ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Representing “The Balance(s) of Power”: International Relations and Economics, 1942-1965
Author: Tomas Rangil Maria Teresa
In recent years, there have been two distinct historical narratives of the way economists accounted for conflicts after WWI. On the one hand, historians interested in the interwar period have described the heterogeneous assortment of individuals and groups of economists interested in wars as terribly puzzled with these irrational phenomena. Most interwar economists believed they had the mission to stir public opinion and governments against wars by highlighting the disruptive effects of international conflicts on a highly interdependent economic system. In this respect, economic research was thought to have the capacity to prevent conflict by accurately informing of the real costs of wars. However, interwar economists’ failure of to prevent WWII partly discredited their ambitions to influence the course of international events. For historians, interwar “economists of conflict” (as we will name them) did not find in economics the intellectual tools to comprehend international struggles and thus, after WWII, “economists of conflict” simply disappeared. On the other hand, historians of the Cold War argue that, after World War II, an unprecedented academic and public space was opened for economists to establish themselves as experts in national security. These “defense economists” (often associated with the Rand Corporation and other military think-tanks) are credited with designing a specific subfield of economics dedicated to the study of military problems with especial emphasis being placed on cost-benefit analysis. For defense economists, political considerations were ruled out and economics was just a set of tools to solve technical problems. In this paper, I argue that historical accounts have downplayed the significance of the transition between these two communities thus giving the impression of an historical vacuum or suggesting the substitution of old theories by new ones more suitable to address conflictual phenomena. I turn to international relations theory to illuminate the nature of the opposition between these two communities. The paper analyzes the different uses of the “balance of power – a traditional IR theory concept – by economists including Kenneth Boulding, Jacob Viner, and Thomas Schelling and by other social scientists such as Quincy Wright and Anatol Rapoport. Different uses of this concept reveal how economists viewed the evolution of international relations in a period of drastic transformations. They also show the variety of political and ideological views of this group of social scientists.
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