Papers > By author > Ali Mona

One of the legacies of the 19th century still prevalent in contemporary economics and IPE is an uncritical embrace of methodological nationalism. (All the standard measurements of economic activity presume an economy defined by a national boundary.) Yet nation-based accounts cannot fully capture key phenomenon in the global economy. The same holds true for analyses of power – it is inadequate to look at state actors alone when transnational actors and alliances play an increasingly dominant role. In this article, I analyze how Anglo-America or the transatlantic axis has shaped the contemporary economic order. Fichtner (2017) and Oatley et al. (2013) powerfully capture how the Anglo-American hub (Wall Street – City of London) occupies the apex of global finance. But the power of Anglo-America extends far beyond the financial sphere. The pioneering IPE scholar Susan Strange (1991) argued that structural power has four key dimensions: finance, production, security (military) and knowledge. Employing Strange's matrix, I schematically map how these four dimensions of Anglo-American power have shaped the architecture of the post-war global régime. This genealogy of Anglo-America includes the forging of the international monetary system, the transatlantic pas de deux which birthed the Eurodollar markets; the embrace of neoliberal governmentality which has contributed to extreme levels of inequality and indebtedness in the Transatlantic; the joint partnership that initiated the Five Eyes supranational surveillance network and the ‘War on Terror'; as well as the consortium of transatlantic think-tanks advocating for a post-Brexit UK-US free trade zone. Exploring Blyth and Mattjhis's (2017) hypothesis that much of political-economic change is internally driven from weaknesses in a particular régime rather than external shocks, I conclude by assessing the effects of Trump's ‘America First' policies and Brexit on Anglo-American power in the international economic order.