The Palgrave Handbook of Critical International Political Economy

Alan Cafruny, Leila Simona Talani, Gonzalo Pozo Martin, Alan Cafruny, Leila Simona Talani, Gonzalo Pozo Martin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137500182
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Trade & Tariffs
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Challenging the assumptions of 'mainstream' International Political Economy (IPE), this Handbook demonstrates the considerable value of critical theory to the discipline through a series of cutting-edge studies. The field of IPE has always had an inbuilt vocation within Historical Materialism, with an explicit ambition to make sense, from a critical standpoint, of the capitalist mode of production as a world system of sometimes paradoxically and sometimes smoothly overlapping states and markets. Having spearheaded the growth of a vigorous critical scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s, however, Marxism and neo-Gramscian approaches became increasingly marginalized over the course of the 1980s. The authors respond to the exposure of limits to mainstream contemporary scholarship in the wake of the onset of the Global Financial Crisis, and provide a comprehensive overview of the field of Critical International Political Economy. Problematizing socioeconomic and political structures, and considering these as potentially transitory and subject to change, the contributors aim not simply to understand a world of conflict, but furthermore to uncover the ways in which purportedly objective analyses reflect the interests of those in positions of privilege and power.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Alan Cafruny, Leila Simona Talani and Gonzalo Pozo Martin (eds.)The Palgrave Handbook of Critical International Political EconomyPalgrave Handbooks in IPE10.1057/978-1-137-50018-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Alan W. Cafruny¹

(1)

Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, USA

End Abstract

Critical international political economy (CIPE) refers to a range of intellectual perspectives that challenge the assumptions of “mainstream” international political economy (IPE). Critical IPE can be distinguished from the two dominant mainstream schools of thought—realism and liberalism—on the basis of two related assumptions. First, from an ontological and methodological standpoint critical theorists reject several propositions common to mainstream scholarship: that IPE’s field of enquiry is constituted by real objects and forms of agency which can be treated as objective and separate, rather than historically and socially dynamic, constructed, and mutually constituted; that the principal objective of social science is to identify causal relations and formulate empirically falsifiable predictions about them; and crucially, that empirical research can be separated from normative inquiry. Second, from a normative standpoint mainstream approaches can be considered to be “problem solving” and not “emancipatory” because they take basic socioeconomic and political structures as neutral categories, given and immutable, and the policy recommendations that arise, either implicitly or explicitly, from their analyses remain confined within the context of these structures. Critical theory, by contrast, problematizes socioeconomic and political structures. It considers them potentially transitory and subject to change. As Robert Cox has written, critical theory “does not take institutions and social and power relations for granted but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins and whether they might be in the process of changing” (Cox 1981, p. 129). Hence his famous dictum “theory is always for someone and for some purpose” (Cox 1981, p. 128). From the perspective of CIPE, states and markets, institutions and power relations or individuals and ideas, along with their historical, co-constitutive evolution, are the site or the engine of political contestation. In this tradition the point of any theory is not simply to understand a world of cooperation and conflict, but also to uncover the ways in which purportedly objective analyses reflect the interests of those in positions of privilege and power.

The field of IPE has always been an inbuilt vocation within historical materialism, with its explicit ambition to make sense, from a critical standpoint, of the capitalist mode of production as a world system of sometimes paradoxically and sometimes smoothly overlapping states and markets. Marxist and neo-Gramscian scholarship spearheaded the growth of a vigorous critical scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s alongside the development of the discipline of IPE. During the 1980s, constructivist, post-modernist, and feminist approaches gained popularity as Marxism and neo-Gramscian approaches became increasingly marginalized, especially in the USA. However, as a result of real changes in the world, and beginning with the critique of neoliberal globalization in the late 1990s, the return of imperialism/empire as essential categories of debate after the Bush administration’s war on terror, and more recently with the global financial crisis, the strengths of critical theory are becoming more widely recognizable.

This divide between the orthodox and critical approaches has been broadly equated in Cohen’s intellectual history of IPE with the growing distinction between the so-called “American” and “British” schools of IPE.¹ This characterization sparked a trail of indignant responses, which found their outlet in the special issues of two of the leading journals in IPE: the Review of International Political Economy (RIPE) which focused on the American school of IPE² and a special issue of New Political Economy (NPE) which hosted the reactions from the so-called British school.³ American IPE scholars as Peter Katzenstein, Kate McNamara, Henry Farrell and Marty Finnemore suggested that Cohen might have missed a large part of the American school of IPE by focusing mainly on journal outlets and forgetting other contributions to the debate, particularly books.⁴ Similarly, the members of the British school emphasized how the field of IPE in the UK (and in Europe for that matter), was much more varied than portrayed in Cohen’s characterization.⁵ The question, however, is not so much one of distinguishing between different political scientists’ interpretations of IPE, but between the orthodoxy and CIPE, which is the subject of this book.

