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Recasting Gramsci in international politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2010

OWEN WORTH
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Abstract

Gramscian theory has had a profound influence 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.

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Type
Research Article
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Review of International Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , January 2011, pp. 373 - 392
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2010

Introduction: recasting Gramsci in international politics

Gramsci's 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, Gramsci's concept of hegemony had a socio-cultural significance in the manner in which it explained how class relationships are harmonised under a specific mode of production.Footnote 1Hegemony 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 dominant states shaped and control specific historical system.Footnote 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 significantly moved beyond the state-centrism of traditional IR thinking.Footnote 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,Footnote 4 its uneasy proximity to liberalism,Footnote 5 and its Euro-Centricism,Footnote 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.Footnote 7

The neo-Gramscian turn

Gramsci's arrival in IR is usually traced back to Robert Cox's two hugely influential interventions written in the early 1980s and Stephen Gill's subsequent coedited volume entitled Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations. In these early articles Cox distinguishes between what he terms ‘problem-solving’ and ‘critical’ IR.Footnote 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 conflict (100 Years War, first half of the 20th Century, etc). The ‘problem-solver’ would thus conclude that international stability coincides with periods of where one state appears to influence and control the international system.Footnote 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 configured and how they transport ideas and construct institutional structures that embed and complement such ideas.Footnote 10 Thus, Gramsci's 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 timeFootnote 11 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 influential 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.Footnote 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 Gramsci's work. Much material has been produced across Europe to demonstrate how Gramsci's perception of hegemony and historic blocs can be used to explain the internationalisation (and subsequent ‘globalisation’) of the state, through the emergence and consolidation of a ‘transnational capitalist class’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 offered by Cox and those involved with Gill's collection, or indeed address the shortcomings and problems that they contain.Footnote 15

In general terms therefore, the work by Cox and Gill have been developed in two different 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.Footnote 16 Before demonstrating how and why it is essential to move beyond these positions, it is necessary to briefly examine them.

World order

Perhaps the central feature of neo-Gramscian IR theory has been that of World Order, which is possibly Cox's most influential and original concept.Footnote 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 specific 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.Footnote 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 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 specific order.Footnote 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 influence 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.Footnote 20 Empirical studies have often reinforced this argument, with studies demonstrating the primacy of neoliberalism in the form of reconstruction in the developing world,Footnote 21 and within the UN system of governance.Footnote 22 Similarly, Mark Rupert's 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.Footnote 23

A less totalising reading to Gill's can be seen in the theoretical study of ‘new regionalism’. Here, Cox's 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.Footnote 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.

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 specific 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.Footnote 27 However its development and hegemonic influence 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 Gill's ‘New Constitutionalism’. Here, the EU can be seen as a construction that was initially conceived by American-European elites to starve off the threat of Communism during the Cold War,Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 30 The 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 offer 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 different hegemonic relationships with national subaltern classes across the global spectrum.Footnote 31 What Robinson's analysis of transnational classes differs 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,Footnote 32 Robinson's work has allowed us to do is to imagine a new method of looking at international hegemony vis-à-vis the structure of transnational classes in a way that moves beyond the configuration 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.Footnote 33 This move has obviously differed 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 influential.Footnote 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.Footnote 35 This is a reasonable point as both the conceptualisation of World Order and the 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.Footnote 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 influenced by Adam Morton who has suggested, sometimes in collaboration with others, a new direction for Gramscian thought in international politics. Morton engages with Burnham's argument that Coxian-inspired neo-Gramscian readings suffer 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.Footnote 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. Morton's 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 firmly opposed not just to the French tradition of Structuralism, and later Regulationism, but in the super-structural realm of Gramsci himself.Footnote 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’.Footnote 39 As a consequence, Gramscian theory appears to have gone full circle. For what started out as a response to World System's inspired accounts of structuralism in international politicsFootnote 40 has returned, via several debates on hegemony, class and the state, back towards the bounded confines of reductionist Marxism. As Germain recently argued, whilst Morton makes pains to stress the need to avoid such ‘vulgar’ class reductionism, his approach remains ‘curiously wedded to such a caricature’.Footnote 41

