Regionalism in the southwest Pacific: Globalization, Europe and the trans-tasman single economic market

Considerable scholarly effort has described the impact of regional economic integration among advanced economies – European integration, in particular – on developing countries. Less attention has been focused on whether and how integration processes travel between different integration projects in the advanced economies themselves. Such transfers are at least partially the intent of so-called “mega-regional” trade negotiations such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). This chapter demonstrates that integration processes in one set of developed economies, Western Europe, have affected integration between another set of advanced economies, Australia and New Zealand, through a different channel. Unlike in TTIP negotiations and in European Union (EU) relations with its neighbours, Europeans have had no intention of exporting their experience with integration to Australasia. Indeed, only in the past few years have Europeans begun to recognize similarities – and differences – between European and Australasian economic integration (Leslie and Elijah 2012; Bauer et al. 2014: 10).