Whither North America

In early January, American University's Robert Pastor died after a 3 1/2 year battle with cancer. Last week I penned a short OpEd in the Edmonton Journal about it. Newspapers being what they are these days, I had to slash it to 750 words.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/Opinion+What+left+North+American+idea/9389663/story.html

Although it is just a rough draft, I thought I'd post the full 1600 word piece here.

Is North America Over?

New Year’s Day 2014 marked the 20^th anniversary of the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). About a week later, January 8, Robert Pastor, one of the NAFTA’s fiercest defenders, and one of academia’s most tireless advocates of deeper North American integration, died after a 3 ½ year battle with cancer. To the citizen on the street, Robert Pastor is hardly a household name. Yet, among those in academia or public policy for whom North America was a focus, Robert Pastor’s work could not be ignored. Indeed, for much of the past three decades we have all—academics, politicians, and the general public-- implicitly been debating the merits of his policy prescriptions.

Pastor’s death also comes at a time of great uncertainty about the future of North American integration. Government priorities in all three countries have shifted elsewhere. Academic centers focused on North America have been disappearing. There’s little private sector consensus on the merits of further integration. Academic centers focused on North America are in rapid decline. And security has become entrenched as the overarching framework for governing the North American economic space. The last phase-ins of the NAFTA came into force some five years ago and the agreement has largely done what it set out to do. Many of the undergraduates I see every fall know little about the NAFTA. In short, the NAFTA is old news.

Robert Pastor’s final book was entitled The North American Idea (2011) but what’s actually left of that idea?

For proponents of North American integration, the early 1990s were heady times. The Cold War was over. Democracy and liberal capitalism had emerged as the victorious, dominant mode of global governance anchored by the United States as the pre-eminent example of both. Yet, for proponents of this view, euphoria gave way to despair as the 1990s wore on as challenges to liberal capitalism and integrated markets emerged. The NAFTA’s implementation in January 1994 was marred by the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico. The newly created World Trade Organization was infamously rocked by violence at its 1999 ministerial meeting in Seattle (Battle in Seattle). And the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, hatched with some fanfare in 1994, was effectively dead by 2002.

Efforts to build upon what the NAFTA had begun mostly fell on deaf ears after 1994. The Clinton Administration, which spent so much of its political capital on getting the NAFTA through the U.S. Congress, seldom mentioned it again during the two terms of his administration. The NAFTA had already become synonymous with all that was wrong with the rapidly expanding global trading regime, Pastor more recently complaining that it became a “piñata for pandering pundits and politicians.” Indeed, critics from both ends of the political spectrum came to see what they wanted in the NAFTA. For some, the Agreement was too shallow and didn’t do enough institutionally to level North America’s asymmetries. For others, the NAFTA dealt with too few issues and left a lengthy list of festering problems off the table. For others still, the NAFTA represented a kind of Trojan Horse, poised to destroy sovereignty, force the export of bulk fresh water, facilitate the construction of twelve lane super-highways, destroy the environment, or unleash waves of low-cost, job-killing labor.

Prior to the September 11 attacks on the United States, virtually every global meeting of economic leaders was guaranteed to illicit protests numbering in the tens of thousands, epitomized by the 1999 Battle in Seattle, anti-FTAA protests in Quebec City in 2001, and tragically capped by the death of a protester at the hands of police at the G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy in July 2001. It had all become a poisonous mix that North America’s political and private sector leadership wanted no part of.

As many others retreated from the debate, Robert Pastor jumped in with two feet, publishing Toward a North American Community in August 2001. There he argued that the central failing of North American integration was that the NAFTA had done too little to institutionalize and strengthen trilateral cooperation. He contrast the absence of institution building in North America with the sclerotic, over-institutionalization of the European Union and argued for a unique approach to North America that landed somewhere in the middle, reflective of the continent’s unique history. Nevertheless, his argument instantly made him the target of intellectual and political foes, among them, CNN’s Lou Dobbs, whose anti-trade, anti-immigration rhetoric was openly xenophobic. Whereas members of the Clinton and Bush administrations refused to challenge Dobbs and others, Pastor took them on, transforming himself into a political piñata as well.

