Beyond NAFTA: The Western Hemisphere Interface

Randall White is the author of Voice of Region: On the Long Journey to
Senate Reform in Canada and Too Good to Be True: Toronto in the 1920s.

Beyond NAFTA presents an assortment of papers and commentaries from a
May 1993 conference in Querétaro, Mexico, sponsored by the North
American Institute, a nongovernmental organization with members in
Canada, Mexico, and the United States. In one sense or another the
conference participants are all supporters of the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that finally took effect on January 1, 1994.
Like the conference on which it reports, the volume focuses on where
NAFTA will be taking us in the future. Even those in Canada who are
sceptical about the agreement itself could find much of the discussion
useful.

The Deutsche Bank economist Kenneth Courtis, for instance, argues that
the present three NAFTA countries are increasingly dependent on savings
generated by the regional economies of East Asia and Japan to fund North
American debts. He believes that we will eventually “look back and see
NAFTA as one of the first steps in the reorganization of the world
economy in the period after the Cold War.” An important feature of
this reorganization is that it is “going to have to bring East Asia
and Japan into some type of structural relationship with the United
States.”

All this casts doubt on scenarios that envision NAFTA as the precursor
of some new political project in North America, or even the wider
Western hemisphere. It also helps explain why Canadian trade minister
Roy MacLaren has recently been urging that efforts to expand the present
NAFTA membership “should go beyond the Americas and stretch into the
Asia–Pacific region.”

There is much else worth noting in the book. A keynote address by the
Brazilian diplomat Rubens Ricupero sheds important light on how
international trade issues are now viewed by many policy intellectuals
and activists in the new “emerging markets” of the so-called Third
World. As Canadian Senator Jack Austin observes in some closing remarks,
the conference on which the volume reports “reflected the views and
experiences of people across a wide spectrum of activity and a very wide
knowledge base.” We ought to be making greater efforts to take such
breadth of vision into account as we deal with our various more
particular problems in the Canada of the 1990s. Anyone who wants to try
should at least find Beyond NAFTA a helpful resource.