Mark Rupert and Hazel Smith (eds.): Historical Materialism and Globalization.

Mark Rupert and Hazel Smith (eds.) Historical Materialism and Globalization Routledge, 2002, 320 pp. ISBN 0-415-26371-9 (pbk) 23 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0-415-26370-0 (hbk) 75 [pounds sterling]

Not too long ago, someone said that we should be grateful to G. W. Bush for silencing all the hoo-ha so typical of the globalisation-frantic 1990s. There is a lot of truth in this. Since this important collection, Historical Materialism and Globalization, was published, capitalism's most powerful state has discarded most of its rhetorical garments, and has appeared before us as naked imperialism busily at work in Afghanistan and Iraq.

These new tragedies flipped the debates on globalisation, and very quickly it became clear that Marxism had much more to offer in the analysis of international relations than was allowed by the practitioners of globalisation studies. From a Marxist perspective, the contributors to this collection have sought to answer the following questions: is the nation-state withering away in the face of an ever-increasing, all-encompassing global economy? How central is the nation-state to the development of capitalism? Could capitalism exist without the nation-state? And underlying all these questions is the issue of which historical materialist approach to take? In answering these questions, many of the contributors revisit the famous Marxist 'state-derivation' debate of the 1970s.

In their contributions, both Ellen Meiksins Wood and Hannes Lacher, drawing on the historical works of Robert Brenner, conceptualise the origins of capitalist sovereignty as a complex product of the enduring territorial character of the absolutist state and the rise of the capital relation within the specific domestic environment of Britain. Where Wood's and Lacher's opinions diverge can be seen in the way they answer the following question: if the territorially bounded state form predates capitalism, does capitalism necessitate the nation state? Wood answers this question in the affirmative, claiming that once the capital relation appears, it becomes inherently linked with the nation-state. According to Lacher, Marxist theory provides proof of the necessity of statehood in the development of capitalism, but lacks a demonstration of why it is that particular brand of statehood, the 'nationstate', that is the central political formation for the development of capitalism. After all, Lacher argues, if the 'interstate-ness of capitalist political space cannot be derived from the capital relation' and must instead be 'regarded as the "historical legacy" from precapitalist development' (p. 161), then there is no reason why it--that is, capitalist political space--should not surpass a capitalism structured politically along national territorial borders. Therefore, as Lacher concludes, 'certain institutions should be theorized as internalized' (p. 162) by capitalism. If the nexus between the capital relation and the nation-state is not inextricable, it is quite possible that capitalism could indeed transcend the nation-state system and replace it with an alternative mode of statehood.

This is exactly what William Robinson has in mind when analysing the contemporary process of economic globalisation. As he argues, the rise of 'transnational capital' acts in the supersession of the 'nation-state system as the organizing principle of capitalist development', thus engendering the emergence of a 'transnational state apparatus (TNS)' coordinated through various international institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and WTO (p. 211). Robinson, Lacher and Wood all emphasise the way capitalism exacerbates the contradictions between the globally expansive nature of capitalism and the territorially national boundedness of the capital relation. The playing-out of these contradictions is where their analyses greatly diverge.

While Lacher concludes that it is an open question as to whether the nationstate will persevere as the predominate form of political community, Robinson argues that nation-states have already been transformed into 'neo-liberal national states', making up a larger TNS. In contradistinction, Wood claims that politically, capitalism is best served by the nation-state and indeed, she writes, 'The forces tending to prolong the historic connection between capitalism and the nation-state are very powerful, indeed, rooted in the very nature of capitalism' (p. 29). Wood readily admits that the gap between the global reach of the economic sphere and the national reach of the political sphere is growing. However, she believes that this entails the contradictions inherent to capitalism becoming more poignant and that, if anything, it signifies 'a growing space for opposition', the main arena of which remains the nation-state (p. 37). Hence, while one might concur with Lacher's analysis of the state emanating from the 'historical legacy' of pre-capitalism, we would, like Wood, nevertheless question the conclusion that something like a 'transnational' or 'global' state has emerged or is emerging with the onset of 'globalisation'.

