Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Re-interpreting the Ottoman path to modernity

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eren Duzgun
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
International Order ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Uneven And Combined Development ◽  
Global Modernity ◽  
Sociological Approaches

AbstractDebates over ‘modernity’ have been central to the development of historical-sociological approaches to International Relations (IR). Within the bourgeoning subfield of International Historical Sociology (IHS), much work has been done to formulate a historically dynamic conception of international relations, which is then used to undermine unilinear conceptions of global modernity. Nevertheless, this article argues that IHS has not proceeded far enough in successfully remedying the problem of unilinearism. The problem remains that historical narratives, informed by IHS, tend to transhistoricise capitalism, which, in turn, obscures the generative nature of international relations, as well as the fundamental heterogeneity of diverging paths to modernity both within and beyond western Europe. Based on the theory of Uneven and Combined Development, Political Marxism, and Robbie Shilliam’s discussion of ‘Jacobinism’, this article first reinterprets the radical multilinearity of modernity within western Europe, and then utilises this reinterpretation to provide a new reading of the Ottoman path to modernity (1839–1918). Such a historical critique and reconstruction will highlight the significance of Jacobinism for a more accurate theorisation of the origin and development of the modern international order, hence contributing to a deeper understanding of the international relations of modernity.

Capitalism, British Grand Strategy, and the Peace Treaty of Utrecht: Towards a Historical Sociology of War- and Peace-making in the Construction of International Order

2021 ◽  
pp. 107-128
Author(s):  
Benno Teschke
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Water Policy ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
International Order ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
International Diplomacy ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

Benno Teschke offers a specific focus on the historical sociology of normative change in the transition from early modernity to modernity in Europe. How can we explain international diplomacy and peace accords from within critical International Relations (IR) Theory? Teschke addresses this question by focusing on the Peace of Utrecht (1713) that concluded the War of the Spanish Succession. It tracks the relations between the domestic sources of the rise of Britain as a great power, the revolutionary transformations of its post-1688 foreign policy institutions, the formulation of a new British grand strategy—the blue water policy—in the context of the War of the Spanish Succession, and its strategic ability to impose through coercive and secret diplomacy a new pro-British ‘normative’ set of rules for post-Utrecht early modern international relations during the ‘long eighteenth Century’ (1688–1815). This British-led reorganization of early modern international order cannot be captured through prevailing IR concepts, including automatic power-balancing, off-shore balancing, hegemony, international society, formal or informal imperialism, or collective security.

scholarly journals ‘Conquest from barbarism’: The Danube Commission, international order and the control of nature as a Standard of Civilization

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Yao
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Natural World ◽  
International Order ◽  
International Organization ◽  
Danube River ◽  
Limited Attention ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
The 19Th Century

In recent years, International Relations scholarship has looked back to the 19th century as a watershed epoch for the formation of the current international order and the development of ‘Standards of Civilization’ to legitimate that order. However, limited attention has been paid to the role played by society’s relationship with the natural world in constructing these civilizational standards. This article argues that the control and exploitation of nature as a standard of civilization developed in the 19th century to constitute membership in a civilized European international society. The standard dictated that civilized polities must both demonstrate internal territorial control and uphold external obligations towards other actors. In examining 19th-century political contestations over the Danube River as a natural highway between Europe and the near periphery, I demonstrate that in the eyes of Western Europe, Russia failed to uphold the taming of nature as a civilizational standard, contributing to the delegitimization of its authority over the Danube. In its place, the Western powers following the Crimean War created an international commission to manage the Danube delta — a rational and scientific body to rectify the troublesome absence of civilized authority. These civilizational assumptions underpin the 1856 Danube Commission as an early international organization, and through its success, continue to have implications for today’s international order.

‘My Capitalism Is Bigger than Yours!’

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 99-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maïa Pal
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Unified Theory ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Uneven And Combined Development ◽  
Different Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
Methodological Problems

AbstractThis article reviews Alex Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu’s How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (2015). It argues that the book offers a stimulating and ambitious approach to solving the problems of Eurocentrism and the origins of capitalism in growing critical scholarship in historical sociology and International Relations. However, by focusing on the ‘problem of the international’ and proposing a ‘single unified theory’ based on uneven and combined development, the authors present a history of international relations that trades off methodological openness and legal complexity for a structural and exclusive consequentialism driven by anti-Eurocentrism. By misrepresenting the concept of social-property relations in terms of the internal/external fallacy, and by confusing different types of ‘internalism’ required by early-modern jurisdictional struggles, the book problematically conflates histories of international law and capitalism. These methodological problems are contextualised by examples from the Spanish, French and British empires’ conceptions of sovereignty and jurisdiction and their significant legal actors and processes.

scholarly journals The international relations of ‘bourgeois revolutions’: Disputing the Turkish Revolution

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 414-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eren Duzgun
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
New Interpretation

The study of revolutions is at the forefront of the growing field of International Historical Sociology. As International Historical Sociology scholars have sought to uncover the spatio-temporally changing character of international relations, they have come a long way in overcoming ‘unilinear’ and ‘internalist’ conceptions of revolutionary modern transformation. In this article, I re-evaluate the extent to which the International Historical Sociology of ‘bourgeois revolutions’ has succeeded in remedying unilinear conceptions of the transition to modernity. I argue that ‘consequentialist’ approaches to the study of bourgeois revolutions tend to obscure the radically heterogeneous character of revolutionary transformations, both within and outside Western Europe. Drawing on Political Marxism and Robbie Shilliam’s discussion of Jacobinism, I first provide a non-consequentialist reading of the revolutions of modernity within Western Europe, and then utilize this reinterpretation to provide a new interpretation of the Turkish Revolution (1923–1945). My aim is to demonstrate that a non-consequentialist conception of ‘bourgeois revolutions’ will enable us to historicize and theorize more accurately the co-constitution of international relations and revolutionary processes, hence providing a stronger foundation for the International Historical Sociology of modern revolutions.

