A capitalising foreign policy: Regulatory geographies and transnationalised state projects
| Author | Kanishka Jayasuriya,Priya Chacko |
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1354066117694702 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066117694702
European Journal of
International Relations
2018, Vol. 24(1) 82 –105
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066117694702
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A capitalising foreign policy:
Regulatory geographies and
transnationalised state projects
Priya Chacko
University of Adelaide, Australia
Kanishka Jayasuriya
Murdoch University, Australia
Abstract
Proposals for regional economic integration, namely, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the
Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and the One Belt One Road proposal,
have recently been driving the security dynamics of the Asian region. To explain
the growing ‘economic’ focus of states’ foreign policies, we need to go beyond the
dominant approaches in International Relations and International Political Economy,
which are limited in their analytical power because they often make a distinction
between politics/security and economics, and prioritise one over the other, rather than
seeing them as internally related. Drawing on Leon Trotsky’s theory of ‘uneven and
combined development’ and Nicos Poulantzas’s notion of ‘internalised transformations’,
we develop a ‘Poulantzian-uneven and combined development’ framework to argue that
the increased focus on economics in foreign policymaking represents a fundamental
change related to the transnationalisation of capitalist state-building projects. The paper
argues that while the Trans-Pacific Partnership reflected an attempt by the Obama
administration to fashion a new stage in the transnationalisation of American capital,
the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and One Belt One Road proposal
reflect an emerging China-centred transnationalised state project. We characterise the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and One Belt
One Road proposal as constituting different forms of a particular type of geoeconomic
strategy called ‘regulatory geographies’ because they entail the export of distinctive
modes of regulatory governance that aim to overcome key contradictions of uneven
and combined capitalist development in the US and China. As the recent demise of the
Corresponding author:
Priya Chacko, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, 5006, Australia.
Email: priya.chacko@adelaide.edu.au
694702EJT0010.1177/1354066117694702European Journal of International RelationsChacko and Jayasuriya
research-article2017
Article
Chacko and Jayasuriya 83
Trans-Pacific Partnership with the election of Donald Trump shows, however, these
transnationalised state projects generate resistance and contestation within, as well as
between, states.
Keywords
China, One Belt One Road, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, Trans-
Pacific Partnership, uneven and combined development, US
Introduction
The nature and character of foreign policymaking has been changing and this is reflected
in the commercialisation of foreign policy missions, instruments and discourses.
Increasingly, economic tools are being used to achieve policy objectives and policies are
being framed in the language of business and economics. For instance, strategic partner-
ships, a term reminiscent of business textbooks, have become ubiquitous, replacing the
more traditional language of alliances. Presidential and prime ministerial visits to foreign
countries often involve large business delegations. Another case in point is the emer-
gence of rival proposals for regional economic integration in Asia. In the past few years,
the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership
(RCEP) and One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiatives ‘moved from being a sideline to the
major rivalries and power dynamics in the region to being a central driver of them’
(Wesley, 2015: 481). While the TPP failed to win congressional support in the US and
has been abandoned by the new administration of Donald Trump, there is still a need to
understand the emergence of these new types of foreign policy initiatives because, as we
touch on in the concluding section of the article, this will help elucidate why they suc-
ceed or fail.
Dominant approaches in International Relations (IR) and International Political
Economy (IPE), however, are limited in their analytical power because they usually
make a distinction between politics and economics, and prioritise one over the other,
rather than seeing them as mutually constitutive (Desai, 2015; Murphy and Tooze,
1991). Specifically, approaches to the analysis of foreign policy in IR focus on politics
and states, while the discipline of IPE, despite having been established to find a ‘middle
ground between politics and economics’ (Strange, 1970: 33), has been focused on eco-
nomics and the international system, with little attention paid to the economics–politics
nexus in states’ foreign policies. This distinction between politics and economics is the
outcome of the assumption that under capitalism, given the detachment of the process
of production from the power of coercion, the political and the economic constitute
separate spheres and possess distinctive logics. This separation, as Wood (1981: 67) has
argued, reflected a ‘historical reality in capitalist society’ and gives rise to practices that
‘actually do divide the arenas of economic and political action, and actually do trans-
form certain essential political issues — struggles over domination and exploitation that
historically have been inextricably bound up with political power — into distinctively
“economic” issues’. Under the ‘real appearance’ of market equality and freedom in
capitalism, however, lies a distinctly political set of economic relations. As Wood (1981:
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