Craig Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change: Global Governance since 1850, Polity Press, 1994; pbk £22.99 or better.
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Since their inception in the 1860s, Murphy states, 'the greatest impact of the world organizations themselves has been on industrial change' (2). Specifically, he sees them as promoting the development of the world economy, and seeking to mitigate the tensions and conflicts such growth produces, both internationally and within individual nation states. In summary, the emergence of successive new communication technologies and new modes of transportation quickly gives rise to new international agencies, while more broadly: 'Each generation of world organizations began in a period of crisis, and its key economic organizations appeared only at the end of the crisis, after years of war involving the great powers and after years of economic malaise' (7); and more broadly still, they underpin successive (partial) world orders: the turn of the century Interimperial Order and the post-war "Free World" Order (8). This, then, is an analysis grounded in successive revolutions in production, and it hinges in particular on the second industrial revolution (the petroleum, chemical and electrical industries), and the dislocations stemming from the rise of Germany on the one hand, and mass production by large corporations on the other. It is an excellent account of the way in which international organizations provided the institutional infrastructure for the development of the world market, particularly worth reading as a prelude to his new book with JoAnne Yates on global standard-setting since 1880, due later this year. As we shall see, Murphy was thrown somewhat by the toxic anti-Marxism of the US academy of the time, and adopted a theoretical framework that was unfit for its purpose and left him somewhat at sea. But the core argument, which is quite compatible with an historical materialist approach, survives unscathed.
While accepting the importance of trade liberalization in developing the world market, Murphy argues that this in itself was never enough: "world government" had a crucial part to play in regard to peace and security, while national governments had an active role 'in building the infrastructure of a liberal industrial economy, as well as in managing the social conflicts that it inevitably creates' (10). Liberal internationalists from Smith and Kant onwards, he argues, recognized that industrial capitalism tends to extend itself on a global scale; that left unchecked it is destructive of society and itself; and that it is vulnerable to sovereign states 'more interested in extending the limits of their sovereign's rule than in assuring the prosperity of the people and their lands' (14); but they believe that it can still be managed productively, in contrast to the pessimists who focus more on the tendency towards conflict and argue that industrial growth spread unevenly across rival great powers leads inevitably to war (19). Murphy identifies four potential areas of conflict that liberal internationalists tend to see as 'temporary problems that will be overcome by the more rapid fulfillment of their vision' (23). First, with workers: 'the deeper issue that capitalist industrialism has always rested on inequalities in power; for the system to work, a few must have the ability to change the processes of production, while most must simply submit to the logic of the machine', giving rise to a 'contradiction between the demands of industrial system (sic) and the demand for democratic control'; second, with older social orders who resist the threat to their status: 'people may fight when technology threatens to transform their lives'; third, with the less industrialized world: 'The resentment both of those who come from countries which have recently entered a regional, imperial, or global manufacturing system, and of those who cannot do so even if they want to, creates the third kind of conflict that many liberal internationalists overlook; and fourth, among the powers: 'a coincidence of desires to preserve an older social order with conflicts arising from uneven development among the industrial powers' may provoke great-power war (21-3). In these circumstances
'Coalitions of powerful states and social forces "select" international institutions to survive by remaining parties to agreements and by continuing to finance IGOs. The institutions that do not survive are those that key state members leave, stop financing, simply ignore, or fail to renew. Not surprisingly, this kind of "natural selection" is most likely to occur during the fiscal and political crises that come with worldwide depressions and great-power wars. In that way even events like these that we might consider as the strongest evidence of the limitations of the liberal internationalist vision can also be understood as playing a role in the process that explains the significant degree to which changes in international civil society have followed the path predicted by liberals since Kant' (25-26).
However, he adds, 'this description of the selection mechanism and the evidence we have of a mechanism of innovation do not make a complete evolutionary explanation. We do not know whether the process of selection will continue to assure evolution along the liberal path, or what exactly the process of innovation really is'; so to 'fill the gaps in this evolutionary explanation and go beyond it', he turns to 'Antonio Gramsci's synthesis of liberal, Marxist, and realist social theories' (26). This is explicitly not Gramsci the historical materialist, then, but Gramsci as filtered through Robert Cox and 'critical IPE' - historical blocs, social forces, intellectual leadership, ethics and hegemony. The crucial missing element is Gramsci on the contradictions of industrial production and the world market - exactly the theme that is central to the book. And although Murphy touches on Fordism here and returns to it later (e.g. 170-73), he does not draw upon the broader historical materialist perspective that informs Americanism and Fordism, with its argument that under the Fordist regime hegemony 'is born in the factory and requires only a minute quantity of professional political and ideological intermediaries' (Gramsci, 1971; 285), and that the rationalisation of production and work requires 'a new type of worker and man' (ibid, 302), a formulation that reflects precisely Marx's 'general law of social production'). Underpinning this analysis was not only a brilliant pioneering account of the mutual imbrication of 'production' and 'social reproduction', but also a sharp analysis of the way in which 'Fordism' ratcheted up the levels of competitiveness in the world market. Gramsci suggested that Europe wanted 'to have all the benefits which Fordism brings to its competitive power while retaining its army of parasites who, by consuming vast sums of surplus value, aggravate initial costs and reduce competitive power on the international market', while in America the 'non-existence of viscous parasitic sedimentations left behind by past phases of history has allowed industry, and commerce in particular, to develop on a sound basis' (ibid: 281, 285). Americanisation, he went on to suggest, 'requires a particular environment, a particular social structure (or at least a determined intention to create it) and a certain type of state. This state is the liberal state, not in the sense of free-trade liberalism or of effective political liberty, but in the more fundamental sense of free initiative and of economic individualism ...' (ibid: 293). The question, then, was 'whether America, through the implacable weight of its economic production (and therefore indirectly), will compel or is already compelling Europe to overturn its excessively antiquated economic and social basis. ... whether we are undergoing a transformation of the material bases of European civilisation, which in the long run (though not all that long, since in the contemporary period everything happens much faster than in past ages) will bring about the overthrow of the existing forms of civilisation and the forced birth of a new' (ibid: 317).
Adoption at the outset of this analytical framework - situated in a direct line from Marx, Lenin and Trotsky - would have transformed Murphy's study, but its absence is understandable in view of the aggressive ideological policing of the borders of the new discipline of IPE to exclude Marx and historical materialism in the US academy at the time (Cammack, 2011; see also Antonio and Bonnano, 2000). In fact, his focus on the role of international organizations in promoting successive revolutions in production and the development of the world market is consistent with it, and all the more impressive, and persuasive, given the limited support for it the anodyne version of Gramsci he deploys is able to offer. It is not surprising either that Gramsci is barely mentioned in the rest of the book after the extended introduction to his approach to world order (26-45), or that the account of the 'promise of liberal internationalism' that prefaces Murphy's substantive analysis is replete with contradictions and missed opportunities. But that is easily factored out in retrospect, allowing the real strengths of the analysis to emerge with clarity.
