La política de la integración hemisférica

Abstract

The FTAA negotiation process as currently structured does not adequately align with the larger political process within which it is being conducted. Once trade was exclusively concerned with issues of trade and investment rules, and players in the trade politics game were limited to a small community of trade experts and business interests. Now the political context for trade is characterized by the linkage of new issues to the trade agenda, including most notably social regulatory issues regarding labor and environment; by the engagement of new actors in trade policy making, particularly activist groups in an increasingly transnational civil society, and by the utilization of a new mode of political engagement, which is less a politics of interests than a politics of identity. The disjuncture between the politics and the FTAA process will need to be addressed if the negotiation is to succeed