Trade Futures

In this final chapter, the authors consider how the shifting and emotional nature around competing claims over what trade is , gives us pause to reconsider a long-standing position among critical thinkers: that trade policy has never actually been about free trade. While the authors agree, this leaves undetermined what it mean to witness the decline of a free trade order that never actually existed? There has been growing recognition, moreover, that trade policy is not shaped solely by material goals, but an array of logics around race, gender, nationalism, ethnicity and status, with non-trade actors impacting policy in previously underestimated ways. The authors engage psychoanalytically with this latest research, demonstrating how insufficient attention to unconscious desires fails to capture the importance of trade fantasies, which are not merely additions or diversions from the true intentions of trade, but central factors behind its relentless drive. Psychoanalytic insights can inform trade analysis, advocacy, and activism, by approaching trade “sideways,” with awareness of the push and pull between gains and losses, and the ways in which sideways thinking can be, and often is, used to for destructive aims, bent on aggression, domination, and control.