Regionalism and domestic politics: U.S.-Latin American trade policy in the Bush era

Latin American Politics and Society, Winter 2002 by Feinberg, Richard E

ABSTRACT

With remarkable success, Latin Americans have sought to impose their free trade policy agenda on a very reluctant and internally fractious United States. They have an ally in President George W. Bush, whose senior appointments notably support hemispheric trade integration even as political pressures sometimes have yielded protectionist outcomes. Bush's trade negotiator, Robert Zoellick, pursues a doctrine of competitive liberalization while accepting some linkage between trade and social and political goals. In negotiating the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the administration will have to balance many domestic pressures without alienating Latin America. Ultimately, FTAA ratification will signal a new Western Hemisphere economic-security alliance for the twenty-first century.

The United States has long resisted what geography would seem to dictate: a special relationship with Latin America. Frequent rhetorical and occasional real concessions to the idea of hemispheric solidarity notwithstanding, U.S. foreign policy has generally preferred to focus on other regions of the world-notably Europe and Asia-or to eschew regional favorites altogether in favor of a global reach. These preferences have been deeply rooted in the ethnic origins of the long-dominant East Coast foreign policy establishment, and in global power relations that located the nation's major challengers and allies in those distant theatres. After World War II, U.S. hegemony seemed to dictate a universalist perspective that favored global institutions and policies as against a more parochial and local regionalism.

This denial of geography often had been reciprocated by Latin American elites throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Feinberg and Corrales 1999). Nationalists of the right and left preferred to limit their dependence on U.S. power by diversifying their relations through stronger ties to Europe or other Latin American nations, or simply by erecting nationalist barriers against foreign commerce and capital. There have been moments in history, however, when Latin America has reached out to the United States and the United States has responded affirmatively. We are living in one such moment.

The idea of a hemispheric free trade zone is not new. It can be traced back at least to Sim6n Bolivar (whose integrationist vision sometimes excluded but sometimes seemed to include North America), and it was discussed at the time of the founding of the Pan-American Union at the end of the nineteenth century. Presidents Ronald Reagan (1980-88) and George Bush (1988-92) made rhetorical references to the idea of a hemispheric free trade zone.

This vague aspiration did not become a hard policy option, however, until it was advanced with energy and persistence during the 1990s in a series of Latin American initiatives. The Latin Americans-acting out of a series of economic, political, and diplomatic motives-have sought to impose their free trade policy agenda on a very reluctant United States. The Latin Americans have worked to take advantage of the sharp divisions within the Washington bureaucracy, Congress, and public opinion to tip the balance in their favor. Just as U.S. policy has so often altered the course of history in Latin American nations by playing on internal divisions and decisively strengthening the hand of its internal allies, so now the Latin Americans have worked their will on a fragmented U.S. body politic, seeking to alter the constellation of forces at the margin that made a difference.

In President George W. Bush, the Latin American integrationists have a professed friend. The 43rd U.S. president inherited his preference for free trade from his Eastern Establishment family, his elite New England schooling, and his Republican Party roots. He took up the cause of free trade in the Western Hemisphere after he saw how exchange with the Mexican economy benefited the Texan economy, and he was among the first politicians to grasp that better relations with Latin America could help garner Latino votes. He learned the benefits of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) from his business associates and Mexican friends, and when he became president his new counterparts in Latin America repeatedly told him that the reputation of the United States as a reliable friend and partner hung on his completion of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Bush wants to please and support his friends south of the border as a gesture of generosity and reciprocity that exemplifies his unique combination of Eastern noblesse and Texas hospitality.

Bush's selection to direct his trade diplomacy, Robert Zoellick, is another true believer in hemispheric integration. Indeed, the administration's trade team is a remarkably homogeneous collection of free-- trade advocates who also support regional trade initiatives. Yet even with well-placed sympathizers in the executive branch, the Latin Americans cannot be certain that their historic gamble will pay off. Only academic theorists rooted in the rigid realist tradition of state security studies would be surprised to discover that trade policy does not arise from some unitary "national interest" embodied in the presidency but rather boils up from the many strands of domestic politics. And U.S. society is deeply divided on trade policy, especially with regard to developing countries. Protectionists, mercantilists, social welfare advocates, and other opponents of freer trade in general and the FTAA in particular have strong influence in the U.S. Congress, which, in turn, has a powerful voice in the making of U.S. trade policy. These forces also carry weight in the more political circles in the White House and presumably with President Bush himself, as evident recently in the joint executive-- legislative branch complicity to grant protection and enriched subsidies to steel and agriculture. In the summer of 2002, after a prolonged struggle, President Bush finally persuaded Congress to grant him the authority to negotiate trade agreements that Congress would not seek to amend, an authority denied to President Clinton since 1994, even as this trade promotion authority was approved by a razor-thin margin in the House of Representatives.