History

Highlighting the world-historical significance of the ‘long 19th century’ (1776–1914) in ushering in the global transformation marking the birth of ‘global modernity’, Buzan and Lawson have offered a much-welcome corrective to the continuing inability of much conventional IR theory to grasp the main logics of modern international relations. As they put it, ‘Marginalizing modernity means that IR rests on unstable foundations’ (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 10). Indeed, failure to recognize the deeply rooted nature of international relations within historically dynamic social structures has resulted in the content of modern international relations being dissolved into generic categories (‘anarchy’, ‘balance of power’, ‘security dilemma’, etc.) that provide little by way of theoretical illumination. This is not to say that conventional IR ignores history. There have been a number of deeply historically informed classic works (e.g. Gilpin Reference Reus-Smit1981). Rather, the problem is the type of engagement with history these works have often entailed: an ahistoricist approach to history that conceives the temporally distinct logics of international relations throughout history as more or less undifferentiated expressions of transhistorical forces (for exceptions, see Ruggie Reference Phillips1993; Spruyt Reference Rosenberg1994; Nexon Reference Mann2009).

In this respect, there has been a strong tendency in conventional ‘neo-positivist’ IR approaches towards a kind of shared historical aphasia: a ‘calculated forgetting’ (Thompson Reference Shilliam2015, 45) of the sociohistorical embeddedness of international relations.Footnote ¹ Neo-positivist IR ‘forgets’ history in the sense that they instrumentalize the use of it. History is conceived as a ‘pre-determined site’ for ‘data accumulation’ and/or the ‘empirical verification of abstract claims’ (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 332; see also Lawson Reference Kagarlitsky2012). Consequently, much neo-positivist IR is stuck within the homogenous ‘timeless’ time of perennial interstate competition and war. Though great powers may rise and fall, everything else remains the same. Even those IR scholars studying international change often remained trapped, as Reus-Smit (2016) notes, within Gilpin’s ‘system/systemic’ dichotomy obfuscating ‘larger macro-historical transformation’, thereby rendering ‘systems change compatible with the prevailing structural mode of theorizing’.

If TGT re-orients disciplinary IR in a more historical–sociological direction, this in itself would constitute a major achievement. While one might challenge some of the details of their story, on the whole, the tightly knit historical narrative Buzan and Lawson weave is penetrating and convincing. The ‘long 19th century’ was indeed a pivotal epoch of ‘macro-historical’ change representing one of the ‘great divides’ in human history (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 21, 46). Unlike earlier world-historical transformations – such as the Neolithic Revolution – the differentia specifica of the global transformation was the highly condensed temporal form it took, with many ‘major changes happening on a scale of decades rather than centuries’ (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 23). Buzan and Lawson are also on solid ground in their identification of the key processes (‘rational’ state-building, industrialization, and ‘ideologies of progress’) that drove the transformation and the concomitant forging of a new ‘mode of power’ – the ‘social sources’ of power ‘generative of both actors and the ways in which power is exercised’ (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 307, 1 (fn. 2), 307).

Perhaps their most important contribution to deciphering the global transformation is the foregrounding of intersocietal relations and astute attention to the intertwined and co-constitutive processes in forging (and potential eroding) the modern ‘core-periphery’ international order (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 171–237). Rejecting traditional IR and historical–sociological conceptions of modernity’s emergence as a ‘uniquely European development arising from endogenous, self-generating civilizational qualities’, Buzan and Lawson highlight ‘the ‘entangled histories’ and ‘multiple vectors’ that combined to vault Western states into a position of pre-eminence’. Hence: ‘Modernity was a global process both in terms of origins and outcomes’ (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 7).

