The Transatlantic Divide: Why Are American and British Ipe so Different?

An academic field of study may be said to exist when a coherent body of knowledge is constructed to define a subject of inquiry. Recognized standards come to be employed to train and certify specialists; full-time employment opportunities become available in university teaching and research; learned societies are established to promote study and dialogue; and publishing venues become available to help disseminate new ideas and analysis. In short, an institutionalized network of scholars comes into being, a distinct research community with its own boundaries, rewards, and careers. In that sense, the field of International Political Economy (IPE) has existed for less than half a century. IPE, Robert Gilpin once famously suggested, may be defined as ‘the reciprocal and dynamic interaction in international relations of the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of power’ (Gilpin, 1975b: 43). In other words, IPE is about the complex linkages between economic and political activity at the level of international affairs. As a practical matter, such linkages have always existed. As a distinct academic field, however, IPE was born no more than a few decades ago. Prior to the 1970s, in the English-speaking world, economics and political science were treated as entirely different disciplines, each with its own view of international affairs. Relatively few efforts were made to bridge the gap between the two. Exceptions could be found, often quite creative, but mostly among Marxists or others outside the ‘respectable’ mainstream of Western scholarship. A broad-based movement to build bridges between the separate specialties of international economics and international relations (IR)—in effect, to construct the field we now know as IPE—was really of very recent origin.