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Book Reviews
With this book on the intricacies that surrounded the negotiation and ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico, and the U.S., Frederick Mayer has raised the bar considerably for scholarly work on this subject. The book breaks new ground on at least three counts. First, as a member of Senator Bill Bradley’s staff in the early 1990s (under the sponsorship of a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship), Mayer was privy to the daily political battles and policy wrangling that NAFTA has provoked since its inception. As a result, Mayer has provided us with an unprecedented firsthand view of the NAFTA phenomenon. Second, in his capacity as visiting academic-cum-policy handler on Capitol Hill, Mayer has succeeded in weaving these two worlds together in ways that further enrich our understanding of the subject at hand. Third, in the process of bridging the academic and policy worlds, Mayer has drawn eclectically from the different subfields of political science (international relations, American politics, social and political theory) in crafting his story. The outcome is a compelling set of explanations, which clearly set this book apart from an already crowded field of work published on North American free trade. Mayer’s analysis focuses on the decision to negotiate NAFTA, the negotiations themselves, and the ratification process—all approached from the standpoint of U.S. politics. Each of these three subjects is treated as a historical narrative, which is then followed by an analytic commentary that situates these phases of NAFTA in a proper theoretical framework. Because the author has such an engaging style of writing, each narrative alone makes for highly entertaining reading on what could otherwise be a very dry subject. But it is the analytic commentaries, and the grounding of these narratives so broadly in the political science literature, that are the main contribution of this book. Mayer argues convincingly that a full explanation of NAFTA, from the prenegotiation phase to the final ratification, requires the application of a different analytic lens (“level of analysis” and “mode of politics”) along each step of the way.
With regard to the decision to negotiate NAFTA on the part of the U.S., Mayer argues that international-level analyses, particularly rational-choice and realist approaches, fail to account for the timing of and perceived need for this particular trade agreement. Thus, he turns to domestic political processes, including the role of interests and institutions, to explain the decision to negotiate NAFTA. As for the actual negotiations, this included the commercial content of the treaty that was agreed upon by all three parties in August 1992, and the completion exactly a year later of supplemental side agreements that concerned labor standards and the environment. In explaining the outcome of the main commercial text of NAFTA, Mayer relies on some eloquent two-level bargaining models which capture the interplay between domestic interest politics and the processes of international negotiation. Explanation of the labor and environmental side agreements is supplemented with an exploration of the individual-level bargaining and “deeply nested” negotiations that occurred between the leaders of those peak organizations (e.g., AFL-CIO, Sierra Club, and Ross Perot’s United We Stand America) that succeeded in placing these issues on the NAFTA negotiating table.
The discussion of the politics of ratification is perhaps the most challenging and intriguing issue taken up in this book. Clearly, the Bush administration had been caught off guard by the vociferous grassroots opposition to NAFTA that first appeared during the 1991 debate to extend the fast-track legislation, the latter being necessary for the president to proceed with the negotiations. For U.S. policy makers, NAFTA was mainly a lever for jump-starting the Uruguay Round negotiations, and a way of signaling U.S. commitment to free trade and investment flows at a time when multilateral support for these goals appeared to be lagging. While the earlier U.S.-Canada free trade agreement had sailed through the U.S. Congress with little notice, why was the addition of Mexico to this agreement so controversial? This question is doubly puzzling, given the wide consensus among economists of all persuasions that the impact of NAFTA (which accounted for less than 1% of U.S. GDP) on the U.S. economy would be small. Mayer suggests that NAFTA had become a symbol for all that was wrong with the U.S. economy in the recessionary atmosphere of the early 1990s, a scapegoat of sorts. “In the end NAFTA was won in part by manipulation of institutional rules, in part by deals to satisfy domestic interests...but in large measure by a countervailing symbolic campaign of support for NAFTA” (28).
Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this book, and the creative combination of political analysis and social science theory, it will appeal to a much broader audience than your usual well-written academic text. Policy makers will snatch it up, mainly because it tells a fascinating policy story that has yet to be fully told. Academics, in all of the subfields mentioned above, will probably want to focus more on the theoretical sections, something that the design of this book easily lends itself to. As for the usefulness of this text in academic courses, the design of this manuscript is accessible at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The book is perfect for use in a professional Master’s degree program in public policy or political economy, as it fills a void in the literature on the negotiation and passage of the bill. Undergraduates may struggle somewhat with the theoretical material, but the beauty of this book is that there is a great deal else there to inform them of this crucial episode in recent U.S. trade politics.
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