Search

In the 1980s, the United States (US), led by President Ronald Regan, negotiated and signed Free Trade Agreements with Israel (1985) and Canada (1988), the first of several preferential trade agreements to follow. The agreements aimed to eliminate all duties and virtually all other restrictions on trade in goods between countries. Neither agreement mentioned protecting people. Two and a half decades later, with President George W. Bush in the White House, the US negotiated and signed Free Trade Agreements with Australia (2004), Chile (2003) and Singapore (2003). The agreements again sought to remove most tariffs and quotas on goods. They also obliged governments to acknowledge worker and children’s human rights and protect them by domestic law, despite opposition from Republicans in Congress. Violators of human rights could now be fined. Even so, prominent labor activists were livid about the policies. Meanwhile, other types of human rights abuses were never mentioned. A similar process has taken place in Europe.What happened to make these new “fair” trade regulations that protect human rights possible? Given widespread opposition â€" the new standards of conduct have been reviled by many policymakers, businesses and activists alike â€" why did the Americans and Europeans, in their own ways, move from negotiating various kinds of preferential trade agreements without regulations protecting human rights, only a few years ago, to signing “fair” trade agreements requiring safeguards for people’s human rights, imposing penalties for violations? Why do American agreements focus exclusively on protecting certain human rights for workers and children, while European agreements center mostly on protecting human rights for voters and citizens â€" a peculiar result since common intuitions suggest the reverse? Why do other countries, especially the repressive ones, sign on to these agreements, which ostensibly run counter to their leaders’ interests and may very well be bad economics? And does the escalating business of preferential trade agreements regulating human rights matter at all for the politics of repression?This paper argues that “fair” preferential trade regulations protecting human rights correspond with global moral principles and laws mainly when they serve shrewd policymakers’ interests to accumulate power or resources, and patently go against or dodge them otherwise; that interest groups’ preferences for “fair” trade regulations that protect human rights have certainly shaped the policy process in crucial ways, but also do not fully explain the way policymakers design trade regulations, because policymaking institutions, which interest groups cannot affect, shape which interests get represented, advantaging some policymakers over others in various stages of the policy process and creating avenues for competition and compromise between them; that most governments that sign on to these regulations unreservedly oppose “fair” trade and have no interest or intention of putting the regulations into practice; but that preferential trade agreements that commit members to protect human rights can, even so, in some instances, prevent abuses or encourage incremental reforms that help to safeguard people’s lives and rights. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]