Critically evaluate Frantz Fanon’s contribution to our understanding of contemporary oppression, and to the politics of dissent and resistance

this essay was written in 2008 for Life, Power, Resistance: Critical Perspectives on a Post-Westphalian Era, an International Relations course at Sussex University

I

Interpretations of Fanon’s writings are multifarious and frequently misleading. He has been variously cast as a violent revolutionary, a critical psychologist and a repressed homophobe, among other things, none of which can be addressed in the scope of this study. Rather, I take as central Fanon’s insight into the racialisation of oppression, briefly outlining what is meant by this concept before locating it within the colonial moment, in order to draw it into a broader discussion of the failings of European humanism. I argue for its continued relevance both in terms of its explanation of the utility of ‘othering’, and because of the parallel we can draw between the dehumanising humanism that Fanon attacks, and the logic of sovereignty that constitutes ‘Westphalian’ norms. I then go on to consider possible alternatives to accepting this racialised and universalised objectification, echoing Fanon’s suspicion of strategic cultural essentialisms and pointing instead to his advocacy of openness towards the other as a meaningful politics of resistance.

II

For Fanon, oppression means something more complex than the subjection to violence or the constraining of agency. Oppression is to be denied one’s own humanity: “A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence” (1986:139). It is to negate the claim to be a ‘Man’. In other words, though he tries to master his own humanity, a humanity which has both been promised to him and which he senses in the immensity and depth of his soul (1986:140), he finds instead: 

I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors… I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’.” (1986:112)

This resonates with Said’s analysis (1978) of the discursive construction of the Orient, itself clearly influenced by Fanon’s account of how the European “had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” (1986:111). Fanon’s innovation was to show how this denial is racialised; how it is inscribed on the body. A process of self-composition becomes a construction of the black man according to “a racial epidermal schema,” a “uniform” from which he can never escape (1986:112, 114). The negative stereotypes attached to this epidermis may change, but ‘the fact of blackness’ remains. Fanon will continue to be “overdetermined from without… I am fixed” (1986:116).

Fanon’s work has been tremendously influential for later ‘neo-colonialism’ and Dependency Theory critiques, articulating the injustice of colonial rule and the hypocrisy of “native intellectuals” and post-independence leaders, whilst inspiring a revolutionary fervour in many Third World readers. His last book is a “bible of the decolonisation movement” (Stuart Hall, cited in Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, 1996). Of greater significance for this paper, however, is his characterisation of the colonial world as “a world cut in two”, as “a Manichaean world” (1990:29, 31). Again echoed by Said, Fanon describes how the native other is defined as lack, as being what we are not.

The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers… (1990:32)

This, argues Fanon, is central to the psychology of colonial rule that is internalised by the native. Disrupting this “mentally debilitating” ideology (Gibson 1999:109) is crucial for attaining real independence, hence Fanon’s scathing attacks on new leaders of the new nations, the “spoilt children of yesterday’s colonialism and of today’s national governments” who failed to mount a “real struggle for freedom” to effect the transfer of power (1990:37, 36).

It might be said that Fanon’s highly incisive critique of colonialism has now been rendered somewhat less potent within contemporary contexts. We no longer conceptualise oppression as a struggle between settler and native, and we may be apt to dismiss Fanon’s revolutionary zeal as a mere ‘apostle of violence’, as commentators frequently do (Pithouse 2003:2). However, this colonial Manichaean split has its present manifestations; a discriminatory denial of humanity once again taking a specifically racialised form. Taking just one example, representations of ‘Africa’ portray it as a place of famine, war, disease, genocide and hunger; these appear to be “‘native’ African products” (Taylor 1998:136). We have seen, consumed, and discarded countless black faces in the news, in Oxfam pamphlets, and in advertisements promising that you can ‘make a difference’ for just £2 per month. The accumulation of images of Africa construct a seemingly inconsequential realm of otherness, a reflection of the state of nature Europe is deemed to have long since transcended.

Those hordes of vital statistics, those hysterical masses, those faces bereft of all humanity, those distended bodies which are like nothing on earth, that mob without beginning or end, those children who seem to belong to nobody, that laziness stretched out in the sun, that vegetative rhythm of life – all this forms part of the colonial vocabulary. (Fanon 1990:33; emphasis added)

Of course, this vocabulary serves its purpose. It permits us to remain undisturbed by ongoing structural violence suffered by vast numbers of the world’s population; it enables us to celebrate military interventions, to keep silent at the erosion of civil liberties, to penetrate weak economies with our capital. This much should be clear. What Fanon’s analysis highlights, in fact, is the more contentious observation that this violent dehumanisation is not made up of piecemeal aberrations and individualised acts, but rather is constitutive of European humanism.

III

This is explicit during, though not limited to, the colonial period. The discrepancy between Western discourses on “human dignity”, and the “Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe” (1990:34, 251), is a discrepancy observable today – the most obvious example being calls for ‘democratisation’ and ‘freedom’ whilst deposing recalcitrant leaders or invading uncooperative states. Fanon exhibits a frustration that Europe continues to be held up as the exemplar, as “a paradise close at hand” (1990:41), when all he sees is the most terrible violence. The oppressed subject finds himself in a catch-22: invited to join the ranks of universally equal men whilst simultaneously discovering he has been rendered immobile by that same universality. It is the settler who “makes history and is conscious of making it” (1990:40); his is the plot whereby the native is constructed as the background.

Thus it is not the physical violence done to the native that results in his dehumanisation, nor is it merely the creation of an ideology that can legitimate such violence. For Fanon, it is the assumption of universality which necessitates the subsumption of the colonised subject into a pre-given understanding of humanity, with a pre-defined telos. As such, it may well be the liberal – perhaps even “colour-blind” or “anti-racist” – perspective which actually replicates this racist objectification, as argued by Schmitt (1996) and Lentin (2003). Like overt racism it simply stops at the racialised epidermis, declaring a “disavowal of difference… [a] political raciology, which constantly reinvokes the body while disavowing its primacy” (Ali 2005:166-167; emphasis added). Fanon laments this disavowal which is once again rooted in the invariability of his aspect: “When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my colour. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle” (1986:116). This refusal to engage with the other may be termed “the prejudice of equality”, stripping the other of his otherness (Rasch 2003:140), or what Schmitt calls ‘objectification’ – “a carefully orchestrated and systematic refusal of genuinely human relationships” (1996:36).

We can draw a parallel between this dehumanising humanity and the Westphalian logic of sovereignty. This too paradoxically combines universal equality with particularism, resulting in a system of containment which exercises the externalisation and repression of the Other in the name of “sameness” (Blaney & Inayatullah 2000:32). As Walker (1993) identifies, orthodox international relations theory actively constitutes this “inside/outside” or self/other demarcation insofar as it continues to insist on the primacy of state sovereignty. Sovereignty, like objectification, seems to say: “I am “my own man” and you are yours. We are separate. We do not share with each other; at best we do things alongside each other” (Schmitt 1996:44). And yet, significantly, this recognition rests upon a refusal to entertain challenges to the basic principle of liberal pluralism, namely “an overriding monism, the monism of humanity” (Rasch 2003:136). It denies “the existence of a human substance truly other” (Todorov 1984:42-3), a denial that there can be an Other both equal and different. Western humanism is inseparable from its simultaneous constitution of the inhuman – which takes the form of any such challenge – and therefore from the project of the ‘civilising mission’; the project of “correcting” those who fail to fulfil their human potential (Rasch 2003:137-138). Furthermore, this once again takes on a racialised character, being grounded in the inclusion of the New World as a bestial state-of-nature against which Europe could achieve a ‘bracketing of war’ (Schmitt 2003:142). The European pluriverse relied on externalising the hierarchical relation to extra-European territory (Rasch 2003:127).