scholarly journals Passive revolution: a universal concept with geographical seats

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Hesketh
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Uneven Development ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Conditioning Factor ◽  
Uneven And Combined Development ◽  
Passive Revolution

AbstractIn this article, I argue that Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution makes a foundational contribution to International Relations (IR), yet has been relatively under appreciated by the broader discipline. Within the Historical Sociology of International Relations, uneven and combined development has recently been postulated as a key trans-historical law that provides a social theory of the ‘international’. Drawing from, but moving beyond these debates, I will argue that passive revolution is a key conditioning factor of capitalist modernity. I will demonstrate how the concept of passive revolution is the element that explains the connection between the universal process of uneven development and the manner in which specific combinations occur within the capitalist era as geopolitical pressures, in tandem with domestic social forces become internalised into geographically specific state forms. It therefore offers a corrective to the frequently aspatial view that is found in much of the literature in IR regarding uneven and combined development. Additionally, passive revolution provides a more politicised understanding of the present as well as an important theoretical lesson in relation to what needs to be done to affect alternative trajectories of development.

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

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 468-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Anievas
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Configurational Approach ◽  
Structural Forces ◽  
Global Modernity ◽  
The Relationship

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’.

Theory, history, and great transformations

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 422-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Reus-Smit
Keyword(s):  
Boundary Condition ◽  
International Relations ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Causal Explanation ◽  
International Order ◽  
Order System ◽  
Large Scale Systems ◽  
Global Modernity ◽  
Fundamental Boundary

In International Relations arguments abouthistoricalorigins provoketheoreticaldebates, as origins assume an emergent theoretical unit of inquiry – an international order, system, society, etc. – while at the same time defining its core properties and dynamics. By boldly casting the long 19th century as the origin of global modernity and, in turn, the modern international order, Buzan and Lawson’sThe Global Transformationchallenges the romance with Westphalia that undergirds so much of our theorizing. Yet, the contributions to this symposium push deeper than usual, challenging established ways of conceiving change, and suggesting very different models ofpropertheorizing. While all of the papers ostensibly debate large-scale systems change, three modes of change are in contention: breakpoint, evolutionary, and processual. The further one pushes towards the latter, however, the more elusive the idea of ‘system’ becomes, eroding the fundamental boundary condition that undergirds the systemic mode of theorizing that dominates the field. Similarly, a persistent theme in these contributions is Buzan and Lawson’s purported failure to theorize change. But instead of offering rival theories, contributors advance very different conceptions oftheorizing, from pre-observational conceptualization to causal explanation. This not only challenges the field to reflect more systematically on the process of theorizing, but to acknowledge forms of theorizing that it currently brackets.

The 1945 World Order – Process with «Open» Continuation

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 52-79
Author(s):  
V. T. Yungblud
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
World Order ◽  
International Order ◽  
International Terrorism ◽  
Bipolar Structure ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The World ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War

The Yalta-Potsdam system of international relations, established by culmination of World War II, was created to maintain the security and cooperation of states in the post-war world. Leaders of the Big Three, who ensured the Victory over the fascist-militarist bloc in 1945, made decisive contribution to its creation. This system cemented the world order during the Cold War years until the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the destruction of the bipolar structure of the organization of international relations. Post-Cold War changes stimulated the search for new structures of the international order. Article purpose is to characterize circumstances of foundations formation of postwar world and to show how the historical decisions made by the leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition powers in 1945 are projected onto modern political processes. Study focuses on interrelated questions: what was the post-war world order and how integral it was? How did the political decisions of 1945 affect the origins of the Cold War? Does the American-centrist international order, that prevailed at the end of the 20th century, genetically linked to the Atlantic Charter and the goals of the anti- Hitler coalition in the war, have a future?Many elements of the Yalta-Potsdam system of international relations in the 1990s survived and proved their viability. The end of the Cold War and globalization created conditions for widespread democracy in the world. The liberal system of international relations, which expanded in the late XX - early XXI century, is currently experiencing a crisis. It will be necessary to strengthen existing international institutions that ensure stability and security, primarily to create barriers to the spread of national egoism, radicalism and international terrorism, for have a chance to continue the liberal principles based world order (not necessarily within a unipolar system). Prerequisite for promoting idea of a liberal system of international relations is the adjustment of liberalism as such, refusal to unilaterally impose its principles on peoples with a different set of values. This will also require that all main participants in modern in-ternational life be able to develop a unilateral agenda for common problems and interstate relations, interact in a dialogue mode, delving into the arguments of opponents and taking into account their vital interests.

The position of the State in the international system from the perspective of major schools of thought in international relations

2019 ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Salah Hassan Mohammed ◽  
Mahaa Ahmed Al-Mawla
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Politics ◽  
International System ◽  
International Order ◽  
The State ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Status ◽  
Future Vision

The Study is based on the state as one of the main pillars in international politics. In additions, it tackles its position in the international order from the major schools perspectives in international relations, Especially, these schools differ in the status and priorities of the state according to its priorities, also, each scholar has a different point of view. The research is dedicated to providing a future vision of the state's position in the international order in which based on the vision of the major schools in international relations.

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