Torn Between Two Lovers? Caught in the Middle of British and American IPE.1
Mark Blyth
Department of Political Science,
The Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD 21218
USA
Introduction:
I approach this topic much as a man without a country approaches international
travel; with trepidation. I am a British subject who was educated at Strathclyde
University in the 1980s. I left for the US to do my PhD. in 1991 because I wanted to
study international relations, a field which hardly existed in the UK at that time.2 I have
lived ‘over there’ for nearly two decades. Despite being both an admirer and consumer of
a great deal of the work that British IPE scholars produce, and being Scottish by birth, I
am by training and temperament an American scholar. Little wonder then that I get some
of my best writing done on BA 228/229 half way across the Atlantic.
If identity theory has taught us anything its that the self is always defined against
‘the other,’ and British IPE’s ‘other’ is very much ‘American IPE.’ But despite spending
my working life (to date) in the USA, I am still not sure what this thing called ‘American
IPE’ actually is, and thus, what the British ‘other’ really is. Three scholars that have
recently tried to answer this question are Jerry Cohen (2007/2008), on the one hand, and
Daniel Maliniak and Michael Tierney (2009) on the other. Cohen set himself the project
of writing an intellectual history of IPE as a discipline that has rightly garnered
considerable attention on both sides of the Atlantic (Cohen 2008). Maliniak and Tierney
1
With apologies to Mary MacGregor.
There were a few places doing IR in the UK to be sure, but New York versus Canterbury really isn’t a
contest when you are 23 years old.
2
1
set out to map statistically what this thing called ‘American IPE’ actually looks like by
crunching the US publication data (Maliniak and Tierney 2009). Cohen built a biography
based around key individuals who seized the moment in the 1970s to wrestle the study of
the IPE away from economics towards political science. Maliniak and Tierney tell a story
of the original methodological pluralism of US IPE at the time of Cohen’s founding
giving way to a disciplinary monotheism of quantitative and formal analysis today.
To a certain extent both stories are true. As Cohen puts it, its hard to imagine US
IPE without the likes of Robert Keohane and Peter Katzenstein, but is it fair to reduce all
of British IPE to the presence or absence of Susan Strange (Langley 2009)? Similarly, it
is true that much of US IPE has become extremely quantitative. If, for example, one
attends the annual meeting of the International Political Economy Society (IPES) in the
US as I did recently (more on this below), it really is 75 scholars doing ‘my cross
sectional time series analysis of X.’ Yet is it fair to define US IPE by reference to the
perhaps one hundred scholars who attend the IPES as opposed to the thousands who
attend the International Studies Association (ISA) meetings? To what extent then is there
really such a thing as a homogenous American IPE for the equally homogenous British
IPE to be constructed against? For if American IPE is far more plural than is generally
acknowledged, then to what extent does it make sense to talk about a distinct British
school that is constituted in opposition and that is supposedly ‘more pluralist’?
Bridges over Troubled Waters?
Angus Cameron and Ronen Palan put it beautifully when they describe the
distance between American and British IPE as being “caught between two untenable
2
positions…one (the American) is that data and observation are so unproblematic we can
accept them as real; the other (the un-rigorous British) that data and observation are so
problematic that we must dispense with them altogether” (Cameron and Palan 2009:
123). Truth and beauty are supposed to go together, but being a skeptic I wanted to see to
what extent this was true even if their line was beautiful, and so my American side
wanted data to figure this out. So I poured over a decade of International Studies
Quarterly (ISQ) (1997 Vol 41 (1) to 2008 Vol 52 (3)) and New Political Economy (NPE)
(1997 Vol 2 (1) to 2008 Vol 13 (3)) to figure out what broad categories the research in
each journal fell into.3 Simply at the level of descriptive statistics, I wanted a data-picture
of both of these so-called schools.
Doing this for ISQ was a breeze (mainly because they provide abstracts while
NPE does not.) Breaking it down by theoretical persuasion, of 372 articles published in
ISQ over this period, 31 percent were identifiable as ‘liberal approaches,’ 17 percent
were ‘realist,’ 9 percent were ‘mixed,’ with the rest, some 27 percent, being scattered
across the categories of constructivism, feminism, post-structuralism and neo-Marxism,
which hardly suggests a disciplinary monotheism.4 The data on methodological
orientation is equally surprising. Of the same 372 articles 30 percent were identifiable as
quantitative in their orientation, 30 percent were qualitative, 24 percent were mixed
methods, and the rest, some 16 percent, were not categorizable. In terms of country of
origin 75 percent of the authors came from the US. Given this, it seems there is further
3
I chose International Studies Quarterly (ISQ) over International Organization (IO) because doing IO as
representative of all American IPE would have been, in a sense, too easy a target. The recent editorial
boards of IO have exhibited a penchant for the formal and the quantitative to the exclusion of other work
(by no means totally). However, that does not mean that there is no other American work. So I chose ISQ, a
more general journal that takes an interest in IPE issues.
