A notebook

[Cain]

Stephen Gill

One of Gill's first contributions to the field was The Global Political Economy: Perspectives, Problems, and Policies (with David Law, 1988), a survey of international political economy that uniquely, for its time, gave serious attention to the entire theoretical spectrum of the field, including variants of Marxism and game theory, as well as making novel arguments about the structural power of capital. These structural arguments moved away from one-dimensional notions of Dahlian 'A has power over B' to recognize the structural power provided by capital's increasing ability to play one country off of another (provided by the increasing mobility of capital and finance).

Gill investigates the Trilateral Commission not as a site of secret power or conspiratorial global dominance, but as a site of elite consensus-building around economic and foreign policy, precisely the sort of place one would expect to see the ideological work of hegemony being undertaken.

What was unique about the Trilateral Commission was its formation as a concerted attempt to promote co-operation around a transnational liberalism over and against the more state-centric realism of the Nixon–Kissinger years. Gill argued that the Trilateral Commission was comprised of 'organic intellectuals' who endorsed a broadly transnational liberalism and dialectically both reflected and helped reconcile some of the emerging conflicts around domestic versus international capitalist class fractions.

Gill borrows 'capillary power' and 'panopticism' from Foucault. Capillary power refers to Foucault's claim that power is best understood through its constitution of subjects and observed through micropractices, the quotidian stuff of everyday life. Panopticism refers to Foucault's discussion of the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham's prison design where inmates would feel they were being watched at all times but could not observe who may or may not be watching them. Foucault used the Panopticon as a metaphor for how subjects are disciplined by internalizing 'the gaze', the sense that they are potentially observed at all times, thus disciplining themselves.

Disciplinary neo-liberalism is institutionalized at the macro-level of power in the quasi-legal restructuring of state and international political forms: the 'new constitutionalism'. This discourse of global economic governance is reflected in the policies of the Bretton Woods organizations (e.g. IMF and World Bank conditionality that mandates changes in the forms of state and economic policy) and quasi-constitutional regional arrangements such as NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] and Maastricht, and the multilateral regulatory framework of the new World Trade Organization. It is reflected in the global trend towards independent central banks, with macroeconomic policy prioritizing the 'fight against inflation'.

With regard to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in particular, Gill is one of many scholars who have charged that a kind of market fundamentalism pervades their decision-making process, and that structural adjustment programmes seem designed, through 'conditionality', to punish states that have strayed from neoliberal economic orthodoxy. Defenders of the IMF would argue that one should not 'shoot the messenger', that less developed countries with balance-of-payment problems got themselves in trouble first, and that they are always free to decline help from the IMF. However, it is the concept of the 'structural power of capital' provided by Gill that would answer conditionality is something not merely desired by the IMF, but looked to as a seal of approval by private investors upon whom most less developed countries are dependent. Similar arguments could be made with relation to multilateral trade deals, the World Trade Organization or the independence of central banks. Attempts to 'democratize' these sites by providing more democratic accountability,
transparency and/or democratic selection of leadership would most assuredly bump up against the structural power of capital and its ability to 'strike' or exit a country or region that seems unable to ensconce these institutions away from democratic decision-making.

So for Gill, market civilization refers to the microlevel instantiations of neoliberal ideology, the way in which neoliberal values of the individual, property, privatization and hierarchy become pervasive globally. Examples include, echoing Karl Polanyi, the increasing commodification of areas of social life such as healthcare, health insurance, religion, leisure, the patenting of human genes and other life forms.

Gill is most vulnerable to the mainstream of the discipline on methodological grounds. Although much of his work has an empirical element, he is most certainly not engaged in attempting to falsify his hypotheses. For example, Gill's argument about the importance of councils such as the Trilateral Commission in the formation of a transnational capitalist class can only be suggestive, as it falls outside the demarcation criteria provided by Popper as a testable proposition.

In Power and Resistance in the New World Order, Gill devotes an entire chapter to questions of epistemology and ontology, and directly addresses the mainstream of the discipline. He approvingly cites Gramsci's rejection of positivism in favour of a dialectical analysis and claims, 'similar and quite fundamental criticisms can be made of the explanatory usefulness of the prevailing positivist approaches to the study of International Political Economy, such as its ahistorical nature; its lack of a dynamic, dialectical quality; the narrowness and incompleteness of its abstractions which are confined, almost tautologically, to the relations between theoretical abstractions (i.e. unitary rational actors called states); the tendency to extreme parsimony in explanation relative to the infinite complexity of its object of analysis, that is the international system'.

Antonio Gramsci

Gramsci's critique of these logics, and the simplest conceptual entry to his thought, rests within his concept of hegemony. Of course, hegemony is a familiar term for international relations scholars. Whether in the arguments about the necessity of a hegemonic power within 'hegemonic stability theory', or simply a referent for a preponderance of military and economic power in a global or regional system, hegemony is a common term. For Gramsci, hegemony meant something much more complex, which encompasses these meanings but goes far beyond them. Hegemony is arguably 'the central organizing concept' of The Prison Notebooks.  For Gramsci, hegemony is the ability of a dominant class to secure consent from the dominated, its ability to exercise 'intellectual and moral leadership', to convince the dominated their interests are the same as those of the dominant class. To understand his use of hegemony, it is critical to recognize that Gramsci's theorization of the capitalist state encompasses both the political state apparatus, which can use coercion if necessary to achieve the interests of the dominant class, and civil society (the sphere of the putatively 'private', including the economy, religion, parties, clubs and other non-state institutions), wherein much of the work of eliciting consent to domination occurs.

