1
Given the significant space on library shelves devoted to aspects of North American integration, there is remarkably little agreement within all that literature as to what North America actually is. For instance, the final instalment of Stephen Clarkson’s excellent trilogy on North America is titled Does North America Exist?, as if there is an agreed definition of North America that can be evaluated (Clarkson 2008). Even Robert Pastor’s last book on North America, The North America Idea, left the “idea” itself unsatisfyingly ill-defined, calling it “a spirit of community based on interdependence” (Pastor 2011: 28). When compared with Pastor’s 2001 advocacy of “deepening” the NAFTA by transforming it into a customs union, it is clear the “North American idea” includes a number of components well beyond the confines of a trade agreement such as the NAFTA (Pastor 2001: 177–86).
The point of this entire volume is to offer readers a short survey of contemporary North American integration, and the politics of the NAFTA as a component part within. This chapter is about the ideational origins of contemporary North America.
There is considerable variability among scholars, public officials and the general public about how North America should be conceptualized. Indeed, that conceptualization is often connected to what people think the NAFTA itself is or ought to have been. Is North America mostly about the NAFTA? What do we mean by North America as a region? Should it be defined geographically, geologically or geopolitically? A geologist looks at North America as inclusive of much of the Caribbean whereas students of political economy think mainly about Canada, the United States and Mexico. What about shared culture or institutions as a defining feature of the region?
Although there is disagreement over what the North American idea is or ought to be, we can anchor the ideational foundations of the NAFTA in terms of the politics of the global economy in the early postwar period and the domestic politics of each NAFTA country. The international and the domestic are, of course, connected. But situating the NAFTA’s origins in this way helps demarcate the boundaries of the North American idea.
Do all roads lead to Rome … er, Brussels?
The origins of the NAFTA, and the beginning of some understanding of the broader North American idea, are usefully set in several important frameworks of thought that evolved during the postwar period, and seemingly gained momentum in the aftermath of the Cold War. Among the dominant theories gaining renewed attention was what students of comparative politics refer to as modernization theory. The primary thrust of modernization theory is that economic growth is the main driver of social and political change. Sustainable market-driven growth is dependent on the free flow of information to commercial interests, entrepreneurs and individuals, which in turn fosters increasing demands for openness, participation in and accountability around political decision-making. In this view, modernization is an explicitly liberal project connecting the merits of liberal capitalism and liberal democracy to economic development and an increasingly cosmopolitan global political economy.
The debate around modernization theory was famously rekindled in 1992 by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, in which he argues that the great ideological debate of the twentieth century between planned, authoritarian economies and those espousing liberal capitalism and democracy had been decided by the outcome of the Cold War (Fukuyama 1992). For a time, it appeared Fukuyama was onto something. Indeed, the collapse of the Soviet Union was seemingly followed by a burst of economic liberalism and interest in rules-based institutions to underwrite it. The proliferation of liberalization projects was dramatic: the Bush administration’s Enterprise for the Americas Initiative in 1990, the Clinton administration’s Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in 1994, the Common Market of the Southern Cone (MERCOSUR) in 1991 and, of course, the NAFTA (negotiations initiated in 1990). According to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the growth of regional and bilateral preferences arrangements expanded dramatically after 1990, doubling to 70 such agreements by 1995 and quadrupling to nearly 300 through to 2010 (World Trade Organization 2011: 54).
Multilaterally, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) launched its “Uruguay Round” in 1986 with 123 members, but had ballooned to 159 by the time the “Doha Round” began in 2001, among them the People’s Republic of China. It seemed as though everyone was trying to get a piece of the liberalization action. Was it possible that even China would come exhibit more and more of the attributes of a capitalist democracy?
Hindsight suggests flaws in modernization’s take on the post-Cold-War era. The wave of democratization that ensued after the collapse of the Soviet Union stalled in 2005, beginning a growing scepticism about democracy and a descent towards illiberal democracy and authoritarianism (see Zakaria 1997; 2003; Freedom House 2019; Latinobarómetro 2018: 31–8). Many of the regional initiatives noted above fell apart. China’s integration into the global economy on market capitalist terms remains a work in progress. And the utility of regional or multilateral trading regimes to govern rules-based trade has been subjected to considerable scepticism.
