The New Authoritarianism by Salvatore Babones

Author:Salvatore Babones
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509533084
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

Democracy versus free trade

Economic rights are the bread and butter of the liberal internationalist agenda, and the most cherished and sacrosanct of these rights has come to be free trade. Free trade is the one issue that more than any other drives a wedge between liberals and progressives. Rightly or wrongly, progressives usually see free trade as an attack on workers’ livelihoods, while liberals see it as a matter of sheer common sense. In the 2016 US Presidential election, the progressive insurgent Bernie Sanders’ relentless opposition to the TPP negotiated by the Obama administration ultimately forced candidate Clinton to back away from a deal she had previously called “gold standard” (as it happens, another one-time liberal policy priority). It’s not only progressives who have historically opposed free trade. Conservatives, too, have often opposed trade deals as undermining economic sovereignty and traditional power structures. It is worth remembering that the Republican Party was the party of high tariffs from its founding in the 1850s until liberals succeeded in making opposition to free trade intellectually disreputable in the 1990s.

But the classic battle between liberals and conservatives over free trade was fought in the United Kingdom. In the nineteenth century, one of the defining issues of the early Conservative Party was its support for restrictions on imported grain. These Corn Laws helped maintain the traditional social, economic, and political structure of the English countryside. They were a primary target for the early Liberal Party.

Free trade in the context of the Corn Laws was at the core of the classic liberal agenda because it was construed as a freedom: the freedom to buy the lowest-priced grain no matter where it came from. It was not a right like the European Union’s right to sell products in all member states. Nineteenth-century British liberals did not advocate that Russians and Americans be given the right to sell grain in the United Kingdom. They merely advocated that British citizens have the freedom to buy grain from anyone they chose. American revolutionaries in liberal New England once demanded the same freedom with respect to tea. What freedom of speech is for the professional wing of the expert class, free trade is for the managerial. The human rights activists and CEOs who attend the World Economic Forum meetings at Davos get along just fine when it comes to free trade. In fact, the most powerful liberal argument in Britain’s Corn Law debate was that high grain prices disproportionately harmed the poor.

As liberalism has evolved over the last two centuries, so have trade deals. Once concerned with the expansion of freedoms, they are now focused on the determination of rights. For example, the dear departed TPP would have governed the right to the exclusive use of intellectual property (including patents, trademarks, and copyrights), the right to invest in companies and operate businesses in foreign jurisdictions, and the right to trial by international expert panel rather than in each country’s court system. As a result the TPP was no more a trade deal than the EU is a customs union.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.