the casual critic

#nonfiction #books #politics #history

With bombs dropping in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Iran, and rearmament firmly back on the political agenda worldwide, there is no escaping the age-old question: why is there war? Instinctively, we might assume that states go to war to get something they want. War, as per Von Clausewitz’ famous dictum, is then simply the continuation of diplomacy by other means. Unsatisfied with such a simple answer, the causes of war remain the topic of scholarly debate between opposed schools within the somewhat detached academic field of international relations (IR).

The Empire of Civil Society (hereafter ‘Empire’) is a PhD monograph by Justin Rosenberg that forms part of this debate, assailing the dominant school of neorealism – Wikipedia”) from a marginal Marxist position. It is both an argument against neorealism’s core tenets, and an argument for a reappraisal of the utility of Marxist theory to international relations. First published in 1994, it feels surprisingly relevant to the world of 2026 and the conflicts that are raging across the world today.

Neorealism emerged in the United States after World War Two as a fusion of the old idea of the ‘balance of power’ and game theory. The school took its name as a claim to a hard-nosed tradition of statecraft that says that while peace may be nice, the nature of the international system means conflict and war are inevitable, always have been, and always will be. In very short summary, neorealism posits that because there is no central authority in the world to govern inter-state behaviour, there is a perpetual anarchy giving rise to a Hobbesian conflict of all against all. It doesn’t matter what states want, or who is in charge, or what their domestic politics are. Any state must be constantly vigilant lest their security or power is surpassed by others.

This is the sort of abstraction reminiscent of Newtonian physics where for convenience one might momentarily assume that all objects are frictionless spherical penguins in the vacuum of space. And such simplifications have their uses, but they must justify themselves. Empire contends that neorealism does not provide such justification, and offers a competing theory rooted in the specific mode of production of states, arguing that conflict between them emerges predominantly as a result of how they must reproduce domestically, rather than as the inevitable function of a transhistorical states system.

Rosenberg mounts a dual challenge to neorealism’s dominant position. First, Empire undermines neorealism’s claim to transhistoricity by demonstrating that its favourite examples (Greek and Italian city states) were both quite unlike modern sovereign states and were driven to conflict for historically specific reasons that derived from their political, social and economic structure. Empire than expands on this by investigating the early modern Spanish (Castilian) and Portuguese empires to show that even at the supposed dawn of the states system era, international actions were shaped predominantly by domestic considerations and constraints and impulses resulting from the level and configuration of the political economy at that time, rather than as blind reaction to an international balance of power. It is a persuasive argument – insofar as I am qualified to judge – and beyond the realm of IR it also reads as a detailed and interesting history of the time when Europe’s development began to diverge from the rest of the world. As with any history of this period, it is perhaps unintentionally a salutary reminder that for most of history Europe was marginal to global political economy, and that its ascendence was in no small part the result of the violent destruction of pre-existing manufacturing and mercantile capacity in Asia, culminating in the devastating famines in the 19th century that were described in Late Victorian Holocausts.

Having surveyed this history, Rosenberg then proceeds to contrast it with the modern states system, arguing that rather than something eternal it is actually historically contingent. Unsurprising for a Marxist, Rosenberg finds the motive force of history in the specific mode of production of capitalist economies, which at the state level expresses itself in the near complete separation of the economic and political realm. The assumed anarchic system of ‘free and independent’ states is mirrored in the anarchic market of ‘free and equal’ individuals, who can contract with one another at will, unencumbered by the reciprocal bonds of obligation that pertained in, for example, European feudal societies. But this formal, political equality both obscures and is necessary for the profound economic inequality that exists between those who own the means of production and those who do not. Empire thus seeks the roots of state behaviour in the historically contingent form of capitalism, but avoids the crude socialist simplification that states are merely imperial extensions for their capitalist class.

