Description
A new era of global disorder has taken root in world politics, marked by the rise of China as a new pole of geo-political and economic power, the eruption of novel military and geo-economic conflicts, and protracted international economic instability (Lavery & Schmid, 2021; Thompson, 2022). A key dimension of this global conjuncture is an apparent ‘eastwards’ shift of power, accompanied by a wider de-centring of global capitalism (Buzan and Lawson, 2014; De Graaff, 2020). For many IR scholars, this portends a crisis of the post-war Atlantic order, centred on the primacy of the United States and its Western European partners (Anderson et al., 2016).
How might international relations grapple with the apparent end of the Atlantic order? A crucial starting point is the observation that the Atlantic order is both a concrete historical formation and an abstract set of social relations. Throughout the post-war era, US hegemony was articulated through a concrete nexus of trans-Atlantic institutions, including the geo-political reach of NATO and deep entanglements between US and Western European capitalism (Panitch and Gindin, 2013). At the same time, the post-war Atlantic sphere was shaped by a more abstract series of relations - a shared ideology, a distinctive liberal political economy, and simmering rivalries between various trans-Atlantic social forces (Van Apeldoorn, 2003; Lundestad, 2005). To trace the long rise and the possible decline of the Atlantic order, it is necessary to deploy a perspective capable of navigating both history and theory.
Numerous scholars have grappled with the question of the Atlantic and its relationship to international order. In this paper, we engage three classic contributions - what we term the “three Atlantics” - before drawing-out some of the lessons these approaches might have for contemporary international relations theory. First, we review the field of Atlantic history, an historical approach that paints a panoramic portrait of the Atlantic world but eschews wider theoretical questions (Bailyn, 2005; Games, 2010). Second, we explore the Braudelian Atlantic, a series of historical sociological approaches that mobilise a range of concepts - the world economy, uneven development and international interaction - to illuminate the deeper structures of Atlantic development (Anievas et al., 2013). Third, we engage the Black Atlantic, an approach which problematises universalist perspectives and foregrounds questions of Eurocentrism and the entanglements between Atlantic expansion and coloniality in the making of hybrid modernity (Gilroy, 1993; Bhambra, 2007; Shilliam, 2013).
These “three Atlantics” all illuminate important aspects in the long formation of the Atlantic order. Each also provides a lens through which to conceptualise the limits of the Atlantic as a historical formation. Taken collectively, these different Atlantic perspectives also contain deep internal contradictions - between the universal and the particular; the abstract and the concrete; the structural and the agential. Rather than ignoring or side-stepping these contradictions, we advocate for an approach that actively embraces the tensions between concrete historical enquiry and the abstract generalisations of social theory. We claim that international relations is well-placed to offer such an integrative and synthetic perspective. By mobilising a series of mid-range concepts - multiplicity, interaction, continuity, change, and politics - we argue that an integrative and interdisciplinary perspective can effectively mediate the concrete and abstract dimensions of Atlantic development, whilst shedding new light on the limits to and possible pathways beyond the Atlantic constellation of international order.