IV

What alternatives to this totalising, racialising metaphysics might be offered by Fanon’s work? One immediate counter to a dominating universalism is the reassertion of particularism, exemplified in the contemporary context by arguments for cultural relativism. These seem to challenge dominant actors to live up to the ideal of mutual recognition by refraining from imposing ‘Western’ norms on noncompliant societies. However, this strategy may result in an essentialised authenticity, reducing contestation to an identity politics whose only possible tactic is to demand “recognition” (Lentin 2006). Fanon’s initial seduction by Cesaire’s negritude – “From the opposite end of the white world a magical Negro culture was hailing me. Negro sculpture! I began to flush with pride. Was this our salvation?” (1986:123) – like contemporary identity politics, ultimately fails to address or indeed challenge the way in which the politicised ‘identity’ in question is itself called into being by a dominant conception of humanity. It reinforces the egocentrism of the European, allowing him to say “We will turn to you as to the childhood of the world… In a way, you reconcile us with ourselves” (Fanon 1986:132).

It also permits the voice of the oppressor to seize upon this strategic essentialism and sublimate it within another teleology, hijacking the self-representation of the oppressed. Fanon accuses Sartre of doing precisely this in his Black Orpheus (1948), denying Fanon the ability to define his own end: “And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me” (1986:134). A similar utilisation can be identified in the advocacy of many contemporary NGOs ‘on behalf’ of the marginalised groups they seek to represent. For example, activists and academics among the Karen hill tribes in Thailand have inadvertently produced what Walker (2001) labels “the Karen Consensus”, trapping the Karen in a fixed primordial identity (sustainable, egalitarian, non-commercial) in order to demand certain rights from the state – to the detriment of those Karen who wish to make other sorts of claims (for government schooling, televisions, trade).

It is this tendency which provokes Fanon to refuse outright any sort of transcendent ideal, to articulate instead a humanism based upon immanent power (Pithouse 2003:10-11).

In opposition to historical becoming, there had always been the unforeseeable… The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself… I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is. It is its own follower. (Fanon 1986:135)

Moulard-Leonard recasts Fanon within a Deleuzian non-dialectical becoming premised on the concept of “Difference-in-itself” and hence the possibility of “radically creative self-alteration” (2005:242-243). It is a transformation which does not necessitate a given end to the process of becoming.

Despite this, however, it is possible to discern in Fanon’s new humanism a latent telos framed by residual assumptions of European humanism, specifically the notions of history-making, progress and self-determination. He declares that to be human is to “introduc[e] invention into existence. In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself” (1990:229); that “no attempt must be made to encase a man, for it is his destiny to be set free” (1990:230). Yet we must historicise the idea that history-making is emancipatory, active, and self-consciously dynamic. Once again, the European encounter with the New World constitutes a formative moment, necessitating a progressivist hierarchy of human societies in which some are more advanced than others, a “dual modality of historical time… events as at once contemporaneous and noncontemporaneous” (Koselleck 1988:249). Furthermore, in the 18th century, Christian linear salvational teleology came together with secular rational prediction to produce the peculiarly modern concept of progress (1988:17); and the Calvinist emphasis on “good works” contributed to the idea that man makes his own history (Weber 1930:xiii). Such Eurocentric values clearly run right through many postcolonial and subalternist efforts which couple ‘agency’ and ‘subjectivity’ in the essentialist-liberal-humanist tradition (O’Hanlon 1988). There may not be space in this humanism for even more radically different conceptions of history-making.

V

This may be reconciled, however, by the fluidity of Fanon’s approach and his radical commitment to destabilising all fixed identities, and the fluidity of his approach to dialogic communication. He states clearly on the first page of his first book, “I do not come with timeless truths” (1986:9). Thus, rather than seeking to positively define The New Humanity, Fanon’s work permits a new humanity to arise out of every moment where there is a “genuine transcendence of the divisions and hierarchies that push us into unequal spaces and trap us in limited, reductive identities” (Pithouse 2003:18). Although he has often been mistaken for an uncritical advocate of violent revolution, as noted above, and certainly comes across as dismissive of the more incremental social changes or post-colonial (neo-colonial) structures that have characterised many ex-colonies, it would be unfair to characterise Fanon’s revolutionary zeal within a simplistic dichotomy between the evil coloniser and the struggling colonised, in which the principle objective is to destroy (and replace) colonial authority. His method of resisting colonial Manichaeanism is precisely to advocate an openness to the other – an openness echoed by Blaney and Inayatullah in their call for a “critical dialogue” (2004:219), or by a Levinasian “ethics of alterity” (Campbell 1994:477).

Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You? At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness. (Fanon 1986:231-232). 

Bibliography
Ali, S. 2005. ‘Uses of the Exotic: Body, Narrative, Mixedness’ in C. Alexander and C. Knowles (eds.) Making Race Matter: Bodies, Space and Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan)

Bernasconi, R. ‘Casting the Slough: Fanon’s New Humanism for a New Humanity’ in L. R. Gordon, T. D. Sharpley-Whiting and R. T. White (eds.) Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell)

Blaney, D. L. and Inayatullah, N. 2000. ‘The Westphalian Deferral’ in International Studies Review 2 (2), 29-64

Blaney, D. L. and Inayatullah, N. 2004. International Relations and the Problem of Difference (London: Routledge)

Campbell, D. 1994. ‘The Deterritorialization of Responsibility: Levinas, Derrida and Ethics after the End of Philosophy’ in Alternatives, 19:4, 455-484

Fanon, F. 1986 [1952]. Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press)

Fanon, F. 1990 [1961]. The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin)

Gibson, N. 1999. ‘Thoughts about Doing Fanonism in the 1990s’ in College Literature 26 (2), 96-117

Koselleck, R. 1988. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press)

Lentin, A. 2006. ‘De-authenticating Fanon: Self-organised anti-racism and the politics of experience’. Available at http://www.alanalentin.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=25. Accessed 16/02/08

Moulard-Leonard, V. 2005. ‘Revolutionary Becomings: Negritude’s Anti-Humanist Humanism’ in Human Studies 28, 231-249

O’Hanlon, R. 1988. ‘Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia’ in Modern Asian Studies, 22:1

Pithouse, R. 2003. ‘That the Tool Never Possess the Man: Taking Fanon’s Humanism Seriously’. Available at http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~janzb/afphil/docs/pithouse1.pdf. Accessed 8/2/08

Rasch, W. 2003. ‘Human Rights as Geopolitics: Carl Schmitt and the Legal Form of American Supremacy’ in Cultural Critique 54, 120-147

Said, E. 1978. Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul)

Sartre, J-P. 1948. ‘Orphée Noir’ in L. Senghor (ed.) L’Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France)

Schmitt, C. 2003 [1950]. The Nomos of the Earth in the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press)

Schmitt, R. 1996. ‘Racism and Objectification: Reflections on Themes from Fanon’ in L. R. Gordon, T. D. Sharpley-Whiting and R. T. White (eds.) Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell)

Taylor, J. 1998. Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press)

Todorov, T. 1984. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper and Row)

Walker, A. 2001. ‘The ‘Karen Consensus’, Ethnic Politics and Resource-Use Legitimacy in Northern Thailand’ in Asian Ethnicity, 2 (2), 145-162

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1996. Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask [film], directed by I. Julien

To what extent is the neoliberal paradigm limiting in the study of ‘offshore’?

this essay was written in 2007 for International Political Economy II, an International Relations course at Sussex University

Neoliberal economists typically ignore the existence and role of the offshore economy in their analysis. This is an extraordinary omission, which speaks volumes about their political values.

