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| Fake smiles, failed Round |
In my search for a silver lining in all of this, I have tried to tell myself that all negotiations look doomed right before a deal is struck. In truth, I predict that before the end of the year Trump will make formal what I believe he's wanted all along; scrap the NAFTA.One of the most ardent proponents of North American integration, American University's Robert Pastor, died in early 2014. To the end, he vigorously pursued efforts to more firmly connect
Over the last few months, I've thought about what he'd say about what's going on. One of my very first posts to this blog was about North America and was connected to Pastor's passing. I thought I'd re-post it since it's as relevant today as ever.
Originally posted, January 21, 2014
Is North America Over?
New Year’s Day 2014 marked the 20th anniversary
of the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). About
a week later, January 8, Robert Pastor, one of the NAFTA’s fiercest defenders,
and one of academia’s most tireless advocates of deeper North American
integration, died after a 3 ½ year battle with cancer. To the citizen on the
street, Robert Pastor is hardly a household name. Yet, among those in academia
or public policy for whom North America was a focus, Robert Pastor’s work could
not be ignored. Indeed, for much of the past three decades we have all—academics,
politicians, and the general public-- implicitly been debating the merits of
his policy prescriptions.
Pastor’s death also comes at a time of great uncertainty
about the future of North American integration. Government priorities in all
three countries have shifted elsewhere. Academic centers focused on North
America have been disappearing. There’s little private sector consensus on the
merits of further integration. Academic centers focused on North America are in
rapid decline. And security has become entrenched as the overarching framework
for governing the North American economic space. The last phase-ins of the
NAFTA came into force some five years ago and the agreement has largely done
what it set out to do. Many of the undergraduates I see every fall know little
about the NAFTA. In short, the NAFTA is old news.
Robert Pastor’s final book was entitled The North American Idea (2011) but what’s actually left of that
idea?
For proponents of North American integration, the early
1990s were heady times. The Cold War was over. Democracy and liberal capitalism
had emerged as the victorious, dominant mode of global governance anchored by
the United States as the pre-eminent example of both. Yet, for proponents of
this view, euphoria gave way to despair as the 1990s wore on as challenges to
liberal capitalism and integrated markets emerged. The NAFTA’s implementation
in January 1994 was marred by the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico. The
newly created World Trade Organization was infamously rocked by violence at its
1999 ministerial meeting in Seattle (Battle in Seattle). And the proposed Free
Trade Area of the Americas, hatched with some fanfare in 1994, was effectively
dead by 2002.
Efforts to build upon what the NAFTA had begun mostly fell
on deaf ears after 1994. The Clinton Administration, which spent so much of its
political capital on getting the NAFTA through the U.S. Congress, seldom
mentioned it again during the two terms of his administration. The NAFTA had
already become synonymous with all that was wrong with the rapidly expanding
global trading regime, Pastor more recently complaining that it became a
“piñata for pandering pundits and politicians.” Indeed, critics from both ends
of the political spectrum came to see what they wanted in the NAFTA. For some,
the Agreement was too shallow and didn’t do enough institutionally to level
North America’s asymmetries. For others, the NAFTA dealt with too few issues
and left a lengthy list of festering problems off the table. For others still,
the NAFTA represented a kind of Trojan Horse, poised to destroy sovereignty,
force the export of bulk fresh water, facilitate the construction of twelve
lane super-highways, destroy the environment, or unleash waves of low-cost,
job-killing labor.
Prior to the September 11 attacks on the United States,
virtually every global meeting of economic leaders was guaranteed to illicit
protests numbering in the tens of thousands, epitomized by the 1999 Battle in
Seattle, anti-FTAA protests in Quebec City in 2001, and tragically capped by
the death of a protester at the hands of police at the G8 Summit in Genoa,
Italy in July 2001. It had all become a poisonous mix that North America’s
political and private sector leadership wanted no part of.
As many others retreated from the debate, Robert Pastor jumped
in with two feet, publishing Toward a
North American Community in August 2001. There he argued that the central
failing of North American integration was that the NAFTA had done too little to
institutionalize and strengthen trilateral cooperation. He contrast the absence
of institution building in North America with the sclerotic,
over-institutionalization of the European Union and argued for a unique
approach to North America that landed somewhere in the middle, reflective of
the continent’s unique history. Nevertheless, his argument instantly made him
the target of intellectual and political foes, among them, CNN’s Lou Dobbs, whose
anti-trade, anti-immigration rhetoric was openly xenophobic. Whereas members of
the Clinton and Bush administrations refused to challenge Dobbs and others,
Pastor took them on, transforming himself into a political piñata as well.
