Critical Realism: Rethinking Change and Development in the Global Political Economy

By Chanzo Greenidge, PhD

It is in the context of general ethical and theoretical dissatisfaction with

current schools of thought in the social sciences that the thesis employs an

eclectic methodology based on critical realism in analysing the capacity of

transnational households to exercise politico-economic agency in a global

context. Critical Realism is primarily an alternative approach to theory,

knowledge and research most useful in clarifying the ontological grounds upon

which the global political economy is based. Critical Realism uses the

technique of genealogy as its point of departure and in the case of this thesis,

akin to the approach adopted by Critical Territorialities, Identities and

Movement theorists, features of the global political economy considered

marginal or anti-systemic become central to an understanding of the historical

and emerging order of the system (Brock, 1999: 483).

The advent of quantum physics and chaos theory in the physical sciences

and the anti-foundationalism of postmodern discourse in social sciences and

the humanities continue to damage the credibility of the deductive-

nomological project of universalising social theory.  It is my argument that

covering or idealised theories can only provide general indications as to the

direction and motivations of human interaction and behaviour. The general

thrust of critical theory and constructivist schools is seen as more acceptable,

but these paradigms are also somewhat limited in their value and applicability

to the formulation of strategy. 

A major weakness identified in critical theory is its dependence on

evolutionary and anthropocentric conceptions of ethics, as in the case of

Habermasian critical theory.  However, critical theory approaches are still

used in the dissertation to uncover metanarratives seen to undergird current

discourse on the issues of migration and diaspora.  Similarly, despite the

value of constructivism as a reaction to the universalist pretentions of

positivist/realist schools, I consider constructivism’s general rejection of truth

as correspondence, without a clear delimitation of the frontiers of the social

construction of reality and objective realities themselves irresponsible (See

Maerk and Cabriolie, 1999; Watson, 2001; Montuori and Purser, 1996). 

Critical Realism then is based on what could be termed 'ecocentric

constructivism'.  This approach places importance on an objective cosmic

reality that encompasses, transcends and/or exists independently of human

perception or consciousness.  This aspect of constructivist theory need not

render itself infinitely layered or contingent as prescribed by the nihilism of a

Baudrillard.  Instead, to borrow from Marx, the cloth from which human

constructions can be developed is limited or, better yet, continuously

informed, by the existence of historical, ecological or cosmic reality.  Human

action then informs and influences the shape of a definite historical, cosmic

and ecological reality.  It is my feeling that such a modification allows

constructivist theory the capacity to prescribe and to some extent predict,

instead of indulging in an endless spiral of scepticism.4 Critical Realism is

therefore an approach to science and critical social theory which posits the

concrete existence of a real world, but which is conscious of the effect of

perception on the collection and interpretation of data from that world.

The thesis also proceeds from related assumptions about human and group

behaviour outlined in Aldrich’s (1982) population ecology approach.  The first,

bounded rationality, is the concept of an individualised rationality shaped by

limitations in knowledge, information and processing capacity, and

idiosyncracies.  These limitations are considered to be relatively fixed in the

short-term.  The second is opportunism- human beings pursue their self-

interest at the expense of others.  It is my argument, however, that the

definition of self-interest can be widened through socialisation processes to

include the interests of households (family and kinship groups) as well as

community, ethnic, national, and regional groups.  Social action usually

represents a negotiation of these various levels of interest.  Human

behaviour, including the research endeavour, is seen as basically logical and

thus predictable, but open to changes and variations due to differences in

perception, consciousness/awareness and socialisation, i.e. identity and

access to information/knowledge.  The redirection of social behaviour

involves the redefinition of interests and associations, as well as a process of

social marketing. 

This approach, informed by constructivist approaches, supports Premdas’

assertion that the modern state is a ‘contingent phenomenon’ that has tended

to “redefine its meaning inconsistently and opportunistically in response to the

exigencies of population shifts, industrial needs, and other factors” (Premdas,

2001: 50). This re-articulation of security and international politics in the post-

Cold War era was motivated in part by these ‘exigencies’ and by domestic

concerns with issues of internal sovereignty and identity. Structural realism or

neo-realism in International Relations differs in several ways from my

approach to diaspora in that it does not include 'domestic politics' as a

consideration, and is focussed primarily on 'state behaviour' based on

structural or external factors.  Structural realism assumes the existence of a

state with the tendency/capacity to 'behave' in aggressive or defensive ways. 

While critical realism does not require primary focus on the state or state

‘behaviour’, attention is paid to the material-semiotic force of the

phenomenon, including in the formation of identity discourses in Diasporas. 

This decentering of the state as a unit of analysis allows me to integrate

alternative units of analysis (households/diasporas) and alter several of the

ontological assumptions on Diasporas and their operation.  This critique of

statecentrism is manifest in the changes in the definition of diaspora in the

following chapter as well as an outline of the choices to be made between

state-based mercantilist strategies drawing from orthodox, structural and

peripheral realism and ecocentric constructivist approaches to diasporic

relations.

Critical Realism, Agency and Change

In his critique of the response of International Political Economy to the

globalisation question, critical realist scholar Jamie Morgan argues that the

material focus of the new IPE has led to a tendency to map relationships,

forms of production, and transnational class while leaving the crucial question

of Structure-Agency untreated.  In his words, “too often, statements along the

lines of structures are human constructions of persistent social practices

created and transformed through our own activity’ is where discussion begins

and ends” (Morgan, 1999: 137).  In an effort to avoid this oversight, I have

attempted to involve the problem or question of the interrelationship of

structural and agentic forces in the development of the central thesis

question. Indeed, the agency of Diasporas in the face of large-scale

technoeconomic paradigm change represents a prime opportunity for

questioning the nature of agency and structure.   

Agency and structure can be addressed using the concept of a four-part

social ontology.  As Gosden relates in Social Being and Time, a social

ontology is a “structure of being springing from social and material relations in

which material existence and thought are intermixed” (Gosden, 1994).  

Borrowing selectively from Hegelian dialectical and Marxian historical

materialist approaches, a social ontology emerges from the interaction of

man/society and the environment, an interaction7 which inevitably leads to the

production of knowledge.  This knowledge in turn shapes the society and its

members influencing future material and social relations.  Social ontology,

then, is basically the combination of knowledges, socio-economic

relationships, and interactions with the physical environment which represents

both a limit and an enabling factor in a society’s historical development.   

A social ontology is composed of four basic and interrelated elements- Time,

Space, Materiality and Mutuality.  This thesis represents timespace as a

simultaneous internal and external phenomenon, revolving dialectically

between the objective and the subjective.  Somewhat like the effect of

viewpoints on matter in Quantum Physics (as we interact with objects, even

through simple observation, we change them), the subjective perception and

construction of timespace does not simply alter the experience of timespace,

but also adjusts ‘objective’ timespace (e.g. the occurrence and non-

occurrence of events) itself.  This concept of ‘mixed’ time is central to the

concept of change in International Relations and the Global Political

Economy.  In other words, I argue that as theoretical approaches to

International Relations are translated into action, knowledge and ontological

assumptions, societies alter in response. As a result of these alterations,

further changes, some of which cannot be provided for by pre-existing theory

are produced. These changes can be externalised or ignored, or may be

incorporated in the development of new or reformed theories which have their

actual impact on social and physical realities.

In the context of social ontology, diaspora does not only involve human

migration in physical space, but is an expression of the relationship between

the ‘culture’, ‘politics’ and ‘economics’ of places or contexts of origin and

reception and the diasporic group itself.  Only in extraordinary circumstances,

then, does diaspora occur between societies which do not have a prior

politico-economic relationship.  Further, as this expression takes shape, it

creates a synthesis of these related social ontologies and creates space for

change in both.  A full understanding of the phenomenon requires not only

sympathy with the realities of receiving and sending countries, but an

understanding of the historical and contemporary relationship between these

two realities.  

As Gosden notes, in addition to their mathematical dimensions, Space and

Time represent media for social action, and can be actively recreated by the

concrete operation of diasporas and other social forms.  For example, as will

be noted in the genealogy and case studies, the uneven development of

global economic geography through the emergence of hinterlands and global

cities creates its own timespace.  This unevenness is further magnified by the

impact of the ‘globalisation’ of social interaction via information and

communications technologies, where some areas of the world are

increasingly 'networked' or effectively joined by flows of information and

people, while other spaces lacking the ability to control strategic resources

become increasingly marginalised and ‘distant’8.   

Like timespace, materiality and mutuality are also inseparable.  Mutuality can

be defined as human inter-relations or the manner in which people are

combined and divided (Gosden, 1994).  Materiality describes human relations

with the environment and comprises the impact of “skilled productive action”

and the relationship and balancing of consumption and production.  The

interaction of materiality and mutuality mirrors the interaction of culture,

politics, and economics, three factors which though often studied and

practiced in isolation, are actually parts of the same social process.  At the

point where human resources are allocated and combined with the

environment to support life and trade, we have economics.  Culture, on the

other hand, represents the knowledge derived from this interaction of man

and environment in the production/reproduction process.  At the point at

which the knowledge and material produced are employed to (re)organise

and secure the society for future production/reproduction, we have politics. 

Politics, in turn, can be divided into its diplomatic, military, and societal

aspects. 

Social ontology, therefore, reflects the relationship of history, geography,

culture, politics, and economics in structuring and enabling human social

action.  While all these elements are related, history/geography and

politics/economics find their crossroads in culture.  Informed by and informing

political economy, culture also represents the producer and product of history

and geography.  Culture/Knowledge also serves to solidify and reproduce

social ontologies, while competing cultures/ideologies/knowledges are often

the most effective in conclusively undermining or recreating the same.   

