Part 2 – Reconstructing the non-Eurocentric foundations of IPE: From Eurocentric ‘open economy politics’ to inter-civilizational political economy

ABSTRACT

In Part 1 (this issue), I deconstructed IPE, past and present, to reveal the Eurocentric foundations of the discipline. This second part completes my critical historiography by revealing how Open Economy Politics, which dominates the latest phase of American IPE, is Eurocentric. However, some readers will, quite rightly, want to know why Eurocentrism poses a problem for IPE and what an alternative non-Eurocentric approach might look like. Accordingly, this article lays out some of the basic properties of what I call ‘inter-civilizational political economy’. To this end, deconstructing OEP is undertaken in tandem with reconstructing a non-Eurocentric inter-civilizational account of trade regime change in the last few centuries. From there, I proceed to specify some key empirical areas that an inter-civilizational research agenda would examine, focussing on three types of politico-economic systems change: the rise of capitalism, the rise and development of globalization, and changes in the distribution of structural power within the world economy. I close that section by pointing to various smaller-scale areas of research that derive from what I call everyday inter-civilizational political economy. And I conclude by considering some of the key methodological and substantive issues that my own non-Eurocentric research approach throws up.

KEYWORDS:

• Eurocentrism/Orientalism
• Open Economy Politics
• IPE historiography
• systems change
• everyday political economy
• civilizations

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to thank once more Tony Heron, Nicola Phillips, Matthew Watson, Joerg Wiegratz and, in particular, the three anonymous reviewers, as well as Brian Webster, for their many constructive comments, though any errors are mine alone.