Putting the nation back into ‘the international’

Abstract

Alex Callinicos and Justin Rosenberg have both drawn on the concept of uneven and combined development to resolve what they see as deficiencies in international relations theory: in the case of the former, the absence of a non-realist explanation for the persistence of the states system; in the case of the latter, the absence of a sociological dimension to geopolitics. However, Callinicos omits any consideration of the ‘combined’ aspect of uneven and combined development, while Rosenberg ascribes characteristics of transhistoricity and internationality to uneven and combined development which it does not possess. Against attempts to either restrict or over-extend use of the concept, I will argue that its theoretical usefulness depends on understanding the limits of its spatial and chronological reach. An alternative, if still partial, explanation for the continued existence of the states system will emphasize the continuing indispensability of nationalism as a means of both containing class conflict within capitalist states and mobilizing support for ‘national capitals’ engaged in geoeconomic and geopolitical competition.

Introduction

In his article ‘Does capitalism need the state system?’, Alex Callinicos raises a series of important methodological, conceptual and empirical issues about this relationship (Callinicos 2007). While I agree with his conclusions, especially in relation to the likely persistence of the states system and the continued relevance of imperialism as a category, I disagree with some of the arguments by which he arrives at them. One such argument is that uneven and combined development (U&CD) can explain the continued coexistence of many capitals and many states. The broader significance of this concept has been the subject of a subsequent exchange between Callinicos and Justin Rosenberg (Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008). The first part of this article explains my disagreements with their respective interpretations of U&CD: in the case of Callinicos, that his argument actually draws on the theory of uneven development rather than that of U&CD; in the case of Rosenberg, that his argument ascribes characteristics of transhistoricity and internationality to U&CD which it does not in fact possess. The second part of this article outlines an alternative, if still partial, explanation of capitalism's need for the states system, emphasizing the ‘national’ aspect of nation-states that has been ignored or at least downplayed in these discussions so far.2

Uneven development or uneven and combined development?

Several contributors to these linked debates have agreed with Callinicos that U&CD can explain the persistence of the states system under capitalism (see, for example, Pozo-Martin 2007, 556). Leaving the substantive issue aside for the moment, it is not clear to me that Callinicos is referring to combined development at all.3 He invokes it at the beginning of his discussion, but almost immediately shifts attention onto the earlier and less comprehensive theory of uneven development. In particular, he draws from Lenin's Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism to show how ‘uneven development that both raises productivity and is economically destabilizing, is inherent in capitalism’ and ‘constantly subverts the efforts to integrate “many capitals” into a single entity’ (Callinicos 2007, 544–545; Lenin 1960–1970b, 295). The slippage involved here from U&CD to uneven development is an example of a more widespread confusion.4 In his exchange with Rosenberg, Callinicos cites Robert Brenner's comparison between English and French feudalism in a passage that concludes, ‘the development of the mechanisms of feudal accumulation tended to be not only “uneven” but also “combined”, in the sense that later developers could build on previous advances made elsewhere in feudal class organization’ (Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008, 101; Brenner 1985, 255). Giovanni Arrighi summarizes this conception of ‘combination’ for the contemporary period as ‘the process whereby laggards in capitalist development seek to catch up, and eventually succeed in catching up, with the leaders of that development’ (Arrighi 2007, 102). But what exactly is being ‘combined’ in such cases? As we shall see, what is being discussed in these passages remains uneven development.

As Callinicos's reference to Lenin suggests, the concept of uneven development was a component of the classical Marxist tradition. Trotsky himself stressed that the concept, if not the term, was present in the work of Marx and Engels, despite claims to the contrary by Stalin (Trotsky 1974, 15, 61; 1972b, 116). More recently, it has also informed such memorable analyses as Brenner's delineation of competition between the core economies of global capitalism after the Second World War; Doreen Massey's construction of a general explanatory model of regional inequality more comprehensive than that of either the neoclassical equilibrium or the cumulative causation school; and Neil Smith's depiction of the ‘seesaw’ reproduction of capital which leads to both spatial differentiation and equalization on the urban, nation-state and global scales (Brenner 2003, 9–24; 2006, 32–40; Massey 1995, 118–119; Smith 1990, 135–154). Can it also explain the persistence of the states system? There is one fundamental reason why I think it cannot.

Individual states have coexisted with massive internal unevenness, in some cases carried over in a different form from the feudal to the capitalist period, without it necessarily leading to fragmentation. The long-standing status of the north/south divide in Italy and the later emergence of a further distinct geographical area in the post-war ‘Third Italy’ have not seriously threatened the integrity of the state (Morton 2007, 51–73; Ginsburg 1990, 17–38, 210–235). Similarly, the Scottish Highland/Lowland divide shows how ongoing and, in Western European terms, unparalleled levels of unevenness have existed at a sub-state, regional level within Britain since 1707 (Davidson 2000, 63–78, 102–106; 2003, 52–70, 220–227, 261–267; Davidson 2004, 448–452). Why could similar extremes of unevenness not be contained within a single global state? As we shall see, there are reasons why a single world state is unlikely, but the territorial unevenness of capitalism is not one of them. But if uneven development alone is unable to explain the continued existence of many states, is U&CD proper any more effective? To answer this question we must first establish the relationship, and the differences, between these two concepts.

From unevenness to combination

By the beginning of the twentieth century uneven development had three main aspects. One was the process by which the advanced states had reached their leading positions within the structured inequality of the world system. Marxists such as Rudolf Hilferding and Antonio Gramsci, and non-Marxists like Thorstein Veblen, noted that late-developing capitalist states had enjoyed the ‘advantages of backwardness’ (Hilferding 1981, 332–333; Gramsci 1977, 36; Veblen 1939, 65–66, 85–86). Trotsky himself gave perhaps the most concise statement of this aspect in one of the most famous—and most quoted—passages in The history of the Russian Revolution: ‘The privilege of historic backwardness—and such a privilege exists—permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages’ (Trotsky 1977a, 27).

