Critical Asian Studies

This article was downloaded by: [Korea University]
On: 11 January 2015, At: 22:41

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,
37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Critical Asian Studies

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcra20
After neoliberal globalization

Richard Higgott
Published online: 08 Aug 2006.
To cite this article: Richard Higgott (2004) After neoliberal globalization, Critical Asian Studies, 36:3, 425-444, DOI:
10.1080/1467271042000241612
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1467271042000241612
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained
in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the
Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and
are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and
should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for
any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever
or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of
the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic
reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any
form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://
www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Critical Asian Studies
36:3 (2004), 425-444
Higgott/After Neoliberal Globalization
AFTER NEOLIBERAL
GLOBALIZATION
Downloaded by [Korea University] at 22:41 11 January 2015
The “Securitization” of U.S. Foreign

Economic Policy in East Asia
Richard Higgott
ABSTRACT: This article traces the “securitization” of U.S. foreign economic policy in
the administration of George W. Bush. It does so with reference to U.S. economic
policy in East and Southeast Asia. It argues that in the context of U.S. economic and
military preponderance in the world order, the United States has been unable to re-
sist the temptation to link foreign economic and security policy. While there was evi-
dence of the securitization of economic globalization in U.S. policy from day one of
the Bush administration, it was 9/11 that firmed up this trend. For the key members
of the Bush foreign policy team, globalization is now seen not simply in neoliberal
economic terms, but also through the lenses of the national security agenda of the
United States. Economic globalization is now not only a benefit but also a “security
problem.” The attacks on 9/11 offered the opportunity for what we might call the
“unilateralist-idealists” in the Bush administration, to set in train their project for a
post-sovereign approach to U.S. foreign policy.
Introduction
The conflicts under investigation in the essays in this two-part series are those
emerging in neoliberal globalization in the early years of the twenty-first cen-
tury. The aim of this paper is to pick out but one element of that process — the
growing connection between the economic and security elements of contem-
porary globalization. It does so with reference to the broad change in the eco-
nomics-security nexus of the predominant global power of this era, the United
States. Then, using U.S. economic relations with East and Southeast Asia as a
ISSN 1467-2715 print/1472-6033 online / 03 / 000425-20 ©2004 BCAS, Inc. DOI:10.1080/1467271042000241612
case study, it illustrates the policy implications of this changing relationship be-
tween economics and security. The broad argument of the paper is that we are
seeing the “securitization” of neoliberal (that is, principally economic) global-
ization by the United States. The specific argument is that this process can be
seen in play in the application of U.S. policy toward East and Southeast Asia.
While 9/11 is a milestone in the evolving economics-security nexus in U.S.
foreign policy, this is not to suggest that the world began anew at that time, nor
that economics and security had ever been perfectly discrete domains of public
policy in the United States. Rather, 9/11 brought into focus some trends that had
already been developing in the global order in the closing stages of the twentieth
century; key among them being a stronger unilateral exercise by the United States
of its politico-military and technological power in an era of preeminence.1
Borrowing, very loosely to be sure, from the Copenhagen School of security
studies, securitization is defined as a socially constructed, contextual speech act
and a process in which “an issue is framed as a security problem.”2 Securitiza-

tion is applied in this article as a heuristic device to demonstrate how some ele-
ments of U.S. foreign economic policy can be subsumed or subjugated within
the wider contextual discourse of the U.S. security agenda. This liberal interpre-
tation the Copenhagen School sees securitization as a process in which the
securitizing actors — in this case, the political leadership of the Bush adminis-
tration, the relevant government agencies, and interested lobbyists and pres-
sure groups — have sought to treat economic policy in a manner different from
the more traditional rules and practices of economic policy-making and imple-
mentation. What the paper tries to do is identify the augmentation of securitiza-
tion as a speech act in U.S. foreign economic policy.3
The use of the concept of securitization, as one critique wrongly asserts, does
not deny the existence of a long history of linkage between economics and secu-
rity in U. S. foreign policy or that securitization can be simply equated with con-
temporary U. S. trade strategy. This is clearly not the case. Nor does the use of
the concept of securitization here ignore the specificity of historical context.4
Indeed, this article is about the securitization of globalization as a wider epochal
discourse in which to understand the elements of U.S. foreign policy addressed
in this article. Economic globalization, it will be argued, is now seen not simply
in neoliberal economic terms in the United States, but also through the lenses
of the national security agenda. Economic globalization is now not only a bene-
fit but also a “security problem.” While there was evidence of the securitization
of globalization in U.S. policy from day one of the Bush administration, it was
9/11 that offered the opportunity for that group of what we might call the
“unilateralist-idealists,” or what William Pfaff calls the “Washington Utopians”5
in the Bush administration, to set in train their project for a new approach to
U.S. foreign policy.
In this discursive turn, foreign economic policy is declared in need of special
and differential treatment (to borrow a phrase from trade policy). It is the iden-
tification of the “existential threat” (for example, a previously not understood
threat such as terrorism on U.S. soil) that generates a turn toward the speech act
that the Copenhagen School calls securitization. It is in this context that securiti-
426 Critical Asian Studies 36:3 (2004)
zation, is a heuristic device. Securitization, to recast Buzan et alia “is the move
that takes…[foreign economic policy]…beyond the established rules of the
game and frames the issue as either a special kind of politics or as above poli-
tics.”6 The audience for this rearticulation of foreign economic policy under the
Bush administration — America’s international economic partners — are made
aware of the salience of the relationship between these two, normally discur-
sively discrete, if never practically discrete, domains of economic and security
policy and the accompanying expectation that they respond accordingly.
The aim of securitization is thus to justify the imposition of conditions and
measures in the area of foreign economic policy that would not usually be con-
sidered the norm in this policy domain. As will be shown in the discussion of
U.S. policy toward trade bilateral relations with Asia, the securitization dis-
course is one of reward and threat. It is the exceptional circumstances of the
post-9/11 “war on terrorism” — what the Copenhagen School describes as the
“existential threat” — that has allowed the securitizing actors (the Bush admin-
istration) to adopt policies and procedures extra-ordinary to the norms of the
foreign economic policy domain. As a case study, this article will show how U.S.
policy toward East and Southeast Asia is part of this wider process of change.
This article is in two parts. Part 1 identifies the principal elements of a
securitized foreign policy and some of the idealist-unilateralist underpinnings
of contemporary U.S. foreign policy. Part 2 examines some implications of the
securitization of U.S. economic foreign policy. While securitization can be seen
across the spectrum of U.S. foreign economic policy interests — most notably in
the Middle East — this article illustrates the argument by way of reference to
contemporary U.S. economic policy in East Asia.
U.S. Preponderance and the Securitization

