The work of Kees van der Pijl covers four main areas: a) transnational classes; b) the structure of the global political economy; c) the history of ideas in International Relations and Global Political Economy; d) modes of foreign relations.
Transnational classes The study of transnational class formation was central in the work at the University of Amsterdam. It built on the writings of
Christian Palloix,
Nikos Poulantzas,
Alfred Sohn-Rethel and on the materialist Cold War history in the United States (Joyce and
Gabriel Kolko). Van der Pijl's contribution was on the transmission of American mass production to Western Europe in the
Marshall Plan and the relegation of the cartelised European steel industry to the role of a supplier for the automobile industry, resulting in a first book in Dutch (1978). Economic statesmen involved in this process weld their different 'fractional' perspectives (heavy/light industrial, national/international trade, investment and commercial banking, etc.) into 'globale beheersconcepties' (comprehensive concepts of control, a notion coined by Ries Bode). A concept of control projects a presumed general interest totalising all others, under the guidance of the dominant fraction. In his doctoral dissertation of 1983 and the book based on it (
The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class, Verso 1984, reprinted with a new preface 2012), Van der Pijl applied this to the evolution of transatlantic class formation. In
Transnational Classes and International Relations (Routledge 1998),
neoliberalism is identified as the hegemonic concept of control in the closing decades of the 20th century. This book also analyses the managerial 'cadre', an auxiliary class of salaried functionaries with directive-educative roles. The cadre typically come to the fore in major crises (the 1930s, the 1970s, and again today), proposing managerial alternatives to liberalism. If not checked by popular mobilization, their intervention may assume authoritarian forms.
Structure of the global political economy Challenging the state-centric understanding of world politics, which assumes that each state contains a self-enclosed society, van der Pijl distinguishes a
Lockean heartland (after the ideologue of the 1688 Glorious Revolution in England) at the centre of the global political economy. This is composed of the white-majority, English-speaking countries. Its common law tradition favouring social self-regulation and distrust of state encroachment, ideology of possessive individualism, and missionary interpretation of its role in the world (inspired by Puritanism) have fostered the development of capitalist social relations. The Lockean heartland has interacted with rival states seeking to impose themselves on their societies, to balance and withstand the influence of the liberal West and avoid colonisation. These
contender states, of which France in the long 18th century, Germany, Japan and Italy from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries, and the Soviet Union after World War II, have been the most important ones, develop through
revolutions from above (Gramsci's ‘
passive revolution’) into alternatives to transnational Western liberalism. This line of analysis, developed in
Transnational Classes and International Relations and more recently in
Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq (Pluto and Sage-Vistaar 2006, Turkish trans., Imge 2014) leads to the identification of China as the current primary contender.
History of international thought Building on the concepts of the Anglophone Lockean heartland and the contender states, Van der Pijl in
Vordenker der Weltpolitik (Leske+Budrich 1996, revised from an earlier work in Dutch) argued that the liberal West typically produced 'idealist' conceptions of world order, against the 'realist' power politics perspective of the contenders. After World War I, there was an exodus of such 'realists' from the European continent to the United States, incorporating the realist argument into the IR mainstream. At Sussex, Van der Pijl has posted a web-textbook for the MA in Global Political Economy, 'A Survey of Global Political Economy'. In volumes II and III of his
Modes of foreign relations project, Van der Pijl discusses what myth and religion say about foreign relations, and how liberalism prescribes the nation-state form for the world. The third volume, The Discipline of Western Supremacy (2014) presents a historical sociology of the IR discipline in this light.
Modes of foreign relations In the Modes of foreign relations project, sponsored by the
Leverhulme Trust under a major research fellowship 2006–2009, Van der Pijl argues that inter-state relations (as well as the national state form itself) are transient, historical forms of more fundamental foreign relations. Just as Marx developed a critique of equilibrium economics by claiming that this was only one ‘
mode of production’, which had been preceded and would be followed by others, Van der Pijl in this project challenges the 'IR' paradigm. Modes of foreign relations include a tribal, an empire/nomad, the sovereign equality, and the
global governance modes; in each, a specific way occupation of space, its protection, and the exchange with others, are made possible by a given level of civilisation. == Controversies ==