The following is the introduction to the forthcoming series of definitional pieces to be published in the Review of International Political Economy, first issue out April 1994. The Editorial team have written FORUM FOR HETERODOX INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY to set the framework for the series. THE NATURE OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY Within the field of International Relations (IR), the term International Political Economy (IPE) has a distinctive meaning. It is one connected with the inseparability of economics from politics as well as with the salience of the international as a sphere of activity over and above the national. Outside of the field, however, the meaning of the term is less precise, and one which has probably something to do with the application of political economy as an analytical tradition to international problems of whatever kind. Without a clear definition of the subject area, the task of specifying the identity of the journal becomes problematic. The approach we have decided to adopt is an iterative one. We will present a number of invited statements from within and without IR on the nature of IPE. The purpose is to stimulate debate: contributions are invited from readers. We begin the process of ÔconstructingÕ the identity of IPE, and therefore also that of the journal, with a statement from the editors on their motives and aspirations in launching the first journal in International Political Economy. FORUM FOR HETERODOX INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY Once divisions of knowledge are institutionalized they become notoriously difficult to change. Most social scientists find themselves located in university departments that have labels reflecting views of the world long since discarded. Hence active researchers are lumped together with colleagues with whom they may share few interests while being separated from potential co-workers in other departments. This university constraint is often extrapolated to larger scales in traditional disciplinary conferences where most sessions are of little relevance to most participants. But social science research has never been completely caged by these departmental and disciplinary prisons. As new research foci have arisen like-minded people from across disciplines have been able to set up `invisible colleges' straddling the world, where ideas are tossed around through new conferences and seminars and, above all, through new communications. With the emergence of electronic mail, invisible colleges look set fair to finally outgrow their stultifying physical nemeses in the future. IPE is one result of this academic breakdown. As it struggles to break free from the constraints of the last century's intellectual boundaries IPE remains as yet a very imperfect invisible college. As far as we are aware there are no university departments of International Political Economy but there is certainly an emerging invisible college in this field. In fact IPEs are being developed separately in different academic contexts in different parts of the world only partially aware of each other's existence. Although the boundaries of IPE are very fuzzy, we think the core of this field is coming more and more into focus. RIPE's raison d'etre is to bring together these exciting new attempts to understand contemporary social change by facilitating dialogue and debate across existing academic divides. This will be our contribution to nurturing a new IPE. The implications of this are that, in traditional terms, the journal will inevitably be `multidisciplinary' in scope and `interdisciplinary' in spirit. The purpose of this essay is to describe the academic niche we claim for this journal and in the process to justify its launch in a world oversupplied with academic journals. We develop two inter-related themes. First we recognize that we are living in an age of extraordinary social change in all realms of human activity. One crucial common denominator of this social turmoil has been the process of Ôglobalization.Õ Second there has been a crisis of the social science disciplines in their treatment of this massive social change. In field after field, orthodox frameworks have been exposed as unsuitable vehicles through which to understand globalization. We are cognizant of the extent to which we are a product of our times. We are only beginning to realize the extent to which the Cold War intertwined with the orthodoxies. What we have witnessed in recent years, and not just in eastern Europe, has seriously shaken the orthodoxies thus providing a window of opportunity to bring together analyses of former opposed positions. By this we do not mean a superficial eclecticism but rather genuine exploration of the possibilities of epistemological convergencies as we grapple with rapid social changes from different starting points. The essay is divided into two main sections. We begin by rehearsing the globalization thesis to provide the broad context in which our intellectual project is set. We then provide some short disciplinary histories of different routes in trying to come to terms with globalization, in order to make the case for the rise of heterodox epistemological converges which could take IPE in new directions. A CHANGING WORLD: GLOBALIZATION The globalization thesis states that there has been a qualitative change in the nature of social activities in the very recent past. Linkages across different regions of the globe are by no means unique to our contemporary world but the existing intensity of such linkages is. Trading links straddled the globe by the sixteenth century and late nineteenth century imperialism ensured all the world lay in the orbit of Europeans. But