Moreover, rather than positing the typical, Eurocentric process of unidirectional West-to-East diffusion, Buzan and Lawson examine the myriad ways in which state practices and organizational forms first forged in the colonial ‘periphery’ radiated back to the imperial ‘metropole’ in the creation and consolidation of modern, ‘rational’ states (e.g. Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 31, 40, 186). Buzan and Lawson thus illustrate the thick geo-social relations of interaction and co-constitution between Global North and South in their joint, if uneven, making of modern world politics – processes further brought out in their examination of revolutions and anti-colonial struggles (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 138–47). In these ways, they take a number of major steps forward in writing the multiple, variegated histories of the ‘periphery’ back into the histories of the ‘core’, while demonstrating their manifold interlinkages.

Theory

A critique of TGT does not reside in the general narrative offered by Buzan and Lawson but, rather, that the book remains just that: a narrative or ‘composite picture’. In all the mixing and melding of different theoretical approaches, a substantive theoretical conception and explanation of the global transformation gets lost. Of course, theoretical eclecticism is not a bad thing in itself. It can be a highly productive means of drawing out the best elements of different traditions in generating more cogent theoretical explanations. Yet this is not the road taken by Buzan and Lawson. In fact, they seem downright resistant to making theoretical claims that might assist in explaining the global transformation besides an implicit emphasis on ‘multi-causality’. They explicitly state as much when writing (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 10, 11):

But the question is why? Why would offering novel theoretical arguments regarding the causes of the global transformation require a different book?

This is not simply an issue of opposing conceptions of theory and theorizing; a question of what constitutes ‘proper theory’, as Reus-Smit puts it in this symposium, since Buzan and Lawson (Reference Buzan and Lawson2015b) are committed to some conception of causality. Rather, the problem is the absence of any discussion of TGT’s underlying theoretical assumptions or, relatedly, their conception of causality and the structured relations between the driving forces of the global transformation. The reader is thus left with a patchwork of different theoretical perspectives and commitments – never fully worked out or related to one another – and a marked ambiguity concerning the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of some of the central developments in the making of global modernity.

Yet, a number of historical–sociological IR works from very different theoretical traditions have productively married in-depth macro-historical analyses with original theoretical claims without losing sight of historical specificities (see inter alia, Rosenberg Reference Matin1994; Spruyt Reference Rosenberg1994; Teschke Reference Ruggie2003; Hobson Reference Gilpin2004; Nexon Reference Mann2009). There seems no reason why Buzan and Lawson’s emphasis on the significance of the ‘long 19th century’ to IR and theorizing its causal dynamics need be mutually exclusive. Indeed, quite the opposite. If the goal is to reconstruct IR theory on historical–sociological grounds, in part helping to historicize theory to better theorize history, then this aim would have been strengthened through the development of systematic theoretical arguments regarding the origins of the global transformation. For without a theoretical understanding of its causes, how are we to come to a more historically attuned conception of global modernity than those offered by existing approaches? In other words, what is the precise theoretical contribution of TGT to their aforementioned ‘shared conversation about how to conceptualize, historicize and theorize global modernity’?

From the perspective of IR, TGT does have something to offer in stressing the need to more adequately historicize international relations. This alone is important given neo-positivist IR’s historical aphasia. Though disciplinary (and, especially, conventional North American) IR is the main target of Buzan and Lawson’s book, they clearly also want their work to speak to a wider audience in connected disciplines (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 331–33). And this is the great ‘missed opportunity’ of cross-disciplinary theoretical fertilization (Allinson Reference Allinson2015). For while Buzan and Lawson are at pains to emphasize the international dynamics underpinning the global transformation, they stop short of offering any explicit theorization of them. In short, they lack a theory of change (see also Musgrave and Nexon Reference Rosenberg2016).

This is again intentional on their part, but no less unfortunate. For the very concept of UCD that Buzan and Lawson deploy as an ‘analytical-heuristic’ device is intended as a means to theorize the international dimensions of sociohistorical causality that Buzan and Lawson are so concerned with (Rosenberg Reference Musgrave and Nexon2006, Reference Nexon2013). And it does so in a way that eschews the kinds of neo-positivist and linear forms of causality they are intent to avoid (cf. Cooper Reference Buzan and Little2013; Anievas and Nişancioğlu Reference Anievas and Nişancioğlu2015; Buzan and Lawson Reference Wade2016). By purposely limiting their use of UCD (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 21, fn. 2), one possible means through which Buzan and Lawson could have made a major theoretical intervention is lost.

