The Cold War and the international political economy in the 1970s

This article reviews the scholarly literature on the international political economy (IPE) in the 1970s and considers the connections between the Cold War and the transformations of the liberal (or capitalist) international political economy. It presents the 1970s as a transitional decade that brought the ascent of globalisation and financial deregulation, the reorientation of advanced capitalist economies towards services and post-industrial production, and the end of the extensive growth patterns of the 1950s and 1960s. While the liberal IPE underwent dramatic changes during the 1970s, the Communist bloc experienced diminished rates of growth but not the kinds of dramatic economic restructuring that occurred in the West. These developments in the 1970s prefigured the Cold War's resolution in the 1980s. Situated in comparative context, the transformations of the liberal world economy during the 1970s exposed - and in some ways exacerbated - the relative backwardness of the Soviet Union's command economy, with decisive consequences for the legitimacy of the Communist regime. International economic change, in this view, precipitated the ideological and geopolitical developments that would bring the Cold War to its end.