traces how the breakdown of feudalism and the rise of capitalism in Europe were fundamentally rooted in and conditioned by extra-European structures and agents. This then sets up our conjunctural analysis of a central yet underappreciated factor explaining Europe rise to global dominance: the disintegration of the Mughal Empire and Britains colonization of India.

Limits of the Universal: The Promises and Pitfalls of Postcolonial Theory and Its Critique

This article seeks to reassess the potential merits and weaknesses of the Subaltern Studies project through the prism of Vivek Chibber’s much-publicised and controversial book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital . By critically examining Chibber’s work, the article aims to better pinpoint exactly what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ with the Subaltern Studies project, while drawing out some productive points of engagement between Marxism and postcolonial theory more generally. In particular, we argue that an understanding of the origins of capitalist modernity remains a relatively unexplored omission within postcolonial thought that problematises their broader project of ‘provincialising Europe’. Against this backdrop, the article explores the affinities between Leon Trotsky’s notion of uneven and combined development and postcolonialism, demonstrating how the former can provide a theoretical solution to the problem of Eurocentrism that the Subaltern Studies project correctly identifies but inadequately conceptualises.