of Foreign Economic Policy
In essence, both the scholarly literature and the empirical historical evidence
suggest that multipolarity creates incentives for economic integration and co-
operation between allies and enhanced economic interaction as a major instru-
ment of cooperative statecraft. By contrast, bipolarity, as, say, during the cold
war, encouraged the separation of economics and politics. The analysis of
unipolarity — of the kind that characterizes the contemporary era — is often
less well defined. Even if we resist the structural realist assumptions about the
independence of state power as an analytical variable in international relations,
the early twenty-first century nevertheless appears to confirm Michael Mastan-
duno’s argument that a unipolar structure will see the hegemonic state orga-
nize economic policy and practice “to line up behind and reinforce its national
security strategy.”7
In contrast to a previous unipolar moment — in the aftermath of World War II
when the United States, defining its national interest broadly, used its unchal-
lenged power (material and ideational) to set in place an international institu-
tional infrastructure of global economic management — in the twenty-first cen-
tury the United States defines national interest much more narrowly. At the
general level, and without elaboration here, policy in the first years of the
Higgott/After Neoliberal Globalization 427
twenty-first century turned its back on institutional arrangements that for half a
century were at the base of its more multilateral view of world order. Indeed, re-
cent changes in U.S. positions, policies, and behavior on the key issues of eco-
nomic globalization, particularly its increasingly unilateralist attitude toward
the reform of the key instruments of international economic management
(the World Trade Organization [WTO], International Monetary Fund [IMF],
and World Bank), and especially following the Asian financial crises, are now as
well understood, as are other aspects of its unilateral behavior (such as walking
away from the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court, the Germ
Weapons Ban, and Trade in Light Arms Treaty).8
While security issues and state power, especially military preponderance, are
clearly important, also salient in explaining U.S. behavior are ideational influ-
ences (a presently dominant neoconservative ideology) and the changing na-
ture of neoliberal economic globalization. Historical perspective is another fac-
tor. As Robert Jervis argues, “nations enjoying unrivalled power, always define
their national interest in increasingly expansive terms.”9 And U.S. policy has
been very much constituted by where the United States stands in either a bipo-
lar, multipolar, or unipolar historical moment. This is reflected in U.S. policy in
the cold war and post-cold war eras. During the bipolar cold war the major secu-
rity rival, the USSR, was not the major economic rival. The West and East were ef-
fectively separate economic entities.10 In this context, the United States strongly
demarcated the practice of its economic and security policies. This is not to sug-
gest, of course, that issue-specific policies were not part of some wider and com-
prehensive strategic thinking. Indeed, in the economic domain, wider strategy
found practice through the Marshall Plan to rebuild its allies — and indeed for-
mer military rivals, Japan and Germany — in a way that reflected a complemen-
tary Western economic order but a competitive East-West security divide.
As a reading of the late 1980s and early 1990s attests, cold war tensions de-
clined, the Soviet Empire came to an end, and economic competition between
the United States and its politico-strategic partners increased. This was also to
be a period of heightened economic tension between the United States and Eu-
rope across the Atlantic and the United States and Japan across the Pacific.11 Eco-
nomic growth in Europe and Asia was such that U.S. economic primacy, and in-
deed, the Anglo-American way of organizing a capitalist economy, was thought
to be under challenge. Tense relations were reflected in a range of policies that
saw the economics-security nexus in foreign policy becoming fuzzier than it had
been during the bipolar cold war era.12
This was to change further by the late 1990s. The United States had enjoyed a
decade of steady growth, the high-tech boom was in full flight and the Asian Eco-
nomic Miracle had run out of steam across the board. Following sustained stag-
nation in Japan and financial crisis in other parts of Asia, the “miracle” was pro-
nounced dead. The atmospherics of the U.S.-Asia relationship saw Asian hubris
of the early 1990s give way to American schadenfreude in the late 1990s.13 U.S.
preponderance was firmly established — unipolarity seemed to be more than
just a moment. The desire of both the late Clinton and early Bush administra-
tions to preserve preponderance led to the greater harmonization of economics
and security considerations in U.S. policy. The trend was in place prior to 9/11
and was evident in relations toward Europe and Asia in general and toward an
economically strengthening China in particular.
If there is a correlation between the degree of military dominance of the in-
ternational system by the United States and the manner in which it uses eco-
nomic policy as an arm of security policy, then the closer integration of eco-
nomic and security policy arguably has its origins back in the second half of the
1990s (especially after that series of financial crises that hit Asia, Russia, Eastern
Europe, and Latin America). But it was 9/11 that offered the unilateralist-ideal-
ists the opportunity to set in train their agenda for a post-sovereign approach to
U.S. foreign policy.
The Economics-Security Nexus and Contemporary U.S. Foreign Policy

For students of the political economy of globalization on the one hand, or secu-
rity studies on the other, the economics-security nexus is not always an easy re-
lationship to work out. Indeed, it is often confused, always problematic. Thus it
is important to distinguish between two types of this relationship in order to
understand what is happening in U.S. policy in the contemporary era:
Type 1: the subordination of economic policy to security policy. Foreign eco-
nomic policy supports wider politico-military policy in the international do-
main. This is the traditional understanding of the relationship between high
politics and low politics. It would also be the traditional view from defense es-
tablishments of the right balance in the relationship.
Type 2: the subordination of security policy to economic interests. From the
point of view of the prevailing hegemonic power, this approach is replete with
assumptions about the need only to make the world safe for the liberal eco-
nomic enterprise.
The second relationship, the subordination of security policy to economic
policy, was the dominant characteristic of U.S. policy in the late twentieth cen-
tury, that is, the era of neoliberal globalization proper; basically that period from
the time of détente and the collapse of the Soviet empire through to the financial
crises of the second half of the 1990s. But it is the first relationship, the subordina-
tion of economic policy to security policy, that has become more prominent since
the late Clinton/early Bush era, with massive accentuation following 9/11. The
change of direction — toward the securitization of economic policy — is to be ex-
plained in both ideational and material ways. Three factors are important:
The first factor is the seemingly paradoxical juxtaposition of the consolida-
tion of U.S. economic primacy after the financial crises of the second half of the
1990s with the increasingly fractious and contested debate over the manage-
ment of the global economic system, as captured in the shift from the Washing-
ton Consensus to the post-Washington Consensus era that accompanied the
growing backlash against globalization after Seattle, 1999.14 The second factor
was the election of George W. Bush and the arrival of a different ideological tra-
dition at the helm in U.S. foreign policy. The third factor was the post-9/11 decla-
ration of war on terrorism. Factors two and three have coalesced to effect a ma-
jor change in the reading of U.S. foreign policy.
Since the U.S. “victory” in the cold war a view has developed in key quarters
of the U.S. foreign policy community that a new system should be advanced to
replace the previous bipolar structure. This view is captured, without a trace of
irony or doubt, in the title of Michael Mandelbaum’s book, Ideas that Con-
quered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Cen-
tury.15 These ideas — peace as a method of organizing international relations,
democracy as the optimal form of government, and free markets as a way to
structure economic life — are the central rhetorical core of contemporary
American idealism. This view is also captured in George Bush’s own words at a
West Point graduation ceremony in June 2002 and in the recent National Secu-
rity Strategy of the United States of America. These two documents provide the
blueprint for what Edwards Rhodes describes as “the imperial logic of Bush’s
liberal agenda.”16
Historically, there are basically two lines of contest that permeate the U.S. for-
eign policy tradition. The contemporary period can be schematized in matrix

