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Recasting Gramsci in international politics

OWEN WORTH

Review of International Studies / Volume 37 / Issue 01 / January 2011, pp 373 - 392

DOI: 10.1017/S0260210510000318, Published online: 30 April 2010

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0260210510000318

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OWEN WORTH (2011). Recasting Gramsci in international politics. Review of International
Studies, 37, pp 373-392 doi:10.1017/S0260210510000318

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Review of International Studies (2011), 37, 373–392  2010 British International Studies Association
doi:10.1017/S0260210510000318 First published online 30 Apr 2010

Recasting Gramsci in international politics

OWEN WORTH*

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.

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

Gramsci’s entry into international politics appeared as a counter-argument to

conventional thinking both within the theoretical academic discipline of Inter-
national 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.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 Gramsci’s 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 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).
373
374 Owen Worth

dominant states shaped and control specific 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 significantly 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

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
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.
 Recasting Gramsci in international politics 375

coedited volume entitled Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Rela-

tions. In these early articles Cox distinguishes between what he terms ‘problem-
solving’ 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
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.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.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
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 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.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

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 Inter-
national 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.
376 Owen Worth

blocs can be used to explain the internationalisation (and subsequent ‘globalisa-

tion’) 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 offered by Cox and those involved with Gill’s
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 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.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.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.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
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.
 Recasting Gramsci in international politics 377

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.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 civilis-
ation 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 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.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.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.

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.
378 Owen Worth

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.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 organi-
sations, ranging from the masons to the Bildenberg Conferences and the Trilateral
Commission.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,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
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 these
 Recasting Gramsci in international politics 379

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.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,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.33 This move has obviously differed from develop-
ments 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.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.
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.
380 Owen Worth

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 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.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.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 System’s inspired accounts of
structuralism in international politics40 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

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.
 Recasting Gramsci in international politics 381

need to avoid such ‘vulgar’ class reductionism, his approach remains ‘curiously
wedded to such a caricature’.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.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
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’,44 often resulting in a ‘hegemonic crisis’, often accompanied by
economic and military conflict.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.46
To illustrate this further it might be of use to look at Robinson’s categorisa-
tions 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
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.
382 Owen Worth

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.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 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).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

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).
 Recasting Gramsci in international politics 383

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.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.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 transporta-
tion 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.56 This

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.
384 Owen Worth

indeed builds upon Gramsci’s own assertions on the complex and contradictory
relationship between structure and agency within the fashioning of hegemony.57
What Joseph’s 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 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’.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’.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

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.
 Recasting Gramsci in international politics 385

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 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.62 Hall maintains the Laclauian concept of articulation and also
acknowledges that no fixed ideological relationship exists between classes vis-à-vis
production.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’.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

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).
386 Owen Worth

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.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.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 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’.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,’70 much of the brief work he did on International

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
 Recasting Gramsci in international politics 387

Political Economy was generalised, often journalistic and presented as a commen-

tary.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 field of IR as a whole.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.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 ‘transna-
tional historical materialist approach to political economy’.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

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.
388 Owen Worth

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 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’.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.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

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.
 Recasting Gramsci in international politics 389

weak state.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.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.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,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.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.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
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.
390 Owen Worth

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 collec-
tion 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.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.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

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.
 Recasting Gramsci in international politics 391

study might provide new avenues.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.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.91 Indeed here Adam Morton is to a

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
392 Owen Worth

certain degree correct when he notes that Laclau (and Mouffe) occupy a similar
position to Croce himself, when attempting to move away from materialism.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.93

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.