Former Professor of International Relations at LSE (1978-88), Susan Strange returned to the School to deliver a lecture “The limits of politics” in the Old Theatre, Old Building on 1 June 1995.
Susan Strange (1923-1998) was an influential academic figure in international relations and world-leading thinker on international political economy. She held the Montague Burton Chair in International Relations at LSE from 1978 to 1988, returning to deliver this candid public lecture in 1995.
Her talk argued that politics is far too narrowly defined and current viewpoints do not take international context into account. Describing the growth of globalisation, using the examples of telecoms and the mafia, Susan Strange made the case for the need for social scientists across the disciplines to break down the divides between them and work together.
Listen to the podcast or read the write up below.
The chair was Sir John Pinder, member of the board of the journal Government and Opposition. He provided this introduction to Susan Strange:
… She needs no introduction. And it certainly is true that she needs no introduction into the premises because she was a student here and she was the Sir Montague Burton Professor of International Relations here for 10 years up til 1988, so she does know this Old Theatre… I take it it hasn’t changed much since those days, got a bit older, that’s all. Cleaner? Marvellous. Progress.
The job she did after that was as a professor in the European University Institute beside Florence and now she’s a professor in the field of international relations at Warwick University. That’s a lot of professorships. When I first knew her, however, she was a lecturer in London University and doubling also as a journalist on the Observer. That was a while ago, I should say.
I know a number of academics who rolled up their sleeves and did journalism for a while, and it usually made them very skilful and prolific writers. And Susan Strange is no exception. She has done a very great deal of writing and a lot of people have done a very great deal of reading what she has written. And she has written on a very wide range of subjects and increasingly on international political economy and European political economy. Indeed, I think you could say that now her subject is the political economy of the planet.
She is going to talk tonight and give this Leonard Schapiro lecture for Government and Opposition on the subject of the limits to, not political economy, because as she gets at the subject I don’t think there are any limits to political economy, but to the limits of politics, which is a very good idea.
So I’m glad to hand you over to Susan Strange.
Susan Strange’s speech in full
Well, thank you very much for the introduction and thank you Government and Opposition for the invitation. I never actually did an inaugural lecture at the School, I was afraid of upsetting my colleagues. I don’t have to worry any more and so I welcome this opportunity. So, friends and colleagues – and the two categories are not mutually exclusive – I have a text because Government and Opposition wanted me to produce a text so that they could publish it. I can’t read lectures, so I won’t do so. I find it always intolerably tedious when people read lectures.
What I’m going to say really is that I think politics, or government, is far too narrowly defined, and the argument really concerns what’s called globalisation. The nature of the causes, and the consequences, for the worlds of politics and business, and for the social sciences.
The need for change in universities
The argument is that globalisation forces upon us as social scientists a much wider, new definition of politics. And that we have to adjust to this. Everybody in business schools knows very well – in Warwick we have a business school, I wonder of the LSE – although they said they wouldn’t do it to the London Business School, in fact it seems to me that we are doing it by the back door – we? You.
In business school’s it’s well understood that under the pressure of globalisation, firms have to restructure. Reengineer is the buzzword. Shape up to the worldwide competition. And it seems to me – and this is where I end up really – is that universities too have to reengineer and we have to start thinking about how we break down the old walls between the social sciences and do things differently. I think it was Karl Popper who once said universities were the victims of long-forgotten architects who built buildings and said, that’s engineering and that’s biology. And that was their territory and so it was very difficult to change.
It seems to me that international relations can no longer be kept apart from government. That won’t be very popular, I think, with every department in this place. The economists, I think, have to take account of, and they are reluctant to do so on the whole, of economic history and of human geography, and of international relations. And the lawyers must understand, I think, that the rule of law is rather more than what the statutes say and the courts decide.
Governance, I think is another word – rather like globalisation – that nobody quite knows what it means. But it does suggest that systems of rule may not only be what states decide. So what I propose is to explain how and why this pressure on us has come about and what caused it, and explain some consequences, with two examples that I think are quite interesting. And which I’m not an expert on but which I looked into for a book which is just about finished. One is the mafias and the other is telecoms. And I’ll come to that.
The case for globalisation
My point of departure here is one rather appropriate to Government and Opposition. It is that there is less and less difference between the government and the opposition. And that globalisation has so constrained the options that governments and states can take that there’s not much difference between the politicians.