This is for two key reasons. First, such a conclusion would be economically reductionist in observing the evolution of political relations as a mechanistic product of changes in the economy. Instead, one must also account for the militaristic aspects of the state. In doing so, an obvious question arises when postulating the connections between the processes of internationalising state and capital: where is the international military apparatus securing a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence? At this time, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is the only international organisation that could conceivably fulfil this role in the near future. However, given the resurgence of us unilateralism in the wake of the 'war on terror', recent trends hardly point in this direction. Instead, it seems more likely that NATO will be effectively abandoned by the US as a global military institution. Secondly, and more problematically, such a hypothesis would suggest that once the nation-state has been 'internalised' by capitalism, the latter could simply dispense with the former. This interpretation seems highly suspect given that once the nation-state was internalised by capitalism, it became a vital function of capital accumulation, as Lacher admits (pp. 160-1). This further demonstrates Wood's crucial point: it is precisely because of the myriad organic functions that it performs in assisting capitalist accumulation that the nation-state is likely to prove more stubborn in adapting to consequent waves of capital internationalisation than Lacher would allow. That the nation-state came to be the 'preferred' political form of capitalism by, to put it very grossly, historical contingencies, does not in any case render it contingent today. Hence we will probably need to see more profound changes than the 'globalisation' of the 1990s before capitalism transcends it.

From this perspective, the separation between the economic and political spheres in world politics becomes untenable. Moreover, since the nature of capital accumulation is inherently competitive, thus spawning inter-state rivalries, it greatly diminishes the chances of anything like a worldwide capitalist state emerging. Therefore, it would seem that even if one considers contemporary capitalism to have been fundamentally altered by the 'forces of globalization', this does not mean that global capital is rendering the state obsolete but instead that, if anything, 'It is ... the very nature of capitalism to intensify the contradiction between its expansionist imperatives and the territorial divisions of its original political (and economic) form' (Wood, p. 30). This raises the issue of globalisation's supposed novelty, bringing us to Sutcliffe and Halliday's critique of the concept of globalisation.

As Sutcliffe shows, globalisation theories rest on various dubious claims--which, we believe, he successfully empirically undermines. To begin with, Sutcliffe reminds us that the current level of international trade relative to value of production is not much greater than that of the early pre-First World War era. Moreover, foreign direct investment--as international trade--has indeed been on the increase, but it has only regained the relative levels of 1913, and not at any unprecedented heights. Sutcliffe also shows how the rising importance of foreign production relative to exports is a misleading statistical result, derived from the inclusion of the value of sales by foreign subsidiaries.

Finally, like Wood, he rejects the 'end of the nation state' thesis. On this point, Teschke and Heine also provide a particularly interesting analysis. They claim that 'capitalist state power has not undergone a quantifiable reduction, but a qualitative shift in purpose, which may be broadly defined as a shift from the welfare state to the competition state (Wettbewerbsstaat)' (p. 176). Moreover, they conclude that if anything is indeed eroding in contemporary world politics, it is not the state but its democratic legitimacy. This analysis, as well as Sutcliffe's and Wood's, is certainly correct. Hence for these reasons, 'globalisation' is hardly anything new.

While Sutcliffe does well in destabilising the economic empirical claims of globalisation theory, Halliday succeeds in undermining globalisation's ideological claims. For Halliday, at the locus of globalisation theories lies an ideologically driven incapacity to utter the two words, 'capitalism' and 'imperialism'.

Paraphrasing Horkheimer, Halliday reminds us that 'those who do not want to speak about capitalism should not speak about IR or globalization' (p. 77). Thus, for Halliday, the Marxist theory of imperialism has more utility, given its analytical purchase, than any theories of 'globalisation', because those theories are abstract and ideological.

Overall, Historical Materialism and Globalization is a much-needed contribution to the globalisation debate and to Marxist theory. It demonstrates the very rich and informed critiques that Marxism is capable of launching at any thread of ruling ideology--a critique largely vindicated by the frightening, and predominately nation-state driven turns our world has taken since it was published.