Beyond Nafta - Sam Gindin

We can of course easily expose the free-traders' promises that NAFTA would deliver security and a generally better life for all while not undermining the substance of our democratic capacities. Yet even in making this point, we need to be a little more circumspect about our own counter-warnings. In arguing that losing the particular struggle against NAFTA would mean that the overall battle 'for Canada' and for progressive social change would essentially be over, weren't our doomsday scenarios also exaggerations?

NAFTA: A Moment in A Deeper Struggle

The point is that NAFTA's immediate impact was in fact a secondary issue; the more fundamental issue (whether expressed this way or not) was about longer-term positioning. The underlying issue wasn't NAFTA per se, but NAFTA's role in the context of a larger conflict that evolved through the 70s and 80s that we have come to summarize as 'neoliberalism'. For the supporters of free trade, winning the fight for NAFTA was not just about confirming access to U.S. markets, but about consolidating an environment in which the values and power embedded in markets and corporate rights were supreme. For those of us on the other side, defeating NAFTA was both an ideological fight against those values and a practical fight against the deepened legal and economic integration that would make future progressive change so much more difficult.

If NAFTA was a moment in a deeper struggle, then strengthening that struggle demands - at a minimum - that we do now what was generally not done in the heat of the moment. At the time, pressures for unity and a focus on the immediate prevented us from stepping back and asking ourselves some of the more difficult questions and issues posed by the issue of free trade. In addition to the importance of such discussions for our future struggles, this is also important for the international movement. Canada has, for historical reasons, been at the forefront of many of the issues that later emerged in the globalization debates and we should, therefore, be able to contribute possible 'lessons' for others.

What follows are some of the inter-related issues that, it seems, need to be more widely discussed and eventually incorporated into our strategies.

State sovereignty or democratic sovereignty?

The Canadian state was not a victim of NAFTA but one of its authors -- the Canadian government was often more aggressive in moving towards a Canada-U.S. free trade agreement than was its American counterpart. This helps explain the paradox of the Canadian state acting to undermine its own independence. Free trade did not undermine the sovereignty of the Canadian state but in many ways reinforced its ability to do things which popular resistance previously blocked, delivering to Canadian governments the cover to say "we have no choice; free trade forces us to do that (or free trade blocks us from doing that)."

Free trade does represent a loss of sovereignty, but it is not so much the sovereignty of states that is undermined as it is democratic sovereignty -- our collective capacity to shape our lives.

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