For all the sound and fury that has accompanied this election
season, it's worth remembering that Democrats and Republicans have remarkably
similar positions on globalization. In an October poll, nearly twice as many
Republicans, usually the party of business, opposed free trade as supported it.
At the same time, with a majority of Democratic voters opposing trade, even the
most centrist Democrats are backpedaling--Hillary Clinton says she would
reexamine the North American Free Trade Agreement, a landmark deal passed by
her own husband.
America
is hardly unique. As a Pew poll from September
revealed, “Since 2002 enthusiasm for trade has declined significantly in the United States, Italy,
France, and Britain.” Except
for small Scandinavian nations, which have relatively small populations and
comprehensive worker transition programs, no developed country has developed an
effective program to help workers who lose jobs because of globalization.
Though some polls show that citizens of developing nations back trade in
principle, this support is shallow, and developing world politicians share this
wariness. Countries like India,
Brazil, and South Africa have become far wealthier in recent
years, but they still believe they do not have enough say at the WTO, which
tends to be dominated by the West and Japan. They may be right: A
Carnegie Endowment study
of the current Doha Round of WTO multilateral trade negotiations, designed to
slash trade barriers around the globe, found that the biggest gainers from the
Round would be developed countries like Japan
and Europe, not poorer nations.
Meanwhile, though fears of China
as an economic competitor first emerged in the West, developing countries,
which only three years ago embraced new trade links to Beijing, have started to worry as well. In South Africa, which once enthusiastically
welcomed Chinese investment, President Thabo Mbeki has warned Beijing not to dump goods on his country. In Thailand, which once touted a new trade deal
between China
and Southeast Asian states, politicians have begun worrying that imports of
Chinese produce will destroy Thai agriculture.
In the past, politicians sometimes were able to ignore
middling support for free trade and push deals anyway; NAFTA hardly had
overwhelming public backing. But in an ever-tighter American political scene--one
in which many voters increasingly blame trade for the insecurity of the modern
workplace, rather than taking a hard look at other factors that might be
causing these problems, like Americans’ abysmal savings
rates andcompanies’ willingness
to shower senior executives with pay packages--no one can afford to lose
votes. While in Europe, a series of
referendums on Continent-wide initiatives, like a new European constitution,
have forced EU politicians to listen more to the public. Though European
politicians once shunned the kind of tough trade sanctions preferred by the U.S.
Congress, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, a longtime trade advocate, now
suggests Europe should consider taking trade cases against China to the
World Trade Organization. What’s more, as many developing nations have become
true democracies over the past decade, their politicians now have to take
public opinion into consideration. After thousands of demonstrators in 2006
surrounded a hotel in Chiang Mai where Thai and U.S. negotiators were attempting to
hammer out a bilateral free trade deal, the proposed agreement soon collapsed.
With public support waning, nearly every major trade
initiative is on life support. The Doha Round has missed one deadline after
another. Though WTO head Pascal Lamy plans to host more Doha discussions later this year, progress most
likely won’t be made before a new administration takes over the White House--if
it happens at all. President Bush already has lost his “fast track” trade
authority, which allows him to put trade deals to Congress for straight yes-or-no
votes. With Doha sidelined, countries in Asia,
Africa, and Europe will focus instead on
bilateral preferential trade deals, which lead to what Haruhiko Kuroda, head of
the Asian Development Bank, calls a “spaghetti bowl” of overlapping deals that
often conflict with each other and confuse companies trying to invest across an
entire region.
The death of real free trade, though it might keep some
American jobs, will not be a benefit in the long run. Lowering trade barriers
around the world, if handled correctly, does boost growth. Even the relatively
pessimistic Carnegie study showed that, if Doha succeeded, it would add over $40 billion
to global income annually. In Asia, countries from Thailand
to South Korea to Singapore have
built their economies on exports and shipping, and many of their exported
products keep American consumer prices low. Africa
now is booming, its best growth in decades, largely because of new trade with
Asian nations. And strong growth rates there, along with the creation of real
middle classes, will promote democracy and reduce support for radicalism. But
don’t expect to hear much about that from Hillary Clinton--or from any of her
rivals.
Joshua Kurlantzick is
a special correspondentfor The NewRepublicand a visiting scholar at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace’s China Program.