Regionalism and Domestic Politics: U.S.-Latin American Trade Policy in the Bush Era

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 Political Economy of United States’ Free Trade Arrangements

“…The Latin Americans have had good reasons to pursue hemispheric commercial integration (Feinberg, 2002). As a consequence of the 1980s debt crisis, among other factors, Latin American economies have adopted a more outwardoriented growth strategy, and their own regional integration models have shifted from inward looking and protective to forms that couple domestic liberalisation with an opening to global markets ('open regionalism').…”

Foreign Policy Change in Latin America: Exploring a Middle-Range Concept

“…Third, there is the political economy of foreign policy. The literature examining this dimension focuses on several issues including the political and commercial relationship with the United States (Bergsten 2002;Feinberg 2002); the role given to transnational corporations; the relationship with the global flow of capital (Robinson 2008); and the positions adopted vis-à-vis global and regional trade (Bouzas 2000;Phillips 2003Phillips , 2014Tussie 2009). In these debates, trade policy has been a fundamental instrument used to address Latin America's regional and global economic integration.…”

“…Both cyclical (Carlsnaes 1992;Rosati 1994) and loss-aversion (Welch 2005) models expect FPCh to occur when the economy is doing badly. An important body of literature has been devoted to explore how economic constraints provoked the realignment of Latin American countries' foreign policies as a way to access credit, investment, and even aid (Feinberg 2002;Phillips 2004;Grugel and Riggirozzi 2012). The implicit understanding of this literature is that countries in dire straits have to make substantial changes in their foreign policies if they want to get help from the markets or a more powerful country.…”

U.S. Power and the Politics of Economic Governance in the Americas

“…The system for dealing with labor and environmental standards in the Chile-US. agreement is, in this sense, envisioned explicitly as the benchmark for the treatment of these issues in the FTM (Feinberg 2003(Feinberg , 1037. It represents in this sense a strategy for circumventing the entrenched opposition among Latin American and Caribbean governments to the linkage of trade with labor and environmental standards-an opposition articulated most vociferously by Brazilian officials-and to some extent also for assuaging Canadian insistence that labor and environmental standards should be negotiated only as side agreements rather than integrated into the text of trade agreements.…”

“…Indeed, the FTAA cannot be understood in any meaningful sense as a "U.S. project," when that is taken to refer to the roots of its impetus and momentum. Although the FTAA project arose from President George H. W. Bush's Enterprise for the Americas Initiative, announced in 1990, it was propelled predominantly by interest from Latin American and Caribbean governments, much as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was driven primarily by pressure from Mexico (Feinberg 1997(Feinberg , 2002. Indeed, over the 1990s, the FTAA process was characterized by a significant lack of political leadership or involvement from the U.S. government, as a consequence partly of the overall "benign neg1ect"'of the region by the Clinton administration and partly of the disabling absence of fast-track negotiating author-ity.…”