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Chapter

Theoretical perspective

Chapter

Theoretical perspective

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Theoretical perspective book

Social forces and the struggle over European order

Theoretical perspective

DOI link for Theoretical perspective

Theoretical perspective book

Social forces and the struggle over European order
ByBastiaan van Apeldoorn
BookTransnational Capitalism and the Struggle over European Integration

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Edition 1st Edition
First Published 2002
Imprint Routledge
Pages 36
eBook ISBN 9780203166802

ABSTRACT

This chapter presents the theoretical framework of this book. Whilst developing a critique of established approaches to European integration, I outline an alternative approach grounded in a historical materialism that emphasises the role of transnational social forces in the construction of European socio-economic order. I will call this alternative approach ‘neo-Gramscian transnationalism’, as it builds upon the so-called neo-Gramscian perspective within International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE), which takes the transnational nature of world politics – as embedded in the social relations of global capitalism – as its point of departure.1 This then implies a fundamental break with the state-centrism that still dominates IR, not just in the guise of the long-predominant neo-realist theory (Waltz 1979) – which sees world politics as pure inter-state politics in which states compete (in a zero-sum game) for wealth and power within an anarchic system of self-help – but also in the form of many contemporary liberal theories, particularly what has been called neo-liberalism (Keohane 1984a, 1989), and recently showing its tenacity in Alexander Wendt’s (1999) explicitly state-centric ‘social theory of international politics’.

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