Susan Strange: A Personal Reflection

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Susan Strange: A Personal Reflection

Susan Strange’s scholarly career was a story of continuing innovation in the field of international studies. Her first major book, Sterling and British Policy. A Political Study of an International Currency in Decline ( 1971) dealt with the power relations surrounding international money. It gave substance to the idea of a merger of political and economic analysis. In the previous year, her article in the Chatham House journal International Affairs, "Intern ational Economics and International Relations: a case of mutual neglect" (April 1970) drew out of that research a manifesto that effectively launched International Political Economy (IPE) as a growing area of international studies.

Her States and Markets (1988) offered a broad framework that embraced different ideological perspectives: different values and purposes could be pursued within a realistic assessment of the forces and constraints at work in polit ical economy. She had nevertheless some concern lest the title of that book suggest a narrowing of the range of forces to the conventional international relations scholar’s limitation to states as sovereign actors and the conventional economist’s notion of market. States were primary but not exclusive actors in world politics, and markets had to be understood in terms of power relations, not an infinity of buyers and sellers.

In The Retreat of the State (1996) she expanded the objects of enquiry to include, for example, international accounting firms and organized crime syndicates. The broadening of enquiry has been continued by others to include bond rating agencies (by Timothy Sinclair) and other forms of private power in the realm between states and markets. There is in addition the whole field of resistance to dominant power through people-based groups such as the Mayan people’s revolt against NAFTA in Chiapas and the transnational mobilization of non-governmental movements that blocked the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. Susan’s work did not extend to the latter forces but their inclusion is a logical extension of her work.

Susan Strange insisted that IPE and international studies as a whole remain an open field: open to the insights of historians, geographers, sociologists and other disciplines as well as economists and political scientists; and open to an awareness of new forces that enter the scene of power relations. Like Chairman Mao’s view of revolution, the revolution she initiated in international studies had to be recurrently revived by bombarding the emerging citadels of new orthodoxies. She w as indefatigable in challenging the coiners of faddish terms like "regimes" and "global governance" to relate what they were writing about to the larger realities of power. She inspired many students and the work of many scholars, but she never formed a "school". Indeed, the notion of a "school" was the negation of the openness she wanted to see in scholarly enquiry.

Apart from the specific contributions of her work in the orientation of international studies, which has been outstanding in this late twentieth century, her lasting impact on scholarship may well be a matter of attitude, a conce ption of the way to approach scholarly endeavour and of the responsibility of the scholar.

On the relationship between the theoretical and the empirical, she was adamant that theory must be about something concrete. Theory can be a guide towards framing an enquiry (and she tried her hand at this in States and Markets) , but theory can only be developed usefully on the basis of something real that you know intimately. This conviction probably derived from her experience as a journalist; and extending the work habits of journalism into academic research she continued to probe for the motivations and perceptions of the people who act in world political economy. This is what gave her cause to intervene in many an academic debate by objecting: "That’s not how it works!" She was equally aware that theory does no t belong in some abstract heaven but always has a purpose bound to social and political time and space. Theory always has to be critically placed in its context.

There is a latent sociology of enquiry to be found in Susan Strange’s casual observations about the contributions of different scholars and the practices to be found in the knowledge industry, a sociology on the lines of Max Weber’s lec ture on science as a vocation. She emphasized the cross-disciplinary nature of some of the most innovative thinking in international studies — the relevancy of the historian Fernand Braudel, for instance. And she pointed to the contribution of the " ;loner" who was not affiliated to any group or school (Weber referred to the insights of "dilettantes"). The classical injunction to "Know thyself" came perhaps easily to someone like herself who entered academia from a previous outside experience. To understand how one’s own perspective on the world has been framed by history and circumstance is a necessary first step to understanding and then criticising others.

She had the ability to take distance from the kind of professionalism that focuses on careers and establishing exclusive protected zones of knowledge, while she encouraged the professionalism of integrity in the production and exchange of knowledge. She was impatient of academic pomposity and she challenged jargon in the name of clear thinking. While building and expanding new academic structures, she never lost contact with the outsider’s view of the academy, a constantly available r eflexive critique of one’s on-going work.

Susan had a strong personal commitment to encouraging the next generation of scholars. Both the London School of Economics and the European University Institute, where she taught, attract students from around the world; and those who h ave been formed in her influence are at work in many countries - a "world-wide invisible circle" as one of her former students puts it. Up to the very end of her life she devoted time to advising young researchers who sent her papers to read, a nd one of her last articles was contributed to a book project undertaken by a recent Dutch graduate of the European University Institute — a project that took off from one of the first joint efforts that Susan herself had participated in a quarter century previously.

A convinced European, she was at once an admirer and critic of United States policy, and she had an ambivalent relationship to American international relations scholarship. She seemed to see the United States as having the power and re sponsibility to initiate beneficial change in the world economy and particularly to lead in regulating world finance; but this potential was blocked by the constraints of a political system born of an 18th century society of farmers and artisan s ill-adapted to a global superpower, and by the dominance of factional interests. She criticized those American scholars who embraced the "decline of hegemony" thesis as offering justification for United States reluctance to assume its global responsibility. At the same time she was uneasy about how American power was being used in the world. This ambivalence between too little and too much America may be a characteristic European (and Canadian) dilemma.

Her work was appreciated and admired in the United States. This was shown by her election in 1995 as President of the (American) International Studies Association. But her work never entered the mainstream of American scholarship. A recent reader in international relations theory designed for American graduate teaching (Michael W Doyle and G John Ikenberry, New Thinking in International Relations Theory, 1997) contains only a passing reference to Susan Strange as a critic of t he "decline of hegemony" thesis. This relative neglect must be taken as a badge of honour rather than a failing. Despite her gregarious nature and remarkable ability to inspire students and senior scholars alike, and her success in building ac ademic institutions, she remained intellectually something of a "loner" — an independent critical spirit. I expect she would be proud about that.

Susan’s position on feminism shares the ambivalence of her relationship to America. Her presidential address to the International Studies Association in 1995 offended some younger women academics when she told them to have their babie s earlier rather than later and then look to their careers. The advice, unwelcome as it may have been to some who were struggling to make their way against obstacles in the university world, came from a deep understanding from personal experience of the discouragements afflicting women in the academic environment. Once, when I reported to her the frustration of a male working-class Brit, she shot back: "He should try being a woman." Yet as a strong person she had not much sympathy with repres enting oneself as a victim; and she had a keen sense of priorities when it came to family and career.

Family was probably the ultimate meaning in her life. It did not however detract in any way from her sense of responsibility to the academic calling. Rather it was a firm support to her work. She carried on her lecturing commitments in the United States and Canada through the tragic time of her son Mark’s death. Perhaps it was a help towards bearing the burden of grief. She was sustained by the support of her husband Cliff Selly throughout her last illness when she was seeing Ma d Money (1998) through the press and writing, among other things, a contribution to a festschrift for Robert Gilpin, one of the American scholars she most admired.

Over and above the creative insights of her writing and teaching and the considerable influence they have had on late 20th century scholarship was the impact of her personality. She showed us how to bear the responsibility o f the scholar — a responsibility to the community of scholars and also to the larger public community. And she showed us how to die. During the last months she looked death squarely in the eye bravely and without complaint or bitterness, and she devoted her remaining energies to completing some unfinished work and conveying reassurance and encouragement in conversation with her many friends. Cliff Selly put it best when he said: "we are fortified by the knowledge that she fulfilled most of her amb itions".

Robert W. Cox is Professor Emeritus at York University, Canada. He came to know Susan in the 1960s through their shared interest in international organisation.

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