ABSTRACT
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 it’s 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 Benjamin J. 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. Maliniak and Tierney set out to map statistically what this thing called ‘American IPE’ actually looks like by crunching the US publication data. 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, it’s 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 100 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’?
