Perspective on the Global Political Economy

Richard W. Chadwick

Lasswell and the Political Economy Focus

Recall Lasswell's deference and welfare values. Only two of the eight values he discusses (power and wealth), are the primary focus of traditional international relations textbooks, but even these generally put the pursuit of wealth ("low politics") under national security or power considerations ("high politics").

There are a number of reasons for this emphasis. For the last few centuries, European colonialism and related warfare have dominated much of world history. Most of the world's international trade was controlled by these coercive processes. In the acquisition and creation of wealth, military power ("coercive influence" in Lasswell's terms) was the dominant factor in the distribution of wealth between nations. As the technologies of war and industrial manufacture spread through the deepening of colonial relations, however, so did the desire and the ability among the colonized to free themselves and take advantage of the benefits of new technologies for themselves, resulting in dozens of colonial wars after World War II.

With the end of most colonial wars in the 1950s and '60s, the "Cold War" came to dominate the attention of scholars. The Russian version of colonialism (from 1945 to 1989) was to control by force and intimidation most of eastern Europe, while the rest of Europe, Japan and the USA turned to global mass marketing and manufacturing with new technologies, to acquire and maintain wealth. Signs of collapse appeared in the 1970s with the Polish workers' organization and demonstrations, and the opening of China by Deng Xiaoping to international trade and investment in 1978. But it wasn't until the collapse of the Russian empire in 1989 and its own Communist Party's mafia-like stranglehold on the Russian economy in 1992, that the politics of coercion began to give way in some substantial way to the politics of competition and cooperation.

The Cold War period was also a period of dramatic growth in world trade, with USA dominance of the world economy in terms of total trade. During this period, however, Japan's share of the world market increased dramatically until it rivaled the USA's, while the European's declined proportionately. And erratically at first, then as a steady trend, the "third world" (low GNPPC nations) emerged as technology transfer and infrastructure development took place, albeit typically at the expense of painful environmental and social consequences. It was during this period that values (cf. Lasswell's checklist of the other six) other than power and wealth gradually became significant factors in global, strategic terms.

Consider, for instance, John Stoessinger's book, Why Nations Go to War In explaining war, he notes again and again that leaders in their international rivalries manipulate their people's perceptions of the religious and ethnic ideologies of their own and other nations, transforming them into inhuman stereotypes or caricatures of "good" versus "evil" to elicit support and to make killing easier. Lasswell would refer to the values manipulated here as affection and rectitude.

Consider also Irving Janis' view expressed in his book, Groupthink, that decision makers regularly substitute consensus seeking for critical evaluation of a wide variety of possible alternative actions, not because they don't have time or are under too much pressure, but because they are faced with a combination of low self-esteem (echoing Maslow) due to feelings of incompetence, sets of choices that they personally feel are immoral, and a desire to retain the esteem of their colleagues and their position as a participant in decision making. In Lasswell's terms they seek respect and affection (Maslow's "belongingness").

Note that none have a principal focus on Lasswell's values of enlightenment or well-being.

M a j o r   C o n c e r n s

Janis	RESPECT procedures for preventing groupthink problem: hierarchical decision making	AFFECTION low self esteem high group esteem
Jones	POWER national security alliances	WEALTH economic expansionism international organization
Stoessinger	RECTITUDE (ideology) religious national ethnic	AFFECTION lack of compassion

Each also sees the problem with international politics differently; for instance, compare their diagnoses of war:

	Diagnosis of key POWER problem:	Value Failure	Value Remedy
Janis	defective decision making ("groupthink")	<-- AFFECTION	RESPECT procedures
Jones	defective power assessments	<-- SKILL	war, I.O.
Stoessinger	defective goal setting (stereotypic thinking)	<-- RECTITUDE morality	AFFECTION compassion

Barry Hughes' IFs places a very different accent on values in international relations, focusing on resources (wealth) and technology (skill, in Lasswell's framework).

Jones, in his best-selling text, The Logic of International Relations, Ch. 7, "Power," theorizes about a number of different sets of resources for "power potential:"

• natural (geographic location, land area, population, mineral wealth, energy, arable land, water),
• social (self/other images, leadership, popular support), and
• synthetic (industrial development, military capacity).
  

He also references Ray Cline's formula for "power potential," from Cline's book, World Power Assessment: a Calculus of Strategic Drift:

Pp = ( C + E + M ) x ( S + W ) where

• C is "critical mass" - population, land, position,
• E is "economic capability" - e.g., GNP,
• M is "military capability" - e.g., military personnel and budget,
• S is "strategic purpose" - goals and objectives, and
• W is "will" - elite and popular support for purposes.

(Again, note the almost complete overlap of Jones' and Cline's categories.)

Barry Hughes, in his text, International Futures, looks in some depth at the demographic, geographic, and economic factors which make up "power potential" in Cline's terms (though he never mentions Cline): population, economics, food, technology, and the environment. His model, IFs90 (International Futures), simulates alternative ("drift" states and the consequences of sustained gaps between them) contingent on various policies such as aid, type of development path taken (capital vs. labor intensive), and a few other things.

In sum, while there are many indications of an emerging view of the world political economy--and the above only begins to scratch the surface!--we are still far from a comprehensive, intellectually mature and substantively grounded theory, philosophy, and applied framework for understanding the international political economy.