4
Some 16 percent had no obvious theoretical proclivity. All numbers are rounded up.
3
diversity within the supposed homology. When one delves deeper into the data however
the story gets even more interesting.
When faced with hundreds of discrete objects the natural temptation is to try and
sort them into categories.5 When one does this with ISQ the categories that emerge from
the articles are:
International Studies
Quarterly
Categories
IR Theory
Security
Foreign Policy
Trade
Finance
Theory (general)
Proportion
27 percent
15 percent
6 percent
6 percent
5 percent
5 percent
What this points to is something telling that has already been commented upon by
Cohen (2008) and Clift and Rosamond (2009) but is worth repeating. In the US, IPE
exists as part of a field called International Relations, once famously described by Stanley
Hoffman (1987) as ‘an American Social Science.’ When you learn IPE in the US that
learning takes place within departments of Political Science, and the authors of IPE
dissertations are usually trained by international relations scholars. Given this, it is not
really surprising then that the biggest single category that emerges from the ISQ sample is
‘questions directly related to existing debates in IR theory,’ while the second is ‘security
studies,’ the twin cores of US International Relations theory. Given this, while US IPE
seems to appear more diverse than is often noticed, especially by methods, it also belongs
within and is restricted to political science, particularly its IR subfield.
5
Any category scoring less than five percent has been left off along with those that defy categorization (36
percent of the total).
4
Doing the same for New Political Economy is much more problematic for one
simple reason: NPE doesn’t do abstracts and I don’t have time to really read 353 articles.
However, repeating the categorization for NPE as best I could yields radically different
results.6
New Political Economy
Categories
Capitalism
Development
Globalization
Theory (general)
Finance
Proportion
17 percent
17 percent
14 percent
12 percent
9 percent
New Political Economy gives us a rather different picture of what IPE is.
Practically none of the contributions to NPE speak to what might be termed core issues of
IR theory as defined by the US literature and existing debates therein. Nods to ‘liberalism
and realism’ are conspicuous by their absence. Instead, they cluster around three topic
areas; the evolution of advanced capitalist states, the (lack of) development of the rest of
the world, and globalization. When NPE publishes theory it is general, not specific, and is
far more likely to be about Deluze than De Mesquita. Unfortunately, I was not able to get
systematic data on author’s country of origin and methods in time for this essay, but
eyeballing the data strongly suggests a strong majority of UK based authors and very
few, almost no, quantitative contributions. So what can we take from this?
The lack of a link to International Relations theory among the articles is telling.
Indeed, many of NPE’s articles would sit well in development studies journals or what
6
Again, any category scoring less than 5 percent has been eliminated.
5
US scholars would consider ‘comparative politics’ journals such as Comparative
Political Studies. Moreover, given how scholars from multiple disciplines contribute to
British IPE (the contributions of the Geography department at Durham University spring
to mind immediately here) the comparison to an American ‘other’ that is self-consciously
part of a defined field called IR, which exists inside a further defined field called political
science, couldn’t be more stark. They are just not the same things. So can they, and
should they, be compared?7
Although I agree in principle with both Cohen and Maliniak and Tierney that
there is a distinct American school and a distinct British school, I am beginning to doubt
that we really can presume a divide between the two. For to be so divided presupposes a
potential unity; that they are two parts of the same whole that were somehow separated.
Reinforcing this image Cohen and his interlocutors often use the metaphor of a
transatlantic divide and the need for a bridge between them (Cohen 2008, Higgot and
Watson 2008, Cerny 2009), but looking at these two journals I wonder if a bridge can, or
indeed should be built between such radically different things? To put it bluntly, when
faced with two similar geographies separated by a river building a bridge makes sense,
but to build one between a river bank and a cliff edge seems less compelling.
Be Careful What You Ask For…
What pushes me further in this direction, away from data (my American side?)
and towards practice (my British side?), are three recent professional experiences; editing
The Routledge Handbook of IPE (Blyth 2009), being a discussant at the Philadelphia
7
A similar point is made in Nicola Phillips in Phillips (2009: 89-91).
6
meeting of the International Political Economy Society (IPES) in November 2008, and
performing the same role at the meeting of the European Critical Political Economy
(ECPE) Group at Oxford Brookes two months earlier in September 2008. The first
experience makes me see these two bodies of scholarship as different but complimentary,
that we can and should recognize both of these things as IPE while acknowledging their
different roots. The second and third experiences make me doubt that desire can be
realized.
