Performing trade:‘Global Britain’ and the UK’s post-Brexit free trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand

Why did the United Kingdom (UK) prioritise post-Brexit free trade agreements (FTAs) with Australia and New Zealand, despite the almost negligible economic benefits on offer? We address this puzzle by focusing on practices in trade policy, contributing to a broader agenda emphasising their role in International Political Economy (IPE). More specifically, we use the concept of performativity to argue that the UK’s pursuit of these agreements reflected a desire to repeatedly perform sovereignty and independence from the European Union (EU): The act of negotiating and signing agreements was more important than policy content or economic impact. This performance of trade policy independence relied on a series of Eurosceptic scripts related to the Anglosphere—an imagined community of English-speaking nations with which the UK purportedly shared neoliberal economic values. As the prospects of a trade agreement with the United States (US) receded, the UK Government improvised on these Anglosphere scripts. The FTAs with Australia and New Zealand were recast as contributions to a wider Asia-Pacific tilt in UK trade policy, a region equated with economic dynamism and commitment to free trade, albeit without the historic connection to the UK.