Waiting for Gramsci: State Formation, Passive Revolution and the International

Abstract

This article asserts that Antonio Gramsci's account of 'the international' linked to the rise of the modern capitalist states-system remains neglected within debates on the historical sociology of International Relations (IR). It does so by following two main axes of inquiry that assist the aim of unravelling Gramsci's relevance to understanding processes of state formation within the causal conditioning of `the international'. The first axis focuses on Gramsci's historical research on Renaissance Italy and the role of mercantile capital in shaping late medieval and early modern states; the `southern question' concerning the terms of uneven development of the Mezzogiorno in Italy; and the Italian Risorgimento understood as a passive revolution, or the reorganisation of state identity through the reproduction of capitalist property relations. These issues provide a historical backdrop to considering Gramsci's novel contribution to understanding the `national' dimension as a point of in understanding processes of capitalist expansion within `the international' realm. This is pursued in the second axis through his account of the states-system and its relation to the emerging hegemony of Anglo-Saxon capitalism that detailed the European response of fascism to the growing intervention of foreign capital and the conditions of uneven development in terms of the specific contexts of the Russian Revolution and Woodrow Wilson's liberal internationalism. It is argued that a recognition of such, as specific instances of passive revolution, assists in providing an essential contribution to understanding `the international' in conditioning state formation that has been absent from current debates in historical sociology in IR.