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Governmental Regionalism: Power/
Knowledge and Neoliberal Regional
Integration in Asia and Latin America
Brendan Donegan
This paper presents a Foucauldian reading of regional integration
projects based on the model of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) as part of a strategy for the restructuring of
national economies along neoliberal lines. Looking at the cases of the
Asia Pacic Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the Free Trade Area
of the Americas (FTAA), the focus of the paper is on the roles played
by technical ‘experts’ in depoliticising decisions and issue-areas,
understood as a central element of enabling this strategy. Moves
toward regional governance can only be considered as a policy
option at the national level if it is possible to distinguish ‘technical’
from ‘political’ within the domestic realm: only an area specied as
‘non-political’ – that is, as posing no threat to national sovereignty
– can be governed at a regional level through inter-state cooperation.
Consequently, a necessary prerequisite for moving towards regional
governance of national economic space is the establishment of a
hegemonic political rationality that conceptualises the economic as
technical and distinct from the political.
In the literature on regionalism, the European Union (EU) is sometimes
presented as the endpoint on a continuum from least to most integrated
forms of regionalism.1 It might be suggested that the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) sits next to the EU on this continuum.
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F.S. Northedge Essay 2006 – The Northedge Essay Competition was established in
1986 in memory of one of the founders of Millennium, Professor F. S. Northedge.
It furthers a Millennium tradition of publishing well-argued student work in a
journal open to new issues and innovative approaches to International Relations.
It is open to students currently pursuing or who have recently completed a
degree in International Relations or a related eld. The editors would like
to thank all those who submitted their work to this year’s competition. A
shortlist of exceptional entries underwent academic peer review. The winner
was then chosen by the editors on the basis of the essay’s contribution to the
advancement of the eld, originality of the argument, and scholarly presentation.
1. See Victor Bulmer-Thomas and Sheila Page, ‘Trade relations in the Americas:
Mercosur, the FTAA and the EU’, in The United States and Latin America: The
© Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2006. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol.35 No. 1, pp23-51
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However, NAFTA is qualitatively different from the EU in at least two
ways. First, unlike the EU NAFTA includes the US and is a North-South
grouping2 As such, it is haunted by what Mittelman and Falk have
dubbed ‘global hegemony’ in a way that the EU is not.3 Second, NAFTA
primarily relies on legal dynamics to drive integration forward, while the
EU places more emphasis on the political dynamics of intergovernmental
negotiation.4
With these distinctions in mind, this article argues that the
regionalism of NAFTA-model regional integration projects can be
understood as a component of the broader neoliberal globalisation project.
The neoliberal project has as its final objective a particular programme
of global government, that is, a conceptual map of a particular way in
which social relations might be organised in global space. Neoliberal
regionalism is less a way of opening borders than a way of restructuring
national economies towards this final objective at a more rapid pace than
that of multilateral liberalisation efforts.5
However, there is an apparent paradox at the heart of the neoliberal
globalisation project: its conceptual map is designed according to the
interests of a nascent global elite, a transnational capitalist class (TCC)
whose interests are often at odds with those of the ‘average’ citizen.6 This
TCC seeks to achieve ‘across-the-board liberalisation’,7 understood as
‘extensive domestic deregulation, apart from trade liberalisation, aimed
at reducing the state’s role in economic life in order to yield efficiency
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New Agenda, eds. Victor Bulmer-Thomas and James Dunkerley (London:
Harvard University Press, 1999), 76.
2. At least unlike the EU before its recent incorporation of the Central and
Eastern European states. This signicant development is beyond the scope of this
article, but the article’s argument nevertheless has relevance to it.
3. James H. Mittelman and Richard Falk, ‘Global Hegemony and Regionalism’,
in The Globalization Syndrome: Transformation and Resistance, ed. James H.
Mittelman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
4. Ivan Bernier and Martin Roy, ‘NAFTA and Mercosur: Two Competing
Models?’, in The Americas in Transition: The Contours of Regionalism, eds.
Gordon Mace and Louis Belanger (London: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 87.
5. Kenneth C. Shadlen, ‘Exchanging Development for Market Access? Deep
Integration and Industrial Policy under Multilateral and Regional-Bilateral Trade
Agreements’, Review of International Political Economy 12, no. 5 (2005).
6. The TCC is comprised of four main groups: owners of transnational capital,
globalising bureaucrats and politicians, globalising professionals, and merchants
and media. See Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001), 17. See also William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism:
Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World (Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, 2004); and Kees van der Pijl, Transnational Classes and
International Relations (London: Routledge, 1998).
7. Sandra Masur, ‘The North American Free Trade Agreement: Why It’s in the
Interest of US Business’, Columbia Journal of World Business 26 (1991): 103, cited
in Mark Rupert, Ideologies of Globalization: Contending Visions of a New World
Order (London: Routledge, 2000), 58.
