Statism as the state ideology of a global hegemony : an analysis of international politics

Abstract

Underpinned by a Lacanian understanding of ideology, the research asks why notions of statehood remain unmoved by their own failure to provide radical humanitarian and environmental solutions. Althusser’s theory of a State Ideology upheld by rituals in State Apparatuses is first applied to the global level to envisage statism as a global State Ideology. Via Gramscian philosophy, it is demonstrated that the political-civil distinction framing international politics as a system of free-acting sovereign states is an ideological fantasy of the hegemonic global integral ‘State’. Hegemony is further revised with Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of polysemy, and the study argues that since classes or states are unfixed signifiers, the global State Ideology reproduces itself as a hegemony without a hegemon. Therefore, state-actors are identified as fetishes meant to absorb the subjects’ guilt of interpellation. Statism is identified as an ideology comprising fantasy elements concealing its contradictions and symbolic deadlock, due to which the subjects remain interpellated in a symbolic security dilemma of citizenship that materialises state-actors as ‘gated communities’. This makes rivalling world powers codependent parties in a global bodiless hegemony, and a gap is identified in international relations theories which do not account for the fetish value of statehood. Applying Žižek’s account of revolution, the dissertation finally proposes a way towards a counter-hegemony which overturns the security dilemma by embracing the Real symbolic gap; this is conducted through political overidentification with the universal symptoms (rather than particular casualties) which are conventionally obscured by the same ideological fantasies of statism.