During the late nineteenth century the ‘skipping of stages’ had been the experience of several states, notably Germany, Italy and Japan. The pressure of military and commercial competition between the actual or aspirant great powers forced those which were still absolutist states based on the feudal mode of production—or at least those which were capable of doing so—to adopt the current stage of development achieved by their capitalist rivals, if they were to have any chance, not only of successfully competing, but of surviving at the summit of the world order. In very compressed timescales they were able to adopt the socio-economic achievements of Britain to the extent that they became recognizably the same kind of society, without necessarily reproducing every characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon pioneer.

Unevenness continued to exist within the territory of these states, of course, but this was also true of Britain itself, as the parallel I have drawn between the Scottish Highlands and the Italian south suggests. Where backwardness remained it tended to be in the nature of the political regimes led by monarchs or emperors supported by a landowning aristocracy. But again was Britain so very different? Between 1870 and 1914 imperial Britain, Germany and Japan all consciously emphasized the role of their monarch-emperors; in each case the pre-existing symbolism of the crown being used to represent national unity against two main challenges: external imperial rivalry and internal class divisions (Cannadine 1983, 120–150; Bayly 2004, 426–430). By the outbreak of the First World War membership of the group of dominant capitalist states was essentially fixed. What remained was the second aspect of uneven development: the ongoing rivalry between the great powers which involved them constantly trying to ‘catch up and overtake’ each other in a contest for supremacy which would continue as long as capitalism itself. This rivalry led in turn to a third aspect: the developed imperialist states collectively but competitively asserting their dominance over two other types, described by Lenin as ‘the colonies themselves’ and ‘the diverse forms of dependent countries which, politically are formally independent but in fact, are enmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence’, like Argentina and Portugal (Lenin 1960–1970b, 263–264). Colonial expansion prevented some of the societies subject to it from developing at all, and in the case of the most undeveloped the peoples involved suffered near or complete extermination and their lands were taken by settlers. More often the peoples survived, but their social systems were immobilized by imperial powers interested in strategic advantage or plunder, or both.

Trotsky certainly took uneven development in these three senses as his starting point—as is suggested by the word order in the title of his own theory: ‘I would put uneven before combined, because the second grows out of the first and completes it’ (Trotsky 1979 [1940], 858). How then does the concept of U&CD differ from uneven development as such? The former cannot be understood outside the context of strategic debates within the international socialist movement. Like all Russian Marxists at the turn of the twentieth century, Trotsky was concerned with the nature of the forthcoming revolution. The strategy he proposed of a minority working class movement overleaping the supposedly necessary stages of bourgeois democracy and capitalist development came to be called permanent revolution. But how was it that the working class of a country like Russia, backward in so many respects, could play the kind of role predicted by Trotsky and realized in 1905 and 1917?

During the Chinese Revolution of 1925–1927 the emergent Stalinist regime in Russia ordered the local communist party to subordinate its own organization and demands to those of the bourgeois nationalists in the Guomindang. The ultimately disastrous outcome for the Chinese working class movement was the catalyst for Trotsky to generalize the strategy of permanent revolution from Russia to sections of the colonial and semi-colonial world; not indiscriminately—since some were still untouched by capitalist development and had no working class of any size—but where conditions similar to those in Russia prevailed. Due to a common set of circumstances, the working classes in these countries had far greater levels of both consciousness and organization than the proletariat in the more developed countries where Marxists had traditionally expected the socialist revolution to begin. Trotsky claimed that ‘the prediction that historically backward Russia could arrive at the proletarian revolution sooner than advanced Britain rests almost entirely upon the law of uneven development’ (Trotsky 1969, 241). But uneven development was not the sole basis for this prediction, as we can see by contrasting actual Russian development with two possible alternatives.

One was the path of the advanced capitalist states. The pace of development was relatively faster in most of the countries that followed Holland and England, partly because of the urgency of acquiring the attributes of capitalist modernity, partly because the long period of experiment and evolution, characteristic of the two pioneers, could be dispensed with. In the case of Scotland in the eighteenth century or Germany in the nineteenth century, this led to enormous tensions which resolved themselves in moments of class struggle foreshadowing the process of permanent revolution: the general strike and insurrection of 1820 in Scotland, the revolution of 1848 in Germany. But because these societies did make the transition—did join the ranks of the advanced societies, either in their own right (Germany) or as part of another national formation (Scotland/Britain)—these moments passed with the tensions that caused them.5

The other was the path of the colonies or semi-colonies. What Peter Curtin (2000) calls ‘defensive modernization’ was not enough to protect these societies from Western incursions. The Bugandese client-chiefs, for example,

did not want to imitate Europe but to protect the new alignment of power, with Christianity and a few other borrowings from the West added … basically designed to protect Ganda society as it emerged shortly after 1900. (Curtin 2000, 143)

The Merinian monarchs of Madagascar were similar: ‘They not only failed to modernize beyond adopting Christianity and superficial European fashions, they failed to build a kind of society and government administration that would perpetuate their own power’ (Curtin 2000, 150). Colonial rule could even throw societies backwards, as in the case of British-occupied Iraq. Ruling through the Hashemite monarchy after 1920, the regime deliberately rejected any attempts at modernization, except in the oil industry. Instead, they reinforced disintegrating tribal loyalties and semi-feudal tenurial relationships over the peasantry. Peter Gowan describes the British initiatives as ‘the creation of new foundational institutions of landownership in order to revive dying traditional authority relations, resulting in economically and socially regressive consequences, undertaken for thoroughly modern imperialist political purposes—namely, to create a ruling class dependent upon British military power and therefore committed to imperial interests in the region’ (Gowan 1999, 167).

