KÜRESEL POLİTİK EKONOMİ

Bullionism was the earliest phase of mercantilism, and it was derived from the experience of an acute shortage of gold and silver bullion in Europe in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries.

Mercantilism was properly regarded as a blend of economic fallacy and state creation of special privilege. As the earliest systemic understanding of IPE, mercantilism goes back to the period between the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. To understand mercantilism, we must look back to the eco-political environment of which the mercantilism was born out. Throughout that period mercantilism served both as a state policy and an economic theory. Mercantilists were also in cooperation with absolutist princes during an era of state-building out of the ashes of feudalism. Therefore, mercantilism was a strong nation-building policy as well as an economic policy. In this sense, it was not surprising to see that mercantilism first occurred in Britain and France, two of the successful absolutist states at that time.

Hegemonic Stability Theory (HST)

The stability of the International System requires a single dominant state to articulate and enforce the rules of interaction among the most important members of the system. According to HST If there is such a hegemon, who is willing to bear the costs and enforce the rules while retaining political, economic and military edge for the hegemony, the international system would be stable (stability means the absence of war among major powers).

Remember that in physiocracy profit (in physiocratic language net product) came from agriculture and therefore capital accumulation or the wealth of nations was relying upon effectiveness in capitalist agriculture production. Therefore in physiocracy, the other classes not occupied with agriculture were simply seen as unproductive one. Here in mercantilism, profit or the source of the capital accumulation came from merchandise trade. That is, buying cheap and selling expensive. So, the important question turned to be how to increase effectiveness in trade in order to increase profit. To this end, the mercantilists in cooperation with monarchs had done several things to create a favourable balance of trade by applying: i. Prioritized policies to increase export; ii. Prioritized policies to decrease import; iii. Created trade monopolies; iv. Heavily relied on state coercive powers to expand and protect economic interests.

IPE is a discipline that studies the way in which global economy and politics interacts and the result of that interactions. That is, “IPE studies the political battle between the winners and losers of global economic exchange”.

Economics is about the use of scarce resources for unlimited desires while politics
is about order and public goods. These two, -state and market or economy and politics-, are distinct field of studies and they require both distinct approaches and theories.

IPE can be classified into three sub-periods, under which general approaches to the discipline shifted fundamentally:

i. classical period;
ii. the long negligence period;
iii. the rise of IPE.

In the classical period, economics and politics were not divided at all as separate disciplines.

The British school reflects classical political economy tradition and as such often discusses normative questions and uses an interpretive tone on the contrary to the American school’s commitment to positivist methodologies.

Emerging approaches in International Political Economy
• Positive IPE
• Constructivist IPE
• Post-Structuralism
• Feminism• Green Approaches in IPE

The Physiocrats were French social reformers and their immediate influence in French economic and political affairs lasted about two decades and ended when their most politically influential member, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot ( 1727- 1781), lost the office of comptroller general of finances in 1776 (Hunt & Lautzenheiser, 2011, 35).

François Quesnay (1694-1774) was the leading figure of the French physiocrats
School. He served as a medical doctor (surprisingly not as an economist) in the Louis
XV’s Versailles palace. Quesnay was the doctor of Madame de Pompadour, King Louis
XV’s favourite mistress.

Mercantilism was properly regarded as a blend of economic fallacy and state creation of special privilege. As the earliest systemic understanding of IPE, mercantilism goes back to the period between the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

The origins of economic nationalism can be traced back to the work of Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich List. Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804) was the first secretary of the treasury of the United States. As such, he was a statesman rather than a theorist.

Classic liberalism has rose from thinking in response to the mercantilist conventional wisdom of the seventeenth century. In this sense, David Hume (1711-1776) was probably the first thinker who criticized the mercantilist thinking and practice. Before the WW I, gold standard was a functional tool in resolving and easing international transactions.

One of the big questions in international relations is about how to achieve cooperation. One type of explanation for that is the neo-realist argument of hegemonic stability theory based on the distribution of power argument. In a simple term, it argues countries cooperate in international politics since hegemon force them with sticks or influence them with carrots to do so.

There are different variants of contemporary Marxism, and it is not an easy task to group them into generally accepted groupings. However, we can find at least two categories that are often used when it comes to International Political Economy. These two neo-Marxist approaches are Neo Gramscian School and Dependency Schools.

Bringing Gramsci’s ideas into the IR jargon, Robert Cox probably is the most cited scholar in this genre of IPE theories. Cox, himself, called his approach as historical materialism, which is a critical theory of the international political economy. Cox distinguishes historical materialist Marxism from other types of Marxism by saying that the first seeks to explain, as well as promote, change in social relations, while the latter provides a framework for the analysis of the capitalist state and society

Dependency school is another neo-Marxist variant of theories of IPE that explains development processes by looking at the dominance and subordination relation taking place between core and periphery. Practically this model departs from the perpetuating inequalities/ discrepancies between core and periphery and the way in which that inequalities/discrepancies has been institutionalized and produced over and over again.