Symposium: Globalization on Trial THE THIRD WAY

New Labor Forum, 2010

This book demonstrates how human rights instruments and values have brought different movements together in the struggle against free trade under the banners of state duty and law enforcement with their underlying principles of equality and human dignity. Special emphasis is placed on how subjectivities influence identification with certain values and legal or political strategies. Furthermore, by focusing on the understanding of human rights by social agents the book also shows that specific human rights have more political potential for certain types of subjects in the struggle against free trade than others, such as the right to development, the rights of women and the right to food. This analysis is conducted with a specifically Latin American theorization of human rights that challenges both Eurocentric scholarly works on the issue and the arguments of European activists directed at the allegedly Western authorship of human rights discourses.

Megaregulation Contested

This chapter presents an analytical pathological appraisal of elite thinking and mobilization in Mexico after the Trump administration withdrew from TPP and forced Mexico to engage in NAFTA renegotiations. It examines the strategies developed by political and economic elites in response to the threat of trade war coming from Mexico’s most important trade partner. This analysis shows that, although Mexican elites developed sophisticated heuristics in order to confront the immediate challenge from the government in Washington DC, they did not engage in what should be a very important debate about Mexico’s role in the reconfigurations of global trade and order. This is a missed opportunity for Mexico which could affect its role in the ongoing reconfigurations of global trade and law, and thus its future stature in world politics.

This paper explores the way in which Mexico’s countryside was affected by how the US economy faced the crisis of the Fordist stage of capitalism after the 1970s: It focused on a cheap-labor strategy to restore profitability. By endorsing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), US officials ensured access to an abundant supply of labor south of the border. For their part, Mexico’s political technocracy placed its bet for economic growth on the comparative advantage of cheap labor. It has been a losing bet: Neoliberal globalization and Mexico’s integration into the North American economy have had a detrimental impact on its food self-sufficiency, its labor sovereignty, and substantially increased its out-migration rates. More specifically, the paper explores the relationship between food self-sufficiency and labor sovereignty in the midst of its integration to its northern neighbors, especially to the US economy. The main thesis is that food-self-sufficiency is a condition for a country to enjoy "labor sovereignty"—the ability of each nation to provide with living wages for a vast majority of the population. Of the three NAFTA nations, Mexico is the least self-sufficient, and hence the one that expels the largest rate of migrants. While most migrants to Canada (the minority) enter that country as part of state-sponsored guest-worker programs, the vast majority of migrants to the United States do so as unauthorized workers. This fact raises huge issues of labor rights, discrimination, and exclusion in the latter country. A review o migration debates reveals a deep division in the United States, concluding that a North American Union with free labor mobility seems like a distant solution to these issues. Hence it is indispensable for Mexico to restore its labor sovereignty, which will also require the restoration of its food self-sufficiency and its countryside.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 1997

The debate around the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) continues to be dominated by the one-sided positions of globalization enthusiasts and skeptics. On the one hand a direct line can be drawn from Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound going south" (New York Times 1992) to Donald Trump's (2016a) simplistic representation of NAFTA as "worst trade deal in history" benefitting Mexico at the expense of the US industrial heartland. Early accounts of NAFTA as a win-win-scenario, on the other hand, are continued today by experts who point to an ever-deeper global division of labor characterized by interlocking supply and value chains. Both sides mobilize their trivial geographies: a deeply entrenched methodological nationalism turned political chauvinism that seeks salvation in declarations of economic independence and contrasting imaginations of globalization as "the economic equivalent of a force of nature" against which there is no point resisting . But this continuity notwithstanding the NAFTA debate is also an example that the zeitgeist has changed during the last 25 years or so. Currently, tales of economic laws of nature are increasingly eclipsed by a mix of frustration and anger that is predominantly inward-looking, driven by diffuse longings for the good old fordist times, and easily slipping into nationalism and ugly populism.