imperialism turned out not to be the highest stage of capitalism and after two world wars in our century global linkages have expanded exponentially. A reform of political institutions in 1945 produced a United Nations system that ushered in decolonisation. It was the collapse of the financial arm of this system, the Bretton Woods Agreement, in 1971 that coincided with an economic explosion in globalization. The creation of a global economic order has come to represent the defining feature of our age, as a major force shaping economies and livelihoods in all areas of the world. Globalization, of course, has many aspects, and these are not fixed, but six aspects can perhaps be counted as the most important in terms of their influence on the world economy. The first of these is the emergence of a truly global financial market created by the growth of the Euro currency markets and stimulated by the de-regulation of the 1980s. At the simplest level this has meant that national authorities are losing power of their `domestic' financial sectors as the global financial market subsumes domestic markets. At a deeper level, it represents the increasing centrality of the financial structure in the economy, and the resulting increase in the power of finance over production. The financial sector today exercises a structural power in the economy which spans the world. The second is the transnationalisation of technology coupled with an enormous increase in the rapidity of redundancy of given technologies. The increasing reliance on technological innovation has given an increasing importance to what Susan Strange has called the `knowledge structure'. Thus, knowledge, like finance, contributes a new force in the economy, straddling across the globe as a result of distance shrinking technologies. However, it is also sufficiently unevenly distributed to bring prosperity to only those places which can claim to be the generators of knowledge. Third, there is a sense that we have now reached a point at which many corporations have no choice but to `go global' very early on in their careers. The way in which they are choosing to do so may vary. There are no standard formulas. Some have developed tightly controlled global hierarchies, while others have chosen to rely on more decentred and more decentralised networks of intra-corporate and inter-corporate alliances. However, the end result is that national measures of concentration and market share have become less meaningful as corporations manoeuvre in global markets, with obvious consequences for the balance of economic power both within and across national boundaries. Fourth, and a parallel development to the globalisation of production, knowledge and finance, is the rise of transnational economic diplomacy and the globalisation of state power. There is clearly a sense in which we have entered a new era where governments and firms bargain with themselves and one another on the world stage. It may indeed be the case that hitherto prevalent systems of international stabilisation and rule formation based upon the unchallenged might of states is being profoundly modified. We are in the midst of great global institutional and regulatory uncertainty, one which poses new challenges to the idea of the nation state as the key institution in economic life. Fifth, and related to the intensification of global communications and international migration, is the rise of global cultural flows and `deterritorial' signs, meanings and identities. This is not a process of cultural homogenization in the hands of readily identifiable global or national cultural hegemons (e.g. the mass media, ÔAmericanismÕ) but the fusion of different master narratives (eg. consumerism, enlightenment concepts such as universal rights and citizenship) with local vernaculars (e.g separatism, folklorism, local sacred beliefs). The emerging `global' culture is a heterogeneous phenomenon - a juxtaposition of sameness and difference, of the `real' and the `imagined', in variegated local settings. Finally, the result of the processes described above, is the rise of new global geographies. For most observers, processes of globalization represent border-less geographies with quite different breaks and boundaries from those in the past. Some see the global economy as a space of flows of commodities, currencies and signs of all sorts across local and national frontiers. Some see it as a centralisation of power and control in a small number of global cities exercising structural power over hinterlands across several countries through their command over finance, knowledge and governance bodies. Others see globalisation as a string of localised production districts spread across the world and increasingly connected with each other. Whatever the view, it is clear that the identity of cities, regions and nations has become more a matter of global interconnections than of internal linkages. EXIT ORTHODOX, ENTER HETERODOX The rise of new patterns of globalization is one factor which has generated a crisis in the social sciences because established orthodoxies within the various disciplines were left wanting in the face of such massive change. In particular as creatures of the nation state the social sciences were especially ill-equipped to make sense of trans-state processes. But they tried. In this section we chart the confrontation between orthodox social science theory and a changing global reality. We make no claim to be comprehensive but we choose what we believe to be three crucial areas of social analysis out of which a new IPE can be discerned. As we might expect given its focus, the field of International Relations (IR) has been a centre for the development of IPE. In fact this is the only discipline