Uneven and Combined Development

Uneven and Combined Development – ‘The International’ in Theory and History

Justin Rosenberg

Source: Historical Sociology and World History – Uneven and Combined Development over the Longue Durée

Edited by Alexander Anievas and Kamran Matin, London/New York 2016, pp. 17-30

The idea of uneven and combined development (UCD) was originally formulated by the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, in the early twentieth century.1 Largely neglected for several decades, it has recently undergone a significant revival, with over 70 articles about it being published in the last ten years alone.2 Arguably this newfound popularity reflects the properties of the idea itself—for it is at once both simple and yet profound. The simplicity can be grasped if one considers the phrase itself, which draws together three claims about the human world.

•฀ The world is uneven: it contains not one but many societies of many different kinds, different levels and stages of development, some stronger and richer than others and so on;

•฀ This is not just a comparative fact about the world. Because these societies co-exist, they also interact with each other—their existence is combined;

•฀ And this interaction is itself a key driver of historical development and change. So much so, that we cannot understand the world if we do not factor it in.

This summary perhaps also makes it clear why the current revival has been occurring predominantly in the field of international relations (IR). After all, it would be hard to imagine an idea that does more to emphasise the importance of IR for understanding the world around us. And yet, stated on its own in this way, the idea can also appear to be simply obvious. How then is it profound? Why all the fuss about ‘uneven and combined development’? In order to answer these questions, we need to recall the context of the idea: we need to know what problems it solves, so that we can see how powerful it can be.

 This chapter seeks to meet these needs by setting out the idea in four parts. First, we shall provide the general context, so we can see what the problem is that this idea addresses—the problem of the international. Then, we shall recall how this problem first presented itself to Trotsky and how it led him to produce the idea of uneven and combined development. Third, we must consider the question of how big an idea this is: does it relate only to the modern world, or did Trotsky stumble upon something that applies to human history as a whole? And finally, we shall return to the present day and ask what this idea can tell us about the world in the twenty-first century.

THE PROBLEM OF THE INTERNATIONAL

The international dimension of human affairs is all around us. Nobody who read the newspapers in 2014 could have missed the souring of relations between Washington and Moscow over Syrian chemical weapons, or the Edward Snowden affair, or events in Ukraine; they could watch the wrangling among Eurozone states over economic policy and bail-outs; they would know about French military interventions in sub-Saharan Africa and so on. International politics, it seems, are always in the news.

But the international dimension is not only something ‘out there’ in the military and political struggles between states. It is also part of a population’s domestic public consciousness of itself as a national society. This too can be readily seen in the media. It shows up in the endless stream of comparisons through which people are continually placing their own society in an international setting in order to criticise it, or boast about it or make demands on it in some way. People compare: rates of economic growth, or manufacturing productivity or monetary inflation; standards of education or other public services; and levels of social justice and democracy. In all these cases, and more besides, politicians, think tanks, academics and campaigning organisations of all kinds are continuously comparing how things are done in other societies, and what can be copied and applied to improve things in their own society to prevent it from falling behind.

And of course societies do not relate to each other only through com- parison. They are also materially interdependent in all kinds of ways. Even the fresh fruit and vegetables in a typical supermarket come from all over the world. But that is only the start. Modern industrial economies depend extensively on both importing and exporting goods and services of all kinds. Indeed, globally, ‘[t]he sum of exports and imports is now higher than 50% of global production’ (Nagdy and Roser 2015). Cut these off, and many societies would grind to a halt.

Finally, even the things that appear as most distinctively national achievements often turn out to be in part the result of interactions between societies. Nothing could seem more English than the English language: and yet we know that it is actually a mixture of the Latin, Saxon, Norse and French languages among others. And those different ingredients are not just linguistic influences: they are the sedimentation in language of the influence of the Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans on British social and political history too.

And this point can apply to some very large things indeed. In 1620, Francis Bacon, the English philosopher and father of modern scientific method, wrote that the modern world was marked off from the past by the impact of three main inventions: gunpowder, the printing press and the magnetic compass. Between them, he wrote, these inventions had done more than any empire or religion to lift Europe out of the darkness of the Middle Ages (Bacon 1960, 118). Unknown to Bacon, all three of these had originated in China and had been transferred to Europe through processes of indirect trade and communication (Hobson 2004, 123, 185, 186). So, even the rise of the West that did so much to shape the modern world was in part interactively produced.

