International Political Economy
- Yet as Peter Katzenstein argues in more detail, a price has been paid. In particular, there is too little emphasis on how ‘interests’ are constructed — how the ideas that people have in their heads, and that they share collectively, affect their preferences. OEP is, to my mind, too materialistic and much of it is too inclined to identify rationality with egoism — an analytical mistake, since altruists, and suicide bombers, can act quite rationally.6 As long ago as 1988 Judith Goldstein and I began discussions of the role of ideas leading to our edited 1993 volume, Ideas and Foreign Policy. We cast our argument in a rationalist framework, but in many ways it was closer to what has come to be called Constructivism than to the materialistic rationalism of the OEP orthodoxy. In our more individualistic formulation, interests are in a symbiotic relationship with ideas: material interests (as Marx argued) indeed affect the ideas people hold, but ideas are not just ‘hooks’ for interests: they have independent impact. That volume contains major papers by, among other scholars now known as Constructivists, Peter Katzenstein and Kathryn Sikkink; and an important paper on sovereignty by Stephen Krasner, whose work is unclassifiable in paradigmatic terms since it represents an original synthesis of Realist, Institutionalist, and Constructivist elements.
- Electronic technologies have become the basis for global communications. We are aware of how such technologies have affected commerce, finance, and investment, but what about their effects on political power? To exercise influence, sets of individuals with common values or interests need to be able to communicate with one another, to form groups, and to act collectively. Indeed, Hannah Arendt once defined power as ‘the ability to act in common’. Historically, such communication has been very difficult except through formal organizations, including the state, and all but impossible across state boundaries except with the aid of states. This formerly constant reality has been changing with incredible speed during the last two decades, but we have hardly begun to understand the implications of this momentous fact. One implication may be that collective action on a global scale, for good or ill, is easier than it has ever been before. In this sense, there is more power in the system than in the past. Since variations in power are crucial to world politics, the changes in electronic technology have to be important, but I have not seen recent work addressing these issues of communication and power.