where an International Political Economy has developed as a recognised sub-discipline. This is the first story we tell. But IPE out of IR is still too narrow a perspective to properly capture globalization. From a rather different direction institutional economists of various persuasions have rejected their neo-classical heritage to develop a broader conceptualization of the economy in a second intellectual assault on globalization. Thirdly we look at those researchers grouped loosely under the banner of development or area studies who pioneered global analysis of `uneven development' but were nonetheless caught off-guard by the effects of contemporary globalization . In each case we find an intellectual time lag as scholars initially treat the study of the global as an extension of their orthodoxies before some realize the intellectual revolution globalization demands if it is to be comprehended. (i) International Political Economy in International Relations World War II marked a watershed in the evolution of International Relations theory, typified by the rise of an old theory, renamed `realism', to an unchallenged and dominant orthodoxy. This theory, which, like all theories, embodied a set of assumptions, conjectures and hypotheses, portrayed itself as the opposite: authentic, genuine, objective. Realism was supposed to be above all else a `realistic' depiction of the motives of the actors in international affairs. It produced a research agenda which narrowly focused on the state as the prime actor in international affairs. The result was IR as a field of study all encompassing in its depiction of international affairs. An orthodoxy was created in which international politics was dominated by one fundamental reality, the state. As the sovereign power recognizing no authority beyond its own, the state was represented as dominating all politics. The principle objective of the state was viewed simply as the aggrandizement of its own power. Since this principle governed international politics, states were to be strong and prepared for action. International politics therefore was seen as an anarchic system dominated by the struggle for power among states. In the original realist framework, culture or ideology were deemed positively unimportant. Even economics did not feature. Culture or ideology were deemed positively unimportant. Later, however, the economy, taken as a `national' production system and as a national economic power-base, became incorporated, to produce an initial IPE. In the 1970s IPE developed to view international relations as the affairs of states alone, but it broadened the concept of national interest to include production, trade and investment. In one rather limiting but popular interpretation, International Political Economy was viewed as the study of trade disputes, economic competition, economic foreign policy and international economic agreements between independent national states. Although the realist framework was internally consistent, it was an essentially static and ahistorical theory, placing actors and the environment in unchanging and eternal relationships. It proved to be unable to come to grips with a world undergoing rapid change. Early theoretical challenges to realism offered very selective interpretations of the causes of dynamic change. For example, the school of interdependence, identified technology as an external force which was altering the character of international politics. The concept of interdependence implicitly introduced into IR the idea of history: the sense of profound and irreversible change, and of the dialectical relationship between the international and the national. But it did so through the contestable proposition that states are increasingly becoming more inter-dependent, which suggested a nostalgic hankering for a time when they were presumably `independent'. The realist response concentrated on the latter, never dealing with the problem of profound change in the international system. But the debate died out. By the 1980s, the liberalization of capital, commodity, and service-sectors transactions, brought home the potency of market forces -- the economy at last had to be given its due. In a subsequent formula Robert Gilpin suggested that `economics' could not be subsumed any longer within an overarching political framework; on the contrary, the international environment had to be seen as the coming together of two systems of opportunities and constraints - a still realist state system, and the market. The Ôstate and marketsÕ approach however had its limitations. It told the story essentially in fragments. Furthermore, it lacked a sufficient concept of historical change. Contrary to its assumptions, states play a critical role in constructing markets and market values. The complex relations connecting, determining, but also separating, societal evolution, international regulation, technological change, political calculations and economic outcomes, were weakly represented from all initial IPE approaches. But how should such complexity be analyzed properly? This question led, perhaps inevitably to a growing interest in Marxism. With it came the recognition for a need to develop a more holistic and total world-view, one which accepted the force of structured relationships, pervading hegemonic practices and group interests, but one which could also deal with the uncertainties of history and social struggle. These ideas began to be discussed seriously in International Political Economy in the 1980s. A 'structural', rather than 'agency-based' account emerged to find favour interpreting globalization in terms of the logical unfolding of the long term tendency towards concentration and centralisation of capital , as a means of