THE STATE, CAPITAL, AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD SYSTEM: AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY FORMATION TOWARDS JAPAN IN THE INTERWAR PERIOD

One of the classical debates of political sociology has been the relationship between political decision-making and economic structures, and the relative weight of business interests in policy formation. On the one hand, some writers (elite theorists, Marxists, revisionist historians) have emphasized the control of political decision-making by a small group of powerful business interests. On the other hand, some writers (pluralists, mainstream political science, institutional historians) have emphasized the independence of political institutions from economic interests and the determination of policy formation by autonomous political processes. Recently a new twist was introduced into the debate by the development of an internal critique within the Marxist analysis of politics of the basic assumptions of the elite theory. This new development has pitted the instrumental theory of the state (elite theory) against the structural theory of the state as two ways of explaining the relationship between state actions and economic structures within the conceptual paradigm of the Marxist analysis of capitalist society. This dissertation uses an historical case study (American foreign policy towards Japan) to test the relative adequacy of the instrumental and structural theories of the state as explanations of foreign policy formation within advanced capitalist society. The first chapter outlines the structural theory of the state and uses that theory in a structural theory of policy formation in terms of "policy strategies," "strategic principles of organization," and "strategic struggles." Using Immanuel Wallerstein's notion of "the modern world system," these concepts are applied to foreign policy as "strategic principles of world system organization" and "foreign policy strategies." The next two chapters apply this structural theory of policy formation to the analysis of the two main policy strategies that directed American foreign policy in the interwar period: internationalism and nationalism. The discussion outlines the grounding of these two strategies in the structure of the interwar world system, how these two strategies competed for hegemony within interwar foreign policy, how the interwar treaty structure emerged from the nationalist dominance in policy formation, and the collapse of this treaty structure after the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. The last three chapters employ an historical methodology of time-series analysis in order to test whether instrumental pressures by powerful business interests or structural problems in the interwar world system were the main cause of American foreign policy towards Japan in the 1930s. The data collected is (1) the main patterns of trade and investment between the American economy and the Far Eastern region, (2) opinions of business leaders about the foreign policy actions of the United States, (3) documents on the mobilization and use of political resources by America and Japan, and (4) the perspective of political bureaucracies within the American and Japanese state. The research design is a time-series contrast of the direction of trade and investments and business leader opinions with the relative weight of world system processes (war/peace, isolation/interdependence, ascendent semi-periphery, etc.) at crucial turning points in the evolution of American policy formation. The major conclusion is that the instrumental pressures played a much less consequential role in American policy formation than the structural processes; and, hence, the instrumental approach must be rejected in favor of a structural approach.