Now, all these examples suggest three basic things about the significance of the international dimension. First, the fact that the world is divided into many countries is a major and enduring feature of social reality. Second, the consequences of this fact reach right down into making individual societies what they are internally too. And finally, it therefore follows that if one sets out to build a social theory to explain what happens in the world, then these two facts—that society is multiple and interactive—should be part of the theory itself.

Once again, all this must appear simply obvious: who could possibly be so remiss as to build a general theory of social change without explicitly incorporating this interactive dimension? And yet if we try to answer this question, we soon discover what is meant by ‘the problem of the international’.

There are many different approaches to social theory, but most of them rest in some way on ideas produced by the tradition of Classical Social Theory, which in turn is dominated by three thinkers in particular: Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. These authors knew, of course, that the world contained many countries. And Marx in particular wrote a great deal about the international politics of his day. And yet none of them, not even Marx, made the co-existence and interaction of multiple societies part of their model of what societies are and how they change. Nor is this just a point about Classical Social Theory. Many writers today argue that as a result of that original lacuna, modern social science continues to suffer from what is called ‘methodological nationalism’—that is, unwittingly thinking about societies as if they really were self-contained entities. The most famous post-war historical sociologist, Theda Skocpol, launched her career with an article that was partly about this problem, and which contained a section entitled: ‘Wanted: an Intersocietal Perspective’ (1973, 28). Twenty years later, Zygmunt Bauman argued that this remained ‘a most urgent task faced by sociology’ (1992, 65). And in 1994, Friedrich Tenbruck pointed out—no doubt for the hundredth time—that by failing to include the international, modern social theory was hopelessly contradicted by what he called ‘the well-known, massive facts of history’, because we all know that societies do not exist in isolation (1994, 87).

Now, one might expect that this problem would have been solved long ago by the existence of IR as a discipline. After all, IR is all about relations between societies. Unfortunately, however, IR has allowed itself to become part of the problem. How so?

Kenneth Waltz, arguably the most influential international theorist since the Second World War, put it like this: ‘Students of international politics have had an extraordinarily difficult time casting their subject in theoretical terms’ (Waltz 1990, 21). IR students today might think this claim outdated. For it was made at the very moment when IR was experiencing a dramatic widening of its theoretical horizons. From the late 1980s onwards, traditional realist, liberal and Marxist approaches were being joined on the stage by numerous new theories: critical theory, constructivism, neo-Gramscianism, feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism and so on. As a result, IR theory today is a very crowded field. And yet Waltz never changed his mind. For him, most of the approaches studied as ‘international theories’ were nothing of the kind. Instead they were theories of domestic society that people were using to think about international affairs. Such theories, argued Waltz, are not useless, because domestic factors do play a large role in how governments behave internationally. But they cannot be the whole story, because at the international level states also have to deal with each other. And if one’s basic model of reality excludes that political multiplicity and its effects, then it can- not avoid wrongly reducing those effects to purely domestic causes.

What Waltz was identifying here is of course the knock-on effect in IR of the original problem of ‘methodological nationalism’ that goes all the way back to Classical Social Theory. But how (apart from importing numer- ous ‘reductionist’ theories) did IR itself become part of the confusion? The answer is that when Waltz saw there was a problem with social theories and the international, his response was not to fix the problem. It was to turn away and produce a completely separate theory of what they had excluded— namely geopolitics. And he advised everyone else to do the same: ‘Students of international politics will do well to concentrate on separate theories of internal and external politics until someone figures out a way to unite them’ (Waltz 1986, 340).

The trouble was that, brilliant though his new theory was, it was as incomplete in its own way as those he had criticised. They comprised theories of society without the international; and he now produced a theory of the inter- national without society. As a result, there now existed two self-contained kinds of theory, neither of which was able to connect to the other. And yet even Waltz agreed that they must be put back together at some point: ‘I don’t see any logical reason why this can’t be done.... However, nobody’s thought of how to do it. I’ve thought about that a lot. I can’t figure out how. Neither can anybody else so far’ (Waltz 1998, 379–80).