(Christensen 2007:216)

This essay first critically examines the construction of ‘offshore’ both within the parameters of a neoliberal analysis (1)  and in light of some of its critiques, looking initially at the broader context of economic globalisation’s supposedly inexorable advance, and then at offshore understood as a competitive state strategy in natural response to the exigencies of the global market. I then explore moments of disjuncture that threaten the smooth functioning of the neoliberal narrative, arguing that a genealogical or more broadly poststructuralist/constructivist methodology is far more useful to the study of offshore than neoliberalism’s ideological postulations. I specifically interrogate the notions that offshore represents an outcome or phase of a linear teleology of global finance, and indeed that the phenomenon of offshore is a mechanistic, ‘automatic’ development taking place outside of human or political volition. Finally, I consider the role of the neoliberal framework in the process of offshore’s ‘moral dislocation’, concluding that neoliberalism seeks to frame highly political and morally-charged operations within a bland discourse that insists on the neutrality of the market. Thus it is necessarily flawed in its contribution to the study of offshore, because it attempts to disguise the invariably political and pragmatic functions of offshore in the contemporary global political economy.

I

[neoliberal narratives, and other stories]

The present preoccupation with the theme of ‘globalisation’ among IPE scholars and other contemporary discourses tends to construct offshore as something which reflects, or indeed exemplifies, the increasing pressures towards deregulation, the rise of finance, and the corresponding decline of the state (in other words, the increasing subservience of the once sovereign state to global capital). An observable demarcation is drawn: first, the postwar Bretton Woods international order of “embedded liberalism” (Ruggie 1982), characterised perhaps somewhat nostalgically as the era of regulation and the general ability of states to exert some form of control over capital; the Fordist ‘social-compromise’ in which state sovereignty could be used to secure certain obligations from business and finance. Second, the international order’s subsequent evolution from the late 1970s onwards to the present neoliberal or post-industrial era, in which global capital has thrown off its state-imposed shackles to become the “mastering force” (Helleiner 1993:20) in world politics. According to one prominent commentator, “[l]ike a phoenix risen from the ashes, global finance took flight and soared to new heights of power and influence in the affairs of nations” (Cohen 1996:268). This development is presented as a natural progression, in distinctly linear terms; from the local to the national to the transnational (for such an evolutionary narrative, see for example Martin 1994:255). It is something bound up with the inevitable advancement of humankind and its increasingly efficient and superior technologies of communication. Furthermore, to a great extent, globalisation is seen as something apolitical and beyond our control – either as individuals or as national governments.

[T]he evolution of the international financial system… characterized by the acceleration of international capital movements … [has] challenged the capacity of the state to provide effective governance not only of financial markets themselves, but also of economic affairs generally.
(Cerny 1994:332)

Within this broader structure, then, the presence of offshore centres and tax havens – characterised by low regulation and low taxation – is understood to exert a downward pressure on governments, compelling them to keep regulation and corporate taxation low (Johns and Le Marchant 1993). This naturally undermines the sovereign ability of the nation-state to make policy, wherever policy objectives conflict with the need to maintain conditions that attract investment. In business circles and neoliberal thought generally, this development is welcomed as global capital’s somewhat automatic response to the “myriad of taxes and regulations” it is forced to negotiate (Hampton and Abbott 1999:13), and as evidence of governments’ slow adaptation to the requirements of global business. Though it is not necessarily accurate to claim that neoliberal scholars and policy-makers ‘ignore’ the presence and role of offshore, it is certainly true that, as far as possible, offshore is incorporated into existing frameworks of analysis – it becomes “part of the neo-liberal ideology of ‘deregulation’” (Picciotto 1999:64) – rather than presenting a reason to revise those frameworks. For example, despite the obvious logical inconsistencies that arise from a simplistic analogy between the firm and the state, prominent neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman seek to apply unproblematically the notion of free ‘competition’, as a mechanism to maximise efficiency, to the state.

Competition among national governments in the public services they provide and in the taxes they impose, is every bit as productive as competition among individuals or enterprises in the goods and services they offer for sale and the prices which they offer.
(Friedman 2001)

Outside of neoliberal and business circles, such developments are often lamented rather than celebrated; however, significantly, even critical accounts tend to lapse into the same determinism exhibited in the analyses cited above. Global capital remains the prime mover, its internal dynamic propelling it further and further from any state control, rendering it increasingly able to “effectively to cast judgement on the fiscal and monetary policies of nation states themselves through the disciplinary fear of capital flight” (Hampton and Abbott 1999:2). This notion of the “capture of the state” (Christensen and Hampton 1999) or the “competition state” (Cerny 1997) resonates with Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, in which he treats ‘money’ as something essentially abstract and which can therefore manipulate human geographies and territorialities – it “has no definite relationship to space: it can exercise its effects upon the most remote areas” (1990:504). Offshore, Picciotto notes, is understood as “an expression of the limits that capital can impose on the forms and functions of the state” (1999:48).

The danger of such representations, however, is their tendency to dichotomise ‘state’ and ‘capital’ too simplistically, without serious investigation into the historicity and complexity of these two naturalised categories. They also seem to characterise the market, finance, or capital more broadly “as an autonomous powerful agency” (de Goede 2005:4) – in other words, as something separate from the human and collective subjectivities which produce and sustain it (see Roberts 1994:91). This is both ahistorical and disempowering, since it seeks to present as natural or ‘technical’ certain power practices which not only find their legitimation in human discursive practices, but also clearly benefit certain groups of people at the expense of others – as Scholte notes, “offshore finance has been largely reserved to large corporations and so-called high net worth individuals” (2005:21; see also Palan 2003:187). Any meaningful critique of this system, then, must interrogate not only the material practices of a system which appears unjust or amoral, but also the discursive practices which reinforce and legitimise it. Narratives of ‘globalisation’ and offshore finance lose their analytical value once they become ideologies or “legends”, identifiable because they run “far too smoothly” (Auerbach, cited in Shapiro 1993:56).

II

[the pertinence of poststructuralism]

International Political Economy remains one area of IR which has yet to embrace poststructuralist thinking wholeheartedly, or even engage with it in a serious way (de Goede 2003). Many IPE scholars do not recognise its value, arguing that postmodernist preoccupations with discourse and knowledge practices are of limited use to a discipline characterised and constrained by certain empirical and material realities (see, for example, Laffey 2000:441). As Campbell notes, power has become conceptualised in mainstream IPE as “a commodity to be wielded by agents” (1996:18), in contrast to poststructuralist theorisations which understand power as constitutive of social relationships and bound up with knowledge and discourse. Yet scholars who dismiss poststructuralist approaches on the grounds that they deal exclusively with discourse present a mistaken characterisation of one central tenet (2): namely that discourse is constitutive of material practices – “[t]o understand it simply as a discourse is to misunderstand discourse’s materiality” (Thrift 2001:430). For example, neoliberal narratives which posit the actuality (and inevitability) of the ‘globalisation’ process in fact materialise and legitimise that very process through the normalisation and repetition of otherwise banal concepts such as ‘going global’ or ‘global strategies’, therefore having a ‘real’ effect on actual processes and decisions made in business models, financial practices, law, and government. These discourses are then validated by a constructed ‘reality’ which, in circular fashion, then reinforces the validity of the discourse. The appearance of ‘truth’ thus “resides in the enhancement of the feeling of power” (Nietzsche 1967:290), which masks the utilitarian meanings of truths.

Orthodox approaches to historical phenomena – which construct such ‘legends’ as those described above – tend to first typologise a particular structure or reify a particular process or idea, before reading history backward in order to provide the teleological narrative to explain its realisation. This kind of approach “aims at dissolving the singular event into an ideal continuity… events are reduced to accentuate their essential traits, their final meaning… We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities” (Foucault 1987:231). Genealogy, by contrast, (see Nietzsche 1998 [1886]; 1969 [1887]; and Foucault 1987) as a historical method developed by poststructuralist scholars, seeks out the suppressed alternatives; the historical contingencies; the discursive foundations for what is now perceived as natural or inevitable. Thus if ‘offshore’ can be revealed to be the production of conscious, deliberate and ongoing reconstructions of statehood, then uncritical narratives of globalisation and deregulation can be greatly undermined. Furthermore, this may enable a radical understanding of knowledge/power practices in the global political economy that invests criticism and discursive deconstruction with transformative potential.

