The course aims to introduce the key assumptions of the international relations theory as a part of social science and as an analytic tool, focusing on the problems of war and peace, foreign policy decision-making, etc. The course combines historic approach and analysis of the modern political problems. The historic part shows the evolution of the international relations theory from being a part of political philosophy to its emergence as a special branch of political science, which is essential to understand the key ideas of the IR science. The lectures also include broad outline of the modern concepts and debates in the context of the contemporary political problems, such as rise of China and other emerging powers, threat of terrorism, US-Russia confrontation, etc. The lectures of the two outstanding Russian scholars and political analysts – Timofey Bordachev and Dmitry Suslov - cover such fields as the problems of international security and conflict resolution, international economic relations, foreign policy decision-making, global governance, the role of power in the IR.
Testing the Neo-Marxist approach
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From the course by National Research University Higher School of Economics
Understanding International Relations Theory
18 оценки
National Research University Higher School of Economics
18 оценки
From the lesson
Marxism and Neo-Marxism
While the two classical paradigms passes through great debates, Marxism proposes a fundamentally different picture of the world. Welcome to the world of class struggle and imperialist wars: a comprehensive study of economic factors, which drives the world politics will challenge the very basic assumptions of realism and liberalism.
Meet the Instructors
Timofei BordachevAssociate professor
Department of international relations
Dmitrii SuslovSenior Lecturer
Department of international relations, HSE
Finally, some illustrations about relevance of Neo-Marxism
to the realities today and unfortunately tomorrow.
I think this approach and the emphasis of inequality and exploitation,
is very relevant to the situation today and to the situation tomorrow.
Just look at this map.
It shows the world looks like from the economic perspective.
From the perspective of GDP produced by these or that countries.
Where is Africa on this map?
It is almost absent.
Compare it with the normal geographical map of the world.
And from this map,
you also explicitly see how rich is
the North in comparison to the poor and almost non-existent south.
Actually Russia, quite particular,
is also extremely tiny on this map because Russia constitutes
to no more than two percent of the global GDP and global income.
And indeed, one-third of global wealth belongs to just half percent of global population.
Two-thirds of billionaires live in the United States and European Union.
And at the same time,
around 700 million people suffer from starvation,
suffered from hunger in 2016, just last year.
This is another chart illustrating the global inequality and how
unbalanced and in an unbalanced and unequal way the global income is being distributed.
The world is put upside down.
It is in a pyramid which is upside down.
If we divide the global population into five equal parts, according to population,
we will see just that one-fifth of
the global population controls about 74 percent of global incomes, the richest part.
Whereas the poorest one-fifth,
the same quantity of the people,
the poorest one fifth of population
controls just one and a half percent of global income.
And this is of course exploitation.
And this of course results into the contradictory interests.
This of course results into the class conflicts about
which the founding fathers of Marxism were talking about.
According to Neo-Marxism, the rules of
the game and economic policies are essentially unfair and unjust.
The main purpose of rich countries of the core is not to stimulate but to
prevent a rapid economic and political development of semi-periphery and periphery,
in order to stimulate themselves.
It is this which results in conflict.
It is this why the conflicts are at
the borders of the current semi-periphery and semi-periphery and periphery.
Because these group interests are contradictory.
And it is very difficult to find a common ground.
It is very difficult to reconcile these contradictory interests.
If the interest of the core is to exploit,
the interests of the rest is to get out of this exploitation,
how will you reconcile this?
It's impossible.
And the major instruments for
preservation of these unfair rules of the game are foreign aid,
foreign trade, and foreign sanctions.
Foreign aid, according to a Neo-mraxist perspective,
is conducted not to stimulate economic development of
developing countries as the liberal theory of economics tells us.
On the contrary, the purpose of foreign aid is to promote national interests and to keep
control over the recipients of the aid and to manage their economic development,
according to your donors' preference.
So the donor decides what kind of industries of
the recipients to stimulate and which industries of the recipients to suppress.
This is a very illustrative chart,
which provides you the major recipients of the American aid.
Look, the major recipient of the U.S. aid is Israel.
Israel is not the most poor country in the world.
It is one of the developed country.
One of the most developed country in the world which
possesses nuclear weapons and so on and so forth.
It is the major recipient of American aid followed by Egypt and so on and so forth.
So the point here is that the major recipients of aid,
not just by the United States but of many other developed countries in the world,
are not the poorest countries.
But the countries in which the donors are interested.
And the nature of aid reflects
the interests of the donor not the interests of the recipients.
The same with let's say United Kingdom,
the major recipients of the British aid are
former British colonists and
thus the United Kingdom projects and promotes national interests.
The major recipients of French aid are the former colonies of France.
The major recipients of Russian aid are the countries of the former Soviet Union.
The major recipients of the Chinese aid are the countries from whom
China extracts raw materials and natural resources.
Does it always stimulate economic development of the recipients?
No, it stimulates economic development and promotes political interests of the donors.
Another component is foreign trade,
which from the Neo-mraxist perspective,
is understood as the freedom of trade for developed countries.
And the purpose of trade regimes is to conquer markets of developing countries,
to doom them to raw materials extraction and development of agriculture, nothing more.
At the same time developed countries establish
quite protectionist trade regimes from the developing countries,
which developing countries have very big troubles in overcoming.
The rules of free trade benefits the more competitive countries.
If you establish a free trade regime,
let's say between the United States of America
and the poor developing country, I don't know,
for instance Mozambique or Tanzania,
it would be absolutely evident that American business will conquer and
simply eliminate the local business of the poor countries.
Then the poor countries will have very big troubles in terms of
competing with American giants or with European giants.
And basically, this is why
developed countries have been historically promoting free trade.
And the current evolution of economic policies of the United States is,
a perfect illustration and the perfect justification of Neo-Marxist approach.
But it is also the perfect illustration of
the egoistic and mercantilist approach to
foreign trade and how unjust the foreign trade regimes are.
When historically, after the Second World War,
the United States was
the global economic hegemony
and for a free trade regime was benefiting the United States,
the US was promoting free trade.
But now, when in conditions of globalization,
free trade started to benefit China,
what did the United States do?
The United States immediately started to adjust rules of the foreign trade.
And Barack Obama, the foreign president of the United States,
invented this idea of trans-Pacific partnership,
and he claimed that it is
the United States who needs to write the rules of foreign trade.
And Donald Trump, the current president of the United States,
is making it even more explicit and claims
that trade regime needs to benefit the United States,
in the first and foremost not the others.
So this is a very clear example of
unjust approach a mercantilist approach to foreign trade.
And finally, foreign sanctions are also considered a very widely used
mechanism of establishing unfair and unjust economic regimes.
Foreign sanctions appear to be illegal restrictions on certain economic activities,
that strengthen competitive advantages of those
who impose the sanctions and thus the result into unfair competition.
For instance, if you sanction a certain sector of your competitor,
of course you provide the particular advantage for yourself.
And this map shows for instance,
against how many countries of the world did the United States impose economic sanctions,
including by the way Russia.
Thus, as you can see from these examples,
the relevance of Neo-Marxism for the analysis of international relations is quite high.
And Marxism and Neo-Marxism remains to be
a very useful analytical instrument to understand how the world functions,
and how the world will develop in the future,
and what kind of conflicts should we
expect in the years and decades to come. Thank you very much.
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