The Politics of Economic Management in the 1990s

Abstract

It is commonly argued that the central, and indeed the defining, question of the discipline of international political economy, concerns the nature of the relationship between political authority and market power (or in less sophisticated parlance, states and markets) (Gilpin, 1987, pp. 8–11; Underhill, 1994, pp. 17–44). In fact, Susan Strange goes so far as to argue that the study of ‘the close relation of political power and the ways market economies function is the essence of Polanyi’s claim— and of Schumpeter’s— to be fathers of modern International Political Economy’ (Strange, S., 1997b, pp. 242–3). Given the popularity of this view it may seem somewhat peculiar to argue that the ‘political’ needs to be put back into international political economy. However, a close inspection of most international political economy (IPE) literature reveals the absence of politics in at least two respects. First, in a rush to avoid the charge of conflating politics with government, much contemporary ‘heterodox’ international political economy with its focus on social movements, single issue campaigns, fractured identities and policy communities, fails to conceptualize the role of the modern state in capitalist reproduction. It is argued, by Foucauldian sleight of hand, that power is everywhere, exercised from innumerable points, and thus a detailed painstaking study of central government with its internal hierarchies and politics of policymaking is obsolete.