Examples abound in which the simplistic neoliberal narrative is called into question or, alternatively, rendered entirely irrelevant. We can point, for instance, to Abbott’s (1999) investigation into the offshore financial centre Labuan, the “pet project” of Malaysia’s ex-prime minister Dr. Mahathir. He details how the Malaysian government poured resources into Labuan’s development, and yet how its central motivations are not primarily rational-economic; nor can they simply be attributed to a strategy of accommodation to global financial exigencies as implemented by the archetypal ‘competition state’. Rather, key ideological factors must be acknowledged, such as the fact that East Malaysia (where Labuan is located) is thought to lag behind the west of the country in terms of economic development, or more broadly the context of ‘Vision 2020’, Mahathir’s expressed intention to make Malaysia a fully ‘developed’, ‘modern’ and industrialised nation by the year 2020. Reputation also remains a primary concern – as one commentator put it, “if you’re not one of the top 200 banks in the world, they’re not interested” (cited in Abbott 1999:195) – and potential operators are subjected to strict criteria to establish their credentials. Further motivations include the development of Islamic banking and Islamic offshore finance, and also certain nationalistic or developmental concerns: namely, particular benefits generated for the Malaysian economy, such as the creation of a captive market and the improvement of Malaysia’s financial system more generally (1999:197-202). The significance of such factors is highlighted by the relatively negligible impact of Labuan’s OFC status for island employment, or by the (similarly negligible) proportional contribution of offshore finance to both Labuan’s economy and Malaysia’s economy on the whole. In turn, the motivations behind international banks’ decisions to commit to the Labuan OFC project should also not necessarily be viewed in purely economistic terms; in fact many were concerned to show visible support for the project in order to demonstrate political commitment to Malaysia’s (or Mahathir’s) overall developmental vision.

Indeed, any investigation committed to disturbing the too-smooth narratives of globalisation and deregulation will find that such pragmatic, non-economistic considerations are not, as the orthodox neoliberal might have you believe, an exception. Sovereignty is not necessarily being undermined; the state is not necessarily becoming subservient to the exigencies of global capital. In fact, as Palan (1998) argues, offshore exemplifies and makes explicit the palimpsest of pragmatic – and manifestly political – processes by which statehood and sovereignty are being continually reconstructed. ‘Sovereignty’ itself, which in contemporary discourses tends to be conceptualised as having a fixed (or fixable) meaning, is shown to have gone from representing a religious claim to the land, to embodying an independent, secular right over a certain territory. Later still it became bound up with emerging ideas about the ‘nation’ – the “imagined community” (Anderson 1981) – as agentive force, the symbol of national ‘self-determination’. And this was further combined with juridical capabilities, or ‘the right to write the law’. The present moment of ‘offshore’ marks yet another reconstruction of sovereignty, characterised by the “increasing use of sovereignty as a commercial asset” (Palan 1998:629-30). Palan introduces the notion of “sovereign bifurcation” (1998:627) to describe the strategy states employ in order to simultaneously pursue two contradictory objectives: the “traditional” forms and functions of statehood, and the “commitment to transnational capitalism” (2003:11) – without undermining state ‘sovereignty’ itself.

The very concept of abstracted (rather than literally geographical) ‘shores’ is also revealed to have developed over time in a piecemeal and instrumental fashion (Palan 1998:635-7). The principle of the Law of the Sea, which only became widely accepted around the beginning of the nineteenth century, was preceded for several centuries by actual claims and unilateral assertions over particular waters – thus, and for quite pragmatic reasons, the notion of sovereignty came to incorporate the important precedent of separation between literal, physical boundaries and juridical or ‘fictional’ boundaries. This also provided a model for the division, alteration, and limitation of ‘sovereignty’. A further example of particular import for the study of offshore is the concept of corporate ‘residence’, which originates in the fragmentary legal-pragmatic response to the proliferation of corporations towards the beginning of the twentieth century, and the need for the state (in this case, the UK) to demand taxes from companies conducting their “real business… where the central management and control actually abides” (Lord Loreburn [1906), cited in Picciotto 1999:49). However, such definitions are contestable from place to place, and the system has to be negotiated using a sort of trial-and-error methodology, in order to deal with flexible avoidance tactics of increasing complexity. “The tax authorities of the developed countries have done their best to combat each device as it became known… [but] they have hardly challenged the fertile minds and flexibility of the ‘tax planning’ industry” (Picciotto 1999:59). Significantly, the developments outlined above do not represent an evolutionary narrative; no latent telos underlies each progression. Rather offshore “took shape over time in bits and pieces and in a series of discrete policy decisions” (Palan 1998:640).

III

[offshore as moral dislocation]

Why, then, should neoliberal (and other) accounts present the construction of offshore as a natural development? Why intentionally relinquish control over a system of such manifest importance? The answers to these questions appear just as instrumental, pragmatic and discrete as those motivations which ultimately contributed to the very creation of the offshore world. It has already been noted that offshore finance is in practice almost exclusively reserved for the extremely wealthy; high net wealth individuals and successful corporations display a remarkable tendency to consider themselves somehow above, or external to, national or social (and, some would say, ‘moral’) obligations such as taxation (Christensen and Hampton 1999:170). One commentator (Baker 2005) estimates the ‘uphill’ flow of capital – that which flows from poor to rich countries through the activities of wealthy individuals and companies – at roughly US$500 billion every year, dwarfing the volume of aid flowing ‘downhill’. Another study (Boyce and Ndikumana 2005) asserts that sub-Saharan Africa is in fact a net creditor to the rest of the world, since “external assets (i.e. the stock of flight capital), exceed external liabilities (i.e. external debt)” (Christensen 2007:218-9). Christensen explains this apparent paradox by noting that whilst the assets are privatised, largely channeled through or existing within offshore finance and banking centres, the debts exist in the public realm, falling upon the public institutions of government. He further highlights how activities traditionally understood as ‘corrupt’ and ‘criminal’ account for approximately 35 per cent of transnational “dirty-money” flows from poorer states; and yet how ‘acceptable’ practices such as “illicit commercial activity, incorporating mispricing, abusive transfer pricing and fake and fraudulent transactions account for 65 per cent of such flows” (Christensen 2007:219). Clearly, what Thrift and Leyshon term the “regulatory dislocation” of offshore (1997:61) may aptly be called a ‘moral dislocation’ also. As Roberts notes, “[f]ast-paced and complex international financial practices can slide between something that may be illegal according to one jurisdiction’s laws but perfectly legal according to another’s” (1999:133).

The moral dislocation of offshore, however, goes beyond this relativism created by the inconsistencies between different jurisdictions. What characterises the neoliberal conception of offshore is its framing of the kinds of processes outlined above as non-moral, as governed and motivated by basic market logic, or the logic of capital. This logic is seen to be “fairer”, as Einaudi (1928:35-6) asserts, in reference to the example of tax havens exerting pressure on other jurisdictions to reduce tax levels to the lowest rate possible. “Tax is a cost of doing business so, naturally, a good manager will try to manage this cost and the risks associated with it. This is an essential part of good corporate governance” (P.J. Henehan, senior tax partner of Ernst & Young, cited in the Irish Times, 7/5/04). Indeed the whole discourse of offshore and global financial investment, despite being presented as rational, even mechanical, is couched in a particular ethic of rights and freedoms which transcend the nation-state and its particular jurisdiction. As Palan (2003:14) emphasises, highly ideological assumptions underlie presentations of natural ‘rights’: of human ‘rights’ (the absolute freedom of the investor); sovereign ‘rights’ (the freedom of states, even little ones, to make their own laws); and even corporate ‘rights’ (the freedom to move elsewhere to avoid what is deemed to be excessive regulation or taxation). The global political order becomes “premised upon the dominance of the investor and reinforcing the protection of his or her property rights. The mobile investor becomes the sovereign political subject” (Gill 1998:25). Tax becomes a “cost” rather than a fundamental social obligation.

