Politics

Since the 1990s, India and Myanmar have sought rapprochement through geoeconomic strategies and discourses. The results, however, have been largely underwhelming. This paper offers an explanation for why this has been the case. We argue that the two geoeconomic strategies deployed –  subregionalism and diaspora-driven trade and investment – require the emergence of particular types of deterritorialised and denationalised citizenship regimes which facilitate the mobilisation of provincial capital and diasporic capital. The development of such social forces in India and Myanmar have been stifled by the persistence of older ‘regimes of citizenship’ associated with geopolitical strategies based on territoriality and pre-existing social hierarchies. In Myanmar, the emphasis on ‘Bamar’ identity has led to a hierarchical citizenship regime which marginalizes people of Indian origin. While deterritorialised forms of citizenship have emerged in India as the government seeks to harness the economic power of the Indian diaspora, the target of its policies has been the more socially-privileged diaspora settled in the West. Moreover, India’s North-East, which borders Myanmar, has long been constructed as being culturally distinct and prone to ‘disloyalty’ which hinders sub-regionalism. Hence, transforming the relationship requires not just greater political will or technocratic policy changes, but addressing the long held national anxieties and social hierarchies which underpin India and Myanmar’s regimes of citizenship.

Recent commentary on India-Australia relations has defined the relationship as ‘natural’ and based on ‘shared values’ and ‘shared history’. The relationship has simultaneously been considered ‘neglected’. The paradoxical juxtaposition of a natural/neglected partnership is yet to be adequately explained. We consider the historical construction of liberalism in both states as a facet of state identity to argue that, far from creating a natural relationship, differing liberal identities have served to keep these two states apart. This is illustrated through case studies of divergent opinions over the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the rise of China.

In this short article, the authors analyse the implications of the election of Donald Trump for the future of the liberal rules-based order, with specific emphasis on its implications for the Asian region. Departing from the institutional fetishism that figures prominently in the literature, the authors argue that this liberal order needs to be conceptualised in terms of its social foundations. Particularly important to consider, in terms of understanding these social foundations, is the nature of social relations in the USA. The election of Trump reflects the deep crisis of the US state and the rise of a new ‘authoritarian populism’. The authors trace the roots of this authoritarian populism to patterns of global capitalist transformation, the crisis of the US state and the modes of crisis management that this has generated. They then explore the implications of Trump’s authoritarian populism for the region.

Proposals for regional economic integration, namely, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and the One Belt One Road proposal, have recently been driving the security dynamics of the Asian region. To explain the growing 'economic' focus of states' foreign policies, we need to go beyond the dominant approaches in International Relations and International Political Economy, which are limited in their analytical power because they often make a distinction between politics/security and economics, and prioritise one over the other, rather than seeing them as internally related. Drawing on Leon Trotsky's theory of 'uneven and combined development' and Nicos Poulantzas's notion of 'internalised transformations', we develop a 'Poulantzian-uneven and combined development' framework to argue that the increased focus on economics in foreign policymaking represents a fundamental change related to the transnationalisation of capitalist state-building projects. The paper argues that while the Trans-Pacific Partnership reflected an attempt by the Obama administration to fashion a new stage in the transnationalisation of American capital, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and One Belt One Road proposal reflect an emerging China-centred transnationalised state project. We characterise the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and One Belt One Road proposal as constituting different forms of a particular type of geoeconomic strategy called 'regulatory geographies' because they entail the export of distinctive modes of regulatory governance that aim to overcome key contradictions of uneven and combined capitalist development in the US and China. As the recent demise of the