Trade Fetishism

This chapter lays the groundwork to explore trade as a fantasy that seeks to meet our unconscious desires. While defenders and critics of dominant trade policies often insist they are driven, ultimately, by rational economic, political, and strategic logics, the authors argue that non-rational beliefs are equally determining in driving our obsession with trade and its promise of enjoyment through development, efficiency, and harmony. Surveying mainstream and critical approaches to trade politics, the authors emphasize the importance of the illogical, seductive, and symbolic content of trade and the collectively shared, unconscious desires and anxieties that are so often expressed through it. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and its distinct approach to investigating values and ideology, the authors recast the political economy of trade by examining the ways in which trade agreements reproduce fetishistic fantasies whose seductive powers cannot be separated from traditional materialists concerns. The point is not to eclipse political economy understandings of trade, but rather, to demonstrate how human desire plays an unavoidable and constitutive role in the political economy of trade and its material outcomes.