Brian Hocking
Coventry University
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World Trade Review | 2004
Brian Hocking
In the light of the events surrounding the Seattle Ministerial in December 1999 and the fate of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, increasing attention is being paid not only to the substance of trade policy but to the processes through which it is effected. Growing realization of the need to enhance transparency and legitimacy in trade policy decision-making is reflected in debates on the openness of the multilateral processes most obviously represented by the World Trade Organization. Somewhat less attention has been paid to ways in which national trade policy processes are adapting to these pressures. The article argues the need to redress the balance and suggests that it is possible to analyse the development of at least some national trade policy environments in terms of a shift from a ‘club’, through an ‘adaptive club’ to a ‘multistakeholder’ model. These are examined with specific reference to the development of the latter in the Canadian and European Union contexts.
Journal of Common Market Studies | 2002
Brian Hocking; Steven McGuire
The increasingly complex character of the US–EU economic relationship is well understood. Within this relationship, trade politics is an important setting for the interaction of firms, states and civil society. Focusing on a highly significant transatlantic trade dispute relating to a US tax policy (called foreign sales corporations), the article explores the business–government interactions generated. We conclude that such cases illustrate how the integrated character of the transatlantic economy limits the tactical options for all policy players and produces patterns of interaction between public and private actors in which both can come to assume significant roles.
Archive | 1993
Brian Hocking
A leading article in a 1983 issue of the Wall Street Journal headed ‘George v. Maggie’, concerned a dilemma then facing President Reagan: in the long-running dispute over the practice, employed by some US state governments, whereby they taxed foreign corporations on the basis of their worldwide earnings (the ‘unitary taxation’ controversy examined later in this book) how should the president balance the pressures flowing from the international environment on the one hand — epitomized by the intervention of the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher — and domestic sensitivities, particularly those of California, presided over by Governor George Deukmejian, on the other? Foreign policy or domestic politics? Both—or more precisely an intricate blend of the two which has become increasingly familiar in the conduct of contemporary foreign policy.
Archive | 1993
Brian Hocking
It has been suggested in the previous chapter that related changes in the international and domestic environments within which public policy develops have produced, alongside the internationalization of the policy processes, a congruent ‘localization’. This development presents policy makers both with challenges, as local interests and politics intermingle to an increasing extent with those in the international environment, and also with resources which can be mobilized in varying ways to manage the resultant complexity and to achieve policy objectives. In the context of federal political systems, these developments have built on the characteristic internal diplomacy between levels of government and added to them an international dimension in the continuing process of determining the appropriate role and responsibilities of governments in a political environment marked by boundary fluidity and issue complexity.
Environmental Politics | 1996
Brian Hocking
The environmental agenda provides ample evidence of the growing complexity characterising much of contemporary policy‐making. But an understanding of the role of diplomacy within the policy processes has been constrained by assumptions rooted in debates about the nature of international relations and the appropriate focus for its analysis, leading to the usually unproductive debates about the ‘decline’ of diplomacy. What is needed is a re‐examination of diplomacy as an activity which has as a core function the linking of what are often portrayed as the separate environments of state and non‐state actors. Such linkage is necessitated by the interaction of autonomy and resource deficiencies in the pursuit of policy goals, resulting in a growing symbiosis between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ diplomacy. The emergence of what is termed ‘catalytic’ diplomacy is clearly demonstrated in the multilayered policy processes generated by the international campaign ‐involving several environmental NGOs led by Greenpeace...