At the core of Murphy's analysis is the idea of capitalist development as a class project promoted by international organizations as well as states. The more successful designers of successive liberal internationalist world organizations, he suggests, have pressed governments to foster industry by creating and securing international markets for industrial goods, and sought to 'manage potential conflicts with organized social forces which might oppose the further extension of the industrial system promoted by the activities undertaken to complete the first task':
'People whose interests are tied to older industries, workers subject to the discipline of new industries, and those in the less industrialized world might be helped to adjust to the new order; agreements maintaining existing privileges might be worked out; or states might agree to use coercion to assure compliance with the new order'. The institutions created will succeed if they develop powerful constituencies: 'major investors who bet on the new opportunities created by the wider markets, and ... interest groups which have come to depend on the benefits that the international institutions confer', thus bringing a supporting alliance into being (34-5).
This captures precisely the role of the World Bank at the time he was writing, and since, so the identification of the same dynamics from the mid-nineteenth century onwards is important, for all that he struggles to locate it theoretically. He offers a 'full evolutionary explanation' in which political leadership and the 'liberal myth' play crucial roles, but in which the driving force is the development of the capitalist industrial economy itself, while world organizations have a 'secondary task'. Capitalists tend to make long-term productive investments in the first stage of a new world order, but once things go wrong (through war, industrial strife, or deep recession) they either pull money from long-term investments and bet on short-term financial manouevres 'with high stakes or little connection to the real economy of jobs and production', or opt for 'unproductive hoarding' - 'putting their funds into precious metals, jewels, or anything rather than the more speculative long-term investment in fundamentally new industries'. But, he argues: 'So far at least, each era of rapid industrial growth (with its institutions encouraging capitalists to put their money into long-term productive investments) has left capitalists, as a global class, in a better position than they were at the beginning of the era' (35). Hence
'When liberal internationalists have succeeded in convincing a bloc of "progressive" investors to lend a hand in creating a new industrial era, the larger historical process of capital accumulation has already provided them with the capacity to make the necessary contribution of investment in new industries, a power that is just as important as the ability of states to cooperate in creating the climate that convinces investors to be "progressive" (35-6, emphasis mine).
Underpinning this situation is an alliance between 'liberal internationalists' and 'state classes' who are strengthened by two of the 'secondary' functions of international institutions: first, as intergovernmental bodies serving states, they have always had the task of strengthening states, and expanding their roles, and secondly 'in diverting opposition directed against the further development of industrial capitalism and in carrying out other functions, global IGOs are strengthening society in relation to the state proper' (36), and encouraging states to be more responsive to their national societies (clearly, more precisely, to class alliances supportive of capitalist development). In short, Murphy sees the development of welfare and a modicum of economic nationalism as functional for the continued development of industrial capitalism (see also p. 45). Throughout, 'the critical strain of liberal internationalism - the strain nurtured by IGOs and by the state - has been preserved, but it has always confronted an equally strong strain of liberal fundamentalists who prefer a world of pure laissez faire' (37). The latter thrive in the early years of the world order crises when the power of private investors is at its peak: 'The fundamentalists provide the intellectual leadership needed to justify the era of gambling and hoarding; they provide justification for a kind of governance of the world economy by capitalists alone, unencumbered by necessary alliances with other social forces' (37). At the same time, this is not just a cycle of repetition: the impetus to the creation of the Interimperial Order came from a 'host of aristocratic philanthropists', and from the United States in the case of the Free World order, but neither is available to play the same role today, 'and it is not clear that alternative leaders have been socialized in sufficient numbers to support the numerous experiments in international organization that would really be needed for something like the "natural selection" of new institutions to operate again' (37-8).
How, then, did liberal internationalists go about their task? According to Murphy, they invoked, paradoxically as it were, 'mythic elements of their philosophy' that appealed to 'the kinds of "higher" interests about which they, as liberals, have always been sceptical' (38). The first step was to secure a supportive coercive alliance, but potential political leaders who were then drawn in 'always appear to be responding (either directly or indirectly) as a result of altruism, noblesse oblige, or one of those other "higher" motivations that liberal theory usually treats as so unreliable': 'liberal internationalists have argued that if capitalists could transcend their short-run individual interests long enough to push collectively for a liberal international order, they all would receive remarkable long-run benefits (the mythic part of the liberal vision)' (40). So while 'their own theory will not reveal it to them, liberal internationalists play their own role in the fulfillment of their vision not by taking interests as given, but by shaping their audiences' motivations, their understandings of both their aspirations and their interests'. But at the same time: 'These institutions also shape action, in part by shaping interests, but more by taking interests as given. The international institutions simply change the actions that powerful states, powerful investors, and others will prefer'. By creating new world markets and satisfying potential opponents of new industrial developments, 'international institutions convince capitalists to invest in the economic base of the next world order' (41). This convoluted and self-contradictory formulation is obviously unsatisfactory, but easily resolved once we recognise that these liberal internationalist institutions were not staffed by conflicted altruists at all, but simply represented the general long-term interest of capital itself.
This is perfectly clear when Murphy goes on to itemise the tasks (fostering industry through the expansion of international markets, satisfying potential opponents of new industries, maintaining a stable balance of military power), means (whether coercive (colonial) or consensual (international support for development) approaches to potential opponents from the less industrialized world), and sites (global, regional, national or local) of regulation that constitute the political institutional order created by liberal international historical blocs (41-3). Here he argues that while the main liberal internationalist tradition focuses too exclusively of consensual global means of regulation, contemporary economists and political scientists of the "social structures of accumulation" and "regulation" schools focus too much on sites of regulation within individual nation-states, tending to ignore the international level. Cox's analysis of the ILO (1977) is offered as a successful integration of the two: initially imagined as 'a powerful regulatory agency that would manage conflicts between workers and capitalists across the industrialized world through a kind of parliament in which both social forces would be represented, a body whose main purpose would be to establish authoritative global labour standards', it in fact became something rather different - far less central than this vision suggested, but nevertheless important in helping to implement at national and factory levels the 'Fordist bargain of mass consumption for mass production', and promote collective bargaining, suggesting that 'the ultimate goal of the liberal internationalists has always been one of securing the global hegemony of a particular class, the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie' (44). And in a final twist, Murphy rounds off this scene-setting chapter by suggesting that 'most critical writers in the liberal internationalist tradition have worked to create what Gramsci called the ethical hegemony of the same class, the kind of hegemony that not only minimizes the use of force, but also eschews all fraudulent ideological claims, all the hype and all the smoke and mirrors designed to secure the consent of allies who do not really benefit much from a social order under bourgeois hegemony' (44-5, drawing on Augelli and Murphy, 1988), and suggesting that the Interimperial and Free World orders were 'approximations, although very poor approximations, of ethical hegemony' (45) - a dead end, then, if ever there was one.
