The concluding chapter summarizes the case for embracing a wider approach to the deep intellectual roots of the IPE field in the pre-1945 period that goes beyond the common focus on just thinkers from Europe and the United States and the debate between economic liberals, neomercantilists, and Marxists. The wider approach of this volume highlights important contributions made by thinkers from outside Europe and the United States in the pre-1945 era as well as important debates both within each of the three orthodoxies and with perspectives beyond them. In addition to providing a more comprehensive history, this wider approach can help to strengthen efforts to foster more “global conversations” in the field of IPE today, to improve interpretations of contemporary political discourse as well as to contribute to the study of topics that are attracting growing interest within current IPE scholarship.

This chapter examines some distinctive ideas about economic regionalism that emerged during the interwar years and the early 1940s. Some arose in the context of Japanese debates about a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity, of which the most sophisticated was Akamatsu Kaname’s “Wild Geese Flying Pattern theory” of regional economic integration. Others were associated with post-1933 German designs for Europe’s economy, including “Schachtian” managed bilateralism (Hjalmar Schacht), fascist multilateralism (Walter Funk), and visions of a “great-space economy” (Friedrich Zimmermann). The final example comes from Peru’s Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre who advanced a quite different anti-imperialist vision of regionalism initially through what he called “Indoamerican economic nationalism” within Latin America and then via a wider vision of “democratic Interamericanism without empire” that was inclusive of the United States.