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| 1 |
ID:
179042
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| 2 |
ID:
179045
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| Summary/Abstract |
After being recovered and expanded by Justin Rosenberg almost two decades ago, Trotsky’s concept of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) has inspired many articles, dissertations and books, becoming the core of one of the most exciting contemporary approaches within the cacophonic discipline of International Relations. Nevertheless, the contribution of the emerging UCD literature remains largely unbalanced. Most of it revolves around the classical sociological problems of capitalist transition and state formation. As such, the UCD scholarship disproportionately belongs to the field of international historical sociology, favouring expansive explanations and broad historical questions. With few exceptions, contemporary UCD has had little to say in shorter-term, policy-oriented, International Political Economy (IPE) debates. To fruitfully inform IPE analysis, UCD must expand and refine its highly abstract conceptual toolkit. In this article, I take stock of the existing literature and offer an original contribution to the UCD-IPE framework. Specifically, I unpack the general notion of the ‘whip of external necessity’ into more granular and operational concepts, setting the foundations for a UCD-inspired exchange-rate, monetary and fiscal policy analysis. Finally, the potential of an expanded UCD-IPE framework is illustrated through considerations on the uneven and combined effects of the 2008 financial crisis.
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| 3 |
ID:
179039
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper introduces the Special Issue on Uneven and Combined Development (UCD). It begins by briefly outlining the idea of UCD and reviewing its history – from its origins in the writings of Leon Trotsky to its contemporary renaissance in the field of international studies. A second section then introduces the contributions to this Special Issue, showing how they amount to a powerful new wave of UCD studies.
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| 4 |
ID:
179047
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| Summary/Abstract |
What is the significance of UCD for the field of International Political Economy? In 2019, Justin Rosenberg and Chris Boyle argued that Trotsky’s idea provided an understanding of capitalist world development that helped explain the 2016 Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump (Rosenberg and Boyle 2019). Situating these events in the longue durée, they interpreted them as outcomes of a unique historical conjuncture of uneven and combined development: neoliberal deregulation in the West had intersected with late-late industrialisation in China; this ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’ multiplied the ‘big country’ effects of China’s industrialisation at a point of maximum openness in the newly deregulated international economy; this produced a major ‘trade shock’ that hastened the decline of manufacturing employment in Britain and the United States, in a geographical pattern that matched the distribution of the Leave and Trump votes.
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| 5 |
ID:
186293
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| Summary/Abstract |
Global monetary hierarchies have recently been posed by Kai Koddenbrock as a challenge to the concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) and its corollary of societal multiplicity and interactivity, suggesting that this approach obscures transnational or global-systemic dynamics. International money and finance represent an arguably autonomous and theoretically unaccounted for dynamic within the UCD framework that escapes the frame of multiplicity. Although international finance and money have not been wholly absent from UCD accounts of the dynamics of capitalist globalisation and its geopolitics, these have tended to be conceptualised as an outgrowth of the processes of industrialisation that are seen to be the primary driver of UCD. Does this represent a theoretical challenge or a lacuna? Money and finance were central to some of the earliest critical attempts to make sense of the conflagrations of the early twentieth century as products of capitalist development. I argue that clarifying and expanding the role of money and finance provides necessary foundations for a critical theory of international relations grounded in UCD.
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| 6 |
ID:
186290
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article responds to criticisms of the current revival of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD), particularly those aimed at the idea of a ‘general abstraction’ of UCD. Three main charges have been pressed: that UCD is not a real theory; that its transhistorical extension has reduced it to an unhistorical reification; and that its language of ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ betrays its enduring Eurocentric foundations. The article argues not only that UCD can be defended, but also that it is the general abstraction which enables UCD to make its strongest contributions to solving problems of theoretical insufficiency, ahistoricism and Eurocentrism in social thought more generally. Finally the article ends by speculating on the reason why the much-maligned general abstraction of UCD should turn out to be of such significance.
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