What is going on here, and why is this such an instructive book to read? Murphy had the misfortune to uncover a fundamental truth about international organizations at a moment when classical Marxism was off limits in the US academy, and the spectrum of the permissible on the 'critical liberal' side ranged from Keohane to Cox, and his pluralist reading of Gramsci. The result was that he described the international organizations on which he focused accurately as concerned with promoting the spread of industrial capitalism, extending the world market, addressing tensions between developed and developing states, seeking to aid governments in addressing the social conflicts the process inevitably threw up, developing means of shaping the thought and behaviour of individuals and the contexts in which they operate, and in broad terms, recognizing that capitalists, if given their heads, will drive the process to the point of ruin. But he could not account for it theoretically or imagine its future. Still, the picture he gives fits exactly with the contemporary roles of the World Bank and the OECD, and the book deserves recognition as a pioneering study of the role of IGOs in promoting global capitalism, albeit blurred by being filtered through a rather hazy version of Gramsci. Hence Murphy's crucial insight, that 'liberal internationalists have argued that if capitalists could transcend their short-run individual interests long enough to push collectively for a liberal international order, they all would receive remarkable long-run benefits', as clear an articulation of their fidelity to the interest of capital in general and the logic of capitalist accumulation on a global scale as can be imagined, presents itself to him as 'the mythic part of the liberal vision', and for want of a deeper grounding in historical materialism, he is seduced into toying with the idea of 'ethical hegemony' despite his awareness that it does not really fit the case. What we have, in fact, is a classic instance of D.H. Lawrence's maxim: "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it". So the purpose of this review is simple. It is to commend the investigation of international organizations that makes up the bulk of this monograph, and to suggest that it is best read from a classical Marxist perspective.
The market-building aspect is apparent in the account of the creation and work of major public international unions in the late nineteenth century, prominent among them the International Telegraph Union (1865), the Universal Postal Union (1867), the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (1875), the International Union for the Protection of Industrial Property (1883), and the International Railway Congress Association (1884). As Murphy summarizes: 'The nineteenth-century public system builders ... would establish international public systems (economically efficient, politically efficient, and extendable to the whole world) in order to create the larger markets in which liberal economic policies would result in improvements in the division of labour (from the global level to the factory floor), thus contributing to human progress' (67). Kings and princes around Europe were frequent sponsors of such initiatives, along with a range of American entrepreneurs, and Murphy illustrates the point with the 'complete elaboration of the new argument' put forward by John Wright, an Anglo-Irish engineer who had promoted railway development in Illinois in 1851: he advocated a world-wide railway network, constructed by awarding land grants and franchises to private companies, insisting that his plan "[could] not fail to soon place all alike on an equality with the advanced kingdoms of the world, and, in many instances, render their sources of wealth superior" (cited p. 68). In fact, fostering industry through the provision of infrastructure was the most prominent task carried out by these bodies (84), and Murphy expands in detail on the creation of the institutional infrastructure for the European market, realized largely by a group of organizations established in Berne (86-97), and the manner in which 'the designers, sponsors, and benefactors of the Unions also strengthened the coercive apparatuses of their state members and helped protect domestic orders from disruptive interstate conflicts' (99). As he notes, though, the liberal internationalists were unable to prevail over proponents, in Germany and the United States, of military power and imperialist expansion (102-4). Overall, then, in this period, 'the tasks that the Public International Unions carried out most effectively remained those associated with creating and regulating a European market for industrial goods' (106). In doing so, he shows, they acted with a considerable degree of autonomy: although the Unions were 'second-order institutions, clubs of jealous states that liked to keep the world organizations in close rein', the widespread belief that they did so effectively was ' more true in theory than it was in fact, and perhaps more true of the world organizations at the end of this century than of those at the end of the last'. Actually, it is no more true of current institutions. In any case, Murphy's careful review of the tasks assigned to these bodies and the degree of surveillance and control exercised over them (Appendix, 285-92) leads him to conclude that while all but 13 per cent of officially assigned tasks were subject to formal oversight:
'Most often this was not exactly what happened. Member governments rarely appointed permanent representatives to the Unions. In some cases the resident ambassador in the capital nearest the headquarters of an agency might be given responsibility for overseeing its activities, but those delegates could only expect to discuss the Union's activities with other representatives at the periodic intergovernmental conferences that could be biennial, triennial, or even less frequent. In most of the Unions, most of the time, the chain of command ended with the chief executive officer, often with a man like Numa Droz, a former Swiss civil servant somewhat detached from the machinations of the powers themselves' (107).
In part, this is understandable in that the Unions carried out tasks that were useful to the states themselves. But they also 'allow[ed] them to see their common interests', and furthered their implementation, with clear implication for class politics at home: 'The change to an international forum ... would almost always favour social forces depending on international commerce' (109). The point is a simple and obvious one, but crucial all the same, and far too often overlooked in more ideological and less careful studies. As the Unions began to prepare for and run periodic intergovernmental conferences themselves, their growing expertise and control of the agenda reinforced this trend (111-3), as did their responsibility for monitoring and reporting on the compliance of states in key areas of activity, and the tendency for habituation to a rule to become the norm (115-6). The impact on industrial change then came from the 'institutional logic' that conditioned 'the choices made by those whose action were the proximate cause of such change - inventors, entrepreneurs and investors (whether private or public), industrial workers, and consumers of industrial products' (117). The brief concluding summary to this chapter (Chapter 3, 117-8) is excellent, and commended for particular attention.
Sensible stuff, then. Chapter 4, on the second industrial revolution and the Great War, drawing astutely on some excellent secondary sources, charts the rise of giant firms in the United States, in a 'continental market knit together by the railroad and the telegraph' (120), and the counterpoint of conflict in Europe that arose precisely because the market there was divided into rival sovereignties exacerbated by differing success in raising productivity in 'old' industries and developing the new ones - chemical, electrical and petroleum-based - constitutive of the second industrial revolution. Referencing a slew of consular reports from 1885-6, Murphy documents British alarm at the rising challenge from German exports in the context of new transport infrastructure and networks of commercial travellers on the European continent. The resonance with contemporary discourse is unmistakable, and indicative of the dynamics of remorseless competition in the world market:
'In the nineteenth-century reports the Germans are even treated as "great imitators" who once made somewhat shoddy products based on English models, but who now, some consuls noted, made much higher quality goods, equaling or bettering anything produced in Britain. There is a lot of respectful praise of the competitor's education system and industrial discipline along with criticism for engaging in an unsportsmanlike level of state-supported competition' (122).
