Review of International Studies (2010), 36, 120 Copyright  British International Studies Association doi:10.

1017/S0260210510000318

Recasting Gramsci in international politics

OWEN WORTH*

Abstract. Gramscian theory has had a profound inuence on critical and Marxist thought within International Relations (IR), particularly in bringing an alternative understanding to the realist concept of hegemony. Despite these developments much Gramscian theory remains developed within the often narrow sub-discipline of International Political Economy (IPE), with Gramscian scholars such as Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams and Ernesto Laclau from diverse disciplines outside of IR largely ignored. This article argues that Gramscian theory needs to be re-thought so that it moves away from the Coxian dominated ontology that it is currently situated within, towards one which both provides a more open theory of global hegemony and engages more with civil societal areas that have often been ignored by those within IPE. Owen Worth is a Lecturer of International Relations at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Limerick. He is the author of Hegemony, International Political Economy and Post-Communist Russia (Ashgate, 2005) and a number of co-edited books. His recent work has been published in journals such as International Politics, Globalizations, Third World Quarterly and Capital and Class (of which he is managing editor). He can be contacted at: {owen.worth@ul.ie}.

Introduction: recasting Gramsci in international politics Gramscis entry into international politics appeared as a counter-argument to conventional thinking both within the theoretical academic discipline of International Relations (IR) and those working in the practical realm of high intergovernmental politics. For those outside the discipline of IR, Gramscis concept of hegemony had a socio-cultural signicance in the manner in which it explained how class relationships are harmonised under a specic mode of production.1 Hegemony in international politics however has been less quick to develop the subtlety that Gramsci brought to the concept. Indeed for much orthodox IR theory, hegemony remains a key concept in understanding how
* An earlier version of this article was presented at a special set of panels at the ECPR conference in Pisa, September 2007 to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of Gramscis death. I would like to thank Mark Mcnally, Pat Devine, Jules Townshend, Adam Morton, Gerry Strange, Barry Hussey and Kyle Murray and the Review of International Studies anonymous reviewers for their useful contributions towards an earlier version of this piece. 1 For an illustration of this within the wider area of Political Science, see both Ann ShowstackSassoon edited collection, (ed.) Approaches to Gramsci (London: Readers and Writers, 1982) and her explanatory monograph, Gramscis Politics (New York: St Martins, 1980), and also Chantel Moue (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory (London: Verso, 1979). For more specialist accounts on the role of culture in Gramscis work see Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso, 1988) and Raymond Williams Culture and Materialism (London: Verso, 1980).

Owen Worth

dominant states shaped and control specic historical system.2 The move or what has often been called the critical or neo-Gramscian turn in IR towards widening the understanding of hegemony in global politics should not therefore be underestimated. Indeed since seminal works by Cox, Gill, van der Pijl, Murphy and Tooze and Rupert (amongst others) moved Gramsci into the realms of the international (see the collection by Gill, 1993 in particular), a whole generation of new scholars have followed in their footsteps and, as a result have reconceptualised the notion of power and signicantly moved beyond the state-centrism of traditional IR thinking.3 Despite this positive move, there has been a lack of theoretical innovation in the development of Gramscian research within IR. Whilst concerns have been made over its validity,4 its uneasy proximity to liberalism,5 and its Euro-Centricism,6 less has been made in actually analysing the concepts used themselves. In addition, even less has been done in looking at the developments of Gramscian discourse in other disciplines, often resulting in a rather narrow and restricted application of key Gramscian concepts and in particularly in the central appliance of hegemony. This article will argue that Gramscian theory in IR has reached a cul-de-sac in its present form and requires new directions if it is going to adequately analyse the growing complexities that exist within global politics. In response, this article will suggest a number of alternative directions for Gramscian methodology in IR. In particular, it will argue that the idea and concept of hegemony requires re-thinking if it wishes to serve its purpose and develop an alternative epistemological understanding of global politics which it originally committed itself to achieve.7

The neo-Gramscian turn Gramscis arrival in IR is usually traced back to Robert Coxs two hugely inuential interventions written in the early 1980s and Stephen Gills subsequent
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Whilst there is a wide range of literature on hegemony and leadership in International Relations, perhaps the most renowned is Robert Keohanes After Hegemony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), which may initially been conceived as a critique of the requirement of a hegemony, nevertheless provides a useful and thorough explanatory account of the notion of conventional hegemony. For a popular modern-day understanding, see Niall Ferguson, Hegemony or Empire?, Foreign Aairs, 5 (2003). See Robert W. Cox, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Stephen Gill (ed.), Gramsci, historical materialism and international relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Stephen Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003);. Mark Rupert, Producing Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Ideologies of Globalization (London: Routledge, 2000); Kees van der Pijl, The making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (London: Verso, 1984) and Transnational Classes and International Relations (London: Routledge, 1998); Craig Murphy and Roger Tooze (eds), The New International Political Economy (Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner, 1991). Randall Germain and Michael Kenny, Engaging Gramsci: International Relations theory and the new Gramscians, Review of International Studies, 24 (1998), pp. 321. Peter Burnham, Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and International Order, Capital and Class, 45 (1991), pp. 7395. John Hobson, Is Critical Theory Always For the White West and For Western Imperialism? Beyond Westphilian, Towards a Post-Racist, International Relations, Review of International Studies, 33 (2007), pp. 91116. Stephen Gill, Epistemology, Ontology and the Italian School, in Gramsci, historical materialism and international relations, pp. 2148.

