US Hegemony and the Trans-Pacific Partnership: Consensus, Crisis, and Common Sense

Abstract

Abstract This article provides a critical analysis of the agency of the United States in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Building on neo-Gramscian theory, it contextualises the US decision to withdraw from the TPP as an expression of hegemonic crisis. Through an examination of the strategic and geoeconomic logics and objectives of the trade agreement in US foreign economic policy, it maintains that the TPP was intended primarily to expand the structural and consensual power of the United States in the international political economy. Partly an attempt to kick-start a stalled neoliberal agenda, the TPP was also an effort to respond to China’s growing influence in trade governance. The article argues that, despite the revival of the TPP in the form of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the inability of elite networks in the United States to implement the original accord is illustrative of a crisis of hegemony driven largely by the collapse of the ‘common sense’ in favour of economic globalisation.