Does this perspective offer anything of value to our present moment? At first glance, the drive to rearmament appears to argue in the neorealists’ favour, with Europe in particular anxious to increase its security and/or power in a more geopolitically unstable and multipolar world where it can no longer rely on the United States as an ally. In the UK, (armchair) generals have quickly emerged to bemoan how the nation’s spending on ‘welfare’ enfeebles its ability to pursue its national interest. Yet on closer inspection, the notion that recent conflicts were not driven by the domestic politics of the instigating states is not tenable. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and American adventurism in Venezuela and Iran are evidently motivated by domestic considerations. The war in Iran in particular makes more sense when read as an effort to forcibly integrate Iran into the capitalist world system than as an inevitable result of some American ‘balance of power’ calculation. Israel, meanwhile, is waging a genocidal war on a people it explicitly refuses to recognise as a state. Perhaps the only ‘realist’ conflict is the one currently perpetrated in Sudan which, while technically a civil war, is being sustained by other nations using it as a proxy to increase their power, influence, or access to resources.

On the face of it therefore, reality seems rather at odds with the claims of the neorealists. Whether it supports Empire’s alternative proposition is hard to tell, as Rosenberg only gives the contours of a possible Marxist IR theory. The second edition ends with a rather self-deprecating afterword where Rosenberg admits that his intention to develop his theory further was diverted by his discovery of the theory of ‘uneven and combined development’ as proposed by Trotsky, which locates some of sources of geopolitical dynamism in the variety of states constituting the international system. Its logic suggests an intriguing possibility for an ‘end of history’ as the result of the complete subsumption of all states in the capitalist world order, ultimately equalising their development and depriving history of a motive force for want of diversity. An IR equivalent of the heat death of the universe. Though whether Rosenberg would have reached that conclusion cannot be inferred from where Empire finishes.

For a contribution to a specific debate within a specialised academic discipline, The Empire of Civil Society is surprisingly readable, in particular its historical chapters. While it remains a niche endeavour, its spirited argument for an IR theory rooted in human agency rather than impersonal and abstract systems is a necessary reminder that we must choose to make our own history, and that statesmen asking us to dissolve our political and class differences for the sake of some putative ‘national interest’ are seldom to be trusted.

Notes & Suggestions

• Rosenberg’s proposition that modern states are built precisely on the separation of political and economic realms struck a chord with me, as it explains my slight scepticism regarding the corpocracy depicted in the otherwise excellent The Ten Percent Thief. Would an entity that fully encompasses the state and the market within itself still act like a corporation? The resultant contradictions are of course part of The Ten Percent Thief’s narrative, and as it is an excellent book, I recommend people read it and draw their own conclusion.
• The enduring debate between the different IR schools put me in mind of Thomas Kuhn’s hypothesis that scientific paradigm shifts don’t happen because people are convinced, but because adherents of obsolete theories are replaced over time by advocates of new, presumably better theories. In the realm of IR and history where we don’t have a control Earth to play with and one can convincingly enough make an argument for any position, one wonders where progress may come from. Plus, I’m unsure if Kuhn allowed for political forces with a vested interest keeping particular sides of a scholarly debate alive.
• I stole the notion that it is Iran’s refusal to be integrated into the US-dominated economic system from the recent Macrodose Extra episode Order as Fiction, which also covers the creation of the The Hague Group, a coalition of Global South nations intending to uphold international law where the West is patently failing. While I prefer not to include paywalled references, in this case honesty demanded that I include my sources.
• There numerous organisations, with a range of political affiliations, that seek to promote peace, which can always do with support in one way or another. In the UK, options include the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Stop the War Coalition, and the Peace & Justice Project.
• Empire relies on the traditional Marxist distinction between feudalist and post-feudalist modes of production, but apparently ‘feudalism’ is no longer a preferred category among historians, and ‘manorialism’ is considered more precise. This distinction between feudalism and manorialism, and its application to the emerging concept of ‘techno-feudalism’ is covered on this episode of Culture, Power, Politics.

______________________________

If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe

You can also Discuss... this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account.

And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic