I remain puzzled by some recent statements questioning whether free trade promotes peace. When I read another one in the Boston Review, I thought I was going to have to go through all my old rebuttals again. The article starts off this way:
To many today, the idea that free trade brings peace looks like bygone naïveté at best and neoliberal apologism at worst.
From what I can tell, most people agree that free trade does not guarantee peace. And most people also agree that free trade does promote peace (or to put it another way, it reduces conflict). So does free trade bring peace? I'm not sure! It depends on whether you are using "bring" to mean "guarantee" or "promote."
But putting that nitpicking aside, I liked a lot of things about the article by Kate Yoon, which is a review of Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World by Marc-William Palen. I have not read the book yet, so this is a review of a review. (I should also note that Palen offers an overview of his book here, but I was already mostly done with this post by the time I saw it, so I'm going to focus on the Yoon piece).
Yoon says that Palen "has excavated a history of those who believed that free trade and peace went together," describing a "wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers he considers were united by opposition to war. They thought that trade barriers were just war by other means—and that free trade could create a world without war."
This does sound like an interesting history to excavate, but I want to point out at the outset that it is not just historical. A lot of people -- including me! -- still believe that free trade and peace go together. Of course, free trade by itself won't create a world without war; you have to do a lot of other things too. And to state the obvious, the idea of free trade promoting peace hasn't really been tested, because we haven't been anywhere close to free trade in the past few decades (although I understand how the existence of so many "free trade agreements" has confused some people about this). The review puts it this way:
[Palen] offers an instructive reckoning with what has passed for free trade until now, allowing us to see that actually existing free trade since the 1970s let us down because it was never free. Instead, neoliberal trade was burdened by unilateralism all along, amounting to little more than war by other means. In our increasingly nationalist moment, he asks, is there a pro-peace, anti-imperial vision of free trade still available to us?
As this blog's readers are aware, I don't think the term "neoliberal" is useful in general, and the passage above is no exception. (The neoliberals were unilateralists? Wait, I thought they were globalists! Forget it, that discussion is hopeless.) Nevertheless, I do agree that trade since the 1970s wasn't anywhere near as free as some people imagine.
The article then talks about free trade, anti-war, anti-imperialism folks such as Richard Cobden, and contrasts their views with those of economic nationalist, pro-imperialism people such as Friedrich List.
While Cobden was a free-trade pacifist, that perspective lost its place over time. As Yoon explains: "Palen argues that the left-liberal and pacifist associations of free traders were lost to the geopolitical fracturing of the Cold War," as trading blocs emerged and the U.S. used force "to deal with nations outside its sphere of influence" (along with economic coercion).
(We then get back into the "neoliberal" problem, as Yoon says "the neoliberals who were ascendant by the 1970s dramatically shifted the meaning of free trade—all but rejecting Cobdenite commitments to peace and democracy and coopting the multilateral organizations that an earlier generation of free traders had pushed hard to create." Are we talking about neocons here? Some people lump them together with neoliberals, but I'm not sure how good a fit that is).
Yoon then describes the period starting in the 1970s as more about unilateral efforts to dismantle foreign protection than about promoting free trade. I see the point here, although I would note that there's an overlap: There is actual foreign protectionism that exists, and trying to reduce it through trade agreements does bring us towards freer trade.
Next there are references to the views and interests of the developing world, which as far as I can tell play very little role in U.S. policy debates today, which is unfortunate.
Finally, Yoon says: "In light of escalating nationalist rhetoric, we need serious thinking about what a liberatory vision of free trade could look like." I think that would be great! So what might it look like? Yoon offers the following:
These are significant challenges, but an alternative is necessary to the escalating nationalist rhetoric that harms minorities at home and forces countries to choose sides in geopolitical struggle abroad. As Jake Werner has argued, progressives should reject the escalating zero-sum competition with China and instead support remaking the global economy through creating demand in the Global South. The realities of global commerce demand serious thinking about what a liberatory vision of free trade could look like, and on this score Palen’s book is a necessary and welcome provocation, if not a blueprint.
Any such vision will have to make careful distinctions between the kinds of markets we want to open up and the kinds of barriers to trade that should be dismantled. It will also have to be clear-eyed about putting countries in the Global South on level footing after centuries of extraction and structurally disadvantageous terms of trade—and thus about being genuinely global in the legitimacy and consensus it commands.
I strongly agree with two points in the second paragraph: (1) We need to put some thought into "the kinds of barriers to trade that should be dismantled," in particular distinguishing between protectionist barriers, on the one hand, and non-protectionist barriers that merely affect trade, on the other; and (2) we need U.S. policies that can help promote economic development in the Global South (and move beyond seeing those countries just as sources of natural resources).
Summing up, I don't consider myself to be on the left (or on the right, for that matter), but I am solidly in the free trade can promote peace and reduce conflict camp. I think it would be great if we could get our own version of horseshoe theory politics working, with people on the left and right (and center) coming together for a version of free trade that maximizes the potential here. (Although the Megadeth album I adapted for this post's title suggests that even popular support might not be enough to turn this into policy.)