In the Critical Realist approach, the relationship of structure and agency in

social ontology is one of inextricable simultaneity.9  Both Structure and

Agency are internal and external to the subject.  Structure, on one hand, is

represented by both external ecological and societal constraints as well as

internal or internalised physical and psychological barriers.  Similarly, social

agency is represented by the internal ‘will’ or capacity for action, as well as

the various spaces or ‘room for manoeuvre’ that are inevitably opened by the

development of structures.  

Each organism or organisation exercises their agency within a structure.  The

structure represents both room for manoeuvre and limits to their action. 

Social structure, then, can be likened to the Earth's gravity in that while it

does represent a limitation to our scope of activity, we are virtually incapable

of effective action or agency in its absence. 

Such an analogy is ultimately insufficient as the agency involved in the

production and distribution of culture/knowledge represents the ability to

fundamentally alter the nature of social organisation itself.  However, this

theme of inextricable simultaneity leads us to the positioning of the political

economy of diaspora within the historical context of global political economy:

a genealogical study of diaspora that reveals the Global Plantation as the

context in which the diasporic economy and the state are formalised.

I: Diaspora: Present, Past,...Future?

INTRODUCTION

The objectives of this chapter are two. The first is to refine the concept and

typology of diaspora using the genealogical approach of critical realism. The

second is to provide a genealogy of the three problematiques of International

Relations.

Diaspora’s political and rhetorical force has been used possessively by a few

ethnic or religious groups to draw attention to the themes of exile,

persecution and dispersion in their respective histories. With the recent

upsurge in the number of refugees and asylum-seekers, some migration

theorists have used diaspora to describe and explain the growing aspect of

non-voluntary movement in contemporary migration that falls outside the

reach of much of current theory. (Skeldon, 1997: 28) As one may expect,

such attempts to widen or adjust the definition and imagery of diaspora for

other purposes have often been criticised as a watering-down or prostitution

of the concept. Both Dufoix (2001) and Goulbourne (2002), for example,

express the fear that the concept of diaspora may be at risk of losing its

usefulness in social analysis, as its meaning is extended to movements

without regard for geographical or cultural distances between these points.

(Goulbourne, 2002: 3)

Goulbourne’s indication of the need to rescue “the hitherto useful concept of

diaspora from its vogue status, its over-employment and its impending

exhaustion…” is quite accurate. (2002: 4-5) However, while Goulbourne

attempts to save ‘diaspora’ from atrophy by privileging exclusionary

approaches, my ‘rescue’ involves placing the phenomenon of diaspora firmly

within the context of other trends in international relations and global political

economy.

Identity and the Problematiques of International Relations/ Global Political

Economy

Despite the re-emergence of a ‘civilisational’ discourse that posits religion as

a major historical and geopolitical cleavage, culture and identity remain at the

margins of international relations and political economy, arising occasionally

to threaten the ineluctable ‘progress’ of humanity away from ‘historical ties’, a

movement which Western epistemology has envisioned for over two

centuries.

This underlying theme of secular Heilsgeschichte (secularisation as progress

or salvation) guided by impersonal and inevitable ‘laws of motion’

(Maiguashca 1993: 367) is discernible in the work of thinkers such as Hegel

and Marx. Even Comte, often presented as an opponent of German

metaphysics, also embraced the concept of evolution towards liberation from

religious and tribal ‘constraints’ (Aiken 1956: 115-126). These discourses,

among others, have hampered the use of diaspora as a unit of analysis in

international relations theory.

Stack's (1981) work Ethnic Identities in a Transnational World signals the

emergence of a discussion of the role of ethnic groups and identity constructs

as major factors within the global political economy. In fact, Stack’s claim

that the role of diaspora in the world system has emerged within the context

of "the vastly expanded scope and intensity of...multileveled interactions"

(Stack 1981) has been echoed by several other theorists in the following

decades. However, it should be noted that while culture and identity were

only recently admitted to the academic table, its practical significance in

terms of the first problematique is not new. As historian Fitzroy Baptiste

writes of U.S. preparations for the Second World War, for example:

“A variable…not lost to the President [Roosevelt] by the mid-1930s

was the fact that with Germany, and probably Italy, in the Atlantic, and

Japan in the Pacific judged to be the United States’ future protagonists

in a two-ocean war, the presence of German, Italian, and Japanese

communities in Latin America was seen to constitute a potential Fifth

Column risk.” (Baptiste, 1980: 17)

The subsequent internment of Americans and Canadians of Japanese

backgrounds was also related to the perceived Fifth Column risk presented

by an ‘enemy’ Diaspora’s presence within the borders of North American

countries.

The role of ethnic/diasporic identity in international relations is far from

exhausted as a subject for research. For example, in Global Diasporas

Cohen (1997: 67) notes that "[n]early all the powerful nation-states,

especially [in] Europe, established their own diasporas abroad to further their

imperial plans." However, this statement has not yet inspired a full

examination of the strategic value of these Diasporas to the imperial plan of

their countries of origins.

In the 1990s, several writers adopted a perspective that both clarified Stack’s

historical errors and placed identity (re)construction at the centre of state

strategy in terms of the second problematique. This ‘instrumentalist’ view

presents identity as an essential part of the cultural economy of the

globalisation process and focuses on the geopolitical and ideological

interests that have prompted the ebbs and flows in the transnational

discourses of nation-states. Instrumentalist writers also highlight the tension

produced by the instrumentalisation of culture and ethnicity in the pursuit of

state-centred strategies.

India and China have generated significant interest from instrumentalist

scholars by their historical combination of nationalism and transnationalism in

foreign politico-economic relations. Prasenjit Duara, for example,

(“Transnationalism in the Era of the Nation-States: China, 1900-1945”)

examines the use of identity discourse in the international strategies of

specific nation-states, especially Boxer China, underlining the success which

such approaches have yielded in terms of political and economic

development in the earlier half of the last century.

In addition, in her 1997 article “’A Momentary Glow of Fraternity’, Narratives

of Chinese Nationalism and Capitalism”, Aihwa Ong comments on the

evolution of relations between China and its ‘corporate diaspora’, pointing to

the cynicism often involved in the deployment of identity for economic

purposes. Ong also notes that despite the importance of diasporic identity in

information flows and initial contacts, business decisions are finally made on

less sentimental bases.

The approach of critical realism can be readily distinguished from what may

be termed a progressive essentialist approach to the third problematique.

Kotkin’s (1993) treatise, Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine

Success in the New Global Economy epitomizes the progressive essentialist

project- to combine strategic analysis with essentialist concepts of culture

and ethnicity. As with similar works of ‘progressive’ essentialism such as

Vasconcelos’ influential concept of ‘la raza cósmica’ and Sowell’s (1996)

discussion of ‘cultural capital’, Kotkin’s book generalises and hierarchises

cultural attitudes or attributes and is far less interested in strictly-defined

international relations than in legitimising and defining success and failure in

the nature of the global economy. From this perspective, success and

development among global ‘tribes’ such as the Indians, Ibos, British,

Chinese, and Japanese in the ‘new’ global economy derives from an “intrinsic

sense of unique historical and ethnic identity and the ability to adapt to a

cosmopolitan global economy.”(Kotkin:16)

In the progressive essentialist approach, the dynamics of cultural interaction

with other groups in countries of destination is largely downplayed as

migration is seen as a mere change of geographical positioning or socio-

cultural context. The global economy is cast as a culturally neutral entity in

which development or the capacity to develop is reduced to the combination

of a fixed set of attitudes and strategies. As a result, Diasporas, ethnicities or

cultures that do not demonstrate suitable attributes are doomed to

underdevelopment.

A narrow, statecentric, and ahistorical approach to the definition and study of

Diaspora cannot be justified by the dangers of 'over-inclusiveness', a desire

for simplicity or practicality, or even lacunae in theories of migration. In

addition to reconstructing a definition and typology of Diaspora that is

applicable to a critical realist view of the social sciences, and in particular

International Relations, this chapter is an attempt to ‘rescue Diaspora’ from

its own entrenched victimhood, as well as from the elements of an

overarching statecentric discourse that conspire to hide its applicability to the

wider history of global political economy. This genealogy represents an

attempt to refine and rethink our understanding of the problematiques of

International Relations using the lens of migration and diaspora.

Diaspora and Globalisation- Context and Contestation

By the 1980s, Globalisation, or more accurately, Globalism, had become a

dominant discursive mechanism, nominally replacing Cold War nationalist

developmentalism as the hegemonic paradigm for understanding change in

international political, socio-economic, and cultural relations, especially

among clients and allies of the United States (Berger: 223).

A general description of the premises of globalisation/globalism as discourse

would be 1) the acceleration, starting from the mid-Cold War period, in the

trans-border flow of people, goods, capital, information and ideas; 2) the key

role of technological change in the form of the rapid development of more

efficient information and communications technologies (Strange, 1996: 7);

and 3) the need for the ‘developing world’ to maintain or develop ‘global

competitiveness’ by “repositioning itself to take advantage of the new market

realities” created by accelerated world trade and communications

(Rajapatirana, 1997: 10).

The phenomenon of globalisation, then, reflects at least three interrelated

paradigmatic shifts. These shifts, it can be argued, proceed from a series of

developments in the combination of capital and labour. However, as in earlier

instances such as the re-configuration of production during the ‘Industrial

Revolution’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the impact of

this reorganisation on the populations of countries in the North has produced

significant attention in academic and political circles as an exceptional, almost

sui generis phenomenon. It is in the attempt to historicise and contextualise

‘Globalisation’ as both event and discourse that migration, transnationalism and

diaspora prove to be of significant value.