Turning first to the experience of editing The Handbook, back in 2006 I asked
four Americans and four British scholars (out of 16 global contributions) to write about
what IPE looks like from their place in the world, based upon the not unreasonable
assumption that where one sits in the world may shape how you think about it. When I
asked the Americans to do this (and I fully admit that I led them in this direction) three of
them responded with pieces that detailed a particular perspective that had its roots in US
IR theory (Realism, Rationalism, and Constructivism) while the other one did an
overview of the field that took all three positions into account.
In contrast, when I asked the British scholars to do the same (and I also admit
leading them too) I received a genealogy of the field, a critique of the notion of
empiricism, a discussion of power-knowledge, and a theory of globalization. Let me
stress here that all these contributions were excellent in their own right, but what is
perhaps most interesting is how the results pretty much mirror the findings of the brief
survey of the two journals. None of the British contributions had anything to do with ‘IR
theory’ while none of the US contributions thought of IPE in terms other than it. Why
was this?
7
Clift and Rosamond (2009) address this issue in their contribution to The
Handbook of IPE. For Clift and Rosamond three things set British IPE apart from the
American vintage. First, British IPE has a far longer lineage than can be ascribed to
Susan Strange and the economic dislocations of the early 1970s (pace Cohen 2008).
Second, as argued here, there never has been a ‘parent discipline’ for British IPE; it has
always been a multi-disciplinary exercise. Third, Marxist approaches have a long
pedigree in UK scholarship that has allowed the development of understandings of the
IPE far removed from the realist-liberal duopoly of the American school. Add to this the
long tradition of scholarship dealing with the political economy of British Imperialism,
the post-war literature on decolonization and the global role of Sterling, and the
enormous literature on the UK’s (relative) economic decline, and the very nature and
generation of British IPE stands quite apart from this supposedly similar thing that the
Americans call IPE.
In short, lacking the concerns that animated American scholarship from within
political science, British IPE has become more historically focused and more open to a
variety of disciplines than its American counterpart. This different lineage enables British
scholarship to, as Cohen noted, to “take on the big questions, especially the normative
questions, lurking behind the ostensibly positivist ones” (Cohen 2007: 207-216). I
consider this to be British IPE’s core strength. After all, if the IPE is (as I think it is) a
complex open entropic adaptive system with disequilibrium dynamics and non-linear
feedbacks (that is, things are more random than you think and the world is not
programmable to a theory of history) then you might as well be sometimes right about the
big questions rather than precisely right about the minutiae that may be wrong next week
8
anyway.8 So maybe I am a Brit after all? Maybe… But there is another side to both
schools of IPE that puts the supposed ‘hard-core’ of the American school into relief into a
very different (and to my mind) more positive light. That is, its not just the Yanks that
are, in some cases, monotheists.
The Dilemmas of Discussants – A Cautionary Tale
In November 2008 I was a conference discussant at the annual meeting of the
International Political Economy Society (IPES) in Philadelphia. As noted above, it really
is seventy-five back-to-back power-point presentations of CSTS, hierarchical linear
models, and GARCH techniques; its quant heaven. Being a more historically-inclined
political economist, when I took the podium for my commentary on all this, I suspected
that many people in the room thought of me as a dodgy-relativist-journalist with no
standards who opposed their ‘science.’ And while there were no doubt some of those
folks around, I found many of these supposed monolithic thinkers to have a very
pragmatic understanding of their work. For example, if you want to figure out why
private pensions diffuse across the world you might want to think about the interaction of
GDP, welfare coverage, debt, and dependence on capital flows, and if you do, you will
come up with some surprising results (Brooks 2008). Similarly, if you are interested in
shifts in global inequality, try doing that without resort to statistics. In short, beneath the
hegemonic technique I found a lot of genuine intellectual curiosity about the way the
world works. There were definitely unanswered questions out there, and using statistics
and models was one way of finding those answers.
8
If you want an example of this, think about the huge literature on ‘independent’ central banks and how
important they are for stability. Not looking too independent at the moment now are they?
9
Two months earlier I was a discussant at the European Critical Political Economy
(ECPE) Group at Oxford Brookes. Although this group contains more than just British
scholars, it was definitely a British IPE experience. After two days there, rather than
being seen as a dodgy-relativist-journalist devoid of standards, I felt typecast in the role
of dangerous neo-liberal American apologist. At this meeting, rather than unanswered
questions, what I found here was a set of unquestioned answers. Those answers were;
historical materialism, neoliberalism, hegemony, Gramsci, historical blocs, social forces,
and resistance. Regardless of the question, these were the answers, and there were by
definition, the right answers. That these concepts may provide us with good answers
some of the time is not in doubt. That they always provide the right answers by virtue of
being the only admissible possible answers is beyond dubious.
