Cerrar ventana

Reason for Opposing the FTAA

Dr. Osvaldo Martínez
Delivered at the "IV Gathering on Globalization and Problems of Development" in Havana, November, 2001

This brief intervention will attempt to accurately characterize the Free Trade Area of American (FTAA) and what could be eight reasons to oppose this project, and finally some considerations about the possible alternative.

I think the FTAA has an appearance we could describe as innocent and technical: just to bring about an accord on free trade, which is, in terms of economic integration theory, a primary form of integration. It is not even a customs union, and even less a common market.

Nevertheless, in content the FTAA is much more than that. It is not only a profound project with implications in terms of integration and even beyond that in terms of absorption, but also means deeply compromising the historical destiny of Latin America and the Caribbean since the intention is to model aspects as important as investment and intellectual property in the neo-liberal sense, and further, to legally establish this kind of policy at the international level so that it would be impossible to reverse.

But even more than that, I see that the FTAA is really a colonial pact of strategic significance and something like re-colonization and virtual annexation of Latin America, even though it would be processed by computer, proclaimed on the Internet and take place in the early years of the 21st century.

It is perhaps the taking shape of a concept that would need to be explored something like a neo-liberal neocolonialism that through the FTAA tries to effect a forced march, now because of the recession in the United States; the exacerbate quarrel over the pie that is not growing but does not rule out the existence in Latin America of public enterprises to be privatised, important markets to be controlled, strategic assets like petroleum, water and biodiversity to be displaced, and real Latin American ones like Brazil, or potential competitors as there would be in the case of the home grow Latin American integration yet to be developed

In realit6y, this form of neo-liberal neocolonialism has elements of an attempt at a new territorial re-division, considering Latin America as an exclusive preserve for the action of U.S capital, and converting it into its regional base or trasnational competition against other centers of economic power.

Why oppose the FTAA? I judge it to be a colonial pact for annexation, and in the reasons for opposition I am not going to include poverty, social exclusion, or even that category sadly absent from our debates -or at least absent from our vocabularies- that of exploitation and plunder. Any of these is reason enough to justify opposition, but since they are well know, I am not going to dwell on them. Now I would like to concentrate on other reasons to make this necessary and indispensable opposition to the FTAA a reality.

In the first place, because the FTAA is, of course, more neo-liberalism, which is an obvious truth. But more than neo-liberalism, it is a higher step involving a new quality that tries to turn neo-liberal ideology and policy into a trasnational norm. That is, to confine the economy to the course something that is also being attempted in the World Trade Organization (WTO). In that way, the policy of neo-liberalism would not be an option subject to modification by the popular will that could express itself democratically. Rather, the FTAA- and the neoliberal policy intrinsically associated with it- would be an international legal obligation. This is a mutilation of sovereignty, the emptying of the existing electoral democracies even more than they already are, since decisions concerning economic policy would be definitively removed from the people and remain in the hands of the market. This market would be dominated internally by the U.S: trasnationals and, obviously, by U.S political decisions externally.

In second place -and this is a reason I shall just mention, but not attempt to elaborate- is the instructive experience of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

The FTAA has a advantage for those who would analyze it, it has contributes a sort of trial laboratory for its application, and the results of this small scale trial lab, the NAFTA, are not ones to enthuse us about the FTAA.

In third place, I think the FTAA deserves opposition for aiming to strip the Latin American countries of their basic defences.
We can say it intends to take from them the special preferential treatment and apply them as general principles of the policy of reciprocity and national treatment. We know very well that equal treatment of unequal parties is equivalent to deepening and eternalising inequality, and how absurd it is to see the representatives of small and poor countries often defend non-discrimination in the abstract. It is as absurd as if those discriminated against in development were to defend the non-discrimination of the rich and powerful. This even graver after the NAFTA extended its national treatment beyond trade in goods to services investment and intellectual property as well.

It also means taking away from Latin American countries their right to regulate their own market, its openness and protection, and imposing an openness that is the negation of the history of what all the countries now developed did to achieve development.

One more reason could be the extension and virtual generalization of free trade and market incentives to the whole of social life, to create a society of buyers and sellers, and not one of civilized human beings standing together in solidarity.

Free competition only exists in a pure state in certain economic texts, since it is not even real in the sale of those same books, where there is always some degree of market manipulation.