Following from Agnew and Corbridge's (1995: 3) argument that the "relative

success of different localities and regions in International Political Economy at

any time is due to their historical accumulation of assets and liabilities and their

adaptive capacity", many proponents of globalisation/globalism discourse

(sometimes referred to as globalists) argue that the challenge to the

‘developing world’ in the face of contemporary globalisation is to properly

(re)assess its 'assets and liabilities', and to find ways of improving 'adaptive

capacity', mainly through improved democratic institutions, human capital

development and incentives for economic activity. This genealogy therefore

injects a note of indeterminacy into the discussion of 'assets', 'liabilities' and

'adaptive capacity' by contesting the present nature and future direction of

globalisation itself.

Defining DiasporaI will briefly re-enter the ambiguities of the modern Diaspora to extract a

typology that is more useful to the study of global political economy. Of the

typologies produced in the literature, the most complete in my view has been

Cohen’s (1997) Global Diasporas, which divides the world’s Diasporas into five

(5) non-exclusive groups: Imperial; Victim; Labour; Auxiliary Trade (and

Military); and Cultural. To his credit, Cohen readily admits that the typology he

proposed “is more unambiguous than the history and development of Diaspora

suggest” (Cohen, x). In my view, Cohen’s classifications require two (2) major

adjustments.

In the first instance, Cohen’s oversimplification of the concept of labour renders

the term ‘labour Diaspora’ much less useful in terms of current historical and

politico-economic discourse. In order to correct this, the term will be further

distilled into four (4) categories:

Slave Labour: The transatlantic African Diaspora, though replete with

exceptions, may be characterised as a labour Diaspora whose dispersion took

place under conditions of enslavement. It is my view that a slave labour

Diaspora should be separated from the designation of ‘victim’, which should

itself be defined as a Diaspora whose migration was forced by religious or

political persecution, expulsion, or natural disaster in its ‘homeland’.

Indentured Labour: In the case of the Americas, this group comprises large

sections of the Japanese, continental Asian, Irish and East European

Diasporas of the 19th century. As the name implies, these groups entered the

political economy of the New World as contracted, bonded labour brought to

the Americas to compensate for labour shortages on plantations, in hinterlands,

or on major infrastructural projects such as railway construction.

Free Labour/ Settler: This group is comprised mainly of the free migrant

labourers from throughout Europe that established landholdings or entered low-

skill professions in the Americas, especially North America and Southern South

America (Argentina, Uruguay, and Southern Brazil) during the so-called Great

Migration of 1871-1920. Also belonging to this group, however, are the

immigrants that entered North America and Europe from their various colonies

or dependencies in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean during the 20th century.

High-Skill Labour: Although the migration of highly skilled free labour started

just after the Industrial Revolution, it began in earnest in the late 1960s and

1970s due to the industrial restructuring of the major North American and

European economies. Examples would be the Japanese Diaspora, as well as

small sections of the current Indian, Chinese, and Caribbean Diasporas.

Cohen’s second major flaw concerns the issue of the Caribbean and cultural

Diaspora. While in the rest of his work, the Diaspora’s designation is based on

the initial context of the group’s diaspora. In Global Diasporas, Cohen creates

the designation of the ‘cultural Diaspora’ as a means of dealing with the

“choppy seas of postmodernism” which presented him with the challenge of

making sense of “the idea of fragmented, postcolonial and “hybridised”

identities, of which the Caribbean is cited as a prime example. Cohen also

presents a semblance of a definition for this ‘cultural Diaspora’. A cultural

Diaspora, in his words, is a diasporic group “cemented as much by literature,

political ideas, religious convictions, music and lifestyles as by permanent

migration” (Cohen 1997: xii).

Most, if not all, modern Diasporas could be characterised by the sharing of a

collective and political myth, as well as the other cultural symbols mentioned

above. To his credit, Cohen readily admits that the typology he proposed “is

more unambiguous than the history and development of Diaspora suggest”

(Cohen 1997: x). This is quite evident in Cohen’s approach to the Caribbean

Diaspora. This characterisation may have been intended as recognition of the

uniqueness of Caribbean culture(s), but it also aptly represents the “sometimes

crippling grip that the culturalist persuasion exerts over matters pertaining to

Caribbean diasporic experiences….” (Goulbourne 2002:1). Proportionate to its

total population size, the volume of Caribbean labour migration is one of the

largest and most sustained in modern history, yet Cohen still does not see it fit

to categorise the region’s Diaspora as being related to the search for work.1

Though the overall effectiveness of such a grouping is questionable, the fruit of

Cohen’s dilemma, however, remains valuable as the beginnings of a definition

of diaspora itself. Diaspora is an ideological post-facto phenomenon created

under conditions of displacement whereby the identity to which the group

subscribes does not exist at the point of migration, but is rather (re)constructed

by the group in response to changes in technology or politico-economic

developments in the countries of origin or habitation. This type of Diaspora is

exemplified as much by the German and Italian nationalist Diasporas, as by the

pan-African and Han-nationalist/ pan-Chinese Diasporas of the late 19th and 1 In order to better place the Caribbean within the context of the global political economy, I have changed the

Caribbean’s designation to that of a labour Diaspora.

20th centuries. A revised typology of Diasporas would thus appear as eight (8)

non-exclusive2 groupings:

Victim Slave Labour Indentured Labour Free Labour High Skill Auxiliary Trade (and Military) Imperial Corporate

It is also useful to define Diaspora diacritically or show their borders in relief.

In their (dis)qualifications of Diaspora, both Van Hear (1998) and more

convincingly, Thomas Faist (2000) seek to categorise those groups that do

not satisfy the criteria of a Diaspora. Van Hear presents a broader term,

transnational community, which he proposes as a “more inclusive notion,

which embraces Diaspora, but also populations that are contiguous, rather

than scattered and may straddle just one border (Van Hear 1998: 6).

Faist, on the other hand, presents a stricter definition of a ‘transnational

community’ that he uses to characterise “situations in which international

movers and stayers are connected by dense and strong social and symbolic

ties over time and across space to patterns of networks and circuits in two

countries.” (Faist, 2000: 207). According to Faist, Diasporas can only be

termed transnational communities, if the members develop social and symbolic

ties of a significant degree with the country of destination. Otherwise, he notes,

2 For example, ancient Chinese diaspora ranged from imperial diasporas in military conquest, victim diasporas that were persecuted following political shifts such as dynastic changes, and auxiliary trading diasporas involved in the vast commercial network that accompanied China’s hegemonic ascent. (Live, 2002: 41)

they (Diasporas) can be spoken of as exilic (Faist 2000: 208). In determining

the position and role of Diaspora in the global political economy, Faist’s logic

provides an important means of differentiating between a transnational and

exilic Diaspora. Transnational Diasporas, those engaged into circulating

commodities, information, cultural artefacts, and/or capital across national

borders can be further split into circulatory or non-circulatory categories.

Non-circulatory transnational Diasporas do not usually travel physically to the

country of origin, but instead “maintain linkages…through telephone, fax,

cassette, mail, and couriers” (Grosfoguel, 1998: 361). As is the case with other

units of analysis in international relations, Diaspora’s complexity cannot be

tamed by ignoring marginal or emergent cases. This redefinition of Diaspora,

transnational and (trans)migrant communities avoids broadening the concept of

Diaspora to describe all divisions that take place through simple border

changes (Cohen 1997: 22), while moving several colonial and internal colonial

transmigrant groups into the realm of Diaspora.

As an alternative to both these versions, the much fought-over term

‘transnational community' can be restricted to describing a contiguous

community divided by nation-state boundaries or, in the words of Faist, groups

with collective identities in frontier regions (Faist: 208). Examples would be the

Mexican transnational community, divided by the revision of the US-Mexican

border via the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase of

1848 and 1853 respectively, and the Kurdish nation/Kurdistan, divided among

relatively modern Turkish, Iraqi, and Iranian political borders.

Similar transnational communities exist in the Basque region, which occupies

an inverted triangle cut by the French/Spanish border (Woodworth, 2001: 3)

and among the states of Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Transnational communities also include several ethnic/language groups of

Africa and the Americas such as the Quechua of Peru/Amazonia and the

Hausa of Nigeria/Cameroon, whose communal relations were interrupted by

European imperial bordering. This ‘transnational community’ is roughly

equivalent to Clifford’s concept of the borderland, but is superior in its ability to

place the nation-state and the national project in historical context.

Rescuing DiasporaThe underlying theme of this genealogy is the recurring role of Transnational

Capital in the creation and development of the South. The transnational

corporation and transnational capital continue to play a major role in the

migration of low and high-skilled labour (see Sassen-Koob, 1981; Sassen,

1997). The contemporary global approaches to production, marketing and

distribution developed and adopted by commercial organisations are by

extension facilitating communications, travel, and trade within diasporic

networks.

When the preceding discussion of the relationship in the evolution of

international relations in the context of human migration, racial constructs and

politics, technological change and transnational capital and geopolitics is

juxtaposed with accepted definitions, theories and typologies of diaspora, the

need for refinement becomes clear. In an effort to develop a workable

definition of diaspora in the context of the Atlantic world system, I will address

one of the seminal works of definition of Diaspora. In 1991, William Safran

presented the following six (6) criteria for qualification as a Diaspora, to which I

have appended adjustments and comments.

According to Safran (italics mine):

“Diasporas are expatriate minority communities”;

Diasporas are intrinsically expatriate, but need not be minority groups within a

'host society'. Indeed, the prevailing view of Diasporas as ‘minority’ groups

(Dufoix, 1999), has significantly reduced the capacity of writers to analyse the

use of Diaspora as a significant element of the culture and conduct of

international relations. The argument that a Diaspora may constitute a

significant share or even a majority of the population of a particular host

society is borne out by the example of diasporic groups in many American

states such as Suriname, Argentina, Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana.

The members of Diasporas or their ancestors have been dispersed

from a specific original ‘centre’ to two or more ‘peripheral’, or foreign,

regions;

Safran implies, as do several other theorists, that the dispersal that creates a

Diaspora is involuntary. This condition is not universally applicable. Authors

such as Clifford (1997) have also noted the overbearing focus in diasporic

theory on the experience of expulsion or victimhood, while Cohen’s seminal

work Global Diasporas: An Introduction (1997) calls attention to imperial and

trading Diasporas that used emigration as strategic options.

