Hegemony, International Political Economy and Post-Communist Russia

Owen Worth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351931090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Relaciones internacionales

This illuminating book explores the neo-Gramscian school of international political economy and their conceptualization of global hegemony, and furthers these by looking at how the often fragmented society of post-Communist Russia can provide insight into the nature and workings of neo-liberal global hegemony. The volume illustrates how historically Russia has been a unique case in rejecting Western-inspired hegemonic projects. It outlines how successive governments since the fall of the Soviet Union have attempted, often unsuccessfully, to integrate Russia into the global economy, and identifies the multitude of ideological contestation within Russia. It will prove a useful addition to the literature on both post-Communist Russian studies and international political economy.

Chapter 1
Hegemony and International Political Economy

My main aims in this chapter are firstly, to demonstrate how the Gramscian School has critiqued positivist theories of hegemony and hegemonic stability, to create a more sophisticated perception of hegemony, and secondly, to address some of the problems and critiques that the Gramscian School itself has faced and often fails to address. The chapter will conclude by illustrating how a more complex neo-Gramscian model is required to address the overall question of the nature of hegemonic orders and their susceptibility to contestation.

The recent involvement of a Gramscian interpretation within the fields of International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE) has brought fresh enquiries into the analysis of events and the structural environment within global politics. Fuelled by the growth of critical enquiry into the epistemological discourse within the discipline of IR, which contributed to the subject's 'third debate' in recent years, the creation of the 'Gramscian' or 'Italian' school has enabled the philosophies of Vico and Gramsci to be applied, providing a form of critical Marxism unsusceptible to the charges of reductionism or crude materialism ¹ The school has critiqued those ahistorical positivistic positions involved in the inter-paradigm debate,² instigating literature that provides an altogether different philosophical mindset on the international arena.

The pioneering work which initiated the school's form of critical enquiry was Robert Cox's 'Social Forces, States and World Orders', which appeared in Millennium in 1981 and attacked the conservative positive theories in IR (which he calls problem-solving theory) for assuming that the present is everlasting, and demonstrates how such theories have ignored the study of historical structures. Cox's form of historicism works around a configuration of forces: ideas, material capabilities, and institutions; or in the context of Global Politics: social forces, forms of states and world orders. These forces do not determine actions in any direct mechanical way but impose pressures and constraints so that individuals and groups may move with the pressures, or resist and oppose them, but they cannot ignore them.³ Another that was printed in Millennium, entitled 'Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations', followed his 1981 article up two years later. Here Cox builds upon his previous work by focussing more explicitly upon how Gramsci's concepts can be developed into a form of critical methodology against the rather narrow insights that had defined IPE up to that point.⁴

Before demonstrating how both Gramsci and Cox's Gramsican theory of hegemony has allowed for a critical platform to development, it is firstly necessary to briefly outline the various mainstream positions that have dominated scholars, ideas, practitioners, policy makers and, to a certain degree, politicians in understanding the complex issues of international economic relations.

Positivist Theory in IPE

Perhaps the best illustration of the development of key theoretical ideas within International Political Economy is found through a satirical tale. In a prologue to her renowned work States and Markets, Susan Strange depicts the three traditional theories of political economy as being involved in a desert island shipwreck.⁵ Three lifeboats settle on the uninhabited island and each party believes that they are the sole survivors. Each group follows their own style of political economy. One survivor follows a model based on security, stemming from a fear that there are other human life forms on the island. One survivor follows a model that devises a form of monetarism to organise consumer needs. The final model sets up a commune based on equality and justice. As the three groups begin to realise that they coexist on the island, Strange continues, conflicts begin to set in with each group determined to protect their own ideal and defeat the others. Thus the latter two must decide whether to provide security for their own groups in order to attack and eradicate the other existing ideologies or to try to use diplomacy in some form and peacefully co-exist.

This metaphorical tale reflects the international political arena both in theory and practice. The above tale represents the dilemmas faced by those states whose ideological framework has been geared initially towards that of national self-determination, liberal co-operation and marketisation, or socialism but have had to compromise their positions due to the existence of the others. It also reflects the case in theory, with the theorist using one of these models, his choice being rooted in his own subjectivity, and applying it to the global stage.⁶ This indeed mimics the observations used by both Cox and Ashley that 'Theory always exists for the purpose of someone or something',⁷ and conjures up elements of bickering and in an Orwellian sense, transformation, as each theory transforms its own initial ideas in order to make sense of new surroundings and uncertainty.