It is to this depoliticisation of finance, necessitating not “some sort of lapse or mistake but an express operation of… technologization: a reduction to calculability” (Edkins 1999:1), and the willful disregard to the social and political implications of financial activity, that I refer when I speak of the ‘moral dislocation’ of offshore. The insistence that offshore represents the subordination of the state to financial markets is itself ideological: as with the very origins of modern accounting and bookkeeping, the materiality of offshore structures – and not just the knowledge about it – has been discursively constituted “through the reiteration of norms” (Butler 1993:10). In other words, these are performative discourses; they tend “to create what [they] purported to describe” (Poovey 1998:56; original emphasis). Attempts to present it otherwise, to dislocate material practices from discourse and morality, have a clear ideological motive:

offshore provides the perfect legitimization of the goals of neoliberalism in terms of pragmatic social aims, defined as “what we can reasonably expect under the circumstances,” conveniently forgetting that the realm of possibility is a socially constructed one.
(Palan 2003:15)

Rather than attributing the creation of offshore to a depersonalised dynamic – the transcendental power of capital – a poststructuralist approach demonstrates a constructivist insistence on human agency. This is crucial to any critical interpretation of offshore, since it necessitates a historicity which “means that global changes are not an inexorable economic process” (Picciotto 1999:43; emphasis added). To answer the question posed at the beginning of this section – why consciously seek to remove human agency and control from the global financial system? – it is clear that neoliberal discourses serve to obscure the pragmatic and manifestly political functions of offshore in the global political economy, whilst legitimising certain practices and ideological assumptions which they seek to present as natural and apolitical. As such, the neoliberal paradigm is not merely of limited use to the study of offshore; in fact, it must be decisively contested.


(1) In using the term ‘neoliberalism’ I refer only intermittently to individual ‘neoliberal’ writers: throughout the essay I use the expression more generally to denote certain elements of neoliberal doctrine of particular pertinence to this study, such as the belief in deregulation and minimal state intervention, the abstraction of finance from social or political volition, or the adamantly materialist approach to a system manifestly more “fictitious” than any before it (see for example Roberts 1991:91; Picciotto 1999:48). These of course influence and characterise other theoretical approaches that would be loth to find themselves under the ‘neoliberal’ banner; these may too come under criticism, though I refer to them as ‘orthodox’ or ‘mainstream’.
(2) Although ‘poststructuralism’ and ‘postmodernism’ are at best umbrella terms used to describe a broad range of theories and theorists (some of whom reject such labelling outright) and cannot therefore accurately be said to collectively present any coherent central “tenets”, it is possible to attribute certain key themes or preoccupations common generally to ‘poststructuralist’ IR and IPE. Namely, the notion that power and knowledge mutually produce one another, and the rejection of a universal or objective reality or truth – intellectual and other endeavours are held to be “battlefields of contending representations” (Devetak 1996:185). Thus dominant discursive ‘truths’ constitute material ‘realities’.

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Anderson, B. 1981. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso)
Baker, R. 2005. Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System (New Jersey: Wiley)
Boyce, J. K. and Ndikumana, L. 2005. ‘Africa’s Debt: Who Owes Whom?’ in G. A. Epstein (ed.) Capital Flight and Capital Controls in Developing Countries (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar)
Butler, J. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge)
Campbell, D. 1996. ‘Political Prosaics, Transversal Politics, and the Anarchical World’ in M. J. Shapiro and H. R. Alker (eds.) Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)
Cerny, P. G. 1997. ‘Paradoxes of the competition state: The dynamics of political globalization’ in Government and Opposition, 32:2, 251-274
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Christensen, J. 2007. ‘The Corruption Interface: Tax Havens, Bankers and Dirty Money Flows’ in Accountancy Business and the Public Interest, 6:1, 215-227
Christensen, J. and Hampton, M. P. 1999. ‘A Legislature for Hire: The Capture of the State in Jersey’s Offshore Finance Centre’ in M. P. Hampton and J. P. Abbott (eds.) Offshore Finance Centers and Tax Havens: The Rise of Global Capital (Indiana: Purdue University Press)
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Is Marx relevant to international relations today?

this essay was written in 2007 for Classical Political Theory and International Relations at Sussex University

Marx – and by implication, Marxism – is frequently disregarded, arguably needing “to be returned to the nineteenth century where many suspected he had always belonged” (Gamble 1999:128). This opposition comes not only from those who have an interest in perpetuating capitalist social relations, but also more recently from the Left, contending that the materialist premise of historical materialism makes it ill-equipped to conceptualise other forms of exploitation and domination. However, there is clearly no definitive Marxism, and there may not even be a definitive Marx. This essay focuses specifically on a ‘neo-Marxist’ theorisation of the capitalist manifestation of power, evaluating its implications for international relations. I first outline the capitalist redefinition of power, arguing that the economic/political divide constitutes a systemic continuity making Marx’s critique still highly relevant. I then assess the quite formidable implications for contemporary international relations, both as a critical interrogation of the norms of orthodox IR, and for the way we presently theorise the ‘international’, looking specifically at the ‘globalisation debate’. I conclude that one central problem remains regarding this Marxist theorisation of the international: namely that the normative concern of historical materialism can engender hostility towards contemporary ‘postmodern’ themes, which may ultimately prove an intractable obstacle to further intellectual enquiry.

I

Power depoliticised: the uniqueness of capitalism

Capitalism’s redefinition of the ‘political’ derives from a real shift in the nature of power, which formed a fundamental part of the historical transitions to capitalism in those European societies that were first to do so. Recent scholarship, using Marx’s understanding of the economic/political dichotomy as an artificial differentiation of capitalist power, has begun to theorise alternative accounts of the process of modern state-formation and its attendant concepts of ‘state’, ‘civil society’ and ‘market’, situating their construction within the historically specific development of the capitalist system. Teschke’s analysis emphasises the uniqueness of this manifestation of power, noting that in pre-capitalist Western Europe social relations of property were at once both ‘political’ and ‘economic’. Those who exercised direct control over production processes were part of a system of “vertical relations of subordination and horizontal relations of co-ordination” (2006:536) forming a highly complex power-system that was far more precarious than the later manifestation of capitalist power, since sovereignty was fragmented or “parcellised” (Anderson 1974) and authority was “personalised” or direct (Teschke 2006:538). The construction of the English state, the formative moment of which Teschke locates in the Glorious Revolution making ‘sovereign’ power conditional on parliamentary approval, embodied the exceptional conditions of the capitalist configuration of power relations – namely the economic/political or private/public split. It enabled a “de-personalization of public authority… as accumulation was prosecuted increasingly in the private sphere of production, whereas the British state assumed, if not overnight, the role of the general public guardian of a private property regime” (2006:539).

The state in capitalist society is therefore defined by its abstraction from ‘civil society’, from private property and the market, and from the processes of production and surplus extraction (Rosenberg 1994:123-8). Parallel to this, the uniqueness of capitalism is also constituted by civil society, as the state’s necessary counterpart, characterised by formally ‘free’ individuals engaging in exchange relations – in other words, the market. This appearance of freedom is caused by the shift in the nature of power from direct domination, which characterised pre-capitalist society, to the impersonal exigencies of the market – “the dissolution of these relations into a general form” (Marx 1973:164). Power is de-personalised, automated, abstracted to the market’s anarchic structure. Under this system, in which “the ‘moment’ of coercion is separate from the ‘moment’ of appropriation” (Wood 1995:30), subordinate individuals are far less able either to comprehend their domination, or to resist it. This differs clearly from comparatively precarious pre- or non-capitalist power structures. Thus it can be seen that the system’s unique strength derives from its depoliticisation of Economy, whereby “the totalizing logic and the coercive power of capitalism become invisible” (1995:245).

