ABSTRACT
Meta-theoretical issues represent a priority theme for many if not most IPE colleagues. They are the root cause for observations about an ‘Atlantic divide’; they also explain why few IPE scholars have attempted to define what the core of it is.2 But the core is not found at the level of meta-theory, in either rationalist or constructivist theory. To me, that is only the third question in the logical sequence of questions to address when research is designed. It should be answered only after we have first determined: what is the problem? An obvious, common-sense question, but one which is often neglected. Too many skip it and go directly to applying a priori their preferred theory, uncritically and exclusively, no matter which research problem they address and often with consequences such as those described by Blyth in this issue. But research must be problem-driven (see also Katzenstein 2009). The question that then follows is: how do I go about addressing the problem I have identified? Again a simple answer lies in quoting a founding father in political science: our focus is the power/distribution relationship, or ‘Who gets what, when and how?’ (Lasswell 1936)3 Within the ‘family tree’ that is political science and IR no ‘branch’ can answer this question better than IPE – provided we are able to agree on its core. And that is where lack of agreement in the field is most challenging. Gilpin’s perspective of politics and the economy being two interrelated but separate spheres (Gilpin 1987) did not help much, although his most recent textbook did
better in that respect (Gilpin 2001).4 The contributions that in my mind helped most were the ones identified by Cohen as landmarks: Keohane and Nye’s Power and Interdependence (1977), Katzenstein’s edited Power and Plenty and his works on the small open European economies (Katzenstein 1985) and Susan Strange’s work (1970), from her call to integrate IR and economics, repeated in her presidential address to the International Studies Association (ISA) in 1995, to a series of later works, well summarised and commented in the posthumous tribute to her (Lawton, Rosenau and Verdun 2000). The works of these three of Cohen’s Magnificent Seven, although clearly different in some important respects, all helped to develop the analytical core which I define as governance of the creation and distribution of wealth through linking (in different ways) the international systemic, the national state, and the sector and societal levels. They also laid the ground for sound decisions in the third step of the logical design sequence – making the choice between broad analytical perspectives, or whether to combine them. The reason why I got interested in Strange and other British researchers is that I pretty soon discovered that this decision is not as straightforward as my training in realism and structuralism would have it. While I included cognitive factors, including cognitive psychology, early in my own research, I have been rather slow, that is sceptical, to include the newer and varied approaches known as constructivism. I could identify myself, though, with the introduction to the IO anniversary issue on this point (Katzenstein, Keohane and Krasner 1998). A major reason is John Ruggie. My own initial use of cognitive theory was based on the assumption that perceptions are a function of position in the international structure. Open economy politics (OEP) theory (Hveem 1972) makes a somewhat similar assumption about preference formation (Lake 2009). It was only well after I had collaborated with Ruggie that I realised that my view was too structuralist.5 Cohen refers to Ruggie, but could have made him the Magnificent Eight. The relevance of using Polanyi to introduce ‘embedded liberalism’, and of much of his later work on the place of ideas in IPE (Ruggie 1998), are repeatedly illustrated in the dynamics of the real world such as in the turn from Keynes to neoliberal economics, in the opening up of former socialist space to the market economy (that is in initiating globalisation) and in the current return to Keynesianism.