Hegemony – what's 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 different 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 offer 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’,Footnote 44 often resulting in a ‘hegemonic crisis’, often accompanied by economic and military conflict.Footnote 45 This in itself does not differ much in essence from the ideas of hegemonic leadership and stability put forward in orthodox IR. Whilst Cox's World Order may wish to demonstrate the social, economic and cultural dimensions towards inter-state power, it remains highly state-centric in its conclusions.Footnote 46

To illustrate this further it might be of use to look at Robinson's 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 world-systems theorists; c) as ideological or consensual forms of control or d) as the inspiration and leadership for a specific form of world order, within a historical bloc.Footnote 47 Whilst b) makes certain reference to Gramsci in its application,Footnote 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,Footnote 49 but that its application of hegemony remains pre-occupied with understanding how class relations within national blocs and alliances are configured 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).Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 53 Yet, for me, there remain a few too many assumptions in Robinson's 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, Gramsci's studies of hegemony appear in multi-regional and multi-disciplinary forms. Beginning with his starting point of Sardinian integration within the Kingdom of Italy, Gramsci's applies hegemony at different levels to Italy, England, France, Europe and the US without limiting these experiences to national exceptionalism.Footnote 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 different forms and in different 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 modified. 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.Footnote 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 defined solely by specific 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 field of IR, each largely taken or at least influenced by other disciplines. The first of these can be seen in Jonathan Joseph's 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 Bhaskar's 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 configurations/projects and the overriding process of hegemony is to restore equilibrium at every level.Footnote 56 This indeed builds upon Gramsci's own assertions on the complex and contradictory relationship between structure and agency within the fashioning of hegemony.Footnote 57

What Joseph's engagement with the tradition of critical realismFootnote 58 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 different ‘projects’ and forms of interpretation to legitimise a wider economic practice. Therefore it provides an avenue where Gramsci's often sketchy accounts of the different levels of hegemony can be transposed onto a larger scale.

Whilst Joseph's ‘critical realist’ account of hegemony offers 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 Laclau's 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. Laclau's 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 confines of class struggles towards a new form of hegemony that abandons the principles of what he (albeit along with Mouffe) terms a relationship based around a distinct hegemonic ‘centre’.Footnote 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 Laclau's 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’.Footnote 60 As such, hegemonic consent is reached through a variety of different ways and under a number of different 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 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.Footnote 61 Indeed in a discipline where patterns of hegemonic resistance – in the form of the anti-globalisation movement, the rise in transnational ‘terror’ movements andethnic conflicts are gaining ever more significance, a wider concept of hegemony should be welcomed.

Laclau's hegemony does have some relevance in its construction, but as an overall concept it cannot escape the charge of post-modernist insignificance, or as Joseph aptly put it, taking hegemony to the winds of arbitrary significance. Indeed, his later work on hegemony takes the concept even further beyond the level that he did with Chantel Mouffe 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 Thatcher's Britain.Footnote 62 Hall maintains the Laclauian concept of articulation and also acknowledges that no fixed ideological relationship exists between classes vis-à-vis production.Footnote 63 Despite this, he rejects the notion that these can in any way operate free of a larger defining 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 influenced by, to use Laclau's phrase, the ‘hegemonic centre’.Footnote 64

Theoretically and methodologically, Hall's main input to Gramscian (or Gramsican Marxist) theory is in his philosophy of ‘Marxism without Guarantees’ or ‘determinism in the first 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 first 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 first instance’, since Marxism is surely correct, against all idealisms, to insist that no social practice or set of relations float free of the determinate effects 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.Footnote 65