International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 1994

Fast capitalism, 2019

Denisa Krásná anD sagar Deva fast capitalism Volume 16 • Issue 1 • 2019 that the intrusion of external or governmental forces into the market reduced its inefficiency, therefore reducing "economic growth," or overall output (Rodrik 2017: 6-10). Unsurprisingly, then, within this paradigm, there has been a substantive power shift away from states and towards multinational corporations as the dominant units of global capitalism and the key "profiteers" from any such move. Multinational corporations have benefited in two key ways from the massive spree of market liberalization unleashed by neoliberalism. Firstly, the removal of tariffs and regulatory protections from local industries opened up substantial new markets in developing countries for corporations to sell their products. Secondly, the liberalization of trade and the removal of barriers allowed multinational corporations to scour the globe for countries where goods could be produced at the lowest cost (Kostova, Kendall, and Dacin 2008: 994-1006). Such a procedure allows for considerable increases in profitability by substantially reducing labor costs for corporations; at least for these corporations, the neoliberal idea of opening markets without restriction was a guaranteed winner. As these corporations grew with the opening up of markets, their influence on powerful states and entities within the broader international system simultaneously increased, allowing them to re-implant this ideology through the system of international institutions created to regulate trade and the global economy (Robinson and Harris 2000: 11-54). At the level of global governance, this philosophy has manifested across international institutions. For example, the World Bank and IMF frequently attached conditionality to the loans they offered developing countries that demanded that these countries remove trade barriers and open up their markets to global corporations, often at considerable cost to local and national economies, for example during the Latin American Debt Crisis in the 1980s (Vetmeyer, Petras, and Vieux 2016). The World Trade Organization (WTO) similarly seeks to remove trade barriers by "reaching inside borders" to open up markets by creating subsidy controls, strengthening global intellectual property rights (including in critical and controversial areas in the medical field), and creating a binding dispute settlement mechanism with the possibility of sanctions for those who defy these rules (WTO 2019). Many prominent scholars, including Sara Dillon believe that such policies substantially damaged the livelihoods of poorer individuals in both developing and developed countries by removing necessary protections provided by the state and further concentrated wealth in the hands of the major global corporations who benefited from increased access to cheap labor and smooth capital movement (Dillon 2018: 1005). This turn towards neoliberalism in international institutions is frequently defined and discussed as the "Washington Consensus," as a result of the vital role the United States played in conceiving it; perceiving untrammeled and open markets as hugely advantageous to the huge corporations present within the United States (Williamson 2009: 7). Along with the IMF and WTO, NAFTA is seen as a cornerstone of the global neoliberal order and will be the core institution focused upon in this study. The brainchild of the Reagan's administration, NAFTA was conceived with the idea of removing barriers to trade between the US, Canada, and Mexico to increase the efficiency of cross border transactions and therefore (at least in theory) create greater prosperity for all three countries. The deal was eventually signed into law after six years of intense negotiation. With the negotiations dominated by the interests of the United States, the three fundamental tenets of NAFTA closely align with the neoliberal philosophy espoused through the Washington consensus (Broad 2004: 129-154). Firstly, NAFTA grants "Most Favored Nation" status to all three participants, which means countries must give all parties equal treatment and thus cannot treat one country differently from another. This means they cannot give domestic companies better direct investment than foreign ones and, importantly, means that governments must offer federal contracts to companies in all three countries. Secondly, NAFTA eliminates virtually all tariffs between the three countries, meaning that governments cannot protect domestic industries by leveling tariffs against foreign products to protect produce from local companies, farms, or suppliers. Finally, NAFTA demands that patents produced in all three countries must be upheld universally by other members ("Nafta: Objectives"). Overall, then, we can see that the structure of NAFTA closely follows the pattern of neoliberalism-in terms of seeking to open up markets without restriction and removing any protections or subsidies for local industry or commerce. In terms of impact on Mexico, which will be the key focus of this study, NAFTA may have contributed to a modest increase in overall GDP (Hanson 2003). However, many have suggested that NAFTA has been instrumental in dividing Mexico into two, one part increasingly wealthy, corporate, and strongly benefiting from trade liberalization, and another, poorer Mexico, which has seen little of the benefit of this liberalization and, indeed in many cases has been actively harmed by the opening up of the Mexican economy to untrammeled competition from corporations in the United States, who often seek to exploit them (Immison 2017). Unlike states which have a more comprehensive set of concerns including human rights and democracy, multinational corporations are almost solely concerned with profit maximization. Therefore individuals are reduced