Global rhetorics, national politics: Pursuing bank mergers in Canada

In the neoliberal reconfiguration of both national and international political economies during the 1980s and 1990s, the interests of North American financial capital have apparently reigned supreme. Having ceded sovereignty to financial markets and financial institutions, national states seem to have lost their power to control them: the genie appears to be well and truly out of the bottle. Drawing upon an analysis of political debates in Canada over plans by the country's largest banks to merge, this article critically engages with literatures that imply that liberal strategies and corporate politics are doomed to prevail. In exploring the reasons for the Canadian government's rejection of the mergers, the article demonstrates the complex relationships between geography, politics and economics in the discursive representations of the national interest. Not only did the banks fail to understand the need to lobby effectively, the paper argues, but bank finance has gone from occupying a privileged role in the Canadian body politic to one in which its interests must now compete openly against others, highlighting important political changes in a globalising world.