The tale by Strange also sheds a certain amount of light upon the relative significance of IPE theory. For example, as Strange continues in the first chapter of her book, International Political Theory has been subjected to the conflict of value and theory, dependent upon the role that politics plays within economies and vice versa. For example, the traditional (realist) way of seeing IPE is as a sub-discipline within the field of IR.⁸ The neorealist model of international politics as constructed by Waltz, places the economic sphere as part of the interplay of units within the system.⁹ The neoliberal institutional approach on the other hand, equally places IPE well within these parameters, but believes that economic co-operation, leadership and co-operation can lead to a greater stability of the international system as a whole.¹⁰ Since the 1970s, however, those with academic backgrounds rooted more in economics such as Strange herself, have challenged this traditional viewpoint. Strange argues that the traditional methods of reviewing IPE are problematic because they exclude economic structure from being a powerful determinant of state policy and rely on state centric theory.¹¹ This can be seen far more with economists and policy makers that have emerged since the end of the Cold War and the 'End of History' thesis. Here, the 'victory of capitalism' that resulted from the defeat of state socialism produced a mind-set that sought to construct a universal polity in which free market economics, rather than state-security should be placed at the forefront of global relations.¹² This far more concentrated form of organic neoliberalism concentrates far more on the overriding importance of the economic over the political.

As the political economy of International Relations has changed during the last 30 years or so with the collapse of the Dollar system, the oil crisis, the demise of bipolarity and the rise of 'globalisation', traditional responses have continued to rely upon a methodology that is unable to escape from historical structural positioning. By continuing to focus upon scientific methods of data-analysis and proposing a variety of ideas placed around containment and within the boundaries of the 'possible', the positivist ontology of (neo) realism and (neo) liberalism are unable to either account for a complex understanding of the power-relations within global politics, or explain the processes of transformation and change.¹³

Neorealism and Neoliberalism

As depicted by Strange's tale, the three models of nationalism, liberalism and socialism have dominated mainstream theories of political economy.¹⁴ In IR/IPE the three are similarly reproduced as realism (or neorealism), liberalism (neoliberalism) and structuralism (or world system theories). The difference between the neorealists and neoliberals is based on the significance placed upon the growth of Transnational Corporations (TNCs) and non-state transnational actors. Realists view these factors as being relatively insignificant in terms of power, as non-state multi-national organisations are subordinate to states in that they must operate within governing structures established by states, and so can be restricted in power and prominence and held in check by that governing state.¹⁵ The state is, despite the processes of greater mobility of capital and trade, still engaged in self-help, with its primary concern being to survive (as Martin Wight once wrote¹⁶) and able to determine its own national policy, albeit with the restrictive guidance of more powerful states (the number of 'powerful states' preferably being small for stability reasons, according to Waltz¹⁷). In contrast, theoretical and normative accounts that stem from the liberal tradition and are encouraged by the deep-rooted philosophies of Smith and Ricardo have long argued for a neo-capitalist eldorado in which a stable international order could exist under a free economy. They see a cobwebbed form of power with a multi-actor framework¹⁸, with transnational institutions, whether they be executive or concerned with law and human rights, wielding the same influence as the state, thus challenging the state = main actor formula that was historically fashioned at the Treaty of Westphalia.

The recent rise in international business bureaucracy and technological advances commonly referred to with the buzzword 'globalisation' has produced differing interpretations from the two schools. Realists point to the fact that international regimes were constructed around the principles of American beliefs and relied on American finance to help them run efficiently - thus consolidating the principles behind hegemonic stability theory.¹⁹ More pluralist-minded theoreticians point to globalisation as leading to a recognition of a global community which would be more suitable in containing the problems of the next millennium (such as universal moral consciousness and environmental concerns) than the state-system.²⁰ Some have even seen the end of the Cold War as a victory for universal liberal democracy, with any ideological alternative being finally defeated, paving the way for the benefits of liberal economics (such as peace, open market, individualism etc).²¹

Positivist Theories of Hegemony

As the Positivists are tied-up with a unit-structure analysis and with a problem-solving rationale, the theories of hegemony...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Dedication
• Introduction: Russia's Place in the Global Political Economy
• 1 Hegemony and International Political Economy
• 2 Neoliberalism and Globalisation
• 3 Hegemony in the Soviet Union
• 4 Russia Under Yeltsin: Neoliberalism and Minimum Hegemony
• 5 Russian Social Movements After the Fall: Russian Responses to Neoliberal Hegemony
• 6 Russian Under Putin: Passive Revolution and Trasformismo
• Bibliography
• Index