This free competition and commercial profit are placed above any other principle, be it human rights, social equity, protection of the environment or sovereignty over natural resources, and we know very well that accompanying the FTAA are things like the appetite of U.S. companies for total control of health care, converting it to private health care, of education to convert it to private education, and even of recreation to turn it into private recreation for consumption by local capable of paying for it.

Another reason could be what we might call the anti-state and anti-public enterprise crusade, which is one of the clichés of neo-liberalism, but which in the texts of the FTAA subjects the public sector in Latin America is not always a pleasant one, and we know there were and are of course elements of political patronage, inefficiency and corruption, the fight against these aspects of public enterprises is becoming not a denunciation in order to correct errors, but a crusade that is not content with the disappearance of those already gone, but aims to turn those remaining into denaturalised entities, imposing on them the discipline of free competition and commercial profit that makes them loose their necessary essence of social service, of national enterprises. In practice, within the norms of the FTAA they end up with no other alternative than to respond to the market.

In the FTAA texts being negotiated, anti-monopoly laws are applied to the public sector while in the enormous and strategic sector intellectual property, private monopoly is established and enshrined.

One more reason would be the conversion of the states into real economic and legal subordinates of the trasnational corporations. It is a matter of simply fostering the new state-enterprise relationship in which the Trasnational Corporation becomes an entity placed at the same level, and on occasions, above the national state, changing what were the traditional law based on relations between sovereign states.

This enterprise-state relationship and the dispute resolution mechanism by international panels placed outside the jurisdiction of national laws, is a genuine monument to the loos of sovereignty, and of negotiated and tolerated subordination.

What we see in the chapter concerning the so-called performance requirements is the up side down version of what was the Code of Conduct for Trasnational Corporations, which the countries of the Third World put forward twenty five years ago as one of their demands in the face of trasnational capital. That same code of conduct is now reversed. Now, performance requirements are not required of the Trasnational Corporations; rather, they are demanded of the states and now is the matter of legally enshrining everything the states cannot do to disturb the good health of the transnational corporation.

In the FTAA version of the enterprise-state relationship, the latter commits to not be a state and instead to be a mere guarantor of freedom an d impunity for trasnational capital. Likewise, in the clause on competition policy, the texts of the FTAA, which one-can suspectare U.S proposals, propose of government in Latin America, is proposed. It would have the mission of avoiding distortion of the market due to the action of states monopolies. The obsession is with states monopolies, and since creation of an autonomous agency is spoken of, one could conclude it could have the standing of a central bank or trusteeship. This would be something like the states putting within its structure an agency to tie its own hand. This is not only a captive market, but also a captive state that is at the same time the guardian of its own imprisonment.

One more reason would be the false promise of access to markets accompanying the rhetoric about free trade, while in real terms, The United States practices selective protectionism through hidden subsidies. In the US economy, 80 billion dollars annually are given in agricultural subsidies, together with anti-dumping measures, and the Foreign Trade Law. Which would have a legal structure above the FTAA, and the black hole of technical barriers and fictitious sanitation measures.

And lastly, because the FTAA aims to eliminate the attempts at home grown integration of Latin America- imperfect as they may have been- and substitute this integration with subordination that tends toward absorption of the region on the part of the United States.

A few brief words about the alternative:

On some occasions during debates about the alternative, a paralysing argument can be heard: nothing can be done because the alternative has not been elaborated. We can criticize the FTAA, criticize the neo-liberal policy that is almost its equivalent, but nothing can be done because no alternative has been elaborated. On this, it is convenient to mention that if we understand the alternative as a written document, as an intellectual construct, we can states this document does exist, elaborated by the Continental Social Alliance in the document called "Alternative for the Americas". But beyond this, all alternatives are always generated through a process of struggle. And I would be as bold as to say that the alternative is first of all the struggle and resistance there would never be an alternative.

The concrete realization of that alternative would be more the result of a process of struggle, of putting the FTAA on the agenda of the peoples, than of an intellectual construct destined to de the alternative.

That is, connect the FTAA to the life of the peoples, which is threatened and negated by this project. Remove the FTAA from a kind of commercial, financial-technocratic space capsule and explain in concrete and real terms of the daily life of the people: that is the firs element of building an alternative. The reality is than in Latin America and the Caribbean, the FTAA continues to be unknown to the broad masses of the population. The FTAA continues being a technical accord negotiated in virtual secrecy by specialists. The great task of the moment is to divulge the truth about FTAA.