I mean do you really think that if Tony Blair is elected at the next British election it’ll make very much difference to our lives? I greatly doubt it. There was a time in Britain – I can remember even if most of you can’t – when there really was a difference between Labour and Conservatives. I don’t think there is and I think it’s the same in France, for example.
Do you really seriously think that Mr Chirac will be very different from Monsieur Balladur. In Italy Berlusconi used to go about saying, “Forza Italia” but nothing much has actually changed. And in Japan the defeat for the Liberal Democratic Party really hasn’t changed the power of the bureaucracy or brought any significant change, either in domestic or in foreign policy.
So now I think the opposition is coming from the people who object to the export of veal calves to the continent, or who object to motorways. It’s not really a matter of party.
So that is one consequence for state policy And it is led because people conceded this, politicians pretend there’s a difference, and the journalists pretend to believe what the politicians say. But ordinary people, I think, are not fooled. And this is why, in the pubs, you don’t really have a serious political discussion. You can talk about football or the weather or the crops, or whatever. So this is one consequence of globalisation.
I have an American friend who said, “oh don’t talk about globaloney.” And in a way he’s right because the people who talk about globalisation don’t know really, very often, what it is they’re talking about. They lump together the fact that everybody around the world wears jeans, listens to the same sort of pop music, eats the same kind of fast food, has the same interest in sports, and new foreign pastimes like ballroom dancing in China, which my youngest son tells me is the in thing.
The mobility of capital and technology
I think what is really important in globaloney – in globalisation distinct from globaloney – is the mobility of capital and of technology. And I would say the most important thing perhaps in globalisation is the one thing you can’t measure. It’s that people feel, perceive themselves, to be operating in a global context rather than a local and national one.
If you think about how government official, managers of business, sportsmen or women, doctors, architects, musicians, many of these people find their closest contacts, their closest colleagues with whom they interact most frequently, more often than not, in many cases, not the same, they don’t carry the same passport, they’re in another country. I certainly find it.
The perception of belonging to what I once called the business civilisation – except that I don’t travel business class because we don’t get paid to travel business class and travel in what the Australians call “goat class”- it’s more and more like goat class I must say.
There are no indicators of this perception of belonging to a business civilisation working in a global context. The only one we have is international production – production outside the home country of the firm. And sales outside the home country of the firm is now – since I think about the mid ‘80s – is now larger than international trade. Although economists still – because they like trade, because you can measure the statistics – haven’t quite caught up with this fact. But still.
The structure of firms
We don’t know the things that we want to know and this is very often true of statistics. We don’t know what percentage of our GDP is produced by foreign-owned firms. We know that the British car industry is mostly owned by foreign-owned firms. In the American car industry, four out of the top ten firms selling cars in the United States are Japanese.
We don’t know the percent of national consumption of specific goods and services which is either imported from another country or produced locally by a foreign-owned firm. It would be very interesting if we could. Conversely, we don’t know the rate at which the percentage of goods or services on sale in Britain are produced only for the British market. We just don’t know.
There are two billboards I’ve seen, one recent as it’s in Newcastle, there’s a big sign in the airport saying, “Nissan welcome you to Newcastle”. And in Bangalore in India, I’m told by a Japanese friend, there’s a big sign saying, “Welcome to IBM Town”. And I was in a funny place called Poitier last Autumn and there was an exhibition of Peugeot bikes, and I went round like a good old journo asking questions, and I said, “these are Japanese bikes”, I said, guessing wildly, they all had Peugeot written on them. And they said, “well, yes. Some of them are assembled in France.” All new bikes now, the parts are being made in Japan and China has taken over from Taiwan as the biggest producer of bikes in the world.
The financial integration of the world market economy
Anyway. The important thing is the financial aspect of globalisation. That it means the financial integration of the world market economy. The erasure of distinctions separating national currency areas, national systems of regulation, financial markets and financial operators. And I think there are four trends in this that come together. Which was pointed out by my Canadian friend very poorly in Toronto.
The disappearance of exchange controls and taxes on capital moving across the exchanges, financial liberalisation, that is deregulation of markets and financial operators. The growth of tax havens, which comes into my mafia story. And new financial technology like securitisations, junk bonds, new kinds of credit instruments, derivatives and so on. You know, probably as well as I do, the story.
The whole point is that all four trends complicate the management by national governments of the national financial systems. It isn’t any more a national financial system, it’s part of a worldwide one. And of course it’s important because it’s been a necessary condition of the internationalisation of production and of the growth of international trade. I mean the GATT and the WTO people now keep saying, “well, trade has grown because we have lowered barriers.” I mean this is – the business schools know this quite well – it’s not true.
