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Disciplinary debates within IPE often leave as an open question how contemporary scholars may build on and incorporate insights from its rich intellectual history. In this article I examine the work of three scholars who are rarely grouped together, but who should be recognised today as engaged in an IPE-inflected debate: Karl Polanyi, E. H. Carr, and David Mitrany. They advanced distinct IPE-centred ways of framing the central problems of the post-1945 world, which are remarkable for how they prefigure important themes in modern IPE scholarship. By assembling and considering their work collectively, I make two arguments: (1) we should recognise their contributions as a precursor to modern IPE; and (2) their work, with certain caveats, provides valuable intellectual resources for contemporary scholars. Their combined work should be considered as part of the common heritage of IPE.

AbstractAlthough the work of E.H. Carr has a prominent place in the scholarly history of international relations (IR), it is notably absent from the discipline of international political economy (IPE). This is puzzling, because Carr's analysis of international politics places a strong emphasis on the organic connection between politics and economics on an international scale. On this reading, his principal publications on IR can also be seen to chart a sophisticated conceptualization of what I want to label historical IPE. This essay retrieves such a reading of Carr for the discipline of IPE. It begins by interrogating the way in which Carr's work has been appropriated by modern IPE scholarship, in order to highlight the limited use made of the political economy dimension of his research. I then explore the historical and political economy aspects of Carr's writings to consider how his contribution might advance recent contemporary theoretical debate in the discipline. I pay particular attention to how his work charts an historical conception of IPE that can synthesize and move beyond the rationalist/constructivist binary that currently dominates theorizing in the discipline.

Canada has long been subject to the powerful cross-pressures of geopolitics and global demand for its bountiful natural resources. Looking ahead over the next quarter century, I expect that the most important impact on Canada's relations with the world will stem from geopolitical developments in the United States and Asia. Not only will demand for natural resources and commercial products from these two parts of the world exert an ineluctable influence over Canada's economic development, but so too will the fallout generated by the politics of China's rise and America's response to this new force. We might call this the shadow of geopolitics. As Canada attempts to diversify its economy away from an overreliance on the American market, rising Sino-American tensions will effectively shrink geopolitical space in the most important new market for Canadian trade and investment. The paradox is that as Canada is drawn into economic flows connected to Asia's political economy, it will also slide into the crosshairs of rising Sino-American geopolitical tensions. In other words, to the extent that Canada reduces its economic vulnerability to the United States, it will become more susceptible to geopolitical vulnerabilities in Asia. Ironically, over the next 25 years or so, economic diversification may well generate geopolitical vulnerability for Canada in its global relations.

AbstractRecent concern with the institutional underpinning of the international financial architecture has intersected with broader debates concerning the possibility of achieving an adequate deliberative context for decisions involving transnational economic governance. Scholars working within traditions associated with international political economy, deliberative democracy, cosmopolitanism and critical theory have informed this broader debate. This article uses this debate to ask whether the structure of financial governance at the global level exhibits the necessary conditions to support deliberative democracy. In particular, it considers the extent to which publicness and a public sphere have become part of the broader structure of financial governance. Although in some ways financial governance is a hard case for this debate, an argument can be made that a public sphere has emerged as an important element of the international financial architecture. At the same time, the analysis of the role of the public sphere in financial governance reveals important lessons which public sphere theorists and deliberative democracy advocates need to consider in order to extend their analysis into the realm of global political economy.