ASTK12573U SEMINAR: Capitalism and Geopolitics

The major theoretical traditions in IR, notably Realism and Neorealism, conceptualise international relations in abstraction from the question of the historical origins and development of capitalism. This restricts the analytical field to political relations – diplomacy, geopolitics, war - between states in an anarchical environment. Classical Marxism, in contrast, has largely neglected the challenge of the geopolitical dimension of capitalist development across time and space. While Realists insist on the primacy and autonomy of geopolitics, Marxists tend to reduce geopolitics to the deep ‘laws of motion’ of capitalism, if the problem of interstate rivalry for the course of capitalist development is not ignored altogether.

This long-standing opposition between Realism and Marxism has been subject to many attempts of theoretical synthesis, but also re-entrenchment. Realism, since Hobbes, has been enriched by Neo-Weberian Historical Sociology seeking to reconnect geopolitics with the classical agenda of sociology, as defined by Max Weber and Otto Hintze, namely how to account for the long-term modernization of single societies. During the interwar period, however, Realism was dramatically redefined by Carl Schmitt, promoting geopolitics again to the irreducible center of international relations. Similarly, Marxism has widened its analytical scope over the years. Classical theories of imperialism, World Systems Theory and Neo-Gramscian IR have confronted the original absence of international relations in Marx and Engels’s work without, however, conceding much ground to Realism.

While these theoretical developments have enriched the field – establishing the new discipline of International Historical Sociology - the opposition between Realism and Marxism and the challenge to integrate, theoretically and historically, the dynamics of capitalism with the dynamics of geopolitics persist.  

This multi-disciplinary seminar is designed to

a) familiarize you with the main theoretical approaches in International Historical Sociology

b) re-examine the historical relations between capitalism and geopolitics from the 17^th to the 21^st Century

c) explore possible avenues beyond this theoretical impasse between Realism and Marxism. 

The seminar reviews the major theoretical debates, old and new, on the nexus between capitalism and geopolitics. It combines these theoretical questions with in-depth interrogations of history – the key processes, actors and events that shaped the turbulent history of the co-development of capitalism and the international system.

The first part of the seminar starts with an overview of the three classical traditions that have most centrally informed this discourse: (i) the writings of Max Weber and Otto Hintze that assert the primacy of military competition for geopolitical orders and that have - since the mid-1980s – inspired a Neo-Weberian turn in Historical Sociology and IR; (ii) the works of Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein – updated and extended by neo-Gramscian IR Theory - that revolve around the rise of commercial exchange and the construction of successive world hegemonies; and (iii) the ideas of Karl Marx that, although short on specific arguments on geopolitics, have more recently led to intense debates within the Neo-Marxist literature on how to conceptualise capitalist social relations and class conflict in their effects on inter-state conflict and co-operation across the centuries.

Against this theoretical setting, the second part of the seminar examines sequentially a number of different historical geopolitical orders – dynastic-absolutist, revolutionary-Napoleonic, 19^th Century British Hegemony, imperialist, fascist, liberal and contemporary – on the basis of the divergent interpretations deriving from the three classical traditions.

I.Introduction

Week 1: Capitalism and Geopolitics – Approaches and Research

Programme

II. Major Theoretical Perspectives

Week 2: The Weberian Tradition: War, the State and the Primacy of

Geopolitics

Week 3: The Marxist Tradition: Exchange versus Class Relations, the State,

and the Turn to Geopolitics

III. The History of Capitalism and Geopolitics

Week 4: Absolutism, War and the ‘Westphalian System of States’

Week 5: The French Revolution and Napoleon

Week 6: Capitalism, British Hegemony, and the ‘Concert of Europe’

Week 7: Imperialism and Inter-Imperial Rivalry

Week 8: Versailles, Fascism and ‘Geopolitik’

Week 9: Term Paper Plan Workshop

Week 10: Reading Week

Week 11: 19^th Century US Imperialism & the Monroe-Doctrine

Week 12: Post-WWII International Order: American Hegemony?

Week 13: Globalisation and the Neo-Imperial Turn

Week 14: Term Paper Workshop