This article is motivated by two trends in international relations (IR): the general trend toward global neoliberalism, and the discursive turn in IR scholarship. Neoliberalism, while not fully practised anywhere, has become the dominant discourse and normative measure of economic policy ideas around which policy debates coalesce. This all is the more noticeable among the lesser-developed countries. This article attempts to explain this gradual shift in the global political economy where most discussions centre around a core set of ideas and beliefs about how the system ought to function. Given that evidence of this ideational/discursive shift predates the end of the Cold War and changed out of step with the steady growth in economic interdependence, new approaches are warranted. What is argued here is that the study of social interaction among states will shed considerable light onto how the international system has developed into its current state.