The truth is that governments don’t trade – now that we have no socialist system, they used to trade in the socialist system. Governments don’t trade, firms trade. And because firms trade and because firms are forced by the accelerating rate of technological change and the substitution of capital for labour to fill outside the national market or the world market.
It’s the only way they can survive because you don’t have the time – because of the accelerating rate of technological change – you don’t have the time any more to reap enough profit from the local market to amalgamise the debt you’ve incurred in installing the new technology. So you have to sell it on multiple markets in order to stay in the game. Otherwise you have to drop out of the game. Globalisation is pushing up the ante all the time for the players in the international game.
The much increased mobility of technology is the other important factor. That it is possible, you don’t have to develop your own technology. The Japanese first discovered this and everybody else has too. I think it’s also interesting that the other factors of production, not only capital but also energy, and more importantly labour, are becoming increasingly mobile. I mean, it’s an interesting question.
Do you count labour as mobile if the labourer, worker actually moves. Or can you say that labour has become mobile if the work moves to the labour. It seems to me you can. Skilled labour is now mobile in the sense that it has access to a global labour market.
If you look at Silicon Valley, 25 per cent of the skilled labour force in electronics is said to be of Asian origin. You don’t know whether they’re carrying an American passport or not, but they come from there because that’s where the work is. A whole lot of the work in electronics actually moves to the workers and goes to India. In the largest software company in India, based in Bombay, which employs 4,300 engineers, average age 29, of whom 80 per cent have a master’s degree or a PhD.
And as a result of this kind of indirect labour mobility is that the Indian computer industry doubled its size and Indian software exports quadrupled in just three years between 1990 and 1993. I think this signals much greater mobility not only in capital but also in labour. And added to this is a factor which again neither the people in international relations nor the people in economics I think take adequate account of, which is the accelerating fall in the cost and rise in the reliability of transport and communications. The relative cost of both transport and communications compared to other things is significantly lower.
Political consequences of globalisation
Now let me come to the political consequences of globalisation. One of course is the omnipresence of the multinationals. The international relations textbooks always have a kind of obligatory – it’s rather like, you know, the statutory woman on the board of directors or other minorities – though we’re not a minority, we’re a majority. I’m not talking about that, what I’m talking about is the omnipresence of multinationals is changing the character of states. And that is changing international relations.
The conventional wisdom in international relations hasn’t really taken this on board. Let me quote from a professor in America, Vivian Schmidt, Amherst. In a recent edition of Daygolus. “The unwritten story behind the internationalisation of trade lies not so much in how international and regional trade associations are diminishing the autonomy of the nation state. Or in how multinationals are escaping the control of the nation state. But in how nation states have been altering their own policies to function in the new international arena. And how these in turn have affected their policymaking processes.”
That, I think, is one very strong reasons for extending the limits of politics. If multinationals, by their competition, are changing the behaviour of states.
Rival states, rival firms
John Stopford and I wrote a book Rival States, Rival Firms, which was sort of written off by most of the people in international relations, “Oh it’s about development economics.” It wasn’t really, it was about the bargaining which we said was just as – more – important actually between host states and foreign owned firms as the stuff that the diplomats did. The diplomats had not woken up to this for the large part.
But nevertheless it was important and it was changing the behaviour of states and making states compete as if they were sort of landlords of rival hotels or office buildings, saying “Please come and rent an apartment in my building because we need your rent. We need your access to foreign markets, we need your access to your technology.”
And the competition between host states for the attentions of multinationals explains the U-turn that so many developing countries have experienced in the last decade or so. From import substitution to export orientation it’s the firms which have brought this about, not the conviction that the IMF and the World Bank and the neoclassical economists must be right. They didn’t suddenly get converted, they just felt that the only way to survive was to compete for the presence of foreign firms.
This triangular diplomacy, we called it, I think is rather important and is probably the fastest expanding and in the long term the most instrumental of the changes that have been brought about by globalisation.
I would say that international trade and production more than governmental institutions have been the kind of gearbox or transmission mechanism between the world market and the state system, and I don’t think that you can separate the two. It’s the decisions of firms, as I’ve said before, not governments, that have brought about the most important changes, and DeAnne Julius who spoke to a seminar here, I think last year, in an American Expresso say, has said that in the next century most manufacturing industry will move away from the OECD countries to newly industrialising countries.
