Globalization and Capitalist Geopolitics

Daniel Woodley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317755715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Globalization and Capitalist Geopolitics is concerned with the nature of corporate power against the backdrop of the decline of the West and the struggle by non-western states to challenge and overcome domination of the rest of the world by the West. This book argues that although the US continues to preside over a quasi-imperial system of power based on global military preponderance and financial statecraft, and remains reluctant to recognize the realities global economic convergence, the age of imperial state hegemony is giving way to a new international order characterized by capitalist sovereignty and competition between regional and transnational concentrations of economic power.

This title seeks to interrogate the structure of world order by examining leading approaches to globalization and political economy in international relations and international political economy. Breaking with the classical school, Woodley argues that geopolitics should be understood as a transnational strategic practice employed by powerful state actors, which mirrors predatory corporate rivalry for control over global resources and markets, reproducing the structural conditions for corporate power through the transnational state form of capital.

In a period of increasing geopolitical insecurity and economic instability this title provides an authoritative yet accessible commentary on debates on capitalism and globalization in the wake of the financial crisis. It is valuable resource for students and scholars seeking to develop a deeper understanding of the historical determinants of the changing dynamics of neoliberal capitalism and their implications for world order.

1 Globalization and world order

Introduction

The following study is concerned with the tension between globalization and geopolitics in a multipolar world order where the balance of global economic power is shifting as emerging capitalist states challenge the established financial and political domination of the West in international politics. The aim of the text is to reconnect the twin logics of capital and territoriality separated in Marxist and neorealist international political economy (IPE) through the idea of capitalist sovereignty, and to assess the implications of corporate globalization for the economic security and future prosperity of the West as that region of the world where rationalization traditionally has been most advanced (Stiegler 2010). Globalization is proceeding in a world characterized by cooperative and antagonistic relations between states and regional organizations of states which, despite growing pressure to comply with the norms of global governance, continue to compete for resources and regional dominance. However, while geoeconomic rivalry remains an essential feature of international relations – exemplified by the conflict between the West and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) economies over the future of the international monetary system – imperialist geopolitics as traditionally practised by hegemonic states is increasingly inconsistent with the transnational organization of trade, investment and production in a post-UScentric global economy in which the balance of economic power is shifting towards Asia. International relations between states and regional economic formations are determined less by territorial fixity and interimperial rivalry than by the overarching logic of accumulation organized through transnational commodity chains, not merely between advanced economies in the ‘Lockean heartland’, but between advanced economies and ‘Hobbesian contenders’ seeking to challenge the prerogative right of the West to determine the geopolitical and ideological form of global capitalism in a posthegemonic international system.

The thesis of capitalist sovereignty places the value form-determined relation of power at the centre of theoretical analysis. It is necessary to move beyond well-meaning critiques of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank or World Trade Organization (WTO) as agencies of the ‘collective imperialism of the Triad’ (Amin 2011) to understand the transnationalization of corporate power and foreign direct investment (FDI) outside the core capitalist economies where accumulation has traditionally been concentrated. While capital is supported by state actors which sustain conditions of accumulation, and while rivalry between a ‘plurality of centres of accumulation remains a constitutive dimension of contemporary capitalism’ (Callinicos 2002: 262) – and is often organized directly by states through sovereign wealth funds (Woolridge 2012) – it is power over global markets which endows financial capital with the capacity to determine frameworks of global extraction and accumulation, and to consolidate and extend the structural asymmetries of power that sustain transnational corporatism.

As Marx argued in Grundrisse, the ‘tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit is a barrier to be overcome’ (Marx 1973: 408). In the political economy of globalization capital assumes the role of the objective subject: the sole aim capital is capable of realizing is self-augmentation through the valorization of value – not simply the blind accumulation of surplus-value through the direct exploitation of commodified labour-power in spatially bounded production sites, but the exponential growth of synthetic market values through the growth of capitalist finance as an end in itself rather than an instrument for the development of production and commerce. Financial capital is managed for the benefit of transnational investors – an interlocking network of corporate-state elites centred in North America, Europe and Asia whose class profile is fragmented but whose structural power is articulated through a transnationally constituted geopolitics that transcends the territorially embedded interests of national capitals. As transnationally constituted power, global finance structures capital flows, patterns of cross-border investment and commodity production, aligning foreign and security policy between economies in the capitalist core in a hierarchical system of cooperation and competition with peripheral economies.

