Governmental Regionalism: Power/ Knowledge and Neoliberal Regional Integration in Asia and Latin America

Abstract

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 Pacific 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 specified 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.