This loose or open approach to Marx is why Gramsci's ‘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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 68 As such it is hard to envisage how Gramsci's 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’.Footnote 69 Such a move falls into the trap of what Williams defined 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 Hall's 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 Joseph's critical realism and Laclau's (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,’Footnote 70 much of the brief work he did on International Political Economy was generalised, often journalistic and presented as a commentary.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 field of IR as a whole.Footnote 73 In addition, Gill's influential 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 Gramsci's use in the discipline as one that was restricted towards IPE.Footnote 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 76 Yet it does need to be stressed that Gramsci was not in any way first 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 influence 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 benefit 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 figures in studies on nationalism, ethnicity and ethnic conflict. 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 being merely a political economist himself.Footnote 77 These shortcomings have beendeveloped 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 William's 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’.Footnote 78 William's 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. Gramsci's work on Italian higher philosophy and Catholicism provides a basis for much of Hall's 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.Footnote 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 reflect the historical dominance of one specific ethnicity. These are then reflected through the functional institutionalisation of both state and civil bodies. As a result Gramsci's work on hegemony, nation-building 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 conflict, especially within the literature of the post-colonial weak state.Footnote 80 New conflicts 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 find hegemony in its relationship.Footnote 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 offered 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.Footnote 82 Yet the realities of world politics in the post-Cold War era have revealed an environment where civil society has been defined 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 confines 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 Gramsci's work on religion. Whilst religion is picked up upon in many of contemporary accounts of Gramsci's work,Footnote 83 there is little drawn from it in IR, save from footnoting the importance Gramsci placed on Catholicism as a hugely influential agent in the development of the Italian state-civil complex and in the emergence of fascism. Yet, Gramsci's 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.Footnote 84 The main objective for Gramsci here was firstly to identity the role of religion as a hegemonic agent within civil society vis-à-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 first 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 influx of missionaries.Footnote 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 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’.Footnote 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. Gramscian-scholarship needs to fill a gap in the theoretical literature as a response to this.Footnote 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 Gramsci's 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 influential in the development of newly independent states in Africa, during the Cold War. Empirical emphasis was placed on the financial 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.Footnote 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 Gramsci's 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 confines 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 different focus of study might provide new avenues.Footnote 89 The reluctance to break with state-centrism and to adopt an approach that is largely (in its different 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.Footnote 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 off 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 fluid, 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 firmly 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 isn't 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 Cox's own reading of Gramsci through World Order is not an accurate assessment of hegemony, but that by looking at accounts of hegemony from different academic fields 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 Laclau's 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 Hall's 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. Gramsci's own position here could perhaps best be expressed in his own criticisms of Croce's brand of post-Marxism, where he constantly berates Croce for misunderstanding how Marxism (or the philosophy of praxis) treats the social and civil sphere.Footnote 91 Indeed here Adam Morton is to a certain degree correct when he notes that Laclau (and Mouffe) occupy a similar position to Croce himself, when attempting to move away from materialism.Footnote 92

Finally, this article has tentatively offered 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, conflict 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 financial backing and is satisfied 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.Footnote 93

References

1 For an illustration of this within the wider area of Political Science, see both Ann Showstack-Sassoon edited collection, (ed.) Approaches to Gramsci (London: Readers and Writers, 1982) and her explanatory monograph, Gramsci's Politics (New York: St Martin's, 1980), and also Chantel Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory (London: Verso, 1979). For more specialist accounts on the role of culture in Gramsci's work see Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso, 1988) and Raymond William's Culture and Materialism (London: Verso, 1980).

2 Whilst there is a wide range of literature on hegemony and leadership in International Relations, perhaps the most renowned is Robert Keohane's 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 Affairs, 5 (2003).

3 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).

4 Randall Germain and Michael Kenny, ‘'Engaging Gramsci: International Relations theory and the new Gramscians’, Review of International Studies, 24 (1998), pp. 3–21.

5 Peter Burnham, ‘Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and International Order’, Capital and Class, 45 (1991), pp. 73–95.

6 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. 91–116.

7 Stephen Gill, ‘Epistemology, Ontology and the ‘Italian School”’, in Gramsci, historical materialism and international relations, pp. 21–48.

8 Cox, Approaches to World Order, pp. 87–91.

9 Ibid., pp. 91–7; 102–4. 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 influential mainstream IR/IPE journals such as International Organizations and International Studies Quarterly, before recently moving to conservative journals such as National Interest and Foreign Affairs. 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. 242–54 and Bruce Russett, ‘The Mysterious Case of Vanishing Hegemony: or is Mark Twain Really Dead?’, International Organization, 39 (1985), pp. 207–31; whilst John Ikenberry, ‘Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order’, Foreign Affairs, 5 (2004), and Niall Ferguson, ‘Hegemony or Empire’ can be seen as being supportive of the latter.

10 Ibid., pp. 135–40.

11 Kenneth Waltz's 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.

12 Gill, ‘Epistemology, Ontology and the “Italian School”’, pp. 30–6.

13 Henk Overbeek, ‘Transnational historical materialism: theories of transnational class formation and world order’, in Ronen Palan (ed.), Global Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 168–84.