While Americans concentrated their multinational investment in manufacturing, much of it in Europe, French financiers preferred colonial enterprises, the British invested in overseas infrastructure with longer-term potential, like railroads and water projects, and the Germans 'bought the government bonds of neighbouring nations and invested in their infrastructure in order to develop markets for German industrial goods' (125). With Germany unable to 'impose a continental market on the other ten key [European] states', the intergovernmental Unions played an indispensable role in building and integrating it (133); but in the United States, with its own 'continental' market, private associations and federal bodies such as the Interstate Commerce Commission played the same role. The differences in form were not so important as the fact that in both cases 'new institutions emerged within civil society to establish and secure larger markets for industrial goods, and they in turn encouraged the investments needed to begin the Second Industrial Revolution' (135). However, the 'fundamental conflicts' (143) to which the uneven development of the world market gave rise precluded any broader advances in global governance (136-52 - another excellent comparative discussion). Murphy avoids the trap of now forgotten 'hegemonic stability theory', taking as a baseline instead the fact that the 'wartime governments all recognized that even with extensive cooperation in public finance, expansionary national macroeconomic policies would be incompatible with a world trade system organized under a fundamentalist version of laissez faire' (165-6). It also proved incompatible, however, with a policy of funding and promoting industrialisation in the developing world, which remained a minority viewpoint after both world wars (166-8). As would prove the case after 1960, when the OECD made the argument, neither liberal internationalists nor global organisations could convince the 'advanced' economies that it was in their long-term interest to promote industrial development in the rest of the world (Cammack, 2019). The result was a long hiatus in the promotion of global industrial change, and Murphy remarks that as the UN system turned its attention to new challenges - development, public finance, peacekeeping and human rights - 'it would be easy to forget that the primary tasks performed by the prewar Unions - fostering industry and managing social conflicts in the industrial world - remained the foundation of global governance' (188), and he uncovers a persistent undercurrent of activity around industrial change, albeit primarily in Western Europe, the United States and Japan. In summary:
'The League and UN system replicated the attempts of the Public International Unions to link the physical infrastructure of an expanded world market, define intellectual property and industrial standards for the new industries that might be created within that market area, and allow the increasingly free exchange of industrial goods that would encourage investment in those industries' (192).
International regimes for radio, telecommunications satellites, civil aviation, shipping, refrigeration, road signs and driving licences all arose from the need to establish standards for increased communications and emerging new technologies, while the International Standards Organization, passing through a number of stages between 1926 and 1946, would eventually underpin the subsequent development of global production chains. The same long-term perspective that prompted the International Law Association to begin work on an international air regime before either flight or ground-to-air communication were possible (136) was in evidence in relation to global production and trade: 'The charters of the infrastructure, intellectual property, and industrial standards organizations of the UN era all anticipate a world in which free trade in manufactured goods has become the rule' (197).
As is well recognized, the advanced economies dragged their feet, and fought off the challenge represented by the brief campaign for a New International Economic Order which might have introduced quasi-Keynesian ideas at a global level, while managing domestic social conflict by developing a variety of welfare regimes, coordinated to some extent both before and after the Second World War, as Murphy shows, by the norm-setting and surveillance powers of the ILO. As a result, 'the international labour standards promulgated by the ILO became substantively significant signs of the boundary between the Free World's "North" and "South," the line between the world where industrial labour was relatively privileged and the one where it was not' (201); and the dividing line was reinforced by the twin faces of the IMF - a means to cooperation in public finance among the major capitalist states, but for the developing world an enforcer of orthodox policies that diminished the role of government in the economy (208). Even so, Murphy argues, 'looked at another way, in the League and UN era world organizations have always been allies in the Third World's struggle to gain the advantages that accrued to industrialized countries' (208). The ensuing section (208-18) needs reading with care, as the logic of extending the world market (the League promoted both free trade in agriculture and the removal of export restrictions on raw materials from colonies; the UN system avidly promoted policies to improve infrastructure and the quality of the global workforce, and to support the introduction of capitalist farming) is far more apparent than any notion of 'ethical hegemony'; and foreign aid and more general receptiveness to demands for development only took off when the risk of socialist revolution had to be averted. But at the same time that he is mildly indulgent towards some liberal myths, Murphy makes a persuasive case that the range of agencies, within and outside the UN, that engage with development are both diverse, and relatively autonomous from external control by governments, though conversely highly dependent on a civil society that was dominated by private sector interests.
In short, the hallmark of the 'Free World historic bloc' (225) was that it 'came to knit the wealthy OECD countries and the dependent capitalist states of the Third World into a single global economy' (226): 'If and when a third industrial revolution begins it will begin in a world economy that has become more truly global than ever before' (227). In the penultimate chapter Murphy examines this record of 'prosperity and disappointment', as the emphasis returns to technological revolutions in production, rising intercontinental competition between large corporations, and capitalist class hegemony. Against this background, he concludes, reasonably, that world organizations tempered the dominance of the United States, played a facilitating role in the management of domestic conflict, offered some modest support for development, and kept some key channels open between East and West, while on the whole furthering a process of 'Westernization' (236-42). The dominant theme, however, is the appearance of cracks in the 'Free World' regime of military competition with the East along with the Fordist high-wage, mass consumption and social welfare settlement at home, and the resulting crisis of liberal internationalism (esp. Table 7, 244-5, and 251-2); the relevant section (242-53) is impressively free of the 'end of history' euphoria that gripped others at the time, and testimony to the merits of the underlying political economy approach Murphy adopts.
The rather downbeat assessment presented in these later chapters has weathered the passage of time very well. The same cannot be said of the conclusion, in which Murphy opts not to return to the robust analytical framework summarized in the first two paragraphs of this review - successive world orders shaped by material change and modulated by international organizations pursuing the development of industry and of the world market - but instead to focus on the relative potential of laissez-faire fundamentalists and global Keynesians to shape the next world order. So his vision of the 'globalisation of the market economy' (271) remains within the confines of the 'liberal internationalist project', and all he can salvage from Gramsci, in the only reference to him in the chapter, is what has become the first port of call for liberal readers of his work - the optimism of the will versus the pessimism of the intellect (275). But as indicated above, there is another Gramsci. Rather than condemning Murphy for missing the barely incipient rise of China, or fixating on the potential for more efficient and technically advanced supersonic travel in the next industrial revolution, to the virtual exclusion of other developments, pardonable faults in each case, we might consider subsequent developments in the light of Murphy's framework and the missing Gramsci. Then it is possible in retrospect to identify a third emergent world order - a truly global World Market Order, in which the logic of capital rules, and international organizations promote it relentlessly. In such a scenario, the current rise of China and the organization of global production networks on the basis of new digital platforms correspond to the earlier rise of Germany and of mass production corporations; and the potential areas of conflict that liberal internationalists tend to see as temporary loom just as large, though the outcomes are unlikely to be the same. And if we adapt the historical materialist Gramsci of Americanism and Fordism to the present, the question becomes
'whether China, through the implacable weight of its economic production (and therefore indirectly), will compel or is already compelling the West to overturn its excessively antiquated economic and social basis. ... whether we are undergoing a transformation of the material bases of Western civilisation, which in the long run (though not all that long, since in the contemporary period everything happens much faster than in past ages) will bring about the overthrow of the existing forms of civilisation and the forced birth of a new'.
In other words, there is a powerful analytical framework in this excellent monograph, albeit one that was struggling to be born. Read properly, it offers an unrivalled perspective on the last hundred years of world market development.
References
Robert J. Antonio and Alessandro Bonanno (2000), 'A New Global Capitalism? From "Americanism and Fordism" to "Americanization-Globalization"', American Studies, 41, 2-3, pp. 33-77.