UNEVEN AND COMBINED DEVELOPMENT

One could be forgiven for thinking that this problem—of how to integrate the international into a theory of social change—is a purely intellectual one with no bearing on the challenges people face in the real world. That, however, would be a mistake. For Leon Trotsky, growing up in nineteenth-century Russia, it had a directly political consequence. At the turn of the century, Trotsky joined the movement for radical change. But this movement was caught up in a mismatch between theory and reality that had a paralysing effect on its political strategy.3 This mismatch in turn was all about the miss- ing international dimension. And it was Trotsky’s response to it that produced the idea of UCD.

For any political movement that wishes to change the world, it helps to have a theorisation of the existing situation—a roadmap that explains both the dynamic of change and how the political movement fits into it. The Russian Marxists had such a map, which they took from the Communist Manifesto of 1848. There, Marx and Engels, using England as an example, had mapped out how the industrial revolution was transforming society and what that meant about the future. All societies, they wrote, contain within them the seeds of change. In England in the seventeenth century, this had produced a revolu- tion that ended feudalism and introduced a new kind of society—capitalism, presided over by a liberal state. Over time, capitalism was transforming society into two opposing classes of people: owners and workers (bourgeois and proletarians). The struggle between these two would eventually create the conditions for a further revolution through which a third kind of society, socialism, would emerge.

For Trotsky and his fellow Marxists, this socialist revolution was already imminent in the West. And the Russian state too was on the verge of col- lapse. And yet Russian society did not look anything like it was supposed to according to the roadmap. The Russian state was still under the control of a semi-feudal ruling class, because Russia had never experienced a bourgeois revolution. The bourgeoisie, which ought to have overthrown it long ago, was far too weak to do so, not least because, in a bizarre twist of history, it was the semi-feudal state that was leading the process of industrialisation. The Russian working class was far too small to play the revolutionary role envisaged by Marx, and yet, partly because its employers were not liberal capitalists but a highly repressive police state, it was already more revolutionary than its counterpart in more advanced England. Russian industry, meanwhile, still had a long way to go to catch up with England, and yet what there was of it, having being very recently built, was actually more technologically modern than most English industry. And yet this super-modern industry was sprouting up in the midst of a sea of peasants who still made up the vast majority of the population.

It is no wonder that the Russian Marxists were paralysed: the roadmap could not tell them where they were. Right up to April 1917, Lenin, who six months later would be leading a communist revolution, was convinced that such a thing was impossible in Russia because it had not even experienced its bourgeois revolution yet (Davidson 2015a, 302).

It was this practical conundrum that Trotsky solved by adding the international into social theory. He argued, in effect, that the contrasting social structures found in the Communist Manifesto and the early twentieth-century Russian state were not unrelated to each other. Not only were they based on actual societies that had interacted with each other in real time; but it was the interaction that produced the differences between them. And by tracing out how this had happened, Trotsky not only resolved the political dilemma of the Russian Marxists; he also produced what Theda Skocpol called ‘an intersocietal perspective’, and what Kenneth Waltz could not work out how to put together: a theory of society that was at the same time an international theory.

Before going any further, it is important to pre-empt a possible misunderstanding. Marxism has often been criticised for possessing a teleological (and hence unilinear) view of history.4 And it might therefore be assumed that overcoming this limitation would be of purely local significance, devoid of any wider implications beyond Marxism itself. Nothing could be more mis- leading. In the early post-war decades, Modernisation Theory was probably the most influential social theory in the US social sciences. One of its most famous early exponents was Walt Rostow who published a book in 1960 called The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. And it was just that: a blueprint for how Third World societies could modernise and become like the West. The major criticism that has always been made of Modernisation Theory is that it was a unilinear roadmap that could not understand how Third World societies were actually changing. And in fact a strong critique of this unilinearity grew up around the work of a Russian émigré called Alexander Gerschenkron.

Now, Gerschenkron never references Trotsky, but their arguments are so similar that it is very hard not to conclude that Trotsky’s writing formed a major unacknowledged influence on Gerschenkron’s most famous work, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Gerschenkron 1962; see also Selwyn 2012). Meanwhile, Walt Rostow went on to become US National Security Advisor during the Vietnam War. And another modernisation theorist, Samuel Huntington, published an article which claimed that American carpet bombing of the Vietnamese countryside was historically progressive, because it was forcing people off the land and into the cities, which was a necessary step in the modernisation of societies (Huntington 1968a). What all this shows is that, on the one hand, the politics of unilinear theories of history do not belong to the Marxists alone. And on the other, Trotsky’s idea may already have played an undercover indirect role in the critique of unilinear thinking in the West.

