State Power, Labour and the Marshall Plan in Britain

Abstract

While the Marshall Plan is a topic that has generated a vast literature, much of this is either empirical or analytical; this study has attempted to combine the two with an empirical study of British labour and the Marshall Plan that draws upon theoretical understandings of domestic and international relations. A particular source is the work of the neo-Gramscian school of international political economy. With its emphasis on concepts and relations that cut across the domestic/international divide, the neo-Gramscian approach offers some potential to overcome barriers to the integration of domestic and international politics. The concept of hegemony, which can be used to describe both domestic and international power relations, is particularly useful for analyzing the impact and the uses of the Marshall Plan. However, there are limits to the neo-Gramscian approach in that it tends to focus on the constraints, rather than opportunities, provided by international structures, and it sometimes forgets that ‘people are not just bearers of structures; they create them.’1 Neo-Gramscians also tend to downgrade the importance of domestic forces vis-a-vis the international, partly because the extrapolation of Gramsci’s use of concepts such as hegemony from the domestic to the international realm shifts the focus of their study away from domestic forces. The result can be an overly deterministic viewpoint that underestimates the ability of actors to manipulate the structures within which they operate. As Germain and Kenny have pointed out, neo-Gramscians have tended to see hegemony ‘largely as a one-directional power relationship’.2 Lastly, neo-Gramscians have yet to demonstrate why a focus on productive power, ideas and institutions necessitates being a Gramscian.