Paul Cammack (2011), ‘Knowledge and power in the field of IPE’, in Stuart Shields, Ian Bruff, and Huw Macartney, eds, Critical International Political Economy: Dialogue, Debate, Dissensus, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 149-168.
---- (2019), ‘The OECD and the World Market: Antecedents of Deep Marketisation, Globalizations, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2018.1560184.
Robert Cox (1977), 'Labor and Hegemony', International Organization, 31, 3, 385-424.
Enrico Augelli and Craig Murphy (1988), America's Quest for Supremacy and the Third World: A Gramscian Analysis, Frances Pinter.
JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy (2019), Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880, Johns Hopkins University Press.
While accepting the importance of trade liberalization in developing the world market, Murphy argues that this in itself was never enough: "world government" had a crucial part to play in regard to peace and security, while national governments had an active role 'in building the infrastructure of a liberal industrial economy, as well as in managing the social conflicts that it inevitably creates' (10). Liberal internationalists from Smith and Kant onwards, he argues, recognized that industrial capitalism tends to extend itself on a global scale; that left unchecked it is destructive of society and itself; and that it is vulnerable to sovereign states 'more interested in extending the limits of their sovereign's rule than in assuring the prosperity of the people and their lands' (14); but they believe that it can still be managed productively, in contrast to the pessimists who focus more on the tendency towards conflict and argue that industrial growth spread unevenly across rival great powers leads inevitably to war (19). Murphy identifies four potential areas of conflict that liberal internationalists tend to see as 'temporary problems that will be overcome by the more rapid fulfillment of their vision' (23). First, with workers: 'the deeper issue that capitalist industrialism has always rested on inequalities in power; for the system to work, a few must have the ability to change the processes of production, while most must simply submit to the logic of the machine', giving rise to a 'contradiction between the demands of industrial system (sic) and the demand for democratic control'; second, with older social orders who resist the threat to their status: 'people may fight when technology threatens to transform their lives'; third, with the less industrialized world: 'The resentment both of those who come from countries which have recently entered a regional, imperial, or global manufacturing system, and of those who cannot do so even if they want to, creates the third kind of conflict that many liberal internationalists overlook; and fourth, among the powers: 'a coincidence of desires to preserve an older social order with conflicts arising from uneven development among the industrial powers' may provoke great-power war (21-3). In these circumstances
'Coalitions of powerful states and social forces "select" international institutions to survive by remaining parties to agreements and by continuing to finance IGOs. The institutions that do not survive are those that key state members leave, stop financing, simply ignore, or fail to renew. Not surprisingly, this kind of "natural selection" is most likely to occur during the fiscal and political crises that come with worldwide depressions and great-power wars. In that way even events like these that we might consider as the strongest evidence of the limitations of the liberal internationalist vision can also be understood as playing a role in the process that explains the significant degree to which changes in international civil society have followed the path predicted by liberals since Kant' (25-26).
However, he adds, 'this description of the selection mechanism and the evidence we have of a mechanism of innovation do not make a complete evolutionary explanation. We do not know whether the process of selection will continue to assure evolution along the liberal path, or what exactly the process of innovation really is'; so to 'fill the gaps in this evolutionary explanation and go beyond it', he turns to 'Antonio Gramsci's synthesis of liberal, Marxist, and realist social theories' (26). This is explicitly not Gramsci the historical materialist, then, but Gramsci as filtered through Robert Cox and 'critical IPE' - historical blocs, social forces, intellectual leadership, ethics and hegemony. The crucial missing element is Gramsci on the contradictions of industrial production and the world market - exactly the theme that is central to the book. And although Murphy touches on Fordism here and returns to it later (e.g. 170-73), he does not draw upon the broader historical materialist perspective that informs Americanism and Fordism, with its argument that under the Fordist regime hegemony 'is born in the factory and requires only a minute quantity of professional political and ideological intermediaries' (Gramsci, 1971; 285), and that the rationalisation of production and work requires 'a new type of worker and man' (ibid, 302), a formulation that reflects precisely Marx's 'general law of social production'). Underpinning this analysis was not only a brilliant pioneering account of the mutual imbrication of 'production' and 'social reproduction', but also a sharp analysis of the way in which 'Fordism' ratcheted up the levels of competitiveness in the world market. Gramsci suggested that Europe wanted 'to have all the benefits which Fordism brings to its competitive power while retaining its army of parasites who, by consuming vast sums of surplus value, aggravate initial costs and reduce competitive power on the international market', while in America the 'non-existence of viscous parasitic sedimentations left behind by past phases of history has allowed industry, and commerce in particular, to develop on a sound basis' (ibid: 281, 285). Americanisation, he went on to suggest, 'requires a particular environment, a particular social structure (or at least a determined intention to create it) and a certain type of state. This state is the liberal state, not in the sense of free-trade liberalism or of effective political liberty, but in the more fundamental sense of free initiative and of economic individualism ...' (ibid: 293). The question, then, was 'whether America, through the implacable weight of its economic production (and therefore indirectly), will compel or is already compelling Europe to overturn its excessively antiquated economic and social basis. ... whether we are undergoing a transformation of the material bases of European civilisation, which in the long run (though not all that long, since in the contemporary period everything happens much faster than in past ages) will bring about the overthrow of the existing forms of civilisation and the forced birth of a new' (ibid: 317).
Adoption at the outset of this analytical framework - situated in a direct line from Marx, Lenin and Trotsky - would have transformed Murphy's study, but its absence is understandable in view of the aggressive ideological policing of the borders of the new discipline of IPE to exclude Marx and historical materialism in the US academy at the time (Cammack, 2011; see also Antonio and Bonnano, 2000). In fact, his focus on the role of international organizations in promoting successive revolutions in production and the development of the world market is consistent with it, and all the more impressive, and persuasive, given the limited support for it the anodyne version of Gramsci he deploys is able to offer. It is not surprising either that Gramsci is barely mentioned in the rest of the book after the extended introduction to his approach to world order (26-45), or that the account of the 'promise of liberal internationalism' that prefaces Murphy's substantive analysis is replete with contradictions and missed opportunities. But that is easily factored out in retrospect, allowing the real strengths of the analysis to emerge with clarity.
At the core of Murphy's analysis is the idea of capitalist development as a class project promoted by international organizations as well as states. The more successful designers of successive liberal internationalist world organizations, he suggests, have pressed governments to foster industry by creating and securing international markets for industrial goods, and sought to 'manage potential conflicts with organized social forces which might oppose the further extension of the industrial system promoted by the activities undertaken to complete the first task':
'People whose interests are tied to older industries, workers subject to the discipline of new industries, and those in the less industrialized world might be helped to adjust to the new order; agreements maintaining existing privileges might be worked out; or states might agree to use coercion to assure compliance with the new order'. The institutions created will succeed if they develop powerful constituencies: 'major investors who bet on the new opportunities created by the wider markets, and ... interest groups which have come to depend on the benefits that the international institutions confer', thus bringing a supporting alliance into being (34-5).