Recasting Gramsci in international politics

coedited volume entitled Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations. In these early articles Cox distinguishes between what he terms problemsolving and critical IR.8 The former, he argues, uses an historical analysis to show how one state asserts its hegemony and stabilises the overall state-system. As such, British supremacy in the 19th century and contemporary post-war US dominance provide examples of successful forms of stability, whilst eras where leading states have competed for hegemonic control have resulted in unrest and conict (100 Years War, rst half of the 20th Century, etc). The problem-solver would thus conclude that international stability coincides with periods of where one state appears to inuence and control the international system.9 Cox argues that such arguments negates the process of history and limited any scope for the potential of transformation. In response, Cox suggests that a critical position would examine how dominant states are congured and how they transport ideas and construct institutional structures that embed and complement such ideas.10 Thus, Gramscis concepts of hegemony and historic blocs are employed to provide a critical alternative to orthodox readings of state-centric power in International Relations. His main objective was to engage with Gramsci as a means to move beyond the narrow scope of structural realism that was prominent in IR at the time11 and develop new forms of normative understanding. Here Cox has been most successful. Not only has there been an explosion of post-positivist literature within IR itself, but with it a sophisticated development of Gramscian theory. In the introduction of his highly inuential edited volume, Gill illustrated the need to expand upon simplistic understandings of the state and state-system by reminding us how Gramsci demonstrated the complexities that exist between state and civil society and as such are equally as complex at the international level. As such, a Gramcsian ontology should be able to investigate these complexities and seek to develop questions on the workings and distribution of power and ideology within global society.12 Yet despite this, Gramscian theory has often favoured state-centric forms of analysis that have often ignored some of the more complex issues behind Gramscis work. Much material has been produced across Europe to demonstrate how Gramscis perception of hegemony and historic
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Cox, Approaches to World Order, pp. 8791. Ibid., pp. 917; 1024. Commonly referred to as hegemonic stability theory, this position emerged from International Economics and in particular from Albert Hirschmann and was thus imported to IR, through its sub-discipline of International Politics Economics (IR), before becoming extended to studies on international security and defence following the end of the Cold War. Initial debates were carried in inuential mainstream IR/IPE journals such as International Organizations and International Studies Quarterly, before recently moving to conservative journals such as National Interest and Foreign Aairs. Examples of earlier debates can be seen in Stephen Krasner (ed.), International Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Charles Kindleberger, Dominance and Leadership in the International Economy, International Studies Quarterly, 25 (1981), pp. 24254 and Bruce Russett, The Mysterious Case of Vanishing Hegemony: or is Mark Twain Really Dead?, International Organization, 39 (1985), pp. 20731; whilst John Ikenberry, Illusions of Empire: Dening the New American Order, Foreign Aairs, 5 (2004), and Niall Ferguson, Hegemony or Empire can be seen as being supportive of the latter. Ibid., pp. 13540. Kenneth Waltzs Theory of International Politics (Mass: Addison Wesley, 1979) was the most prominent text in the discipline at the time which argued that states should be regarded merely as units in a structure (International system), with their relevant dependent upon the way they are ordered within that system. Gill, Epistemology, Ontology and the Italian School, pp. 306.

Owen Worth

blocs can be used to explain the internationalisation (and subsequent globalisation) of the state, through the emergence and consolidation of a transnational capitalist class.13 Other studies, largely with their origins in North America, locate the processes of global hegemony and the fashioning of neoliberal common-sense as one that is constitutionalised at the institutional level within International Organisations such as from the UN institutions, the World Trade Organisation, the Trilateral Commission, etc.14 Such studies are often empirically rich and contain interesting ideas, but also make generalisations that in places are guilty of structural reductionism. In addition, they often do not necessarily expand upon the theoretical work tentatively oered by Cox and those involved with Gills collection, or indeed address the shortcomings and problems that they contain.15 In general terms therefore, the work by Cox and Gill have been developed in two dierent ways one placing emphasis on the notion of the importance of World Order and the other focussing on the maintenance of this through the formation of transnational class formation. An attempt to synthesise current themes and subsequent criticism, yet placing them back inside an orthodox Marxist framework has also recently emerged.16 Before demonstrating how and why it is essential to move beyond these positions, it is necessary to briey examine them.

World order Perhaps the central feature of neo-Gramscian IR theory has been that of World Order, which is possibly Coxs most inuential and original concept.17 The idea of World Order is one in which embedded norms and laws are transposed onto the international stage. Originally outlined in his early 1980s Millennium articles and then fully constructed in his 1987 book Power, Production and World Order, a World Order represents a specic era, or if you like historic bloc, that was determined through social forces, organised though a combination of production, ideology and institutionalism. In this way a World Order could account for international economic social and cultural trends and contributes towards what Williams termed the hegemonic saturation of everyday life.18 Explained by Cox, World Order could historically account for transformation at the global level and also explain the nature and working conditions of international institutions. For as
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Henk Overbeek, Transnational historical materialism: theories of transnational class formation and world order, in Ronen Palan (ed.), Global Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 16884. See for example, Stephen Gills case study on the formation of the Trilateral Commission, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Craig Murphys study on International Organizations, International Organizations and Industrial Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Mark Ruperts Ideologies of Globalization, that provides a focus on the hegemonic role of the World Trade Organization. Owen Worth, The Poverty and Potential of Gramscian Thought in International Relations, International Politics, 45 (2008); Germain and Kenny, Engaging Gramsci; Burnham, NeoGramscian Hegemony and International Order; Hobson, Is Critical Theory Always For the White West and For Western Imperialism? Worth, Ibid. Cox, Approaches to World Order, pp. 85144; Robert W. Cox, Power, Production and World Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Williams, Culture and Materialism, p. 37.

Recasting Gramsci in international politics

Murphy explains, contrary to conventional wisdom International Organisations and Global Governance are not new developments in International Relations but act in accordance with dominant norms of a specic order.19 Since the end of the Cold War, attention has naturally been given to the economic dominance of neoliberalism and political dominance of globalisation, and how these twin developments have re-shaped the contemporary World Order. Thus the contemporary world order is seen as one in which the principles of neoliberalism have been realised through a combination of inter-related processes, so that its inuence has shaped state and institutional policy in often unchallenging ways. Gill, for example goes so far as suggesting that the contemporary World Order is one where a new form of constitutionalism is being fashioned one which recognises the supremacy of disciplinary neoliberalism and market civilisation as the only viable method of governance.20 Empirical studies have often reinforced this argument, with studies demonstrating the primacy of neoliberalism in the form of reconstruction in the developing world,21 and within the UN system of governance.22 Similarly, Mark Ruperts Ideologies of Globalization has been most successful in demonstrating how neoliberalism has been constructed, shaped and contested within civil society, through the common sense of globalisation.23 A less totalising reading to Gills can be seen in the theoretical study of new regionalism. Here, Coxs notion of World Order is applied to the emerging development of regional economic and political blocs within international politics. Writers such as Gamble, Strange and Hettne endorse the historical trajectory that Cox suggests, but do not necessarily suggest that every structural facet is inspired through disciplinary neoliberalism although they acknowledge that at present, the trend within International Political Economy and regional development has been geared towards this in recent years.24 Instead they argue that the nature of a World Order is an open one, with elements within it consistently contesting its hegemonic legitimacy. Regionalism may (and equally may not) provide a vehicle to contest neoliberalism, especially once regional strategies begin to contest the US-inspired neoliberal legacy. Obvious regional contenders referred to here include the EU and the emergence of a more integrated and cohesive Latin America.
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Murphy, International Organizations and Industrial Change, pp. 4980. Stephen Gill, Globalisation, Market Civilisation and Disciplinary Neoliberalism, Millennium, 24 (1995), pp. 399423. Enrico Augelli and Craig Murphy, Americas quest for supremacy and the Third World: A Gramscian analysis (London: Pinter, 1988); Pasha, Mustapha and James Mittelman, Out of Underdevelopment Revisited: Changing Global and the remaking of the Third World (New York: St. Martins Press, 1997). Kelley Lee, A neo-Gramscian Approach to international organisation: an expanded analysis of current reforms to UN development activities, in James Macmillan and Andrew Linklater (eds), Boundaries in Question: New Directions in International Relations (London: Pinter, 1995), pp. 14462; Owen Worth, Health for All?, in J. Abbott and O. Worth (eds), Critical Perspectives on International Political Economy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 13959. Rupert, Ideologies of Globalization. Andrew Gamble, Regional Blocs, World Order and the New Medievalism, in Mario Telo (ed.), European Union and the New Regionalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 2139; B. Hettne, Regionalism and World Order, in Mary Farrell, Bjorn Hettne and Luk van Langenhove (eds), Global Politics of Regionalism (London: Pluto, 2005), pp. 26987; Gerard Strange, The Left against Europe? A Critical Engagement with New Constitutionalism and Structural Dependency Theory, Government and Opposition, 41 (2006), pp. 197229.