Tsarist Russia neither emulated the process of ‘catch up and overtake’ among the advanced countries nor suffered that of ‘blocked development’ within the backward, but instead experienced a collision between the two. The tensions created by rapid development went unresolved: the modern and the archaic therefore continued to exist in an ongoing tension. Marxists before Trotsky had noticed their coexistence in Russia. Antonio Labriola commented that Russian industrialization ‘seems destined to put under our eyes, as in an epitome, all the phases, even the most extreme, of our history’ (Labriola 1908, 133). Lenin wrote of Russia ‘where modern capitalist imperialism is enmeshed, so to speak, in a particularly close network of pre-capitalist relations’ (Lenin 1960–1970b, 259). But Trotsky was the first to see that these elements did not simply coexist in picturesque or dramatic contrasts: they overlapped, fused, merged in dynamic ways that generated socially explosive situations in which revolution became what Georg Lukács termed ‘actual’ (Lukács 1970, chap 1).

Between 1928 and 1930, Trotsky continued to employ the term ‘uneven development’—above all in the articles collected in The Third International after Lenin and in Permanent revolution and its various prefaces—yet he did so in ways that suggest that he was conscious of stretching its meaning to cover new phenomena, which would ultimately require new terminology (Davidson forthcoming b, chap 3). The inability of ‘uneven development’ to fully encapsulate these phenomena is what appears to have made Trotsky search for a new concept with which to supplement it.

From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which for want of a better name, we may call the law of combined development—by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms. (Trotsky 1977a, 27–28)

A third group of states embodied ‘combination’: those unable to reproduce the level of development attained by the advanced capitalist states, but nevertheless able to ‘unblock’ themselves to the extent of making partial advances in specific areas. There were essentially three sub-sets in this group. The first were feudal-absolutist or tributary states, like Russia or Turkey, which, under pressure from the Western powers, were forced for reasons of military competition to introduce limited industrialization and partial agrarian reform. The second were still more backward states like China or regions like the post-Ottoman Arab Middle East, which had been broken by imperialist pressure but which, instead of being colonized, were allowed to disintegrate while the agents of foreign capital established areas of industrialization under the protection of either their own governments or local warlords. The third were colonial states like British India, and to a lesser extent French Algeria, where the metropolitan power was unwilling to allow full-scale industrialization in case it produced competition for its own commodities, but was prepared to sanction it in specific circumstances for reasons of military supply or where goods were not intended for home markets. In each case,

an entirely new ‘combined’ social formation in which the latest conquests of capitalist technique and structure root themselves into relations of feudal or prefeudal barbarism, transforming and subjecting them and creating peculiar relations of classes. (Trotsky 1976, 583)

In the end, in order to describe these new formations Trotsky had to abandon the metaphors drawn from human biology which had been used in relation to development from the Enlightenment to the Second International:

The absorptive and flexible psyche, as a necessary condition for historical progress, confers on the so-called social ‘organisms’, as distinguished from the real, that is, biological organisms, an exceptional variability of internal structure. (Trotsky 1972c, 251)

U&CD usually involves what Michael Burawoy (1985, 99) calls ‘the combination of the capitalist mode of production with pre-existing modes’. Jamie Allinson and Alexander Anievas too have written of how the ‘logics of different modes of production interact with one another in consequential ways in backward countries’ (Allinson and Anievas 2009, 52). But a process that permeates every aspect of society, ideology as much as economy, must involve more than this. The ‘articulation’ of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes had, after all, been progressing slowly in the Russian countryside since the abolition of serfdom in 1861, and had led to many complex transitional forms (Lenin 1960–1970a, 191–210). None led to the type of situation Trotsky was seeking to explain.

At the same time that peasant land-cultivation as a whole remained, right up to the revolution, at the level of the seventeenth century, Russian industry in its technique and capitalist structure stood at the level of the advanced countries, and in certain respects even outstripped them. (Trotsky 1977a, 30)

The detonation of the process of U&CD requires sudden, intensive industrialization and urbanization, regardless of whether the pre-existing agrarian economy was based on feudal or capitalist relations. Burawoy is therefore right to describe U&CD as a product of ‘the timing of industrialization in relation to the history of world capitalism’ (Burawoy 1985, 99). Trotsky himself saw China in the 1920s as an example of U&CD, and consequently a situation where the strategy of permanent revolution could be applied, but argued strongly that capitalist relations of production already dominated the economy, ‘and not “feudal” (more correctly, serf and, generally, pre-capitalist) relations’ (Trotsky 1974, 160).

This should remind us that U&CD was intended to deepen a fundamentally strategic conception. Thus, for Trotsky, the most important consequence of U&CD was the enhanced capacity it gave the working classes for political and industrial organization, theoretical understanding and revolutionary activity:

when the productive forces of the metropolis, of a country of classical capitalism … find ingress into more backward countries, like Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century, and Russia at the merging of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the present day in Asia; when the economic factors burst in a revolutionary manner, breaking up the old order; when development is no longer gradual and ‘organic’ but assumes the form of terrible convulsions and drastic changes of former conceptions, then it becomes easier for critical thought to find revolutionary expression, provided that the necessary theoretical prerequisites exist in the given country. (Trotsky 1972a, 199; see also Trotsky 1977a, 33)

Following Trotsky, McDaniel argues that there are four reasons why what he calls the ‘autocratic capitalism’ of Tsarist Russia tended to produce a revolutionary labour movement. First, it eliminated or reduced the distinction between economic and political issues. Second, it generated opposition for both traditional and modern reasons. Third, it reduced the fragmentation of the working class, but prevented the formation of a stable conservative bureaucracy, thus leading to more radical attitudes. Fourth, it forced a degree of interdependence between the mass of the working class, class-conscious workers and revolutionary intellectuals (McDaniel 1988, 41–47). McDaniel claims that a comparable situation has arisen only in Iran, but this seems to unnecessarily restrict the applicability of the model to situations that resemble pre-revolutionary Russia closely in formal terms (McDaniel 1988, 407). In fact, the relentless expansion of neoliberal globalization, and the consequent irruption of industrialization and urbanization into areas they had previously bypassed, means that U&CD is the process most characteristic of the current phase of capitalist development. Mike Davis has identified Dubai and China as the most extreme contemporary examples (Davis 2007, 53–54). Indeed, in the case of the latter, it might be said that the neoliberal turn after 1978 actually resumed the process of U&CD which had been consciously halted by a Maoist leadership only too conscious of the explosive effects of uncontrolled urban expansion in particular (Davidson 2006b, 214–222).