Let us turn now to the original idea itself. Trotsky’s exposition of ‘uneven and combined development’ is scattered across his writings.5 But we can use these fragments to reconstruct the core of the idea as follows. His foundational move was to change the starting point of social theory. Instead of focusing on a single society—as in the roadmap—he began instead with the unevenness of world development: namely the fact that the world is made up of many different societies of different sizes and kinds and levels. And he pointed out that when industrial capitalism first emerged in Western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, its first effect was to radically deepen this unevenness by suddenly making European states much more powerful than the rest. And because all these societies co-existed concretely in real time, this deepening unevenness produced a ‘whip of external necessity’ (Trotsky 1932, 5) that compelled the ruling elites of other societies to change course and try to follow the path of development now pioneered by the industrial societies.

But how could they ever catch up in time? Russia was so far behind that it would take several hundred years for it just to arrive at the conditions that had produced the industrial revolution in England. However, it turned out that Russia did not need to repeat English development, because unevenness also produced a second international effect that Trotsky (1932, 5) called ‘the privilege of historic backwardness’. Once again, precisely because late developers co-exist with more advanced societies, they can directly import the achievements of those other societies and use them without having to reinvent them for themselves. In this way, they leap over intermediate stages of development that would otherwise have been necessary, massively compressing and accelerating the process.

Thus we now have two sources of change that render unilinear change impossible; indeed they break all the rules of how development would happen if there was only one society in the world. And sure enough, as a result of these two sources, Russia’s industrialisation (like China’s today) was proceeding much faster than England’s had done. However, Russia was not turning into another England. And this brings us to the third effect of multiple societies, namely ‘combined development’.

Recall that unevenness involves the co-existence of societies that might be at completely different stages of internal development. What this meant in the case of Russia was that the ‘whip of external necessity’ imposed itself at a time when there did not even exist a politically independent middle class that was strong enough to overthrow the semi-feudal Czarist state. But someone had to respond to the external pressure. And when the Czarist state used the ‘privilege of historic backwardness’ to build a modern industrial sector, its purpose was not to create a Western liberal society. It was to extend its own survival. Thus, the techniques of capitalist industry were now (quite unlike in England) being combined with an anti-liberal, semi-feudal form of state. A quite new kind of society was being produced. And Trotsky called this interactive process of change: ‘combined development’.

Once Trotsky grasped the logic of this situation—the way that different temporalities of development were being spliced unpredictably into each other—he was able to use it to explain all the peculiarities of Russian development that had so confused the Marxist revolutionaries. But how did that solve the political dilemma they were faced with?

The answer is that combined development turned out to have three meanings. There was the combination of different stages of development that resulted from the importing of advanced technologies into a pre-industrial society. There was also the combination of different types of society, as capi- talism fused with different pre-existing social structures in different countries. But there was also a kind of combination of these different countries themselves into a larger whole. For by importing all these ideas and resources and technologies, Russia was unavoidably becoming integrated into a wider interconnected structure of capitalist world development—but one that was itself now modified by the inclusion of Russia into it.

Trotsky (1962, 9) called this wider structure ‘the social structure of humanity’. And what he saw was that the more capitalism expanded beyond its original heartlands, the more its global structure was coming to include unstable hybrids like Russia. Thus, instead of the world as a whole turning into an enormous version of the Marxist roadmap, it was itself becoming an unstable, interconnected hybrid. And although there was indeed no way a revolution in Russia could produce a socialist society, it might, thought Trotsky, because of all these interconnections, trigger the long overdue revolution in the advanced countries.

In effect, Trotsky was arguing that just as the global transition to industrial capitalism was uneven and combined, so too would be the further transition beyond capitalism. In that scenario—an intersocietal scenario—the Russian revolution, which was unstoppable anyway, finally made political sense. And all the vicissitudes and horrors of twentieth-century ‘communism’ should not blind us to the intellectual achievement of this idea: for Trotsky had produced an intersocietal theory of social change.