This process of transnationalization and world modernization – always partial, uneven and incomplete, has implications for the structural logic of anarchy in international relations (IR) by creating incentives for multilateralism, yet globalization simultaneously creates new sources of conflict between transnational capital and regional power centres along the arc of geopolitical insecurity from Central Asia to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), as advanced capitalist economies try to exploit, yet struggle to contain the legacies of, weak state formation in the periphery (Dannreuther 2013), to limit the rise of an independent Eurasian alliance system resistant to Western geopolitical intervention, to constrain China’s diplomatic and economic penetration of pro-Western client states in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, and to suppress counterhegemonic nationalist and religious movements by direct force.¹ Despite liberal-cosmopolitan dreams of a ‘global commonwealth of citizens’ (Archibugi 2008), the willingness of Western corporate-state elites to manage globalization through transnational institutions is diminished by their refusal to recognize at an institutional level the changing balance of power in the world economy and the structural imbalances created by the fiscal and monetary crisis of the American state.

To make sense of capitalist sovereignty in a world structured by nationstates, it is necessary to theorize transnational corporatism against the backdrop of debates in IR and the ‘relative decline’ of the West. As Robinson argues, the dynamic force of global capital and the relative economic power of capitalist nations are increasingly determined by forces and institutions ‘grounded in the global system rather than the interstate system’ (Robinson 2004a: 56). Yet despite belated recognition of the impact of global capitalism on international politics, IR remains not only epistemologically confined in state-centric theory (methodological nationalism), but fails to deal adequately with three themes in the political economy of world order, namely the consolidation of corporate power in the transition from liberal to postliberal capitalism, the rise of a transnational security system consistent with the defence of corporate property, and the challenge posed by the economic geography of regionalism to the financial and geopolitical power of the West.

Contrary to the claims of cosmopolitan theorists, a world federation founded on shared commitment to liberal universalism is implausible, not merely because revisionist states such as Russia and China favour mercantilism and question Anglo-American leadership of the global economy, but because transnational corporatism itself is incompatible with democratic authority and legal accountability. The pressure to comply with rules-based trade compels all states to adapt to ‘complex interdependence’ in their own interests, as neoliberal institutionalists correctly argue; yet corporate financial capital (a private mode of power engineered for the pecuniary gain of investors) and democracy (a public mode of decision making for resolving distribution issues in sovereign polities) are essentially antithetical: far from empowering states to establish a rational basis for multilateral co-governance (synarchy), international legal agreements such as the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the European Union (EU) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) threaten to restrict market competition and limit the capacity of states to enact legislation to regulate corporations, thereby consolidating the economic and political power of the transnational investor class – while potentially also excluding Russian firms from EU markets.

Dominated by Anglo-American scholarship, mainstream IR has been relatively slow to explore these themes, for while globalization promotes trade and investment and advances ‘synarchic’ properties in the world-system (cogovernance between states and open interregionalism), the uneven and combined development of global capitalism has produced a ‘coexistence of multiplicity’ in the international system in which no single economy or economic model is triumphant. In addition, while the rapid development of capitalist forms in emerging economies is challenging Western economic leadership, the insertion of core and peripheral economies into structures of global governance – whose agendas are co-determined by corporate power – is problematizing the historic status of the unified state actor as the epistemological ground of IR.

Although globalization requires the national state form of capital to reproduce non-capitalist social structures of accumulation (Kotz 1994, 2007), it simultaneously creates unstable dynamics between economies at different stages of development in a ‘heterogeneous interstate system that yields an endless proliferation of transnational actors and identities’ (Wilson 2009: 35). This entails not simply the intrusion of ‘irrational’ identities and practices in an otherwise ‘rational’ world system formed during five centuries of Western hegemony, but a rupture in the linear modernizing dynamic of liberal universalism characterized by a jettisoning of the growth paradigm of industrialism and progress and a reversion to non-capitalist informal economy/ decommodified labour-power across disaggregated and spatially distributed supply chains in emerging market economies where local firms employing billions of low-paid workers in ‘special production zones’ compete for contracts to supply global brands (cf. Sanyal 2007).

