Freeports
History
Alexandra Hall on Historicising freeports:
"Taking a step back is important in understanding the model of political and economic ordering on which freeports are based. Recent work points to the ideas of a group of influential twentieth-century thinkers at the centre of the neoliberal project, whose influence is still felt today. Although freeports have existed in one way or another since antiquity, one way of historicising modern SEZs as a specific type of legal-spatial configuration is by situating them as “birthplaces of neoliberal manufacturing globalisation” and uneven capitalist development in the global economy in the latter half of the 20th century.
Although the logic of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century neoliberal globalisation has been challenged by several political and economic ruptures of late, the SEZ has not faded away. On the contrary, the global economy has witnessed an expansion of SEZs across many nations. What was once the preserve of countries in the global South pushing export-oriented industrialisation is now also a key policy in the economic models of countries in the global North, ranging from Switzerland’s elite service economy to the UK’s new industrial strategy. The new UK freeports can therefore be recast as part of a general commitment to a model of ordering in which global economic actors use economic zoning initiatives to carve out corporate Utopias across the globe.
However, freeports are far from Utopian. By their very nature they are contradictory spaces, problematising normative assumptions about governance, territory and sovereignty. The contradictions abound in the current period where the platitudes of partisan politics in liberal democracies are shattering around us."
Examples
UK
Alexandra Hall:
"And perhaps there is no better example of such political chaos than the UK right now. The man at the centre of the new UK freeport agenda was then Chancellor and now Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, stepping in as he did following Liz Truss’s mere 44 days in office. Back in 2016, Sunak argued that EU rules on state aid and the single market “have ensured that modern EU Free Zones amount to little more than storage and warehouse facilities with simpler customs formalities”. His plans for the UK would be far more ambitious as we broke free from EU red tape post-Brexit. Freeports in the UK are nothing new. In fact, the UK had a set of freeports in operation until 2012, when their contracts were not renewed, and they were ultimately seen as a policy failure. The government has argued that the new plans offer ways for sites to interact, a range of new tax benefits, and seed funding for innovation and infrastructure plans that did not previously exist. If we take a drive around Teesworks, a site stretching across 4,500 acres encompassing already existing industrial sites, seaports and an airport, we might assume that in practice this would simply mean underlying changes to the institutional framework of structures, rules and norms. A tweak to legislation here, a pot of seed money invested there. That might have been believable until the real effects of the actual changes bubbling under the surface began to break through, dealing a visceral blow to the narrative peddled by elites at the helm of the freeport agenda. This emphasises just how important it is to reflect on the political dynamics of such projects and their real-world impact at the local level."