form.17 On a horizontal axis we can identify the objectives in which we have a
tradition running from idealism to realism. On a vertical axis we can identify a
tradition running from multilateralism to unilateralism. The key distinction in
the current administration is between the unilateralist-idealists and the unilat-
eralist-realists (boxes 4 and 3 respectively).
Table 1. The Philosophical Objectives of U.S. Foreign Policy
Idealism Realism
Box 1 Box 2
Multilateralism Liberal Internationalists Realist Managers
M
E Joseph Nye Henry Kissinger
A
Box 4 Box 3
N
S Unilateralism Neo-Conservatives/ Isolationists/Sovereignists
Post-Sovereignists The American Cause and
New American Century The American Conservative
Influenced by the New American Century Project (box 4) the unilater-

alist-idealist argue that, in the absence of a better alternative and with few con-
straints on its behavior, the United States should develop a Pax Americana. This
should be global in scope and should aim to create a world that accepts and/or
acquires American values. The essence of this view is captured in several key
concepts — regime change for failed or rogue states, war against terrorism, na-
tion building, etc. In its application it is a language, described by Robert
Skidelsky as the “linguistic basis of an imperial ideology” that distinguishes be-
tween good and evil and rejects moral relativism.18
To be fair to George Bush he makes it very easy for the world to understand
his position. America, he says without equivocation, has a “moral duty” to create
“a balance of power that favors freedom.”19 As Rhodes argues, “America’s global
military power allows it to dictate the rules of international discourse and this is
not an ambivalent discourse open to negotiation.”20 Bush’s language is symp-
tomatic of a desire — present not only in U.S. foreign policy since the time of
Woodrow Wilson, but also long present in U.S. theorizing about development
— now finding full voice in the Bush administration, to underwrite U.S. security
by bringing order to the postcolonial world. 21 Bush sees the role of the United
States as not simply to defend liberalism and freedom in America but to expand
these benefits to others. As he notes, “The requirements of freedom apply fully
to Africa and Latin America and the entire Islamic world.”22 Sovereignty cannot
be used as a shield for corrupt and ruthless governments to thwart people’s as-
pirations for liberalism and freedom. As the National Security Agenda says, “No
nation owns these aspirations and no nation is exempt from them.”23
The imperial — or post-sovereign — element of this strategy was not present
in Bush’s foreign policy agenda from the outset. Indeed, the agenda when he
was running for president in 2000 was to avoid foreign entanglements.24 Deter-
rence and containment were the order of the day. But, since 9/11, this more con-
servative agenda has now been shelved for a more assertive — indeed preemp-
tive — posture characterized by Peter Spiro as “post-sovereigntist.”25 The

bedrock assumptions of sovereignty, as we have known them for much of the
post-Westphalian era — the center of authority, the origin of law, and the source
of individual and collective security within designated boundaries that distin-
guished the domesticated interior from the anarchical exterior — are chal-
lenged by the notion of preemption at the heart of the modern Bush Doctrine.
The more radical post-sovereign order envisaged by the Bush administration
will be underwritten by U.S. military power, not by the collective approval of a
wider community. As Rhodes notes, “America’s sovereign responsibilities super-
sede its commitment to international institutions.”26 This is not, of course, new.
The United States has a history of ambivalence in its attitude toward multi-
lateralism. A long-standing belief of U.S. leaders of all persuasions has been that
conducting foreign policy through international institutions is but one option
among many rather than that there might be any sense of obligation to operate
in this manner.27
The language of the unilateralist-idealists is to be contrasted with that of the
isolationist-realists (box 3). The isolationist-realists would withdraw troops
from overseas deterrence bases and reinstate protectionist measures. In its most
extreme forms — for example in the views of The American Conservative and the
American Cause — the isolationist position calls for withdrawal from all global
organizations that “threaten American sovereignty,” an end to financial support
to the IMF and the World Bank, withdrawal of ground troops from Europe and
Asia, and no new membership in security organizations such as NATO. These
differences between unilateralist-idealists and unilateralist-realists are real but
both see multilateral dialogue as a constraint on U.S. interests and action.
The argument of the unilateralist-idealist finds its fullest articulation in con-
temporary U.S. policy in Iraq.28 But the removal of Saddam Hussein should be
seen as one episode in a wider agenda for a world the United States “seeks to
create” and the manner in which it proposes to undertake this task.29 Unilateral
action, backed by American military power, is the modus operandi to be
adopted. Much of the preceding argument is well understood. But it is in this
wider context — of changed thinking in U.S. foreign policy under the Bush ad-
ministration — that what I have chosen to call the “securitization” of economic
policy should be located. This is discussed in the next section.
The Implications of Securitization

At one level it is inevitable in the post-9/11 era that the reassertion of the geo-se-
curity agenda over the geoeconomic agenda (which prevailed in the 1990s hey-
day of neoliberal globalization) should result in wider policy change. Moreover,
the weakened U.S. economy of the early twenty-first century — which does not
contradict the argument that we live in a unipolar hegemonic moment — has
seen the administration think more about the degree to which the security
agenda could also be a prop to the U.S. domestic economy.
U.S. economic policy is increasingly framed as a security question and global-
ization is now seen not simply through rose-tinted neoliberal economic (de-
regulatory and liberalizing) lenses, but also through the less-rosy-colored lenses
of the national security agenda. Specifically, economic globalization is seen not

only as an economic benefit, but also as a security “problem.” In the context of
the New Security Agenda, economic policy becomes an explicit arm of security
policy. This trend can be seen across the spectrum of U.S. economic policy —
not only toward the neoliberal economic globalization project in general but
also in specific policies toward the international economic institutions (the IMF,
the World Bank) and especially toward the WTO in the Doha Multilateral Trade
Negotiations (MTN) Round; in bilateral economic relations with the European
Union (EU), where the nexus between economic and security relations is now
an integral part of its wider security agenda in the wake of the split over military
involvement in Iraq and in the economic relationship with Asia.
Contrary to some of the more pietistic beliefs that prevailed in the 1990s hy-
per-globalist literature, globalization does not eliminate more traditional un-
derstandings of inter-state competition between the major powers.30 Nor does
it eliminate competition between various sectors of the ruling economic elites
of the major powers. As Marxists, and many non-Marxists, would argue, the in-
terests of “capital” can be expected to split between sections that are global and
sections that are more nationalist in character. In the United States, the prime
example of that section that is more nationalist than global is the so-called mili-
tary industrial complex.
In the early-mid 1990s, what we might call the heyday of the global neoliberal
project prior to the beginning of the anti-globalization backlash, global capital
received substantial support from the U.S. administration. To give one example,
Clinton’s support of a strong dollar policy to ensure re-stimulation of Germany
and Japan — the largest markets for the growing U.S. service industries — was
the kind of policy one would expect from a genuinely neoliberal globalization
perspective. By contrast, the Bush administration has shown itself to be more
nationalist than neoliberal in its attitudes toward the drivers of economic glob-
alization. Its policies are geared to rebooting the U.S. economy at the expense of
others. This can be seen at its crudest in the contracting policies adopted in Iraq
and more subtly (just) in the case of the support for decline in value of the U.S.
dollar against the euro. While the U.S. government would resist this assertion,
the 25 percent plus depreciation of the dollar in less than two years should not
be read merely as a purely market-driven correction. Rather, as Walden Bello
notes, it should be seen as part of an implicit-beggar-thy-neighbor strategy to
enhance U.S. competitiveness.31 In short, policies geared toward controlling
globalization, unlike in the more genuinely market-driven period of the last de-
cades of the twentieth century — have had a much stronger place in U.S. policy
since the advent of the Bush administration.
Similarly, the Bush administration is, at best, ambivalent toward the interna-
tional institutions of multilateral global economic governance. For example,
the WTO is now seen as a site at which it cannot always be guaranteed to secure
its own way. There are two reasons for this. First, this is the one international in-
stitutional arena where collective European power is closer to par with that of
the United States. The EU, impressively and in contrast to many other areas of
policy, speaks and acts mostly with one voice in the WTO. Second, the creation
of the dispute settlement mechanism (DSM), developed during the Uruguay

