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This article traces the Marxist debate on the concept of 'bourgeois revolution' and criticises attempts within orthodox Marxism to salvage the concept in the face of the historiographical revisionist critique. It then introduces into the Anglo-American tradition of Political Marxism and argues that while scholars of this orientation have presented a powerful renewal of Marxism and re-interpretation of late medieval and early modern history, they have failed to systematically incorporate international relations into their reconstructions of early modern revolutions and state-formations. The article demonstrates how the international played a crucial role in shaping the respective trajectories of national developments, exemplified with reference to England and France, and concludes by arguing the case for a theoretical re-integration of the role of international relations into Marxist Historical Sociology.

This article argues that it is the absence of "the international" which accounts for many of the problems in contemporary Marxist thought about bourgeois revolutions & state formation. First, the essay outlines the orthodox-Marxist notion of "bourgeois revolution" & how it has mutated over the years in order to preserve itself over the years against the attacks of non-Marxist revisionist historians. Second, the position of "political Marxism" on the English & French revolutions is introduced. While it is noted that this literature, associated with the work of Robert Brenner, Ellen Wood, & George Comninel, has provided a powerful renewal of Marxism & re-interpretation of European history, it is suggested that political Marxism needs to be further developed, because, thirdly, it is shown, with reference to early-modern Anglo-French history, how "the international" enters as a constitutive moment, & not merely as a contingent or residual quantity, into the social dynamics of early-modern revolutions & the developmental trajectories of state formation. The wider argument is that any specific understanding of country-specific co-developments of capitalism, revolution, & state formation has to register the fact that these processes unfolded within & across an interstate system that centrally shaped their respective national peculiarities. A concluding section outlines the theoretical challenge this poses to Marxism, & suggests a re-reading of political Marxism that is capable of comprehending the regionally spatio-temporally differentiated & geopolitically mediated development of Europe as a whole. 74 References. T. K. Brown

Der Verfasser verfolgt die marxistische Debatte über das Konzept der bürgerlichen Revolution und kritisiert Versuche der marxistischen Orthodoxie, dieses Konzept angesichts revisionistischer Kritik seitens der Geschichtswissenschaft zu retten. Er führt sodann in die anglo-amerikanische Tradition des politischen Marxismus ein. Vertretern dieser Richtung hält er eine fundierte Erneuerung des Marxismus und die Neuinterpretation der spätmittelalterlichen und frühmodernen Geschichte zugute. Es fehle jedoch an einer systematischen Einbeziehung der internationalen Beziehungen in die Rekonstruktion der frühmodernen Revolutionen und Staatsgründungen. Der Verfasser zeigt am Beispiel Englands und Frankreichs, welch bedeutende Rolle das Internationale bei der Formung nationaler Entwicklungspfade spielte, und plädiert abschließend für eine theoretische Reintegration der internationalen Beziehungen in die marxistische historische Soziologie. (ICEÜbers)

This article provides a new approach, revolving around contested property relations, for theorizing the constitution, operation and transformation of geopolitical systems, exemplified with reference to early modern international relations. Against the cross-paradigmatic IR consensus that equates the Westphalian Settlement with the codification of modern international relations, the article shows to which degree 17th and 18th century European geopolitics remained tied to rather unique pre-modern practices. These cannot be understood on the basis of realist or constructivist premises. In contrast, the theoretical argument is that the proprietary and personalized character of dynastic sovereignty was predicated on pre-capitalist property relations. Dynasticism, in turn, translated into historically specific patterns of conflict and cooperation that were fundamentally governed by the competitive logic of geopolitical accumulation. The decisive break to international modernity comes with the rise of the first modern state — England. After the establishment of a capitalist agrarian property regime and the transformation of the English state in the 17th century, post-1688 Britain starts to restructure international relations in a long-term process of geopolitically combined and socially uneven development.

Die Strukturen und geopolitischen Beziehungen des europäischen Mittelalters dienen als Grundlage für die heutige Theorie der internationalen Beziehungen.Vielfach haben Neorealisten und Konstruktivisten über die Bedeutung mittelalterlicher Anarchie und Hierarchie diskutiert, die ohne das Vorhandensein von Souveränität existierten.Der Autor spezifiziert die Bedeutung des mittelalterlichen Staates, der Territorität, Grenze, Krieg, Anarchie und Hierarchie und sucht nach Implikationen für die Therorie der internationalen Beziehungen (SWP-Drh)

The European Middle Ages have recently attracted the attention of international relations (IR) scholars as a "testing-ground" for established IR theories. Neorealists, historicizing neorealists, and constructivists dispute the meanings of medieval anarchy and hierarchy in the absence of sovereignty. On the basis of a detailed critique of these approaches, I offer a historically informed and theoretically controlled interpretation of medieval geopolitics revolving around contested social property relations. My interpretation is meta-theoretically guided by dialectical principles. Lordships are the constitutive units of medieval authority, combining economic and political powers and assigning contradictory forms of rationality to their major agents, lords, and peasants. Interlordly competition over land and labor translates directly into distinct forms of geopolitical relations, generating a culture of war. Against this background, I clarify the specific meanings of the medieval "state," territoriality, frontiers, peace, war, anarchy, and hierarchy before drawing out the wider implications of changing social property forms for IR theory.

The ongoing Schmitt revival has extended Carl Schmitt's reach over the fields of international legal and political theory. Neo-Schmittians suggest that his international thought provides a new reading of the history of international law and order, which validates the explanatory power of his theoretical premises – the concept of the political, political decisionism, and concrete-order-thinking. Against this background, this article mounts a systematic reappraisal of Schmitt's international thought in a historical perspective. The argument is that his work requires re-contextualization as the intellectual product of an ultra-intense moment in Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction. It inscribed Hitler's 'spatial revolution' into a full-scale reinterpretation of Europe's geopolitical history, grounded in land appropriations, which legitimized Nazi Germany's wars of conquest. Consequently, Schmitt's elevation of the early modern nomos as the model for civilized warfare – the 'golden age' of international law – against which American legal universalism can be portrayed as degenerated, is conceptually and empirically flawed. Schmitt devised a politically motivated set of theoretical premises to provide a historical counter-narrative against liberal normativism, which generated defective history. The reconstruction of this history reveals the explanatory limits of his theoretical vocabulary – friend/enemy binary, sovereignty-as-exception, nomos/universalism – for past and present analytical purposes. Schmitt's defective analytics and problematic history compromise the standing of his work for purposes of international theory.