Globalization and Nationalism at a Crossroads: The Identity Politics of Competing Imagined Economies Across the Taiwan Strait

Even before the implementation of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) between China and Taiwan in 2011, the increasing rate of cross-Strait economic integration and the potential volatility of Taiwan’s ambiguous international status has been the subject of intense political debate and academic research. The island’s shift away from an imagined community of ‘One China’ to part of an “imagined economy” inextricably linked to mainland China is not just a projection or re-grafting of national sovereignty onto the global scale, but rather an ongoing process of the re-imagining of space and scale, in which both concepts are mutually constitutive of one another.  While the symbolic act of closer economic integration between two parts of a divided nation bring justification and legitimacy to a priori definitions of globalization as a project, at the same time, the process continues to stretch the traditional confines of national sovereignty. The aim here is to analyze how through the act of selection, specific historical periodizations have been reframed to form a dominant narrative of the relationship between national identity and the spatial limits of economic possibility for current contexts.

Specifically, this paper provides a discourse analytical perspective on the social forces and ideas that have sought to dominate the narrative of harnessing an externalized concept of globalization on the one hand, and harmonizing regional security and prosperity as a crucial cornerstone to national development on the other.  Particular attention is made to the framing of post-2008 cross-Strait trade policies by political elites both in support of and in opposition to deepening economic integration.  It is argued that ideas of the imagined economy heavily influence the framing the possibilities of political action.