BACKWARDS INTO WORLD HISTORY

How big an idea is ‘uneven and combined development’? The question must be faced because most writers argue that it applies only in the modern period of capitalist development that it was initially designed to explain (Ashman 2009; Davidson 2009). But if UCD applies only to one kind of society, then it would not be a general solution for incorporating international relations into social theory. And we do need such a general solution, because we know that throughout history societies have interacted with each other in all kinds of ways. Written records of interactions between political entities are among ‘the oldest legible documents’ that survive, dating from over four thousand years ago (Bozeman 1994, 21; Watson 1992, 24ff). And in fact Trotsky (1932, 5) himself says at one point that ‘unevenness is the most general law of the historic process’. Trotsky never elaborated on this comment, but we can see what it means if we simply take a snapshot of world development at any point in history.

Imagine, for example, a map of the world in 1530 which used different colours to indicate the different kinds of society co-existing at the time.6 The irregular pattern of colours would immediately reveal that the biggest fact about this world, viewed as a whole, really is its radical unevenness. For it would form a tapestry in which several different kinds of human society, which had emerged at different points in history, are co-existing in real time. One colour might denote the great state-based power centres of the day (European, Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Ming, etc.), each of them rooted in a different regional civilisation, having different histories, different cultural worldviews and different ways of organising politics and society. But the world was not only composed of states and empires. A second colour would mark the vast areas of Asia, Arabia and North Africa that were occupied by nomadic pastoralists—tribal societies in constant motion with the seasons, living off their herds of livestock. A third would indicate those parts of the world still covered by communities of settled farmers organised in family and tribal groupings of the kind that preceded the original emergence of state organisa- tions. And a fourth would be needed for the huge areas (especially in the Americas and Australasia) that were still composed of hunter-gatherer groups. 

And of course these different societies were interacting with each other. The nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppe-lands periodically erupted in great campaigns of conquest that could overwhelm the surrounding civilisations—a perennial ‘whip of external necessity’ (Wolf 1982, 32–4). When Marco Polo visited China in the thirteenth century, he found it had been completely conquered by the Mongol nomads.

And there were also interactions among the civilisations of the time. The transmission of inventions indirectly from China to Europe has already been mentioned. But by the time of this snapshot, Europe had also received an infusion of ancient Greek learning from the Arab world that helped stimulate the Renaissance. And in 1530, the Iberians were conquering America and unlocking huge resources of silver and gold that would buy them into the Indian Ocean trade of Asian societies that were still much wealthier than Europe. So, multiplicity and interaction played a major role in the rise of the West (Hobson 2004; Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015). And Trotsky’s idea therefore provides an antidote to Eurocentric versions of modern world history (Matin 2013a).

Going further back, Trotsky’s own society of Russia originated in a fusion between two completely different types of society. In the tenth century, a branch of the Scandinavian Vikings called the Rus settled in what is now Ukraine, in order to secure their trade with Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. It was from this relationship that the first Russian state was born, and from which it received the Cyrillic alphabet, the Greek Orthodox religion and the Byzantine code of commercial law. Kiev did not have to reinvent these artefacts of Byzantine civilisation—it accessed them ready-made through the ‘privilege of historic backwardness’ (Bozeman 1994, 327ff).

In fact, the importance of interaction reaches all the way back to the very earliest known civilisation. Ancient Sumer was built on a flood plain, which was ideally suited to agriculture but was completely lacking in the metals and timber and precious stones that became central to Sumerian city life. All these had to be imported through interactions with surrounding communities (McNeil and McNeil 2009, 50; Smith 2009, 25).

Why go back so far? And what do all these examples tell us? First, they tell us that Trotsky was right: uneven and combined development really is a universal in human history, and should therefore always have been part of our basic model of the social world. Second, they also show that the whip of external necessity and the privilege of historic backwardness are repeatedly generated across history as routine effects of the multiplicity of societies. Through these effects, uneven development underlies two of the most elemental problematics in human affairs: the problematic of security and the problematic of cultural difference.

And finally, what does all this show us about IR? Here we must be careful. We cannot say it shows that international relations extend all the way back in history, because nation states are modern. But the claim that needs to be made here is actually even bigger than this. These examples show us what the international really is. It is not just a by-product of modern capitalism. It is the form taken today by a central feature of human history: namely the fact that social existence has been multiple and interactive right from the start.

