ABSTRACT
In their contributions to this volume, Benjamin Cohen and Robert Keohane in particular have offered some masterful and compelling suggestions as to productive future directions for International Political Economy (IPE) research. Given the unlikelihood of being able to improve on these agendas, the much more modest contribution offered in this chapter is to pose a paradox, and provide some rough benchmarks against which future progress towards the seemingly shared aim of bridge-building and greater dialogue between the American and British schools of IPE might be judged. Nearly every contributor has endorsed Cohen’s (2008) call for greater dialogue, respect for diversity and bridgebuilding between different intellectual communities (albeit with some strong reservations in some cases). Thus as the standard-bearer for the American liberal school, David Lake notes in his contribution that explanations which synthesize elements of both traditions ‘are undoubtedly more insightful and complete than either alone’. At the other end of the spectrum, although Robert Cox sees the preferred arrangement more in terms of complementary strengths, the shared desire for a more co-operative relationship is clear. And there are indeed some modest, positive signs of enhanced engagement between the two schools, beyond that represented by the exchange contained in this volume. The mystery or paradox, however, is that if everyone is so much in favour of exchange, cross-fertilization, tolerance of diversity and so on, why do we have the sort of problems of intellectual isolationism and uninformed mutual disdain that most contributors identify? Given the combined intellectual and institutional heft of the contributors to the volume, the near-consensus in favour of exchange should have prevented the very problem that motivated Cohen to write his very insightful book in the first place (a point echoed by Kathleen McNamara). How can we explain this situation? The notion of mantras included in Peter Katzenstein’s incisive and good-humoured chapter provides one answer, while another (possibly complementary) factor might be the influence of structures of power within the discipline acting to entrench and widen the transatlantic scholarly divide. In either case, the repeated public protestations of the desire to bridge the gap between American and British-school IPE scholars might not amount to much. This chapter is not so much an exercise in predicting whether the gap will widen or close in future years, but more an attempt to identify some relevant
current trends, and to suggest a couple of rough-and-ready benchmarks against which progress in narrowing any transatlantic divide might be gauged. First, however, it is necessary to briefly situate this contribution. To follow Ronen Palan’s lead, Cohen’s characterization of the field as roughly divided into American and British camps seems very convincing. No doubt critics are correct when they point out exceptions, simplifications and omissions. But Cohen’s careful prior disclaimers to this effect mean that they are largely kicking against an open door. Alternative ways of drawing the divide either seem to have empirical problems (the ‘Harvard school’), or depend on idiosyncratic neologisms (‘Open Economy Politics’). Any effort to capture the field in one volume will of course be incomplete and open to challenge. But it is difficult to imagine a more sensitive, even-handed or generous treatment than it receives in Cohen’s book. The impression that there is something more to the division than just intellectual artifice is further bolstered by the data collected by the TRIP project, reported by Daniel Maliniak and Michael Tierney. By 2006 this provided powerful testimony that the commanding heights of the discipline (or sub-discipline, depending on one’s taste) in the United States had seen a rapid and dramatic homogenization around a shared research programme of rationalism and quantitative or related formal methods. The contributors to the original issues did not have access to the 2008 ten-country TRIP survey released in February 2009. This brief chapter does not have space to do justice to its intriguing findings, but in important instances the results reinforce the notion that there is something to the divide. The divide seems to extend far beyond the geographical confines of the Atlantic. With interesting exceptions (Israel and Hong Kong), International Relations (IR) scholars in the United States are far more positivist and quantitative than those in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia (the last-mentioned being more British school than the British themselves on this and other measures) (TRIP 2009: 38). Those of the British-school persuasion might be quick to respond that extrapolating from a survey of IR scholars to draw conclusions about IPE is to commit the typically American mistake of assuming that the latter is a subset of the former – a point made by Nicola Phillips in her contribution. But although an outsider is not really qualified to judge, Chris Brown’s critique of IR theory as ‘the new black’ in the United Kingdom (Brown 2006) does seem to echo many of the themes raised by contributors to Part II of this volume, and most of the British IPE contributors do seem to hail from what are recognizably politics or IR departments.