Safran’s approach to dispersal as movement across physical/political

geography reflects a particularly statecentric approach where boundaries and

spaces are defined by the linear divisions typified by the Westphalian

convention on territory, European principles of contract and Euclidean

conceptions of space. Besides limiting the explicative power of Diaspora, an

insistence on two or more geopolitical (state) boundaries does not fully capture

the experience of scattering that many of the authors on Diaspora are trying to

communicate.

While Safran’s criteria for dispersal is mirrored by Cohen’s work (1997) as well

as Van Hear’s (1998) affirmation that dispersal to two or more countries

represents one of the minimal criteria for a Diaspora, it can also be strongly

argued, as does Barnor Hesse, that dispersal does not necessarily involve

movement per se, but dis-place-ment. An expatriate community need not

depart from its original geographical references. Instead, as in the case of

many of the indigenous societies of Southern Africa and the Americas,

communities can be diasporised in situ via the dispossession and

renaming/rebordering of space. These groups may remain, but the geography

has been materially and discursively re-placed. In other words, the place of

origin, and the place of habitation for these groups exist in roughly the same

space.

The importance of geopolitical boundaries in the creation of a Diaspora should

not preclude the use of other criteria for distance and dispersal. Geopolitical

boundaries can be complemented as per Sahlins (1989) with the concept of

‘frontiers’. Frontiers are zonal divisions mapped by social and socio-economic

contexts. The combination of ‘boundaries’ and ‘frontiers’ allow one to theorise

differences in the mode of incorporation of migrant groups and to better explain

the dynamics of interaction among diasporic groups. As Grosfoguel and

Guzmán (1998) note, such an approach allows one to place “internal colonial”

migration experiences such as early 20th century Afro-American migration from

the southern plantation states to the northern industrial centres in the United

States of America or the North and Northeast states of Brazil to the Southeast

states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the context of Diaspora.

“They [members of a Diaspora] retain a collective memory, vision, or

myth about their original homeland - its physical location, history, and

achievements”

While the retention of a collective memory, vision, or myth about their original

homeland is common among Diasporas, I would argue that it is not essential.

Rather than stress the retention of a collective metaphysical reference, this

definition also allows, as does Clifford (1997) for the active recreation of

memory, myth and vision in response to the centripetal force of discrimination

suffered within the host country, and discourses within their country or

countries of origin. In other words, despite some measure of cohesion,

Diasporas also tend to have divergent memories of, visions for and myths

about their homeland based on differences in gender, age, race/colour, and

class. I suggest that attention should also be paid to smaller-scale sub-

national or sub-diasporic identities, family ties and other forms of kinship, as

these can be equally, if not more, salient in the study of the social and

economic dynamics of diaspora.

“They [members of a Diaspora] believe they are not - and perhaps

cannot be - fully accepted by their host society and therefore feel partly

alienated and insulated from it”;

The perception of social rejection is often a key ingredient in the formation

and maintenance of Diaspora. Alienation should be widened to include

'psychic or self-alienation', where, despite its acceptance to or even control of

the host society, the Diaspora continues to see itself as foreign or intrinsically

belonging to a separate geo-cultural construct. Despite Clifford’s insistence

that Diaspora cultures are not separatist (Clifford 1997: 252), examples of

‘self-alienated’ or isolationist Diasporas such as Mennonite communities in

the Americas are readily available.

They regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and as

the place to which they or their descendants would (or should)

eventually return - when conditions are appropriate;

While admitting the near omnipresence of the 'myth of return' among

diasporic communities, this definition eschews the concept of the 'homeland',

at least in Safran's essentialist sense of a 'true', ‘ideal’ and therefore

presumably singular, place of origin. In other terms, it is possible to be a

member of several Diasporas at once. Caribbean Diasporas in particular

display the possibility of multiple homelands whose relative salience and

comprehensiveness depend on various factors such as contemporary identity

politics in various loci of origin and the Diaspora's mode of incorporation into

the host society.

It may also be useful to widen the definition of return beyond the physical to

incorporate the essence of the myth of return itself, the celebration of one’s

traditions or ‘roots’. Such a return can include retentions or return to

‘traditional’ religion, language, music, dance, dress and architecture, a key

aspect of the economy of Diaspora. As will be shown in the studies to follow,

diasporic return, beyond the desire to return physically to a geo-cultural

space, also involves the effort to transfer the temporality, spatiality and

sensory cues of the ‘homeland’ to one’s country of habitation.

They believe that they should, collectively, be committed to the

maintenance or restoration of their original homeland and its safety

and prosperity; and they continue to relate, personally or vicariously, to

that homeland in one way or another, and their ethnocommunal

consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence

of such relationships.

While agreeing with Safran's argument that Diasporas continue to relate,

personally or vicariously, to their homeland(s) in one way or another, his

assertion is questionable. Also important to the acceptance of the ‘qualification

of interest in the homeland’ to diasporic identity was Khachig Tölölyan’s (1996)

differentiation between a Diaspora (Armenian-American in this case) and an

ethnic community (Italian-American). His reasons were the perceived lack of

involvement among Italo-Americans in the cultural or political life of

contemporary Italy contrasted with the perceived desire of return and

interaction among Armenian-Americans. As Tölölyan himself admits:

“My view of Diaspora is as much the result of my biography as of my

education or current intellectual and editorial positioning…. In the world in

which I was brought up, merely to claim to be a Diasporan…was not

regarded as adequate: it was cheap, a “bluff” requiring no further

commitment….”(1996:2,14).

While Tölölyan’s view is valid, I do not believe it prudent to universalise his

experience or the politics of the Armenian Diaspora(s). For example, as

historian J.M. Turner notes in his discussion of the identity politics of Afro-

Latinos, the declaration of identity, especially in cases where such identification

represents a social disadvantage, is a “courageous political act” (Turner, 2002:

31). This may not be true in the case of Italian-Americans, but the fact remains

that the universal exclusion of ‘identification’ is ill-advised. An alternative

approach to the disqualification of the Italian-American community as a

Diaspora would be to simply typologise them according to their degree of

involvement. The Italo-American community may represent a dormant identity-

based group or a ‘nested polity’ as per Ferguson and Mansbach (1996: 31). As

Stephen Gill notes in Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International

Relations (1993), “History is always in the making, in a complex and dialectical

interplay between agency, structure, consciousness and action.” Diasporic

relationships are fluid and can be transformed, obliterated or (re)activated by

nationalist or transnationalist discourses in host or home countries, as well as

within the Diaspora itself. The waxing and waning of interest in the homeland

is common in Diaspora. Unqualified patriotism, though in my view an important

factor, is not a prerequisite for membership in a Diaspora. A more

sophisticated assertion would be that membership in a Diaspora is usually

accompanied by (or may itself create the conditions for) this type of collective

interest in the imagined 'homeland'.

Relatedly, theorists such as Marienstras (1989) have argued that ‘durability’

should be a criterion for Diaspora. As Clifford notes, Diaspora involves

“dwelling, maintaining communities, having collective homes away from

home….” (Clifford 1997: 251). I would concur that extended time is necessary

to articulate relations that could be qualified as diasporic. Perhaps sufficient

time would be a generation, at which point a group of individuals comprising

migrants and a native-born ‘second’ generation (or a significant proportion

thereof) could claim appartenance to both spaces and diasporic qualification

could be applied retroactively. A community or group that does not (yet) satisfy

this criterion of permanence may be described simply as migrant or

transmigrant.

Diaspora: Past to PresentThe first period in the development of the Modern Atlantic global economy, the

Mercantilist era, can be divided into two techno-economic paradigms. The first,

referred to by some as the ‘First Modernity’ (see Grosfoguel 2002) featured the

arrival and conquest by Spanish and Portuguese imperial powers in the

Americas. Iberian colonists attempted to reproduce or adapt a feudal system

based on the forced extraction of tradable minerals and precious stones. Due

in part to the decimation of the indigenous peasantry by massacre and disease,

this type of economy was soon to run aground in many parts of the continent.

As indigenous labour continued to be exploited and marginalized with the

securing of large landholdings by Spanish and Portuguese colonists, the

rudiments of the mercantilist plantation economy had been established.

By 1503, the exhaustion of the indentured labour force and the previous

experience of the trade in bonded labour on the African continent had led to the

importation of enslaved West and Central Africans as chattel slaves in the

Americas. The trade in African captives would be complemented during the

mercantilist period by the migration of enslaved and indentured European

labourers and prisoners.

While the Southern and Central Americas had been the focus of conflict and

conquest in the late 15th and early 16th century, the intervening sea and its

island territories were to become also the sites of major politico-military conflict

among European mercantilist powers from the middle of the 16th century to the

end of the mercantilist era in the late 18th century (Newton, ix). Iberian control

over trans-Atlantic trade and American territory began to diminish in the 17th

century, and by 1650, the locus of power in this system had shifted decidedly to

other Eurasian states such as France and the Netherlands (Grosfoguel, 2002,

xii).

These notes are significant primarily in terms of the impact of these events on

the structure of production and their subsequent effect on patterns of migration

in the Greater Atlantic area. Whereas, the Iberian powers focussed largely on

the extraction of American mineral wealth, the Second Modernity ushered in

the emergence of a plantation-centred techno-economic paradigm that would

create a massive demand for labour and land. This would be satisfied by the

Westphalian contract among European sovereigns and displacement of

indigenous Americans and the coeval importation of enslaved/indentured

workers. Implicated in the political economy of the mercantilist period,

therefore, were four (4) processes of diaspora, namely the displacement of the

indigenous American throughout the continent, the exile of indentured/enslaved

Europeans and Africans to the Americas, and imperial Diasporas that were

established in the Roman tradition as dependent outposts that dealt with the

administration of trading and production (see Barker, 1945).