14 See for example, Stephen Gill's case study on the formation of the Trilateral Commission, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Craig Murphy's study on International Organizations, International Organizations and Industrial Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Mark Rupert's Ideologies of Globalization, that provides a focus on the hegemonic role of the World Trade Organization.

15 Owen Worth, ‘The Poverty and Potential of Gramscian Thought in International Relations’, International Politics, 45 (2008); Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging Gramsci’; Burnham, ‘Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and International Order’; Hobson, ‘Is Critical Theory Always For the White West and For Western Imperialism?

16 Worth, Ibid.

17 Cox, Approaches to World Order, pp. 85–144; Robert W. Cox, Power, Production and World Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

18 Williams, Culture and Materialism, p. 37.

19 Murphy, International Organizations and Industrial Change, pp. 49–80.

20 Stephen Gill, ‘Globalisation, Market Civilisation and Disciplinary Neoliberalism’, Millennium, 24 (1995), pp. 399–423.

21 Enrico Augelli and Craig Murphy, America's 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).

22 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. 144–62; Owen Worth, ‘Health for All?’, in J. Abbott and O. Worth (eds), Critical Perspectives on International Political Economy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 139–59.

23 Rupert, Ideologies of Globalization.

24 Andrew Gamble, ‘Regional Blocs, World Order and the New Medievalism’, in Mario Telo (ed.), European Union and the New Regionalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 21–39; B. Hettne, ‘Regionalism and World Order’, in Mary Farrell, Bjorn Hettne and Luk van Langenhove (eds), Global Politics of Regionalism (London: Pluto, 2005), pp. 269–87; Gerard Strange, ‘The Left against Europe? A Critical Engagement with New Constitutionalism and Structural Dependency Theory, Government and Opposition, 41 (2006), pp. 197–229.

25 Kees van der Pijl, Transnational Classes and International Relations.

26 Henk Overbeek, ‘Transnational historical materialism: theories of transnational class formation and world order’, p. 175.

27 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. 123–7.

28 van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class.

29 Baastian van Apeldoorn, ‘Transnationalisation and the Restructuring of Europe's socio-Economic Order’, International Journal of Political Economy, 28 (1998), pp. 12–53; B. van Apeldoorn, J. Drahokoupil and L. Horn (eds), Contradictions and Limits of Neoliberal European Governance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008).

30 This was one of the charges levelled by Germain and Kenny. Indeed much of van der Pijl's later claims made in Transnational Classes and International Relations demonstrate theseshortcomings even more. See Worth, Poverty and Potential of Gramscian Thought in International Relations.

31 This is demonstrated across Robinson's 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. 157–200.

32 These are perhaps best covered in Robinson's replies to various authors, including van der Pijl, see William Robinson, ‘Global Capitalism and the Nation-State centric thinking: What we don't see when we do see Nation States. Responses to Arrighi, Mann, Moore, van der Pijl and Went’, Science and Society, 65 (2002), pp. 500–08.

33 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. 467–99 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).

34 E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory & other essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978).

35 Burnham, ‘Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and International Order’, pp. 77–9; Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging Gramsci: International Relations theory and the new Gramscians’, pp. 10–12.

36 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 reflections to refraction: opening up Open Marxism’, Capital and Class, 78 (2002), pp. 87–116.

37 Adam Morton, ‘The grimly comic riddle of hegemony in IPE: where is class struggle?’, Politics, 26 (2006), pp. 62–72.

38 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 Bruff, ‘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. 332–51.

39 Bieler and Morton, ‘Globalisation, the state and class struggle’, pp. 489–91.

40 The best and most poignant example of this remains Cox's Power, Production and World Order.

41 Randall Germain, ‘“Critical” Political Economy, Historical Materialism and Adam Morton’, Politics, 27 (2007), p. 132.

42 See respectively, Augelli and Murphy America's quest for supremacy and the Third World and van der Pijl, Transnational Classes and International Relations.

43 Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging Gramsci’.

44 Cox, Approaches to World Order, pp. 135–6.

45 Gill, Power and Resistance, p. 56.

46 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. 273–391.

