By Marty Logan
MONTREAL, Mar 31 2004 (IPS)

A decade ago, activists from both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border joined hands – many for the first time – to fight a proposed free trade deal that, to little surprise, was adopted by governments in the two countries, plus Canada.

But have those uniquely positioned activist groups built upon that early campaign to fashion a model of resistance against growing economic globalisation?

No, says a paper published by the U.S.-based Interhemispheric Resource Centre (IRC). Yes, say other civil society players.

“This bi-national relationship is the broadest and deepest example of global integration between North and South, offering a clear ‘paradigm case’ for assessing the dynamics of cross-border civil society interaction,” write authors Jonathan Fox and David Brooks in the IRC report, ‘NAFTA: Ten Years of Cross-Border Dialogues’. ”

“Sympathetic journalistic coverage often features headlines like ‘budding cross-border resistance’, yet … for reasons not yet fully understood, these ‘buds’ have had difficulty flowering. Consolidating cross-border partnerships turns out to be easier said than done and their impact has often been overestimated,” they add.

Laura Carlsen, director of IRC’s Americas Programme, says the writers’ main point is, “while there have been certain actions that have been effective, they’ve been effective in very specific situations and usually for a short period of time”.

One exception, according to the authors, is among border-based groups, which live daily with the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

“Border environmental coalitions have blocked several controversial proposed projects, including the Tamaulipas canal waterway and the Sierra Blanca nuclear waste dump in Texas,” write Fox and Brooks.

Otherwise, factors like the strong nationalist outlook of many U.S. groups, opposing philosophies among environmentalists on the role of economic growth, and hard-to-reconcile positions that issue from radically different social and political cultures have hindered progress, argue the authors.

“So far, most cross-border networks have not generated sustained, balanced coalitions or movements. Historical legacies, cultural differences, and multiple power imbalances make U.S.-Mexican social movement coalition-building especially challenging.”

Groups say NAFTA generally has weakened environmental protection in Mexico, ravaged that country’s agricultural sector and watered down local sovereignty in the face of corporate power in all three nations.

But one activist says the authors fail to recognise that groups purposely shifted their attention after NAFTA started operating in 1994 to the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

“It’s true that we have tended to focus on concrete things like NAFTA, so over time priorities have shifted. But some of that is that we have shifted from a Mexico-U.S. focus to a more hemispheric focus with the FTAA discussions,” says U.S.-based Karen Hansen-Kuhn, coordinator for the Alliance for Responsible Trade.

“While it’s true we’re not working as exclusively with the Mexicans as we used to, they are definitely a part of this whole citizens’ movement against the FTAA. In fact I think that this whole NAFTA experience, with the Canadians too, really served as a model for the Hemispheric Social Alliance,” she adds in an interview.

“We do continue to do analyses and events together and, absolutely, if we thought there was a real possibility to re-open part of NAFTA, we could absolutely re-open that collaboration.”

The IRC paper does not argue that civil society had no impact on the NAFTA debate. It states, in fact, that “The U.S. opposition was strong enough to oblige then-presidential-candidate Bill Clinton to recognise the legitimacy of the need for labour and environmental standards in trade policy for the first time in U.S. history”.

Carlsen also points to progress made during the NAFTA debate. For example, “the farming sector had basically no idea what trade had to do with them, certainly in Mexico and to a large degree in the United States as well. They were still basically looking for state subsidies and saving family farms in terms of domestic politics in the United States; not in terms of trade politics.”

Today, the impact of rich countries’ agricultural subsidies on farmers in the developing South is a point of contention in many trade talks, including FTAA negotiations. Yet, the paper advises activists to question the space that governments are making for them around the negotiating tables.

“As powerful institutions respond to the critics of globalisation with partial concessions, movements face the challenge of figuring out which ones are important cracks in the system and which ones are window dressing, or ‘green-washing’.”

One lawyer working in the NAFTA realm has a clear answer to that question.

“We see some real fundamental shifts in the capacity of civil society to actually directly influence at least some of the process, and inevitably when you start to influence some of the progress and make it more public, you do end up having a greater impact,” says Ottawa-based Howard Mann, who specialises in the law on international sustainable development.

In particular, he points to changes in the administration of NAFTA rules on investor arbitration (known as Chapter 11 of the agreement). “In the year 2000 they were completely closed processes – documentation was scarce if available at all; sometimes you didn’t know cases had been started; government officials were literally lying outright as to cases that had been initiated”, says Mann.

But starting in 2000, trade ministers from the NAFTA countries established processes that have resulted in websites being created that carry extensive collections of the documents for all of the cases.

In addition, “two of the proceedings are now being heard in public, which may not sound like much, but in international law terms, that’s absolutely a radical change,” adds Mann.

Hansen-Kuhn also singles out important changes in process, among the activists fighting NAFTA. “Some of those early meetings between the U.S., Mexican and Canadian groups were difficult … because there were a lot of misperceptions … It was a process of learning about each other’s priorities, each other’s experiences, and from there developing campaigns, developing alternatives.”

“We didn’t defeat NAFTA but we have succeeded in making a mess of the FTAA. It’s almost lost at this point. You never know what’s going to happen, but governments – not the U.S. government but the Brazilian, Venezuelan and Argentine governments – are listening to what social movements are saying.”

“We’re able to gain access to a lot of information about what’s going on that we couldn’t in the past … In fact, just today I was translating some comments on a meeting happening in Argentina right now, among trade ministers, based on draft documents. We couldn’t have done that in the past,” she adds.

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