avoiding structural crisis, or as a basis for establishing a new set of principles for a new long wave of capital accumulation. Countering any implicit teleology or economism within this account, there also developed the Gramscian approach which identified the rise and salience of transnational ideologies (e.g. neo-liberalism) or transnational class alliances, in cementing or legitimizing particular dominant economic projects. Out of the heterodoxies, Murphy and Tooze identify the emergence of a Ônew IPEÕ. This aspires to place IPE on a broader theoretical basis in three ways. First, the inevitable subjectivity of the social sciences is admitted. Second, a variety of social and historical modes of explanation is encouraged. Third, the old categories of Marxism and Liberalism are transcended; IPE is seen in its own historical specificity: contemporary globalization. In short, the route to understanding globalization in IPE out of IR has led to basic epistemological questioning of our activities as researchers. The new ÔIPEÕ is not alone in reaching this position. (ii) A More Creative Economics In the early years after 1945 economics was dominated by a Keynesian orthodoxy whose purpose was to aid in the economic management of nation-states. The focus was on the `national economy' and the international dimension was treated rather as an appendix dealing with trade between national economies. In Paul Samuelson's classic textbook, for instance, "International Trade and Finance" appears as Part 5 constituting just four chapters out of 38. The replacement of this Keynesian paradigm by monetarism in the 1970s did not really change the situation. The national economy remained the focus of concern albeit with very different policy prescriptions. For both Keynesians and monetarists, both of whom drew selectively on neo-classical economics, it was slow to dawn that Ôcapitalism in one countryÕ was as difficult to achieve as Ôsocialism in one countryÕ. Quite simply the emerging global economy escaped from the orthodox conceptualization of the international economy. In the neo-classical orthodoxy, the international economy exists predominantly as an arena of exchange, as a more or less perfectly competitive market governed by transactions between rational, information-rich and knowledge-rich national communities of individual entrepreneurs. This concept, however, does not fit easily with the reality of the international economy as, for example, a global business system owned or controlled by transnational corporations - economic agents who derive oligopolistic or monopolistic profits; who represent a vivid institutionalisation of large sections of the economy; who have the power to influence decisions taken by other institutions (especially the state) as well as the ability to shape markets; who are governed by habit following and satisfying (rather than profit-maximising) behaviour; and who now represent an increasingly global production system within which transactions rarely resemble pure market transactions. In the 1970s this recognition of the international economy as a globally inter-connected system of production and exchange driven by agents with systemic or 'structural' power, was paralleled , inevitably, by a search for theoretical alternatives in economics. An eclectic, broad, and often incompatible, heterodoxy of positions emerged, seeking to explore and make sense of the global realities of today. One heterodoxy, close to the margins of the orthodoxy, is the theory of international production, which like the transactions cost approach associated with Williamson, offers an uncomplicated account of the international spread of firms as the trade-off between cost and revenue considerations. Another approach, which is less rationalist and less atomistic, but still very firm-centric, draws upon ideas developed in behavioural science, cognitive psychology and cybernetics to account for globalisation as the spread of organisations and business systems seeking strategic or positional advantage. This approach, pioneered in departments of business and management studies, recognises the institutional and behavioural aspects of markets and firms, as well as the systemic, rule-driven and norm-driven conduct of economic processes. Yet another tradition, which explores the interface between firms and markets is one which draws upon the legacy of such writers as Polanyi, Kalecki and Myrdal, to account for the globalisation of corporate activity as the outcome of strategies by dominant firms to acquire greater market power. Beyond firm-centric approaches, lie accounts of the global economy rooted in Marxian political economy, and interested in developing a more holistic or structural explanation for the economic behaviour of firms, institutions and markets. The move from agency to structure was partially tempered in this political economy, as in IPE in International Relations, by incorporating Gramscian ideas in the form of the rise of transnational ideologies for binding the structures. The 'heterodoxy', thus, both within and on the fringes of economics which has sought to make sense of the globalization of the economy beyond local and national boundaries, has been composed of a number a traditions, each drawing on its own distinct set of concepts. Very lately this emerging project has been given fresh impetus by both the crisis of Ôscientific MarxismÕ and the rise of trenchant critiques of the foundations of neo-classical thought. It is a process which has included re-imagining the thought of a number of 'classical' economists including Marx, Myrdal, Hirschman, Kaldor, Kapp, Veblen and Polanyi, to produce a new and much more 'socialised' or, 'institutionalised' view of the economy. As yet an incomplete