Mercantilist patterns of diaspora, motivated as much by factors of imperial state

politics and techno-economic paradigms as by considerations of climate and

land availability (Basto, 10), were instrumental in mapping the frontiers of the

Americas that apply in contemporary political economy. In mapping these

frontiers, the Americas can be divided into four (4) major groupings:

Imperial-Colonial: This class, more prevalent or durable in the cases of early

European colonisation of modern-day Africa as well as coeval invasions of

modern-India and China (Wallerstein, 1970: 405-418), involves the implantation

of a colonial administration as a graft at the top of an existing socio-political and

economic structure, where the society being colonised remains more or less

intact (Ajayi, 1969:497-498; Watson, 1975: 7).

Imperial Quasi-Colonial: This class, similar to Samir Amin’s ‘Proto-core’

(Bergesen, 1980: 193), is characterised by the elimination or exile of the

indigenous population and the creation of colonies of settlement peopled by

emigrants from European countries. Oommen defines this as transplantive or

replicative colonialism (Oommen, 1997: 8-9) as opposed to the intrusive or

oppressive colonialism widely practised in Asia and Africa (Oommen, 95-97).

Examples of this class would emerge in most of present-day Canada, the

northern United States, Southern Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and El Salvador

were supplemented by the so-called Great Migrations of 1871-1920. The

states formed within the frontiers of Imperial Quasi-colonial space were usually

able to obtain or seize independent national status from the respective empires

and achieve varying levels of ascent in the global political economy, while

retaining a substantial politico-economic link with the same.

Creole-Colonial: The major distinction between this class and the preceding is

the substantial persistence within the social structure of the indigenous

population. In addition, in contradistinction with the classical Imperial-Colonial

model, the elites of these areas were able to seize political independence,

usually from declining Iberian empires. Despite these differences, Creole-

colonial states continued to witness the colonisation of its peoples, this time by

(native-born) or creole nationalist elites, predominantly of European descent.

This group includes areas such as Andean Latin America: Peru, Paraguay, and

Ecuador, most of contemporary Central America, Guatemala including Belize,

and Honduras, as well as parts of South America, including large areas of

Colombia including Panama and Venezuela.

Plantation-Colonial: The fourth and final class of American colonial formation

is the plantation colony. This class has two (2) main characteristics:

1. The absence or marginalisation of the indigenous population and the

importation of enslaved or indentured labour.

2. Significant influx of victim/labour Diasporas in the context of plantation-

based production.3

The plantation model of primary, export-oriented production as discussed by

scholars such as George Beckford, Fred Reno, Norman Girvan, Lloyd Best and

Kari Levitt does not refer directly to Diaspora as a politico-economic

consideration. However, the frontiers of the Plantation-colonial region,

especially with the Imperial Quasi-Colonial region represent major factors in

determining the direction of migration in later periods.

As historical phenomena, the states drawn within the frontiers of the Plantation-

colonial area are all Caribbean. However, certain areas such as the Southern

plantation states of modern United States of America (Mississippi, Tennessee

and Louisiana for example), and as well as the North and Northeast of Brasil 3 The uniformity of the plantation structure has been contested by various new studies, yet I would argue that the

theory of the Plantation still provides a useful indication of socio-economic structures in these regions.

were eventually absorbed into Imperial Quasi-Colonial states in the late 18th

and early 19th century. The regions along the Caribbean coast of Colombia,

Central America, and Mexico have also been absorbed by non-Plantation-

colonial states.

Baptiste argues that in the study of history, boundaries are merely convenient

tools…for research and writing.” (Baptiste 1996:1) In discussing the geography

of the Americas, one may enter into debate as to whether it would not be more

relevant to speak of a strictly defined core and periphery, as opposed to

replacing this relationship with a characterisation of racial or socio-economic

frontiers.

While it may be useful to stress the role of international or transnational capital

in directing the course of the various colonial systems discussed below, it is

also important to demonstrate the omnipresence of a race- or identity-based

global political economy, which also contributed to the important differences in

the social and economic articulation of these various regions.

It is my view that these views of politico-economic geography are

complimentary rather than mutually exclusive. It is the complex interaction of

these contrasting economic, political and social histories within the Americas

that have shaped the structure of the core and periphery in the continent, the

evolution of International Relations’ strategies regarding the first, second and

third problematiques, and by extension, the direction and outcomes of

migration and diaspora in the greater Atlantic.

The Industrial Revolution- Globalization of the Plantation Model

Mintz, in his discussion of the plantation as technology, identifies six (6) major

elements of the agro-industrial complex. The (sugar) plantation as an agro-

industrial technology involved:

1. combination of agriculture and processing under one authority

2. labour specialisation and organisation

3. interchangeable units (the slaves/indentured labourers)

4. time-consciousness, focus on productivity and efficiency

5. separation of production from consumption

6. separation of the worker from the tools of work (Mintz, 1985: 51-52).

7. Separation of household and industrial production.

The coercion of local and migrant labour, as well as the direct linkage

between primary production in the periphery and higher value-added

processes in the core, adds a global dimension to the plantation system as a

pre-cursor of the contemporary transnational production network.

As is demonstrated by social and economic historiography by authors such as

Polanyi (1944) and Wallerstein (1982), the social ontology of the plantation as

outlined above was exported, refined and circulated throughout the

international system, including the ‘core’ of the epoch. The exploration of the

implications of a ‘Caribbean’ techno-economic paradigm based on a non-

professional, segregated, time-pressured, and directed labour force holds

important lessons for the post-Fordist labour market, whose core, the

relationship between transnational capital and transnational labour as

mediated by the social technologies of the era shares many commonalities

with the plantation techno-economic paradigm (see Lipietz, 1998), including

the massive international transfer of human capital.

The geopolitical and economic context of the mercantilist period would be

replaced in and after the 1770s by a cluster of technological developments and

commercial reforms known as the Industrial Revolution. In his optimistic

assessment of the spirit of the revolution, Toynbee notes that the “essence of

the Industrial Revolution [was] the substitution of competition for the medieval

regulations which had previously controlled the production and distribution of

wealth.” (Toynbee: 1884). In fact, the reforms of the industrial age only came

after European states achieved relative technological and political superiority

through the Industrial Revolution and the accumulation of massive stores of

wealth through plunder (Skeldon: 26; see also Chang, 2003).

Coupled with these advantages were the technological advances initiated by

the almost simultaneous development of the steam engine by James Watt

(1769) and the Cotton Ginny by Hargreaves (1770). The transportation and

manufacturing sectors’ advances facilitated the transition to freer trade and the

Industrial Revolution led to geo-economic innovations within the European

world-system such as the 1807 British abolition of the African slave trade,

successive emancipation strategies in the British, French, Dutch, and American

plantation economies and the 1846 repeal of Britain’s Corn Laws. The end or

transition of the first industrial age coincides here with the decline of the British

Empire in the late 1880s and early 1890s.

The industrial revolution’s effect on production methods4 and the speed of

international transport also had serious ramifications for migration patterns and

the overall diasporic political economy. Several geopolitical shifts (including the

major wars/revolutions in the Caribbean and North America) contributed greatly

to the declaration of the elimination of slavery in the Americas. However, the

advent of industrial production in Europe, as Williams (1964) would argue, also

played an important role in African emancipation and the almost immediately

subsequent migration of freed Africans across the Plantation regions.

Despite some attempts at restriction by the plantocracy (see Fletcher, 1980),

the movement of male workers within the circum-Caribbean area steadily

expanded, and as the industrial economy of the United States flourished in the

latter half of the 19th century, many African-Americans chose to migrate to

urban centres in the North of the country as an alternative to the declining

Southern agricultural economy. As anthropologist Richard Lobban notes in a

personal communication, Afro-American migration also occurred between the

4 Wigfield refers alternately to the period 1759-1850 as the period of Craft Production.

Caribbean territories and North America, primarily the United States. For

example, Caribbean migration to the United States between 1840 and 1880

was about 1,000 per year (Guegnant, 1992: 95).

The sustained resistance of African Diasporas in the Americas due in part to

the mistreatment received by freed workers in their countries of

habitation/origin, prompted the coercion by European imperialists of other

groups, including Chinese, Indians, and Southern European into service on the

plantations, especially in the Caribbean. In the aftermath of the Battle of

Plassey (1757), the British had steadily brought the Indian sub-continent under

nominal control (Smith, 1991: 243). Shortages of labour in the British

agricultural empire would see Indian labourers recruited by force and/or

deception from Hindi-speaking zones of Bihar and modern Uttar Pradesh, and

“zones of recruitment around Calcutta, Madras and Bombay” (Saha, 1970: 28-

31).

The interaction of geopolitics and techno-economic shifts also played a clear

role in the emergence of the Chinese Diaspora. According to Latourette’s

account, Great Britain, the chief maritime and commercial power at this point,

was ‘dissatisfied’ with “the conditions under which the Chinese permitted trade.”

Particularly worrying for the British was the success of imperial commissioner

Lin Tzê-hsu in stamping out the traffic of opium. The major results of this

impasse were the first and second Opium Wars (Latourette, 1964: 276-278).

An eventual British victory lead to the final fall of the Ch’ing Dynasty, and

Chinese workers, whom the British directed largely through violence and fraud,

emigrated in large numbers to augment the labour force of California mines,

irrigation projects in Mexico, railroad construction projects in several parts of

the Americas and the plantations of Cuba and British Guiana (Latourette, 1964:

278-280; Cummings, 2002). Of the more than 2.3 million Chinese that

migrated in this period, approximately 400,000 were brought to the Caribbean

and South America (Live, 1993: 41). For example, starting in 1870,

approximately 125, 000 Chinese were brought to Cuba (Beozzo, 1992: 90).

