Benno Teschke

The changing ‘logics’ of capitalist competition

This article criticizes contemporary attempts within the Marxist tradition to understand the current juncture of international relations in terms of either a return to classical Marxist theories of inter-imperial rivalry or ultra-imperialism. It argues instead to put the debate on a new theoretical footing that is able to capture the rich diversity of international relations and permutations of territorial orders within the entire history of capitalism since its inception in 17th-century England. It argues specifically that the system of multiple states and capitalism, rather than being causally co-emergent and co-constitutive, have historically different origins. Since the latter emerged within the former, their interrelation is not structurally determined by any ‘logic of capital’ per se or by a ‘logic of anarchy’ (or by their intersection). Rather, profound variations in capitalist international orders result from the contested construction of diverse projects of territorialization by historically situated capitalist classes and states. They are neither subject to an evolutionary long-term logic of globalization and global state-formation, nor to a recurring logic of inter-imperial rivalry, but far exceed the limits of these narrow options.

Theorizing the Westphalian system of states: international relations from absolutism to capitalism

This article provides a new approach, revolving around contested property relations, for theorizing the constitution, operation and transformation of geopolitical systems, exemplified with reference to early modern international relations. Against the cross-paradigmatic IR consensus that equates the Westphalian Settlement with the codification of modern international relations, the article shows to which degree 17th and 18th century European geopolitics remained tied to rather unique pre-modern practices. These cannot be understood on the basis of realist or constructivist premises. In contrast, the theoretical argument is that the proprietary and personalized character of dynastic sovereignty was predicated on pre-capitalist property relations. Dynasticism, in turn, translated into historically specific patterns of conflict and cooperation that were fundamentally governed by the competitive logic of geopolitical accumulation. The decisive break to international modernity comes with the rise of the first modern state — England. After the establishment of a capitalist agrarian property regime and the transformation of the English state in the 17th century, post-1688 Britain starts to restructure international relations in a long-term process of geopolitically combined and socially uneven development.

Geopolitical Relations in the European Middle Ages: History and Theory

The European Middle Ages have recently attracted the attention of international relations (IR) scholars as a “testing-ground” for established IR theories. Neorealists, historicizing neorealists, and constructivists dispute the meanings of medieval anarchy and hierarchy in the absence of sovereignty. On the basis of a detailed critique of these approaches, I offer a historically informed and theoretically controlled interpretation of medieval geopolitics revolving around contested social property relations. My interpretation is meta-theoretically guided by dialectical principles. Lordships are the constitutive units of medieval authority, combining economic and political powers and assigning contradictory forms of rationality to their major agents, lords, and peasants. Interlordly competition over land and labor translates directly into distinct forms of geopolitical relations, generating a culture of war. Against this background, I clarify the specific meanings of the medieval “state,” territoriality, frontiers, peace, war, anarchy, and hierarchy before drawing out the wider implications of changing social property forms for IR theory.

Bourgeois Revolution, State Formation and the Absence of the International

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 Also available online – www.brill.nl 1 This is a revised version of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial lecture, delivered on 9 October 2004 at Birkbeck College, University of London. I am grateful to the Deutscher Committee for the award of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize 2003, and, in particular, to Alfredo Saad-Filho for organisational and editorial support and George Comninel for his role as discussant on the Deutscher Lectures panel. Additionally, I would like to thank Justin Rosenberg, Kees van der Pijl, Ellen Wood, Samuel Knafo, Kamran Matin, and Robert Shilliam for detailed comments on the paper. The article was written in the register of a lecture and carries its synoptic, programmatic, and provocative marks. [Editorial note: the 2003 Deutscher Memorial Prize was won jointly by Benno Teschke (for The Myth of 1648) and Neil Davidson (for Discovering the Scottish Revolution). The following issue will carry Davidson’s Lecture. In a future issue, George Comninel will review both books.] 2 Teschke 2003. Benno Teschke Bourgeois Revolution, State Formation and the Absence of the International

Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl Schmitt's international political and legal theory

The ongoing Schmitt revival has extended Carl Schmitts reach over the fields of international legal and political theory. Neo-Schmittians suggest that his international thought provides a new reading of the history of international law and order, which validates the explanatory power of his theoretical premises – the concept of the political, political decisionism, and concrete-order-thinking. Against this background, this article mounts a systematic reappraisal of Schmitts international thought in a historical perspective. The argument is that his work requires re-contextualization as the intellectual product of an ultra-intense moment in Schmitts friend/enemy distinction. It inscribed Hitlers ‘spatial revolution’ into a full-scale reinterpretation of Europes geopolitical history, grounded in land appropriations, which legitimized Nazi Germanys wars of conquest. Consequently, Schmitts elevation of the early modern nomos as the model for civilized warfare – the ‘golden age’ of international law – against which American legal universalism can be portrayed as degenerated, is conceptually and empirically flawed. Schmitt devised a politically motivated set of theoretical premises to provide a historical counter-narrative against liberal normativism, which generated defective history. The reconstruction of this history reveals the explanatory limits of his theoretical vocabulary – friend/enemy binary, sovereignty-as-exception, nomos/universalism – for past and present analytical purposes. Schmitts defective analytics and problematic history compromise the standing of his work for purposes of international theory.

