Review of Geopolitical Economy—After Hegemony, Globalization and Empire, by Radhika Desai

Abstract

REVIEW OF GEOPOLITICAL ECONOMY-AFTER HEGEMONY, GLOBALIZATION AND EMPIRE, BY RADHIKA DESAI Geopolitical Economy-After Hegemony, Globalization and Empire, by Radhika Desai, London, Pluto Press, 2013, xiv + 313 pp., US$35 (paperback), ISBN 978-07453-2992-5Geopolitical Economy is not an easy book to read, though Radhika Desai's (2013) stated aim is welcome, namely, telling a story in the sense of building a text with a clear and comprehensible chain of reasoning. She reinterprets world history from the late eighteenth century meaningful and consistently, from the initial period of formation of nation-states, up to its consolidation as the multipolar system seen today. This conceptualization involves a deep and complex critique of of American hegemony, globalization, and empire, which are the focus of a critical evaluation which runs through the book.The difficulty lies in the book's theoretical complexity. The thesis of Geopolitical Economy and the book's critique of hegemonic require familiarity with Marx, Keynes, Polanyi, and Poulantzas, along with mastery of the contributions of the key participants in classic debates on imperialism. However, it is precisely this feature that makes the book so interesting and challenging.It should be read from cover to cover, beginning with the Acknowledgements, which present key motivations for the work and its form. The first chapter is an introduction in which the arguments are presented and justified theoretically: why Geopolitical Economy? The starting point is the apprehension that the three that dominate contemporary debate about the nature of the global world formulate, in some sense, a unitary conception of a unified global system organized either simply by markets or simply by the organic relation between regions and the most powerful state-the USA. This unitary conception suggests a decline in the importance of the nation-state in the world order. Radhika defines such views as Cosmopolitan.The thesis is that cosmopolitan views do not explain the multipolar world, advanced by Radhika from the beginning as a better reading of global political reality. Rather, these views ideologically misrepresent reality, being fundamentally a product of the class interest of the USA. In this way, interpretations of the world that are incapable of grasping it in its complexity irradiate and spread.There are three main arguments. First and most fundamental is the materiality of the nations. The capitalist world order and its historical evolution is formulated as a product of interaction-conflictive, competitive, or cooperative-of a variety of states, forming an interstate system.The second argument is that world domination by the first industrial capitalist country, the United Kingdom, was both inevitable and not reproducible, because of the specificity of the historical conditions of the Industrial Revolution and the international division of labor on which it was based. The third argument is that globalization of the 1990s and the empire of the 2000s essentially constitute ideologies. They are not genuine but the result of two recent attempts of the USA to maintain an imperial role.This is followed by a section of great theoretical density, establishing the perspective of Geopolitical Economy. It is clear that Marx's critique of capitalism and its fundamental contradictions are the basis of the analysis, hence the decisive and overwhelming character of the book's critique of neoclassical thought and of the abusive intentions of the proponents of the three cosmopolitan theories in treating contemporary society as homogeneous, whether purely capitalist or not, and without inherent contradictions. These deliberately present society as devoid of any complexity, or diversity of political, cultural, or even ethnic interests.After this fundamental critique, the analysis subsumes contributions of Keynes, Kalecki, and Polanyi to formulate an interpretation of world order consisting of a complex system of national states. …