I have heard Robert Pastor referred to as North America’s Jean Monnet; a reference to one of European integration’s greatest intellectual and political champions. The Monnet Plan was designed to jumpstart the integration of Europe through the integration of French and German coal and steel production. Monnet himself was later appointed president of the European Coal and Steel Community’s governing body. Monnet lived to see even more economic integration among western European economies, but died in 1979, well before Europe’s post-Cold War expansion and the creation of the Euro. The European project remains a work in progress, and there were certainly days on which Monnet wondered if his vision of an integrated, prosperous, and peaceful Europe would ever come to pass.

Comparing Pastor to Monnet might be taking matters too far, particularly since many of his ideas (customs unions, common currency) are controversial.  Yet, the comparison is apt in that, like Monnet, Pastor pushed his vision for North America everywhere he went; within academia, the halls of power, the private sector, and the media.

Yet, the timing of Pastor’s Toward a North American Community could not have been worse. The 9/11 terrorist attacks instantly put the economic integration debate on hold, quickly replacing it with security—in many minds, the antithesis of economic openness.

In recent years, Pastor became an outspoken critic of the impact post-9/11 security measures were having on the economic benefits of North American integration. He was dismayed at the absence of political courage by the three governments to pursue a larger vision of an integrated, and secure, North American economic space. In 2005, the three governments launched the Security and Prosperity Partnership aimed at balancing the benefits of economics with the new imperatives of security.

It was the first serious trilateral cooperative effort since the NAFTA. Yet its main achievements were to upset nearly every stakeholder group imaginable, each of the national legislatures, and provide fodder to conspiracy theorists on the political left and right. The SPP generated a long list of issues the three countries could work on, but was never guided by an overarching vision of what North America could become, and quietly went away in 2009, further solidifying border security as the overarching paradigm through which our leaders see the continent. In 1994, scholars spoke of the implications of a borderless North America with passport free travel and integrated labor markets. In 2014, North America’s borders are more prominent than ever, acting as both commercial choke-point and security dragnet.

Much as Winston Churchill warned of an “iron curtain” descending across Europe at the onset of the Cold War, Pastor was aghast at the descent of a “security curtain” over North America and its effect on trilateral cooperation. He was especially critical of the leadership in Ottawa as it sought to sideline Mexico City and deal with Washington bilaterally. Ottawa believed it could cash in on Canada’s “special relationship” win security concessions from Washington that would prevent the “Mexicanization” of the Canada-U.S. border; the U.S.-Mexico and Canada-U.S. borders are actually more similar now than they are different. In fact, Pastor argued that Ottawa’s approach only exacerbated the asymmetries of power among the three countries that Canada had spent much of the last two decades trying to minimize through agreements like the NAFTA. Further, he argued, the leadership in Mexico City was far more open than Ottawa to a collective, perimeter approach with Washington to the mix of economics and security. More troubling still, Ottawa’s approach represented a puzzling misread of the importance of Latin America, and Mexico in particular, in U.S. policy-making that has netted Canada few, if any, benefits.

In his last book, The North American Idea (2011), Pastor argues that the historical experiences of Canada, the United States, and Mexico have far more similarities and points of intersection than is often assumed. In addition, public opinion surveys in all three countries suggest the populations of all three are more open to the idea of a more unified North America than any of the three governments. However, the idea of a unified North America seems more elusive than ever. Security overwhelmingly dominates our approach to border policy, arguably undermining many of the economic benefits of economic integration. Apart from border security issues, North America has faded in the policy priorities of all three national capitals. And the academic and policy research focus on North America is in rapid retreat throughout the continent.

The European project has been over 60 years in the making and remains a work in progress. Jean Monnet did not live to see the advent of passport free travel or a common currency in Europe, and must have despaired over the pace at which is vision was being implemented. Yet, the idea of a more unified Europe remained.

Robert Pastor’s specific prescriptions for North America were not always popular, even among those who basically agreed with him. Yet, he, like Monnet, spent much of his life trying to keep the “idea” of North America alive in whatever form it eventually takes. North America is not Europe, nor will it ever be. However, the “idea” of a more trilaterally oriented North American economic, security, and (I’d argue) ecological space is as important as it’s ever been to the people who live in it. Our policy leadership would be wise to keep this “idea” in mind.