project, the new institutional economics draws upon contemporary concepts developed in evolutionary economics, American institutionalist thought, French regulation theory, Schumpetarian economics and the historicist tradition in Marxism. At the heart of the new institutional economics is a new epistemological consciousness which is similar to the new IPE. First, institutional political economy seeks to avoid any clinical separation between economic and non-economic processes. The economic life of firms and markets is taken to be embedded in social and cultural relations, and dependent upon: processes of cognition (different forms of rationality); culture (different forms of shared understanding or collective consciousness); and politics (the way in which economic institutions are shaped by the state, class forces, etc). The multidisciplinarity implicit in this approach, thus, clearly militates against any economism in the study of global 'economic' problems. Second, and against the methodological individualism of neo-classical economics, it is proposed that the economy, like all social action, consists of institutions and institutionalising processes. Thus, markets and firms are like any other institution, and guided by formal organisation but also more informal conventions, habits and routines which are sustained over time. The clear advantage of an interpretation of economic action as institutionalised activity, (i.e. the result of both the behaviour of individuals as well as the collective processes and institutions which underpin individual action) is its ability to avoid the presumed opposition between structure-driven or agency-determined economic behaviour. For the study of IPE, an institutional political economy opens up the possibility of interpreting the global economy as a multitude of interlocking institutional structures, from firms and trade associations, through to rules, policies and different governance bodies. It thus makes for a composite and multidisciplinary approach to the global economy. Third it has the makings of an open and non-teleological political economy, through its simultaneous emphasis on structured as well as non-structured action, rule-driven as well as irrational behaviour, and through its acceptance of uncertainty, imperfect knowledge and evolutionary change as key pillars of economic life. The great challenge of our time in economics is to develop analytical frameworks which are capable of simultaneously recognising the durable driving forces of global capitalism as well as its many nuances, twists and turns, and unexpected outcomes. (iii) The Conundrum of Uneven Development Perhaps the biggest crisis of all precipitated by globalization has been in orthodox development theory. In the two decades after World War II theories were highly optimistic in their treatment of the economic growth potential of the newly independent countries. ÔDevelopmentÕ, as national development was a new universal project. Each country was viewed as a largely autonomous unit travelling along a common path to what the most famous theory termed the stage of high mass consumption. The realization that the world did not consist of a myriad of countries all marching in the same direction in the late 1960s and 1970s led to fundamental revisions of how we conceptualize `development'. At the heart of these assessments space and place were rediscovered. First the world as a single arena of development was recognized. Second, within this arena, countries and regions were identified as having local characteristics that produced unique trajectories of social change. In short there was a re-imagining of the global and the local. We will illustrate this particular turn to IPE through short discussions of changes in human geography and sociology. Human geographers are the usual investigators of society-space relations in the disciplinary division of labour. In fact geographers have followed a by now familiar route to globalizing their studies. The `new geography' of the post-World War II period was an abstract spatial modelling discipline using neo-classical economic location models from `regional science'. Traditional geographical concern for the `global' was sacrificed at the altar of scientism. In an era of naively optimistic developmentalism, geographers modelled poorer countries as if they were simply proto-rich countries on lower rungs of a ubiquitous development ladder. In the last two decades geographers have broken out of this `scientific' Rostovian bind in two ways. First the epistemology of an abstract universal space was challenged. The key process was the introduction of political economy concepts into geography through pioneering studies of of the urban situation. This addition of spatial considerations to Marxist analysis turned geography again towards the variety that is our world and whose study had been the discipline's original raison d'etre. This move was consolidated by research bringing the concept of spatial divisions of labour in industrial activity to centre stage in geographical researches attempting to connect local economic fortunes to a wider arena of capital. Second the scale of analysis broke away from focussing on the state level. The global and the local returned to the research agenda notably in the study of `multinational companies' which soon came to be `global corporations'. For these powerful actors on the world stage it was easily shown that `geography matters' in the sense that they all employed spatial strategies of investment and disinvestment in which the characteristics of places was all important. World-wide variety of place had come to replace abstract universal space as the hallmark of contemporary geography. This turn in geography