Neo-Mercantilism:

Abstract

This article takes the view that mercantilism can be understood as a pursuit of stateness, an articulation of the nation-state logic vis-à-vis the free play of market forces. The contemporary context of the mercantilist logic is the international political economy, in which `the political' refers to a transnational framework of economic transactions, in brief, a world order. Hence the concept `neomercantilism', to which this discussion is primarily addressed. This conceptualization is somewhat troublesome because of the historical association of mercantilism with the nation-state. The solution to this paradox is to see regionalism as a return of `the political', the need for control, in a transnational context. The argument is pursued in three steps: first the concept is located in the historical political economy discourse, focusing on mercantilism proper; second, a definition of neo-mercantilism is suggested which associates it with `the new regionalism' in a global context, more precisely the pursuit of `regionness'; third, contemporary manifestations of `the new regionalism' are presented as a preliminary attempt to test the hypothesis. In the concluding discussion the significance of these regional manifestations in an international political economy perspective is assessed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 64 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.