What’s left of ‘the North American idea’?
New Year’s Day marked the 20th anniversary of the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. On Jan. 8, Robert Pastor, one of NAFTA’s fiercest defenders and academia’s most tireless advocates of deeper North American integration, died after a 3-1/2-year battle with cancer. Pastor may not be a household name, but among those in academia or public policy for whom North America was a focus, his work could not be ignored.
Pastor’s death comes at a time of uncertainty about the future of North America. Government priorities in all three countries have shifted elsewhere. There’s little private-sector consensus about further integration. Academic centres focused on North America are in rapid decline. Security has become the continent’s entrenched governance mode. And NAFTA itself is old and tired.
Pastor wrote of The North American Idea (2011), but what’s actually left of it?
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 their pre-eminent example. Yet, euphoria gave way to despair as new challenges to the liberal order emerged. NAFTA’s implementation was marred by the Zapatista Rebellion in Mexico. The proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas quietly disappeared in 2002. And the November 1999 meetings of the newly created World Trade Organization staged the infamous Battle in Seattle.
Hence, efforts to build upon what NAFTA had begun mostly fell on deaf ears.
After spending precious political capital getting NAFTA approved, president Bill Clinton seldom mentioned it during the rest of his presidency. NAFTA became synonymous with all that was wrong with the expanding liberal order — Pastor complained that it had become a “piñata for pandering pundits and politicians.” Indeed, critics from both ends of the political spectrum came to see what they wanted in it. For some, NAFTA was too shallow and left too many outstanding issues. For others, it represented a kind of Trojan Horse, poised to destroy sovereignty, force the export of bulk fresh water, create 12-lane super-highways, destroy the environment or unleash waves of low-cost, job-killing labour.
While many retreated from this poisonous debate, Pastor jumped in with two feet, publishing Toward a North American Community in August 2001 arguing the central failing of North America was that too little had been done to institutionalize and strengthen trilateral co-operation. He contrast the dearth of North American institutions with the sclerotic, over-institutionalization of the European Union and argued for a unique approach to North America that landed somewhere in the middle. His argument instantly made him a political piñata as well — a role he seemed to relish.
As the post-9/11 security agenda expanded, Pastor became an outspoken critic of its impact. He was dismayed at the absence of political courage by the three governments to pursue a larger vision of an integrated economic and security space. He was dismissive of the lack of ambition or vision embodied in the 2005 Security and Prosperity Partnership, its main achievement being to anger most stakeholders, cut out all three national legislatures, and provide fodder for conspiracy theorists everywhere. In 1994, some dared speak of a borderless North America. In 2014, security has made North America’s borders more prominent than ever.
Pastor was especially scornful of 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 and prevent the “Mexicanization” of the Canada-U.S. border; both of North America’s borders are more similar now than they are different. In fact, Pastor argued Ottawa’s approach only exacerbated the asymmetries of power Canada had spent the previous two decades trying to minimize through agreements like NAFTA. Moreover, Ottawa’s approach was a puzzling misread of the importance of Mexico in U.S. policymaking, disregarded Mexico City’s openness to new initiatives, and contributed to all three governments ignoring surveys suggesting their respective publics would be receptive to bold ideas on economics, security and the environment.
Some have referred to Pastor as North America’s Jean Monnet, a reference to one of European integration’s greatest intellectual and political champions. Both proffered ideas that were frequently unpopular. And he, like Monnet, spent much of his life trying to keep the “idea” of North America alive. North America is not Europe, nor will it ever be. However, the idea of a more trilaterally oriented North America 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.