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Your point makes sense if you treat states as the relevant actors, but a free trade deal is actually normally about states aggreeing to not stop or impede their

Your point makes sense if you treat states as the relevant actors, but a free trade deal is actually normally about states aggreeing to not stop or impede their citizens from trading with each other, which I think flips it back to being a coercive relationship, though who is coercing who might change depending on the framing. I still tend to think the "imposing western IP regime" frame feels accurate to me, though I would call it "America imposing its IP regime on the rest of the world", perhaps not accurately.

throwaway894345 5y ago
> a free trade deal is actually normally about states aggreeing to not stop or impede their citizens from trading with each other, which I think flips it back to being a coercive relationship Coercion requires a threat to an actor's rights. In the case of nations, these rights can probably be summarized as territorial integrity and political independence. While there are powerful incentives to cooperate, these incentives aren't coercive as they don't intrude upon territory or political independence (including the ability to decide with whom and under which terms one trades). I think it's a fine thing to criticize the western legal framework of IP and you can argue that the west shouldn't export this legal framework; however, I don't think there's any philosophically consistent way to argue that the export mechanism (mutually beneficial agreements, basically) is "coercive" except perhaps to indict any kind of mutually beneficial agreement.