This captures precisely the role of the World Bank at the time he was writing, and since, so the identification of the same dynamics from the mid-nineteenth century onwards is important, for all that he struggles to locate it theoretically. He offers a 'full evolutionary explanation' in which political leadership and the 'liberal myth' play crucial roles, but in which the driving force is the development of the capitalist industrial economy itself, while world organizations have a 'secondary task'. Capitalists tend to make long-term productive investments in the first stage of a new world order, but once things go wrong (through war, industrial strife, or deep recession) they either pull money from long-term investments and bet on short-term financial manouevres 'with high stakes or little connection to the real economy of jobs and production', or opt for 'unproductive hoarding' - 'putting their funds into precious metals, jewels, or anything rather than the more speculative long-term investment in fundamentally new industries'. But, he argues: 'So far at least, each era of rapid industrial growth (with its institutions encouraging capitalists to put their money into long-term productive investments) has left capitalists, as a global class, in a better position than they were at the beginning of the era' (35). Hence
'When liberal internationalists have succeeded in convincing a bloc of "progressive" investors to lend a hand in creating a new industrial era, the larger historical process of capital accumulation has already provided them with the capacity to make the necessary contribution of investment in new industries, a power that is just as important as the ability of states to cooperate in creating the climate that convinces investors to be "progressive" (35-6, emphasis mine).
Underpinning this situation is an alliance between 'liberal internationalists' and 'state classes' who are strengthened by two of the 'secondary' functions of international institutions: first, as intergovernmental bodies serving states, they have always had the task of strengthening states, and expanding their roles, and secondly 'in diverting opposition directed against the further development of industrial capitalism and in carrying out other functions, global IGOs are strengthening society in relation to the state proper' (36), and encouraging states to be more responsive to their national societies (clearly, more precisely, to class alliances supportive of capitalist development). In short, Murphy sees the development of welfare and a modicum of economic nationalism as functional for the continued development of industrial capitalism (see also p. 45). Throughout, 'the critical strain of liberal internationalism - the strain nurtured by IGOs and by the state - has been preserved, but it has always confronted an equally strong strain of liberal fundamentalists who prefer a world of pure laissez faire' (37). The latter thrive in the early years of the world order crises when the power of private investors is at its peak: 'The fundamentalists provide the intellectual leadership needed to justify the era of gambling and hoarding; they provide justification for a kind of governance of the world economy by capitalists alone, unencumbered by necessary alliances with other social forces' (37). At the same time, this is not just a cycle of repetition: the impetus to the creation of the Interimperial Order came from a 'host of aristocratic philanthropists', and from the United States in the case of the Free World order, but neither is available to play the same role today, 'and it is not clear that alternative leaders have been socialized in sufficient numbers to support the numerous experiments in international organization that would really be needed for something like the "natural selection" of new institutions to operate again' (37-8).
How, then, did liberal internationalists go about their task? According to Murphy, they invoked, paradoxically as it were, 'mythic elements of their philosophy' that appealed to 'the kinds of "higher" interests about which they, as liberals, have always been sceptical' (38). The first step was to secure a supportive coercive alliance, but potential political leaders who were then drawn in 'always appear to be responding (either directly or indirectly) as a result of altruism, noblesse oblige, or one of those other "higher" motivations that liberal theory usually treats as so unreliable': 'liberal internationalists have argued that if capitalists could transcend their short-run individual interests long enough to push collectively for a liberal international order, they all would receive remarkable long-run benefits (the mythic part of the liberal vision)' (40). So while 'their own theory will not reveal it to them, liberal internationalists play their own role in the fulfillment of their vision not by taking interests as given, but by shaping their audiences' motivations, their understandings of both their aspirations and their interests'. But at the same time: 'These institutions also shape action, in part by shaping interests, but more by taking interests as given. The international institutions simply change the actions that powerful states, powerful investors, and others will prefer'. By creating new world markets and satisfying potential opponents of new industrial developments, 'international institutions convince capitalists to invest in the economic base of the next world order' (41). This convoluted and self-contradictory formulation is obviously unsatisfactory, but easily resolved once we recognise that these liberal internationalist institutions were not staffed by conflicted altruists at all, but simply represented the general long-term interest of capital itself.
This is perfectly clear when Murphy goes on to itemise the tasks (fostering industry through the expansion of international markets, satisfying potential opponents of new industries, maintaining a stable balance of military power), means (whether coercive (colonial) or consensual (international support for development) approaches to potential opponents from the less industrialized world), and sites (global, regional, national or local) of regulation that constitute the political institutional order created by liberal international historical blocs (41-3). Here he argues that while the main liberal internationalist tradition focuses too exclusively of consensual global means of regulation, contemporary economists and political scientists of the "social structures of accumulation" and "regulation" schools focus too much on sites of regulation within individual nation-states, tending to ignore the international level. Cox's analysis of the ILO (1977) is offered as a successful integration of the two: initially imagined as 'a powerful regulatory agency that would manage conflicts between workers and capitalists across the industrialized world through a kind of parliament in which both social forces would be represented, a body whose main purpose would be to establish authoritative global labour standards', it in fact became something rather different - far less central than this vision suggested, but nevertheless important in helping to implement at national and factory levels the 'Fordist bargain of mass consumption for mass production', and promote collective bargaining, suggesting that 'the ultimate goal of the liberal internationalists has always been one of securing the global hegemony of a particular class, the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie' (44). And in a final twist, Murphy rounds off this scene-setting chapter by suggesting that 'most critical writers in the liberal internationalist tradition have worked to create what Gramsci called the ethical hegemony of the same class, the kind of hegemony that not only minimizes the use of force, but also eschews all fraudulent ideological claims, all the hype and all the smoke and mirrors designed to secure the consent of allies who do not really benefit much from a social order under bourgeois hegemony' (44-5, drawing on Augelli and Murphy, 1988), and suggesting that the Interimperial and Free World orders were 'approximations, although very poor approximations, of ethical hegemony' (45) - a dead end, then, if ever there was one.
What is going on here, and why is this such an instructive book to read? Murphy had the misfortune to uncover a fundamental truth about international organizations at a moment when classical Marxism was off limits in the US academy, and the spectrum of the permissible on the 'critical liberal' side ranged from Keohane to Cox, and his pluralist reading of Gramsci. The result was that he described the international organizations on which he focused accurately as concerned with promoting the spread of industrial capitalism, extending the world market, addressing tensions between developed and developing states, seeking to aid governments in addressing the social conflicts the process inevitably threw up, developing means of shaping the thought and behaviour of individuals and the contexts in which they operate, and in broad terms, recognizing that capitalists, if given their heads, will drive the process to the point of ruin. But he could not account for it theoretically or imagine its future. Still, the picture he gives fits exactly with the contemporary roles of the World Bank and the OECD, and the book deserves recognition as a pioneering study of the role of IGOs in promoting global capitalism, albeit blurred by being filtered through a rather hazy version of Gramsci. Hence Murphy's crucial insight, that 'liberal internationalists have argued that if capitalists could transcend their short-run individual interests long enough to push collectively for a liberal international order, they all would receive remarkable long-run benefits', as clear an articulation of their fidelity to the interest of capital in general and the logic of capitalist accumulation on a global scale as can be imagined, presents itself to him as 'the mythic part of the liberal vision', and for want of a deeper grounding in historical materialism, he is seduced into toying with the idea of 'ethical hegemony' despite his awareness that it does not really fit the case. What we have, in fact, is a classic instance of D.H. Lawrence's maxim: "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it". So the purpose of this review is simple. It is to commend the investigation of international organizations that makes up the bulk of this monograph, and to suggest that it is best read from a classical Marxist perspective.