More problematically still, when Buzan and Lawson come to conceptualize the global transformation, they fall back on a contingent-based, conjunctural perspective. Their ‘configurational approach’ conceptualizes the global transformation as ‘involving a complex configuration of industrialization, rational state-building and ideologies of progress’ that came to ‘concatenate in historically specific form’. These transformations are in turn understood as ‘arising from the conjunctural intersection of sequences of events and processes that are causally, but contingently, interrelated’ (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 1, fn. 1, emphasis added). In short, ‘modernity was a contingent concatenation of social forces, a complex jumble of myriad events and processes’ (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 8). Yet, this collapses what should be an epochal mode of analysis into a conjunctural one, emphasizing the interactive play of free-floating contingently related causes. One can certainly agree that ‘big events do not require big causes’. However, the global transformation was not simply an event; it was, in Buzan and Lawson’s (Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 324) words, ‘a case of long-term transformation’. The result is a precarious engagement with the longer term (often structural) sources of the dynamics they conceive as driving the global transformation (cf. Musgrave and Nexon Reference Rosenberg2016; Phillips Reference Wood2016). For if it is correct that the novel ‘mode of power’ which ‘coalesced in a small group of polities’ during the long 19th century ‘had deep roots, some of which went back centuries’ (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 8), then it cannot be fully explained by a contingent-based, conjunctural framework.

Contingency

This is not to deny that contingencies played a – at times, crucial – part in the making of global modernity. Nonetheless, something much deeper, more structural, was also at work. This becomes evident when we pose the question of exactly how Buzan and Lawson’s drivers of change can be conceived as contingent in any meaningful sense?

First, rational state-building practices – the ‘process by which administrative and bureaucratic competences were accumulated and “caged” within national territories’ – were present and advancing (if ‘incomplete’) in the United Provinces (t’Hart Reference Rosenberg1993; Brandon Reference Brandon2015), England (Brewer Reference Brewer1989; Teschke Reference Ruggie2003, 249–70) and possibly Sweden (Kagarlitsky Reference Hobson2014, Ch. 4) during the 17th and 18th centuries. Second, one of Buzan and Lawson’s four ‘ideologies of progress’ (‘scientific’ racism) was a development originating in the Euro-Amerindian encounter in the Americas and resulting African slave trade during the late 17th and 18th centuries (Linebaugh and Rediker Reference Lawson2000, 135–39; Wade Reference Spruyt2000), not a product of the long 19th century as they claim. These macro-transformational processes were, moreover, organically related to the (uneven and combined) development of capitalist relations in Northwestern Europe, with ‘non-Western’ agents and structural processes playing a decisive role in their emergence (Anievas and Nişancioğlu Reference Anievas and Nişancioğlu2015).

Might not this longer time-frame, say from the 17th century to the early 20th century, be a more appropriate one in understanding the origins of global modernity? Such a perspective would allow for a more temporally (and spatially) de-centred conception of ‘origins’ making for a more fruitful balance between ‘breakpoint’, ‘evolutionary’, and ‘processual’ understandings of change (see Reus-Smit Reference Thompson2016).

The structural character of these processes becomes even more apparent when turning to industrialization. The development of capitalism and its geopolitical expansion were necessary conditions for industrialization’s take-off (Wood Reference t’hart2002; Anievas and Nişancioğlu Reference Anievas and Nişancioğlu2015) – a claim Buzan and Lawson would not likely dispute. Indeed, one could argue that the internationally structured emergence of capitalism provided the conditions of possibility for all three elements of the new ‘mode of power’ – rational states, industrialization, and ideologies of progress – that Buzan and Lawson conceive as integral, but contingently related, aspects of the global transformation. From the perspective of the long 19th century, these processes might appear ‘conjunctural’, but not if one takes a longer view.