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Transnational classes If World Order provides a general framework to understand how hegemony is framed within international politics, then the concept of the transnational capitalist class is used as a method to explain how a particular order is constructed. Here, empirical research is given to how a capitalist class in one particular state forges links with another, creating mutual interests and as such consolidate specic class divisions. Historically, much work is given to the Anglo-American business and banking groups that emerged at the turn of the 20th century and pluralised their Lockean visions of the separation between state and civil society.25 Simply put therefore, international hegemony is referred to as a form of class rule based on consent rather than coercion and on accommodation of subordinate interests rather than on their repression.26 Transnational classes have in recent years moved towards embarking upon a coordinated project based upon the neoliberal model of globalisation, championed by Anglo-American elites in the 1980s. Such a class was not merely situated in the US/UK, but has historically emerged within a number of industrial countries and cemented through elitist international organisations, ranging from the masons to the Bildenberg Conferences and the Trilateral Commission.27 However its development and hegemonic inuence has been more notable since its internationalisation has become more prominent through the emergence of neoliberal economics. Thus, for those that subscribe to the logic of the transnational capitalist class, international hegemony is processed through the consensual relationship forged between the transnational elites and respective national subordinate classes. Like the more explicitly Coxian interpretations of World Order, the concept of the transnational capitalist class has been used to understand regional integration, yet unlike the former their arguments complement Gills New Constitutionalism. Here, the EU can be seen as a construction that was initially conceived by American-European elites to starve o the threat of Communism during the Cold War,28 before emerging as a transnational class struggle between neo-mercantilist and neoliberal forces. The recent development of EMU, the Copenhagen criteria for EU membership and subsequent enlargement suggests that the latter has not only gained supremacy, but has managed to institutionally embed this, minimising potential alternatives.29 One of the problems with analysing the rise of such a transnational class is that much of the historical development of the concept seems to be based upon meta-narrative assumption, rather than on any substantial claim of how such classes have been formed across national barriers into a coherent whole.30 The
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Kees van der Pijl, Transnational Classes and International Relations. Henk Overbeek, Transnational historical materialism: theories of transnational class formation and world order, p. 175. Kees van der Pijl, Transnational Class Formation, in S. Gill and J. Mittelman (eds), Innovation and Transformation in International Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 1237. van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class. Baastian van Apeldoorn, Transnationalisation and the Restructuring of Europes socio-Economic Order, International Journal of Political Economy, 28 (1998), pp. 1253; B. van Apeldoorn, J. Drahokoupil and L. Horn (eds), Contradictions and Limits of Neoliberal European Governance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008). This was one of the charges levelled by Germain and Kenny. Indeed much of van der Pijls later claims made in Transnational Classes and International Relations demonstrate these

Recasting Gramsci in international politics

most interesting and ambitious account that attempts to address these problems has come from William Robinson and his notion of the transnational state and it is this departure point that might oer one avenue of alternative exploration. Robinson argues that one way of understanding the composition of transnational classes is to view them from within a transnational state. As globalisation has provided the basis where global markets and super-structural institutions have been formed, then one can conceive of a transnational state. The deregulation of the economy by states has thus allowed for an establishment of a corporate elite that has forged dierent hegemonic relationships with national subaltern classes across the global spectrum.31 What Robinsons analysis of transnational classes diers from those drawn on the lines conceived by van der Pijl as it attempts to move beyond the state-centricity of the Hobbesian/Lockeian hegemonic rivalry towards a more international openness of class analysis. Whilst there are obvious problems with the rejection of the nation-state in an analysis of international hegemony,32 Robinsons work has allowed us to do is to imagine a new method of looking at international hegemony vis--vis the structure of transnational classes in a way that moves beyond the conguration of the state-system and something alternative usages of Gramsci might wish to revisit.

Back to basics Whilst there have been a number of criticisms levelled against neo-Gramscian accounts within IR, the response has been to re-instate Gramsci back within the realms of Marxist orthodoxy.33 This move has obviously diered from developments in other subjects within Humanities and the Social Sciences, where the invention of British Cultural Studies and the input of bottom-up research from Thompson et al. became inuential.34 However some neo-Gramscian critiques in IR argued that hegemony at an international level could not be conceived of in the same manner as it was in the nation-state as the international arena lacked a concrete hierarchical form in which hegemony could be constructed.35 This is a reasonable point as both the conceptualisation of World Order and the
shortcomings even more. See Worth, Poverty and Potential of Gramscian Thought in International Relations. This is demonstrated across Robinsons work and explored perhaps most precisely in William Robinson, Social theory and globalization: The rise of a transnational state, Theory and Society, 30 (2001), pp. 157200. These are perhaps best covered in Robinsons replies to various authors, including van der Pijl, see William Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Nation-State centric thinking: What we dont see when we do see Nation States. Responses to Arrighi, Mann, Moore, van der Pijl and Went, Science and Society, 65 (2002), pp. 50008. This is perhaps best explained and examined in Andreas Bieler and Adam Morton, Globalisation, the state and class struggle: a Critical Economy engagement with Open Marxism, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 5 (2003), pp. 46799 and further developed and debated in Andreas Bieler, Werner Bonefeld, Peter Burnham and Adam Morton (eds), Global Restructuring, State, Capital and Labour: Contesting Neo-Gramscian Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006). E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory & other essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978). Burnham, Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and International Order, pp. 779; Germain and Kenny, Engaging Gramsci: International Relations theory and the new Gramscians, pp. 1012.