Round and enshrined in the WTO, applies to the United States as much as to any
other state. There is a strong feeling in large quarters of the U.S. policy commu-
nity that in signing on to the WTO/DSM — effectively swapping its aggressive uni-
lateralist trade policy of the 1970s and 1980s for the “multilateral assertiveness”
of the DSM — the United States failed to appreciate the manner in which the con-
straints of the DSM would bite it as much as other WTO contracting parties.32
Indeed, the United States has lost several disputes under the new dispute set-
tlement system in the years since the abortive Seattle and Cancun ministerial
meetings of 1999 and 2003. There was outrage in the United States in early 2003
at the WTO ruling that allowed the EU to impose US$4 billion in trade sanctions
on the United States as compensation in a dispute it won over U.S. tax subsidies
to exporters. Similar indignation accompanied the November 2003 ruling
against the temporary steel tariffs imposed by the current Bush administration
and the 2004 ruling on the illegality of support to the cotton industry. Growing
hostility to the WTO in U.S. policy circles is not only among the unilateralist-iso-
lationists, but also amongst the unilateralist-idealists. The hostility represents
change overtime. Historically, U.S. commitments to multilateralism have been
stronger in the economic domain than in other policy areas. But in what has
been a continual tension between unilateralism and multilateralism the unilat-
eralist urge has gained the upper hand once again. Nowhere is this better illus-
trated than in the contrast between U.S. rhetorical commitments to a successful
Doha MTN Round, with its increasing recourse to bilateral free trade, or more
accurately preferential trade, agreements discussed in the next section.
Asia: Hubs and Spokes All the Way Down

U.S. economic relations with East Asia have been “securitized.” This can be seen
not only in policy toward the Asia Pacific regional institutions, but also in bilat-
eral economic relations. Even prior to 9/11, Asian observers had increasingly
evaluated APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum) as a tool of U.S. for-
eign policy. APEC’s failure to provide any meaningful response to the biggest
economic crisis in the Asia Pacific region since 1945 (the financial crisis of the
second half of the 1990s) made it, if not irrelevant, then less important, for many
Asian members.33 The resistance of Asian policy-makers to a strengthened APEC
after the financial crisis was caused not only by the lack of tangible benefits but
also by a fear of U.S. dominance within the organization.34 APEC had always
struggled to reconcile its regional focus with the wider agendas of the United
States. APEC’s concentration on facilitating contacts in the corporate and pri-
vate sector, accompanied by an almost total neglect of development of an
intra-regional network at the wider civil society level, has resulted in a weak or
nonexistent sense of community. As a consequence, it has failed to provide
much-needed political legitimacy for the wider regional neoliberal economic
project.
Most immediately, the manner in which the United States has treated APEC in
the wake of 9/11 has, in large part, confirmed these previously held Asian per-
ceptions. Throughout the 1990s, as is now well told in the voluminous second-
ary literature, the Asia Pacific had been a major focus of attention for U.S. foreign
economic policy. It was an important part of its neoliberal global economic
agenda. APEC was to be an important vehicle for this. It was meant to be a key
liberalizing agent in the wider Asia Pacific, evinced by the U.S. attempts to use
APEC to secure Early Voluntary Sectoral Liberalisation (EVSL) in key areas.35
EVSL was blocked in the region, however, notably by Japan, but also with the
support of other smaller players. Following 9/11, U.S. interests in regions of the
world other than the Middle East were placed firmly on the back burner. Policy
began to reflect a declining American concern for the viability of an economi-
cally focused organization such as APEC if it does not contribute toward U.S.
policy on the privileged issue of the containment of terrorism.
Nothing illustrates the point better than the three post-9/11 summits (Shang-
hai, 2001, Mexico, 2002, and Bangkok, 2003). At all three, most Asian leaders
felt the economic agenda had been hijacked by President Bush to galvanize sup-
port against the war on terrorism in general and support for the military coali-
tion against Iraq in particular. Few of the Asian leaders present at these summits
doubted Bush’s contention that terrorism and economic development were
linked, but most felt that the balance, with its overriding focus on security, was
wrong for APEC. By the end of the Bangkok summit, this trend had, however,
been largely confirmed. While important APEC-related bodies from the re-
search and corporate sector complained, as did some Muslim-dominated coun-
tries, terrorist activity in Southeast Asia had brought a grudging acceptance of
the Bush agenda.36
Not all questioning of APEC’s continued utility stems from current U.S. pol-
icy. Rivalry between various Asian integration projects and APEC is not new. In-
dependently of the position of the United States toward APEC, policy elites in
Asia, as far back as Prime Minister Mahathir’s suggestions of an East Asian caucus
in APEC have been reconsidering the benefits of regionalism without the “Pa-
cific Caucasians.”37 In particular, U.S. opposition to an Asian Monetary Fund in
1997 has sewed the seeds for further polarization and bolstered the develop-
ment of a dialogue between Southeast and Northeast Asia on this and other is-
sues. Since the turn of the century, regular Asean summits have been expanded
by the participation of Japan, China, and South Korea in Asean+3 (or APT)
meetings. Steps in the search for a new monetary regionalism have been nu-
merous.38
Does this represent a “new regionalism” in East Asia without a central role for
the United States? It is too early to tell. If not a new regionalism then it may at
least reflect a “new realism” on the part of Asian leaders in the wake of the finan-
cial crises of the 1990s and other contemporaneous changes in regional mood.
Irrespective of the explanations of the Asian financial crises, the closing years of
the twentieth century convinced Asian regional policy elites, as even influential
Americans such as Fred Bergsten noted, that “Asians no longer want to be in
thrall to Washington or the West when trouble hits in.”39 Such views, acknowl-
edging the degree to which East Asian states felt that they were “both let down
and put upon by the West” in the crisis, are rare among U.S. observers. As is the
recognition that a more purpose-designed, specifically East Asian, response to
certain policy issues was neither uninteresting nor unreasonable in the circum-
stances. The point for this article is that the United States, since 9/11, has been
largely disinterested in Asia-specific, regionally inspired cooperative initiatives in
the economic domain. This lack of interest would have been hard to envisage just
a few years ago.
Asian concerns were also a reflection of the potential destabilizing effect on
the international trade agenda of the enhanced unilateral character of U.S. pol-
icy that has accompanied the election of the Bush administration. While the
rhetoric of the “objective market” remains strong, the impact of “subjective poli-
tics” on markets is never far away. Nowhere is this better seen than in the rela-
tionship between the U.S. government’s rhetorical support for the multilateral
trade regime on the one hand and its practice toward trade policy in the early
twenty-first century on the other. The imposition of emergency tariffs in “sensi-
tive U.S. sectors” — on steel imports and increased agricultural subsidies in the
Farm Bill in 2001 — when accompanied by the constant U.S. hectoring of Japan,
Korea, and Europe to end protection and subsidies to their sensitive sectors
highlighted the marked disconnect between the rhetoric and practice of U.S.
trade policy. The same can be said for its interest in bilateral trading relation-
ships, which are now a key element of U.S. trade policy in Asia.
Interest in bilateral trade arrangements is in fact a complex matter, deter-
mined by a number of factors of an economic as well as a wider foreign policy
nature. For many reasons the Doha MTN Round is making slow progress, not
the least because of the increasingly forceful articulation of a “developing country
position” as the Round lengthens. But there can be little doubt that the growing
unilateralism of U.S. policies and Washington’s interest in bilateral preferential
trading relationships (PTAs) is at one and the same time both a symptom and a
cause of this malaise. At the very least, this unilateralist posture casts doubt on the
priority that the U.S. accords to securing a successful MTN Round since it clearly
detracts from full U.S. attention to the Round. In trenchant form, even by his stan-
dards, Jagdish Bhagwati argues that the United States has taken its eye off the
multilateral ball. It has, as he says, “frittered its attention on piffling bilaterals

