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 and companies’ 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.