What then is the precise explanatory role that contingencies play in their account? It would seem very little. Take Buzan and Lawson’s discussion of the relations between industrialization (and implicitly capitalism), the rise of a core-periphery world order and rational state-building. ‘Prior to modernity’, they write (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 39), ‘economic relations were generally political tools through which elites exerted their authority’, as with peasant–landlord relations of the corvée. Pre-capitalist societies were, in other words, characterized by a fusion of political and economic functions underpinning processes of surplus extraction. With the advent of capitalism, these two conjoined spheres (political and economic) were differentiated (Wood Reference t’hart2002). Accompanying this ‘shift to economies mediated by prices, wage-contracts and commodities’, states came to provide ‘the legal frameworks that sustained market transactions’ assuming ‘many of the regulative and coercive functions that underpinned capitalist expansion’ (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015a, 39). Rational states were in turn ‘sustained’ by capitalist industrialization and ‘grew through’ imperialism while facilitating such reinforcing domestic–international dynamics in generating a core-periphery world order. By their own account, then, the interconnections between capitalism and industrialization, on the one hand, and the development of a core-periphery world market and rational state, on the other, were structurally related. But rather than teasing out these structural relations from a more international, non-Eurocentric historical–sociological account, as the framework of UCD (among others) could have provided, Buzan and Lawson ‘refrain from … explicating its effects’ or causes ‘in systematic theoretical terms’ (Go Reference Cooper2015).

Ultimately in their rush to eschew all forms of ‘monocausal’ explanation, which Buzan and Lawson seem to equate with structural theorizing writ large, they largely side-step the task of theorizing the global transformation in all its depth and complexity. In response to Go’s (Reference Cooper2015) similar criticism regarding the ‘relative absence of theory’ in TGT, Buzan and Lawson (Reference Buzan and Lawson2015b) reaffirm their rejection of

Yet, this conflates monocausal explanations with structural ones or even theory itself. Providing a descriptive, narrative-driven examination of the conjunctural intertwining of event and processes that were causally, but contingently, interconnected may make for highly stimulating reading, but it does not add up to a theoretical argument – or if it is a theoretical argument (see the essays by Reus-Smit (Reference Thompson2016) and Buzan and Lawson (Reference Wade2016)), it does not improve upon many existing accounts, which would require a more convincing account of the key drivers of change and the relations between them.

For one of the major achievements of many contemporary historical–sociological treatises on the making of the modern world (e.g. Anderson Reference Anderson1974; Wallerstein 1974–Reference Teschke2011; Mann Reference Lawson1986, Reference Linebaugh and Rediker1993; Wood Reference t’hart2002) has been their focus on the structural interconnections of those processes Buzan and Lawson conceive as contingencies. Even neo-Weberians espousing multi-causality have not shunned structural modes of explanations. In the neo-Weberian discourse, notions such as the ‘co-determination’, ‘mutual interdependence’, or ‘entwined development’ of social relations are not the same as conceiving them as contingent. Rather, they seek to capture the ‘multiple, overlapping and intersecting networks of social interaction’ that ‘entwine’ in transforming the different sources of power’s ‘inner shapes’ and ‘outward trajectories’ (Mann Reference Lawson1986, 2, Reference Linebaugh and Rediker1993, 2). These relations are simultaneously mutually interdependent and (partially) autonomous, irreducible to any singularly conceived ‘essence’ (Mann Reference Linebaugh and Rediker1993, 4). Contingencies and ‘world-historical’ accidents (Mann Reference Lawson1986, 508) do play their part in neo-Weberians accounts. Nevertheless, the primary model of causality is structural or systemic.