that threaten the multilateral system in ways that the energetic U.S. Trade Repre-
sentative [USTR] Robert Zoellick astonishingly will not recognise.”40
This interest is not, it should be said, simply a U.S. phenomenon. But, if the
Europeans started it, and other, smaller and weaker states are now also explor-
ing it, it is nevertheless the zeal with which the interest in bilateral activities has
been picked up by the United States that has been the major spur to bilateralism
since the turn of the century. This is not surprising. The role of the United States,
as the strongest partner in any bilateral relationship, is bound to be dispropor-
tionately influential. The United States is in a position to use its hegemonic
power and the prospect of preferential access to the U.S. market hard for
smaller states to resist. The proliferation of bilateral PTAs is also, we can note,
the issue on which the biggest divide between settled economic theory and
short-term political practice can be seen in the global economy since the intro-
duction of protectionist measures in the 1930s. Ironically, on few things are
economists and political scientists so agreed than that bilateral trade deals are
sub-optimal and pose major threats to the multilateral trading system.
Empirical observation suggests that the United States currently attaches im-
portance to a range of bilateral deals that have moved, and continue to move
quickly with a range of countries, including Chile, Australia, Singapore, Mo-
rocco, and a range of the smaller Latin American states, among others. Indeed,
in the immediate aftermath of the failed Cancun ministerial meeting, USTR
Zoellick made it clear that the United States would press on alone with its strat-
egy for selected bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) with as much if not more
vigor than the pursuit of an MTN. In its defense, when it chooses to give one, the
current U.S. administration argues that it is merely using its bilateral strategy to
build, what Zoellick calls, a “coalition of liberalizers, placing the United States at
the heart of a network of initiatives to open markets.” But it also appears that
there is a decidedly political element to the choice of partners in this process. As
Zoellick told an audience at the Institute for International Economics in Wash-
ington, D.C., in June 2003:
A free trade agreement is not something that one has a right to. It’s a privi-
lege. But it is a privilege that must be earned via the support of U.S. policy
goals.…[The Bush administration]…expects cooperation — or better —
on foreign policy and security issues.”41
By way of illustration, Zoellick has also indicated that a free trade deal with
New Zealand — given its long-standing ban on nuclear ship visits and the more
recent failure to support the war in Iraq — was unlikely. The U.S. Embassy in
Wellington also made it clear that FTA discussions were not on the agenda and
that New Zealand’s negative attitude toward U.S. security policy is a key factor in
the U.S. position.42 By contrast, the FTA with Australia was “fast tracked” after
the end of formal hostilities in Iraq, and concluded in less than twelve months.
Political considerations have been as important as economic ones in the devel-
opment of U.S. bilateral trading agreements since the Iraq invasion. Singapore,
a strong coalition supporter, symbolically had its FTA signed with all due dis-
patch after agreement was reached at the White House. Chile, a near neighbor,
had the signing of its agreement, the negotiations for which had been con-
cluded prior to those with Singapore, delayed three months and signed in Mi-
ami!
Bilateral free trade deals undoubtedly prove popular to the policy elites of
the small states that are offered them.43 Australia and Singapore, as but two ex-
amples among many, have been keen partners in this process. Prime Minister
Goh Chok Tong sees Singapore’s FTA with the United States as having a strategic
significance as a way of “embedding the United States in East Asian regional-
ism.”44 The U.S.-Singapore FTA (USSFTA) also had the happy coincidence of re-
flecting the desire of both countries to manage the role of China in the East
Asian region. Indeed, bilateral PTAs in Asia are seen in Washington foreign pol-
icy circles to reflect a desire on the part of the Bush administration to contain
what it sees as the rising politico-economic influence of China in the region.45
The China relationship, important as it is, has not been a focus of this article.
This is because the relationship has been, and remains, a Type 1 security rela-
tionship in which economic policy has always been subordinated to security

policy rather than a Type 2 relationship in which the erstwhile subordination
of security policy to economic policy has been reversed via a process of securi-
tization.
Bilateral PTAs represent a cheap and easy process by which the United States
secures political support in other areas, in what are invariably and self-evidently
asymmetrical negotiations and bargains. The rewards for the junior partners —
rather than securing substantial economic gain — should perhaps be seen,
somewhat paradoxically, more as good publicity for the political leaders secur-
ing them. Thus, while the United States may see bilateral agreements as a way of
bolstering or rewarding good partners in other policy areas (such as the fight
against terrorism) East Asian leaders see them as useful policy tools. In theory, if
not always in practice, they assuage Asian elite concerns over their limited abili-
ties to influence the direction of the MTN by giving the appearance of greater
control over national trade policies. As such, bilateral free trade agreements for
smaller states are, albeit paradoxically I would suggest, statements of sover-
eignty.46
I am not, of course, suggesting that U.S. policy is the only reason for this
trend. There is a regional interest in bilateral agreements, reflecting disillusion-
ment with APEC and concern over the agenda of the Doha MTN Round. But
given the interest of the Bush administration in the Free Trade Agreement of the
Americas (itself a massive PTA) it is no surprise that, since 2000, the tempo of bi-
lateral negotiations has increased in other parts of the world. From January
1995 to December 1999 alone sixty-nine new regional trade agreements were
notified to the WTO. Including previously existing arrangements, 113 were in
power at the end of 1999. These figures do not include regional agreements still
in the negotiation stage and yet to be notified to the WTO. As of late 2003 in East
Asia and the Pacific there were eight signed bilateral FTAs, ten under negotia-
tion, and twenty-eight proposed. Of the twenty-eight proposals, two-thirds had
originated since 2001.
The degree to which bilateral free trade agreements, or other forms of PTAs,
are suboptimal in comparison to the multilateral freeing of trade is well ex-
plained in the theoretical literature. PTAs, in the language of Fred Hirsch,
should be seen as “positional goods.”47 Their value stems from the fact that they
are, in theory at least, in limited supply. The problem of course is that the impe-
tus for the creation of PTAs is growing. Should they proliferate — as the contem-
porary frenzy about them suggests they might — then the gains to the smaller
players are diminished. They are only advantageous to those who have them
while most others do not. To this extent they are suboptimal to the overall
health of the multilateral trading system. They undermine the principle of the
level playing field that gives free trade its theoretical legitimacy.
Thus the important question is why sound economic theory does not auto-
matically lead to good public policy. The answer, which most economic theory
fails to take into account, is that good economic theory is often bad politics.
Good politics, conversely, can be bad economic theory. Policy-makers are pre-
pared to engage in uncoordinated bilateral decision-making — often leading to
inferior outcomes (especially asymmetrical bargains for weaker states) — to