This does not mean that wherever U&CD exists today the working class movement will automatically adopt what Trotsky called the ‘boldest conclusions of revolutionary thought’ (Trotsky 1937, 33). In circumstances where Marxist ideas (and those of secular radicalism more generally) are either unavailable or discredited after the experience of Stalinism, movements will reach for whatever ideas seem to assist them in their struggle, regardless of their antiquity—but they will transform them in the process. Carol McAllister explains the Islamic revival or dakwah in Malaysia, for example, as ‘primarily a reaction against both the economic stress and dislocation and cultural deracination brought by capitalist development; it is in large part an attempt to define a personal and a political alternative’. Drawing explicitly on the theory of U&CD, she argues that interpreting this resistance as ‘a return to the past or a strengthening of tradition’ misunderstands the nature of Islamic militancy, which involves ‘the reassertion but also reinterpretation of the traditional Malay Islam it promotes’, and consequently has to be seen as ‘a contemporary phenomenon, arising from people's current problems and needs’ (McAllister 1990, 12). Given the increasingly hysterical Islamophobia that dominates public discourse in the West, this is clearly a contemporary area where the theory of U&CD might be usefully employed in more general ways.

The limits of uneven and combined development

The concept of U&CD was excluded from serious discussion for several decades, partly as a result of Stalinist opprobrium, and partly because—although it informs virtually all of Trotsky's concrete analysis—in theoretical terms it remained a sketch that has to be reconstructed from chapter 1 of The history of the Russian Revolution and a series of ‘occasional’ pieces (Davidson forthcoming b, introduction and chap 3). The term now appears with increasing frequency, but often attached to virtually any topic, no matter how distant from those it was originally intended to illuminate. One senses here a variation on a familiar academic strategy, whereby a currently fashionable concept is used to anoint arguments derived from quite different theoretical sources (see, for example, Dufour 2007). Like many other Marxist concepts developed to explain specific situations or institutions (such as Gramsci's use of ‘hegemony’ or Benedict Anderson's (2006) notion of ‘imagined community’), the explanatory power of the concept can only be diminished or diluted by over-extending its applicability. The major exception to this superficial and uncomprehending use of U&CD has been a series of thought-provoking articles by Rosenberg, which represent the most serious recent attempt to draw out the implications of Trotsky's theory, although as we shall see they too suffer from a tendency to over-extend the concept.

Rosenberg claims the theory of U&CD can overcome a twofold absence: of an international dimension from sociological theory and of a sociological dimension from international relations (Rosenberg 2006, 310–313). As he writes in his exchange with Callinicos,

by simultaneously asserting the uneven and combined character of … development overall, it recovers for social theory those properties of multilinearity and interactivity which would otherwise unavoidably give rise to a sociologically impregnable and rival discourse of geopolitical explanation. I know no other idea that does this. (Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008, 86)

But Rosenberg also claims that U&CD is of limited use by itself, for ‘it lacks any tools for specifying the causal properties of those processes of social life to whose multiplicity and interaction it draws attention’. Consequently, ‘it cannot operate as a replacement for the classical social theories whose limitations we are trying to overcome’ and without these ‘it cannot reach down to the level of concrete historical explanation at all’ (Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008, 86). I find this claim puzzling, since U&CD was conceived precisely as a specific application of one ‘classical social theory’ (historical materialism) to explain a ‘concrete historical situation’ (the revolutionary potential of the working class in Russia and other late-developing countries). Here, however, I want to contest two positive claims that Rosenberg makes for the concept: one, that it identifies a process that is present throughout history, and, the other, that it only takes place at the level of ‘the international’.6

Transhistoricity

Trotsky wrote in The revolution betrayed, ‘The law of uneven development is supplemented throughout the whole course of history by the law of combined development’ (Trotsky 1937, 300). Whether Trotsky actually demonstrates this claim is another matter. Rosenberg (2006) attempts to illustrate the transhistoricity of U&CD with examples from the Russian state after AD 800 which he claims show three aspects of combination. First, ‘the course of Russian development was “combined” in the sense that at every point it was causally integrated with a wider social field of interacting patterns of development’ (Rosenberg 2006, 321). By this he means that Russia was subject to ‘inter-societal causality’, an environment in which the endless interplay of other states or social forces shaped the nation's internal structure in a way that could never be completed. Second, combination also involved ‘structures’ that ‘extended beyond Russia itself’. Among such structures Rosenberg includes ‘regional political orders, cultural systems and material divisions of labour’. The third, ‘yet deeper’ dimension is the consequence of the first two, the creation of a ‘hybrid’ social formation, ‘a changing amalgam of pre-existent “internal” structures of social life with external socio-political and cultural influences’. Consequently, there ‘never existed a “pre-combination” Russia’; at every point its existence was traversed by these influences: ‘combined development identifies the inter-societal, relational texture of the historical processes within which the shifting meanings of the term “Russia” crystallized and accumulated’. In general terms, Rosenberg invites us to ‘abandon at the deepest theoretical level any notion of the constitution of society as analytically prior to its interaction with other societies’ (Rosenberg 2006, 321–325).

