Turtle Island
My exposure to the politics of international trade began in the mid-1980s, when Canadians were thrust into an existential debate among themselves over the future of their economic relationship with the United States. The catalyst was a proposed comprehensive free trade agreement between the two countries. Americans hardly batted an eyelash at the negotiations, but they transformed Canada’s 1988 federal election campaign into a single-issue referendum on the future of the country. Just a few years later Americans and Mexicans confronted similar angst as all three North American states debated whether to support the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
To students of North American integration, the bruising political debates that preceded the NAFTA’s eventual implementation in 1994 can myopically appear to have been one of the most important events in the history of North America: time before NAFTA and then NAFTA. The NAFTA era was unquestionably a significant development in the political economy of postwar North America.
Yet it was hardly the first time anyone has thought about what North America is and what it ought to be.
When Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas in 1492, he quickly learned a lot of people had already discovered it. Indeed, by some estimates, there were as many as 100 million people spread throughout the Western Hemisphere at the time, many of them descendants of Asian migrants from a much earlier period (see C. Mann 2005; Jennings 1975).
The 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was awarded to University of California–Davis professor and poet Gary Snyder for his collection of poems entitled Turtle Island. It was a name given to what we now refer to as North America by aboriginal communities and derived from the creation myths common to many of them.
Turtle Island – the old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millennia, and reapplied by some of them to “North America” in recent years. Also, an idea found worldwide, of the earth, or cosmos even, sustained by a great turtle or serpent-of-eternity.
A name: that we may ourselves more accurately on this continent of watersheds and life-communities – plant zones, physiographic provinces, culture areas; following natural boundaries. The “U.S.A.” and its states and counties are arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is really there.
The poems speak of place, and the energy-pathways that sustain life. Each living being is a swirl in the flow, a formal turbulence, a “song.” The land, the planet itself, is also a living being – at another pace. Anglos, Black people, Chicanos, and others beached up on these shores all share such views at the deepest levels of their old cultural traditions – African, Asian, or European. Hark again to those roots to see our ancient solidarity, and then to the work of being together on Turtle Island.
(Snyder 1974: introductory note)
In the aboriginal community’s vision of Turtle Island, we see a politically, economically and socially integrated land mass uninterrupted by the borders of the modern nation state, undivided by the exigencies of security, the politics of immigration or populist fear-mongering about what resides just beyond the border. Indeed, Turtle Island is a conception of North America that modern proponents of integration have pursued for decades, but has in recent years seemed more elusive than ever.
Whither North America?
The elusiveness of a modern, coherent unifying vision of North America stems, in part, from the way in which modern political borders have shaped (limited) our thinking about the continent. In some minds, there is no “North America”, nor should there be (see Corsi 2007). How can visionaries think of knitting together cultures shaped by three different European languages, distinct political cultures and unique experiences with colonialism and federalism? Turtle Island suggests such a vision is not without precedent. Yet modern North America is full of stark contrasts and divisions, many of which have become fodder for opponents of anything approaching Turtle Island.
Former New York Times correspondent Anthony DePalma recalls the experience of being reassigned to Toronto from Mexico City in 1996, two years after the NAFTA was implemented. During his time in Mexico there was no shortage of signals that DePalma was in a foreign country; language, culture and politics. Especially salient was the US–Mexican border, particularly near busy ports of entry that featured large fences, long lines, sceptical customs and immigration officials all standing in the way of easy entry and exit. Indeed, parts of the US–Mexican border are only slightly less militarized than the border separating North and South Korea; heavily armed patrols, surveillance aircraft, sniffer dogs and motion detectors are ubiquitous.
DePalma’s arrival in Toronto was a different story. There were no sniffer dogs, no fences, no heavily armed staff; just a few questions from a customs inspector and a short wait while relatively friendly immigration authorities examined entry papers. Toronto felt so much like being in the United States that he subsequently forgot his passport as he checked in for a flight to New York; it was a pre-trip gaffe that resulted in several missed flights, but one he would never have made had he been making the same trip from Mexico City. DePalma had quickly assimilated into Canadian society because the differences between English Canadians and Americans are comparatively subtle. It was a point that was driven home even further several months later, when he and his family tried to arrange for their Mexico City housekeeper to join them in Canada. Unlike the experience of the DePalma family itself, the bureaucratic hurdles and restrictions placed upon their housekeeper were arduous. So much so, in fact, that their housekeeper stayed a mere six months, having felt alienated and unwelcome.
The physical, economic and psychological qualities of contemporary North America’s borders have been difficult to overcome. DePalma’s experience in Toronto’s airport was instructive as to the divides that remain:
That was my first lesson in understanding the line separating Canada and the United States. In time, I came to appreciate that the northern border is so complex because of its ubiquitously dual nature. For Americans, the border is almost invisible, whereas Canadians are painfully conscious of it all the time. We [Americans] see the border as joining Canada to the United States. For Canadians it is the last frontier separating us from them.