create an illusion of control over one’s own policy processes and policy
choices. But as is well understood in the theoretical literature if this might seem-
ingly be the case in the short term, it is not so in the longer run. It does in fact
weaken the bargaining powers of poor countries in the MTN Round.48 Bilateral
deals fragment, or prevent the development of, coalitions of developing coun-
tries as they abandon principle for small concessions from the powerful part-
ner. As Bhagwati and Panagiriya have argued:
Trade liberalisation is becoming a sham, the ultimate objective [of the
United States]…being the capture, reshaping and distortion of the WTO
in the image of American lobbying interests.…Thanks to the myopic and
self-serving policies of the world’s only superpower, bilateral free trade
agreements are damaging the global trading system.49
Elements of this argument are borne out in the specific deals of a given bilat-
eral deal. For example, notwithstanding Australia’s unstinting support of the
United States in Iraq, the details of the U.S.-Australian FTA have turned out to be
less than generous for the junior partner. The agreement demonstrates no ma-
jor concessions by the Bush administration, which, with one eye on the presi-
dential elections has held the line on those elements of the negotiations dear
to the hearts of powerful domestic political lobbies. U.S. concessions to Aus-
tralia in the all-important areas of agricultural subsidy, especially in the sugar
and beef industries, fell well short of Australian aspirations. Concessions to
Australia in this area were meant to be the deal-maker (or indeed deal--
breaker). In the end, in a lesson instructive to East Asian states wishing to secure
bilateral FTAs with the United States, the major concessions were made by Aus-
tralia.50 Notwithstanding the Bush administration’s desire to reward Australian
military support, this wish was jettisoned in the face of stronger domestic elec-
toral imperatives.
It is not surprising that from an Asian perspective the growing interest in bi-
lateral PTAs is about regional states positioning themselves on a firmer bilateral
basis in their relations with the United States. For most states of the region, the
United States is still the major bilateral relationship in both the economic and
security domains. Good relationships are a vital component of regime stability.
And in the pursuit, tacitly if not explicitly, of a renewed hub-and-spoke relation-
ship with the economies of the region, the United States following the Mexico
APEC Summit has expressed its openness to bilateral FTA negotiations with
APEC members.
Of course, all states, in East Asia as elsewhere, pursue multidimensional in-
ternational economic policies (bilateral, regional, and multilateral). This inter-
play cannot be discussed in this article.51 The important point here is that a
stronger U.S. use of the bilateral PTA, as reward for support in other policy areas
is, in part at least, a reflection of the linking of the economics-security nexus that
I call the “securitization” of foreign economic policy. Given the strength of the
U.S. bilateral presence in the foreign policies of most states of the region — and
the return to a hub-and-spoke strategy in both its economic and security rela-
tions in the region — this has not proved difficult to do. While it may not always
be the case, the United States remains the major economic partner for most
states in the region and the greatest guarantor of security in the context of
China’s rising presence in the region.
Indeed, the prospect of building stronger East Asian support for regional
multilateralism may represent one of the most interesting lines of scholarly and
policy inquiry in international relations in the early decades of the twenty-first
century, especially if China, in the longer term, comes to be seen as an economic
opportunity, rather than just a security threat.52 China is the one state that could
replace the United States as an alternative consumer market for the producing
states of the region. This fact is well understood by current enthusiasts for an
Asean-China FTA. In this context, the introduction of PTAs as an instrument of
securitization for the United States may take on a stronger, wider regional logic
for Asian states. Interest is now clearly extending beyond just a search for rela-
tionships with the United States.53
Other bilateral trade initiatives in the region are in train and, notwithstand-
ing their suboptimality vis-à-vis a first-best multilateral option, it is not impossi-
ble that they could generate a building block process toward greater East Asian
(as opposed to Pacific) regional economic integration. While bilateral arrange-
ments with the United States may be in large part politically motivated, intra-re-
gional bilateral negotiations in East Asia are going to be much more about
market access. If, as in the case of the well-advanced Singapore-Japan FTA ne-
gotiations or even maybe the Asean-China FTA, they turn out to be WTO-plus
and facilitators of more rapid liberalization, then they are clearly as economi-
cally legitimate as they are politically expedient. In the long run they will inevita-
bly alter patterns of trade and bring about changes in the patterns of regional
economic distribution.54
Conclusion
Stripped to its essentials, the purpose of U.S. strategy in the early years of the
twenty-first century seems to be to use its military, technical, and what it believes
to be its moral superiority to advance a very specific view of liberalism and free-
dom. As any undergraduate major in political philosophy would know, the sim-
ple and universal view of freedom espoused by the neoconservative idealists
currently driving U.S. foreign policy is rarely reflected in political practice.
Moreover, and without elaboration, the ideas of liberalism and freedom to be
found on parts of the American Right is alien to that which exists in many of the
world’s other developed democracies, and indeed also within significant
streams of political thinking within the United States.55
Contrary to the manner in which the neoconservatives in and around the
Bush administration have articulated ideas of liberalism and freedom, these are
contested concepts, not universal truths. The Bush view of liberalism assumes
that it has universalist properties, and does so at the very time when many tradi-
tionally significant proponents of liberalism are abandoning this conceit. The
Bush view takes no account of the fact that liberal norms embedded in the polit-
ical cultures of many Western societies might not be similarly suited to societies
with different philosophical and cultural underpinnings. It is “a single value
concept of liberalism.”56 Its logic suggests that, if needs be, the rest of the world
must be forced to be free. Thus, an assumption of the neoliberal globalization of
the later twentieth century — that it was self-generating — needs to be reconsid-
ered. Rather than being self-generating, it appears that it must now be de-
fended, indeed advanced, by U.S. power if necessary.
But, any decent reading of history will tell us that attempts by a hegemonic
power to force its philosophy on others can be expected to undermine the po-
litical legitimacy of the cause it wishes to advance. Moreover, even if liberalism
did enjoy a universal acceptance in the United States there would be no reason
for nonliberals elsewhere to accept it. Not so, say the neoconservatives. This ar-
gument is merely the smart, semantic chicanery and scholasticism one would
expect from academics. Rhodes notes:
For the Bush Administration, there is no logical inconsistency between
freedom and the requirement that the liberal alternative be selected since
it is inconceivable that anyone, given the opportunity to choose, would
freely choose any other option.57
According to the National Security Strategy, “these values of freedom are right
and true for every person, in every society.”58 But even in the most democratic
of societies, alternative readings of the liberal tradition, let alone nonliberal
(by which I do not mean illiberal) readings, of how to organize society
abound. Liberalism, of any variant, and despite 1990s Fukayama-style asser-
tions to the contrary, does not represent an end to history. A forceful imposition
of an American-style liberal world order can be expected to generate — indeed
already has generated — the seeds of opposition to its imposition. It is now well
established how unthinking fundamentalist neoliberal economic globalization
strategies of the 1980s-early 1990s (free market globalization, “naked in tooth
and claw”) spawned the very opposition to it that developed in the latter part of
the 1990s.
Neoliberal fundamentalism did not lead to a convergence around its core
themes. Ironically what some saw as the very triumph of the neoliberal moment
— the financial crises in Asia and Latin America as evidence of the failure of the
developmental-state model — actually heralded the real beginning of the artic-
ulation of resistance to this process.59 Often generically, and crudely, referred to
as the anti-globalization movement, we now find, across the political spectrum,
articulate and at times powerful groups and actors advancing counter positions
against globalization. By logical extension, there seems to be neither reason,
nor contemporary evidence, to assume that the aggressive securitization of
globalization will not also have the effect of generating articulate, and eventu-
ally influential, points of resistance.
Thus, the discussion of the limits of the theoretical view of freedom under-
pinning the policies of the Bush administration, with which I began this Conclu-
sion, was no mere academic exercise. Rather, when linked with the discussion of
the securitization of economic policy in general and the case study of the securiti-
zation of U.S. trade policy in the East in Part 2 of this article, it allows us to build up
a more complete picture of how the ideational influences of the unilateralist-ide-
alists have cast massive policy shadows in the twenty-first century. We do not need
even to visit the most obvious case — Iraq — to see that this is so.
But we are at a stage where history actually offers us little by way of lesson
learning. The late Susan Strange, like the distinguished economist Charles Kin-
dleberger before her, felt that on balance the United States in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries had been an “altruistic hegemon” delivering multilat-
eral public goods.60 Today as Bhagwati and Panagariya argue, “we have a “selfish
hegemon” precisely delivering the opposite.”61 If we are at the high-water mark
of the unilateral moment, and some sense of commitment to multilateral coop-
eration and agendas geared to underwriting global public goods, even if only
comparable to those that existed prior to the Bush administration, can be re-
gained, then a constructive reformist international dialogue about the man-
agement of the twenty-first century liberal global economic order might still
be possible.62 But to assume that a change of administration in Washington
will overnight see the United States restore the kind of liberal internationalism
that characterized U.S. policy in the early post-World War II era is, as Charles
Kupchan tells us, to misread the dramatic process of restructuring taking place
in domestic American politics. The increasing polarization between north and
south on the one hand, and the left and right on the other makes the prospect
of a return to bipartisan internationalism in United States in foreign policy ex-
tremely unlikely.63
Notes
An early draft of this article was first presented to a conference on “Globalization,
Conflict and Political Regimes in East and Southeast Asia,” organized by the Asia Re-
search Centre, Murdoch University, and the Southeast Asia Research Centre of the
City University of Hong Kong, Fremantle, Western Australia, 15-16 August 2003. This
article was written while the author was visiting professor at the Institute for De-
fence and Strategic Studies in Singapore (IDSS). Thanks are extended to its director,
Mr. Barry Desker and Professors Amitav Acharya, Mely Anthony, and Helen Nesa-
durai, and the staff of IDSS for support during this period. Needless to say, the views
expressed in the paper are those of the author alone and do not reflect those of any-
one mentioned or of the IDSS.
1. See John Ikenberry, “Introduction,” in America Unrivalled: The Future of the
Balance of Power, ed. J.G. Ikenberry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002)
and Robert Jervis, “The Compulsive Empire,” Foreign Policy, July-August 2003,
83-87.
2. Ole Waever, “Securitization and Desecuritization,” in On Security, ed. R.D. Lip-
schutz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 75. See also Barry Buzan,
Ole Waever, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boul-
der: Lynne Rienner, 1998.)
3. See Buzan et al., Security, 40ff.
4. For one disingenuous and simple-minded misreading of securitization, espe-
cially reflecting a failure to understand it as a speech act, see Nicola Phillips,
“The Dynamics of Linkage: The Economic Security Nexus in Contemporary US
Trade Strategies,” in Conference on Asia Pacific Economies: Multilateral vs Bi-
lateral Relationships (Hong Kong: Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, City
University of Hong Kong, 2004), 2-3.
5. William Pfaff, “The Philosophers of Chaos Reap the Whirl Wind,” International
Herald Tribune, 10 August 2003, 23-24.
6. Buzan et al., Security, 23.
7. Michael Mastanduno, “Economics and Security in Statecraft and Scholarship,”
International Organisation 52, no. 4 (1998): 825-54.