I agree with all of this, but I remain unconvinced that it has anything to do with U&CD. The inseparability of the international from the social is, after all, inscribed in historical materialism from the moment of its formation, notably The German ideology. But in this moment Marx and Engels were also clear that ‘history becomes world history’ as a result of the spread of capitalism (Marx and Engels 1976, 50–51). Why? Before capitalism all societies, with the exception of those based on slavery, were based on variations of the same mode of production, involving surplus extraction from a class of peasants and taking either a ‘feudal’ or ‘tributary’ form depending on whether the main agent of exploitation was a class of local landlords or the state bureaucracy (Haldon 1994, 63–69; Wickham 2005, 57–61). There were important differences between them, particularly in terms of how the ruling classes organized, but most pre-capitalist societies seem to have involved elements of both, with one or the other achieving dominance at different times. Those cases which were the purest examples of one variant or the other (for example, feudal England or tributary China) had quite different possibilities for capitalist development. Until that development took place, however, societies could borrow from each other, could influence one another—particularly in the field of culture and philosophy—but were not sufficiently differentiated from each other for elements to ‘combine’ to any effect. The very terms that Trotsky uses in describing combination—‘archaic and more contemporary forms’—were unthinkable until capitalism defined what it meant to be ‘archaic’ (Trotsky 1977, 28).

We therefore need to draw a distinction between Trotsky's general account of Russian development, which, as Rosenberg correctly says, was always subject to external influence, and the specific moment at which these influences were not merely successfully absorbed into an endlessly mutating social form, but set up a series of tensions that threatened to, and eventually did, tear the fabric of Russian society apart in 1917. The moment of U&CD, in other words, only arrives with capitalist industrialization and the historically unique society to which it gave rise. The immense difference between industrial capitalism and previous modes of production meant that, from the moment the former was introduced, combination became possible in a way that it had not been hitherto; but the structural dynamism of industrial capitalism compared with previous modes of production also meant that combination became inescapable, as all aspects of existing society registered the impact on them, to differing degrees, of this radically new means of exploitation. ‘In contrast to the economic systems that preceded it,’ wrote Trotsky, ‘capitalism inherently and constantly aims at economic expansion, at the penetration of new territories, the conversion of self-sufficient provincial and national economies into a system of financial interrelationships’ (Trotsky 1974, 15). Rosenberg himself notes that, ‘for Trotsky, capitalism did not just change the world: it actually changed the overall nature of historical change itself’ (Rosenberg 2007, 456). I think he has insufficiently incorporated this insight into his own work.

Internationality

Rosenberg argues that, for Trotsky, ‘“combined development” was a phenomenon not of individual societies alone, but of the evolving international social formation as a whole’ (Rosenberg 2005, 41). In a discussion of Marx's original plan for the structure of Capital, he further claims that if we ‘neglect the significance of uneven and combined development’ at the level of those determinants which apply to all societies, then ‘either reductionism or proto-Realism will unfailingly result further down the line’ (Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008, 99). Colin Barker has reached similar conclusions, suggesting that an ‘extended’ concept of U&CD is implicit in Trotsky's own work: ‘Only from the angle of world economy, of the combined development of the different countries within it, do words like “advanced” and “archaic” have any meaning, as measures of coercive comparison within a larger system of competitive transactions’ (Barker 2006, 78). Allinson and Anievas (2009) also see this globalized view of U&CD as a ‘logical extension of Trotsky's original concept’ (54). I have more sympathy with these arguments than with those for transhistoricity, since, as I have argued above, U&CD is produced by the impact of different aspects of the international capitalist system (economic competition, military rivalry and colonial rule) on the societies constitutive of it. It is important, however, not to confuse the sources of a particular historical process with the process itself.

Trotsky famously wrote that

Marxism takes its point of departure from world economy, not as a sum of national parts, but as a mighty and independent reality which has been created by the international division of labour and the world market, and which in our epoch imperiously dominates the national markets. (Trotsky 1969, 146)

U&CD is a consequence of the world economy, but it is played out within the component parts of the states system whose continued existence initiated this discussion: the territorial confines of these states are where the specific combinations take place. Indeed, it is difficult to see how any analysis of a ‘concrete situation’ could take place while remaining at the level of ‘the international’. If the writers quoted above are right, and what happened in Russia was merely an example of a universal process, then what remains of the ‘peculiarities’ of Russian development which Trotsky took as the basis of his theory, and which he later extended to other areas of the colonial and semi-colonial world? If everywhere is subject to U&CD then it clearly explains nothing in particular about Russia, or anywhere else for that matter, and we must search for another theory to achieve what Trotsky sought to do. U&CD is a feature of certain societies: unlike the world economy of which Trotsky spoke or the states system, whose interaction gave it birth, it does not constitute ‘an independent reality’ greater than its component parts.

The concept of U&CD is an attempt to comprehend in thought an actual social process. That process emerged historically at a specific moment in time, when imperialism led to the expansion of capitalist industrialization outside the boundaries of the advanced capitalist powers themselves, and operated geographically within a specific area in space, where capitalist industrialization met and merged with earlier socio-economic forms. The time of U&CD continues, and the space of U&CD expands, since capitalism still encroaches onto ever new areas, and returns in new forms to areas that it had previously encompassed. The state ‘containers’ within which the process of U&CD unfolds, including China, will never achieve the type of total transformation characteristic of the states that formed the original core of the capitalist world system, at least in any foreseeable timescale. U&CD is therefore likely to be an ongoing process which will only be resolved by either revolution or disintegration. But in the meantime, China and other states like India and Brazil where growth has been less dramatic remain both inherently unstable in their internal social relations and expansive in their external search for markets, raw materials and investment opportunities. This combination is likely to lead to clashes with other states and an increasing escalation of nationalist ideology to maintain social control. Because it is not a universal experience U&CD can scarcely explain the persistence of the states system throughout the world. It can, however, act to heighten two general aspects of capitalist development that are genuinely universal throughout the system, even in those areas where U&CD has never been present or is only a distant memory. One of these is what Edward Luttwak (1998) calls ‘geo-economics’ (see also Davidson forthcoming a). The other, to which I now turn, is nationalism.

