Ed,
The notion that the meshing of economies through trade and business would
ensure peace was prevalent in the 1920s. It was an argument used by people
opposed to the League of Nations. It didn't work very well then and I
doubt that it will work very well now. Competition for resources is a
frequent cause of wars - the colonial wars between the English, Spanish,
Dutch and French, for example, and the German doctrine of lebensraum which
was used in the Second World War. Trade wars frequently lead to hot wars.
The MNCs work both sides of the street. AT&T collaborated with the Germans
in the Second World War as a way to protect its European assets, for
example. German big business collaborated with the Nazis for the same
reasons.
I doubt we will ever eliminate war, humans are such aggressive, territorial
animals which for millions of years have developed around the concepts of
in groups and out groups.
The problem with trade is that under the current Western, modern paradigm,
it leads to extensive use of resource on a scale which is unsustainable. I
can buy in my local Safeway coral reef fish which are caught by dynamiting,
a process which is wrecking reefs all over the Pacific. I can buy cheap
shrimp which are raised in South East Asia by clearing mangroves for shrimp
lagoons, in the process destroying the nurseries and feeding grounds of
numerous important food fishes. I can buy farmed salmon, which in Norway,
Scotland and New Brunswick have passed a deadly disease to wild salmon
which in Scotland and Norway has caused a catastrophic decline in wild
salmonid populations (the industry is still small in Canada, but give us
time). The economic history of Canada is a history of similar rapes in the
pursuit of trade. We wiped out the white pine forests which once covered
the entire St. Lawrence lowlands from New Brunswick to Ontario in about
four generations. The last mature, untouched stand is in Temagami Park,
which the Harrris Government would like to license loggers to fell.
Commerce and sustainable values are poor bed fellows.
Mankind needs to back up and take stock, not continue to heedlessly charge
forward chanting the free trade mantra of laissez faire ideology. I say
this as a trade and development economist who used to teach the history of
economic development. The whole comparative advantage argument for free
trade is bogus, even from the point of view of national economic
development (a subject for a future post).
I see hope for the future much more in the emergence of the concept of
"civil society" and a United Nations Peoples Assembly. Sustainable values
which will throw a restraining loop of laws around the MNCs will come from
these directions. That is what the protest in Seattle was all about, in my
view, and the resistance to the MAI.
Mike
>I don't want to see the WTO destroyed because, as I believe I've stated in
>other postings, the removal of trade barriers and extension of trade
>represents one of the surest ways of so completely enmeshing the world in
>common interests that any part of it would be foolish to be in serious
>conflict with any other. Rather the WTO promoting peaceful trade and
>competition among all countries than the development of large economic
>blocks which could become political blocks and ultimately military blocks.
>When it comes to labour standards and the environment, I rather like Sylvia
>Ostrey's idea of a meaningful ILO (International Labour Office) and a WEO
>(World Environment Organization). I would even accept that the latter two
>should have primacy of place over the WTO, as someone on the list has
>suggested. If you simply kill the WTO, nothing much will happen that is not
>already happening -- i.e., the continued formation of blocks of interest and
>an increasingly polarized world.
>