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transnational capitalist class fails to adequately explain how and where hegemony is yielded. In response to this, new revisions have called for a neo-Gramscian account of international politics that engages more empirically with the traditions of open Marxism on the one hand and with the work of the French structuralism of Louis Althusser and in particular of Nicos Poulantzas on the other.36 In this way, it is argued a more concrete hierarchical foundation can be developed to account for the processes of hegemony at the national and international levels. This back to basics move has been heavily inuenced by Adam Morton who has suggested, sometimes in collaboration with others, a new direction for Gramscian thought in international politics. Morton engages with Burnhams argument that Coxian-inspired neo-Gramscian readings suer from a non-Marxist form of pluralism, in accounting for World Order. As a response, Morton insists that Gramscian research needs to place traditional concepts such as class struggle back into its focal analysis, in order to restate the primacy of the economic base in determining the productive arena for such a struggle. Thus, any attempt at transposing Gramsci to the international needs to be adequately backed by an understanding of state and civil structures on the one hand, and of class struggle as the engine room of production on the other.37 The result however, is a move towards a form of critique that concerns itself more with abstract economism than it does with agency or civil consciousness. Mortons work with Bieler for example, seems more pre-occupied with the open-Marxist model of social reproduction than it does with Gramsci. This, despite the very fabric of the open Marxist tradition was rooted in an economism rmly opposed not just to the French tradition of Structuralism, and later Regulationism, but in the super-structural realm of Gramsci himself.38 Yet, Bieler and Morton have argued that Gramscian research needs to engage with the competing poles of open Marxist economism and structural Marxism in order to supplement a new form of Marxist orthodoxy, in order to halt contemporary critical accounts slipping towards bourgeoisie pluralism.39 As a consequence, Gramscian theory appears to have gone full circle. For what started out as a response to World Systems inspired accounts of structuralism in international politics40 has returned, via several debates on hegemony, class and the state, back towards the bounded connes of reductionist Marxism. As Germain recently argued, whilst Morton makes pains to stress the
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It should be explicitly stressed here that open Marxism emerged not as a complementary form, but as a response to structural Marxism and in particular to the functional-structuralism of Althusser, whereby the latter is criticised for failing to stress that capitalism is built upon the sum of the relationship between the state, capital and labour, rather than on its institutional structural parts. Class struggle therefore becomes the dialectical engine for change. For an overview see John Roberts, From reections to refraction: opening up Open Marxism, Capital and Class, 78 (2002), pp. 87116. Adam Morton, The grimly comic riddle of hegemony in IPE: where is class struggle?, Politics, 26 (2006), pp. 6272. Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopelis (eds), Open Marxism Volume 1 (London: Pluto Press, 1992). For a rounded Gramscian critique of the open Marxist position on this point, see Ian Bru, The Totalisation of Human Social Practice: Open Marxists and Capitalist Social Relations, Foucauldians and Power Relations, British Journal of Politics and International Relation s, 11 (2009), pp. 33251. Bieler and Morton, Globalisation, the state and class struggle, pp. 48991. The best and most poignant example of this remains Coxs Power, Production and World Order.

Recasting Gramsci in international politics

need to avoid such vulgar class reductionism, his approach remains curiously wedded to such a caricature.41

Hegemony whats in a name? If therefore, Gramscian research in IR has not substantially reached its explanatory potential, then which fresh direction should it take? Firstly, as outlined by many of its critiques, it needs to develop a coherent and innovative concept of hegemony. As it is, van der Pijl, and Augelli and Murphy have all made useful attempts in accounting for the variety of practices of socio-cultural hegemony inherent within the world system, but they do not place this within a wider conception of international hegemony.42 Indeed, one of the main criticisms of neo-Gramscian theory is not that such a theory has to be placed within the distinct conditions of an international state, but that a suitable one needed to be constructed that can adequately account for the complexities inherent within (global) civil society.43 Against the arguments put forward by Morton, I argue that these complexities can only be understood if hegemony is seen as a concept that is more-open and less rigid in its understanding of the relationship between capital and production and the highly complex issues of culture, identity and class that are played out at dierent levels within international society. Part of the problem with the concept of hegemony can be seen in the manner in which it entered the literature as an explanatory tool that accompanied the wider notion of World Order. As outlined above this was supposed to oer an alternative to theories of leadership and dominance in problem-solving theory. Yet, for Cox, like for the problem-solving orthodoxy, a World Order does not necessarily have to be hegemonic. Highly volatile periods, where no one state is powerful enough to forge a hegemonic project capable of internationalising, are dubbed as being non-hegemonic,44 often resulting in a hegemonic crisis, often accompanied by economic and military conict.45 This in itself does not dier much in essence from the ideas of hegemonic leadership and stability put forward in orthodox IR. Whilst Coxs World Order may wish to demonstrate the social, economic and cultural dimensions towards inter-state power, it remains highly state-centric in its conclusions.46 To illustrate this further it might be of use to look at Robinsons categorisations of hegemony, which he has used in his critique of Cox. Robinson argues that hegemony is generally used in four ways towards understanding the international, as: a) a realist model of leadership; b) as a state within the core, as argued by
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Randall Germain, Critical Political Economy, Historical Materialism and Adam Morton, Politics, 27 (2007), p. 132. See respectively, Augelli and Murphy Americas quest for supremacy and the Third World and van der Pijl, Transnational Classes and International Relations. Germain and Kenny, Engaging Gramsci. Cox, Approaches to World Order, pp. 1356. Gill, Power and Resistance, p. 56. Indeed in his monograph Power, Production and World Order, Cox, in line with orthodox accounts on the International Political Economy, argued that American-inspired hegemony had reached its end, although he did indicate a number of alternative world orders that would replace it. See Power, Production and World Order, pp. 273391.

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world-systems theorists; c) as ideological or consensual forms of control or d) as the inspiration and leadership for a specic form of world order, within a historical bloc.47 Whilst b) makes certain reference to Gramsci in its application,48 d) is generally the favoured usage by Cox and for students of World Order and the transnational capitalist class. Whilst it provides a novel and unique approach to understanding the processes of hegemony at the international level through a Gramscian lens, it does remain state-centric in its analysis. This is not to say that Gramsci himself would not have favoured the approach to the international used in d), or that this approach employs Gramscian terms in a misleading manner,49 but that its application of hegemony remains pre-occupied with understanding how class relations within national blocs and alliances are congured so that they conform to the hegemonic instigated by the leading classes within the dominant state (or in terms of the trans-Atlantic alliance, dominate states).50 However, it is approach c) that remains the most Gramscian, if only at least in the national-civil generic sense and it is this approach that has been developed in depth outside the discipline in IR. As noted above Robinson favours using a transnational state analysis to develop this more generic account of hegemony by borrowing from Sklair to argue that in terms of class organisation, globalisation has replaced the nation state in the spatial construction of civil society.51 Thus, hegemony at the global level should be approached in the same manner as it should at the level of the national and the fashioning of a hegemonic relationship can be understood without the preoccupation of territoriality. In doing so, Robinson allows us to consider the subordination of subaltern groups closer than those that are concerned more with the construction of state-led world orders or transnational elites.52 For hegemony, at least in its purest Gramscian sense, is primarily a theory of the subaltern, that is constructed at every civilisation level where a sets of norms and rules exist, however formal/informal they may be.53 Yet, for me, there remain a few too many
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William Robinson, Gramsci and Globalisation: From Nation-State Transnational Hegemony, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8 (2005), pp. 55960. See for example, Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, Globalization, Hegemony & Power: Anti-systemic Movements and the Global System (Bolder: CO: Paradigm, 2004). For example both Rupert and Cox make convincing textually-based arguments that any Gramscian involvement with International Politics must be seen only as an after-thought from the politics of the national. This follow Gramscis oft. quoted remarks that International Relations follows fundamental social relations, but the point of departure remains national in context, see Cox, Approaches to World Order, p. 133 and Rupert, Producing Hegemony, pp. 2234. Robinson, Gramsci and Globalisation, pp, 5612. Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). The most recent accounts that illustrate this include (amongst many others) Andreas Bielers The Struggle for a Social Europe: Trade Unions and EMU at Times of Global Restructuring (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Alan Cafruny and Magnus Ryner, Europe at Bay: In the Shadow of US Hegemony (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007); Phoebe Moore, Globalisation and Labour Struggle in Asia: A neo-Gramscian critique of South Koreas Political Economy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); Nicola Short, The International Politics of Post-Conict in Guatemala (London: Palgrave, 2008). From a variety of dierent geographical case-studies, each provide detailed empirical accounts of how states, regions and institutions have been cooperated into the US-led neoliberal project. Yet, these accounts largely focus on the construction of elites from the top, rather than on the various cultural practices and processes used and articulated within the subaltern classes in order to achieve this hegemonic consent. See this emphasised across both edited selections of his Prison Notebooks. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971) and Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1995).