Capital, states and nations

International relations specialists have been known to complain that the very concept of ‘the international’ improperly draws attention away from the fact that their discipline is concerned with state relations, not national relations (Halliday 1994, 81). In fact, despite the presence of the term ‘national’ within the title of the discipline, discussions of ‘the international’ are almost always about inter-state relations, and the fact that states are usually also nation-states is simply not registered as significant, the terms ‘state’ and ‘nation-state’ being treated as virtually interchangeable. The difficulty is compounded if nations are also seen as pre-dating capitalism, as they are by both political Marxists and Althusserians, for whom nations are apparently a phenomenon with a purely contingent relationship to the dominant mode of production (Wood 1991, 28–31; 2007, 153; Balibar 1991, 89–90.) Callinicos, who is certainly aware of the modernity of nations, only writes in passing that ‘the formation and fission of national identities no doubt plays its part in producing the intense and exclusive nature of modern territorial sovereignty’ (Callinicos 2007, 545). The issue is more central than these positions suggest. As Claudia von Braunmuhl once noted, ‘the bourgeois nation state is both historically and conceptually part of the capitalist mode of production’ (Braunmuhl 1978, 173). The prefixes ‘bourgeois’ and ‘nation’ are not simply terminological elaborations here, but indicate a key distinguishing feature of capitalist states that contributes to the survival of the states system.

One powerful state could hypothetically succeed so overwhelmingly in the competitive struggle that it not only imposed hegemony over all the others, but actually achieved their territorial incorporation; the fusion of political unity and economic anarchy on a global basis. But such an outcome could only be temporary, before the former rapidly fragmented into newly created or recreated states of the type with which we are currently so familiar. The reason is not simply one of practicality. Ellen Wood has noted the difficulties of maintaining state control over too large an area, while Smith has argued that states can also be too small to be effective for capital (Wood 2003, 141; 2006, 25; Smith 1990, 142–143). But size is not the decisive issue. As Vivek Chibber notes, ‘one could certainly imagine a federated system, in which administrative and regulative authority is localized, but sovereignty is not’ (Chibber 2005, 157). The capitalist class in its constituent parts has a continuing need to retain territorial home bases presided over by states for their operations (Anderson 1992, 6; Harman 1991, 32–38; Harvey 2005, 35–36). Why?

Capitalism is based on competition, but capitalists want competition to take place on their terms; they do not want to suffer the consequences if they lose. In one sense, then, they want a state to ensure that they are protected from these consequences—in other words, they require a state to provide more than simply an infrastructure; they need it to ensure that the effects of competition are experienced as far as possible by someone else. A global state could not do this; indeed, in this respect it would be the same as having no state at all. For if everyone is protected then no one is: unrestricted market relations would prevail, with all the risks that entails. The state therefore has to have limits, has to be able to distinguish between those who will receive its protection and support and those who will not. Capitals within a global super-state would therefore tend to group together to create new states or recreate old ones in order to achieve these ends.

But the state cannot simply be the site of particular functions, with no ideological attachment; capitalists, and to an even greater extent, state managers, have at least to try to convince themselves that what they are doing is in a greater ‘national’ interest, even if it is plainly in their own. Without some level of self-delusion, some ‘ethico-political’ justification for their actions, the tendency would be for the legal rules and other structures put in place to organize the collective affairs of the bourgeoisie to be in constant danger of collapse, resulting in mere gangsterism. The nation is as much required here as the state. Therefore, when Liah Greenfield describes the ‘spirit of capitalism’ as ‘the economic expression of the collective competitiveness inherent in nationalism—itself a product of its members’ collective investment in the dignity and prestige of the nation', she is turning history on its head (Greenfield 2001, 473). It is the collective competitiveness of capitalism, expressed at the level of the state, which requires nationalism as a framework within which competitiveness can be justified in terms of a higher aspiration than increased profit margins. If ‘Britain’ is to be collectively competitive then this obviously means that individual British companies must be individually competitive, but they are in competition with each other as much as with foreign rivals. In the course of competition some will fail. Their failure is, however, a contribution to national survival, comparable perhaps to the sacrifice of soldiers in the field: competition is the health of the nation, just as—in Randolph Bourne's famous phrase—war is the health of the state.

Nationalism does not simply unify territorially demarcated sections of the bourgeoisie; it plays an equally important role for capital in fragmenting the working class.7 Lukács (1970, 66) points out that one of the ways in which the bourgeoisie tries to prevent workers achieving coherent class consciousness is by ‘binding the individual members of those classes as single individuals, as mere “citizens”, to an abstract state reigning over and above them’. But it cannot be an ‘abstract state’; it has to be a very concrete, particular state founded on a sense of common identity. In historical terms, nationalism originally had two sources for individual working classes. One was from the spontaneous search for a form of collective identity with which to overcome the alienation of capitalist society. National consciousness was therefore an available alternative to class consciousness, but was never a complete alternative, since reformism was effectively the means by which nationalism was naturalized for workers. The other source was the deliberate fostering of nationalism by the bourgeoisie in order to bind workers to the state, and hence to capital (Davidson 2000, 37–46; 2008, 158–160). Hence, the absurdity of claims by Tom Nairn that ‘what the extra-American world should fear is not United States (US) nationalism but the debility of the American state’—as if nationalism were not the means by which the American state mobilizes popular support behind imperialist adventures like Afghanistan and Iraq (Nairn 2005, 233).