Structural power of states
There are three consequences, and I won’t dwell on them, of these changes that I’m trying to describe. One is that there is an increased asymmetry between the power of states. When I was first a UN correspondent a long time ago, there were about, under 80 members of the United Nations. Somewhere around about 60. There are now three times as many, there are about 180. And the difference between the top say ten per cent and the bottom ten per cent is much greater. To think of the Republic of San Marino, a recent member of the United Nations, Vanuatu, Kiribatu. These are not really states, they are mini states. And this increases the structural power, I think, of the United States.
Now where I think a lot of my friends and colleagues in the United States have gone wrong in the last decade is in talking about the decline of the United States, is that if they think that the United States has declined in power somebody else must have grown in power. And this is the great fallacy.
What happened is that there has been a shift in power from states to markets and the United States has shared in vulnerability to the oil market, first of all, that was one of the first big shocks. Vulnerability to competition in the car market, in semi-conductors, in a whole lot of other electronic products. But the United States still, I would maintain has structural power as I explained, in states and markets. Jo Nye calls this soft power. I don’t think there is anything terribly soft about structural power, though it sounds much nicer.
Case study: telecoms
Now let me come to my two stories. One is a telecoms story. I think that this is a classic, almost extreme case of the process by which authority has shifted massively away from the governments of states to the managers of firms. And it also demonstrates very clearly the asymmetries of state power between the United States and the rest of the world.
In alliance with the technologists who developed, revolutionised the business of communication, and with the entrepreneurial firms who seized the opportunities in an expanding market, the United States has not only refashioned the way in which information is transmitted over long distances, but in doing so has helped to ensure that the lion’s share of the new global market goes to American firms.
I think the story is worth telling because it does emphasise the importance of the technological variable. And this is something that social scientists, with the exception of the strategic studies people who are now rather, with the end of the Cold War, rather looking around for what to do. They knew that the technology of missiles and AWACS and stuff like that was important so they took the trouble of learning about it.
Most social scientists are too lazy to really set about learning what is changing in technology and figuring out what the consequences are. I think where telecommunications is important, and how it has an impact on domestic politics, is that in the past, as part of the business of holding national society together, a state wanted not only to control communication, if necessary by censorship, certainly in times of war, if necessary by controlling even books, but certainly by rigging the price system so that remote areas of the state were kept in touch.
Greece is a particular case where this was important, but you could also think of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. And making it easier for people, both in transport and in communications, to stay in touch with the rest of society. Now, the new technology, the new firms, and the expansion of the world market in communications means that this has been reverse.
That it is the cost, as you all know if you’ve got a telephone bill. The cost of long distance calls has come down enormously and the relative cost of local calls across town and so on has gone up. And this has been brought about by a combination of several technologies. The development of optic fibre cables, of satellites, large capacity for computers, some of the recent developments, and this means greater reliability at lower cost but it also means that there is a higher capital cost.
And this is where the structural power of the United States comes in, because the United States started by deregulating in 1984 the communications business by busting up the two AT&T and Bell Telephone systems and opening them up to competition. And that gave the American firms a head start in developing, and taking advantage of, the new technology. And the Europeans, sticking to the old PTT state owned enterprises were left behind.
The British privatised earlier than other people and that’s why I think BT is relatively successful. But the interesting thing here is that it is not a British enterprise because BT has a strategic alliance with MCI. That is a Dutch-Italian-Swiss-Swedish consortium. There is something called Unisource, AT&T’s world partners network. And networks –and this is the point that a lot of the business school people I think rightly make. People like Micheler and Peter Drucker that the firm doesn’t any longer exist. And I think Anthony Sampson’s new book The End of Company Man is probably – I bought it today but I haven’t had time to read it, obviously.
So the important thing is the market, this expansion, means that the market for information, for communications, grew fivefold in the decade 1984-94. A quarter in equipment sales and three quarters in services. There are now 15 telephone operating enterprises with annual revenues of over $10 billion. That’s really quite a striking change. And it means that, as I’ve said, domestic policy on communications has to give way to these forces of globalisation.
And the latest thing of course is internet. And email. And this also privileges the corporate user and the academic insiders and disadvantages outsiders. African scholars, small businesses, family relatives don’t have email. I can use email, you can use email, that doesn’t cost us a thing. The cost even to anybody is cheaper and Jill Hills, I think has described what she calls the beginning of a form of privatisation of an international organisation, Intelsat, where she explains how an increasing role in decision-making for instance on aid to developing countries is taken not by government representatives but by the multinational firms who in their committees take the really important decisions and of course most of those firms are based in the United States.