The securitization necessary to sustain this global accumulation regime has also contributed to the development of ‘parapolitics’, namely the nexus of transnational power interests that flourishes along the interstices between formal government, the ‘deep state’ and organized crime which is dyadic to corporate power as a form of globalized predatory entrepreneurialism (Wilson 2009; cf. Deneault 2010; Napoleoni 2009; Blakely 2009). Wilson (2012) derives the deep state from the structure of the liberal ‘dual state’ which represses and conceals political conflict and which sustains the bourgeois illusion of a rational ‘risk-free’ business civilization but which cannot overcome its genesis in the originary violence of state formation. In the post-9/11 era the deep state is finally revealed for what it is: the crimogenic dimension of liberal order. Parapolitics, in this sense, is also the ‘study of criminal sovereignty, of criminals behaving as sovereigns and sovereigns behaving as criminals in a systematic way’ (Cribb 2009: 8).

A second theme of the text is the present contradictory status of the US as self-appointed guarantor of global security and superpower in decline – the ‘indispensible nation’ whose control over international finance and global security have been severely tested by the failure of the Iraq war and the impact of the global financial crisis (Xinbo 2010). To understand the condition of the last superpower, it is necessary to consider the academic controversy between unipolar optimists – apologists for Pax Americana under a ‘liberal Leviathan’ (Ikenberry 2011; Kindleberger 1981) – and unipolar pessimists – neorealist and neo-Marxist critics of US foreign policy who reject hegemonic stability theory and/or emphasize the inherently conflictual character of attempts to establish an enduring global hegemony (Kennedy 1987; Mearsheimer 2001; Layne 2012; Monteiro 2014; Waltz 1993; Zakaria 2011; Arrighi 1994, 2007). The thesis of unipolar pessimists is hardly new, for as Gilpin argued in the 1980s, while the normative role of a hegemon is to act as the cement binding the international system (providing collective private goods like security where no state can be denied access to a good or where consumption of a good by one actor does not preclude its enjoyment by others), the rapid expansion and financialization of the global economy under American leadership has unleashed centrifugal forces that will ultimately overwhelm the US. Anticipating Arrighi (1994), Gilpin (1987) stressed that corporations in a global capitalist economy must continually restructure and relocate economic activities to remain competitive and expand market share, with major implications for the geoeconomic balance of power: unleashing the global market, he argues, creates a ‘new political environment […] With the inevitable shift in the international distribution of economic and military power from the core to rising nations in the periphery and elsewhere, the capacity of the hegemon to maintain the system decreases’ (Gilpin 1987: 77–8).

Unprecedented in the present epoch are: (i) the gap between US military and economic capabilities; (ii) the rapidity of America’s decline from unipolar ascendency in the ‘permissive environment’ of the early post-Cold War period to defensive retrenchment and reluctant multilateralism in the present decade as the geopolitical foundations of the US-centric order are eroded; and (iii) the growing gulf between the wealth of transnational financial corporations headquartered in the US and the collapse of America’s economy since 2007. Yet mainstream IR continues to be framed in terms acceptable to US foreign policymakers. The only issues separating neorealists and neoliberals are their respective views on the possibility of multilateral cooperation: both elide not only the precedents for America’s intervention in Iraq (Sarai 2008; Burman 2007; Hartnet & Stengrim 2006; Konings 2010; Stokes 2004), or the manipulation of the international monetary system by the Federal Reserve (Hudson 2003; Wheatley 2013a), but also the illiberal character of neoliberalism as an economic ideology which has destroyed embedded liberalism in favour of corporate ownership and privatized citizenship, leading to a general ‘regression in thought and social organization that has been detrimental to the vast majority of individual lives and societies as a whole’ (Bone 2010: 725; O’Flynn 2012; Wallerstein 1995).

Despite the deep malaise of US society (Hedges 2009; Berman 2011), as apologists for Western hegemony, neorealists and neoliberals both contend that the US must remain active in the field of global security by countering regional hegemons and binding rising powers within the existing structure of global governance. Yet the shifting nature of world order is reflected in a trend towards ‘soft balancing’ as proto-peers and regional powers seek to counter US leadership in global institutions without challenging the US directly (Pape 2005; Bobrow 2008). This has caught the Anglosphere by surprise, no less than Russia’s willingness to use ‘hard balancing’ to limit the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) encroachment into the post-Soviet space of Eurasia, which has led the US in turn to retaliate with economic sanctions and pressure on Saudi Arabia to depress the market price of Russia’s primary export and source of hard currency. These developments presage the end of a distinct period in the evolution of the international system:

The post-Cold War era was quite literally defined by endings: of bipolarity, and of the threat of total nuclear annihilation. That ending has, at last, ended. Post-post-Cold War politics are defined by an increasingly chaotic diversity of ideas and practices. That the Chinese, Indian and Russian models of capitalism diverge systematically from the erstwhile simplicity of market fundamentalism is hardly surprising. The same holds in the security realm where these and other rising states seek their own roles, channels of influence, and representation in regional and global governance structures, which the old American-made Cold War and post-Cold War order by its very nature could not accommodate.