Nationalism often appears to be so internalized that any attempt to transcend it must be futile; but this is simply to accept, as Nairn has done, the self-image presented by nationalist ideology. In fact, although nationalism runs wide, it does not always or necessarily run very deep, which is why defenders of the bourgeois order must ensure that attempts by the exploited to overcome alienation through collective identity are constantly directed towards national rather than class resolutions. Nationalism is the spontaneous ideology generated by capitalist society, but it has always to be supplemented by a conscious process of reinforcement.

We should not, however, mistake the possibility of dispensing with nationalism for the illusion that this has already occurred. Exaggerated claims that a transnational class of capitalists is about to emerge tend to coexist with over-optimistic assessments of similar developments occurring among the oppressed and exploited, in which ‘the ideas of national interest and national economy were revealed for the ideological tools that they were’ (Sklair 2001, 31). In fact, as David Harvey (2005, 84) has noted, ‘the neoliberal state needs nationalism of a certain sort to survive’. Why?

The application of neoliberal policies over the past 30 years, even if only partly achieved, has increased the alienation and atomization that are the normal condition of capitalist everyday life. ‘Capitalism needs a human being who has never existed,’ writes Terry Eagleton, ‘one who is prudently restrained in the office and wildly anarchic in the shopping mall’ (Eagleton 2003, 28). But precisely because these human beings do not exist, because the economic and the social are not as separate in life as they are in academic disciplines, anarchy, the emphasis on self-gratification, self-realization and self-fulfilment through commodities, has tended to permeate all relations, with uncertain consequences requiring repression. Unchecked, the future will be as foreseen by George Steiner at the fall of the Berlin Wall, combining repression and commodification: ‘The knout on the one hand; the cheeseburger on the other’ (Steiner 1990, 131). But repression on its own will not produce the degree of willing acceptance that the system requires. In these circumstances nationalism plays three roles. First, it provides a type of psychic compensation for the direct producers which is unobtainable from the mere consumption of commodities. It is, as they say, no accident that the nationalist turn in the ideology of the Chinese ruling class became most marked with the initial opening up of the Chinese economy to world markets in 1978 and the suppression of the movement for political reform in 1989, which was followed by a ‘patriotic education campaign’, the general tone of which continues to this day (Hughes 2006). Second, nationalism acts as a means of recreating at the political level the cohesion that is being lost at the social level. Third, it uses this sense of cohesion to mobilize populations behind the performance of national capitals against their competitors and rivals. This last aspect requires some elaboration.

The division into national territories has always helped to determine where the devaluation or destruction of capital occurs, as one set of state managers attempts to protect their ‘own’ national capital from the pressure of global crisis at the expense of other sets attempting the same.8 This occurs most sharply in cases of actual military conflict: ‘In an age of mass politics all interstate wars are nationalist wars, conducted in the name of nations and purportedly in their interests’ (Beissinger 1998, 176). But war is scarcely the only, or even the most common, form of geopolitical rivalry; there is also what Luttwak describes as ‘geo-economics’ or ‘warfare by other means’:

In it, investment capital for industry provided or guided by the state is the equivalent of firepower; product development subsidized by the state is the equivalent of weapon innovation; and market penetration supported by the state replaces military bases and garrisons on foreign soil as well as diplomatic influence. (Luttwak 1998, 128)

These are not simply analogies. As Luttwak notes, war may be ‘different from commerce, but evidently not different enough’: ‘In particular, an action–reaction cycle of trade restrictions that evoke retaliation has a distinct resemblance to crisis escalation that can lead to outright war’ (Luttwak 1998, 128). Indeed, the ability to wage war is clearly seen as an advantage by state managers in relation to their economic strategies. Greenfield quotes one Indian commentator: ‘A soft state that yields on vital national issues cannot project an image of a tough negotiator on trade and commerce’ (Greenfield 2001, 482).

What Luttwak calls the ‘adversarial attitudes’ mobilized by states can of course escape the control of those who initially fostered them (Luttwak 1998, 128). Ian Kershaw suggests that one of the reasons the Japanese military elite was forced into the Second World War was that it had encouraged levels of mass chauvinism and expectations of military–territorial expansion from which it could not retreat without provoking popular hostility: the generals were trapped in a prison of their own devising (Kershaw 2007, 105–106, 380). Norman Stone argues more generally that the First World War could not have been brought to a negotiated conclusion by the end of 1916 no matter what the politicians and generals may have wished, because the nationalist hatreds they had encouraged, now amplified by the deaths, injuries and destruction, had acquired their own ‘momentum’ and called forth leaders committed to victory (Stone 2007, 97). But similar outcomes can be found in the neoliberal era. Before 1997 the British Conservative Party was associated with an imperialist nationalism opposed to ‘Europe’—not because the European Union (EU) was in any sense hostile to neoliberalism, but as an ideological diversion from the failure of neoliberalism to transform the fortunes of British capital. The nationalism invoked for this purpose now places a major obstacle before British politicians and state managers who want to pursue a strategy of greater European integration, however rational that may be from their perspective (Gowan 1997, 99–103). But there is another danger for the ruling classes too, namely that neoliberal nationalism will lead to the fragmentation of neoliberal states. Harvey writes,

Margaret Thatcher, through the Falklands/Malvinas war and in her antagonistic posture towards Europe, invoked nationalist sentiment in support of her neoliberal project, though it was the idea of England and St George, rather than the United Kingdom, that animated her vision—which turned Scotland and Wales hostile. (Harvey 2005, 86)

But would the hostility of (some) Scottish and (some) Welsh people have been less had Thatcher conveyed a sense of Britishness rather than Englishness? Gordon Brown is currently trying to do the former, with no real success. The difficulty here is a deeper one. Because nationalism is such an inescapable aspect of capitalist development, the first response to intolerable conditions is to seek to establish a new nation-state, although this is usually only possible where some level of national consciousness already exists, as it does, for example, in Scotland. In other words, neoliberalism may require nations, but it does not require particular nations.