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assumptions in Robinsons use of the transnational state in order to examine this. I do not think that hegemony needs to be assessed in such structural conditions in the way all facets of IR like to claim, but instead should focus more upon how relationships of consent that are construction and deconstructed at every level of interaction. For as outlined throughout his Prison Notebooks, Gramscis studies of hegemony appear in multi-regional and multi-disciplinary forms. Beginning with his starting point of Sardinian integration within the Kingdom of Italy, Gramscis applies hegemony at dierent levels to Italy, England, France, Europe and the US without limiting these experiences to national exceptionalism.54 Within these he assesses the educational (hegemonic) binding evident within individual cultures, transnational cultures and religion, as well as the more obvious social studies of the economy and production. Yet these studies do not appear separate or static, but are interrelated through a wider understanding of the relationship between the dominant and subaltern, exploited, or to put it more explicitly the exploited and exploited at each junction. Hegemony is thus inter-connected, but far reaching and articulated in dierent forms and in dierent contexts. As Raymond Williams classically argued:
We have to emphasize that hegemony is not singular; indeed that its own internal structures are highly complex, and have continually to be renewed, recreated and defended; and by the same token, that they can be continually challenged and in certain respects modied. That is why instead of speaking simply of the hegemony a hegemony, I would propose a model which allows for this kind of variation and contradiction, its sets of alternatives and its processes of change.55

International or Global hegemony like any other form, does not require a distinct formulated set of institutional bodies in order to preside and oversee the settlement of civil society, but is bound through a multilayered process. The hegemonic outcomes are not dened solely by specic super-structures, but by the larger relationship between the dominant and subordinate classes, which in turn is shaped by production. There are several avenues where such an approach can develop within the eld of IR, each largely taken or at least inuenced by other disciplines. The rst of these can be seen in Jonathan Josephs work on hegemony. Arguing against the Coxian approach to hegemony (or on point d) in Robinson analyses), Joseph suggests that hegemony is not merely a process carried out through a simple reproduction of state and civil society, or internationally between the transportation of this reproduction from the dominant state. Borrowing from Roy Bhaskars form of critical realism, Joseph argues that hegemony is a process that exists at two levels a conscious level, whereby ideas are conceived and a structural one that embeds and secures the unity of the contradictions that arise from the various practices that emerge from such ideas. In global politics therefore, there exists a multitude of both structural and conscious hegemonic congurations/projects and the overriding process of hegemony is to restore equilibrium at every level.56 This

54 55 56

Ibid. Williams, Culture and Materialism, p. 38. Jonathan Joseph, Hegemony: A realist analysis (London: Routledge, 2002); See also Jonathan Joseph, Hegemony and the structure-agency problem in IR, Review of International Studies, 34 (2008), pp. 10928.

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indeed builds upon Gramscis own assertions on the complex and contradictory relationship between structure and agency within the fashioning of hegemony.57 What Josephs engagement with the tradition of critical realism58 does for the concept of international hegemony is that it gives a wider explanation of how certain groups and structures at various levels manage to rearrange and adapt to certain overriding material conditions. For example, it can explain how certain religious groups can become structurally organised in order to be compatible with the processes of neoliberal capitalism. Conversely, it can explain how certain groups/parties/states/regional bodies in the West can construct dierent projects and forms of interpretation to legitimise a wider economic practice. Therefore it provides an avenue where Gramscis often sketchy accounts of the dierent levels of hegemony can be transposed onto a larger scale. Whilst Josephs critical realist account of hegemony oers a potential way into international politics that does not rely on the dictates of World Order, there is also a danger here that hegemony can be misinterpreted more as a form of dominance impressed through a relationship between structure and agency, rather than as one which constantly seeks to explain and understand the hegemonic saturation between classes. This is seen more in Laclaus often controversial reading of hegemony, which could equally be conceived on the global stage. For Laclau, hegemony is not a relationship that is formed through a re-positioning of class relations, but is an organic whole that articulates itself through complex interactions with the social sphere. Laclaus most contentious claim is to explicitly move beyond the realms of both critical and structural Marxism and into the arena of post-structuralism, by moving hegemony beyond the connes of class struggles towards a new form of hegemony that abandons the principles of what he (albeit along with Moue) terms a relationship based around a distinct hegemonic centre.59 This represents a distinct problem in international politics, as no matter how far you shed traditional forms of structuralism, the realities of economic production in shaping the processes of social relationships still remain. However rather than dismiss Laclaus reading of hegemony out of hand as unfounded, unformulated or even somehow sacrilegious to the Marxist canon, there is much in his work to suggest that there is some currency in his interpretation of international hegemony. In particular, his work on articulation provides us ways and means in which we can extend our understanding of identity, hegemony and resistance within global society. Laclau argues throughout his work that systemic (hegemonic) wholes depend on the articulation of concepts which are not logically interlinked.60 As such, hegemonic consent is reached through a variety of dierent ways and under a number of dierent meanings, and is characterised through its articulation. This again gives us a novel approach to account for the complex ways in which identity, nationhood, religion and culture (indeed the main areas of study that Gramsci himself was focussing on) can articulate itself, both within the nation-state and within the more general realm of global civil society. Again, as Laclau continues in his Making
57 58

59 60

Joseph, Hegemony and the structure-agency problem in IR, p. 121. For a wider introduction to Critical Realism see Andrew Brown, Steve Fleetwood and John Roberts (eds), Marxism and Critical Realism (London: Routledge, 2002). Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Moue, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985). Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 10.