Whether or not one agrees with these accounts,Footnote ² they do offer a more cogent (albeit often Eurocentric) theoretical explanation of the rise of global modernity than a contingent-based one. While Buzan and Lawson are correct in breaking out of the Eurocentric cage – marking an analytical advance over such perspectives – they end up replicating some of the theoretical problems besetting similar contingent-based, ‘revisionist’ accounts of the ‘great divergence’ (e.g. Hobson Reference Gilpin2004; cf. Anievas and Nişancioğlu Reference Anievas and Nişancioğlu2015, 247–51).

The history–contingency–theory nexus

One possible response to this line of critique might be that Buzan and Lawson’s emphasis on the contingent nature of global modernity is the theoretical point. In other words, by underscoring the radical contingencies of macro-transformational processes, they are in fact making a theoretical argument against overly structuralist accounts of modernity and international relations (see Reus-Smit Reference Thompson2016). And, of course, IR and historical sociology are no strangers to structuralism. But Buzan and Lawson’s contingent-based, conjunctural mode of analysis is not the same as internalizing contingencies into the realm of theory. Rather, it sensitizes analyses to ‘the contingent, disruptive, constitutive impact of local events, particularities and discontinuities’ (Lawson Reference Kagarlitsky2012, 207), without reconstituting contingencies as a potential object of theorization. And here too, there is something of a ‘missed opportunity’ to TGT as the ‘analytic-heuristic’ of UCD they draw upon could have been deployed as a means to theorize such contingent phenomena. How so?Footnote ³

Since unevenness posits developmental variations both within and between societies, along with the attendant spatial differentiations between them, the starting point for theoretical investigation is an empirical observation about the basic ontology of human development: that a multiplicity of societies varying in size, culture, political organization, and economic systems is a transhistorical feature of history (cf. Rosenberg Reference Musgrave and Nexon2006; Anievas and Nişancioğlu Reference Anievas and Nişancioğlu2015). From this perspective, one is able to capture both the quantitative (multiple societies) and qualitative (different societies) aspects of development (Rosenberg Reference Nexon2013, 576). But rather than simply describing two static conditions of development (multiplicity–difference), UCD captures how their dialectical interaction forms the socio-relational texture of the historical process, wherein the shifting identity of a particular society accumulates and crystalizes (Rosenberg Reference Musgrave and Nexon2006, 324).

Emphasizing the specificities of a society’s development as a necessary (albeit highly variable) outcome of this broader intersocietal milieu, historical development itself becomes irreducible to any unilinear path. Thus, as Rosenberg (Reference Musgrave and Nexon2006, 317) notes, ‘while the concrete pattern of socio-cultural diversity at any given time is contingent, the fact of this diversity itself is not’. Building upon this passage, Cooper (Reference Buzan and Little2013) teases out the implications of UCD in incorporating contingencies within the bounds of theory. His claim is that when diverse and differentially situated social formations interact – whether through cooperation, conflict, or cross-cultural exchange – this results ‘in particular outcomes that cannot be anticipated in advance and are therefore “contingent”’. The ‘more-than-one’ ontological premise that unevenness incorporates (Rosenberg Reference Nexon2013), thus imparts upon the developmental process an unpredictable, contingent character generating highly variegated outcomes. As such, ‘[w]hether a given set of cultural meanings, social forms and processes are passed generationally across time, or socially across space, is dependent on a whole web of “necessary but contingent” interactions’ (Cooper Reference Buzan and Little2013, 592).

The indeterminacy of outcomes this involves, along with the ‘contingent, disruptive, constitutive impact of local events, particularities and discontinuities’ on sociohistorical processes, can therefore be reconceptualized as an intrinsic property of development itself. One benefit of UCD is thus the capacity to theoretically explain the differentiated forms of agency and outcomes emergent from these ‘necessary but contingent’ interactions contradicting any deterministic, linear reading of causality and development. In these ways, ‘contingency’ and ‘necessity’ can be brought into a more productive, historically sensitive framework going beyond contingent and structural-based theories of modernity.