ABSTRACT
Introduction Given the divisions and stratifications characteristic of international politics, and the diversity of histories, cultures, levels of development and strategic objectives among states, it is curious that economic policies, both domestic and international, have settled uniformly on a commitment to growth. I introduced in Chapter 1 a neo-Gramscian approach to understanding this puzzle; it will be the purpose of the present chapter to incorporate alternative perspectives, drawn from traditional approaches to IR, into the explanatory matrix. Though none is as sensitive to socio-cultural background conditions, or to the ethos and tensions that animate those conditions, three such perspectives offer important contributions to understanding the ubiquity of the growth paradigm. These perspectives can be usefully categorized according to ‘levels of analysis’, by which the relative importance of causal factors at different levels of aggregation can be assessed.1 In IR these levels are typically identified as systemic, state and individual. Each yields a unique set of plausible explanations for the commitment to growth, and each set in turn reflects a particular type of explanatory mode. Specifically, systemic factors are structural in nature, constraining or enabling state behaviour in a top-down fashion; state-level factors tend to be of a functional type, that is, they reflect policy decisions purposely taken to serve particular needs; and individual-level factors are either genetic or socio-psychological in origin, bringing bottom-up pressure to bear on policymaking. Using this approach one may then hypothesize, for example, that free market capitalism is the systemic force that drives growth; or that domestic pressures for a continuously improving standard of living push state policy toward economic growth; or that the penchant for growth is more deeply engrained in the human psyche, a psychological, even genetic, predisposition made manifest in political decision-making. I discuss these possibilities in the following sections.