Intellectual Background: Rationale for the Handbook

IPE is a very young discipline, at least in its “modern” phase having (re-)emerged during the late 1960s and early 1970s amid the growing turbulence of the collapsing Bretton Woods international monetary order. Prior to this time international relations (IR) and economics had constituted more or less autonomous and self-contained fields of inquiry. Their separation can be traced to intellectual developments in the mid-19th century when the classical conception of a unified “political economy” was replaced by more narrowly defined disciplines of sociology, political science, and neoclassical economics, the latter with its assumption of general equilibrium and emphasis on marginal utility. The nature of the post-World War II settlement served to reinforce this separation of economics and IR. The three-decade long “golden age” of steady growth, full employment, and relatively harmonious international economic relations appeared to validate the distinction between economic relations as “low politics” and Cold War great power rivalry as “high politics”. However, by the late 1960s it had become clear that this distinction made little sense. The inherent politicization of international economic relations was becoming increasingly apparent.

The (re)birth of IPE was marked by what can be seen in retrospect to have been a spirit of intellectual openness and engagement. Three basic paradigms or schools of thought emerged: liberalism and mercantilism corresponded closely to the idealist–realist dichotomy that had long held sway in the study of IR. A third school of thought, Marxism (often misleadingly cast as “structuralism”), completed the trinity. As a review of textbooks and leading journals of the 1970s and early 1980s suggests, Marxism played an important role in establishing the theoretical parameters of the fledgling discipline and provoking vigorous and constructive debates. Prominent realist scholars such as Robert Gilpin (1975), and Stephen Krasner (1978) and liberals such as Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye self-consciously and painstakingly constructed their own theoretical and conceptual models in opposition to the Marxist tradition. For example, Keohane and Nye’s influential Power and Interdependence (1977) acknowledged important disagreements with Marxist scholars while exhorting them “to develop models of international regime change to compete with or complement our own” (p. ix). Their subsequent After Hegemony (1984) was by no means unique in including a sustained, sophisticated discussion of the various strains of thought within the Marxist tradition. The centrality of this tradition to early IPE scholarship was not, perhaps, surprising. Marxism represented a unified political economic approach to social and international relations. It studied the interaction of interests and ideology as well as power and production. It conceptualized global capitalism not in terms of stability and equilibrium, as with the neoclassical tradition, but rather in terms of uneven development, conflict, and crises. And it sought to promote structural change at a time of massive popular mobilization.

Since the early 1980s scholars of critical IPE working within the Marxist and neo-Gramscian traditions have continued to make significant contributions to our understanding of the international political economy. Indeed, as this volume clearly attests, a rich and variegated tradition has continued to develop over the past four decades. Yet, their contributions would not be so readily accessible to students and scholars on the basis of a review of the leading IPE journals and textbooks over the past three decades. Even as other strands of what we have called CIPE—feminism, post-modernism, and constructivism—emerged and, in some respects flourished, during this period Marxist scholarship was for the most part cast out of the mainstream temple. As a result, the field of IPE lost much of the ecumenical character that had marked its founding. IPE scholarship has been impoverished, especially in the USA where critical IPE has been most marginalized. Indeed, this impoverishment has been widely recognized. For example, Benjamin Cohen has concluded that (mainstream) IPE journals have become “boring” reflective of a “distinct loss of ambition”, especially in the USA:

Out are the kind of big ideas and intellectual challenges that characterized the field in its earlier years. Instead, scholars are incentivized to focus on mid-level theory. In contrast to macro theory (or metatheory), mid-level theory eschews interpretive theory or grand visions of history and society. Rather, work tends to concentrate on narrow individual relationships isolated within a broader structure whose characteristics are assumed, normally, to be given and unchanging (Economists would call this partial-equilibrium analysis, in contrast to general-equilibrium analysis). Such work is by no means unimportant; much of it yields useful new insights. But like a steady diet of gruel, it leaves us hungry for more—more variety, more exotic ingredients, more spice (2009).

