Constructing narratives of global order: The Obama presidency, TPP, TTIP, and the contested politics of geoeconomics

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe emergence of the Pacific-based trade initiative Transpacific Partnership (TPP) and the Atlantic-based trade initiative Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) have underscored the central transoceanic contest underway to construct new narratives for geoeconomic and by extension geopolitical global order. The Obama administration made clear that at stake is the writing of new rules that will underpin an international system with a transnational normative structure. The politics around TPP and TTIP illustrate simultaneously that national participants in the trade negotiations possess robust agency and act accordingly. In short, while TPP and TTIP represent recognizable agendas of classical geoeconomic and geopolitical order construction, the diverse countries involved have actively shaped the contours and content of the emerging narratives of global order by practicing provincial or national politics to encourage a critical normative and institutional mapping or cartography for a twenty-first-century transoceanic political economy.