I was in San Antonio again last week, and was just as impressed with the city. However, San Antonio is significant in the history of the North American Free Trade Agreement as well. In October 1992, the final text of the NAFTA had been completed, and San Antonio became the site of an outdoor initialing ceremony designed, in part, to boost the economic bona fides of President Bush.
As their trade and economy ministers inked their initials on the final text, Carlos Salinas, George Bush, and Brian Mulroney proudly looked on. Interestingly, none of the three would still be in office when the NAFTA was formally implemented in January 1994.
Students of North American integration will recall that the NAFTA really entered the American political consciousness at the height of the 1992 Presidential Election campaign when President Bush pressured Governor Clinton to take a stand on the nearly completed agreement. It was a political wedge issue that the President hope would shore up his credibility on reviving a U.S. economy then mired in recession.
The NAFTA was politically dangerous for Governor Clinton since many of his Democratic supporters, especially those in labor unions, were generally against trade liberalization. As perhaps only Bill Clinton could have done, he eventually both endorsed the NAFTA and managed to critique it at the same time saying that there were serious flaws in the text that needed re-negotiation. In splitting hairs this way, Clinton largely neutralized the issue for the remainder of the election campaign. Once in office, President Clinton risked much of his early political capital pushing for Congressional approval of the NAFTA-- which he eventually won.
However, this past week I was also struck by news from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that since 1990, nearly a billion monarch butterflies have vanished. The mass congregation of tens of millions of monarch butterflies in central Mexico each winter is one of the marvels of the natural world (video). The Monarch also happens to be one of the few genuinely North American species, inhabiting large swaths of all three countries at different points in its life-cycle. Many of those Monarchs fly right over San Antonio.
One byproduct of Bill Clinton having split hairs on the NAFTA in the 1992 campaign was the negotiation of the NAFTA's so-called side agreements on labor and the environment. With respect to the environment, the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation created the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. For many years after its creation, the CEC was criticized by parts of civil society and scientific community for having too few enforcement mechanisms. Scientists, civil society, even citizens, could make submissions regarding the adherence of all three countries to their environmental standards. Initial complaints have given way to praise for the CEC as an effective forum for the exchange of information about a range of issues related to the environment. The CEC still lacks the enforcement mechanisms that would compel governments to act upon the CEC's findings (the CEC is funded by all three governments and its council is chaired by cabinet level officials from each). However, as an open, public, transparent, and trilateral forum for the exchange of information and calling for government action, the CEC has clearly evolved beyond the negotiators expectations.
The CEC's logo also happens to be the Monarch Butterfly.
Sadly, the decline of the Monarch butterfly is rich with symbolism of what has happened to the idea of regionalism in North America generally; in steep decline. The CEC remains a bright institutional byproduct of the NAFTA, an Agreement that intentionally avoided the creation of supranational institutions at all. Indeed, there are those who think the lack of formal institutionalization has been the NAFTA's central undoing. That's certainly part of the story, but as I've noted in several other posts, there are plenty of villains in the decline of North America; among them, America's post-9/11 security agenda, and the failure of Canada and Mexico to build a genuine bilateral relationship.
The decline of the North American idea need not have been, but will soon be supplanted by other regional arrangements like the Trans Pacific Partnership, to which Canada, Mexico, and the United States are all parties. Similarly, all three countries have completed (Mexico and Canada), or are in the process of completing (US), significant agreements with the European Union. It was inevitable that the NAFTA text would be surpassed, supplanted, and improved upon with each subsequent agreement the three countries concluded. Yet, the North American idea, and the advantages that could have flowed from it on contemporary challenges like climate change or continental security, have been squandered.
The NAFTA has been a political pinata from its conception in 1990. Proponents have over-promised what the NAFTA could do while critics have grossly exaggerated its supposed ills. I'm sure someone, somewhere will try and claim that the NAFTA is directly responsible for the demise of the Monarch butterfly. Whatever!!!
However, the NAFTA and the Monarch are deeply connected and the long decline of each is worth lamenting.......
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