This historical transformation of the nature of power has been buttressed, of course, by an accompanying ideology. Yet the conceptual separation of Economic and Political not only constituted a basic assumption of classical political economy, but also continues to be accepted and reproduced in contemporary intellectual discourses, having taken on the appearance of a self-evident truth. This is certainly true of Neoliberal and Realist analyses, but also of many Marxist accounts, particularly ‘base/superstructure’ theories. Yet Marx in fact saw no such separation; he understood Economy as Political, both in terms of the power relation between capitalist and worker, and in the structuring of broader social relations (Wood 1995:20-1). The abstraction of ‘economics’ from processes of domination and exploitation divests economic exchanges of their political content, creating the appearance of a neutral, impersonal market. Furthermore, it necessitates a separate and specialised public realm in which ‘political’ practices are conducted, exemplified by the construction of the modern state as articulated above. Hence power becomes differentiated into the private (market) and the public (state), but “the differentiation of the economic is in fact a differentiation within the political sphere” (Wood 1995:31; emphasis added).

Marx challenged these assumptions of classical political economy in order to explain how these economic processes came to be understood “as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded” (Marx 1973:86), an observation which remains entirely applicable today. The absolute impunity with which actors in the ‘economic’ realm are permitted to carry out market transactions with serious social consequences – companies using sweatshop labour, or IMF ‘structural readjustment’ programmes, to give a few pertinent examples – can only be possible if this false dichotomy remains intact. Thus Wood’s emphasis on the systemic unity of capitalism is clearly justifiable, since this element of Marx’s analysis remains fundamental in explaining contemporary structures of domination. Despite capitalism’s unquestionable evolution and adaptation over time, certain defining elements, including the way in which the exercise of power is redefined and thus obscured (which Marx was first to identify and critique in such a way), continue to characterise social relations even now.

II

Implications: IR theory and the ‘international’ 

Thus the very idea of the ‘international’, and its widely accepted definition as a separate, externalised realm governed by a separate logic to ‘society’, is undermined. If, as this essay argues, ‘state’ and ‘society’ form a constructed (rather than natural) dichotomy; if power is revealed to reside elsewhere than merely the ‘political’: what is to be made of the conception of international relations as inter-state relations, or of the notion of national or state interest? Under this dominant paradigm how can we theorise, for example, the actions of multinational corporations, which exercise their power across ‘state’ boundaries whilst remaining chiefly within the apolitical realm of ‘civil society’ and its market imperatives? In short, we can’t. This theory constitutes a direct challenge to IR’s dominant Neorealist paradigm in which modern categories and social forms are often assumed to be natural, timeless, and universal. ‘Civil society’; ‘the state’; ‘natural law’; ‘individual freedom’: these concepts crumble (or at the very least, quaver alarmingly) under a critical analysis which locates their establishment firmly within the European capitalist experience.

Indeed, in opposition to the positivist assumptions that dominate the discipline in its present condition, orthodox IR theory can be better understood “as aspects of contemporary world politics that need to be explained [rather] than as explanations of contemporary world politics” (Walker 1995:6), being part of the institutionalisation and legitimisation of the particular norms and ideas which constitute the capitalist logic. Of course, this criticism of IR has already been made in reference to its establishment as an academic discipline, heavily determined by normative concerns surrounding security, diplomacy and inter-state conduct (Bierstecker 1999:3). It is also evident in contemporary practices whereby ‘political’ determinants limit the direction and scope of intellectual enquiry (Smith 2002). And yet even aside from any ethical concerns about the autonomy of research and education, a deeper problematic emerges. Namely that, as Teschke and Rosenberg demonstrate, the analytical constructs much mainstream IR theory unapologetically employs are revealed to be thoroughly embedded in, and constitutive of, the historical construction of capitalist relations. “Epistemologically, Neorealism’s survival is predicated on its move to cut off the political from the social” (Teschke 2003:274) and thus preserve a relationship which obscures social mechanisms of power, treating these as automatic, whilst maintaining a designated sphere within which IR theorists may theorise. Unfortunately any theory which reproduces existing structures of power ceases to be of explanatory value, and this may be said not only of Neorealism, but of Neoliberalism and a large proportion of political ‘Marxism’ too. Hence whilst these schools constitute the mainstream, the discipline will remain principally a “science of domination” (Teschke 2003:274). The relevance of Marx to international relations theory can therefore be understood primarily in terms of a critical interrogation of the most basic, underlying assumptions of the discipline – even the elemental internal/external analytic divide. By historicising the construction of these assumptions, it becomes possible to relativise and thus completely undermine the universalising claims of orthodox theories of the ‘international’.

How then, having established the critical value of this approach, can it be used constructively to contribute to contemporary debates in IR? According to Justin Rosenberg, it is the approach best equipped to conceptualise ‘globalisation’. For what distinguishes a Marxian analysis from, for example, the postmodernist approach to which Wood so disdainfully refers for its emphasis on fragmentation and heterogeneity (1995:1-4; 256-7) – or indeed from Neorealism’s backward projection of contemporary social forms – is Marx’s conception of capitalism as possessing a uniquely totalising or ‘globalising’ dynamic. “[F]rom the cosmopolitan assertion of the Communist Manifesto onwards… Marxism has seen world affairs confidently in terms of a single world process” (Halliday 1994:50). Building on Trotsky’s notion of ‘uneven and combined development’, Rosenberg (2007) argues that modern capitalism radically transformed the nature of world-history and historical change itself. Pre-capitalist interactive systems of social development should be characterised as ‘inter-societal’ rather than ‘global’ since they were episodic and not worldwide; only under capitalism is it actually possible to speak of the overall logic of a globalising process. The process does not produce equal results in different societies, but this ‘unevenness’ is characteristic of, not contradictory to, the structural unity of capitalist development. Rosenberg rephrases Thomson’s words from, “It happened one way in France, and another way here” (1978:269) to “‘it happened another way’ in France in part because it had already happened ‘here’” (2007:23).

This ‘globality’ is descriptive, certainly, being characterised by the gradual incorporation of every society into a worldwide division of labour, but more significantly it is also constitutive of a shift in the nature of inter-societal interaction – capitalism does not encounter other social systems in an external or superficial way; it penetrates, transforms and incorporates their productive foundations into itself (Rosenberg 2007:4-5). This implies a radical reformulation of the way we understand the processes of historical change. It is a clear improvement on much ‘globalisation theory’ (which Rosenberg distinguishes sharply from ‘theories of globalisation’; see 2000:4), which remains premised on the fallacious state/society analytical divide discussed above, treating the ‘global’ as external to the ‘social’ (Morton 2004:136). This misguided focus – generating such banalities as the observation that globalisation has “deepened and strengthened practices that enhance the state’s role as much as it has generated practices that bypass the state” (Migdal:142) – and preoccupation with the ‘public’ realm of power “obscures the fact that capitalist exchange relations have always been implicitly ‘supra-territorial’” (Rosenberg 2007:14), able to transcend the ‘political’ demarcations of state by marking out a separate space within which to operate the exercise of power. Thus a Marxian approach to the ‘globalisation debate’ can avoid making descriptive and circular claims about the character of inter-societal relations, instead providing an alternative basis for analysis centred on the capitalist dynamic as a uniquely globalising agent. Furthermore, as Wood argues, resistance – the normative premise of all Marxist analysis – is only possible from the perspective of capitalism as a totality, both in terms of the broad spectrum of power relations (rejecting the public/private divide) and in terms of a single, totalising historical process (1995: 1-4; 19-20).

