Framework of Analysis

1. Framework of Analysis Ch. 1, Payne

2. Most important line of division within the world order is the one between richer countries versus poorer countries • Interpreting Sept. 11 from this perspective (that September 11 reflected this divide between the ‘richer’ and ‘poorer’ parts of the world. • All countries now wrapped up together in globalization. • The divide between the poor and the rich-old fissure within the history of modern international politics. • This divide drove forward in the 1970s a powerful protest movement, calling for the enactment for New International Economic Orderto bring about fairer economic relations between the countries of the world. • This demand was prosecuted within the Conference on International Economic Cooperation and fourth UNConference on Trade and Development. • In the final analysis, the NIEO demand failed to shift the inherited hierarchies of the world order. The summit of selected heads of state held in 1981 could not agree on final communique. This marks the end of this particular phase of history.

3. There is a need to reassess the academic debate • Lack of conceptual clarity • Korany: Our global ‘conceptual geography’ needs reordering. Are basic categories such as the Third World or Nonalignment still relevant in the new global equation? • Chapter: briefly reconsiders the dominant conceptual frameworksused in the1960s through 1980s • Then discussion of liberal and sociological political economy perspectives • Finally, preferred method of analysis (i.e. critical political economy)

4. The dominant concepts of the past • Notion of the ‘Third World’. Sauvy’s ‘third estate’: referred to the common people before the French Revolution. Usage implied poverty, powerlessness and marginalization, then used for ex-colonial countries • (First World: Western capitalist countries, Second World: Soviet Bloc) • Another simple dichotomy provided by modernization theory. World seen in terms of developing’ countries or ‘less developed countries’ versus ‘developed’ countries • Developed countries as a model for the less developed countries to follow • Dependency perspective much different, but similar categorizations: ‘underdeveloped’ versus ‘developed’ • World system: ‘core’ versus ‘periphery’, semi-periphery • North-South divide drew a line between Northern and Southern Hemispheres • Brandt Commission (of 1980) brought together in the late 70s a group of eminent social democratic politicians to examine international development priorities • Short-lived ‘North-South’ dialogue • But was not sustained after mid-1980s • All these conceptualizations are dated and flawed.

5. Example: Third World is less meaningful following collapse of Soviet Union (i.e. second world) • Problem is the dichotomous categorization • There are, in fact, many ‘Norths’ and many ‘Souths’….no homogeneity

6. Conventional contemporary interpretations and their problems • Therien: Bretton Woods paradigm versus United Nations paradigm • IMF, World Bank, GATT and WTO • UNDP, ILO • Bretton Woods institutions optimistic • But,Bretton Woods institutions did also concede that there are ‘zones of extreme poverty’ • Bretton Woods institutions perceive poverty to be domestic in causality (‘the result of a temporary misadaption of markets). • UN paradigm remains closer to the spirit of radicalism embracing concept of ‘global poverty’ • Emphasizes unequal distribution of fruits of development • Globalization generates losers and winners • UN no longer treats developing countries as a homogeneous group • UNDP broadened approach by quoting aggregate statistics: e.g. 100 million people below poverty line in OECD countries….

7. Neither approach moves us forward theoretically. • Bretton Woods paradigm is based on classic economic liberal position- draws on a worldview that favours market solutions to development needs. Establishment of a minimal state to secure the operation of the market is necessary. • This approached buried the notion of situational peculiarity of the Third World within a universalist liberal discourse which asserted that development was a process attainable all over the world, provided that the market was allowed itself over the state.

8. UN paradigm based on sociological strand associated with Ankie Hoogvelt and William I. Robinson. • Hoogvelt argued that the ‘familiar pyramid of the core-periphery hierarchy is no longer a geographic but a social division of the world economy’. Robinson called for for a break with all analyses that put nation-states at their centre and a reconsideration not on the basis of territory but social groups, esp. classes. (Third World nestled within the First World). (Global class analysis, each cr • Both perspectives underplay international politics, most of still goes on in and between states, globalization notwithstanding. • Each makes the mistake of assuming that somehow the global restructuring of the last decade or so has led to traditional interstate political conflicts about development being superseded.

9. The politics of critical political economy • Drawing inspiration from critical theory of Frankfurt School and • Writing of Robert Cox • Critical in the sense that it asks how the prevailing world order came about… • Cox’s formulation contained the possibility of drawing outlines of alternative distributions of power from those prevailing at the time. • Cox: method of historical structures conceived as: • Configurations of forces: material capabilities, ideas and institutions that do not determine actions but create opportunities and impose constraints) • Material capabilities were defined as natural resources transformed by technology and organization • Ideas were divided into two kinds: intersubjective and contested ideologies • Institutions reflected amalgamations of ideas and material power at time of inception but took on their own life • ‘no one way determinism’ between these three forces • Social forces engendered by different and changing production processes; the varying forms of state derived from different state/society complexes; types of world order • The three levels were perceived to be interrelated • Notion of world order is preferable to world systems according to Cox (allows for change and does not entail a natural equilibrium connotation of system)

10. State/society complexes (as opposed to individual states) • Cox incorporated World Systems theory as well as Gramscian concepts (ideational dimension) into his approach • ‘watery Marxism’ or ‘pluralist empiricism’? – critiques of Cox • But Payne likes Cox and his approach • Payne is aware of the agent-structure problem and the potential of deterministic tendencies in the critical political economy framework • ‘Structural context’

11. Plan of the book • Part I: Reviewing and taking up positions on some of the most important debates about politics and international relations that have been generated within critical political economy over the past few years • Hegemony, globalization, states, development (Chapter 2) • Part II: ‘structural context’ • Part III: activities of the various agents that then prosecute this politics in ‘diplomatic arenas’