Archive | 2008
Andrew F. Cooper; Brian Hocking; William Maley
This book examines the relationship between diplomacy and global governance. While diplomacy is a well-established topic for study, global governance, conceived broadly as a pattern of transparent and inclusive processes to address complex transnational collective-action problems, is a relatively new arrival on the conceptual landscape of global politics. At first glance the two — whether interpreted as academic concepts or operational patterns — exist in separate worlds with little or no engagement between scholars of diplomacy on the one hand and of global governance on the other. And even in recent work dealing with these two areas, there is often a substantial silence about the significance or even the existence of the other (Ba and Hoffmann, 2005; Berridge, 2005). In practical terms, the functions of diplomacy and global governance can be portrayed as distinct and in opposition to one another. Thus diplomacy is sometimes viewed as a guild activity, with well-placed insiders distinguished from excluded outsiders (Henrikson, 1997; Ross, 2007). Through this lens, diplomatic skills are a type of knowledge possessed by a particular set of professionals and handed down via a long apprenticeship. Global governance, by contrast, is an open-ended way of looking at and navigating in the world, with a high degree of inclusiveness about whom and what is included in its machinery and agenda.
Archive | 1993
Brian Hocking
One of the first documents bearing on America’s foreign relations to land on the desk of newly elected President George Bush came not, as one might have expected, from a federal agency such as the State Department or the Office of the Special Trade Representative, but from the World Trade Commission of the State of California.1 This memorandum, with its observations and recommendations on state and federal roles in export promotion and the trade policy processes, reflects, as earlier chapters have already suggested, a key factor in growing foreign policy localization; namely, an enhanced interest in foreign trade policy shown by localities and the interests they represent. The impact of this can be seen in a number of forms both at the national and international levels and is underscored by the observation of former US special trade representative, Robert S. Strauss, regarding his role during the Tokyo Round of GATT negotiations: The Tokyo Round ... was, among other things, an exercise in domestic American politics at its best. In fact during my tenure as Special Trade Representative ... I spent as much time negotiating with domestic constituents (both industry and labour) and members of the US Congress as I did negotiating with our foreign trading partners.2
Archive | 2005
Brian Hocking; David Spence
This book has focused on a very specific issue relating to what is often referred to as ‘Europeanisation’: namely its impact on the role and organisation of EU member state foreign ministries (FMs). However, it is often difficult to separate the effects of the broader processes of growing global interdependence from those related to the membership of regional organisations such as the EU since, as one study has argued, ‘European integration interacts and intersects with wider processes of change in the contemporary nation state, international political economy and world politics!’ As we can see from the foregoing chapters, national foreign policy administration has confronted several ‘layers’ of change as it has sought to adapt to internal and external pressures, but the EU is an arena with distinctive qualities that set it apart and pose particular challenges for member states. One of these challenges relates to the uncertainty expressed by Laffan et al. in terms of the EU’s ‘betweenness’ (poised between politics and diplomacy and the international and the domestic, for example) and the ‘process of becoming’, that is to say its evolution towards an indeterminate end state which may prove to bear little relation to traditional assumptions regarding forms of political order.2
International Journal | 1995
Hans J. Michelmann; Brian Hocking
Introduction - Localizing Foreign Policy - Non-central Governments and Multilayered Diplomacy - The Trade Agenda - Multilayered Diplomacy and the Canada-US Free Trade Negotiations - British Industry versus US State Governments: the Politics of Unitary Taxation - The Environmental Agenda: Canada, the United States and Acid Rain - Managing Multilayered Diplomacy - Conclusion - Bibliography - Index
Archive | 1993
Brian Hocking
The focus of the previous chapter was on the pattern of negotiations at two levels — the domestic and international — in the context of traditional intergovernmental trade negotiations. It demonstrates the point made in earlier chapters, namely that non-central governments can become enmeshed in complex diplomatic processes and, in so doing, discharge a number of roles. But, clearly, there are a wide range of circumstances outside those imposed by formal negotiations in which NCGs are likely to find themselves involved in interactions with a variety of international actors. The point was made in Chapter 3 that, as authorities possessing the capacity to make rules capable of affecting the operations of the ‘global web’ of international business, NCGs are likely to find themselves the focus of the latter’s interest. Consequently, international business enterprises are increasingly constrained to operate in a variety of political jurisdictions at both national and subnational levels.