(Abdelal & Krotz 2014: 132)

The US has attempted to impose a rehierarchization of world order, arrogating ‘special governance rights’ to Western economies while denying equivalent categorial rights to self-determination and non-intervention to emerging economies (Reus-Smit 2005b: 72). Yet the era when international relations could be guided and balanced by a ‘superpower’ is ending and those observers who still see ‘no credible alternative to the American role as lynchpin and guarantor of the global system grossly overestimate the current US capacity’ (Cohen 2008: 3; Layne 2012).

What remains to be determined is whether peaceful transition to multipolarity is possible – facilitating the ascent of China, India, Russia and Iran as emerging powers (Zakaria 2011; Hiro 2010; Tselichtchev 2012), or whether the US will attempt to delay global convergence by embroiling contenders in low-intensity regional conflicts (as in Ukraine) or fostering internal unrest (as in Iran). The power of the Anglosphere derives from the transnational organization of capitalist finance, which has accelerated the de-democratization and deterritorialization of political decision making, yet the uncontrolled growth of neoliberal globalization has also accelerated the rapid and uneven growth of capital markets and investment outside the Lockean heartland. The paradox of world order is that having created the institutional basis for multilateral trade and governance, the West is unwilling to sanction a minimum level of geopolitical rebalancing necessary to allow contenders a proportionate voice in international politics or to enable the global market to function as neoclassical theory claims it ought – that is, by yielding positive-sum welfare gains through free trade. This subversion of rationality by Western financial capital lies at the heart of recurring crises in the Western-led global economy which emerging economies blame on the ‘domestic needs of the country issuing the primary reserve currency [clashing] with international fiscal requirements’ (Hiro 2010: 287).

This leads to a third major theme in the text, namely the origins of America’s economic decline and the problem of overaccumulation in financialized economies. Much has been written on the origins of the global financial crisis and the financialization of Western economies, and as we shall see in Chapter 5, the decline of the US economy has been determined less by cyclical than structural economic factors – an historically specific confluence of contingent processes including weakness of demand formation (Cynamon 2013; Foster & Magdoff 2009; Stiegler 2011), fiscal and monetary instability, misallocation of capital and mass employment (Nasser 2013), constraints to growth posed by declining access to cheap energy (Heinberg 2005; Ruppert 2004), and the reappropriation of developmental sovereignty by non-Western states acting through regional organizations as competitors to the Washington consensus (Nicolas 2012; Telò 2007; Ambrosio 2005; Chance 2010). However, the origins of the crisis lie in the nature of capital itself, and in the attempt by corporatestate elites to overcome the contradiction between accumulation and declining profitability in deindustrialized societies.

In liberal economic theory, overaccumulation is typically defined as capital superabundance, a self-generating process stimulated by financial innovation and securitization, through which investors leverage positions and maximize yields at the expense of long-term investments. In critical IPE, on the other hand, overaccumulation is linked to a decline in the rate of return on capital investment and the failure of the rate of profit to recover from recessions, leading to a structural crisis of valorization where financial and nonfinancial corporations seek higher returns through the accumulation of ‘fictitious value’. Defined in orthodox or Marxian terms, however, the assumption is the same: that the value of ‘fictitious capital’ has expanded so far out of proportion to the ‘real’ economy of production and consumption that the latter risks being overwhelmed by a glut of idle capital that cannot be usefully or profitably invested. The beneficiaries of this system are assumed to be predatory (and interchangeable) corporate-state elites that have depended on fiat money creation to sustain their power over local economies based on consumption and savings for the last four decades.

However, while it is accepted that revenues generated through financialized capitalism dwarf the level of value generated in commodity production, and while devaluation and deleveraging are sources of instability in financialized economies, the argument that capital accumulation has reached its historic limits must be placed in question, not merely because new poten...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Globalization and world order
• 2. Capitalist sovereignty
• 3. Corporate globalization
• 4. The state form of transnational capital
• 5. The crisis of Western economic power
• 6. Towards a posthegemonic global growth system
• 7. Capitalist geopolitics
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index