Abstract:

This article aims to criticize classical international relations theories in regard to issues of internality and externality, ahistoricism, and asociologism within the scope of historical sociology. In doing so, the article will address the uneven and combined development approach. An analysis of Turkey’s integration to world capitalism between the 1940s and the 1960s will serve as a case study for this critique. The article will employ a Marxist method with a historical analysis. The article claims that historical sociology takes up international relations by embedding it in societies’ historical contexts and structures. Within this framework, the uneven and combined development approach provides a significant dimension to understanding the social interactions between the domestic and the international structures within historical processes. Particularly, combined development, which connotes the amalgam of modern and backward forms of production, helps us to overcome the separation between the national and the international. For this reason, the article claims that Turkey’s incorporation into capitalism after WWII contains significant dynamics of combined development (economic, political, and sociological) in both intra – and inter-state levels. Specifically, Turkey’s technology transfer after the war in terms of new class dynamics emerges as a significant mechanism of combined development.

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