The cultural foundations of trade policy: Competitive free trade and the UK–Australia free trade agreement

Abstract

This article examines United Kingdom (UK) parliamentary debates on the adoption of its first post-Brexit, from-scratch free trade agreement (FTA), with Australia. Building on Jessop’s cultural political economy framework, we identify and analyse the economic imaginaries animating UK post-Brexit trade policy debates at this time. We find that an imaginary of what we term ‘competitive free trade’ shaped the UK Government’s approach to the UK–Australia FTA. Meanwhile, the Opposition, much of the House of Lords, and a small number of Conservative Members of Parliament endorsed an alternative ‘embedded free trade’ imaginary. Our analysis suggests that the UK government successfully used the context of an unsettled domestic institutional environment for trade policy post-Brexit in order to negotiate and ratify an FTA with Australia that reflected its competitive free trade imaginary. The article offers an account of UK post-Brexit trade policy that highlights how material, political, and ideational dimensions co-constitute each other in the political economy of trade, and how particular economic imaginaries become reified and dominant at certain junctures.