The market-building aspect is apparent in the account of the creation and work of major public international unions in the late nineteenth century, prominent among them the International Telegraph Union (1865), the Universal Postal Union (1867), the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (1875), the International Union for the Protection of Industrial Property (1883), and the International Railway Congress Association (1884). As Murphy summarizes: 'The nineteenth-century public system builders ... would establish international public systems (economically efficient, politically efficient, and extendable to the whole world) in order to create the larger markets in which liberal economic policies would result in improvements in the division of labour (from the global level to the factory floor), thus contributing to human progress' (67). Kings and princes around Europe were frequent sponsors of such initiatives, along with a range of American entrepreneurs, and Murphy illustrates the point with the 'complete elaboration of the new argument' put forward by John Wright, an Anglo-Irish engineer who had promoted railway development in Illinois in 1851: he advocated a world-wide railway network, constructed by awarding land grants and franchises to private companies, insisting that his plan "[could] not fail to soon place all alike on an equality with the advanced kingdoms of the world, and, in many instances, render their sources of wealth superior" (cited p. 68). In fact, fostering industry through the provision of infrastructure was the most prominent task carried out by these bodies (84), and Murphy expands in detail on the creation of the institutional infrastructure for the European market, realized largely by a group of organizations established in Berne (86-97), and the manner in which 'the designers, sponsors, and benefactors of the Unions also strengthened the coercive apparatuses of their state members and helped protect domestic orders from disruptive interstate conflicts' (99). As he notes, though, the liberal internationalists were unable to prevail over proponents, in Germany and the United States, of military power and imperialist expansion (102-4). Overall, then, in this period, 'the tasks that the Public International Unions carried out most effectively remained those associated with creating and regulating a European market for industrial goods' (106). In doing so, he shows, they acted with a considerable degree of autonomy: although the Unions were 'second-order institutions, clubs of jealous states that liked to keep the world organizations in close rein', the widespread belief that they did so effectively was ' more true in theory than it was in fact, and perhaps more true of the world organizations at the end of this century than of those at the end of the last'. Actually, it is no more true of current institutions. In any case, Murphy's careful review of the tasks assigned to these bodies and the degree of surveillance and control exercised over them (Appendix, 285-92) leads him to conclude that while all but 13 per cent of officially assigned tasks were subject to formal oversight:
'Most often this was not exactly what happened. Member governments rarely appointed permanent representatives to the Unions. In some cases the resident ambassador in the capital nearest the headquarters of an agency might be given responsibility for overseeing its activities, but those delegates could only expect to discuss the Union's activities with other representatives at the periodic intergovernmental conferences that could be biennial, triennial, or even less frequent. In most of the Unions, most of the time, the chain of command ended with the chief executive officer, often with a man like Numa Droz, a former Swiss civil servant somewhat detached from the machinations of the powers themselves' (107).
In part, this is understandable in that the Unions carried out tasks that were useful to the states themselves. But they also 'allow[ed] them to see their common interests', and furthered their implementation, with clear implication for class politics at home: 'The change to an international forum ... would almost always favour social forces depending on international commerce' (109). The point is a simple and obvious one, but crucial all the same, and far too often overlooked in more ideological and less careful studies. As the Unions began to prepare for and run periodic intergovernmental conferences themselves, their growing expertise and control of the agenda reinforced this trend (111-3), as did their responsibility for monitoring and reporting on the compliance of states in key areas of activity, and the tendency for habituation to a rule to become the norm (115-6). The impact on industrial change then came from the 'institutional logic' that conditioned 'the choices made by those whose action were the proximate cause of such change - inventors, entrepreneurs and investors (whether private or public), industrial workers, and consumers of industrial products' (117). The brief concluding summary to this chapter (Chapter 3, 117-8) is excellent, and commended for particular attention.
Sensible stuff, then. Chapter 4, on the second industrial revolution and the Great War, drawing astutely on some excellent secondary sources, charts the rise of giant firms in the United States, in a 'continental market knit together by the railroad and the telegraph' (120), and the counterpoint of conflict in Europe that arose precisely because the market there was divided into rival sovereignties exacerbated by differing success in raising productivity in 'old' industries and developing the new ones - chemical, electrical and petroleum-based - constitutive of the second industrial revolution. Referencing a slew of consular reports from 1885-6, Murphy documents British alarm at the rising challenge from German exports in the context of new transport infrastructure and networks of commercial travellers on the European continent. The resonance with contemporary discourse is unmistakable, and indicative of the dynamics of remorseless competition in the world market:
'In the nineteenth-century reports the Germans are even treated as "great imitators" who once made somewhat shoddy products based on English models, but who now, some consuls noted, made much higher quality goods, equaling or bettering anything produced in Britain. There is a lot of respectful praise of the competitor's education system and industrial discipline along with criticism for engaging in an unsportsmanlike level of state-supported competition' (122).
While Americans concentrated their multinational investment in manufacturing, much of it in Europe, French financiers preferred colonial enterprises, the British invested in overseas infrastructure with longer-term potential, like railroads and water projects, and the Germans 'bought the government bonds of neighbouring nations and invested in their infrastructure in order to develop markets for German industrial goods' (125). With Germany unable to 'impose a continental market on the other ten key [European] states', the intergovernmental Unions played an indispensable role in building and integrating it (133); but in the United States, with its own 'continental' market, private associations and federal bodies such as the Interstate Commerce Commission played the same role. The differences in form were not so important as the fact that in both cases 'new institutions emerged within civil society to establish and secure larger markets for industrial goods, and they in turn encouraged the investments needed to begin the Second Industrial Revolution' (135). However, the 'fundamental conflicts' (143) to which the uneven development of the world market gave rise precluded any broader advances in global governance (136-52 - another excellent comparative discussion). Murphy avoids the trap of now forgotten 'hegemonic stability theory', taking as a baseline instead the fact that the 'wartime governments all recognized that even with extensive cooperation in public finance, expansionary national macroeconomic policies would be incompatible with a world trade system organized under a fundamentalist version of laissez faire' (165-6). It also proved incompatible, however, with a policy of funding and promoting industrialisation in the developing world, which remained a minority viewpoint after both world wars (166-8). As would prove the case after 1960, when the OECD made the argument, neither liberal internationalists nor global organisations could convince the 'advanced' economies that it was in their long-term interest to promote industrial development in the rest of the world (Cammack, 2019). The result was a long hiatus in the promotion of global industrial change, and Murphy remarks that as the UN system turned its attention to new challenges - development, public finance, peacekeeping and human rights - 'it would be easy to forget that the primary tasks performed by the prewar Unions - fostering industry and managing social conflicts in the industrial world - remained the foundation of global governance' (188), and he uncovers a persistent undercurrent of activity around industrial change, albeit primarily in Western Europe, the United States and Japan. In summary:
'The League and UN system replicated the attempts of the Public International Unions to link the physical infrastructure of an expanded world market, define intellectual property and industrial standards for the new industries that might be created within that market area, and allow the increasingly free exchange of industrial goods that would encourage investment in those industries' (192).
International regimes for radio, telecommunications satellites, civil aviation, shipping, refrigeration, road signs and driving licences all arose from the need to establish standards for increased communications and emerging new technologies, while the International Standards Organization, passing through a number of stages between 1926 and 1946, would eventually underpin the subsequent development of global production chains. The same long-term perspective that prompted the International Law Association to begin work on an international air regime before either flight or ground-to-air communication were possible (136) was in evidence in relation to global production and trade: 'The charters of the infrastructure, intellectual property, and industrial standards organizations of the UN era all anticipate a world in which free trade in manufactured goods has become the rule' (197).
As is well recognized, the advanced economies dragged their feet, and fought off the challenge represented by the brief campaign for a New International Economic Order which might have introduced quasi-Keynesian ideas at a global level, while managing domestic social conflict by developing a variety of welfare regimes, coordinated to some extent both before and after the Second World War, as Murphy shows, by the norm-setting and surveillance powers of the ILO. As a result, 'the international labour standards promulgated by the ILO became substantively significant signs of the boundary between the Free World's "North" and "South," the line between the world where industrial labour was relatively privileged and the one where it was not' (201); and the dividing line was reinforced by the twin faces of the IMF - a means to cooperation in public finance among the major capitalist states, but for the developing world an enforcer of orthodox policies that diminished the role of government in the economy (208). Even so, Murphy argues, 'looked at another way, in the League and UN era world organizations have always been allies in the Third World's struggle to gain the advantages that accrued to industrialized countries' (208). The ensuing section (208-18) needs reading with care, as the logic of extending the world market (the League promoted both free trade in agriculture and the removal of export restrictions on raw materials from colonies; the UN system avidly promoted policies to improve infrastructure and the quality of the global workforce, and to support the introduction of capitalist farming) is far more apparent than any notion of 'ethical hegemony'; and foreign aid and more general receptiveness to demands for development only took off when the risk of socialist revolution had to be averted. But at the same time that he is mildly indulgent towards some liberal myths, Murphy makes a persuasive case that the range of agencies, within and outside the UN, that engage with development are both diverse, and relatively autonomous from external control by governments, though conversely highly dependent on a civil society that was dominated by private sector interests.
In short, the hallmark of the 'Free World historic bloc' (225) was that it 'came to knit the wealthy OECD countries and the dependent capitalist states of the Third World into a single global economy' (226): 'If and when a third industrial revolution begins it will begin in a world economy that has become more truly global than ever before' (227). In the penultimate chapter Murphy examines this record of 'prosperity and disappointment', as the emphasis returns to technological revolutions in production, rising intercontinental competition between large corporations, and capitalist class hegemony. Against this background, he concludes, reasonably, that world organizations tempered the dominance of the United States, played a facilitating role in the management of domestic conflict, offered some modest support for development, and kept some key channels open between East and West, while on the whole furthering a process of 'Westernization' (236-42). The dominant theme, however, is the appearance of cracks in the 'Free World' regime of military competition with the East along with the Fordist high-wage, mass consumption and social welfare settlement at home, and the resulting crisis of liberal internationalism (esp. Table 7, 244-5, and 251-2); the relevant section (242-53) is impressively free of the 'end of history' euphoria that gripped others at the time, and testimony to the merits of the underlying political economy approach Murphy adopts.
The rather downbeat assessment presented in these later chapters has weathered the passage of time very well. The same cannot be said of the conclusion, in which Murphy opts not to return to the robust analytical framework summarized in the first two paragraphs of this review - successive world orders shaped by material change and modulated by international organizations pursuing the development of industry and of the world market - but instead to focus on the relative potential of laissez-faire fundamentalists and global Keynesians to shape the next world order. So his vision of the 'globalisation of the market economy' (271) remains within the confines of the 'liberal internationalist project', and all he can salvage from Gramsci, in the only reference to him in the chapter, is what has become the first port of call for liberal readers of his work - the optimism of the will versus the pessimism of the intellect (275). But as indicated above, there is another Gramsci. Rather than condemning Murphy for missing the barely incipient rise of China, or fixating on the potential for more efficient and technically advanced supersonic travel in the next industrial revolution, to the virtual exclusion of other developments, pardonable faults in each case, we might consider subsequent developments in the light of Murphy's framework and the missing Gramsci. Then it is possible in retrospect to identify a third emergent world order - a truly global World Market Order, in which the logic of capital rules, and international organizations promote it relentlessly. In such a scenario, the current rise of China and the organization of global production networks on the basis of new digital platforms correspond to the earlier rise of Germany and of mass production corporations; and the potential areas of conflict that liberal internationalists tend to see as temporary loom just as large, though the outcomes are unlikely to be the same. And if we adapt the historical materialist Gramsci of Americanism and Fordism to the present, the question becomes
'whether China, through the implacable weight of its economic production (and therefore indirectly), will compel or is already compelling the West to overturn its excessively antiquated economic and social basis. ... whether we are undergoing a transformation of the material bases of Western civilisation, which in the long run (though not all that long, since in the contemporary period everything happens much faster than in past ages) will bring about the overthrow of the existing forms of civilisation and the forced birth of a new'.
In other words, there is a powerful analytical framework in this excellent monograph, albeit one that was struggling to be born. Read properly, it offers an unrivalled perspective on the last hundred years of world market development.
References
Robert J. Antonio and Alessandro Bonanno (2000), 'A New Global Capitalism? From "Americanism and Fordism" to "Americanization-Globalization"', American Studies, 41, 2-3, pp. 33-77.
Paul Cammack (2011), ‘Knowledge and power in the field of IPE’, in Stuart Shields, Ian Bruff, and Huw Macartney, eds, Critical International Political Economy: Dialogue, Debate, Dissensus, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 149-168.
---- (2019), ‘The OECD and the World Market: Antecedents of Deep Marketisation, Globalizations, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2018.1560184.
Robert Cox (1977), 'Labor and Hegemony', International Organization, 31, 3, 385-424.
Enrico Augelli and Craig Murphy (1988), America's Quest for Supremacy and the Third World: A Gramscian Analysis, Frances Pinter.
JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy (2019), Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880, Johns Hopkins University Press.