I have heard Robert Pastor referred to as North America’s
Jean Monnet; a reference to one of European integration’s greatest intellectual
and political champions. The Monnet Plan was designed to jumpstart the
integration of Europe through the integration of French and German coal and
steel production. Monnet himself was later appointed president of the European
Coal and Steel Community’s governing body. Monnet lived to see even more
economic integration among western European economies, but died in 1979, well
before Europe’s post-Cold War expansion and the creation of the Euro. The
European project remains a work in progress, and there were certainly days on
which Monnet wondered if his vision of an integrated, prosperous, and peaceful
Europe would ever come to pass.
Comparing Pastor to Monnet might be taking matters too far,
particularly since many of his ideas (customs unions, common currency) are
controversial. Yet, the comparison is
apt in that, like Monnet, Pastor pushed his vision for North America everywhere
he went; within academia, the halls of power, the private sector, and the
media.
Yet, the timing of Pastor’s Toward a North American Community could not have been worse. The
9/11 terrorist attacks instantly put the economic integration debate on hold,
quickly replacing it with security—in many minds, the antithesis of economic
openness.
In recent years, Pastor became an outspoken critic of the
impact post-9/11 security measures were having on the economic benefits of
North American integration. He was dismayed at the absence of political courage
by the three governments to pursue a larger vision of an integrated, and
secure, North American economic space. In 2005, the three governments launched
the Security and Prosperity Partnership aimed at balancing the benefits of
economics with the new imperatives of security.
It was the first serious trilateral cooperative effort since
the NAFTA. Yet its main achievements were to upset nearly every stakeholder
group imaginable, each of the national legislatures, and provide fodder to
conspiracy theorists on the political left and right. The SPP generated a long
list of issues the three countries could work on, but was never guided by an
overarching vision of what North America could become, and quietly went away in
2009, further solidifying border security as the overarching paradigm through
which our leaders see the continent. In 1994, scholars spoke of the
implications of a borderless North America with passport free travel and
integrated labor markets. In 2014, North America’s borders are more prominent
than ever, acting as both commercial choke-point and security dragnet.
Much as Winston Churchill warned of an “iron curtain”
descending across Europe at the onset of the Cold War, Pastor was aghast at the
descent of a “security curtain” over North America and its effect on trilateral
cooperation. He was especially critical of the leadership in Ottawa as it
sought to sideline Mexico City and deal with Washington bilaterally. Ottawa
believed it could cash in on Canada’s “special relationship” win security
concessions from Washington that would prevent the “Mexicanization” of the
Canada-U.S. border; the U.S.-Mexico and Canada-U.S. borders are actually more
similar now than they are different. In fact, Pastor argued that Ottawa’s
approach only exacerbated the asymmetries of power among the three countries
that Canada had spent much of the last two decades trying to minimize through agreements
like the NAFTA. Further, he argued, the leadership in Mexico City was far more
open than Ottawa to a collective, perimeter approach with Washington to the mix
of economics and security. More troubling still, Ottawa’s approach represented
a puzzling misread of the importance of Latin America, and Mexico in
particular, in U.S. policy-making that has netted Canada few, if any, benefits.
In his last book, The
North American Idea (2011), Pastor argues that the historical experiences
of Canada, the United States, and Mexico have far more similarities and points
of intersection than is often assumed. In addition, public opinion surveys in
all three countries suggest the populations of all three are more open to the
idea of a more unified North America than any of the three governments. However,
the idea of a unified North America seems more elusive than ever. Security
overwhelmingly dominates our approach to border policy, arguably undermining
many of the economic benefits of economic integration. Apart from border
security issues, North America has faded in the policy priorities of all three
national capitals. And the academic and policy research focus on North America
is in rapid retreat throughout the continent.
The European project has been over 60 years in the making
and remains a work in progress. Jean Monnet did not live to see the advent of
passport free travel or a common currency in Europe, and must have despaired
over the pace at which is vision was being implemented. Yet, the idea of a more
unified Europe remained.
Robert Pastor’s specific prescriptions for North America
were not always popular, even among those who basically agreed with him. Yet,
he, like Monnet, spent much of his life trying to keep the “idea” of North
America alive in whatever form it eventually takes. North America is not
Europe, nor will it ever be. However, the “idea” of a more trilaterally oriented
North American economic, security, and (I’d argue) ecological space is as
important as it’s ever been to the people who live in it. Our policy leadership
would be wise to keep this “idea” in mind.
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