풀란차스와 미국 제국주의: 비평

Abstract

The dominance of American power has been one of the most influential factors to world politics in the wake of the collapse of the communist bloc in the 1990s. Accordingly, there has been a proliferation of literature on the subject of American power among the leftist scholars. For all of those leftist scholars, Nicos Poulantzas's investigation of American imperialism in the early 1970s is implicitly or explicitly an important point of reference. However, recent theorists of American imperialism incorrectly and uncritically interpret the theory of Nicos Poulantzas and then attempt to apply his theory in an inappropriate manner to highlight American dominance over Europe. Both neoimperialism theorists and Poulantzas stress American dominance over the European nation states. However, the neoimperialists do not correctly understand the underlying ideas of Poulantzas on the relationship, nor do they apply his ideas correctly, despite apparent agreement. While revealing (for the first time) the hard-core of Poulantzas' theory, i.e., the reproduction mechanism of the system, this paper demonstrates that Poulantzas'argument of American domination over the European nation states rests upon class reductionism in a global context and overestimates the power and influence of American capital and the American state while underestimating the autonomy of the European nation states and European capitalism.