Accompanied by demographic pressure and civil unrest, the industrial

restructuring of the global political economy contributed to the trafficking of

Asian labour into European colonies in Asia, the Indian Ocean islands, and the

Americas from the late 1830s up to 1890 (Madhavan, 1987; Guegnant, 1992).

The British abolition of the slave trade (1807) and nominal slavery (1834/38)

did not prevent the continued transhipment of enslaved Africans by states such

as Portugal. The end result of these abolitions would be a simple shift in the

geography of an exilic African Diaspora. Indeed, during the 19th century over

two million Africans came to the Americas as slaves, many of which were

directed to the expansion of slavery-based plantations in areas such as Cuba

and Brazil (Smith, 1991: 241-242). There were also internal shifts in the

structure and location of the plantation economy as, for example, planters in

Brazil moved further south from the sugar plantations and gold mines of

Northeastern Brazil and Minas Gerais to the coffee plantations of Rio de

Janeiro, Espírito Santo and São Paulo (Beozzo, 1992: 60-61).

The shifting techno-economic paradigm also had major implications for

European societies. The increase in population and urbanisation that followed

the Industrial Revolutions in Europe also created the conditions for a new wave

of free and indentured labour from that region to the Americas and Australasia,

starting in 1815. As Susan George observes, out-migration in this period

stemmed from a rapid rural-urban exodus (George: 116). This process was

most evident in England, the first country to industrialise. The machinery of

the Industrial Revolution displaced five-sixths of the “hands”, while the

‘consolidation’ of rural landholdings displaced massive numbers in rural

England (Guillet, 1963: 5). This period of migration5 presages the massive

impact of urban concentrations on internal and international migration patterns

in the Americas and beyond. A related development was the politically

engineered natural disaster that occasioned the departure of an Irish victim

Diaspora in 1845.

In documenting the history of modern migration, scholars characterise the

migrations of this period as unobstructed, especially in comparison with the

massive bureaucratic operations that deal with cross-border movements today.

5These developments led to what some writers refer to as the Great Migration. From 1871, as an immediate response to a recession in the European economy, free labour and trading Diasporas established themselves in temperate regions such as the Northern United States (as far as Maryland), Canada, and the southern states of South America, including southern Brazil.

In fact, cross-border mobility was highly restricted at this point with clear

restrictions instituted against migrants from South Asia, East Asia and Africa.

Informed by racist discourses of the time, legislative eugenics was widely

practised in the Americas (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, and the United

States of America, for example) as policy-makers restricted access to many

‘non-white’ migrants (Beozzo, 1992: 95-98). In the United States for example,

the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 as well as the ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ to

exclude the Japanese in 1907 reflected racial selectivity rampant in the

migration and immigration policy of the 19th and early 20th century (Baptiste,

1996).

The concept of race and racism was manifest in immigration policies of

receiving countries, and played a key role in the composition and direction of

immigrant populations to the Americas (Cohen, 1988: 44). Over the course of

the 19th century, Afro-American populations continued to be marginalized in

Southern America through preferential access to immigration and landholding

by European migrants. Cheap African labour from the southern United States

was often foregone in favour of imported European labour in Imperial Quasi-

colonial regions (Thomas, 1973: 35-82).

A similar policy of eugenics/racism was undertaken by Brazilian policymakers,

who during the 1870s and 1880s actively promoted the immigration of

Europeans while prohibiting the entry, even for tourism, of people of Asian or

African descent (dos Santos: 69-72). Although there were both African-

American and Puerto Rican populations in the Northern United States by the

19th century, the mass influx of these did not begin until a vacuum was left by

the interruption of the European free labour supply to the industrialised

Northern United States.

In moving into the Taylorist period, however, it should be reiterated that techno-

economic paradigms do not fully explain the orientation of diasporas. Race, as

an ideational system, had become an alternate axis or organising principle for

international relations and foreign policy.

The following trends of diaspora can be observed in the Americas in this

period:

1 Slave Labour Diasporas- Akan, Kongo-Angola, Yoruba, etc.

2 Indentured Labour Diasporas- Chinese, Indian and Portuguese/Madeiran

3 Free Labour Diasporas- British, German, Italian, Polish etc.

4 Victim Diasporas- Irish

5 Auxiliary Trading Diasporas- Jewish, Lebanese, Chinese.

The ease of transportation afforded by the introduction of the steam ship and

the railroad (in 1807 and 1830 respectively) represents the basis of the

contemporary diasporic economy. Transactions across large spaces were

facilitated, and the spread of the industrial model set the stage for the

emergence of labour-importing global cities. Also a key element of the

development of the global diasporic economy was the standardisation of labour

and telecommunications advances that would follow in the Taylorist period that

extends from the decline of the British Empire in the 1890s to the emergence of

the American Empire at the end of the First World War.

Taylorism was a techno-economic paradigm related to the ‘scientific’

reorganisation of factory work prescribed by Frederick Winslow Taylor, the

standardization of parts and supplies, and the introduction of mass production

(Wilkinson, 1995: 128-9). More importantly for the development of the

diasporic economy, the pace of production and communication increased

manifold with the technological advances of electrification and telegraphy,

among others (Skeldon: 71-72). Norman Angell’s 1912 seminal work The

Great Illusion pointed to the international interconnectedness of finance and

investment (Collier, 2001: 8) and the impact of “rapid post, the instantaneous

dissemination of financial and commercial information by means of telegraphy,

and generally the incredible progress of rapidity in communication.” (Angell,

1912: 50 as quoted by Woods, 2001: 3)

The spread of global business and finance also involved the cross-border

movement of a Jewish auxiliary Diaspora mainly from Germany and Britain.

Also on the move were a large number of free labourers from Europe, as

currents of migrants from Irish, Polish. Ukrainian, Yugoslav, and Italian polities

entered low wage, low skill positions (Cohen,1998: 44). This trend of European

immigration started in 1871 would end abruptly with the outbreak of European

armed conflict in 1914. The events of this war, in addition to shifting the focus

of migration and creating an atmosphere of hostility towards German

Diasporas in particular, created an Armenian Diaspora at the hands of the

Turks in 1914-1915. Another victim Diaspora produced in the period was a

Russian Jewish Diaspora produced by religious persecution in Russia and

Eastern Europe under Czars Nicholas I and II.

As much of an impact as this sea change had on other elements of the global

political economy, the Taylorist techno-economic shift would prove extremely

potent in shaping the nature and very existence of a coherent diasporic political

economy. Woods notes that the relative democratisation of these advances in

telecommunications and travel changed “the way people and groups think and

identify themselves” and also the way that states, firms and other actors

perceive and pursue their interests” (Woods: 2). Previously, the ship had been

the primary means of trans-oceanic communication. The low speed and high

cost of this conduit permitted access only to imperial and some auxiliary

Diasporas.

Even in these cases, the operation of a diasporic political economy was

hindered by the expense and lack of close contact (Ragatz, 1971: 3-4). The

explosion of activity that accompanied the emergence of the diasporic political

economy (Heisler: 235-237) is reflected by the birth of the Pan-African

diasporic movement which articulated the re-inscribing and articulation of

relations among the African Diaspora in Africa, Europe and the Americas.

Duara also points to the emergence of transnational appeal from Boxer China

towards the Chinese Diaspora after 1900 (Duara, 1999: 67). While this

initiative reflected a change in the political outlook of the Chinese leadership,

the very possibility of implementing such a strategy rested on the availability of

enabling information and communications technologies.

By the late 1880s, technological, economic and political conditions in the world

economy would allow for the emergence of the modern multinational

corporation. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the decline and/or departure

of the independent landowning classes opened the way for corporations such

as Great Britain’s Tate and Lyle and the United Fruit Company of the United

States of America, which would organise the production of commodities such

as sugar, coffee and bananas on a massive scale.

Whereas wage labourers were displaced in the earlier paradigm, multinationals

now took aim at putting an end to independent or peasant farming operations

by extending and quickly foreclosing on loans (Headley, 1996: 26). Similar to

the enclosures that accompanied the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the

‘recruitment’ of East Indian labour in the mid-1800s, Afro-American peasant

landowners, now reduced to wage-seeking labour, also began to flood towards

urban areas.

The Taylorist techno-economic era witnessed the emergence of the following

Diasporas:

1 Armenian and Russian Jewish Victim Diaspora

2 Caribbean Free-Labour Diaspora- Southern U.S., Puerto Rico, British

colonies esp. Jamaica

3 European Free-Labour Diasporas

4 Pan-African, Pan-Chinese, and European Post Facto Diasporas

As suggested above, military conflicts, due to their politico-economic results

and direct effect on the pace of technological innovation, represent major

events in the development of techno-economic paradigms and the process of

modern diaspora. The necessities of combat and economic mobilisation that

accompanied the First World War accelerated technological change.

Developments in this case included the proliferation of the airplane, the

automobile, the introduction of the radio, and full-scale electrification, at least in

the core areas. Skeldon (1997: 71) notes that “by 1914 the transformation of

the European world from agriculture to industry was essentially complete.”

However, in the interwar period, the mass production engendered by Taylorist

scientific management principles were complemented practices of

standardisation and simplification of factory tasks, the introduction of the

assembly line, and a forty-hour work week. The name usually given to this new

system is Fordism, after the developer of the latest techniques of mass

production, Henry Ford.

The technological developments of the Fordist era also facilitated the

expansion of the multinational or transnational corporation. Much as the

trading companies of the mercantilist paradigm, the multinational corporation

contributed to the functional interdependence of the regions of the world

system. While most of their organisational activity took place in core, home-

states, these firms were instrumental in the penetration of the periphery in the

post-World War period, especially for the extraction and exploitation of natural

and human resources. A ‘new international division of labour’ emerged at this

point, centering labour-intensive manufacturing activities in the periphery, while

the core areas shed this area to focus on high-level services and capital-

intensive manufacturing (Skeldon: 25).