In spite of the risks, however, it is not clear what could replace nationalism as a means of securing even the partial loyalty of the working class to the capitalist state and preventing the formation of revolutionary class consciousness. Early in the neoliberal era, Raymond Williams noted that ‘a global system of production and trade’ also required ‘a socially organized and socially disciplined population, one from which effort can be mobilized and taxes collected along the residual but still effective national lines; there are still no effective political competitors in that’ (Williams 1983, 192). Could loyalties be transferred upwards to a global or even regional state? Montserrat Guibernau has argued that the EU will ultimately require ‘European national consciousness’ to give coherence to the otherwise uneven group of nations that comprise that body (Guibernau 1996, 114). But, as Anderson writes, ‘in themselves, market-zones, “natural”-geographic or politico-administrative, do not create attachments. Who would willingly die for Comecon or the EEC [European Economic Community]?’ (Anderson 2006, 53.) Nor could loyalties easily be transferred downwards to individual capitals. It has been known for workers to support their company, even to make sacrifices to keep it in business. But this tends to happen where firms are local, well established and workers are employed on a long-term basis. Where workers make sacrifices in terms of job losses, worsened conditions and—as happened in the US during the 1980s—real cuts in pay, they do not do so because of loyalty to the firm, but because their trade unions had won the argument that there was no alternative that did not involve the even worse fate of the firm closing down entirely. Individual managers or ‘team leaders’ may internalize the ethos of McDonald's or Wal-Mart, but workers cannot: the reality of the daily conflict between themselves and the employer is too stark to be overcome. Beyond this, even those companies which still retain health insurance and pension arrangements come nowhere near providing the integrative functions of even the weakest nation-state. It is of course possible for workers outside a company to celebrate its achievements—but only because it is national, as, for example, in the reaction of German workers to the merger of Daimler and Chrysler, which effectively saw the German company acquire the American (Greenfield 2001, 483).

Conclusion

By asserting the centrality of national consciousness and nationalism to the continued existence of the states system, I am not proposing that we simply add a sub-set of political science (‘national and ethnic studies’) to international relations and sociology, in the hope that this, and an awareness of U&CD, will overcome their theoretical deficiencies. The obstacles to understanding caused by disciplinary specialization, which Rosenberg highlights, are real enough, but not accidental. They are the direct consequence of the disintegration of post-Enlightenment bourgeois thought, which involved retreating from the cultivation of a scientific understanding of the world as a whole, and turning instead to the contemplation of individual fragments arbitrarily divided into academic disciplines. These categories would have made no sense to Adam Smith. The wealth of nations is neither a work of ‘economics’, the one to which it has been retrospectively consigned, nor an academic text; it is a revolutionary programme for the transformation of Scotland and ultimately the world into ‘commercial society’ (Davidson 2005, 11–12, 18). In one sense, classical Marxism was an attempt to restore the lost unity of bourgeois thought for similarly revolutionary aims, but on the basis of a new proletarian class subject. U&CD may inadvertently help resolve the problems identified by Rosenberg, but only because it is a specific application of historical materialism and shares its methodological assumptions. One in particular is central here. Trotsky noted how his own intellectual development was influenced by the ‘Hegelian Marxist, Antonio Labriola’ who counterposed the concept of totality to ‘the theory of multiple factors’ in historical explanation (Trotsky 1984, 123; Labriola 1908, 140–155). The ostensible disciplinary base from which analysis is undertaken is less important than an approach that recognizes that the real ‘specificity’ of the capitalist mode of production is precisely the way in which it permeates and colours every form of identity (the nation), every institution (the state) and every set of structures (the state system). How it does so is an issue that will have to be addressed elsewhere (see Davidson forthcoming a).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neil Davidson

1 1 I am grateful to Alex Anievas and two out of three anonymous reviewers for their comments. Justin Rosenberg, with whom disagreement is always an intellectual stimulus, helped me clarify our respective positions during a discussion in Brighton during May 2007. This paper was written with the support of Economic and Social Research Council Grant RES-063-27-0174.

Notes

¹ I am grateful to Alex Anievas and two out of three anonymous reviewers for their comments. Justin Rosenberg, with whom disagreement is always an intellectual stimulus, helped me clarify our respective positions during a discussion in Brighton during May 2007. This paper was written with the support of Economic and Social Research Council Grant RES-063-27-0174.

² The broader question of whether the relationship between capitalism and the states system is determined by historical contingency, twin logics or some other factor is discussed in Davidson (forthcoming a).

³ Callinicos has discussed the ‘combined’ element of U&CD elsewhere. See Callinicos (1999, 199).

⁴ For different examples from those cited here, see Davidson (2006a, 10).

⁵ For the Scottish experience see Davidson (2000, 167–186) and Davidson (2005, 29–36).

⁶ Allinson and Anievas also have concerns with Rosenberg's claims for the transhistorical nature of U&CD, although for different reasons to those expressed here. See Allinson and Anievas (2009, 62–63).

⁷ Nationalism affects all classes, not only capitalists and workers; but for the purposes of this argument I am using a ‘two-class’ model that does not exist anywhere in pure form, nor is ever likely to.

⁸ What counts as ‘national capital’ is a complex matter, as was pointed out by Colin Barker in an important contribution to the debate over the relationship between the state and capital during the 1970s (Barker 1978, 33–37). For the purposes of this article, it includes all capitals, state and private, based in the nation-state of their origin, plus their overseas operations. More controversially, perhaps, I would argue that it should also include all those foreign capitals operating within that nation-state, to the extent that they are subject to its legal and fiscal regime. One consequence of this in the era of neoliberal globalization would of course be that some capitals will increasingly be claimed as ‘national’ by two or more states: their state of origin and those other states upon whose territory they operate.