(DePalma 2001: 186)
North America’s two internal borders are at once similar (arbitrary political lines on a map) and vastly different in terms of how they shape the lives of the people they separate. In the last half-century, assumptions about the impermeable nature of these barriers have been challenged, most substantively in North America by the NAFTA itself. Indeed, until recently the NAFTA was a component of the post-Cold-War reconsideration of the utility and meaning of borders in our social, economic and political lives (see Rodrik 1997).
This volume is about the political economy of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its apparent successor, the inelegantly named United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). These are very deep waters to try and swim in a short book. Underwriting the NAFTA, or soon the USMCA, is an ever-evolving set of ideas conceptualizing what North America is or ought to be. In the wake of the NAFTA’s implementation in 1994, the academic exploration of the ideas underlying the NAFTA exploded; so much so that, just two years later, Alan Metz could produce a bibliographic list of NAFTA literature totalling nearly 500 pages (Metz 1996).
The NAFTA’s bibliographic possibilities now occupy significantly more storage space in libraries and data farms around the world, and do so from every corner of the social sciences and humanities. At the core of this vast, growing literature are the same two basic questions: does North America exist? And is there a “North American” idea?
The ambiguity around these questions is at least part of the reason for writing this volume. As I will point out in comparing Europe with North America, what has become the European Union has had a succession of intellectual and political champions, most notably the French statesman Jean Monnet. In North America, several have tried, including many of those cited in this volume. Yet the reality is that none have succeeded in instilling anything approaching a vision for North America.
There are no illusions about this volume changing that. However, an important objective of this volume is to create a short, accessible guide to some of the most important aspects of the NAFTA and the politics that flow from them, all with the aim of demystifying the NAFTA, and distinguishing the agreement itself from broader debates of which it is nevertheless a part.
Long-time students of North America will quickly detect an underlying point of view to this volume that is worth making explicit here. Specifically, trade liberalization is generally a positive-sum enterprise that improves efficiencies and raises living standards through the international division of labour and increased market access. On that score, the NAFTA is viewed throughout this volume as having generally been good for all three countries. However, that judgement is tempered by what the NAFTA actually is and what it is designed to accomplish. Unfortunately, the NAFTA could have been, and probably should have been, far more than it was.
The point of this short volume is less about rendering a new judgement on the merits of the NAFTA; a small army of social scientists will continue working on that for a long time. It will not, for example, try and break new econometric ground on the impact of the NAFTA on wage growth or how increased trade volumes may have contributed to climate change. Instead, this volume is intended as both a quick user’s guide to what the NAFTA actually is and as a primer into the complex political economy of North America, of which the agreement is a part.
Chapter 1 starts with the North American idea – specifically, what the contemporary origins of that “idea” are, where the NAFTA fits within it and where it might be headed in light of the advent of the USMCA. Chapter 2 casts several components of the NAFTA against the broader postwar history of economic liberalization, institutionalization and the neoclassical stages of integration as a means of contextualizing the kind of arrangement the NAFTA actually is.
Chapter 3 continues the discussion of the North American idea in the context of regionalism. Specifically, does North America pass the smell test as a cohesive economic, social and political region? Has North America been inching towards something resembling Turtle Island, and what role has the NAFTA played in advancing towards it?
Chapter 4 then revisits some of the main goals and achievements of the NAFTA as it was designed. Specifically, did the NAFTA stimulate trade and investment? In what areas did the NAFTA break new ground or innovate in terms of economic governance? And, of course, where did it leave a mixed result or come up short?
Chapter 5 focuses attention on foreign direct investment, an area not typically considered at length in analyses of the NAFTA. However, among the most innovative parts of the NAFTA were the investment rules embedded within. More importantly, the innovations around investment, and the controversies they engendered, are a microcosm of many of the issues plaguing the global trading regime more broadly. Chapter 6 explores the important debates about the institutional design of the NAFTA. The NAFTA infamously eschewed certain types of institutional mechanisms, yet it is hardly without them nor are they without significance as elements of regional governance.
Labour and the environment are the focus of Chapter 7. Both these issues are now firmly entrenched as critical components of the global trading regime. The NAFTA was instrumental in putting them there, but did so in a round-about way that simultaneously helped and hurt the agreement’s standing with the public. Finally, Chapter 8 looks at the 2017/18 renegotiation of the NAFTA, the USMCA, and asks how much of the NAFTA 2.0 (as some also call it) is new and improved. It is an evaluation undertaken through the lens of the merits and shortcomings of the original NAFTA outlined in Chapters 2 to 7.
For those of you who would rather not read further, the punchline is this: if approved by all three legislatures, the USMCA represents a partial improvement from the NAFTA in regional governance. That is a very large “if”, since, at the time of writing, divided government in the United States, a measure of political instability swirling around the Trump administration and the lack of headway in removing US tariffs imposed on steel and aluminium from Canada and Mexico (a stated condition for considering the USMCA in both countries) all cast some uncertainty on the viability of the USMCA. However, the USMCA updates the NAFTA in ways that proponents of modernization failed to do in the two decades following the NAFTA’s implementation in 1994. That said, the USMCA is not perfect, and is in other ways a lamentable turn away from anything resembling Turtle Island, a North American accord or the North American idea.