In the New Global Economy, Can the United States Export Its Values?
After an election-year lull, the smoldering battle over American trade policy is flaring again. But it’s returning in a revealing new shape. This time, the debate over trade’s impact on jobs--the centerpiece of the struggle over the North American Free Trade Agreement--is a secondary note. Now the principal focus is on values.
Trade politics is shifting toward issues like human and labor rights and religious freedom, partly because it’s hard to generate a fierce argument over jobs when unemployment is at an eight-year low. But a more profound change is also at work.
Even through the 1980s, the most pressing trade disputes involved Europe and Japan--nations that broadly share American attitudes toward basic human rights. But, as former Commerce Undersecretary Jeffrey E. Garten notes in his new book “The Big Ten,” the most important trading issues now involve “big emerging markets” like China, Mexico and Indonesia--nations with a loose attachment, if not an active hostility, to Western notions of individual liberty. Inevitably, that culture clash is forcing human rights higher on the trade agenda.
Even in this environment, the historic divide between protectionists and free-traders hasn’t disappeared. But it’s being overlapped, and to some extent eclipsed, by a new division between mercantalists and moralists.
The mercantalists--including President Clinton and most leading congressional Republicans--say the preeminent goal for trade policy should be to advance American commercial interests by opening markets abroad. The moralists--an eclectic coalition that ranges from liberal human rights groups to prominent religious conservatives and most House Democrats--say the United States should use the leverage of trade negotiations to advance American values like individual freedom, environmental protection and dignity at work.
The mercantalists insist that those concerns are best pursued through international forums (such as the World Trade Organization) or by targeted negotiations like the worldwide anti-sweatshop agreement that Clinton will announce with U.S. apparel makers today. The moralists counter that relegating human and labor rights to a separate track dooms them to a lower priority. “There is really a profound question on whether American foreign policy is going to be driven by large corporations or American values,” said Gary Bauer, president of the Family Research Council, a social conservative group now weighing in on trade issues.
These contending camps will collide twice in the months ahead. They already are mobilizing for a congressional battle this summer over Clinton’s expected decision to renew most-favored-nation trading status for China. Sometime later this year, the two sides will clash again when Clinton formally requests “fast-track” negotiating authority to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement into South America.
Mercantalists like Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) believe that the moralists are merely repackaging “protectionism in another guise.” That undoubtedly explains part of the phenomenon. But not all.
This argument also updates a fundamental division in American foreign policy that traces back to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. In the Wilsonian tradition, the moralists argue that American foreign policy will succeed only to the extent that it embodies basic American values. Like Roosevelt, the mercantalists emphasize American self-interest.
But neither side entirely cedes the opponents’ ground. The moralists convincingly argue that opening markets without ensuring labor rights runs against American interests because Third World workers won’t ever earn enough to buy U.S. products unless they can organize collectively.
Conversely, the mercantalists maintain that trade is a solvent of repression--that by pursuing our interest in opened markets, we’re also advancing the values of democracy and freedom. Clinton has succinctly laid out their credo: “We remain convinced . . . that as societies become more open economically, they also become more open politically.” In other words, by doing well, we’re also doing good.
That conclusion is comforting, but overdrawn. In Taiwan, South Korea and Chile, greater democracy has followed prosperity and opening to the international market. But in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and, even in many ways, Mexico, open markets haven’t produced true political or labor rights. On the other hand, trade sanctions aren’t a silver bullet either; the precise alchemy of domestic affluence and international pressure that nurtures freedom remains inscrutable.
The difficulty of reforming distant countries with either commerce or coercion looms over the congressional battles on China and the fast-track authority for NAFTA expansion. Backed by the business community, the mercantalists hold the upper hand in both--but only tenuously. Although the moralist coalition might overturn the favored trading status for China in the House, its members face a tougher climb in the Senate, and have little chance of overriding an inevitable Clinton veto. The fast-track vote could be dicier because many Democrats are refusing to back the authority for Clinton unless he explicitly commits to including labor and environmental agreements in any new trade treaties--and many Republicans say they’ll back fast track only if it explicitly precludes negotiations on those subjects. Clinton hopes to thread the needle with authority that neither demands nor prohibits such negotiations, but the outlook remains murky.
Even if Clinton and the mercantalists prevail on both these tests, they face a rising challenge. Ironically, the pressure flows from their own success at raising the prominence of trade in international relations. Economic policy is now so integral to America’s foreign policy that it’s being judged by the same standards applied to all other foreign policy decisions. Americans have never supported a foreign policy based on interests alone; they’ve always demanded that it embody American values as well. In the years ahead, that demand is likely to become increasingly inescapable for the architects of American trade policy too.
Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space every Monday.
