Which Direction for Post-Cold War U.S.? : Trade vote is a vote for American foreign policy continuity

If the European Common Market had been designed by Ronald Reagan and George Bush over five years instead of by Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and their successors over 35 years, its successor, the European Union, would not have the sociopolitical character it has today. This is so because even Europe’s business-oriented parties have always had a relatively liberal social agenda. As the European Union took shape, that agenda was enacted along with economic integration.

To bring this comparison closer to home, the historic North American Free Trade Agreement, which the U.S. House is scheduled to vote on Wednesday, would look different--for better as well as for worse--if it had been drafted by the Democrats instead of the Republicans, by Canada’s Liberals instead of its Progressive Conservatives and by Mexico’s Revolutionary Democratic Party instead of its entrenched Institutional Revolutionary Party. NAFTA is the handiwork of the most business-oriented political groups of all three countries. Little wonder that their traditional foes oppose the pact.

In 1993 the conservative consensus that dominated the 1980s, when NAFTA was negotiated, is eroded. In Canada, the Progressive Conservatives recently suffered a defeat without parallel in a modern Western state. In the United States, the Republicans suffered a smaller but still significant defeat in 1992. And in Mexico, the Democratic Revolutionary Party of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, though out of power, continues to press the PRI in local elections.

Just this fact of electoral political life--the waxing and waning of parties--must commend NAFTA even to those who, given the chance, would have produced a different accord. In the defeat of communism, nothing mattered more than continuity. U.S. Republicans and Democrats, despite sharply different national security priorities, ratified the international agreements either party negotiated.

Free trade is a decades-long, bipartisan effort comparable, in its way, to the containment of communism at the height of the Cold War. And a vote for NAFTA should be seen as a vote for continuity in that effort. The very fact that NAFTA has been tinkered with down to almost the last moment proves that it can be improved. But scuttling it would be almost like scuttling NATO in 1949. The Soviet Union would not have waited while a NATO II was planned. World trade will not wait while a NAFTA II is negotiated. Not only could that process take years but a defeat of NAFTA would badly weaken President Clinton just hours before he travels to Seattle for an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting with other heads of state. It could also doom U.S. efforts to open up world trade rules under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

To some degree, NAFTA’s proponents have caricatured the pact’s critics as enemies of free trade simply because they favor the liberal approach taken in Europe over the conservative approach proposed here. That’s as simplistic, in a way, as the sky-is-falling alarms some NAFTA opponents have bandied about. Yet NAFTA’s most responsible opponents represent large and permanent constituencies with fully legitimate concerns. But however unsatisfactorily NAFTA deals with those concerns, the effect of a NAFTA defeat would be even worse.

The treaty may be a boardroom version of free trade, but in their own interest its opponents in the House should hold their noses and vote for it. Then they must start working to make it better, along with all the other foreign trade policies that, with the end of the Cold War, will henceforth play such a pivotal role in this country’s relations with the rest of the world.