In Search of the Real State

Abstract

The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations. By Benno Teschke. London: Verso, 2003. 300 pp., $35.00 cloth (ISBN: 1-85984-693-9). Benno Teschke's The Myth of 1648 is a welcome, though flawed, addition to the growing body of literature in international relations written by the likes of Michael Mann (1986), John Ruggie (1993), Hendrik Spruyt (1994), Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil (1996), Rodney Hall (1999), Robert Denemark (Denemark, Modelski, and Gills 2000) that takes history seriously and that emphasizes the critical role of the past in explaining the present. Taking issue with the views of many of above scholars, Teschke argues that a genuine interstate system did not come into existence with the seventeenth century Westphalian settlement. Rather, it emerged over a century later as a result of the shift in property relations under capitalism, which, Teschke asserts, initially took place in nineteenth-century Britain. The Myth of 1648 surveys European international relations from the early Middle Ages to the twentieth century. It does so from an imaginative and highly accessible neo-Marxist perspective that is derived, in the author's words, from a “theory of social property relations” (p. 7). The historical analysis that follows from this foundation leads Teschke to conclude that both Europe's Middle Ages and the dynastic epoch of absolutism that followed featured precapitalist property relations based on exploitation and war rather than on the accumulation of wealth as in the later capitalist era. In simplified form, his argument is that modern international relations (IR) consists of modern or capitalist states, that such states did not emerge until the nineteenth century, and that much …