The Dialectic of the Concrete: Reconsidering Dialectic for IR and Foreign Policy Analysis

Abstract Modes of dialectical reasoning were introduced into International Relations (IR) from the 1980s onwards in the context of the post-positivist debate as an alternative intellectual resource drawn from the philosophy of the social sciences. To the extent that the deployment of dialectics for IR drew upon Marx and the wider Hegelian Marxist tradition, it was challenged philosophically and substantively on two fronts. Philosophically, the problem emerged how to disassociate dialectics from the ‘systemic’ Hegelian legacy, which expressed itself in the naturalism and monism of dialectical materialism, and how to overcome a reading of capital as a self-unfolding conceptual category, expressed in systematic dialectics, which de-historicised and de-subjectified capitalism as a social relation. Substantively, the problem remained how to anchor a Historical Sociology of international relations in a historicist philosophy of praxis to avoid the temptation of a relapse into structuralist modes of explanation. By addressing this double challenge, this paper identifies a central lacuna within the Marxist IR tradition—the gap between general Marxist theories of IR and the analysis of foreign policy-making. This gap persists in equal measure in the bifurcation between the fields of general IR theory and actor-specific foreign policy analysis (FPA). For general IR theories—Marxist and non-Marxist—tend to deploy structuralist versions of theory, which relegate the problem of foreign policy-making to lesser, possibly non-theorisable, forms of inquiry. FPA is thereby demoted and subsumed under wider structural imperatives capable of cross-case generalisation. The paper moves from a critical exposition of the wider debate in IR and FPA of attempts to close this gap, via a critique of dialectical materialism and systematic dialectics, to a re-statement of the dialectic of the concrete. It concludes with a reconsideration of how dialectical thinking may bridge this gap by incorporating foreign policy as the crucial site for the active drawing together and re-articulation of multiple influences from the domestic and the foreign into a Historical Sociology of international relations.

Marxismus in den Internationalen Beziehungen

Das Kapitel liefert eine chronologisch geordnete Einfuhrung und kritische Ubersicht marxistisch-inspirierter theoretischer Paradigmen zum Phanomen der internationalen Beziehungen. Ausgangspunkt ist der Nachweis der relativen Absenz der Problematik internationaler Beziehungen bei Marx und Engels, die erst im Kontext der Imperialismus-Debatten der Zwischenkriegszeit zu einem zentralen Explanandum diverser marxistischer Denkstromungen wurden. Innerhalb der nach wie vor anglo-amerikanisch dominierten Teildisziplin der IB wurden im Laufe der 1970er-Jahre unter dem Einfluss der Weltsystemtheorie, gefolgt von neo-gramscianischen Theorien internationaler Beziehungen in den 1980er-Jahren, marxistische Ansatze dem klassischen Kanon realistischer und liberaler Theorietraditionen angefugt. Heute, nach dem Ende von Denkverboten auferlegt durch wissenschaftspolitische Implikationen des Kalten Krieges und rigider Parteidogmen, stellen marxistische IB-Theorien – auch im Kontext der post-positivistischen Wende innerhalb der IB – einen dynamischen, pluralistischen, und zunehmend ausdifferenzierten Teilbereich der Disziplin dar, der sich nicht nur der Verdinglichung von Macht und Geopolitik im klassischen (Neo-)Realismus, sondern auch den Verheissungen liberaler IB-Theorien kritisch und reflexiv widersetzt. Zentral bleibt dem gegenwartigen kritischen Diskurs – Weltsystemtheorie, Neo-Gramscianismus, Politischer Marxismus, Ungleiche und Kombinierte Entwicklung, Theorien des Neo-Imperialismus – nicht nur der, wenn auch sehr verschieden akzentuierte, Rekurs auf die klassische Kapitalismuskritik bei Marx, sondern auch die Kategorienkritik des begrifflichen Vokabulars des IB mainstreams. Dem entspricht ein Forschungsprogramm, welches die Historisierung von „Anarchie“, Staatlichkeit, politischer Rationalitat und diverser geopolitischer Ordnungen als gesellschaftlich-politischer Konstruktionen unter Hinzunahme der Kategorie umkampfter sozialer Klassen- und Herrschaftsverhaltnisse betreibt, denen stets eine internationale Dimension beiwohnt. Allerdings bleibt auch die gegenwartige marxistische Debatte durch einen tendenziell objektivierenden Strukturalismus gekennzeichnet, den es durch eine theoretische und empirische Spezifizierung sozialer, politischer und geopolitischer Praxen zu uberwinden gilt. Dieses Forschungsdesiderat sollte nicht nur im Hinblick auf theorie-interne Defizite nicht-marxistischer rivalisierender Theorieangebote verstanden werden, sondern auch im Hinblick auf das originare Unverstandnis von Marxismus als intervenierender, kritischer und praktischer Wissenschaft gesellschaftlicher Verhaltnisse.