Case study: mafias
Well that’s one story I want to tell. The other is about the mafias. I tell this story partly because one of my students in Florence, with whom I talk about as my orphans in Florence because nobody’s looking after them much except me, who worked in the Ministry of Finance writing the report for the ministry on financial crime in Italy. It’s quite a thick report. And she knows a great deal and I’ve learned from her. The whole point of supervising research students is that you learn from them. Hopefully they may even learn a bit from you, but not always.
I think the mafia story is important because like the transnational corporation, what is new is not organised crime gangs, they’ve been around, the Chinese triads have been here for yonks. It’s that like T&Cs they are encroaching on the authority of the state. And there are many more of them. And they are negotiating with one another. And I think this is one of the important new developments in international political economy which requires serious attention and analysis.
It’s interesting because the mafia is a kind of mirror image of the state isn’t it, really, if you think about it. Charles Tilly, I think, once said that state making was a protection racket and the largest example of organised crime.
Because both states and the mafia use force to punish disobedience and penalise disloyalty. Both also began with blood-related groups but then let in other people. They both create myths, invent symbols, rituals to reinforce their coercive power. Both have hierarchical systems of government that sometimes make concessions to demotic principles. Both in fact demand money with menaces. Governments call it tax and call it extortion when the mafia’s doing it. But these taxes or extortions are used to pay both the cost of administration and sometimes to line the pockets of the people who raise the taxes.
Tax systems mostly are not progressive but regressive, always have been. What has changed in both cases is that territorial limits no longer matter and globalisation of the trade in a stupefying and hallucinatory drug which you know started with the British in the opium wars in the 1840s were involved in this. It became a big issue in the League of Nations. The market didn’t really grow until the ‘60s and the ‘70s. How much it had to do with the Vietnam War, how much it had to do with other social movements, I don’t know.
The whole point is that this market expanded and whereas if you look at the Sicilian mafia for example. The Sicilian mafia used to prey on poor farmers. Now I’m a farmer’s wife, I know, despite the CAP, that on the whole average farm incomes are lower than the average incomes for agricultural workers in Britain. Average, because it includes all those people on Welsh mountains.
But while they were only exploiting the locals, they didn’t get very rich. Even Toto Riina in his early days didn’t make a lot of money. But once the market became global and once the mafias were preying not on poor farmers but on urban drug users who were desperate for the product and prepared to pay for it, the market in cannabis grew in two decades ten times, in heroin grew 20 times bigger, in cocaine 50 times bigger.
And the profits of course are astronomical. And the result is then that the profit had to be laundered. And this is where the developments in the financial system link in with organised crime because the laundering of the dirty money is indistinguishable from money which uses tax havens and other devices and the secrecy of banks to conceal itself from the tax collector or from the boss or whoever. And this mix up of laundered money from the organised crime gangs is what has really changed the nature of the whole thing.
Telecoms meets mafia
And so much so it links up with the telecoms situation too because there was a story recently that the German police for example are greatly handicapped because while people use static telephones you can bug them. You can’t bug a mobile phone. So it’s very difficult. And since all the gangsters use mobile phones it’s very difficult to keep a track on what they’re up to.
And what they’re up to, I think, is a series of “you scratch my back and I scratch yours” kind of deals between the Sicilian and Italian mafias, ‘Ndrangheta, the Camorra and so on, the American ones, the Japan Yakuza, the Chinese triads, the Chechens and the whole innumerable mafias operating in the former Soviet Union and responsible in large part for the enormous capital sleight that I’ve no doubt you’ve read about.
So I think this is where we come to the consequences of these developments, these sort of globalisation developments in which I’ve chosen two. There are others: the importance of the accountants, the importance of the insurers, the importance of cartel arrangements which may not be written down but nevertheless are a form of private protection which goes on across the world market.
I’m trying to put these in a book which I’ve pretty well finished, I think I call it The Retreat of the State. And this is a commercial of course. You have to have a commercial in a lecture. But I think it redefines politics. Both stories I think show the impact on politics of the globalisation of markets and of accelerating technological change. And neither national constitutions nor international organisations like Intelsat are immune from these changes.
We have to go back I think and think carefully about what we actually mean by politics. And you go back to the old books that students are given in the first term, and you find that Harold Lasswell said that politics is about who gets what, where, how and when. And David Easton talked about the authoritative allocation of values.
