| Review of: | The strategic dynamics of Latin American trade edited by Vinod K. Aggarwal, Ralph H. Espach, Joseph S. Tulchin |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Sean Burges |
| Reviewed in: | International Affairs |
| Date accepted online: | 25/11/2005 |
| Published in print: | Volume 81, Issue 3, Pages 635-667 |
Latin America and Caribbean
Trade liberalization in the Americas has not proceeded over the last few years as many had expected. Accelerated access to the US market has effectively been spurned with the near-collapse of Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) talks, Mercosur has continued to bumble through successive crises despite repeated presidential commitments to strengthen the bloc and visions of a South American free trade area have largely been restricted to the elaboration of energy infrastructure matrices. The road to full trade liberalization in the Americas has, in short, been decidedly bumpy. Explaining this seemingly contradictory pattern of trade negotiations is the subject of the book under review.
The argument advanced by the contributors is that there is a strategic dynamic to trade policy in the Americas. Major regional economies such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico are not besotted with guaranteeing access to the US, but rather are consciously shifting their trade negotiations to advance larger foreign policy prerogatives. The book begins with a theoretical chapter by Vinod K. Aggarwal and Ralph H. Espach, providing a framework for analysing a country's trade policy that takes into account the political and economic factors, on both an internal and external level, driving government action.
Joseph S. Tulchin's survey of soft power as a device for enhancing trade strategies draws on this theme, elaborating a vision that sees strategic trade policy employed as a device to improve national insertion into the post-Cold War global political economy. Significantly, this involves actions by regional states on a bilateral, sub-regional, hemispheric and globally multilateral basis. Sylvia Maxfield takes international aspects of the framework set out by Aggarwal and Espach and applies them to a domestic level, reaching the conclusion that business pressure for trade liberalization has not been the same in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico, leading to a conclusion that information and organizational structure play a key role in determining individual national policies.
Carol Wise subjects the FTAA to the analytical lens of the theoretical framework framing this text. The results are significant for understanding why the FTAA has stalled, which Wise summarizes as resulting from distributional strains in regional countries and on a sub-regional level a lack of political or economic consensus that an FTAA is necessary. Recent proliferation of trade agreements in Latin America is addressed by José Salazar-Xirinachs. Rather than being explicable as simply a desire for expanded market access, Salazar-Xirinachs points to a range of factors that not only address various aspects of trade, but also include forward political, economic and security positioning on a continental and global level. The point here is that there can be a very strong strategic element to trade policy in the Americas. Argentina, however, in some respects emerges as the exception to the rule, with the account offered by Eduardo Ablin and Roberto Bouzas highlighting the reactive and at times ad hoc approach to trade policy that has marked successive Argentine governments. Brazil, as explained by Pedro da Motta Veiga, offers a markedly different example, with that country's foreign ministry standing out as an exemplar of trade diplomacy being used to advance a multiplicity of foreign policy objectives. Indeed, da Motta Veiga's account is one of the most nuanced analyses of Brazilian foreign policy published in recent years. The account of Chilean trade policy provided by Osvaldo Rosales is equally revealing of the long-term strategy driving Santiago's decisions, linking international trade issues back to domestic political and economic realities. Antonio Ortiz Mena continues the theme of explicating the strategic elements of regional trade policies by setting out the logic underpinning Mexico's decision to sign up to the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent attempts to position itself as a regional trade hub between the US and the rest of Latin America, an initiative which has itself elicited reactive strategies from Brazil. One of these Brazilian trade strategies, the Southern Cone trade bloc Mercosur, is examined by Alcides Costa Vaz, who eschews the almost traditional suggestion that the bloc is destined for a bright future by addressing some of the internal tensions that wrack it before turning to a careful assessment of the bloc's potential for future success.
As the contributors quietly suggest throughout the various chapters, trade policy is about far more than the simple exchange of goods, a lesson that permeates early works on international trade but appears to have faded in recent times. The major contribution that this important book offers is a full consideration of the strategic dimensions of the trade policies pursued by Latin America's largest economies. Policy-makers, students and scholars interested in Latin American trade issues will find this book a valuable addition to their libraries and an invaluable reference tool.