The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership: A Battleground for Competing Hegemons?

Abstract

The proponents of mega-regional trade, investment and economic integration agreements over the past decade aim to set the rules for global capitalism in the twenty-first century. In the United States negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) have been portrayed as a struggle for hegemonic dominance between the USA and China over who writes the rule-book. The American narrative feeds a domestic political sentiment that is hostile to and fearful of China, and which oversimplifies China’s role and strategic interests in such negotiations. The TPP and RCEP include overlapping negotiating parties and substantive texts, even after the USA’s withdrawal from the TPP. A review of four areas—intellectual property, investment, services and electronic commerce—shows the RCEP negotiating parties have adopted a complex matrix of positions within a legal framework that overlaps significantly with the TPP. Ironically, the RCEP parties have continued negotiating provisions that have been suspended from the TPP by the remaining eleven countries. This chapter urges a more nuanced view of international trade and investment agreements as one of a plurality of factors that are reshaping the global political economy, as China’s hegemonic power grows and that of the USA declines. Those dynamics are unpredictable. As the Trump administration reverts to unilateral power and regional relationships that seek to target and isolate China, it is possible that China, rather than the USA, may emerge as the champion of a rules-based regime. But any quest for dominance would not be pursued through mega-regionals, such as the TPP and RCEP. An equally unpredictable factor is the growing popular antipathy to the model of international capitalism and associated rules that beset the original TPP, and has been ignored by the negotiating parties in the revised TPP and the RCEP.

This is a revised version of a paper delivered at a conference at the Beijing Foreign Studies University Law School in May 2017 funded by the University of New England. The research has been conducted in part with assistance of a New Zealand Royal Society Marsden Fund Grant.