The NAFTA came into being and the European project took its next big step in this period of euphoric triumphalism around the merits of integrated markets. It is, in part, for this reason they have always been useful, if not perfect, comparators.
European project
In Europe, the postwar project of integration seemed to have been given its capstone in the early post-Cold-War years with the conclusion of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Maastricht was an enormous leap of faith for many Europeans, paving the way for passport-free travel and the adoption of the euro. The euro, in particular, was a difficult pill to swallow for some Europeans, since it meant the replacement of national currencies with a single currency – a loss of monetary sovereignty and, in some ways, the loss of a long-standing national symbol. For the United Kingdom, of course, the euro was a bridge to far in the early 1990s, and remained so through the country’s 2016 decision to withdraw from most other aspects of the European project.
Although elements of Europe’s postwar integration overlap with aspects of modernization theory, including democratic or commercial peace theory, the conceptual roots of the European project are most firmly anchored in liberal theories of international relations examining the salutary benefits of greater and greater degrees of economic and political linkage. The formal study of the impact of linkage was popularized most notably among academics by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye in the 1970s in their now standard study Power and Interdependence (Keohane & Nye 1977). Therein, Keohane and Nye advance the argument that with increasing degrees of complex interdependence, typified by the depth of economic and political linkages between nations, nation states were less and less likely to actually go to war with each other. Interestingly, it was the depth and sophistication of linkages then in existence between Canada and the United States in the mid-1970s that Keohane and Nye pointed to as evidence for their argument. War between the two countries had effectively been removed as a possibility between the two countries, mainly as a result of the depth of economic and political interdependence that had been fostered by years of cooperation on geostrategic, political and, increasingly, economic relations, which made the cost of armed conflict too high for both nations and, therefore, unthinkable.
However, the European project has roots that go back to well before the end of the Second World War. Indeed, the intellectual connection between economic nationalism and political nationalism has its roots firmly planted in the interwar years (1918 to 1939). For example, in his political memoirs, former US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, puts it clearly:
Toward 1916 I embraced the philosophy I carried throughout my twelve years as Secretary of State, into the Trade Agreements, into numerous speeches and statements addressed to this country and to the world. From then on, to me unhampered trade dovetailed with peace; high tariffs, trade barriers, and unfair economic competition, with war. (Hull 1948: 211)
This basic linkage spilled over into the planning for the postwar peace. For Hull, it meant convincing the US Congress to pass the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in 1934, aimed at jump-starting the global trading flows destroyed by the Great Depression. But it was a basic rationale that also spilled over into the postwar design of the international financial institutions at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 (Steil 2013; Irwin, Mavroidis & Sykes 2008).
In Europe, the rationale behind interdependence in economic and politics fostering a lasting peace was most prominently advanced by Jean Monnet, a French economist and diplomat, widely considered the originator of the postwar European project. For Monnet, the roots of a lasting peace in Europe were to be found in the errors made at Versailles in 1918, which consigned Germany to economic privation and political isolation. Instead, Monnet argued, the route to peace was anchored in fostering the seeds of shared economic and political dependence between the victor and the defeated. For him, this meant firmly linking France and Germany to each other, connecting their futures together institutionally, economically and politically such that fighting could be pulled off the table. In 1951 the Treaty of Paris formally created the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), linking the industrial production activities of six countries under a single coordinative umbrella.
North America, of course, is different.
There have been important periods of conflict among what we now think of as Canada, the United States and Mexico, much of it the result of colonial frontier expansion: the American Revolutionary War (1774 to 1783), the exodus of United Empire Loyalists north, multiple skirmishes that followed such as the Caroline Affair (1837), the Fenian raids of the 1860s, the Texas Revolution (1835 to 1836) or the “Mexican Expedition” to capture Pancho Villa in 1916/17.
The devastation wrought by the twentieth century’s major European conflicts was partly responsible for laying the intellectual foundation of a modern integrated continent. The collective shock to people among all walks of European life facilitated the spread of a set of ideas for preventing a repeat of those conflicts. In North America there has been no such transcendent event lending itself to a collective response. Whereas Europe’s Jean Monnet became a vocal and active champion of European integration as a means of solidifying peace and economic prosperity, no such individual has emerged in North America. Several academics, including many cited in this volume, have been vocal proponents of movement towards forms of greater cooperation in North America, but none have had a sustained public resonance, nor have their ideas.
