Mega-Regional Agreements and the Struggle for Economic Order in the Asia-Pacific Region

The U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) project in January 2017 effectively marked the end (at least-for some time) of the period of active competition between so-called "mega-regional agreements" in the Asia-Pacific region. A flagship of the Obama administration's initiatives in Asia, the TPP spurred China to intensify work on an alternative project-its Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)-and sparked an unusual wave of competition among APR institutions. Significantly, Russia joined this "partnership race" in 2016, putting forward an initiative to build a Greater Eurasian Partnership. It became something of a given that any power aspiring to regional leadership must have its own "partnership plan" to promote. At the same time, the formation and development of mega-regional partnerships is an important stage in the regionalization of the world economy and global politics and a key element of the new phenomenon of regionalization. This article examines the TPP and RCEP initiatives as attempts to form a regional international order holding some degree of autonomy from the global set of rules for the functioning of regional international systems-in this case, that of the APR.