Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

A central contribution of Fukuyama’s End of History to the discipline of International Relations (IR) has been to enhance the belief in the causal role of liberal ideas and natural resources to explain international outcomes under the assumption of a ‘global liberal order’. However, such a belief not only fades the plurality of international relations but also results in poor explanations of China’s engagement with certain places from the Global South. This paper analyses the categories of materialism and idealism in mainstream IR Theory and aims to overcome such a dualism by applying Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of ‘the instability of the objects’. In so doing, it takes as example China-Chile relationship, which has the particularity of having experienced a good number of pioneering commitments since the nineties; among them, Chile was the first country in the world to sign a free trade agreement with China (2005). Although at first glance this kind of outcome reinforces the belief on the causality of material factors and liberal ideas within a Western-led global order, the application of approaches embedded in mainstream IRT, such as Fukuyama’s thesis, results into explanatory contradictions and ontological deficits to understand the particularities of this relationship. In contrast, by revealing the field of meanings articulated into this relationship, we propose the use of poststructuralist discourse theory, to explore new possibilities of solutions of those instabilities and gaps that persist not only in the scholarship of Chile-China relationship but also in the growing field of post-Western international relations.