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of Political Identities, both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic practices articulate a wide variety of competing identities and ideologies, but each need to be located into broader categorisations as either consenters or contesters.61 Indeed in a discipline where patterns of hegemonic resistance in the form of the anti-globalisation movement, the rise in transnational terror movements and ethnic conicts are gaining ever more signicance, a wider concept of hegemony should be welcomed. Laclaus hegemony does have some relevance in its construction, but as an overall concept it cannot escape the charge of post-modernist insignicance, or as Joseph aptly put it, taking hegemony to the winds of arbitrary signicance. Indeed, his later work on hegemony takes the concept even further beyond the level that he did with Chantel Moue in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, further down the often confusing cul-de-sac of radical discourse theory. However, his notion of articulation is one worth pursuing and one which can be seen more in the work of the British Cultural Studies theorist, Stuart Hall. Hall came to prominence in the 1980s in Britain when he looked at the variety of contradictory practices within Thatchers Britain.62 Hall maintains the Laclauian concept of articulation and also acknowledges that no xed ideological relationship exists between classes vis--vis production.63 Despite this, he rejects the notion that these can in any way operate free of a larger dening structure of economic materialism. Instead for Hall, hegemony is constructed in a more loosely bounded manner where a multiple set of cultural, social and economic agents serve to both consolidate and contest avenues on common-sense upon an open terrain, but all are nevertheless shaped and inuenced by, to use Laclaus phrase, the hegemonic centre.64 Theoretically and methodologically, Halls main input to Gramscian (or Gramsican Marxist) theory is in his philosophy of Marxism without Guarantees or determinism in the rst instance. For Hall, hegemonic relationships and classes are not ordered or structured upon the lines that either reductionist Marxism or French Structural revisionism dictated, but are moulded only in the rst instance by economic materialism. It is in the open and complex terrain of civil and social society which institutions, structures, cultures and ideologies are formed and consolidated. It is also within this sphere that identity is formed and hegemony is constructed and consented. As Hall argues in response to Althusser:
Marxism without guarantees establishes the open horizon of Marxist theorizing determinacy without guaranteed closures. The paradigm of perfectly closed, perfectly predictable systems of thought is religion or astrology, not science. It would be preferable, from this perspective, to think of the materialism of Marxist theory in terms of determinism by the economic in the rst instance, since Marxism is surely correct, against all idealisms, to insist that no social practice or set of relations oat free of the determinate

61

62

63

64

Ernesto Laclau, The Making of Political Identities (London: Verso, 1994); Owen Worth and Carmen Kuhling, Counter-hegemony, anti-globalisation and culture in International Political Economy, Capital and Class, 84 (2004), pp. 3142. Hall will possibly be most remembered for his work in editing the highly inuential journal Marxism Today with Martin Jacques. Stuart Hall, The Problem of Ideology: Marxism within Guarantees, in D. Morley and K-H. Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 347. Such an observation is perhaps best summed up through Halls collection of essays on the hegemonic nature of Thatcherism in Britain in the 1980s. See Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso 1988).

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eects of the concrete relations in which they are located. However, determination in the last instance has long been the repository of the lost dream or illusion of theoretical certainty.65

This loose or open approach to Marx is why Gramscis hegemony remains highly applicable to the multilayered discipline of Cultural Studies and equally can explain the complexities inherent with the equally multilayered processes of globalisation. Indeed certain accounts in IR are tentatively using the arguments put forward by Hall to analyse hegemony in a wider global context.66 Yet many capitalist-state theorists, who draw from their own brand of self proclaimed open Marxism, lamented Hall in the late 80s/early 90s for ignoring that the state appears primarily in the form of a capital accumulator.67 As a result, hegemonic relationships do not merely have the time to form and consolidate and indeed form complex models of articulation in the light of changes to state capitalist strategies.68 As such it is hard to envisage how Gramscis ideas provide any relevance to such theorists. However, it is exactly this type of orthodox state determinism that the recent back-to-basics accounts have called for to avoid slipping into pluralistic ways.69 Such a move falls into the trap of what Williams dened as simplistic base-superstructure when insisting upon the complexity of hegemony as a model. Instead of this, I have tried to explain in this section that Halls brand of Gramscian Marxism and subsequent hegemony gives us a far more comprehensive understanding of how hegemony might work at an International Level. In addition, both Josephs critical realism and Laclaus (admittedly often problematic) theory of articulation compliment this model in certain areas. From this, it is necessary to look at how this account of hegemony could be applied to the spheres of global politics, again looking at related work that is not always associated with international issues.

New directions for Gramscian research One of the main peculiarities in Gramscian studies within IR is that the overwhelming bulk of empirical accounts are predominately located within the sub-disciplines of International Political Economy (IPE). Gramsci has thus been used alongside established Political Economists such as Polanyi, Braudel and Schumpeter. Yet whilst Gramsci may have written on the concept of what he termed Critical Economy,70 much of the brief work he did on International
65 66

67

68

69 70

Stuart Hall, The Problem of Ideology, p. 45. Mark Rupert, Ideologies of Globalization; Owen Worth, Hegemony, International Political Economy and Post-Communist Russia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 4167. As argued by Burnham in Neo-Gramscian hegemony and International Order, and also by Simon Clarke, Overaccumulation, class struggle and the regulation approach, Capital and Class, 42 (1990), pp. 5993. David Lockwood, Review of Hegemony, International Political Economy and Post-Communist Russia, Slavic Review, 65 (2006), 62022. Bieler and Morton, Globalisation, the state and class struggle, pp. 4819. In one of the many metaphorical references that cover the many translations of the Prison Notebooks, the term Critical Economy is widely seen as reference to Marxist/Marx-inspired Economics, but was like many other concepts, given another name due to potential censoring. As such much of his writing on the economy was drawing up vague comparisons between critical and