Several of North America’s politicians have picked up the ideational torch for the North American idea, only to drop it when confronted with the politics of the NAFTA. A case in point is President Clinton, who, as described in several places in this volume, was initially lukewarm to the NAFTA, subsequently fought hard for US implementation in his first year in office but then seldom mentioned it during the remainder of his two terms of in office. One exception to the uneven attention given to the North American idea is Mexico’s Vicente Fox, who hoped to use his presidency (2000 to 2006) to pursue structural reforms to the Mexican state, including deepening the country’s integration into the North American political economy (Pastor Jr & Wise 2005; Wise 2007). Indeed, Fox’s ambitions were on display when he was the invitee for the first state visit of the administration of George W. Bush, on 5 September 2001 (White House 2001), when he used the occasion to propose the two countries reach an immigration accord (Leiken 2002). In the years since leaving office, and particularly with the arrival of Donald Trump’s brand of anti-immigrant populism, Fox has remained in the public spotlight, often appearing on English-language news programmes to challenge opponents of the NAFTA.
North America as a throwaway line
One of the most prominent American proponents of North America as an “idea” was Ronald Reagan. However, Reagan is also emblematic of the on-again-off-again attention to that “idea”. The road to the NAFTA arguably began in November 1979, when Reagan announced his intention to seek the Republican nomination for president in 1980. Part of his announcement was a call to advance towards what he referred to as “a North American accord” (Lindsey 1979). Reagan did not spell out what exactly he meant such an “accord” to be, saying only that he was willing to invite the views of Canadians and Mexicans about forging closer ties. For some, the proposal was dismissed as a throwaway speech filler, but Reagan biographer Lou Cannon believes the future president took the North American accord idea seriously, in part, as a result of his experience with Mexico while governor of California (1967 to 1975) (Cannon 1991: 461).
Yet Reagan’s announcement remarks are also emblematic of what became the politics of the North American idea. Once begun, the American interest in free trade talks with Canada and, a few years later, Mexico can be seen in a variety of areas. Some of it was geostrategic, in that all three countries were emerging from periods of economic nationalism and stagnation. Free trade offered the United States an opportunity to “lock in” reforms with two of its most important trading partners (Cameron & Wise 2004). Some went even further and speculated that further liberalization in Mexico could lead to greater democratization, as per the tenets of modernization theory (Heredia 1994; Moreno & Méndez 2002). America’s interest was also geostrategic, in that frustrations had emerged with the larger, but stagnant, multilateral negotiation process anchored in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The Reagan administration believed the symbolism of doing something separate with Canada, and later Mexico, might break the multilateral logjam. The message to the GATT was that “we have options and are willing to team up with our friends” (Bergsten 1996; Evenett & Meier 2008).
Yet describing the United States as completely focused on engaging Canada and Mexico is a stretch. Were the negotiations important? Yes, for many of the reasons noted above. The NAFTA negotiations were a large undertaking that became one of the most complex and comprehensive negotiations over economic policy the United States had ever undertaken (Cameron & Tomlin 2000: 106–8). However, there is always an underlying ambivalence on the part of the United States in relations with Canada and Mexico. The US agenda is vast, and frequently distracting for American officials. The asymmetries of power in North America are pervasive and complicate relations among the three parties (Anderson 2019). And the size and depth of the US domestic economy minimizes the country’s dependence upon, and vulnerability to, fluctuations in global trade.
The American public was only vaguely aware the NAFTA negotiations were happening at all, and the major focal points for the US trade bureaucracy at the time were bilateral disputes with Japan and efforts to launch a new round of the multilateral GATT negotiations (the Uruguay Round was finally launched in 1986) (Dryden 1995; Hart, Dymond & Robertson 1994). Not so for Canada and Mexico, both of which have economies deeply tied to the United States alone. These are issues and dynamics that arise repeatedly when considering North America and the ideas emanating from the United States that shape them.
Hence, despite all Reagan’s enthusiasm for free trade negotiations when he announced his presidential run in 1979, his support for free trade with Canada starting in 1985 came only after negotiations were proposed by Canada’s newly elected conservative prime minister, Brian Mulroney. Similarly, it was Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari who proposed free trade to President George H. W. Bush in June 1990, ultimately leading to the initiation of trilateral talks and the NAFTA.