47 William Robinson, ‘Gramsci and Globalisation: From Nation-State Transnational Hegemony’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8 (2005), pp. 559–60.

48 See for example, Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, Globalization, Hegemony & Power: Anti-systemic Movements and the Global System (Bolder: CO: Paradigm, 2004).

49 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 Gramsci's 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. 22–34.

50 Robinson, ‘Gramsci and Globalisation’, pp, 561–2.

51 Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

52 The most recent accounts that illustrate this include (amongst many others) Andreas Bieler's 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 Korea's Political Economy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); Nicola Short, The International Politics of Post-Conflict in Guatemala (London: Palgrave, 2008). From a variety of different 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.

53 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).

54 Ibid.

55 Williams, Culture and Materialism, p. 38.

56 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. 109–28.

57 Joseph, ‘Hegemony and the structure-agency problem in IR’, p. 121.

58 For a wider introduction to Critical Realism see Andrew Brown, Steve Fleetwood and John Roberts (eds), Marxism and Critical Realism (London: Routledge, 2002).

59 Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985).

60 Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 10.

61 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. 31–42.

62 Hall will possibly be most remembered for his work in editing the highly influential journal Marxism Today with Martin Jacques.

63 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. 34–7.

64 Such an observation is perhaps best summed up through Hall's 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).

65 Stuart Hall, ‘The Problem of Ideology’, p. 45.

66 Mark Rupert, Ideologies of Globalization; Owen Worth, Hegemony, International Political Economy and Post-Communist Russia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 41–67.

67 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. 59–93.

68 David Lockwood, ‘Review of Hegemony, International Political Economy and Post-Communist Russia’, Slavic Review, 65 (2006), 620–22.

69 Bieler and Morton, ‘Globalisation, the state and class struggle’, pp. 481–9.

70 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 orthodox economics and looking at building upon Marx's Capital – often referred to as the various volumes of the Critique of Political Economy.

71 Indeed, much of the sketchy material that Gramsci did write on ‘critical economy’ was often encouraged and enhanced by Piero Staffa, 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 Gramsci's material on Political Economy, see Antonio Gramsci, Further Selections of the Prison Notebook, pp. 161–278.

72 Ibid., pp. 230–60.

73 Robert Cox, Approaches to World Order, pp. 27–30.

74 Gill, ‘Epistemology, Ontology and the “Italian School”’, p. 22.

75 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.

76 Overbeek, ‘Transnational historical materialism’, pp. 168–9.

77 Richard Wyn Jones, ‘Introduction: Locating Critical International Relations Theory’, in R. Wyn Jones (ed.), Critical Theory & World Politics (Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), pp 5–6.

78 Raymond Williams, Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 191–2.

79 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 331.

80 Stuart Hall, ‘Gramsci's relevance for the study of race and ethnicity’, in Morley and Chen (eds), Stuart Hall, pp. 411–40.

81 Ibid., pp. 435–40.

82 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); Jeffrey T. Checkel, ‘The Constructivist Turn in International Relations’, World Politics, 50 (1998), pp. 324–48; Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press).

83 See for example John Fulton, ‘Religion and Politics in Gramsci: An introduction’, in Sociological Analysis, 48 (1987), pp. 197–216 and Otto Maduro, Religion and Social Conflicts (New York: Orbis, 1981).

84 Gramsci, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 1–137.

85 Ibid., pp. 115–8.

86 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebook, pp. 131–4.

87 Mustapha Pasha, ‘Islam, ‘Soft’ Orientalism and Hegemony: A Gramscian Rereading’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8 (2005), pp. 543–58.

88 Augelli and Murphy, America's quest for supremacy and the Third World.

89 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. 134–40.

90 Susan Strange, ‘The Persistent Myth of Lost Hegemony’, International Organization. 41 (1987), pp. 551–74.

91 In response to Croce's 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 Philosophy of Praxis does not exclude ethnic-political history. The opposition between Croce's historical doctrines and the philosophy of praxis lies in the speculative nature of Croce's conception. Gramsci, Further Selections of the Prison Notebooks, p. 330.

92 Adam Morton, ‘A double reading of Gramsci: beyond the logic of contingency’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8 (2005), pp. 439–54.

93 Gramsci, Selection from the Prison Notebooks, p. 167.