For Gramsci, civil society was more than just the sphere of 'egoistic' self-seeking and private behaviour. It was a vital site of popular contestation that offered the possibility of transcending the apparent public–private divisions of modern capitalism. Gramsci used the term 'historic bloc' to refer to the particular constellation of forces that utilizes hegemony, and theorized that for advanced capitalist countries, it would be necessary to develop a counter-hegemony in order to secure power for the dominated. That is, power was not located in the state apparatus, but instead in the extended state that includes civil society, and revolution could not be achieved merely by seizing the reins of the state apparatus. Hegemony is produced and reproduced through a historic bloc, the reach of which extends throughout society.

Gramsci rejected this form of 'economism' in favour of recognizing the interplay of base and superstructure, or perhaps more accurately, he rejected the base!superstructure metaphor entirely in favour of the more complex notion of hegemony. By doing so, Gramsci helped fashion an open-ended form of historical materialism (or Marxism), which rejected economic determinism and teleological forms of historicism, and identified the previously marginalized (in the sense of epiphenomenal) terrain of culture and ideology as a site of vital struggle.

Given his interest in culture and ideology as critical sites of political struggle, it is not surprising that Gramsci would reject simplistic notions of 'false consciousness', where the dominated are simply unaware of their true interests, and instead argue that 'all men are philosophers', in that each is situated in a particular historical setting and makes sense of a complex world through recourse to 'common sense'. For Gramsci, common sense does not have the same connotation as 'good sense', but rather represents a kind of fragmentary and often contradictory amalgam of popular, religious and cultural beliefs. Common sense functions like a world view that, although fragmentary and not systematic, reflects hegemonic ideology. Gramsci argued that in order to challenge the hegemony represented in common sense, a counter-hegemonic project 'must be a criticism of "common sense", basing itself initially, however, on common sense in order to demonstrate that "everyone" is a philosopher and that it is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought into everyone's individual life, but of renovating and making "critical" an already existing activity'. Thus, Gramsci finds within each individual elements of both hegemonic ideology and the capacity to utilize their common sense in order to engage in critical reflection upon that ideology.

One of the most recent and direct attacks on the legitimacy of Gramscian international relations was offered by Germain and Kenny in the Review of International Studies. They argue that Gramsci's conceptual inventory was developed by analysis of particular state conditions that are not easily appropriated for a different historical epoch; that the key Gramscian international relations step of theorizing global hegemony and global civil society (begun by Cox) is entirely inappropriate given Gramsci's analysis of a particular state and civil society; and that Gramsci's complex theoretical and conceptual works cannot be taken up cavalierly by contemporary scholars without historicizing them. A later issue of Review of International Studies features rebuttals by Rupert and Craig Murphy, but the most extensive and rigorous rejection of Germain and Kenny's critique was offered by Adam David Morton in Review of International Political Economy. In a compelling defence of a careful use of Gramsci's ideas 'in and beyond their context', Morton develops an immanent critique of the Germain and Kenny position by emphasizing three points: there is no privileged singular reading of Gramsci, but there is also not a limitless or infinite number of readings; only an 'austere historicism' would shackle ideas to the immediate context in which they are produced; and Gramsci's own works reveal that a Gramscian perspective requires us to think both 'in and beyond' the context of an idea's provenance. Morton carefully marshals a considerable amount of evidence to make the case that Germain and Kenny's own critique of Gramscian international relations fails on Gramscian terms.

Jürgen Habermas

According to Habermas, strategic action and its constitutive elements of calculation and design remain in constant tension with the ethical and moral claims to truth. Validating these claims (moral, truth, ethical, strategic) requires us to persuade others that our opinions and ideas are worth considering and instituting. Such claims, often couched in terms 'universal pragmatics', are based on the speech act, which refers to our doing something in what we say.

The performativity of speech acts is a crucial element of what Habermas refers to as 'the struggle to reach consensus'. As Habermas insists, 'the very medium of mutual understanding abides in a peculiar half-transcendence. So long as participants maintain their performative attitudes, the language actually in use remains at their backs'. Yet one of the problems with Habermas's consensus theory, as Thomas McCarthy notes, is that it fails to deal adequately with the difference between an utterance that is true, and one in which rational consensus dictates that a statement is true.

In his essay on 'Citizenship and national identity', Habermas argued that immigration and economic globalization had begun to challenge the constitutional patriotism of national polities. The erosion of national identity raised the question of whether the political loyalties of domestic polities could provide the basis for solidarity at the transnational level. In his later writings on the EU constitution, Habermas would argue that an EU constitution – one modelled after the framework of the US constitution – could foster the needed solidarity and identity to promote an EU polity.

On the one hand, globalization has engendered many benefits and opportunities for social movements and citizens to channel their demands to higher political authorities. On the other hand, the political and legal institutions of the global community, while forming a novel network of global justice, still lack developed legitimization processes to foster the needed loyalties and commitments for global citizenship. It is crucial to stress, therefore, that Habermas's ambivalence stems from his own convictions concerning the strong nationalist loyalties to the constitutional state. As already noted, constitutional patriotism, or the evolution of loyalties of national citizens to their constitutional frameworks, has not materialized in any strong form at the global level (and to a lesser extent the transnational, EU level). The development of global citizenship takes time, of course, and requires stronger enforcement mechanisms to interlink democratic procedures with democratic solidarity. For cosmopolitan nationalists, for instance, this idea requires us to take more seriously the dynamics of national communities when formulating the possibilities of solidarity at the global level.

Thomas Risse, for instance, has argued that communicative action theory explains how international agreements and institutional norms are shaped by reasoned argumentation.  Communicative action, as he explains, involves empathy and ethical and moral claims, which, in turn, constitute a common knowledge (or anarchy as lifeworld) of actors that helps to explain behavioural outcomes. In this manner, strategy/power offers one mode of explanation, while reasoned argumentation offers another to assess these outcomes. Risse's application of Habermas's theory is arguably the most concrete and effective application to international politics of Habermas's ideas.