III

Totalising knowledge vs. the rest of the world

The problem, however, is that the historical materialist understanding of capitalism as “the most totalizing system the world has ever known” (Wood 1995:2) can be interpreted as the approach’s principle strength, or indeed as its fundamental flaw. Certainly, the capitalist system is a globalising process and, as this essay has argued, its unique mechanism of obfuscating power relations by consigning them to a non-political sphere does constitute a rupture with patterns of social relations that had gone before. But the danger in this approach is the hostility it can engender to ‘postmodern’ themes of heterogeneity and fragmentation. Though the two schools are often believed to be diametrically opposed, by both historical materialists (see Wood 1995) as well as by postmodernists, who tend to conflate Marxism with economism and reproduce the misguided dichotomy of discourse/representation versus material reality (Laffey 2004: 460), it is worth considering whether each may in fact benefit considerably from engaging with the other. Reluctance to do so places major limitations on the scope of enquiry, denying Marxism the ability to theorise potential sites of resistance located in the encounter between the totalising dynamic of capitalism and the Other identities with which it is continuously interacting. Using Trotsky’s concept of ‘uneven and combined development’, Rosenberg certainly furthers the potential for theorising how the capitalist dynamic combines with indigenous forces in other societies. Yet even this, as Hobson notes, must be seen as Eurocentric since it includes the analysis of other societies only insofar as they encounter Western capitalism (Hobson 2005:378). After condemning Marx’s consistently Orientalist outlook (1) – an issue which many Marxists will concede as problematic – he outlines a historical account which traces the formative influences on Western capitalism to a “global economy” existing in the East as far back as the year 500 (2005:376-8). Rosenberg responds by charging Hobson with the mistaken conflation of the term ‘global’ with the merely ‘inter-societal’, re-emphasising the point that not until capitalist industrialisation in Western Europe could a uniquely ‘globalising’ process be identified (2007:8-11).

However, the problem with this insistence on historical uniqueness and systemic unity is that it justifies treating capitalism as a totality by virtue of the totalising nature of capitalist development itself. In this sense the argument is tautological, the consequence of which is that the approach is severely limiting. For when Wood stresses that “Marxist political economy and history are intended to challenge capitalism as a totality head-on”, she assumes that only by understanding capitalism as a totalising system can that system be effectively contested. Theories of fragmentation and heterogeneity “clos[e] off critical access to this totalizing power by denying its systemic unity and insisting on the impossibility of 'totalizing' knowledges” (Wood 1995:1-2). Yet the antithesis of capitalism is not an antithetical totality; it must surely be the antithesis of totality – in other words, fragmentation. It seems simplistic, therefore, to accuse identity politics, cultural studies and the like of attempting to skirt around the issue of capitalist globalisation, when what could better counter the totalising, universalising capitalist logic than an approach which renders that uniqueness highly visible by locating where and how capitalist social relations encounter Other epistemologies and alternative bases for organising society? If historical materialism refuses to engage with these ‘postmodern’ themes, it will not shake off its lingering Eurocentric heritage. Though, as this essay has shown, it remains an effective and consistent critique of orthodox theory and norms, a denial that Marxist theory itself is prone to Eurocentric, ‘totalising’ tendencies will limit its potential for theoretical innovation. As Morton notes, it is

crucial to reflect further on whether an account of the rise of capitalism and the modern state can avoid the perils of Eurocentrism. Or whether, by moving away from the genesis of capitalism in Europe, this would merely end up producing conclusions that are “tantamount to rejecting capitalism as a useful notion for analysing world historical social change”.
(2005: 517; citing Arrighi 2003:133)

The question, then, of whether Marx and historical materialism provide useful concepts for international relations today depends quite significantly on the extent to which it is willing (and able) to combine its normative emphasis on challenging capitalism, “the most totalizing system the world has ever known” (Wood 1995:2), with an approach it has hitherto resisted; an approach which attempts to locate both capitalism and Marxism within an Orientalist discourse, but one which may yet prove crucial in understanding – and resisting – capitalism itself.

(1) He defines Orientalism/Eurocentrism as “a discourse that places Europe at the centre of progressive world (dare I say ‘global’?) history” (Hobson 2005:374).

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How can an alternative interpretation of Hobbes’ ‘state of nature’ be of relevance to IR theory today?

this essay was written in November 2006 for Classical Political Theory and International Relations at Sussex University

The average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies... The main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The anarchical Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ is a commonly used paradigm in IR theory, and yet alternative understandings of Hobbes’ work call into question the degree to which he himself could be accurately described as ‘Hobbesian’. This essay examines the reinterpretation of the state of nature concept as epistemic anarchy, arguing that this is in fact more faithful to Hobbes’ ideas than the concept’s appropriation by the Realist tradition, and that it generates an understanding of human nature and authority which is highly relevant to contemporary ideas about value pluralism and cultural relativism. It then explores this unresolved paradox in Hobbes’ work: namely the application of notions of equality and anarchy to the international realm, and how these can be reconciled with a stable and peaceful system in the absence of a global Leviathan. Finally, this essay considers the role of IR theory in developing and legitimising the dominant (Realist) conceptualisation in IR of other-as-enemy, arguing that IR theory is limited as an analytical discipline, given that its particularist worldview contradicts the idea of value pluralism present in Hobbes’ writings.

HOBBES AND THE STATE OF NATURE
In the Realist dogma Hobbes is used as an ideological cornerstone. Much has been made of his description of mankind’s natural condition as a “warre of every man against every man”, and the logical consequence of this being that “nothing can be unjust… Force, and Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall vertues” (Hobbes 1977: 90). He has thus been taken to describe the world as an anarchic system in which strength rules, and there exists no higher moral framework within which the struggle for power is played out. The Leviathan’s purpose is to provide stability, on the condition that citizens surrender to it their right to exercise power. This is used in Realism to justify the trinity of state, security and self-interest, and this position has come to be called ‘Hobbesian’. However this application of Hobbes’ writings to international relations theory is highly unsatisfactory. Without giving an exhaustive explanation of all the ways in which the Realist school takes Hobbes’ words entirely out of context, it is nevertheless quite clear that Hobbes was “attempting to create a new political understanding and with it, new political practices, not describe an existing state of affairs between Hobbesian Leviathans” (Williams 1996: 232; my emphasis). Therefore the use of his theory as a justification of power politics is not only to ignore the complexities of his characterisation of state and society, but also to fundamentally misinterpret the normative quality of his writings.

Furthermore, the Realist claims objectivity – he claims to know and represent the world as it ‘really’ is, however unpleasant to our moral sensibilities that may be. However, as Michael Williams and Richard Tuck argue, the influence of the Sceptical movement on Hobbes actually led him to regard as impossible such essentialistic assertions of objective knowledge. His was a certain nominalism – for example, in Leviathan he writes, “…these words of good, evil, and contemptibel are ever used with relation to the person that useth them, there being nothing simply and absolutely so” (cited in Williams 1996: 217). Certain natural conditions, such as his declaration of the fundamental equality of men (1977: 86), mean that no individual can legitimately claim authority over others. For Hobbes, there was no universal moral framework. In challenging the Realists’ exclusive rights to Hobbes, we can dispute the idea that this absence of natural moral authority creates a condition of literal anarchy, reinterpreting it as an “epistemic and ethical anarchy” (Williams 1996: 219) in which uncertainty is created by the potential for conflict. Indeed, Hobbes’ constant condition of war is manifested “not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto” (1977: 89).

This generates a significantly different characterisation of human nature. Unlike the conventional interpretation, which makes competition and security central to the individual’s motivation behind antagonistic behaviour, we can now see that Hobbes finds the root of such behaviour in this general condition of epistemic uncertainty. This removes the aggressive trait from Hobbes’ conception of human nature, instead locating it in “the social construction of action” (Williams 1996: 215). However, the observation that this disposition naturally derives from the problematic of man’s sociability is not to be treated as justification of aggression. Despite the absence of a higher, common notion of what is right and what is good, one qualitative distinction can be made: that which differentiates between those particular actions or judgements which contribute to the maintenance of peace, and those which do not. Peace is in the interest of the self-preservation of all – thus it is “Hobbes’ minimal moral consensus” (Lister 1998: 51).