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Political Economy was generalised, often journalistic and presented as a commentary.71 Ironically, in this area Gramsci also deploys terms especially his use of hegemony in the traditional way, rather than placing them within his wider philosophies.72 Cox himself certainly did not intent his usage of Gramsci to be located within the sub-discipline of IPE and favoured the use of Vico, Sorel and even E. H. Carr, alongside Gramsci and the more social aspects of Polanyi, as a broad historical critique for the eld of IR as a whole.73 In addition, Gills inuential 1993 collection was geared for inclusion as a wider research project within International Relations and certainly many of the contributors (for example Murphy and Augelli) did not see Gramscis use in the discipline as one that was restricted towards IPE.74 Therefore, its inclusion within IPE initially emerged through practical reasons and from individuals like Susan Strange who was keen to exploit exclusions within conventional readings that were evident at the time. Therefore, despite the use of Gramsci was not originally intended solely for studies within IPE, the sub-discipline itself very much began to claim it as its own as a way of critically understanding the dynamics of power emerging in an increasingly globalised political economy.75 As a result, neo-Gramscian studies have, albeit with certain notable exceptions, become less and less keen to embrace new avenues of research in the same manner as their founding predecessors did and have become increasingly entrenched within what Overbeek terms as the transnational historical materialist approach to political economy.76 Yet it does need to be stressed that Gramsci was not in any way rst and foremost a political economist, although admittedly he was equally not solely interested in the workings and positioning of the subaltern/dominant classes, through socio-cultural constructions as some might argue. His inuence within IPE is important, especially in areas such as globalisation and the internationalisation of the state, dealt with above, but if IPE is to delve into the study of social and cultural movements within global society, then broader studies within IR would also benet from a Hall-inspired understanding of hegemony for a theoretical departure point. With certain exceptions, Gramsci has played less of a role in critical security studies and equally little gures in studies on nationalism, ethnicity and ethnic conict. This is despite that such areas have obviously become increasingly prominent within the post-Cold War era of IR. Indeed as indicated by Wyn Jones, Gramsci has often found a way into the political economy of world politics, but has been less prominent in other areas of IR, despite paradoxically being far from
orthodox economics and looking at building upon Marxs Capital often referred to as the various volumes of the Critique of Political Economy. Indeed, much of the sketchy material that Gramsci did write on critical economy was often encouraged and enhanced by Piero Staa, who felt that Gramsci needed to develop his understanding of economic science so to provide a critical understanding that complemented his more developed work on civil society. For a general overview of Gramscis material on Political Economy, see Antonio Gramsci, Further Selections of the Prison Notebook, pp. 161278. Ibid., pp. 23060. Robert Cox, Approaches to World Order, pp. 2730. Gill, Epistemology, Ontology and the Italian School, p. 22. Jason P. Abbott and Owen Worth, The many worlds of Critical International Political Economy, in Jason P. Abbott and Owen Worth (eds), Critical Perspectives on International Political Economy (Basingstoke: Palgrave), p. 3. Overbeek, Transnational historical materialism, pp. 1689.

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72 73 74 75

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being merely a political economist himself.77 These shortcomings have been developed in other disciplines. For example there have been a number of studies in Cultural Studies that give great attention to identity and nationhood which might allow us in IR to think of alternative ways that the Gramscian ontology might move beyond its IPE centrality. One such study is Raymond Williams posthumous collection Who Speaks for Wales? Drawing from Culture, Literature, Politics and History, Williams draws upon the contradictions, mythologies and class formations that are constructed within his native Wales, and then demonstrates how contested forms of articulation combine to construct a form of common-sense that historically account for a nation without a voice functioning in a larger non-national state.78 Williams critique of Nationalism (The Culture of Nations) in the collection provides a similar novel approach to the Nation, State and territoriality, by employing a similar understanding of open hegemony to that of Hall and placing a multitude of competing ideas that make up the social fabric of a nation under the larger material conditionality of international capitalism. Interestingly, Williams main intention from much of what he writes on the nation and internationalism is to illustrate to those in Cultural Studies the importance to consider wider implications of neoliberal globalisation in understanding national cultural trends. For Gramscian scholars in IR, the reverse is required when understanding Williams implications that bottom-up studies widen our epistemological understanding of the global environment, especially in an era that tends to favour macro and uniformed explanations and solutions. If Williams show us new avenues to explore identity, then Hall himself adds to this potentially rich material through his work by relating Gramscian theory to race and ethnicity. Gramscis work on Italian higher philosophy and Catholicism provides a basis for much of Halls work on ethnicity. In every hegemonic construction of the Italian nation, a balance between potential divisions be they cultural, social or ethno-political, was ironed out by higher intellectual reasoning that came from the institutions above. As aptly put by Gramsci:
The relationship between common-sense and the upper-level of philosophy is assured by politics, just as it is politics that assures the relationship between the Catholicism of the intellectuals and that of the simple.79

In applying this to questions of ethnicity, Hall argues that the same conditions apply to the mechanisms of the modern multi-cultural nation-state and to extend this to the realms of globalisation and global society. For ethnicities are bounded together in an often unequal form to reect the historical dominance of one specic ethnicity. These are then reected through the functional institutionalisation of both state and civil bodies. As a result Gramscis work on hegemony, nationbuilding and civil society can, for Hall, point us to an inequitable understanding of ethnic relationships within a variety of nation-states. Equally, it can point us to new directions in ethnic conict, especially within the literature of the post-colonial
77

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Richard Wyn Jones, Introduction: Locating Critical International Relations Theory, in R. Wyn Jones (ed.), Critical Theory & World Politics (Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), pp 56. Raymond Williams, Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity (Cardi: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 1912. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 331.

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weak state.80 New conicts that have occurred in the post-Cold War era have often resulted from an organic crisis within state/civil societal relationships where an ethnic-political project has failed to nd hegemony in its relationship.81 Through a Gramscian lens, Hall and Williams show us a way in which we might use Gramsci as a form of explanation within global society that moves well beyond the current readings oered in IPE. Indeed one of the problems with the many neo-Gramscians is their reluctance to engage with some of the more complex areas of the super-structure, preferring to leave such complexities in the hands of the various post-modern and social constructivist accounts that have tended to dominate contemporary accounts of identity and ethnicity in IR.82 Yet the realities of world politics in the post-Cold War era have revealed an environment where civil society has been dened through a complex mix of competing identities that hold great resemblance to the Gramscian readings of Hall and Williams. I would venture to suggest that it is here and away from the connes of the study of the economic base that Gramscian-inspired studies need to go, not just to broaden their own horizons, but to re-instate a sophisticated Marxist theory back into the broader realms of International Relations and in particularly in the growing discourse of international/global civil society. If Gramscian accounts have often been slow to engage with Hall and Williams and with the use of Gramsci in Cultural and Literary Studies, then another area which is neglected in contemporary global society is Gramscis work on religion. Whilst religion is picked up upon in many of contemporary accounts of Gramscis work,83 there is little drawn from it in IR, save from footnoting the importance Gramsci placed on Catholicism as a hugely inuential agent in the development of the Italian state-civil complex and in the emergence of fascism. Yet, Gramscis notes on religion were empirically rich in their analysis, with studies being given to religion in individual European countries and the US, in South America and in India, Japan and the Middle East.84 The main objective for Gramsci here was rstly to identity the role of religion as a hegemonic agent within civil society vis--vis the state, and how the need for spirituality and belief in an organic form is required in order for the politics of counter-hegemony. In the rst instance, great emphasis was given to how both Catholicism and Protestantism were central in the formulation of educative, cultural practices and in forging the boundaries of common-sense. Likewise, similar notes are discussed in the manner of the territorial expansion of such practices, though the inux of missionaries.85 On the second point, Gramsci broke with much of the rational materialism inherent within Marxism at the time, by insisting that spiritual belief, free from hegemonic
80

81 82

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84 85

Stuart Hall, Gramscis relevance for the study of race and ethnicity, in Morley and Chen (eds), Stuart Hall, pp. 41140. Ibid., pp. 43540. For the best representation of these, see David Campbell and D. Michael Dillon (eds), The Political Subject of Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press); James der Derian (ed.), International Theory: Critical Investigations (Basingstoke: Palgrave); Jerey T. Checkel, The Constructivist Turn in International Relations, World Politics, 50 (1998), pp. 32448; Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press). See for example John Fulton, Religion and Politics in Gramsci: An introduction, in Sociological Analysis, 48 (1987), pp. 197216 and Otto Maduro, Religion and Social Conicts (New York: Orbis, 1981). Gramsci, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 1137. Ibid., pp. 1158.

