The Global Political Economy

Abstract

Throughout this book, I have suggested that an exclusive focus on states and their power and security was inadequate for a comprehensive theory of international relations. To define the subject as concerned with just these is to be unduly restrictive. Clearly international interactions involve far more than this. Further, it is far from clear that even if the centre of our interest is the state and military security, they can be understood purely in their own terms without bringing in other factors. Of course, it has always been understood that the underlying power of a state depended on a strong economy and that relative power could change as different countries’ economies developed at different rates. However, this was regarded as a background factor to be analysed in other terms, namely those of the economic system, and fed in to the international system from the outside. This narrow view is now open to doubt. The economic system is believed to be much more intertwined with the political and international system than was earlier thought. They are more appropriately thought of as a single system. However, the aim of this chapter is not just to provide an elaboration of realism. It is to consider the global political economy as a feature of international relations in its own right, which is an important feature of global interactions.