For Hobbes, then, conflict arises not from the essentially competitive nature of human beings, but from the uncertain nature of a society in which different truths and different epistemologies compete for legitimacy. Conflict is rooted in the encounter with the Other. Thus the function of the sovereign power is to fix meanings, in the interest of maintaining periods of peace and epistemic stability. It is important to note that this conceives of state authority as a function, unlike the Realist characterisation of power as “an objective capability” (Williams 1996: 223). The absolute authority of Hobbes’ Leviathan – and by implication, the epistemic harmony it maintains – is undermined if ideologically challenged and, as Lister notes, it is therefore necessary for the Leviathan to regulate opinion (1998: 56). This does not necessarily justify totalitarianism and the repression of dissent; but rather is seen as a process of educating and creating acceptance and support among the population, in order “to legitimise and strengthen the political order of the state” (Williams 1996: 220). It is clear from this understanding that for Hobbes, epistemic stability and political stability are mutually constitutive and interdependent. Furthermore, there is evidently a strong normative emphasis to his work, in the interest of maintaining peace.

BEYOND HOBBES
The Leviathan, acting to provide ideological stability in a condition of uncertainty, is a mechanism of state or domestic authority. However Hobbes does not explicitly apply his model to the international realm. Yet we can see that Hobbes’ acceptance of diversity, and of the equality of different epistemologies and different claims to truth, reflect current debates around pluralism and cultural relativism. The problem occurs when we attempt to reconcile these concepts with a system of peaceful coexistence in the absence of common moral or ideological ground – and, as Lister notes, this contradiction is far from adequately resolved in Hobbes’ writings (Lister 1998: 58). The Leviathan model may present a domestic solution, but the degree of cultural difference between actors in the international sphere is such that “there will be no agreement about what should be done, and everyone will act on the basis of their own different assessments of the situation” (Tuck 1989: 64). The focus of analysis is therefore located in the encounter between self and Other.

Many Realist and neo-Realist explorations of this issue seem unable to escape the assumptions that interaction means competition, or that individual self-interest inevitably prevails (see for example Waltz 1959: 167-8). Contrastingly, many writers on the colonial encounter, as well as anthropologists concerned with the construction of community, understand the principle function of intercultural interaction to be its defining role in the conception of the Self. Todorov (1984: 42-3) uses Columbus as an example of the “double movement” – the double response to the Amerindian Other as either a human being with equal rights (the ‘noble savage’), or as an fundamentally different and inevitably inferior creature (the ‘dirty dog’). The important point is that in either case, the encounter is entirely egocentric, since it consists of a projection of culturally specific values onto the Other, a universalisation that denies “the existence of a human substance truly other” (1984: 42-3, my emphasis) – a denial that there can be an Other both equal and different. The paradox is identical to that present in Hobbes’ theorisation: how do we reconcile the fundamental equality of human beings, and of their different cultures/epistemologies/value systems, with the epistemic and ethical anarchy this principle necessarily creates? There has been no satisfactory solution to this paradox. We can see examples of Todorov’s ‘double movement’ all the way from Columbus to current discourses around ‘development’, ‘universal’ human rights, or the supposedly universal applicability of the Anglo-American liberal democratic model – all of which presume Other societies either to be comparable to the West in some earlier stage of its historical development, or capable and desirable of assimilation into a Western-led global system.

This seems reasonable grounds for a degree of pessimism about the prospects of resolving this paradox. However, Todorov also notes that certain Spaniards did oppose the colonising mission, either because as individuals they managed to understand the Amerindians as both equal and different, or because through spending time in these societies they grew to attain this understanding (1984: 188-9; 237-8). This suggests that there is no fixed or universal rule that determines the international/intercultural encounter as necessarily conflictual; rather, as agents it is possible for us to relativise our cultural parochialism through dialogue with the Other – “cultural interactions admit of growth, the creation of new structures of self-other relations” (Inayatullah and Blaney 1997: 80). Furthermore, as Ashis Nandy argues, the assertion of cultural relativism does not necessarily exclude the possibility of locating shared and therefore universalisable values, since many of man’s basic values “derive from man’s biological self and social experience” (1987: 17; 22; 54-5).

IR THEORY: FUNCTIONS AND FOUNDATIONS
Accepting, then, that this form of encounter may provide a different way of dealing with the problem of Other epistemologies and cultural relativism, we can make a case for normative IR theory to address this same concern. Unfortunately, the evaluative premise of normative theory presents us with another, related paradox: the norms and value systems of each state differ, and we must accept each as being valid as our own. In the context of this ‘value pluralism’ any interaction, if it fails to first identify truly common ground, “runs the danger of simply reflecting existing power structures” (Lensu 2000: xii) – and this can certainly be observed in IR theory. Mainstream IR is premised on the assumption of objectivity; however, as Robert Cox warns, where knowledge claims to be impartial “it is the more important to examine it as ideology, and to lay bare its concealed perspective” (1986: 207). In fact, our hegemonic IR theory does not suffer this examination well. The concept of the state of nature as a contemporary condition arose out of the European discourses that ultimately served to legitimise the actions of the Spaniards in their encounter with the Amerindians, by constructing a contemporary Other as both wholly external and qualitatively different. In Beate Jahn’s analysis this understanding of the international realm as the state of nature becomes “the defining claim of IR, its very raison d’ètre” (1999: 411) – since it provided an ideological foundation for the universalisation of European theory and European political models, for the justification of the Realist notion of ‘might is right’, and for the separation of domestic and external affairs (1999: 412-3). In this sense, IR theory can be seen as a product of the political and social developments taking place during the early modern period.

This has two important implications. Firstly, the state of nature paradigm under which IR theory operates was established as (and remains) an “ethos of survival”, in which the encounter with the Other is constructed as an encounter with the enemy (Odysseos 2002: 403). That this ethos is partly derived from Hobbes, and his impression of the need for sovereign authority, is paradoxical because his state of nature thesis (as this essay has demonstrated) can be interpreted in a way that necessitates a recognition of Other as equal and different. Secondly, IR theory is the universalisation of a profoundly Eurocentric methodology, which suggests that its function far outweighs its analytical value – indeed, Rob Walker argues that IR theory should be understood “as aspects of contemporary world politics that need to be explained [rather] than as explanations of contemporary world politics” (1995: 6). Walker, however, is sceptical about the prospect of a new paradigm that takes “humanity” as a meaningful political category (1995:6). Yet it is arguable, as Stephen Chan suggests, that there is hope for International Relations to become international in its methodology too – for a “meaningful project of rough compound universals, awkward syntheses” between different value systems and epistemologies (2000: 73) to be attempted, as already discussed. It is essential, however, first to reject the realist state of nature paradigm which frames the self/Other relationship as self/enemy; and second, to relativise IR theory acknowledging both the particularity of its world view and its historical and political function in defining the Other.

“Hobbes believed that peace required a substantial change in people’s self-understanding – a Hobbesian reformulation of the evaluative vocabularies in which individuals grasp the social world” (Lister 1998: 55). In attempting to overcome the unresolved paradoxes of ‘Hobbesianism’, namely the contradiction between understanding Other epistemologies as equally valid as one’s own and the ‘epistemic anarchy’ this understanding produces, I argue that a fundamental change is necessary both in the approach with which we engage in the international/intercultural encounter, and in the theorisation of such encounters. Such a change would be closer in spirit to Hobbes’ original prescription for society and, more importantly, it would revolutionise IR theory itself – a revolution which is absolutely crucial if IR is to properly make sense of the world in all its diversity, instead of merely making sense of hegemonic cultures and dominant paradigms.

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