FORWARDS TO TODAY

How then is Trotsky’s idea relevant to the world in the twenty-first century? We need not look far to find really striking examples of combined development today. In Saudi Arabia, a tribal system of politics has been grafted onto an industrialising society, so that the state, which owns the wealth of society, is itself the property of a 7,000-strong extended family of princes. The forcing together of the old and the new rarely comes in more extreme forms than this. And yet a significant fraction of the world’s energy sup- ply rests on this peculiar political hybrid (and the events of 9/11 and after showed just how unstable and destabilising this hybrid could be). In China, a Communist government presides over the most rapid and enormous process of capitalist industrialisation ever seen—creating in the process the second largest industrial economy in the world. And in Iran, a theocratic revolution that has no precedent in Shia Islam, let alone the textbooks of Western social theory, has been locked in a confrontation with the great powers over its use of advanced nuclear technology. Because we live with these examples every day, we forget how truly remarkable they are. Their peculiarities could never be explained by internal development alone—intersocietal pressures and opportunities have created these hybrids and woven them into ‘the social structure of humanity’. They are a sign of the need for Trotsky’s idea in contemporary social analysis.

But what about ‘the social structure of humanity’ itself? What is the overall shape of uneven and combined development in the world today? Arguably, the key here remains what it has been for more than two centuries now: namely the radical unevenness in space and time of industrialisation as a global process. In the nineteenth century this unevenness suddenly unbalanced world development and led to an unprecedented world domination by one region—Europe. But it also created a geopolitical roller coaster inside Europe as late developers like Germany and Russia caught up with Britain, but on the basis of very unstable socio-political structures created by their combined development. In the twentieth century, the contradictions of this regional unevenness produced first the two world wars and then, as a direct outgrowth of the case first analysed by Trotsky, the Cold War which dominated world politics right up to the 1990s.7 In the twenty-first century, with the long-delayed industrialisation of the Asian giants, this same historical unevenness of world development is finally bringing an end to the Western Age of world history as we have known it (Buzan and Lawson 2015).

At the centre of this process is China, a country that endured a whip of exter- nal necessity so intense and prolonged that it has been named ‘the century of humiliations’. Using the privilege of historic backwardness, Chinese industri- alisation is now occurring on an even more accelerated, compressed scale than the other late developers before it. And like others before it, Chinese combined development is also scrambling and reshuffling the sequence of stages set out in the roadmap. Capitalist industrialisation organised by a semi-feudal Czarist monarchy was peculiar enough. But capitalism presided over by a Communist state is surely the most peculiar, most paradoxical combination so far.

Furthermore, its impact on the social structure of humanity today is one of the central themes of contemporary world affairs, in at least two key ways. By producing the sudden rise of China as a great power, uneven development is driving a geopolitical revolution as the United States hurries to disentangle itself from Europe and the Middle East in order to concentrate on its famous ‘pivot to Asia’. At the same time, a new structure of economic interdependence has grown up that has already had major consequences for world development. As we know, from the 1990s onwards, China’s export-oriented model of development produced a tidal wave of cheap products that counteracted inflationary tendencies in Western economies. In addition, Chinese purchases of US treasury bonds helped to keep US interest rates lower than they would otherwise have had to be to finance the trade deficit. The net result of this was surely an extension of the global economic boom of the 1990s, and arguably much higher levels of sovereign and private debt when that boom finally collapsed in 2007–2008. The claim is not that China caused the crash. It is rather that international uneven development, with its deflationary effects and global trade imbalances, is a key ingredient of the economic crisis we are still living through today.

It is in the nature of UCD that complex, dialectical relationships form between advanced and rapidly developing societies. Through these relationships, different social formations are both newly produced and woven together into a historically specific ‘social structure of humanity’. And the future of world affairs then arises not from a pure model of any single type of society but from the shape and consequences of these global patterns of combined development.

In the light of all these examples (ancient as well as modern) we can now formulate UCD not just as a claim about the nature of historical process but also as a distinctive method of analysis. The elements of this method are given in the sequence of terms making up the phrase itself: uneven, combined, development. Thus, when seeking to explain any given event or phenomenon, we first use the concept of unevenness to invoke the international dimension: what is the wider intersection of different forms and temporalities of development that frames the context of this event or phenomenon? Second, we specify the empirical consequences of that intersection. What pressures of ‘external necessity’ does it produce for the societies involved? Conversely, what additional possibilities does it generate for social change, over and above those arising from their internal structures? And how are the particular features and temporalities of different societies therefore being concretely combined by the historical process? Third, we ask what unique dynamic of combined development arises from this dialectical process, and how far its ‘peculiarities’ explain the event or phenomenon we are trying to understand.