8. See for example the analyses in Joseph Stiglitz, Globalisation and Its Discon-
tents (London: Penguin, 2002) and Clyde Prestowitz, Rogue Nation: American
Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (New York: Basic Books,
2003).
9. Jervis, “The Compulsive Empire,” 83.
10. See Joan Spero, The Politics of International Economic Relations (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1977).
11. See Jeffrey Garten, A Cold Peace: America, Japan, Germany and the Struggle
for Supremacy (New York: Time Books for the Twentieth Century Fund, 1992)
and Lester Thurow, Head to Head: The Coming Battle among Japan, Europe
and America (London: Nicholas Brealey, 1992).
12. Mastanduno, “Economics and Security,” 829-43.
13. This schadenfreude is exemplified by Mortimer Zuckerman in “A Second Amer-
ican Century,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 3 (1999): 18-31.
14. See the discussion in Richard Higgott, “Contested Globalization: The Changing
Context and Normative Challenges,” Review of International Studies 26
(2000): 131-54.
15. Michael Mandelbaum, Ideas that Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy
and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Council on Foreign
Relations/Public Affairs, 2001).
16. Edward Rhodes, “The Imperial Logic of Bush’s Imperial Agenda,” Survival 45,
no. 1 (2003): 131-54.
17. This twofold delineation is adopted from a classification found in the second-
ary literature. See inter alia, Ole Holsti and James Rosenau, “Internationalism:
Intact or in Trouble?” in The Future of American Foreign Policy, ed. Eugene
Wittkopf and Christopher Jones, 3d ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Pi-
erre Hassner and Justine Vaisse, Washington et le monde: Dilemmes d’un
superpuissance (Paris: CERI/Autrement, 2003); and Walter Russell Mead, Spe-
cial Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World
(New York: Routledge, 2002).
18. Robert Skidelsky, “The American Contact,” Prospect (July 2003): 30. For an in-
sight into the New American Century Project see its statement of principles at
www.newamericancentury.org.
19. George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President at the 2002 Graduation Exercise of
the United States Military Academy,” West Point, N.Y., on-line at www.white