Initiated in the post-WWI United States, Fordism became a full-fledged techno-

economic paradigm only after WWII when it was adopted in Great Britain, West

Germany and France under the United States’ ‘Marshall Plan’ for rebuilding

post-war Europe. The development of the welfare state and Keynesian

demand management also became a feature of Fordism in the core. These

social and economic buffer strategies were meant to absorb the new higher

rate of mass production through the promotion of mass consumption while

insulating this system of consumption from cyclical demand fluctuations’ and

especially to avoid the economic depression known during the so-called Great

Depression of the 1930s (Wigfield: 8).

The expansion of multinational enterprise was also a major influence on

migration patterns. As Sassen (1997) notes, “the networks assumed under the

Pax Americana, including international direct foreign investment and export

processing zones, have not only created bridges for the flow of capital,

information and high level personnel from the center to the periphery, but…also

for the flow of migrants from the periphery to the center.” Political and social

conditions in the core and periphery were also important in determining the

volume and direction of migration. The American quota laws of 1921 and 1924,

especially the latter, sought to cut off immigration from Southern and Eastern

Europe, while privileging immigrants from Western European countries such as

Great Britain. Paradoxically, this allowed a second wave of Anglophone

Caribbean migration, as British colonial citizens entered the United States,

taking advantage of a vastly under-subscribed British quota.

This trend would continue after the 1924 Immigration Act, slowing somewhat in

the early 1950s as the United States Congress placed racist provisions in the

way of migrants of Asian and African descent. It should be noted though that

the influx of Puerto Ricans continued despite these provisions and steadily

increased into the 1960s (Grosfoguel/Georas: 103-105). However, the

persistent poverty that plagued Afro-American communities during this period

created a ready supply of free labour as households continued to use migration

as an investment strategy.

In the core, demand began to increase significantly. For example, the

recruitment of labourers for work in orange, grapefruit and other plantations in

the United States of America was now complemented the WWII military

diasporas of the early 1940s. Important demographic and economic trends

created in the core after almost three decades of continuous warfare coupled

with the conditions engendered by colonialism in the global South would create

the conditions for changes in immigration policy and a new wave of migration

towards core states. This was especially true in Europe, given the impact of

the Second World War on the region’s working population (especially among

European males) and the subsequent need for reconstruction.

In addition, after mid-term consolidation in the 1950s, the core areas began to

experience a stagnant or declining labour force with rising incomes and

expectations under regimes of welfare and mass consumption (Skeldon: 75).

North American and Western European states, unable to recruit sufficient

labour from within their continental borders, now opened their wage markets to

unskilled and semi-skilled (free) labour from Latin American, African and

Caribbean (ex-) colonies6. The impact of the end of the Second World War, so

often associated with ‘Baby Boom’ in the North, was not limited to demographic

shifts in the core. The decline of the construction and other service industries

associated with the war economy in these colonies also created conditions for 6 Migrant workers would also be drawn from Eastern European, Pacific and Eastern Asian countries as well as the

Iberian Peninsula.

the mass migration of labour.

Diaspora and the Globalisation of the South The re-organisation and acceleration of production, consumption and social

interaction in the global economy in the context of computers, the Internet and

related technologies is often termed Globalisation. In other words, as Davis

states, globalisation is “capitalism in the age of electronics” (Davis, 2003:2).

The massive expenditures on research and development in areas of medicine,

materials science, physics, mechanics and electronics that accompanied the

World War period laid the foundation for the arrival of the electronic techno-

economic paradigm which would emerge as a definite stage in the early 1970s

(Davis, 2003: 5-6).

This contemporary period features certain major changes that destabilise and

re-orient the Fordist regime. The current techno-economic paradigm is based

on computerisation, flexible production and management techniques, the

intensification and expansion of transnational production, a focus on intellectual

property rights and the centralisation of high-skill branding, marketing and

Research and Development.7

Globalisation is also a geopolitical phenomenon. Most significantly, the

7 There is some disagreement as to when the Fordist period ended, or even whether or not we have entered into a Late or Neo-Fordist era rather than a post-Fordist one. However, for the purposes of this work, the end of the Fordist techno-economic era is the early 1970s.

collapse of the Soviet continental and global power structure, by altering the

configuration of military power at the international level, favoured the expansion

and increased sophistication of an American-led post-Fordist system that had

its genesis in the early 1970s (Watson, 2002: 32- 33). The following

developments are also credited by both Institutionalist and Regulationist

schools with the decline of the Fordist regime (Wigfield: 11-16):

The abandonment of the Gold Standard by US President Richard Nixon

in 1971.

Oil crises of the late 60s and the early 1970s that resulted in stagflation,

a combination of unemployment and inflation, and undermined investor

confidence and consumer spending.

The maturation of the market as products began to be mass-produced

by ‘newly-industrialising’ countries like Mexico, Brazil, and South Korea,

which depressed employment and effective demand in the core.

Relatedly, the development of electronics (especially computers and the

Internet) and high-capacity aerial mobility technologies (such as the 1970

‘Boeing 747’) extended the realm of possibilities for production and

consumption through the combination of communications, travel and transport.

The profound effect of these technologies has been described by some

economic analysts as a paradigmatic shift in the modes and organisation of

labour and production from the Fordist, mass-production phase to a new ICT-

based techno-economic paradigm, which closely integrates the economies of

speed and information flows facilitated by new ICTs into the overall economic

process (Castells, 1993). This paradigm has allowed for the development of

new production techniques, enhanced market reach, and the improvement of

credit/debt circuits as well as surveillance and control technologies (Davis,

2003: 2-3).

In order to keep pace with liberalisation regimes, global competition, and the

possibilities offered by advancing information and communications

technologies, firms are creating integrated production networks with “flexible,

specialized suppliers in lower-cost locations” (Henderson et al., 2002: 443).

This has been particularly pronounced in knowledge-based industries such as

electronics and information technology. However, it is clear that, in general,

networks, defined by Henderson as “the nexus of interconnected functions and

operations through which goods and services are produced, distributed and

consumed” (Henderson et al., 2002: 445) have become more complex, more

extensive, and more intensive. As multinational-cum-transnational enterprises

reorganise their approach to production through the techno-economic

advances of the ‘electronic revolution’, the content and direction of migration,

both internal and international have followed suit.

As research continues into the value of ICTs for development, it is important to

reflect on the increasingly valuable theoretical concept of information and

communications networks as space. The concept of virtual space, usually

represented by the connection of two or more users over the internet and/or the

positioning of information in media compatible to access by internet users,

provides an interesting reworking of the concept of space. In this iteration,

space or presence is represented by communication and accessibility, rather

than by physical dimensions or proximity.

The shift is key to the reconceptualisation of territory and the development of

the subject of the next chapter, Global Diasporic Networks. While the political

economy of virtual spaces will most likely mirror the geopolitical context from

which they spring, it is important to interrogate the forms of agency created or

facilitated by the current version of the global economy.

The inter-relationship of trade and migratory flows are a constant in the modern

era. As the trading networks of ancient civilisations determined the direction of

travel and trading among scholars, merchants and missionaries (Anderson,

1991), the evolution of the post-Columbian global political economy has

created a web of diasporic relationships that mirror the geopolitical and

technoeconomic trends of the last five centuries. The long-range perspective

on the complex interplay of trade, technology, financial capital, multinational

commercial enterprise, and, most importantly, human migration reveals the

diasporic economy as a reflection of the increasingly elaborate global political

economy.

To date, several authors have noted that while the concepts of First World and

Third World still provide salient insights, the location of the Third World is

changing with the shifts in the organisation and distribution of labour and

capital. In her article “Where is the Third World Now?”, Caroline Thomas

(1999) notes that the divisions between elites and a marginalized underclass is

becoming itself globalised. Relatedly, national capitalist classes are being

superseded by a transnational managerial class in which the social and

functional distinctions between state and corporate bureaucracies are

becoming rather blurred, and in which the “life-styles of each resemble each

other more than they do those of state officials or corporate managers who

function only in a national milieu” (Strange 1988: 134).

As the multinational reorganises its approach to production through the techno-

economic advances of ‘electronic revolution’, the content and direction of

migration, both internal and international have followed suit. Multinationals of

this period, in addition to influencing the direction and content of free labour

Diasporas, also brought within them imperial or corporate Diasporas of

Japanese, British, Americans, and Canadians, among others.8 In essence,

then, both the North and the South are being ‘globalised’ or dispersed in ways

that reduce the applicability of traditional state-based analyses to the concept

of power, development, identity, territory and class at both the local and

8 The so-called ‘ex-pat’ phenomenon is a major, but largely ignored aspect of migration and diaspora.

international level.

Other authors such as Tokman and Klein (2000) have also noted the

polarisation of constituencies within the ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ worlds.

While the American historical experience reveals the persistence of internalised

peripheries in the South, by the mid-nineties, Caroline Thomas (1995) would

point to the increasing importance of the migration of low-skill labour to core

countries. Writers such as Sassen-Koob (1981) and Klein (2000) also noted

the proliferation of homeworkers and sweatshops within global cities as

signalling the globalisation and internalisation of the core-periphery dichotomy.

These trends can be described as the ‘globalisation of the South’ or the

emergence of the ‘Global South’. The next chapter lays the foundation for a

new approach to international political economy and international relations

strategy that focuses on the development of networks, as an alternative to

geographically-bound production and trade strategy.

II: Diasporic Political Economy

INTRODUCTION

By displacing the concept of the state as an artifact of the two modern

problematiques, the critical realist approach allows for the consideration of the

similarities and differences among a wider variety of agents in the Global

Political Economy.

