I greatly appreciate Margaret Peters’s thoughtful engagement with Trade Battles. Our exchange shows the tremendous value of interdisciplinary analyses of trade. Peters has two primary critiques. First, she asks about Ross Perot’s influence on the trade debate. We found surprisingly little evidence that Perot influenced how trade was politized after the election or that his success affected partisan politics in relationship to trade. By the time Perot made his famous “giant sucking sound” statement, activists had been rallying public opposition to NAFTA for two years. After the election the positions of the two major parties did not change; Republicans and some Democrats continued to support free trade agreements. Democrats who opposed NAFTA generally borrowed discursive strategies from and worked closely with labor and environmental organizations, as we discuss at length in Trade Battles. A compelling question then, is, why did Perot not have more impact on trade politics after the election? Might the answer lie in the majoritarian electoral rules of the U.S. political system? Perot was an outsider who ran as an independent. Did this make him irrelevant to both major parties’ trade positions even after the election? In striking contrast, Trump’s anti-trade message was likely more successful, in part, because he channeled it through a major political party.
In my previous book NAFTA and the Politics of Labor Transnationalism, I detail how many activists perceived Perot’s anti-NAFTA stance to have racist and nationalist overtones—he accused Mexico of “taking” U.S. jobs and claimed NAFTA would increase illegal immigration and drug trafficking—and distanced themselves from it. As an AFL-CIO official revealed, “I’m sure there were people who preferred the Buchanan approach or Perot. I mean that’s one thing I would never do, I wouldn’t talk to them” (p. 81).
Peters’s second criticism is that she would have liked more engagement with alternative explanations, in particular, the role of international bargaining. We agree that strong preferences by the Canadian and Mexican governments shaped and constrained international bargaining dynamics. As we wrote in Trade Battles, “Labor concerns touched the heart of Mexico’s economic relationship with the United States and its means of attaining its capital needs. The intensity of Mexican negotiators’ preferences for a weak labor agreement far outweighed their preferences for a weak environmental agreement. And it was not countered by an equally strong preference by President Clinton for a strong labor agreement” (p. 133). For us the most interesting question was, given that these preferences and the constraints they created were clear from the beginning, how did labor unions deal with them? How did they attempt to improve the agreement, in what ways did they actually succeed, and how did working in a coalition with environmental organizations help and hurt their efforts? Ironically, during the recent renegotiation of NAFTA, labor unions stayed at the table and pushed USTR Lighthizer to strengthen labor rights and protections, which he did. And this time, the PRI administration agreed to provisions that would significantly and fundamentally change Mexican labor law.
Peters also poses two interesting rhetorical questions. First, she “wonder(s) what the counterfactual would have been had Congress not delegated the authority to negotiate more or less in secret to the executive branch?” In fact, the counterfactual exists. Hundreds of U.S. trade agreements have been successfully negotiated without using the fast-track procedure, with more congressional oversight often resulting in stronger social protections.
Second, the idea that activists have “thrown the baby out with the bathwater” represents a fundamental misunderstanding of their position on trade. Unions and environmental organizations are not opposed to trade; they oppose unfair trade rules and nontariff-related provisions that affect domestic laws and regulatory policies and create secret courts for corporations. These provisions make it harder for countries to protect workers and the environment, provide low-cost medicine, regulate food, and protect consumers. Activists are in good company. Economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz opposed the TPP in large part because of these provisions. Is it not possible to secure the benefits of trade while maintaining Streeckian “beneficial constraints” of “high floor” social policies?
Ultimately, I disagree with Peters’s assumption about the universal benefits of free trade and neoliberal globalization. In fact, this is not a settled question. Economists show that the benefits of free trade may be exaggerated and uneven and may induce inequalities. Political scientists and sociologists illuminate the emerging costs as regions left behind by trade are decimated now, as during the first globalization a century ago, as polarization increases, and as a virulent strain of populism emerges. If there is a normative argument in Trade Battles, it is that the inequalities that result from neoliberal globalization are neither inevitable nor immutable. They result, in part, from the way we choose to construct the rules.