house.gov.news/ releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html and cited in the Washing-
ton Post, 27 October 2002).
20. Rhodes, “The Imperial Logic,” 134.
21. See the discussion in Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Soci-
eties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).
22. Bush, “Remarks by the President,” 4-5
23. U.S. Government, The National Security Strategy of the United States of Amer-
ica, September 2002; on-line at www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html.
24. Condoleeza Rice, “Promoting the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 1
(2000): 45-62.
25. Peter Spiro, “The New Sovereigntists: American Exceptionalism and its False
Prophets,” Foreign Affairs 79, no. 6 (2000): 9-15.
27. Edward Luck, “American Exceptionalism and International Organisations: Les-
sons from the 1990s,” in US Hegemony and International Organisations, ed.
Rosemary Foot, Neil MacFarlane, and Michael Mastanduno (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
28. Toby Dodge, “US Interventionism and Possible Iraqi Futures,” Survival 45, no.
3 (2003): 103-22.
30. See, quintessentially, Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World (New York: Fon-
tana, 1990).
31. Walden Bello, cited in The Bangkok Post, 19 June 2003, 4.
32. Karen Elliott and Gary Hufbauer, “Ambivalent Multilateralism and the Emer-
ging Backlash: The IMF and the WTO,” in Multilateralism and US Foreign Pol-
icy: Ambivalent Engagement, ed. Stewart Patrick and Shepherd Forman (Boul-
der: Lynne Rienner, 2002), especially 404-07.
33. Richard Higgott, “The Asian Financial Crisis: A Case Study in the Politics of Re-
sentment,” New Political Economy 3, no. 3 (1998): 333-56.
34. Miles Kahler, “Legalization as a Strategy: The Asia Pacific Case,” International
Organisation 54, no. 3 (2000): 549-71.
35. Vinod Aggarwal and John Ravenhill, “Undermining the WTO: The Case against
Open Sectoralism,” Asia Pacific Issues, February 2001, 1-12.
36. See the Bangkok Leaders Declaration at www.apec.org/apec/leaders__declara-
tions/2003.htm. By January 2004, APEC’s Counter Terrorism Taskforce and its
Counter Terrorism Action Group had released a strategy paper; available on-
line at www. apecsec.org.sg/ apec/news_media/media_releases/190104.
37. Richard Higgott and Richard Stubbs, “Competing Conceptions of Economic
Regionalism: APEC versus EAEC in the Asia Pacific,” Review of International
Political Economy 2, no. 3 (1995): 549-68.
38. For discussion see, inter alia, Richard Stubbs, “ASEAN Plus 3: Emerging East
Asian Regionalism,” Asian Survey 42, no. 3 (2002): 440-55; Xioke Wang, “The
Asian Financial Crisis and Its Aftermath: Do We Need a Regional Financial Ar-
rangement?” ASEAN Economic Bulletin 17, no. 2 (2000): 205-17; and Heribert
Dieter and Richard Higgott, “Exploring Alternative Theories of Economic Re-
gionalism: From Trade to Finance in Asian Co-operation,” Review of Interna-
tional Political Economy 10, no. 3 (2003): 430-54.
39. See Fred Bergsten, “East Asian Regionalism: Towards a Tripartite World,” The
Economist, 15 July 2000, 19-21. See also Stiglitz, Globalisation and Its Discon-
tents.
40. Jagdish Bhagwati, “The Caravan to Cancun,” The Wall Street Journal, 3 July
2003, 10.
41. Zoellick, cited in The New Statesman, 23 June 2003, 17.
42. “US Toughens Trade Stance,” The New Zealand Herald, 24 May 2003, 4.

43. For an articulate defense of this position see Barry Desker, “In Defence of FTAs:
From Purity to Pragmatism in East Asia,” The Pacific Review 17, no. 1 (2004):
3-26.
44. Cited in Asia Inc, August 2003, 10.
45. I owe this insight to Professor Iain Johnstone of Harvard University.
46. For an excellent discussion of trends in trade relations in East Asia see Christo-
pher Dent, The New Economic Bilateralism and Southeast Asia: Region-Con-
vergent or Region-Divergent? British International Studies Association, IPEG
Papers in Global Political Economy, no. 7 (April 2004).
47. Fred Hirsch, The Social Limits to Growth (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1977).
48. See the argument in Jagdish Bhagwati, Free Trade Today (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2002).
49. Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya, “Bilateral Treaties Are a Sham,” The Fi-
nancial Times, 14 July 2003, 13.
50. The Financial Times, 9 February 2004, 2.
51. But for an excellent discussion, see Helen Nesadurai, “Is There an Asia Pacific
Model of Regional Agreements?” Conference on Regional Integration and

Global Economic Governance, Brugge, United Nations University-Centre for
Regional Integration Studies, 28-30 November 2002, 1-28.
52. See Dieter and Higgott, “Exploring Alternative Theories of Economic Regional-
ism,” 449-54.
53. See Desker, “In Defence of FTAs.”
54. See Nesadurai “Is There an Asia Pacific Model of Regional Agreements?”
55. Of a rich literature see, inter alia, C. Wolfe, and J. Hittinger, eds., An Introduc-
tion to Contemporary Liberal Theory and Its Critics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman
and Littlefield, 1994); E. Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1998); and especially J.L. Richardson, Contending Liberalism in
World Politics (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002).
56. See James L. Richardson, “Critical Liberalism in International Relations,”
Working Paper, no. 7 (Canberra: Australian National University, Department of
International Relations, 2002), 8-9.
58. U.S. Government, The National Security Strategy, 1.
59. See Higgott, “Contested Globalizations.”
60. Susan Strange, “The Persistent Myth of Lost Hegemony,” International Organi-
sation 44, no. 4 (1987): 551-75.
61. Bhagwati and Panagiriya, “Bilateral Treaties Are a Sham,” 13.
62. For the contours of such a scenario see James Brassett and Richard Higgott,
“Building the Normative Dimensions of a Global Polity,” Review of Interna-
tional Studies 29 (December 2003): 29-56.
63. Charles Kupchan, “America Searches for Its Centre,” The Financial Times, 10
February 2004, 13.
q

Critical Asian Studies

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Critical Asian Studies

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Critical Asian Studies

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This article was downloaded by: [Korea University]

On: 11 January 2015, At: 22:41

Critical Asian Studies

After neoliberal globalization

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1467271042000241612

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

The “Securitization” of U.S. Foreign

and a process in which “an issue is framed as a security problem.”2 Securitiza-

U.S. Preponderance and the Securitization

The Economics-Security Nexus and Contemporary U.S. Foreign Policy

eign policy tradition. The contemporary period can be schematized in matrix

Influenced by the New American Century Project (box 4) the unilater-

tive — posture characterized by Peter Spiro as “post-sovereigntist.”25 The

The Implications of Securitization

of the national security agenda. Specifically, economic globalization is seen not

of the dispute settlement mechanism (DSM), developed during the Uruguay

Asia: Hubs and Spokes All the Way Down

Higgott/After Neoliberal Globalization 435

tionship in which economic policy has always been subordinated to security

inferior outcomes (especially asymmetrical bargains for weaker states) — to

International Organisation 52, no. 4 (1998): 825-54.

442 Critical Asian Studies 36:3 (2004)

Higgott/After Neoliberal Globalization 443

Model of Regional Agreements?” Conference on Regional Integration and

444 Critical Asian Studies 36:3 (2004)

You might also like