This was truly eye opening. Far from the celebrated pluralism and openness that
non-American (qua British) scholarship is supposed to produce, I encountered a
disciplinary monotheism that would make the US quants blush. There was no other
admissible perspective, and not at the level of methods, but at the more fundamental level
of ontology. To be critical was to be Marxist. To be not Marxist, as I found out, was to be
uncritical, and therefore, wrong, bad, against the ‘global south,’ for ‘American
imperialism,’ and all the rest.
Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, the Americans looked not just more pluralistic,
but more intellectually open than their ‘critical’ other. In the American world of IPE there
might be surprises (if the data showed it). In this ‘critical’ world there were no surprises
since all questions were already answered; the trick was to simply find the evidence to
10
back it up.9 In quantitative circles this is known as curve-fitting and is seen as
illegitimate.10 Here it was what IPE scholars should do to ‘uncover’ the (rather-obviousgiven-the-right-theory) reality of the IPE.
This is not to say that ‘all’ British IPE succumbs to such authoritarian tendencies
and that all American quants are misunderstood pluralists. Rather, the point of these
anecdotes is to stress the difficulty of drawing boundaries around real disciplinary
communities. The British school can be open and plural or closed and monotheistic
depending on which part of it you encounter. The same is true for the Americans. Are
there tendencies, styles, elective affinities and the like that enable us to talk about distinct
schools? Certainly there are. But the danger surely lies, as Higgot and Watson (2008)
have pointed out, in taking the (self)-representation as real. If we do we risk driving
scholarship ever further apart.
Conclusions: Burning Bridges When We Come To Them?
Reflecting on both of these experiences, and on the worlds created by ISQ and
NPE discussed above has left me more confused than ever about the British school and
its American other. Yes they exist, yes their attributes can be listed, but the devil is in the
details. I have learned that American IPE has no monopoly on intellectual narrowness
and claims to ‘the truth,’ while the idea that British IPE is more open and pluralistic
depends very much upon the particular British IPE one encounters. So what then are we
left with?
9
Geoffrey Underhill, in this issue, seems to have had a very similar experience at BISA. Cameron and
Palan (2009) report a similar story.
10
When I pointed this out at the conference I was told that such criticisms (curve fitting, data mining,
confirmation bias etc.) are wide of the mark since this work is ‘post-positivist.’
11
Personally, I think that the biggest problem facing American IPE is redundancy,
not methodological sterility nor the lack of ‘critical’ analysis. If American IPE’s
contribution is econometrics, then there are some people out there already called
economists who can already do this really well. If all American IPE is doing is sticking a
‘beta’ called ‘politics’ in the model, then its not much of a value added. I don’t worry
about American IPE’s pluralism. The fact that I get published over there tells me its not
as closed as British scholars sometimes see it. I worry about its identity and long term
viability; especially since its intellectual muse - neoclassical economics – is hardly
distinguishing itself in this moment of crisis (Wade 2009).
As for British IPE, I worry about its politics getting in the way of its analysis. The
commitment to uncovering the politics, questioning the ethics, exposing the hypocrisy,
celebrating the resistance is fine and good, but does it always have to be in the paper? Do
my personal politics actually have a bearing on the credit default swap market? Is there
always a ‘hidden hand of hegemony’ story in every outcome in the IPE? This is not some
plea for an untenable ‘value-free’ social science, but a plea to remember what Arthur
Okun (reportedly) once said to Milton Friedman, ‘Milton, with you everything is money.
Money causes this, money does that, money matters, money is everything. To me
everything is sex and sex is everything, its just that I leave it out of the paper.’
Over the past 15 years I have learned much from British IPE. John Hobson has
made it impossible for me to think about European economic development in the same
way again, Colin Hay has inexorably altered the way I think about globalization and the
state, Matt Watson has made me think twice about almost everything…I could go on and
on. But I also learn a lot from American IPE, from the quants as well as the
12
constructivists. I close with an example of this.
There have been two recent outstanding books on the politics of pension reform.
Paul Langley’s very British school The Everyday Life of Global Finance (2008) and
Sarah Brookes very American school Social Protection and the Market in Latin America
(2008). The former is poststructuralist actor-network theory, the latter is quantitative and
formal. But both are also deeply historical and are asking similar questions. When read
together Langley’s book adds much to the account of ‘selling’ private pensions that
Brooks makes part of her argument. Likewise, Brooks discussion of global capital flows,
coverage, replacement rates, and the like are surely of relevance to a project such as
Langley’s. Building bridges works at the level that there can be productive engagement.
Some scholars are up for this; those who have the courage to say “I don’t know” and go
off and read someone different who might help them out. But for those on either side of
the Atlantic who have no unanswered questions, only unquestioned answers, there are
only bridges to be burned, not built.
13
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