In other words, the United States got on board, but was not the one in hot pursuit of regional free trade. Reagan’s “accord” proposal was initially met with some trepidation in Canada and Mexico over concerns about dominance or absorption by the continental “colossus” (Granatstein 1996; Moreno 2003). However, the regional integration vision behind Reagan’s “accord” idea has been met by a populist, nativist, conspiracy-prone opposition in the United States itself, seriously complicating any pursuit of any sort of North American idea.
Canada’s change of heart
The ideational origins of the NAFTA in Canada are anchored in a series of postwar reconsiderations of the nation’s economic policy posture, especially that with the United States (Hart 1989; Officer & Smith 1968; Johnston & Percy 1980). The so-called “Nixon shocks” of 1971, which included a 10 per cent surcharge on all imports, prompted a renewed debate about Canada’s economic policy options, which initially lurched towards statist intervention, protectionism and efforts to wean the Canadian economy off of dependence on the United States (Glover 1974; Fry 1983; Muirhead 2004). However, Canada as a political and economic project of its own was, in many minds, still incomplete; a referendum on Quebec sovereignty had been defeated in 1980, and the Canadian constitution was about to be “repatriated” from the United Kingdom with significant modifications. Hence, the prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, created the so-called Macdonald Commission to re-examine the country’s economic and development prospects (see Laidler & Robson 2015). One of the major conclusions of the Macdonald Commission’s final report was for Ottawa to move towards more market-driven international economic policies in an effort to diversify Canada’s economy, and propose free trade with the United States (Hart, Dymond & Robertson 1994: 29–35).
In late 1984 the commission’s recommendations found a receptive audience in the form of the newly elected Conservative Party of Brian Mulroney. Within a year the new government had proposed free trade to Reagan, formalizing the initiation of comprehensive free trade negotiations in the spring of 1985. When Canadians went to the polls in 1988 the Mulroney government’s pursuit of free trade with the United States became the single most important issue in the federal campaign; indeed, the issue effectively transformed a general election into a referendum on Canada’s relationship with the United States (Granatstein 1996: 246–77). It was an election that some scholars argue marked the end of anti-Americanism as a major political force in Canada, as well as a broader shift in the thinking among Canadians about their economic relationship with the rest of the world, but particularly the United States.
Mexican resignation?
Porfirio Diaz, a multi-term president of Mexico in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is alleged to have been the originator of a now famous quip about his country’s relationship with the United States: “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.” Canada and Mexico share a certain friendly antipathy towards the United States – a country that can be simultaneously overbearing and indifferent, all the while casting long economic, cultural and military shadows over its smaller neighbours (Weintraub 1990; 2010).
Mexico also walked a long ideational path to get to the NAFTA, emerging from decades of experiments with nationalizing industry, development through import substitution policies and, in the 1970s and 1980s, heavy reliance on deficit spending. By the early 1980s a heavy debt burden and weak energy prices were taking their toll on the Mexican economy, prompting the administrations of Miguel de la Madrid (1982–1988) and Carlos Salinas (1988–1994) to embark on difficult structural economic reforms (Weintraub 1991; Bergoeing et al. 2002; Devlin & Ffrench-Davis 1995). Among these initiatives were efforts to attract new foreign investment. In February 1990 President Salinas travelled to Davos, Switzerland, and the World Economic Forum meetings to pitch Mexico as a newly attractive target for private capital flows. However, European capital was not interested in Mexico (Cameron & Tomlin 2000: 1–7, 62–3; Sánchez 2001). Europe was preoccupied with German reunification, the transition of the former Soviet republics and the run-up to the Maastricht Treaty, which significantly deepened its own integration project.
Europe’s preoccupations pushed Mexico towards the United States.
