I argue that it is possible to discern five basic variants of liberalism which are situated within two categories: individual-centric liberalism, comprising classical liberalism, new liberalism and functionalism; and state-centric liberalism which comprises English school rationalism and neoliberal institutionalism. I suggest that new liberalism (though not functionalism) constitutes the ‘via media’ between classical liberalism and modern ‘state-centric’ liberalism. There are perhaps three fundamental traits that define the rational kernel or essence of the liberal theory of the state and of political institutions more generally:

1. (1) The theory of the socially-adaptive state: the prime directive of state behaviour is to meet the economic and social needs of individuals. Rather than technically conform to anarchy (as in neorealism), states must ultimately conform to the needs of individuals: states must be socially adaptive.

2. (2) Socially adaptive states have high international agential power and can buck the logic of anarchy: paradoxically by conforming to the economic and social requirements of individuals, states are able to buck the logic of anarchy and inter-state competition thereby creating a peaceful world. In the process, the international realm is redefined as a realm of possibility, which enables states to maximise global welfare and create peace. While neorealism prescribes that states should be primarily concerned to gain ‘technical control’ in a hostile anarchic environment, liberals prescribe that states should pursue a ‘practical’ rationality, by which states come to create a peaceful, cooperative and orderly world.

3. (3) Only the ‘appropriate’ institutions (domestic and international) can achieve the desired ends of global welfare and peace: inappropriate domestic and international institutions lead to diminishing global and national welfare, as well as war.

Introduction

Though Marxism is clearly not a ‘recent’ theory, it has only recently been integrated into IR theory (though mainly within IPE). Like its realist and liberal counterparts, Marxism is far from a monolithic body of thought, and embodies a wide number of variants. Nevertheless, with respect to the state's agential power (see pp. 5–8 for full definitions) I suggest that there are three broad positions in the Marxist theory of the state:

1. (1) a theory of low domestic agential state power but moderate international agential state power found in classical Marxism

2. (2) a theory of moderate domestic agential state power and moderate international agential state power, also found in parts of classical Marxism but most especially in ‘orthodox’ neo-Marxism

3. (3) a theory of low-moderate domestic agential state power but no international agential state power, found in world systems theory (WST).

Classical Marxism

Marxists often argue that Karl Marx never developed a finished theory of the state – a task that was supposedly reserved for his projected sixth volume of Capital. The prominent neo-Marxist state theorist Bob Jessop even goes so far as arguing that the construction of a ‘finished’ Marxist theory of the state is not even possible (Jessop 1984: 29, 211–13). However, Marx did succeed in formulating a theory of the state, even though at times it was ambiguous and, arguably, it would be surprising if his projected sixth volume would have added much more to what he had already produced in his extensive writings between 1843 and his death in 1883.

Introduction: the two ‘state debates’ within the social sciences

If ‘the state is dead’, as so many International Relations (IR) scholars today contend, why do we need a book on ‘the state and International Relations’? Indeed, it seems that the direction that the ‘vanguard’ of IR theory is currently taking is, if not in the opposite direction to the state, then at least ‘away from the state’. Surely one of the common denominators that underpins the rapid rise of postmodernism, of critical theory and especially of constructivism along with feminism and Marxism, is an agenda that goes beyond the state: one that indeed seeks to displace state-centrism in general, and ‘the state’ as an object of enquiry, once and for all? At least, this appears to be the received wisdom within IR. But the argument of this book takes the form of a paradox: that it is neorealist state-centrism that denies the importance of the state in IR, while the various approaches listed above (along with liberalism), I argue, all take the state more seriously – a position which I readily concede contradicts my earlier statement (Hobson 1997: 1). This surprising conclusion emerges from introducing and applying a conceptual innovation that has largely been ignored by IR scholars – the ‘international agential power’ of the state – and reappraising each theory through this particular lens. This enables us to radically (re)view state theory in IR, such that in effect we end up by turning IR theory upside down.

Summarising the ‘second state debate’

What have we learned in this book so far? I will first summarise the second state debate and extract five generic ‘theories’ of the state that can be discerned within IR theory. I argued in chapter 1 that IR has in fact had two ‘state debates’ running in parallel, even though the second state debate has remained obscured. The structure of the first state debate presents us with the orthodox view of IR theory: that neorealism is state-centric while liberalism, Marxism and constructivism are essentially ‘society-centric’. But I suggested in chapter 1 that this received picture emerges because IR theorists have ignored what I have called the ‘international agential power’ of the state. The central message of this book is that the first state debate presents an inadequate framework for understanding IR theory and its various approaches to the state. The irony of the first state debate is that, arguably, it is not even about the state, given that both sides reify international structure over the state-as-agent (i.e. the economic structure for radical pluralists and the political structure for neorealists). Indeed, for neorealists the state is no less imprisoned within an international structure than it is for radical pluralists. In the end, then, both sides deny the possibility that states can shape the international realm, or even construct policy free of international structural constraints. The second state debate goes beyond the first debate, because it locates IR theory within the agent–structure problematic.

Are local places important? How can assessors or friends gauge the significance of a place to people who may scarcely realise its value to them until that place is threatened? How, when a loved place is destroyed, should dispossessed people receive emotional support?

