nin.’s Reviews > The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations > Status Update

“The historical movement of ‘geopolitical’ expropriation (imperialism) which brought about the partial integration of non-European peoples into the world market (in some cases effected by a forced ‘liberation’ of labour) appears in its outcome, the world of independent ‘nation-states’, as the sovereign emancipation of the peoples.” 1/2

“The main factor which prevented non-European societies from being treated in the same way was the very different social structure of those societies, in which labour was not a ‘thing’ able to be commanded by money, production was oriented towards subsistence, and financial investment was therefore unable to lay hold of the means of wealth-creation.”

“Far from being just another great power [the United States, historically], this great, defining fixture of postwar international relations is the child of the industrial-capitalist transformation of Europe. Indeed, having no formal ethnic definition, its national (constitutional) identity is practically indistinguishable from the purest ideological expression of capitalist relations of production.”

“It is not enough to perform the usual exposé and walk away. To secure the ground we must pursue our methodological critique into the sketching of an alternative historical explanation. We must give our own answer to the riddle of historical appearances. And it must be a better one.”

“In the end, the ultimate judgement we can make of a substantive social theory is whether it enables us to write better history.”

“A substantive theoretical argument must remain permanently open to the threat of empirical refutation – otherwise it must give up its claim to be engaging with historical realities.”

“The very notion of a distinctive field of IR, separated somehow from what goes on inside nations or ‘societies’, is in some part symptomatic of the limitations in social thought […]. Although there must be divisions of labour and specialism within the social sciences, there can be no justification for the theoretical aberrations which this particular disciplinary partitioning tends to perpetuate.”

“The Europeans did not carve up the planet in order to extend the states-system. But they did install the colonial state apparatuses for their own purposes of exploitation and control; […] and the mobilization for independence was supplemented from the outside by American pressure for unrestricted economic access, clothed in a rhetoric of freedom and selfdetermination.”

“IR remains, in terms of the sheer weight of numbers, resources and publications ‘an American social science’”

france cannot have equal amount of tanks as britain, no matter how much they hate each other, cuz the yellowjackets, farmers, and parisians as collective would make macron into a literal baguette and eat him >>> is an actual sentence a wrote as a note to a friend. needed to share. 🇫🇷🦅✨