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constraint, make up a necessary component of transformation. Here, Gramsci turns to the radicalism of the reformation as an example of one where the historical development was challenged and sets out the importance of such radical theological engagement in the New Prince.86 Since the events of September 11th there has quite logically been a collection of new material on the importance of religion and of the predictable Huntington-inspired logic given to the clash of civilisation thesis. Gramscianscholarship needs to ll a gap in the theoretical literature as a response to this.87 The move against secularisation, the transportation and conditionality of education/social welfare from the West to parts of the developing world, the fundamentalist contestation of globalisation from elements within the Islamic and Christian faiths all point for a need to look at Gramscis reading of religious grouping, their organisational power and their involvement in civil society more closely. Part of this was looked into by some in IPE when looking at the growth of American structural power. Augelli and Murphy, for example examined how many evangelical civil groups within the US became highly inuential in the development of newly independent states in Africa, during the Cold War. Empirical emphasis was placed on the nancial incentives given by such civil groups towards the practice of education, government loans and other forms of soft power in exchange for the adoption of respective religious programmes.88 However, little has followed this. The challenge for Gramscians is to reclaim these areas of civil study which the IPE School have been slow and reluctant to make an impact. From the work of cultural studies and from Gramscis own writings on factors such as religion, I have argued in this section that there should be more potential for Gramscian research to develop than its current agenda, which appears lock within the connes of IPE. If the theoretical approach towards hegemony is broadened then it is also necessary to broaden its scope of study, especially within the contemporary complexities inherent within the politics of globalisation.

Conclusion This article has argued that at present the deployment of Gramsci within IR is under-developed. Whilst the work of Cox and Gill et al. have created a space for a Gramscian ontology to develop, it has largely been shaped by the principles of World Order and the transnational capitalist class. In addition, whilst Cox, Murphy, Rupert and others that were initially involved in the engagement with Gramsci aimed to propel accounts of World Order towards other areas of IR, neo-Gramscian accounts have generally been rooted within IPE. There has also been a general reluctance to adequately look at the development of Gramscian thought in other subjects. Those that have used Gramsci from other disciplines have been developing the existing state-centric models, rather than look at how their dierent focus of
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88

Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebook, pp. 1314. Mustapha Pasha, Islam, Soft Orientalism and Hegemony: A Gramscian Rereading, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8 (2005), pp. 54358. Augelli and Murphy, Americas quest for supremacy and the Third World.

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study might provide new avenues.89 The reluctance to break with state-centrism and to adopt an approach that is largely (in its dierent forms) in tandem with what Robinson termed as ideological leadership through a powerful state (see above) is partly due to the observation that the move towards Gramsci was indeed initially used as a counter measure to discuss some of the historical developments of state-led hegemony within the international economic.90 Recent debates surrounding the viability of Gramscian theory have expressed further concerns over the possibilities of projecting the notion of hegemony onto an international level. As a result, recent Gramscian approaches have favoured a highly structured approach in order to stave o such criticism and as a means to maintain its Marxist credentials. However the result of this is an approach that is, in my opinion, highly deterministic in its application and one that does not allow for the many social interactions that occur on the open terrain of civil society or for the process of hegemony to be articulated. As both Hall and Williams note, hegemony is a uid, complex process and is not formulated around a static structured approach of base-superstructure determinism that is favoured by both state capitalist theorists and French Structuralism. As a response I have argued here that IR needs to be far less parochial in its study if it is to get the best out of Gramsci. Furthermore, it rmly suggested here that scholars of International Politics move beyond Coxian ontology and look to other readings of hegemony so to expand upon the openings already made. This isnt to say that a more generic account of hegemony is necessarily what Gramsci himself would have in mind when looking at the international, or that Coxs own reading of Gramsci through World Order is not an accurate assessment of hegemony, but that by looking at accounts of hegemony from dierent academic elds and objects of study, we might be able to provide alternative readings to the complex realm of global politics. It is also argued that Gramscians should not be restricted as some have argued from some engagement with Laclaus brand of post-structuralism. However, whilst I believe that there is much interest in such a reading of hegemony, especially in appliance to the variety of analytical levels that exist within the various parts within IR as a discipline, it does not mean that this should warrant a move to free Gramsci from materialism. As Halls reading of Gramsci shows us, all empirical studies of civil societal developments need to be mindful of the larger material boundaries that they work within. Gramscis own position here could perhaps best be expressed in his own criticisms of Croces brand of post-Marxism, where he constantly berates Croce for misunderstanding how Marxism (or the philosophy of praxis) treats the social and civil sphere.91 Indeed here Adam Morton is to a
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91

For example, Morton has argued elsewhere that in order to apply Gramsci, one needs to engage with contrasting accounts of Gramsci within the social sciences and recommends the method employed by Hall which aims to think in a Gramscian way rather than rely solely upon textual analysis. He does not however show how such a method can move us beyond current theoretical developments within Gramscian IPE, favouring instead on using it to defend such developments. See Adam Morton, Historicizing Gramsci: situating ideas, Review of International Political Economy, 10 (2003), pp. 13440. Susan Strange, The Persistent Myth of Lost Hegemony, International Organization. 41 (1987), pp. 55174. In response to Croces question of how Marxism can account for ethico-political history, Gramsci simply replies, It is an arbitrary and mechanical hypostasisation of the moment of hegemony. The

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certain degree correct when he notes that Laclau (and Moue) occupy a similar position to Croce himself, when attempting to move away from materialism.92 Finally, this article has tentatively oered new avenues of study for Grasmcian research in IR in order that it breaks from the cosy world of IPE. The attraction of areas such as ethnicity, religion, conict and nation-hood is equally appealing as it would also bring critical Marxism back into areas that it has neglected. Widening studies in greater empirical areas would equally expand the Gramscian scope for explanation. To neglect this would limit such potentially rich work on (global) civil society and leave it in danger of moving towards an increasingly narrow abstraction. As Gramsci himself observed while commenting on the dangers of relying on Economism:
Research must (therefore) be directed towards identifying theirs strengths and weaknesses. The economist hypothesis asserts the existence of an immediate element of strength i.e the availability of a certain direct or indirect nancial backing and is satised with that. But this is not enough. In this case too, an analysis of the balance of forces at all levels can only culminate in the sphere of hegemony and ethico-political relations.93

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Philosophy of Praxis does not exclude ethnic-political history. The opposition between Croces historical doctrines and the philosophy of praxis lies in the speculative nature of Croces conception. Gramsci, Further Selections of the Prison Notebooks, p. 330. Adam Morton, A double reading of Gramsci: beyond the logic of contingency, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8 (2005), pp. 43954. Gramsci, Selection from the Prison Notebooks, p. 167.