Download or read book Nationalism and International Political Economy in Post-Soviet Eurasia written by Rawi Abdelal and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does nationalism affect the economic relations among states? We should know, because international political economy (IPE) already has something called the "Nationalist perspective." However, there is no nationalism in the Nationalist perspective. It is, rather, a masterful restatement of the Realist perspective: it is based on the distribution of power and economic statism. I argue that: nations are not equivalent to states; economic nationalism is not equivalent to economic statism, or mercantilism; and, therefore, a Nationalist perspective on international political economy (which, if it is to take nationalism seriously, must emphasize the causal power of socially constructed national identities) cannot be equivalent to the Realist perspective (which emphasizes the causal power of statism). In this article I also show that distinguishing the Nationalist from the Realist perspective on IPE is necessary to resolve the central empirical puzzle of the political economy of post-Soviet international relations: why the Eurasian regional economy has both disintegrated, among some states, and reintegrated, among others, during the first post-Soviet decade. After the Union collapsed, all post-Soviet states were economically dependent on Russia. However, post-Soviet governments interpreted their dependence in dramatically different ways: for some it was a reason to reintegrate, for others it was a security threat, while a third group was ambivalent about their dependence. I argue that differences in the national identities of post-Soviet societies led to these varying interpretations of the economic interdependence among them.