The work of the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci has had a significant impact upon the study of International Relations (IR) over the past fifteen years. Despite the emergence of a distinct 'Italian School' in IR, however, there have been few assessments of the utility of Gramsci's concepts in this area. Our purpose here is to engage with the work of the new Gramscians. We begin by specifying the theoretical attractions of using Gramsci in IR, and then subject the key foundational claims of the new Gramscians to critical analysis. Our principal conclusions are that the Italian school's appropriation of Gramsci is far more conceptually problematic than they acknowledge, and that their use of his framework is difficult to sustain with respect to the scholarship devoted to his ideas. If Gramsci is to be used effectively within IR, closer attention must be paid both to the historical meaning of his work and to the problems raised by it. In short, Gramsci and his ideas must be more thoroughly historicized if his work is to be used to comprehend the multiple dynamics of world order today.

In this book, Randall Germain explores the international organization of credit in a changing world economy. At the centre of his analysis is the construction of successive international organisations of credit, built around principal financial centres (PFCs) and constituted by overlapping networks of credit institutions, mainly investment, commercial, and central banks. A critical historical approach to international political economy (IPE) allows Germain to stress both the multiple roles of finance within the world economy, and the centrality of financial practices and networks for the construction of monetary order. He argues that the private global credit system which replaced Bretton Woods is anchored unevenly across the world's three principal financial centres: New York, London, and Tokyo. This balance of power is irrevocably fragmented with respect to relations between states, and highly ambiguous in terms of how power is exercised between public authorities and private financial institutions.

Many insist that the world economy today is in the grip of the most severe financial crisis since 1931. Although the origins of this crisis are in dispute, the extent and scale of the changes prompted by it are becoming clear. Among these changes are a recalibration of the relationship between public and private authority, a reconfiguration of the regulatory responsibilities and capacities of the state with respect to the financial system, and a rebalancing of relations of power among states. While the financial crisis has generated points of stress along all of these axes of change, we should be wary of expecting an entirely new global financial order to emerge from the carnage. The complex links between financial order and world politics suggest that this financial crisis will result in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary transformation in the world's financial order.

In response to Adam Morton's survey of ‘critical’ IPE in the January 2006 issue of this journal, I argue that we should resist the call to privilege the question of class struggle when considering the political economy of world order. This question, although not unimportant, draws upon an overly narrow and austere conception of historical materialism. Instead, I consider a more fulsome – but decidedly non‐Marxist – tradition of historical materialism in order to move beyond the monological tendency that continues to mar much Marxist historiography, especially when the question of class struggle is elevated as the principal lens through which our understanding of capitalism is organised. I do this by considering the importance of historical idealism in the work of Robert W. Cox, a key interlocutor of much so‐called ‘critical’ IPE. Although I agree with Morton that class struggle should not be effaced, I make the counter‐claim that understanding the political economy of world order demands an attention to the formation of collective human subjectivities if we are adequately to grasp its contemporary dynamics.

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. In this essay we consider these perennial questions of modern IPE scholarship in reverse order to ask whether the euro could ever have become, or seek to become, a true international currency rivalling the US dollar, used not only for passive foreign exchange reserves but also as a major commercial currency outside the EU. We argue that the EU lacks the will, the ideas and the capacity to promote the euro into the status of an international currency. In this article, we concentrate on this final issue of capacity, as the will and ideas issues have already been well explored. Capacity is an issue coeval with, if not prior to, the first two issues. The EU's current institutional arrangements and its economic geography create macro--economic consequences that diminish the euro's capacity to operate as a top currency. These conflicts go beyond the well--recognized issue that the euro--zone is not an optimum currency area. Examining the euro's debilities sheds light not only on the euro's (in)capacity to rival the dollar as an international currency, but also on the future of both the euro and the dollar in the aftermath of the euro--zone crisis. Permanent repository link