This genealogy presents two challenges to the study of International

Relations. Firstly, it supports the argument for the inclusion on non-state

actors such as multinational firms and diasporas in the history of International

Relations. I propose here the widening of the scope of International Relations

beyond the centrality of the state, and introduce the concept of Global

Relations: the multileveled study of the combination of international/interstate

relations, transnational commerce, and diasporic or transnational relations in

the pursuit of strategic goals and interests. 

This approach sets the stage for the development of a comparison between

diasporic networks and transnational corporate institutions, an exercise which

draws from Global Systems Theory as proposed by Sklair (2001) and

Strange’s (1984) description of Structures of Power.  Global Systems Theory

(GST) emerges in the late 1990s as a theoretical response to the discourse(s)

of contemporary globalization and extends the Wallersteinian World Systems

approach to consider transnational political, economic and cultural/ideological

activity that both transcends and involves the state or interstate system,

driven by a triad of transnational or globalising capitalist class, the

transnational corporation and global consumer culture (Sklair, 2001: 2-3;

Sklair 2005).  Central to the argument of the thesis is Sklair's differentiation

between capitalist globalization and 'generic globalization', and the implied

possibility of alternative forms of globalization processes.   GST, through its

focus on transnational practices (TNP) as its unit of analysis and by allowing

for the transnational influence of class, gender, ideology and ethnicity, also

provides the basis for a comparison of the role of transnational capital and

diasporas in the political, economic and cultural-ideological processes of

globalisation (Sklair, 2001: 29). 

The second challenge is more fundamental and is related to the question of

the problematique(s) of International Relations itself. This challenge is related

to the approaches to structuralism and International Political Economy

adopted by Herb Addo and Susan Strange. Susan Strange's brand of

structuralism, in particular her Structures of Power (see Strange, 1994), aptly

describes the emergence and persistence of systems of unequal distribution

of resources and wealth which have in turn spurred trans-border movements

of peoples from the poorer regions to richer ones, largely in search of

opportunities for employment and socio-economic advance.  As Kratchowil

points out, “there are no simple givens for constructivists, such as ‘structures’

or ‘forces’ that are not again results of particular actions and ‘constructions’

that require further explanation. (Kratchowil, 2000: 82)  However, Strange’s

structures does not attempt to present “an all-embracing theory that pretends

to enable even partially to predict what will happen in the world economy

tomorrow” (Strange, 1994: 16) though the discovery and elaboration of

various laws of motion.  Strange, by contrast, sees structural power as the

power to control the articulation of the world’s political economy and divides

the elements that shape the environment “within which [other] states, [their]

political institutions, [their] economic enterprises and scientists and other

professional people have to operate” (Strange, 1994: 24-25) into four (4)

major groups, namely Security; Production; Finance; and Knowledge.  In so

doing, Strange transcends Marxist and neo-Marxist views which stem from

Marx’s apparent reduction of identity to one of social class and relation to

economic modes of production as well as traditional structuralist arguments

that also see economic relations, especially in terms of trade, as the source of

power inequalities (Spero, 1997: 154).   

As Patömaki notes in his work on critical realism and its implications for

international relations, the international relations problematique is inseparable

from the fundamental conceptions of capitalism (2003: 173). In widening the

debate on international relations beyond its central problematique of modernity,

that is, capitalism and the power relations which it involves, the approach

allows for a discussion of GPE which includes and transcends the insights and

approaches provided by Gill, Patömaki, Gunder Frank and Addo, as well as the

inclusion of Sklair’s central differentiation between generic and capitalist

globalisation.

In other words, I argue that realism, liberal institutionalism, Marxism and other

state-centric approaches to GPE and International Relations are based on the

attempt to treat with one or two central problematiques of International

Relations, when three problematiques are actually involved. The first

problematique, which I term here the modern or colonial problematique, is

centred around the attempt to manage or explain the operation of the global

political economy following the decline of the Asian mid-millennium world

system and the appropriation of massive wealth from the Americas by

European polities. This shift is amply described by Janet Abu-Lughod (1989)

and alluded to by Herb Addo (1985, 1988) in his work on development and

multiple modernities.

The development of this Atlantic-centred world system is a complex interplay

of movements- those of goods and resources, financial capital and

commercial enterprise, and, most importantly, social groups, households,

individuals and their cultures.  I argue that the ‘management’ issue is

influential in questions of both ontology and epistemology in the social

sciences of this period. Realism, Idealism and Marxism emerge as a

response to the management of European political economy and their

perspectives, as discussed earlier, are limited by these concerns.

The second problematique, termed here as the development or postcolonial

problematique, emerges with two waves of nationalist movements in colonies

developed in the First and Second Modernities. The problematique of these

states is basically the question of state development and participation in the

global Atlantic-based economy in the context of pre-existing European empires,

states and multinational business and civil society interests. The pursuit of this

nationalist development is articulated in various ways based largely on the

context of colonisation, independence and/or internal colonisation.

International Relations and the Great Debate between Realism, Liberal

Institutionalism and Marxism are thus focussed largely on the approaches to

management and development in these two state-centred problematiques. I

would argue that one essential part of the response to these two

problematiques is the discourse of modern identity, termed here as RAGE

(Race/class, Age, Gender, and Ethnicity/nationality) as contingent with

modern and post-modern regimes of production.6

Critical realism allows for the existence of a third problematique, which I term

here the endemic problematique of International Relations, which is the

question of the Gunder Frank’s World System: the organisation of human

society in localised hierarchies in a global context of anarchy. The emergence

of European global imperialism and the concept of the State constitute recent

iterations of this endemic problematique.

Diaspora represents an ideal unit of analysis for uncovering the processes

that have produced today’s globalisation process, and for formulating a

coherent and effective response to this process.  The concept of Diaspora,

suitably reformulated, allows us to address the question of negotiating three

problematiques, the traditional IR problematiques and the problem of

advancing the interests of groups displaced during and prior to modernity by

civilizational or imperial developments. The shift from concentration on the

State as a negotiation of post-Columbian political economy to a complementary

focus on diaspora allows for the balancing of these simultaneous

problematiques within the study of International Relations.

For example, as part of the shift in Global Political Economy suggested by

recent global economic crises, the rise of major postcolonial states to join the

United States and Canada in participating in the upper echelon of world

politics, and the demographic crisis facing countries of the North, the critical

realist view presents a range of choices for strategic action in the South. In

terms of the first and second problematique, one example would involve a shift

towards mercantilist labour-exporting or producing state formations in the

South, creating collective or individual power through barriers to movement of

its citizens, Mode 4 negotiations and circular migration. Another would be a

traditional realist conflict (e.g. discourse of Brain Drain/Gain) involving the

migration of qualified personnel in strategic fields. In light of the third

problematique, the current conjuncture may present an opportunity for a

reformulation of the state-diaspora relations or concepts of citizenship and

alternative approach to the question of global anarchy, given the complexity

presented by multiple forms of migration and transnational labour.

Critical Realism’s approach to ontology and methodology also represents a

balance of empirical and normative approaches, now a major source of debate

within the field of International Relations and the social sciences. As Fischer

(1998) states: "sociological investigation has shown the elements of empirical

enquiry...to be grounded in the theoretical assumptions of the sociocultural

practices through which they are developed." While quantitative methods will

be used in the preparation of the thesis, a simultaneous attempt will be made

to situate research methods and findings within the "context of normative

concerns...." (Fischer, 1998) and produce more accurate questions and

criteria to inform the collection and analysis of statistical data.

This broadening of the problematiques and methodological approaches

facilitates one of my contributions to the question of migration and

development, which is the inclusion of ‘postmodern’ approaches to migration

including NELM, livelihood strategies and transnationalism in the analysis of

international relations practice and theory. The inclusion of the endemic

problematique reduces the certainty of the ‘fall of capitalism’ by putting into

question as Gunder Frank (see Gunder Frank and Gills 1993) did in his later

writings, the centrality of European capitalism to the problematique of global

inequality.

Critical realism also offers the advantages of neo-Gramscian GPE, namely the

ability to combine historicism with an ontological openness to the conception of

power (Patömaki, 2003). Critical realism provides a framework for the

rapprochement of GPE and economic/development theory, which has not

advanced significantly from the discussions of the 1960s: a genealogy of

power relations, linking diaspora directly to the enclosure of land and other

natural resources in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, discourses of

exclusion based on race, gender and ethnicity, the emergence of the

plantation and multinational commercial enterprise as socio-economic

technologies, and the pressing of households into unpaid and/or wage labour.

Also important is the openness of the approach to self-critique, especially in

terms of its ontological underpinnings. The approach is itself undergoing a

period of self-reappraisal including a new discourse with quantum physics

and post-colonialism which has created the possibility of including

theoretically informed empiricism as part of its body of scholarly work and the

expansion of the application of critical realism beyond its usual limits in the

treatment of the first problematique of International Relations and Global

Political Economy in Western and Northern Europe (see Patömaki, 2003).

Critical Realism is therefore much closer to Realism in the context of

Philosophy than it is to Realism in International Relations. Instead of acting

simply as an addendum or counterpart to Marxist thought as associated with

Roy Bhaskar (see Bhaskar 1993), one of the central thinkers of contemporary

Critical Realism, I argue that Critical Realism plays the more vital role of

attacking the underlying discursive assumptions of ‘realism’, that is, its claim to

scientific rigour and objectivity (Bhaskar, 1989; Patömaki, 2008). In

demonstrating the vital link between postpositivist inquiry in the physical

sciences and the limitations of theories based on ‘closed systems’ in both

International Relations and Economics (see Bhaskar 1975, 2000), Critical

Realism as applied in this research presents not a refinement of World-

Systems theory, marxism, liberal institutionalism or realism, but a less

Eurocentric and statecentric approach which addresses a wider set of

questions within the realm of International Relations.

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