was underpinned by an epistemological turn to methodologies derived from the philosophical realism of HarrŽ and Bhaskar. By simultaneously considering structures, mechanisms and events, this realism offered the appropriate mode of explanation for treating the global and the local equally. Economic geographyÕs escape from `spatial science' was complemented by an alternative `route to the global' in political geography. In an unlikely problematizing of the state, this subdiscipline took a `world-systems' turn which was explicitly cross-disciplinary in nature. In particular this development links with sociology and its breaking away from `society' implicitly defined by the boundaries of states. The creation of a Ôsociology of the global systemÕ has relocated traditional sociological concerns to the new scale of analysis. The most influential global project to come out of sociology is undoubtably world-systems analysis. Once again this has its origins in the failure of developmental models of social change in poorer countries. It builds upon radical dependency theory and Gunder Frank's linking of `under development' in one part of the world with `development' in another part. The interpretation of this as a single capitalist world-economy which replaced the classical sociological notion of `society' in a new `historical social science'. This analysis starts from the premise that contemporary social change in both rich and poor countries can be understood only as parts of a global whole. In keeping with other disciplinary developments, world-systems analysis promotes a new sensitivity to the spatial, and in this case temporal also, patterns and productions. This new body of knowledge is perhaps most concerned with epistemological issues setting itself full square in a process it calls the crisis of the sciences. As an attack on orthodoxy Immanuel Wallerstein calls for Ôunthinking social scienceÕ Finally there has been a resurgence of cultural studies which have taken a global turn as part of increasing concern for the role of the media and communication revolution. In recent years, within Ôcultural studiesÕ, a debate has emerged around whether the rise of global cultural projects dominated by the West represent a homogenizing threat to distinctive local cultural identities. Increasingly, the growing sensitivity to the absence of a functional relationship between global hegemonic projects and local outcomes, is yielding a more nuanced interpretation which stresses the contested and undecided nature of the encounter between global cultural flows and inherited local identities. This is also a recognition of the uneasy balance between the persistence of unique local cultural identities and the reshaping of such uniqueness by totalizing transnational cultural influences ranging from Coca-Colarization to the universalisation of western ideological and political concepts. This recognition introduces new thinking in the development question. At one level, it is forcing a long overdue acceptance of issues of culture and cultural identity in development theory. At a second level the recognition of culture poses new problems concerning whether cultural heterogeneity at the local level resulting from the fusion of global and local influences, constitutes a threat or an opportunity for development. At a final level, it opens up a space for recognising the power of culture in resisting and, thereby, shaping globalization. Does this mean that today it is in the ÔlocalÕ that resistance is most clearly apparent as the site for contested politics? NEW CONNECTIONS These potted disciplinary histories have a remarkable similarity. Their common convergence is to go beyond the state-society to a global scale of analysis. But they are also united in their desire to develop methodologies which are not only trans-disciplinary, but also attempting to carve a way between mechanistic or totalising visions of the global, and atomistic or voluntarist celebrations of the particular. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and a recognition of the transparent limitations of neo-liberalism, the social sciences are experiencing their own glasnost. The time is ripe for a general relaxation in methodologies, and a new cross-fertilization of ideas. Now, facing the new millennium, an unexpected and curious alliance of business studies and Marxism, geography and history has emerged in search of a new epistemology. For a growing number of authors, many of whom are represented on the RIPE Board and Council, International Political Economy is ideally suited to represent this new ferment. But to achieve that, IPE has to break away from the confines of IR and its restricting assumptions. For some IPE can no longer be a branch of IR, but the nexus around which research into the many aspects of global change can be fruitfully linked together in a new understanding. As we have argued, there is a search for a new approach and a rejection of old orthodoxies. Our desire is to represent this emerging heterodoxy, and, in so doing, to encourage dialogue as well as a diffusion of ideas between the different constituencies. Clearly, some positions will remain irreconcilable, but then, the objective of RIPE is not to move towards a single approach which can claim exclusivity. The current crisis of the economic dogmas which produced hitherto prevalent certainties, demands a certain pluralism of thought and dialogue across theoretical paradigms. Otherwise it will not be easy to develop new concepts better able to capture the global economy of today. It is this dialectical project which RIPE wishes to host and encourage. Without such a project we will not be able to develop a new political language for a better world. The Editors