Susan Strange meets the everyday: The mundane sources of structural power
Kasper Arabi discusses the key points from his new Review of International Studies (RIS) article. If you'd like to know more you can read the full article here - Susan Strange meets the everyday: The mundane sources of structural power
News media all over the world have been trying to follow along ever since American President Donald Trump announced his reciprocal tariff package on what he called Liberation Day back in April. Since then, countries have sought to negotiate deals with the American administration, US trade conflicts with Canada, Mexico, and China have escalated, and Trump has been u-turning, pausing, postponing, and changing different tariff rates throughout the last months. Most recently, the EU and the US have reached a trade agreement that has convinced Brussels to put away its so-called “trade bazooka”, which it otherwise had been waving in front of Washington in response to American tariffs. Trump’s Liberation Day, in other words, has shaken the core of the international economic order and signalled a new direction for the deployment of American structural power in the international system. Yet, the American president was not the only one on the stage that day in the Rose Garden. After Trump had labelled his new tariff regime ‘our declaration of economic independence’, he gave the floor to a former auto worker from Michigan who endorsed Trump’s economic agenda and linked it with his own everyday experiences in the former Factory Belt:
"My first vote for president was for Ronald Reagan. I thought that was gonna be the best president I ever saw in my lifetime until Donald J. Trump came along. ... My entire life, I have watched plant after plant after plant in Detroit and in the metro Detroit area close. There are now plants sitting idle. There are now plants that are underutilised. And Donald Trump’s policies are gonna bring product back into those underutilised plants. … And the UAW [United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America] members … We support Donald Trump’s policies on tariffs 100%."
In a new article published in the Review of International Studies, I explore those connections between everyday life and structural power in the international system that were displayed in front of the White House that day in April. Structural power research and everyday scholarship usually represent two different conceptualisations of power. Susan Strange published her notion of structural power in States and Markets in 1988 and made the case for a market-authority nexus that operated in four different primary spheres in the world economy: security, production, finance, and knowledge. An important part of her agenda was to challenge the realists’ focus on a state-centred notion of power, as she emphasised the importance of various non-state actors – especially those of the financial world – in shaping and structuring international economic relations.
Despite these efforts, I find that Strange never got to develop an everyday approach to structural power in any detail. However, in the meantime, the everyday movement has spurred a lot of debate about the study of power in the international system. Everyday research, which especially has received attention in International Political Economy and feminist scholarship before that, seeks to highlight the importance of often overlooked or neglected practices and actors and how they hold the potential to inform world affairs. Approaching power in the international system this way, in other words, entails expanding the subject matter we tend to study when researching international power to include otherwise overseen actors and dynamics such as shop floor routines, daily practices at home, or non-elite experiences and perceptions of everyday life.
In short, I attempt to make Susan Strange meet the everyday by linking her notion of structural power with everyday research. I therefore advance a new theoretical framework that reconceptualises the state as the mediator that sits firmly in between the everyday and structural power in the international system. Using the strategic-relational approach as forwarded by Bob Jessop and Colin Hay as my starting point, I emphasise how a selective context regulates access to elite policymakers and, hence, how everyday dynamics might inform state regimes and their international agendas. Yet, where Jessop and Hay prefer notions such as strategic selectivity and discursive selectivity when studying the selective context of the state, I argue that a perceptual selectivity functions as an ontological prior that meaningfully can be used to investigate those perceptual interpretations on an everyday level that might translate into specific discursive narratives and ultimately inform the state’s strategic intentions. Two important implications follow from this argument.
Firstly, I hope to direct attention towards how structural power – and the way it is utilised – is legitimised on an everyday level. Following previous everyday scholarship, I find that the way elite policymakers deploy and utilise the structural power of the state in question only is sustainable in the long run if no delegitimising pressures manage to slip through the state’s selective context and challenge the status quo. This is all a matter of how the elite policymakers themselves interpret whether their position is turning rickety or not. If they experience minor pressures from below, a response might come from within the existing toolbox. This was, for instance, the case when the American hegemonic project changed course in the 1970s and 1980s from a Keynesian-inspired one of embedded liberalism to a more neoliberal direction. On the other hand, if they find their position is being challenged by a fully-fledged legitimacy crisis, the response might turn out more fundamental, resulting in a complete restructuring of the international order.
Secondly, as the selectivities of the state function as a filter, I argue that all everyday agency by no means is equal. While some everyday actions might find their way through the selective context to the most intimate spaces of elite policymaking and inform how elite policymakers interpret support for their positions, others are blocked from doing so. This sheds new light on the transformative agency of the everyday as well as its structural restrictions. Everyday agency might be discriminated and blocked from influencing state policies if they are based on perceptions and experiences that are at odds with the dominating perceptual interpretations, if they run counter to the ruling discursive narrative, or if they represent a challenge to the existing strategic intentions of the state. However, accumulative build-up of everyday actions might change these selectivities over time if they become forceful enough to constitute what is considered a full legitimacy crisis as described above.
In order to demonstrate how this theoretical framework translates into real-world phenomena fit for study, I illustrate these rather abstract mechanisms by investigating shifts in the American production structure and how they have influenced recent disruptions to the way American structural power is deployed. Drawing on interviews with everyday Americans in former industrial powerhouses conducted by other researchers, I explore how those perceptions the former auto worker displayed in the Rose Garden on Liberation Day, quoted above, echoed the experiences of other everyday agents who also have seen deindustrialisation and urban decay in what is now known as the Rust Belt. As they have experienced increasing inequalities and wage stagnation, among other factors, a feeling of resignation and being deserted seems rather widespread. While this is not a new development, the selectivities of the American state managed to filter out many of these grievances in the 1990s and early 2000s. Part of this story is how access to cheap finance played a role in offsetting such resentments. Yet, in the wake of the financial crisis, these dynamics changed. Delegitimising forces from the everyday were ramping up, putting increasing pressure on the selectivities of the state and elite policymakers. I therefore make the case that Trump’s conquests (now in plural) of the White House demonstrate how the selectivities of the American state have changed. Everyday perceptions and experiences – that previously were ignored – have now overruled the previous configuration of the state selectivities. Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs illustrate the international implications of these transformations.
While Trump 1.0 succeeded in changing the course of the way American structural power is deployed, his second term in office has continued down the same path. It is still too early to judge whether the course he has taken since taking office in January is the outcome of a fully-fledged legitimacy crisis or something less fundamental. However, what his presidencies demonstrate is that everyday actions, experiences, and dynamics can find their way – through the state and its selectivities – to the international level and challenge the status quo. This, I conclude, illustrates how it makes sense to keep an eye out for the everyday to grasp a more complete picture of what constitutes structural power in the international system. The theoretical framework I present in this paper in the Review of International Studies, I hope, might be the first step in that direction.
Want to know more? You can read the full article at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210525101083
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