But it seems to me, if I look at the world around me, the world of political economy, that it’s not only states that have authority to allocate values. The telecoms have it, the mafias have it. Do you get a pair of concrete boots or a nice, fat Swiss bank account? That’s what the mafias can decide.
The way money is laundered is very often the gangster, the drug dealer say, going to somebody who he knows, has some garage business or something, he’s short of money, and says, “Look, you launder the money for me and you can have ten per cent.” And all sorts of people are doing this. There’s no way of catching up with them – well, not so far.
It would need a revolution in the way the state regards police, the policing function of the state. And if you look at Interpol, it’s a joke. And they’re talking about Europol, but Europol will not be enough and it will be resisted by all the national governments because the regulation of police, policing and law and order is a highly political business which national government is not going to give up in a hurry.
You cannot leave markets out of politics
The markets, it seems to me, have the power to allocate, the authority to allocate, values. The telecoms market and its terrific growth and the drugs market are two examples. You cannot leave markets out of politics. This idea of the economists saying, “Markets are our business, politics are for the Government Department,” it just doesn’t work in the real world.
There’s an old French writer, Bertrand de Jouvenel, who wrote a book on sovereignty, which I think is a much better book than Harold Laski’s, if I may say it in these sanctified halls. He argues that the politics takes place whenever someone needs the help of other wills to achieve his or her objective. That seems to me to make sense.
A chief executive officer of a firm needs the support of other wills to achieve the survival of the firm and a nice dough of stock options or an increase in salary or whatever in order to achieve his personal objectives and the corporate objectives. He needs the supporting wheels of his managers, his designers, his salesmen, his suppliers, his bankers, his shareholders, and the workers on the shopfloor. This doesn’t seem to me a difficult notion at all.
Anybody who’s engaged, as I once did a long, long time ago, as Secretary of the LSE Students’ Union and Vice President, and my former President is here, will realise that student politics, like academic politics, is a pretty rough game. And to achieve the support of other wills is what the name of the game is.
It takes place in British rugby football, you remember this recent story when the captain called the selection committee “a bunch of old farts” and got sacked, but then they changed their minds, that was a political story.
If you accept Hannah Arendt’s description of political institutions as manifestations and materialisations of power, then the firm that has power to relocate its production, to decide which technology to go for, to cut its workforce at home, to sell itself to a foreign firm, like Rover for example, is engaging in politics.
So the implications of redefining politics in this way and of enlarging the limits of what we understand as politics, may be uncomfortable for vested interests both in government, in business, and perhaps even in the universities.
As I said at the beginning, I think universities like firms, are going to have to think about restructuring, in the way they operate and the way they are organised. As I hinted at the beginning, I think this leads to the conclusion that most social science hasn’t yet caught up with the times. Nor with the truly revolutionary nature of the social and economic globalisation.
Now that society, economy and authority are no longer bound by the frontiers of the territorial state, it makes very little sense to behave in the old way. Authority is exercised across boundaries and exercised unequally by states. The allocation of values is shared between state authority and non-state authority and with markets. And in a random, complex and untidy way across issues, across sectors, and thanks to the dynamism of markets and of technological change, across time periods.
All the heroic assumptions by the economists that markets function within a state and political framework, according to rational patterns of behaviour, and independently of dynamic shifts in bargaining power inside or outside the market, become untenable.
And even less defensible is the separation of international politics from other kinds of politics. It’s less easily justified now that most of the competition between states, like that between firms, is for world market shares and for corporate allies who could be persuaded to take up productive residence in the country.
Peter Dicken, the geographer, has put it, there has been a global shift in political economy. I think the geographers and the historians understand what’s going on a whole lot better than a lot of political scientists, and perhaps geographers and historians may be better guides because they have purer intellectual intentions than the economists.
Breaking down the dividing rules between social sciences
But for the future and the future of universities it may be that departments were defined by disciplines are not the best basis from which to organise either teaching or research. Now I don’t know how you restructure a university. But it does seem to me that we have to start thinking about this and to start breaking down the dividing rules between social sciences.
And this isn’t a new thought but I have just tried to add my small voice to those who are saying that those who are resisting change are going to regret it because those who will move with the times and think about how you design new masters courses and new ways of supervising PhDs, new ways of teaching interdisciplinary courses are going to be those who adapt to the future and who guide the future planning in universities, breaking down the old barriers and distinctions between the social sciences.
And I believe the progress will be easier and faster if we agree to extend the limits of politics and political science.
Thank you.
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