IPE Fall 2014 - Initial Thoughts

Greetings all.  I thought I would start out with a few thoughts on the way we will approach "IPE" in the coming weeks. One way to do that is to illustrate a main point that I want to make over the course of the term, using a few major items from the news today. My point to follow... 

The first item is what is going on in Ukraine, where pro-Russian (and by most indications, Russian-backed) rebels in the east are fighting the central government, in the hopes of either independence or annexation by Russia. This follows the actual annexation by Russia of the historically important and culturally Russian Crimean Peninsula earlier this year. My initial point about this event is that it looks simply like old fashioned power politics, focused on security rather than economics, yet... notice that much of the actual debate between the US, the European Union, and Russia is taking place in the economic sphere. It is all about sanctions and counter-sanctions, import bans and export bans, and so on. That is, it is really difficult to disentangle the international relations of power politics from the role of the international economy in this day and age.

The second item might seem even more tenuously related to "political economy" (whatever that is, and we will discuss in class). It is the activity of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS or ISIL). Yet a case can be made that this too loops back pretty quickly to economic relations, from oil investment conditioning much politics in the Middle East to the role of Russia (again) and France in Syria. This is not to deny the primacy of issues that are not purely political-economic, such as the Sunni-Shia split in Islam or the simple reaction to Islamist fundamentalism (among other major issues), but it is again to say that there are few issues where economics doesn't enter the picture quickly and with some degree of decisiveness.

The third item: I am just back last night from Scotland...

...where on September 18th, the Scots will tell the Brits once and for all that for centuries, they may have taken their lives, but they will never take our Freeeeeeeeeeeeedom. (Or maybe not.) Anyway. The fascinating thing about the debate there, for me, was the combination of two things: on the one hand, raw emotion about identity and who people are (Scottish, British, or both); and on the other, massively important conversations about implications for monetary policy, fiscal transfers, membership in the European Union, and so on.  In other words, two different sides of "who will we be?" and "what will our country be like?"

The unifying factor is clear by this point. "IPE" is never - at least in my view - far from the surface of virtually anything going on in current events around the world today. We can talk another time about how this is true of American domestic politics, as well, of course. But that in due time.

- jtd