The concrete road which destroyed west Beecroft is a phenomenon of creeping international sameness, the victory of ‘universal civilisation, symbolised by the serpentine freeway and the free-standing high-rise office tower, over locally inflected culture’. The bulldozer has been described as the ‘agent of tabula rasa modernization, the technocratic gesture aspiring to a condition of absolute placelessness’. We have watched this tendency of Euro-American culture towards delocalising and devaluing the built landscape in many places: in eighteenthcentury Britain, at Adaminaby, Jindabyne, Cribb Island, Yallourn, Weetangerra, Goulburn, Darwin and now Beecroft. For several decades scholars have pondered the implications of the continued draining of particularity from regions and cultures and even from nations. Are we doomed to a uniform ‘megalopolis’, as one critic put it, proliferating until internationally inspired planners reduce cities to ‘little more than the allocation of land use and logistics of distribution?’

Not only cities suffer from creeping sameness, so do towns and suburbs. Cities like Darwin and Sydney can dominate as well as be dominated. We have seen bodies like the Sydney and Melbourne City Councils destroying Surry Hills and Carlton.

Hodgins wrote these words after he returned to the locations of his childhood to find them unrecognisable, changed or destroyed. This book is a history of the migrations away from dying homes, streets, neighbourhoods, suburbs, towns, cities and countries—and the return journeys to the empty spaces where once they were. I have called these journeys, which can take place either on the ground or in the mind, ‘returning to nothing’.

Often the journey to nothing is actual. Kass Hancock returned to Darwin twenty years after Cyclone Tracy had destroyed her home and almost the entire suburb of Wagaman. The house opposite the place she had lived, where two little children had been killed, had vanished and the street itself was almost unrecognisable. Cracks in the pavement in Wagaman Terrace were almost the only tangible reminder of many sunny days and of one dreadful night. The returning journey to a lost place can also be metaphorical. Dorothy Hewett, in her poem ‘In Summer’, imagined herself going back for a look to her childhood home, listening to the ever-flowing rip in the darkness outside as it closed about the family and the dwelling.

SINKING ROOTS

Margaret Johnson spent most of her youth at Narrandera in south-western New South Wales. From her birth in 1933 she was a solitary child. When she thinks of that time she recalls a sleepy town, heat and dust, birds, long summer days, walking by herself knee-deep through piles of plane-tree leaves.

As a young woman Margaret Johnson travelled overseas, and on her return felt restless. Office work held no attraction. At the age of twenty-two she took a job as governess on a sheep property near Young on the central slopes and plains of New South Wales. Here was that half-forgotten but familiar lovely smell of hot weather and dusty roads. The following year she married Jim Johnson, the owner of a neighbouring property. The young bride saw the property's overgrown tennis court, dilapidated gravel paths, run-down gardens, horses grazing a few metres from the back door, the dark, two-storey rambling house with heavy curtains and brown blinds. She fell in love with them all, she says, almost instantly.

The property she had come to was 2500 ha of pleasant grazing country. Its name was Windermere Station; it had been held by the Johnson family since 1923. In the nineteenth century ten people had worked on it, now there were two. Except for the river flats the land was, and is, undulating to rough.

In August 1993 Luka Prkan left Canberra to return to his birth country of Croatia. He had emigrated in the 1960s, and had returned to Yugoslavia with pleasure several times, but the civil war of the 1990s made this homecoming agonising. He made his way to his birthplace, the family home for 600 years, to find it in ruins, rubble, block on shattered block. Pieces of window, half a door, a twisted iron bedframe. Half the outside staircase pointed to nothing. The enormous stove which had kept his family warm when he was a child had vanished. Donkeys, turkeys, geese, pigs, all the farm animals slaughtered; other once-domesticated animals charged past in terror. The ruin seemed so small and pitiful. Lost homelands are dead localities.

Lost countries are dead people. Luka Prkan's father died in the 1970s and his brother was wounded by a mortar splinter during the civil war. His mother, who had somehow survived the mortar attack on her home, had at first refused to leave the ruin. He found her in the refugee camp to which she had been escorted. He was not sure whether she knew him or not. It was said that from time to time she scrambled back to the wreckage of the family home, to be extricated from the stone fragments and returned to the refugee camp.

Granville Crawford's country was a corner of south-eastern New South Wales. It ran 100 km from east to west, from Michelago to the Murrumbidgee headwaters near Coolamon, and north-south from Yaouk to Tharwa. After a residence of fifty-seven years Granville Crawford knew that land as well as the average bloke knows his backyard. Yet his deep attachment to this land was shared by others. The Ngunnawal Aboriginal people, bushwalkers and environmentalists knew and loved the same valleys and ranges. Now this land is not only emotionally loved but emotionally contested.

Granville Crawford knew his country almost from birth. He was born in Queanbeyan, near Canberra, in 1929; his father died in an accident just before he was born and he was reared at Naas, a tiny settlement in the foothills of the Brindabella ranges. His foster parents were his grandmother Bertha Dyball, who won the contract to bring mail to the remote stations in the hills above Tharwa, and his stepgrandfather Herbert Oldfield, a high-country sheep and cattle farmer.

In a world where the sexes lived their lives more separately than today, the old bushman had the greatest influence on the boy. Herbert Oldfield showed Granville Crawford his own special places: That's where Hi [I] used to turn the cattle, a sparkle in his eyes. Once Oldfield gave him the last of the tucker because a young feller like Granville needed it more than an old feller like him.

Homes, like other places, are mentally constructed. What we identify as ‘home’ is not only a different location from everyone else's, it occupies a different space. Home can be an area as big as half of Sydney:

Home can be the inner city:

Home can be a suburb:

Home can be a house: