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national struggle over the moral order that is civilisational in its contours as well as a class struggle that is political and economic. Gramsci’s reconstruction of problems of moral order and social existence in ‘Americanism and Fordism’ paved the way for a series of later neo-Marxist conceptions of capitalism. One neo-Gramscian offshoot turned explicitly to problematics of civilisation. Robert W. Cox has a disciplinary background in international political economy and international relations. He began by taking the implications of Gramsci’s perspective on the
own security, others would have to emerge as great or regional powers and behave as independent geopolitical actors.40 This American globalism, then, is compatible with a set of principles that have come to be associated with world order, stability and, hence, vital US interests. Three principal objectives remained as they had for forty years: to maintain a strong European defence capacity, led by the US; to encourage a process of European integration that remained compatible with a ‘US-made’ liberal international political economy; and to continue global
forms of social organisation and political authority. These may not be enough to stop war, change the government and the rules of international political economy, but they are an essential basis for more meaningful social and political order. 195
, since it is embedded more broadly in patterns of society relations, in the dynamics of international political economy and in state constitutive patterns of world order. Power–resistance relations are not an isolated relationship between authority and subject. In fact, one of the insights from looking at peacebuilding from a historical sociological perspective and from an African case study is that this relationship is a plural relationship of ‘multiple authorities and centres of political control’, not a binary (Raeymaekers 2007: 173). The particular context is
the core great powers and the international political economy constitutes a dilemma for regional states. The core is both the indispensable source of many crucial resources and of constraints on the autonomy of regional states. The constraining impact of the core ranges from the threat of active military intervention or economic sanctions to the leverage derived from the dependency of regional states, maximised where there is high need and a lack of alternatives for the client state. In extreme cases, foreign policy may be chiefly designed to access economic