Inter-State Relations: Furthering National Interests

In the context of debate on the question of imperialism, inter-imperialist rivalry and geopolitical conflicts, Lacher and Teschke (2007) criticize contemporary historical materialist theoretical accounts of global capitalism with respect to the relationship between the inter-state system and capital. They claim that these approaches are inattentive to the historically changing forms of inter-state geopolitical competition, because these conceptions presume the territoriality of the state system as an internal necessary aspect of capitalism, while territoriality of the state is a pre-capitalist legacy that still produces and structures the geopolitical dimension of the capitalist world system. Callinicos (2009) attempted to overcome these criticisms by providing an alternative account of geopolitical inter-state competition on the basis of multiplicity of the state system. He says that the states have distinct interests from the interests of capital, and this divergence between the interests of the state and capital stems from the uneven and combined development of capitals, and it expresses itself in geopolitical competitions between the states. However, I will argue that despite their claims to produce non-economistic and non-functionalist accounts of inter-state relations, Lacher, Teschke and Callinicos could not go beyond economism and functionalism and they could not reveal the historically specific constitution of the political form of state and the inter-state relations under capitalism. Through a critical discussion of these authors, I will argue that Marx’s value-form critique of capital, as developed by Eldred (1984) and Reuten and Williams (1989), can allow us to provide a non-functionalist/economistic conceptualization of inter-state relations under global capital relation. I will claim that the state as the universal social subject that aims the realization of the universal well-being of civil society appears in the context of the multiplicity of the state system as a particular social subject striving for its national interests in competition with other states.