Cooperation or Rivalry?: Regional Integration in the Americas and the Pacific Rim by Shoji Nishijima

Author:Shoji Nishijima [Nishijima, Shoji]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780429720352
Google: of0-EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-11-28T07:47:01+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

From NAFTA to WHFTA? Prospects for Hemispheric Free Trade

Joe Foweraker

DOI: 10.4324/9780429039430-11

RECENT HISTORY SUGGESTS A STRONG IMPETUS toward free trade in the Western Hemisphere. The United States had initiated the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations early in 1986, and Mexico joined the GATT in August of that year. By November 1987, Mexico and the United States had signed a framework agreement for liberalizing bilateral trade. In June 1990, President George Bush announced the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative (EAI), and this was quickly followed by news of an impending Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR). By October 1991, further framework agreements had been negotiated between the United States and all countries of the continent except the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Suriname, and Cuba (a total of thirty-one countries); and the record appears to indicate that such framework agreements (like those signed with Canada in 1985 and Mexico in 1987) tend to lead to full free trade agreements (FTAs), such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Moreover, the action agendas attached to these agreements included NAFTA-style items such as zero tariffs, removal of nontariff barriers, an open investment climate, and full protection of intellectual property rights. Thus, the prospect suddenly appeared of “a free trade zone stretching from the port of Anchorage to Tierra del Fuego,”1 that is, of a Western Hemisphere Free Trade Area (WHFTA) creating the largest market in the world, with a population of 700 million and a gross domestic product (GDP) of more than US$7.3 billion. Little wonder that the EAI was touted by none other than Henry Kissinger as “the most creative … foreign policy initiative of the Bush administration.”2

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