A comprehensive explanation for this state of affairs would require a more extensive sociology of knowledge of the field of IPE and related developments throughout the social sciences. However, our contention in this volume is that the narrowing of the discipline of IPE was closely connected to the marginalization of critical theory. Such marginalization, we hasten to add, was not a result of the intellectual limitations of the Marxist and critical scholarship. Rather, it was a reflection of a transformed political climate and transitory academic fashion that resulted from the crises of “Fordism” and Keynesian macroeconomic policies, the corresponding collapse of socialism and social democracy, and, above all, the short-lived but extraordinarily consequential, intellectual hegemony of neoliberalism.

Academic Marxism, together with other more recent critical approaches that we include in this volume under the heading of “critical international political economy”, emerged not only because the crisis of the Bretton Woods system had undermined so many of the assumptions of existing mainstream scholarship, but also because it accorded with the broader political zeitgeist of the 1960s. In the USA the anti-imperialist and civil rights movements gradually overcame Cold War restrictions on academic freedom and re-introduced a flourishing radical scholarship to the academy. Similar if less dramatic developments took place in the UK, Europe and beyond. However, the end of the “Golden Age” amid debt crisis and stagflation produced an entirely new situation. Spearheaded by the elections of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 the neoliberal era was dawning. “Globalization”, with its emphasis on open markets, deregulation, and radical individualism, was thought to be inaugurating a new era of international harmony. In the wake of the collapse of socialism in China and Eastern Europe, Francis Fukuyama, the high priest of capitalist “triumphalism”, proclaimed “the end of ideology”. Proponents of the “Washington consensus” in Wall Street, Washington, international organizations, and academia sang the praises of an allegedly seamless global capitalism, even as the draconian “structural adjustment” programs that they demanded were achieved through the application of massive state power. As the International Monetary Fund was tightening its grip over massively indebted states of the global south, rapid growth rates in some developing countries were widely assumed to have refuted claims that north–south relations were characterized by power and dependency. Europe’s neoliberal architects sought to unite the continent under the banner of “competitiveness” and market freedom. It was assumed that formerly socialist countries should have little trouble integrating rapidly into this seamless global web as long as their embrace of the marketplace was sufficiently ardent and unconditional. Central bankers asserted that recessions had been rendered obsolete as a result of globalization and their newfound ability to fine-tune the “goldilocks economy”.

Whilst the currency crises of the late 1990s, the rise of an anti-globalization movement and the overtly imperial turn in American foreign policy opened the first fissures into the theoretical stronghold of mainstream theories, all of this came crashing down in 2008, leaving the fields of economics and IPE in disarray. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to assert that the crash of Lehman Brothers Bank and the subsequent global financial crisis not only exposed the profound “internal contradictions” of neoliberal globalization over the past three decades, but also much of the entire intellectual edifice on which it rested. It is a striking fact that the increasingly narrow confines of mainstream scholarship have had very little to say about the crisis of the Eurozone, the failure of structural adjustment programs to inaugurate economic development, the growth of mass unemployment and inequality, the inability to develop alternatives to austerity, and the rise of new social movements. Scholars working within the tradition of CIPE have been particularly inclined at studying precisely these phenomena. It is indeed debatable, as this handbook will try to demonstrate, that 8 years into the crisis the established body of neoclassical concepts and approaches derived from Liberalism and Realism provide an adequate basis for analysis. In important respects, then, this volume represents something of a restorative effort at the same time as, of course, seeking to point the way forward.

The handbook comprises three parts. In the first part, our authors present the basic elements of each of the main critical perspectives. The second part will show how critical theory can be applied to basic problems and issues in the contemporary IPE. In the third part an attempt is made to study the political economy of different geographical areas from a distinctive critical political economy perspective.

References

Cox, T. (1981). Social forces, states and world orders: Beyond international relations theory. Millennium-Journal of International Studies.

Gilpin, R. (1975). U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation. New York: Basic Books.

Keohane, R., & Nye, J. (1977). Power and Interdependance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Keohane, R., & Nye, J. (1989). After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princetion University Press.

Krasner, Stephen (1928). Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princetion University Press.

Footnotes

1

See Cohen, B., (2008), International Political Economy: An intellectual history, Princeton University Press, p.4; see also Cohen, B., (2007), “The transatlantic divide: why are American and British IPE so different?”, Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 197–219.

2

See Review of International Political Economy (2009) Vol. 16, n...