In the wake of the cool reception he received in Europe, Salinas wasted little time in proposing a comprehensive free trade deal with the United States, first floating the idea in early February 1990 (Salinas de Gortari 2002: 48).1 The goal, as Carlos Salinas later wrote, was to generate foreign investment, but also to stabilize foreign perceptions about Mexico:
[T]he flow of foreign investment did not increase with the speed or in the volume that Mexico required. Both domestic and foreign investors argued that the rules in Mexico changed with each administration: one nationalized, the next privatized. It was essential to provide internal stability, convince investors that our policies would have continuity and long-term validity, and that they would not depend on the discretionary powers of the administration in office. (Salinas de Gortari 2002: 42)
Indeed, part of the ideational shift in Mexico, among a certain group of elites, was that Mexico’s record of economic instability, lax enforcement of the rule of law and a history of expropriation of foreign property (oil sector in 1938, banking in 1982) necessitated a signal to the rest of the world that future policy would be locked in – something Salinas and others believed an international agreement such as the NAFTA could achieve (Levy 1995; Cameron & Wise 2004).
Context matters
The diverse ideational sources for the North American idea are also reflective of the diversity of meaning in what North America has become since the advent of the NAFTA and what the NAFTA itself has come to mean as a component part.
Whether it is called the North American idea, a North American accord, Turtle Island or – more pejoratively by the American right – the “North American Union”, the notion of the continent’s three sovereign states working more closely together has taken on numerous forms and meanings, often closely tied to the context from which they flow. Some of that context is properly located in broad, geopolitical and macroeconomic trends and ideas, some more localized, domestically situated imperatives.
Part of the purpose of this volume is to describe what the NAFTA is as a trade agreement, but also what it has come to symbolize as a kind of litmus test for things it was never designed to do. The next chapter, for example, will begin taking up the NAFTA in the very limited terms familiar to economists: what the agreement is, what it is designed to do and how it has functioned. Yet the NAFTA has become a profoundly symbolic, too frequently pejorative, term used by politicians, proponents and critics alike as shorthand for aspects of the global economy – many unrelated to the NAFTA itself.
As suggested above, the NAFTA emerged at a unique historical moment: the “End of History”. Indeed, for economists and proponents of a freer, more efficient global economy, the NAFTA was just one of many initiatives promising to raise living standards through the integration of markets and the international division of labour. Yet, whatever the ideational source material for the North American idea actually is, that material has become left behind by both proponents and critics, who either over- or undersold what the NAFTA could or would do to suit their political objectives. In fact, the NAFTA became a political piñata before anyone had seen a word of the final text.
Throughout the fall of 1992, as the NAFTA text was nearing formal completion, President George H. W. Bush pushed his Democratic challenger, Bill Clinton, to take a position on its merits. Clinton finally said he was supportive of the NAFTA subject to enhanced protections for labour and the environment. Yet it was Texas businessman, and independent presidential candidate, Ross Perot who arguably did the most to transform the NAFTA into a political piñata. Perot opposed the NAFTA, scoffed at the ideas behind it and vigorously critiqued it throughout the fall campaign, and he was a central figure in the 1993 US ratification debate.
Perot’s description of a “giant sucking sound” of American investment and jobs going south into Mexico in a November 1993 debate with Vice-President Al Gore on Larry King’s prime-time CNN talk show left an indelible mark on public perceptions. Although Gore seemed to win the rational arguments, Perot’s attacks presented a dark, devastating and distorted picture of the NAFTA’s impact on everything from wages, labour rights and the environment; each of these is now a commonplace set of concerns swirling around trade liberalization.
Ross Perot will always be known as one of the most successful third-party presidential candidates in American history, capturing 19 per cent of the popular vote in 1992. However, Perot’s impact on American perceptions of the NAFTA, and the acronym’s transformation into a symbolic pejorative, has arguably been more consequential. The NAFTA was ultimately approved by the US Congress, but it never enjoyed much popular or political support. Indeed, whereas President Clinton spent a considerable portion of his early political capital pushing the NAFTA’s congressional approval, he hardly mentioned it again during his next seven years in office.
Of course, the American debate over the NAFTA was not the only one that solidified the agreement’s status as a kind of poster child for all anxieties around trade liberalization. On 1 January 1994, the very day the NAFTA began its implementation phase in all three countries, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation began 12 days of armed rebellion in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. A major purpose of the rebellion was to draw attention to the plight of the poor in southern Mexico, but it also drew attention to the unevenness of development flowing from the liberalization of the global economy, of which the NAFTA was a newly minted example.