But has this method not simply replaced the false logic of ‘internalism’ (Tenbruck 1994) with an equally false ‘externalist’ assumption (that ‘the international’ explains ‘the domestic’)? Worse, does it not detach external factors from any historically specific context and ‘ontologize’ them into transhistorical logics that operate independently of the kinds of society involved? By asserting a ‘universal law of unevenness’, and deriving a general ‘whip of external necessity’ and ‘privilege of historic backwardness’, has UCD not simply reifed ‘the international’? (Teschke 2014).

The danger looks real—until we hold it up to the actual method of UCD just outlined. For every conjuncture of uneven development is necessarily made up of the particular social formations themselves, with their unique ‘domestic’ characteristics as they co-exist at a given point in their own inner histories. The causes arising from these internal structures are not replaced by external ones; instead, they are rescued from the fallacy of unilinear thinking by being relocated in a wider field of causation that now includes the conjunction of social formations, as well as their inner make-up. In this respect, UCD leads to more historical specificity, not less: for it requires the empirical identification not only of a particular social formation itself but also of the shifting configurations formed at any moment by its co-existence with others.

Who truly wishes to return to a form of theorising that does not include the interactive dimension that arises from these configurations? And yet how can this be avoided unless we incorporate the fact of multiplicity and interaction into our conception of social development itself?

CONCLUSION

One final point remains to be made. It is a point that carries us away from the global political economy. And yet it is also, if anything, even larger in its implications. We suggested earlier that international relations is the distinctive form that UCD takes in the modern world. But the logic of the idea is that it cannot be the only such form—or to put it another way, UCD enables us to track the significance of the international far beyond the normal subject matter of IR itself. This is because the multiplicity of societies entails interactions not only of politics and economics and technologies, but of every other dimension of social existence too. It includes ideas, religions, literature, music, cinema and all the other ways that humans construct their worlds culturally as well as in physical and organisational ways.

It follows that some version of Trotsky’s idea can be used to map the role that intersocietal influences play in all the different national traditions of these cultural processes. And if we use it in this way, it will surely reveal that—culturally as well as politically—the interactive multiplicity of human societies is not only a constraint and (sometimes) a threat, but it is also a fun- damental source of creative change and innovation in human history.

Like World-Systems Theory or Postcolonial Theory, UCD is thus an idea whose application is not limited to any one field. In principle, it can speak right across the social sciences and humanities. For all these disciplines study social practices and processes that are formed in the context of multiple interacting societies. And this thought points to an ironic conclusion: the final wisdom of the idea of UCD, an idea which can do so much to make intelligible the subject matter of IR, may be that to grasp the full significance of the international, we shall have to embrace much more than the discipline of IR.

NOTES

   1. This chapter is an edited version of a Professorial (Inaugural) Lecture delivered at the University of Sussex on 26 February 2014. I am grateful to the editors for numerous helpful suggestions in the course of preparing it for publication. The third section (‘Backwards into History) and the first three paragraphs of the fourth (‘Forwards to Today’) have already appeared in ‘IR in the Prison of Political Science’. International Relations 30(2), June 2016.

   2. For a comprehensive bibliography of contemporary writings on UCD, see www. unevenandcombined.com.

   3. For the political context of Trotsky’s thought, see Deutscher (1954) and Knei-Paz (1978).

   4. For critical discussions of this charge, see Erik Olin Wright (1983) and Ellen Wood (1995).

   5. Many of the relevant fragments have been assembled into a Trotsky Digest, which is available on the ‘selections’ page of www.unevenandcombined.com.

   6. The following discussion is based on an actual map, ‘The World, AD 1530’, which can be found in Atlas of World History, by John Haywood, Sheriffs Lench: Sandcastle Books 2006, p. 4.01.

   7. For applications of UCD to the causes of the First World War, see Anievas 2013, Green 2012 and Rosenberg 2013a.

Further readings

The Conditions for the Emergence of Uneven and Combined Development, p. 31

The Myth of the National Bourgeoisie