North-South Relations
Once the effects of international trade and international finance had been introduced into the
study of international relations, the IPE "genie" was out of its bottle. That is, the IPE
problématique began to develop according to its own logic and was no longer limited by the
"traditional" questions and concerns of International Relations. During the Cold War, for
example, the geography of International Relations was East-West. But the geography of IPE,
shaped by international trade and capital movements, was also North-South, where North is
shorthand for industrialized countries and South represents less developed countries, regardless
of where they are situated on a world map.
The Cold War analysis of less-developed countries (LDCs) was naturally focused on the EastWest bipolar alliances and the place of LDCs in geopolitical strategy, which New York Times
writer Thomas Friedman has memorably termed the strategy of the "checkbook and the
chessboard." The US and the Soviet Union, Friedman proposes, used aid (the checkbook) and
other economic strategies to form alliances with LDCs that advanced their Cold War position
(the chessboard). LDCs were strategic pawns in the Big Power Cold War game
As international trade and international finance were increasingly used to expand and strengthen
the Cold War alliances (especially but not exclusively on the western side), IPE scholars pursued
the impact of economic relations generally on LDCs. Or, in the terms associated with Immanuel
Wallerstein, they probed the relationship between Core and Periphery.
The IPE problématique therefore expanded to encompass a critique of economic development,
an analysis of neo-colonialism and Lenin's theory of imperialism, and a general study of CorePeriphery relations. Security and geopolitical issues were not excluded from this North-South
analysis, they merely lost the privileged position that they enjoyed in traditional International
Relations research. The checkbook and the chessboard were considered just one of the many sets
of unequal and asymmetrical relationships linking core and periphery.
As this discussion suggests, another effect of this problématique was to bring Marxist and
structuralist theories explicitly into the study of IPE alongside the realist orthodoxy of
International Relations and the liberal ideology of economics.
Three theories stand out as milestones on the road to an IPE of North-South relations.
• Immanuel Wallterstein's Modern World Systems theory, which looks at the interaction of
the industrial and technological Core with the less developed Periphery and the
intermediate Semi-Periphery, which corresponds to the Newly Industrialized Countries.
Core and Periphery have become integral elements of the IPE vocabulary.
• Dependency Theory, which is most often associated with the name Theotonio Dos
Santos, examines the web of North-South relations and highlights the elements that keep
the South dependent upon the North, to the North's systematic advantage.
• Finally, Andre Gunder Frank has written powerfully on a theory of Underdevelopment. It
is argued that capitalism does not produce economic development in the South along the