The NAFTA debate in Canada was much more muted between 1990 and 1994, in part because the bruising 1988 federal election campaign had settled part of the debate, but also because Canada’s goals in the NAFTA were mostly defensive; Ottawa didn’t want to see the hard-won preferences it had just negotiated with Washington between 1985 and 1987 watered down in a US–Mexico initiative (Cameron & Tomlin 2000: 6; Hart 2002: 393–5).
Finally, in March 1994, a series of events in Mexico solidified the NAFTA’s status as the source of controversy, tainting the agreement’s function in a broader notion of the North American idea. Part of both the Bush and Clinton administrations’ cases for the NAFTA was the rapid emergence of Mexico from a state of underdevelopment to one of rapidly developing middle-income country. A series of reforms throughout the 1980s won Mexico membership in both the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1986, and suggested that Mexico would soon rank among the world’s most formidable economies. Indeed, part of the political case in favour of the NAFTA in the United States was that the agreement would effectively help “lock in” many of these reforms in Mexico, facilitating both open markets and increasingly transparent (hopefully democratic) governance.
Instead, March 1994 brought the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, Mexican presidential candidate and heir apparent to the political dynasty that was the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional: PRI). A sudden political crisis sparked capital flight, downward pressure on the Mexican peso, devaluation in December 1994 and financial panic in Mexico shortly thereafter. The NAFTA did not cause the rebellion, the assassination or the financial panic, but to many observers it had no prospect of helping with any of them. Adding insult to the injury of having spent so much of his early political capital pushing for the NAFTA’s approval, President Clinton had little choice but to intervene to help stabilize the peso and Mexico, brokering a US$50 billion infusion of financing from the United States, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Bank for International Settlements and Canada.
Returning to the description of the North American idea as “a spirit of community based on interdependence” (Pastor 2011: 28), many could see vividly the “interdependence”. In fact, the Clinton administration’s decision to act in the face of the peso crisis was, for critics, just the first sign of how ill-conceived the knitting of the three economies together via the NAFTA may have been. Moreover, it was hard to see the “spirit of community” in the midst of all the criticism and crisis.
The worst agreement ever?
Before the NAFTA was even a year into its implementation phase it had suffered a series of political setbacks, leaving a permanent stain that has since made the NAFTA synonymous with virtually anything critics wanted to assign to it. It was a tough blow to all the many permutations of the North American idea. The NAFTA was partly the victim of circumstance – it did not create the peso crisis or conditions in Chiapas – but it became emblematic of a number of broad flaws in governance (economic and political) with which the NAFTA sometimes had little to do and was too limited to fix (Morales 1997).
Importantly, President Clinton’s disinterest in advocating for or defending the NAFTA after 1994 opened the door for critics of all stripes to pile in, appropriate the NAFTA for their cause and undermine public support for the agreement. In fact, after 1994 politicians willing to defend the NAFTA became a rarity. By the mid-2000s the NAFTA enjoyed so little public support that, when the George W. Bush administration was nearing the conclusion of the US–Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), that agreement’s prospects on Capitol Hill were diminished simply because the acronym rhymed with NAFTA.
The absence of NAFTA advocates since 1994 is only part of the reason the agreement was not revised until 2018 (the USMCA). But this vacuum is also part of the reason populists such as Donald Trump could seize upon the NAFTA’s perceived ills, manipulating both the substance and symbolism of the agreement – “the single worst agreement ever approved” – to political advantage in 2016.
Even though the NAFTA’s text didn’t evolve much between 1994 and 2018, the NAFTA has been at the forefront of debates about the global economy. For some, such as the late Robert Pastor, the controversy around the NAFTA has resulted in the North American idea being drowned out. Indeed, Pastor and others who spent part of their professional careers supporting the North American idea cannot be thrilled with how things have evolved. Yet that same debate has arguably shaped the contours of the North American political and economic space in ways that are entirely reflective of the uniqueness of North America itself – a discussion I take up next in outlining how limited the NAFTA really is, and what that says about the North American idea.
1. In his memoir, Carlos Salinas recounts that the first proposal for a free trade agreement between the United States and Mexico came from President Bush on 22 November 1988, and was rejected. Mexico’s own proposal came on 1 February 1990, in a meeting between the country’s commerce secretary, Jaime Serra Pucha, and Carla Hills, the US trade representative.