Uneven and Combined Development and the Capitalist States System

Abstract

This chapter establishes the theoretical framework of the book. I explain how Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development (UCD) can be mobilised in order to transcend the limitations of both globalising and methodologically nationalist theories of the global political economy. First, I demonstrate that while theorists of uneven development have demonstrated how the development of a global capitalist economy tends to reproduce (rather than undermine) geographic unevenness, they have failed to specify or problematise the role of states in this process. Consequently, uneven development fails to explain either why, or with what sociological effects, the states system persists under conditions of deep economic integration. State theorists, meanwhile, have point to the continuing role of states and politics in political economy while tending to exclude the world economy and the states system as conditioning factors in state (trans)formation. For this reason, much state theory focuses overwhelmingly on the ‘internal’ politics of particular states. I close the chapter by explaining how UCD can provides a nonreductionist means of integrating global processes of capital accumulation with their distinctive and peculiar national mediations, and suggest how the insights of UCD can be mobilised to conduct social research.