Putting the nation back into ‘the international’

Reframing development theory: the significance of the idea of uneven and combined development

“…But in the subsequent declining epoch of capitalist world development, dating roughly from the eve of the First World War, the space for a sustained process of industrialization was closed off by the preponderant weight of Western industry in the world market and the feebleness of local bourgeois classes aligned with conservative agrarian elites out of fear of popular 15 Rosenberg's reconceptualization of uneven and combined development not just as Ba concrete abstraction of the international impact of capitalist society, but as a general abstraction of the significance of inter-societal co-existence per se^(2006, p. 319) has generated a lively controversy in its own right. See (Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008;Ashman 2009;Davidson 2009;Allinson and Anievas 2009). mobilizations that could escape their control (Trotsky 1957, p. 80;1977, pp. 111-152;Mandel 1979, pp.…”

Basic problems in the theory of uneven and combined development. Part II: unevenness and political multiplicity

“…Granted that unevenness has always involved numerical multiplicity, why should this be? And since, as Neil Davidson (2009) points out, unevenness is also fully manifest within societies, without always entailing their political fragmentation, how can it be used to account for the fact of political fragmentation among societies? If one cannot answer this question, one cannot claim to render the international sociologically intelligible as a dimension of development.…”

“…See, for example,Deutscher (1954),Knei-Paz (1978), Lö wy (1981),Davidson (2009). A very significant exception here isNovack (1972), while partial exceptions includeBarker (2006) andAllinson and Anievas (2009).…”

Navigating Beyond the Eurofetishist Frontier of Critical IR Theory: Exploring the Complex Landscapes of Non-Western Agency

“…Moreover, the dominant approach views modern capitalism as constituting a disciplinary "global panopticon," which serves to constrain the agency of non-Western actors by erecting a New (Western) Constitutionalism that constructs the global empire of Western capitalism (Gill 1995). This approach finds its equivalent expression in various neo-Trotskyist IR works wherein Western industrial capitalism constitutes the global "whip of external necessity" to which all non-Western states must conform (e.g., Ashman 2009;Davidson 2009). While these imperialist arguments are undoubtedly important, nevertheless, when reified into a Eurofetish, they render CIRT blind both to the many different forms of non-Western agency enacted in world politics and to their constitutive consequentialism.…”

“…2). Last but not least, many neoTrotskyists in IR (e.g., Ashman 2009;Davidson 2009;Callinicos 2009, 123-36) subscribe to the first step of the BBT by assuming that modern capitalism originated as an intra-European process and that industrialization emerged spontaneously within Britain, with no discussion of the non-Western involvement in the making of capitalist modernity on show (see Hobson 2011;Bhambra 2011). Nevertheless, a significant minority of neo-Trotskyists has effectively dispensed with the Eurocentric logic of immanence, thereby advancing what we view as a genuinely non-Eurocentric approach (Matin 2013;Anievas and Nişancio glu 2015;Tansel 2015;cf.…”